I met Avery at Smith College, where she was the quintessential good student and I had a reputation as a wild child. It was easier to explain how I didn’t know about a universal family tradition because I had been stuck in an Austrian boarding school. Easier to act unaffected by the infamy of my dysfunctional trust fund by pretending to obsess over parties and frat boys and reckless stunts.
It would be easier to really be as self-absorbed as people thought I was, but I felt every whisper, every criticism, every cruel smile directed at me as if my skin were made of paper.
I pull my leased BMW into the wide circular drive as the electronic gates swing open. Around back there’s an eight-car garage with empty bays for Rolls-Royces and Aston Martins, the kind of cars befitting a house like this. I would have bought them, too, if Mom cared anything for cars.
Or if she could go anywhere.
“Helloooo,” I call into the wide marble-floor foyer, hearing my voice echo back to me.
There’s only silence.
I didn’t feel guilty about the incident with that statue and the campus police. Those kinds of things were hobbies. Or maybe defense mechanisms. I didn’t have the paralyzing doubt and self-recrimination I have now, when I dread coming home every evening.
Upstairs I find my mother napping even though it’s already almost bedtime. She looks peaceful on her side, her hands resting one on top of the other. There would be no sign that she was unwell to someone who didn’t know her. The main difference is her weight, something she’s fought to keep down her entire life. Now she can’t eat enough to even maintain her weight.
That’s what the cancer does, takes all the nutrients away so her own cells starve.
It’s her eyes that look the most different. There are dark shadows underneath her lashes. I can see the blue-green veins in her eyelids. They look sunken, especially when she opens them and smiles.
“There you are,” she says, her voice rusty with sleep.
I brush her hair back, the way she did when I was a little girl. “Here I am. And I brought takeout.”
She scrunches her nose. That’s another side effect of the cancer. She doesn’t even want to eat, when really her body needs even more calories. “I ate a big lunch.”
“Well, you can have a little fried rice. And some sweet and sour chicken.”
A disapproving sound. “There’s some quinoa and kale salad in the fridge.”
“I also got some fried wontons,” I say in a singsong voice because no one can resist fried wontons—not even my mother. She’s into whole grains and organic fruit, but they weren’t enough to save her. Not even the herbalist or the acupuncture made a dent in the cancer.
She sits up, looking like some sleeping beauty awakened with a kiss. The irony is that if she’d done the rounds of chemo and experimental treatments that the doctor prescribed, she would look much worse. Her hair would be gone, her skin might be bruised.
And the cancer might have been held back, if only for a few years.
I fought with her to do the treatments. Begged her. In the end it wasn’t truly Christopher who kept her from having them. I had to accept that she didn’t want that. That she wanted to live out what was left of her life with whatever peace she could find. This house is part of that peace. The fried wontons are part of that peace. But God, it hurts to watch it happen. It hurts bad enough that I dread coming home, and that’s when I feel guilty.
“How’s the library coming?”
She knows about the issues with contractors, though I haven’t told her quite how dangerous it is for me to work on the restoration with the current structural problems. And I have no plans to tell her about Christopher Bardot, who’s still a tender spot considering he left her destitute after taking the helm of my inheritance. I should not want a man who did that. I never should have been able to love him, in the deepest, most secret part of my heart. “The last shipment of oak looks really good. A close match. I’m going to stain it and see how it holds up. The bigger problem is my own skill with the chisel.”
“You’ll figure it out. I have faith in you.”
I make a face. “Are you sure I shouldn’t hire someone? I talked to Professor Basu over e-mail, and she said there’s a really promising woodworking artist who graduated last year.”
She sits up, moving slowly because I know she gets dizzy sometimes. “I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.”
That’s what she says when I’m thinking about doing the wrong thing. “The wall is worth doing well, even if I have to find someone else to do it.”
“Someone else who understands your vision?”
That’s the part that kept me from e-mailing Professor Basu back to ask for this guy’s contact information. There’s skill and there’s passion. Both are required to do this wall. I don’t have much skill in this medium, despite having graduated in studio art, but I don’t trust anyone else to have the passion. The wall speaks to me, and with my clumsy hands I’m speaking back.
Mom stands up and then slides back to the bed. I catch her under her elbows, pulling her to standing. “Are you okay?” I breathe even though the answer is clearly no.
She’s not okay. She’s dying. That’s what this house is—a personal hospice.
A place to say goodbye.
Her slender hand cups my cheek. “You’re so strong,” she whispers.
“I’m not,” I whisper back because even now I want to fight her. I want to beg her to do some kind of therapy, even though I know we passed the point of no return. There’s only death now, and waiting for it is killing me.
I know something is different as I hopscotch over rubble.
A sharp mechanical sound cuts through the hum of male voices. The heavy plastic sheeting that protects the library from the elements is my very own looking glass. As I step through it, I find a whole bevy of strange creatures, muscled men with tools and boots, as if they stepped from the wall and became flesh.
They spare me a few glances, a little curious, mostly wary, before going about their work. It’s almost noon, and though I only got up and showered an hour ago, the sheen of sweat on their brows tells me they’ve been at this a long time. They have hard hats on their heads and smudges on their dark shirts.
“Harper.” The low voice makes me jolt.
I turn to face Sutton, who looks more like the old version of himself, the one I first met, wearing black slacks and a white button-down, the sleeves rolled up to reveal golden hair on his forearms. He isn’t covered in smudges or sweat, but he does have a yellow hard hat on, burnished curls peeking out from beneath it.
My heart thumps a warm welcome for those forearms. “What are you doing here?”
“Restoring the library.” He raises an eyebrow. “Like you asked me to.”
“Well yeah, but I thought you couldn’t find a construction crew willing to work on the library. And these people seem like they know what they’re doing. Not like you found them on Craigslist.”
“Thanks,” he says drily. “They do know what they’re doing, and I didn’t find them on Craigslist. You don’t need to worry about the library. How’s your mother feeling?”