I opened the front door; Mom and Dad were on theporch and whispering to each other impatiently, coming up with an attack strategy. Abe was still on his phone, his fingers flying across the touch screen at a speed I’d never managed. Texting Amy, probably.
“We’ll start upstairs,” Dad said, gesturing to himself and Mom. “Abe, you want to check out the basement? And Lottie, you can wander around down here?”
He meant the first floor, which consisted of a kitchen, dining room, living room, solarium, library, three bathrooms, and probably four or five more rooms I was forgetting.
Dad handed out the sticky notes from Harry. I got blue; Mom got red; Abe got purple; Dad kept green.
“Don’t go crazy,” Mom said lightly. “We have room but notthis muchroom. If there’s any furniture or anything big... Just run it by us first.”
“What, you don’t think the grand piano will fit in my room?” I asked. I meant it as a joke, but then I remembered how Aunt Helen had taught Abe to play, patiently running through the different scales and explaining the differences between white and black keys.
“Count them,” I’d heard her say once. “If you count the keys yourself, you’ll never forget how many there are.”
Eighty-eight.
I’d counted them myself because, although I had no interest in learning piano, I didn’t want to be left out.
Abe put his phone in his back pocket and blinked a fewtimes and then smiled weakly at me. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s fine.”
We split up. Occasionally I heard my parents talking or arguing upstairs and at one point there was a particularly loud crash from the basement, but otherwise I felt entirely alone. I started in the library (so empty now that the movers had taken all the books) and made my way through her study and into the solarium, which was at the back of the house and filled with plants she had managed not to kill. I put sticky notes on things that made me miss her or things I didn’t want to see sent to auction. A paperweight shaped like Earth—when you looked inside, you saw galaxies. Her collection of fountain pens. A small potted bonsai with a miniature metal table and chairs set in the dirt underneath it, like fairies had come for tea and left just before I’d gotten there. A stack of photo albums. A dozen small, framed cloth canvases that featured the needlepoints she’d done as a teenager: flower scenes and trees and bridges and a sun with many faded orange rays.
Eventually I made my way into the backyard, needing air, hoping for a breeze.
“Do you think I need a croquet set?” Abe asked, coming up behind me. I jumped a mile and shrieked again, and he held his hands up likewhoa, calm down.
“Geez, Abe,” I said.
“I mean, would you play croquet with me?” he asked. He held the croquet set out to me, an enormous vintagesuitcase that held the pieces of the game inside it.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll play croquet with you. As long as you don’t bury me in the ground.”
“Ah, good reference,” he said, setting the case on the deck and adorning it with a purple sticky note. “Come on, you look like you could use a glass of water.”
We went back inside the house and he got me a glass of water, and then he left to do more looking around. I drank the water at the breakfast bar. I felt emptied out, scooped clean, exhausted from the party last night. In the books, Alvin and his sister are immortal and don’t need sleep. Theycansleep, and they do sometimes, out of habit. Eternally thirteen (Alvin) and eleven (Margo). That didn’t sound so bad to me at the current moment.
They didn’t have to worry about cancer, about cells inside your body that might already be inside you, so far symptomless and hiding and waiting their turn.
Aunt Helen had gone to a normal gynecologist appointment on a normal Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, and her doctor had done a normal breast exam where nothing is ever out of the ordinary. Only something was out of the ordinary, andit’s probably nothing, Helen, but we don’t like to take these things lightly. She had gone the very next day for a mammogram, and then the week after that she was sitting down with all of us and speaking quietly about survival rates becauseI just want you guys to know what I know. I don’t want there to be any secrets.
“Ah, my firstborn,” Dad said, coming into the kitchen. I looked up sharply, Aunt Helen’s words still vibrating around in my head. She’d told us here, in this house, in the living room. She’d invited us over for dinner and waited until we were getting ready to leave.
Dad sat down next to me, pulled my water glass toward him, and took a sip. “Are you doing okay?” he asked.
“Are you doing okay, Dad?”
“Shit,” he said quietly. “No idea.”
I waited a minute or two, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I slid off the stool and left him alone. I made my way to the living room quietly, and when I walked through the doorway, I swear I could almost see the five of us, huddled around each other, my dad crying and my mom crying and Abe and me just looking at each other with wide eyes and Aunt Helen not really looking at anything, just letting her eyes scan the room, the walls, the ceiling, the chairs, the windows.
“Oh, Helen,” my mother had said while my brain struggled to rewrite the course of that evening. It was not supposed to end like that. We were supposed to have ice cream for dessert and go to bed too full.
I sat down on the couch. I felt a tiny thrill of undirected anger (at cancer, at death, at dying, at everything), but I did my best to ignore it.
“Good-bye, house,” I whispered for the second time.
It was the best I could do.
The attic was expansive, its space seemed to not even make sense, like surely there was too much here to have actually fit inside the house. Alvin wondered idly of blueprints, of square footage, as he carefully picked his way through the room, navigating countless wooden boxes and scientific paraphernalia: a telescope, a globe (but not Earth, he noted), something that looked like a printing press. Behind him, Margo banged her knee against a suit of armor and cursed. Her voice sounded quiet and muffled, lost among all the clutter of the room.
