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Mom had moved to Bar Harbor within the month. “Someone should be with her,” she’d said, and when I tried to point out that someone didn’t have to be her, she laughed ruefully. “If not me, who?”
She lasted six months up here, just her and Mimi. Long enough for the doctors to recommend that Mimi relinquish her car keys, take her pills, and get any outstanding affairs in order. It was also long enough for us to find out that just because Mimi needed care, that didn’t mean she would want it or accept it—and long enough for there to be a second and third and tenth incident, all different from the first one, as she became more forgetful, more frightened, and finally, angrier and more defiant and sometimes cruel. My mother hadn’t been back to the Whispers in decades, and it was a maze of hallways and doorways and places to hide, places she didn’t know existed but that Mimi knew by heart. She would disappear every time my mother’s back was turned. Sometimes Mom would find her. More often, she would wander the house for hours, calling out while the shadows lengthened outside.Eventually she would sit down and give up, which was when Mimi would emerge from wherever she’d been and stalk past her like an imperious queen.
“Don’t fuss, Theodora,” she’d say.
It wasn’t funny, except that it sort of was, an eighty-five-year-old woman who still got off on playing hide-and-seek—but a creepy, nonconsensual version where the other person was always it whether they wanted to be or not. Even Mom would laugh about it when she called me afterward, usually three glasses deep into a bottle of wine, and I’d laugh, too. But under the laughter was the ominous sense that things were going badly and getting worse. That there would come a time, very soon, when Mimi wasn’t safe at home anymore.
Actually, that time had come and gone. My mother’s hesitation wasn’t about Mimi, but about herself: she’d sold her house and packed her things and moved back north for one thing, and one thing only. If Mimi went into a care facility, she hadn’t just failed. She had no backup plan. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. No purpose.
Really, I did her a favor by blowing up my life and getting kicked out of my apartment. My mother needed someone to take care of, and I’d had nowhere else to go.
Marcus set the folded wheelchair down inside the door. My grandmother, still holding Adam’s arm, scowled at it and turned away, her gaze drifting around the room as if she were taking inventory. Nothing missing, everything in its place. Two tall mirrors stood on either side of a pair of pocket doors, which opened to the formal dining room; a long wood table and threadbare oriental rug were visible through the doorway. She glanced at her reflection in one of the mirrors, then turned to gaze up along the gleaming wooden staircase that took two turns on its way to the second floor.
Marcus was looking around, too. “This is some place,” he said to me. “You and your ma have been living here just the two of you?”
“We only really live in a few rooms.” My mother came up abruptlybehind me. “The cost of heating the whole place alone would bankrupt us.”
Marcus chuckled dutifully but continued to stare at the dark hallways, the peeling walls, the cracked ceiling. “It must have been something once upon a time.”
“It’s seen better days,” Mom said. “That wing there was practically destroyed in 1947. The fire, you know.”
“My uncle was there,” Marcus said. “They had every man on the island out there trying to fight the fire. He said he never saw anything like it. You’re lucky the whole place didn’t go.”
“Sometimes I wish it had.” She smiled weakly, gesturing toward the dark hallway that opened up to our left. “We keep it all closed up, but—”
A sharp voice broke in. “You changed it,” Mimi said, glaring at my mother.
Mom sighed. “Mother, I’ve done no such thing. Everything is just like you left it.”
Mimi’s voice was getting louder. “No. You changed it. You changed...” She trailed off, her eyes flitting from place to place, lingering on an empty space just over my shoulder. “Where’s the plant?”
Mom looked in the same direction and shook her head, frustration creeping into her voice. “There’s never been a plant there, Mother.”
“But my shoes,” Mimi said, her voice faltering. “How will I find...”
“I think she’s just tired. Let’s get these things to her room,” Mom said, turning to Adam as Mimi’s voice dropped to a low mutter. She pointed. “There’s a back bedroom here on the first floor, just past the kitchen that way.”
“The one with all the hats?” I said. In the years that Mimi had lived here alone, she’d managed to fill up the house with clutter that was worthless but bizarrely, carefully curated. One room had housed a collection of at least three dozen dining chairs, none ofwhich seemed to match; another had been crammed floor to ceiling with boxes that turned out to contain old, moldy copies of theLadies’ Home Journal.But the most interesting was the little room off the kitchen that had contained a bed, a nightstand, and about a hundred hats of all shapes and sizes that looked like they’d dropped through a wormhole from the 1950s. I had even briefly thought about starting an Instagram account for the hats, which seemed like a great idea right up until I opened one of the hatboxes and found, nestled alongside a black wool pillbox covered with white feathers and a twee little veil, the desiccated corpse of either a very large mouse or a small rat.
I’d clapped the top back on the hatbox and kicked it under the bed, and that was the end of that project. It was also the last time I’d gone poking through any of Mimi’s collections.
My mother snorted a little. “I moved the hats yesterday. If you hadn’t been so glued to your phone, maybe you would have noticed. Anyway, it’s a bit cold and small, but it’s got its own bathroom. And I don’t want her attempting stairs.” She moved to my grandmother’s side, gently taking her arm. “Okay, Mother? We’re going to get you settled in, right here on the first floor.”
Mimi blinked and pulled her arm free. “But that’s Shelly’s room.” She looked back at us, her gaze jumping from face to face, the imperious tone back in her voice. “Where is Shelly?”
A funny thing about Mimi was that her confidence was contagious: even though she wasn’t making sense, the rest of us began shuffling and looking around as if the mysterious missing Shelly might suddenly materialize from behind a door. Marcus turned to Adam. “Do we know a Shelly?”
“Oh,” Mom said abruptly. “Shelly worked here. A long time back, when I was just a little girl. She was my nanny, too, wasn’t she? Mother?” Mimi didn’t answer and Mom shrugged, turning back to the group. “I was so young, I hardly remember her. But that backbedroom was hers. I think it was actually the servant’s quarters when the house was first built.”
“Servants! Fancy folks,” Marcus said, and everyone laughed.
“Like you said, once upon a time,” Mom said. “I don’t think anyone lives like that anymore. At least not around here.”
“What happened to Shelly?” Adam asked, and my mother shrugged.
“I’d guess she’s still in town, unless she retired somewhere. She had a son about my age...” She trailed off, furrowing her brow. “Anyway, I think Mother might feel better if she could lie down for a bit. Would you bring her bags?”
“Sure thing,” Marcus said. “The chair, too?”
