“But listen—”
“It’s Rei’s.”
I stared at him, confused.
“This is Rei’s house,” Amir said. “She’s in the photographs in the living room. There’s a grocery list in her handwriting in the kitchen.”
I sat back on my heels, gripping the money with both hands now. Rei had distinctive handwriting, as quietly precise as embroidery. I thought it was very sophisticated, and I had shaped my own handwriting after Rei’s, tracing her letters for most of my life. We knew Rei’s handwriting; we would recognize it anywhere.
This was Rei’s house.
We knew she lived near Osha, but we had never been to her house. It was funny, but I wasn’t sure I had even ever wondered about Rei’s home... Rei’s life outside of Horseshoe Cliff. I glanced at the closed closet door, knowing the colors and materials of the dresses that were hanging inside, the overalls that were folded within the bureau, the assortment of bracelets that would be stacked carefully somewhere, the collection of wide-brimmed hats. I breathed in and smelled Rei. I ran my fingers over the money. Rei’s money.
“There’s something else,” Amir said.
I followed him out of the bedroom. Amir’s brow furrowed, but I could not bring myself to leave the money behind.
On the shelves of the living room, amid photographs of Rei and my father and me and Amir and Bear and other people Idid not know, were my father’s houses, each and every one of the tiny wood houses that he had made over the course of so many years. Amir’s animals, too, were there, sanded perfectly smooth.
We stood very still. The house echoed our stillness. It felt as though time were frozen, waiting for us to understand.
“There are no craft fairs,” I said at last.
“I guess not.”
“She just bought them all herself. Rei is rich.”
Amir looked around the room. “Richer than us. That’s for sure.”
My father would never have accepted the money from Rei if he’d known it was charity. She had been very clever to find a way to help us without offending him. It was strange to feel our world shifting, to see everything in a different way. To know a truth that my father had never known. I felt no animosity toward Rei for her duplicity. I felt only gratitude. She had been watching over us, all of us, for so many years.
I looked around. I imagined Rei stretched on the cream-colored sofa, reading a book. The lovely scent on Rei’s skin was rose water—now it had a name. I imagined Rei settling into her deep bathtub at night when she returned home from Horseshoe Cliff, how the bubbles might turn brown with the dirt she’d carried from her visit to the farm. I imagined her stepping out of the bath and pressing rose water to her newly clean wrists.
What if all those years ago when Rei had asked if Bear was hurting us, we had told her the truth? Would she have founda way to keep us together? Would she have brought us to this beautiful house where we might have grown up the way the kids on Bear’s television grew up instead of the way we actually had, perpetually swinging from fear to our wild, wonderful kind of freedom to fear again? If I had ignored Amir’s pleas in the shed that night and instead blurted out just once to Rei the extent of Bear’s cruelty, everything might have been different.
But of course, there was no way to know just how different it would have been. My life was tied to Amir’s, and if we had been separated, there was no amount of clean sheets and jeweled sandals that would have been worth his absence.
“We need to thank her,” I said. “We need to thank her for everything she’s done for us.”
“How can we? She can’t ever know that we were here.”
Of course he was right—there was no way we could thank Rei without her learning that we’d broken into her home. This would be another secret we would have to keep.
I turned the stack of money in my hand sadly. The weight of it surprised me. It was so light, all that money. A soft wind could blow it far away. This was the image that for months would come to me at strange moments of my day: money that floated and looped through the air, forming first the lines of Rei’s beautiful handwriting and then the thin outline of a path I could never reach, a road that narrowed and disappeared from view before I could set foot on it.
