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“Mimi, what happened in there—”
She cut me off with an embarrassed little laugh. “Oh, don’t mention it, dear. A dreadful misunderstanding. I was looking for my husband, you see, and in the dark, I didn’t recognize—well, no matter. He’s explained everything,” she said, gesturing at Adam.
I stared. “Oh. Um. Okay.”
Mimi smiled. “Have you met my husband?”
I paused, trying to remember what the line was that we were supposed to use when Mimi asked about my grandfather, but was cut off by the sound of hurried footsteps coming through the house.
My mother entered at the other end of the foyer, her phone to her ear, clutching it so hard that her knuckles had turned white. “Yes, please do, thanks,” she was saying, in a voice that sounded like a paper-thin veneer of calm laid over a deep well of panic. When she saw Mimi, she stopped dead, the phone dropping from her hand with a clatter. Richard, who had been walking just behind her, stumbled into her back with anoof.
“Mother?!” Mom shrieked, taking in Mimi’s wild hair, her bare and dirty feet. “My god, oh my god. Her feet. Was she outside? Mother, did you go outside?”
The front door slammed as Diana and William appeared, both of them flushed and out of breath. “Dora, I found—” Diana started to say, and then broke off mid-sentence when she saw Mimi.
My mother didn’t even look at her. “Mother,” she said again, her voice rising. She shouldered Adam aside, grabbing Mimi’s wrist hard, her fingernails digging in. “Where were you? Do you have any idea how worried—”
Mimi yanked her hand away and snarled, “You’rehurtingme!” Her eyes narrowed, and she stood up straighter, glaring at my mother. “Oh, but this is what you do, isn’t it? You always did. Always crying.Alwaysclinging. I never had a moment’s peace with you, not one single moment. It was always mother-mother-mother and daddy-daddy-daddy, a demand every damned minute, draining me like a little...” She trailed off, fumbling for the word while the rest of us stared in shock. Then her gaze sharpened, and she snapped her fingers. “Like a parasite. That’s it, a little parasite. You sucked the life out of me, Theodora. You sucked the life out of everything.”
Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Even Richard had the decency to look horrified, staring at Mimi with his mouth half-open.
Adam cleared his throat and stepped up, catching my grandmother by the arm. “I’ll take her to her room.”
“Oh no you won’t,” my mother practically shrieked. She looked around wildly at each of us and then pointed at Adam. “Not you. If you’d been monitoring her properly, if you’d been doing your job, none of this would have happened!”
For the second time, there was nothing but silence. I burned with embarrassment for Adam, trying to flash him a sympathetic look, but he just flinched and looked at his feet.
After another moment, Mom shook her head and put her face in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice muffled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m just so tired—” Her voice broke, and her hands dropped away. She wasn’t crying, not yet, but her eyes were filled with tears. “Excuse me. I need a moment.”
She pushed past me, past Adam and Mimi, taking the stairs at a run. Her bedroom door slammed. The silence that followed was broken by the sound of murmuring—not a human voice, but the house itself as the wind began to rise outside.
I took my grandmother’s arm and nodded at Adam. “I’ll take her,” I said under my breath. “She’s clearly not herself right now.”
Richard clapped his hands together sharply, and everyone jumped. “She’s exactly like herself,” he said cheerfully. “More than ever, really. Aren’t you, Ma? But don’t worry, it’ll pass.”
Diana laughed nervously. “She just needs a nap. Don’t you, Mother? You sure scared us.”
Mimi looked at her feet, with their red-painted toenails, and then at me. She looked bewildered. “Look at that,” she said, all the acid gone from her voice. “I’ve had a pedicure.”
I steered Mimi back toward her room, trying to ignore the sound of hushed conversation that rose behind us as we walked away. I worried that she might snap at me the way she’d snapped at my mother, but she seemed lost in thought, walking obediently beside me with her hands pressed together like a nun. When we reached the little back bedroom, I helped her sit down on the side of the en suite tub and ran warm water over her bare feet, watching the dirt swirling between her toes and down the drain. She was humming to herself, her hands resting in her lap.
I picked up her hairbrush from the side of the sink. “Let’s get some of these tangles out,” I said, beginning to gather her hair from the nape of her neck—and then stopping short. There was a mark there, just behind the soft curve of her jaw, a purplish oval that could only be a thumbprint. I could picture exactly how it had happened. Someone’s hand coming up to grip her just under the chin. Grabbing her hard enough to bruise. Grabbing her like my mother had, just moments before.
“Mimi?” I said, but she didn’t respond, just kept humming to herself. I set the brush down and reached for her hand, keeping my voice gentle, saying, “Mimi, did someone—” before she turned to look at me and something clattered from her hand onto the bathroom floor. I saw the glint of silver against the tile and leaned down to scoop it up. It was a pendant, a pale glass rectangle with a small glittering stone at the center that might have been a diamond, framed by a tarnished but delicate silver setting. It wasn’t Mimi’s taste at all, and I didn’t think it belonged to her. Everything about it screamed 1920s, which wouldmake it older than she was, and I’d never seen it among her things at Willowcrest, where she liked to bring out her jewelry box and ask me to help her select a necklace or a brooch before dinner.
“Give it back,” she said, and I looked up to see her eyes fixed on me, dark and suspicious. “It’s mine.”
I put it back in her hand with a shrug. “Okay, it’s yours. It’s very pretty. Where did you get it?”
“Papa gave it to Mother,” she said in a singsong little girl’s voice. “And then my sweetheart gave it to me.”
“I see,” I said, biting my lip, playing along. This was one of the reasons it had taken so long for anyone to know that Mimi was sick: when she didn’t remember something, she would simply invent a story to fill in the blanks, so persuasive and richly detailed that you’d never have guessed she was making it up. “When did he give it to you?”
“It’s for Christmas,” she said, and sighed again. “He said he can forgive if I can forget. He says he’ll come for me soon. Maybe even tonight.”
“Tonight?”
Mimi tilted her head. “Oh yes,” she said. Her gaze was dark and intense, and her lips curled in a smile—the one I’d seen on her face so often when she talked about her unseen visitors and her overnight trips to the moon, the one that made her look like a little girl with a secret. She leaned in close, lowering her voice to a whisper. “He always comes at night.”
