“Do you think it’s over between you two?”
Her face twists. “I don’t know.” She turns her wedding ring on her finger, around and around. “I don’t know.”
Mother returns with extra lemon wedges. “I’ll go make up the bed. The sheets must be dusty. Sam, would you help your sister bring up her things? She really shouldn’t be carrying anything heavy.” She sets down the tray of lemons and stands there as if unsure where to settle her hands. “Just think—a baby, here! A blessing in disguise.”
I carry Elizabeth’s luggage upstairs to her old room, where a four-poster bed holds court with a weatherworn desk and a dresser bearing framed photographs. Soft ragged posters line the walls: Audrey Hepburn, Green Day, American Beauty, a Degas facsimile. Artifacts of adolescent angst. The canopy above the bed drapes down in a gauzy cotton-mouthed smile.
“I see she still hasn’t changed anything in here.” She sits down heavily, and the beleaguered bedsprings squeal. “I used to pretend I was a princess locked away in the highest tower of a castle when I pulled down the canopy around me.” She sighs. “How’s Mom been?”
“Same as ever,” I say. “But I can sense a change now that you’re here.”
She smiles wryly. “Don’t worry. It won’t last.”
She’s right. The next morning, which dawns clear and dewy, a sleepy aftermath of yesterday’s agony of rain, I find Mother in the backyard sitting in her wooden Adirondack chair and gazing with glazed-eyed nostalgia at the tumble of overgrown greenery and puddled marsh leading windingly to the swamp beyond. A tumorous weed-choked garden has grown wild over a defunct stone fountain, now bone-dry and weathered as a tombstone, ensnared by possessive vines, collecting the odd damp leaf to decay in its bottommost parts. Tomato plants bloom enthusiastically amid bushes that haven’t been trimmed in so long they’ve grown rough and rogue, with an air of neglect that doesn’t belong in an inhabited home. But who has the money to hire a caretaker or a gardener in these times, or the energy to keep up such a sprawling, schizophrenic place?
Playing in the jungle-grown yard are two little girls: one small and freckled with two unraveling braids, the other a posh little adult of twelve with dark hair swept coolly over her eyes. The sun cants over them in a goldish halo that doesn’t quite touch them at the correct angle because it wasn’t morning when this moment first occurred, but afternoon. They chase one another in a game they have invented whose rules are lost to me. A faint smile ghosts my mother’s face.
“Look how young we are,” I say as I come up beside her.
Young Sam’s foot slips into a shallow ditch and she goes sprawling in the weeds, while young Elizabeth cackles with cruel glee.
“Careful, girls,” calls my mother, even though the children cannot hear her through the span of time. “My girls,” she murmurs with amused pride. “They’ll come in covered in dirt and licking their wounds like battle heroes. And here I used to worry that boys would be the bigger handful.”
“Lizzie’s having a boy,” I say, to draw her back to the present.
“Silly. Lizzie’s just a girl. Oh,” and she turns away from the girls playing in the yard and finally looks up at me as if just remembering how much time has passed since the memory she is watching. She looks into my face and frowns as if surprised to see me all grown up. “That’s right. She is.” She turns back to the girls wrestling on the ground. Young Elizabeth yanks on young Sam’s braid, and young Sam cries out indignantly. “It will be nice to have a boy in the family.” A distant smile plays on her face. “We need to finish getting everything ready. There’s so much to do.”
“Why don’t you come inside, Mom.” I help her up, though she is hardly so old as to need my aid in getting out of a chair. But something about watching the dance of memories seems to age her considerably. “They’re not going anywhere.”
* * *
Finding Elizabeth in the labyrinthine house isn’t easy, but Mother prefers not to shout our names through the halls lest those shouts ring out at random intervals in the future, echoing from the house’s memory so that we wake to hear our names called out by ghostly voices in the middle of the night. This is why the house bears such a tomblike quietude. Occasionally you can hear soft music whispering from empty rooms, music from decades ago playing eerily of its own volition. Once I heard a big-band tune crackling through a phonograph in the billiards room, and it drew me there where I could hear but not see its source. Just an echo of a memory. I danced until the music faded away into nothing and went in search of good omens and other mysterious ephemera of the past.
Sometimes it’s auditory—gentle echoes riding in on the waves of time; other times it’s visible—holograms of what has happened in the house or on the land in perfect re-creation.
We find Elizabeth in the library, perusing the collection of books that have been accumulating since time immemorial.
“At least I’ll have some way to occupy my time,” she says, gesturing to the towering bookshelves that lean in close, crowding the room into a claustrophobia of untouched volumes. “How is it you still don’t have internet?”
Mother waves her off. “I’ve no use for that.”
Elizabeth looks at me incredulously, and I tell her I go into town when I want to check up on the digital world.
“You’re something,” she says disapprovingly. “This place is going to eat right through my data plan.”
“Come on downstairs, Lizzie, and I’ll make us some breakfast.”
“Please don’t call me that,” she cuts in. “I’m not a child.”
“All right,” Mother says, conciliatory. “Eggs. Poached?”
“I haven’t eaten a poached egg since I was twelve.”
“I thought they were your favorite.”
“They were,” she says, exasperated. “When I was twelve.”
While we breakfast on fried eggs and toast, Mother gazes off at the doorway to the kitchen or out the windows where memories are stirring with the morning. In the middle of a lengthy rant about swollen ankles, swollen feet, and swollen fingers, Elizabeth pauses with her fork halfway to her mouth, waiting for Mother to respond.
“I’m sorry, what?” She blinks out of her reveries.
Elizabeth lets the fork drop. “Was it the same way for you?”
“Oh,” she says distractedly, the sun-yellow orbs of her cooling eggs leaking viscously across the plate. “Why, yes. I suppose it was. I don’t remember all that. I just remember looking at your face for the first time and thinking, look what I’ve made.”
“How convenient, to forget all the awful parts.” Elizabeth rolls her eyes at me, as if expecting me to agree. She has always expected me to follow along with her in a sort of obligatory mimesis.
“It will be worth it, when you get to hold him in your arms. Just you wait,” says my mother. “Sam, would you do the grocery shopping this afternoon? We’re low on milk.”
Elizabeth offers to accompany me. She looks too large for the kitchen, as if she is caged, desperate to escape.
The drive into town is about twenty minutes on the country road that bears little sign of civilization. Rural areas like this that once flourished now seem to be expiring in the face of urban rush. There is something lonesome about the drive, despite Elizabeth’s ceaseless talking, which makes me wish she would shut up so I could enjoy the rumble of movement, because I quite like the lonesomeness, sometimes. The road, flush with light, slices through gold-leafed trees vivid with rain.