“She didn’t give me anything,” Miles says, and I wait until their backs are turned and then hide the ring behind the collar of my dress.
My bedroom is simple and cheerful, with yellow walls that are cozy even with the storm beating against the window. There is a white four-poster bed with an embroidered quilt, and a window seat that looks out on the branch of a large oak. Mrs. Cliffton has placed tight puffs of cabbage roses and a picture in a silver frame on the bureau. The image holds younger versions of her and my mother. Juliet and Matilda wear matching school uniforms, their arms slung around each other, their faces caught in open-mouthed laughs.
I’ve never seen a picture of Mother at my age. Her hair was a lighter auburn than mine, but she has my gray eyes that are a bit too wide, a small nose, and a sharp chin. It’s startling how much I look like her.
I unpack my dresses and line my toiletries on top of the milk-white sink, then shelve the poetry volumes I’ve taken from the castaway pile at the Gardner library over the years. Stevenson, Frost, Dickinson, Yeats, and Wilde, each missing its cover or spidered with stains the color of light tea. I can’t bring myself to unpack my winter clothes just yet. Maybe we’ll be home by then. Instead I arrange my father’s dulled throwing dart, Mother’s Shakespeare volume, and Cass’s ribbon on my nightstand. Then I run a bath in the porcelain claw tub and dress for dinner. There are no mirrors in the bathroom—?odd for a house that has just about everything else. I wonder if it would be too forward to ask Mrs. Cliffton for one.
I do the best I can with my hair, feeling only by touch, and head downstairs for dinner.
Dr. Cliffton stands from where he is seated at the mahogany dinner table to greet me when I enter the dining room. He is an older, softer version of Will, with blue eyes that aren’t quite as striking and are framed by wire-rimmed glasses. I make polite, stilted conversation—?“I’ve never been this far north before”; “The rain sure is coming down”—?over a dinner of watercress and grilled peach salad, roast chicken, and some sort of squash tart, all served by Genevieve. We did not eat like this even before the war and the rationing started. “One of the benefits of living in farm country,” Dr. Cliffton says as he notices me eyeing the small pat of freshly churned butter. I want to smear it, salty and smooth and creamy, all along my slice of bread, but I pretend that I don’t care for it and pass the plate on. Miles takes my cue and declines as well. We are impinging on the Clifftons enough without eating their precious butter.
Dr. Cliffton clears his throat. “Did your mother speak often of Sterling?” he asks me. He pauses in cutting the tart. His knife and fork hover over his plate.
“Only a little,” I say. In truth, she’d barely spoken of it at all. There is a long beat, as if this wasn’t the correct answer. For a moment all I can hear is cutlery scraping and the sound of my own chewing.
“She told me once she didn’t much like it,” Miles offers, followed by a yelp as my heel catches his ankle.
Dr. Cliffton laughs graciously, but there is something else in it as well. He pushes his chair back in concert with a loud crack of thunder and says, “You know, I believe I’ve just the thing for this occasion.” His right foot drags as he leaves the room, and I recall the collection of canes I’d seen during my tour of the house.
Dr. Cliffton reappears a moment later, trailing bright strains of Glenn Miller from down the hall. It helps to drown out the steady patter of the rain. “Shall we move into the library?” Mrs. Cliffton suggests. “Genevieve could bring us some coffee, maybe even some ice cream?”
Miles jumps up with a nod.
They are all trying so hard, I realize. But I don’t have the energy to keep up. “Actually, I think I’ll turn in,” I say.
“Long day,” Mrs. Cliffton says, nodding. The lights flicker.
The four of them move on to Dr. Cliffton’s library, and I climb the stairs to my room. “Good night, Miles,” I call from the balcony, and he gives a short wave without really looking.
I change into my nightgown and brush my teeth, staring at the blank wall in front of me. Tomorrow I’m going to ask about the mirror.
I climb into bed, rolling my father’s dart between my hands. I hear Will challenge Miles to a game of checkers, followed by an amused “Hot dog!” barely five minutes later. Miles rarely loses games. He never loses at checkers.
Someone changes the record to Billie Holiday, her voice drowsy and warm. She was Mother’s favorite. I return my dart to the nightstand and use my pillow to block out the music and the sound of the rain.
It’s the first night in three weeks that I do not dream of her.
Chapter Three
The summer I was thirteen, there was a storm that swept through during the night. The thunder was loud enough to wake us all, and Miles cried out until Mother went to him. I don’t know if she ever went back to sleep, but at dawn she knelt to wake me.
“Come with me,” she said, pulling me from the warmth of my bed. I was grumpy until she handed me a mug of hot chocolate. “The sunrise is always best after a big storm,” she said. We pulled on coats over our nightgowns and shoved our feet into rubber boots, and she led me out to the garden.
Mother toweled dry one of the rusty wrought-iron chaises so I could sit and keep her company while she cleared out the debris cast by the storm. She hadn’t lied about the sunrise. It started out a soft pink and then heated into a searing orange.
“I was reading the other day about it raining frogs and fish,” she said. She wore gloves, picking through the splintered branches and tucking dirt back into divots. “It’s been documented as really happening. Can you imagine what it would be like if you were just walking along, minding your own business, and you got thumped in the head by a falling fish?”
She’d been laughing about it until she abruptly stopped. She bent down to nudge a nest that had been battered. I could see the white shards of egg by her boots. “Poor birds,” she said, her mood suddenly darkening.
Sometimes she was like that. A paper crane, folding in on herself without warning. I didn’t say anything else, and neither did she. I hated her moods. I could never tell when they would strike or how long they would last. I just watched her step around the puddles as I sipped my hot chocolate until it grew cold.
“I’m sorry about the birds,” I said when we were taking off our boots in the front hallway. “I’m sorry it made you sad.”
“Not the birds, honey,” she said. She tucked my hair behind the ear she never wanted me to hide. “Just reminded me of someone I used to know.”
“Tell me more about the frogs raining down, then,” I said, and just as quickly as it had come, her mood passed. After that morning we’d never say it was raining cats and dogs outside. We’d say our version instead.
Frogs and fish, I’m thinking when I wake, and for a moment I’m disoriented. I’m not in my own bed. The quilt on top of me is stiffer than the one I’m used to and it isn’t thrown to the floor, the sheets tangled around my legs. I must have slept peacefully.
