I had forgotten all about it. I sat up quickly and opened my hand. The necklace was so black that for a moment I didn’t recognize the small tarnished heart. When I did, I couldn’t believe it. I had thought it was gone forever!
The silver necklace was a gift from Aunt Jule when I was born. I had loved it and worn it at the shore every summer, though on a sturdier chain than the original. The summer my mother had come, she had taken it from me after a fight with Aunt Jule. The next day I had sneaked into her room and searched for the necklace everywhere — her jewelry case and purse, her bureau drawers and suitcase. I didn’t find it and feared she had done as she’d threatened — thrown it in the river.
So how had it ended up in the loft? Though the boathouse was in better shape seven years ago, I couldn’t imagine my mother going in, much less hiding something there. But if Aunt Jule, Nora, or Holly had found the necklace, why wasn’t it returned to me? Maybe they meant to, but forgot. A lot of things went undone and forgotten around here. Still, why keep it in the boathouse loft?
I hung the necklace on the wood post of my mirror stand, puzzling over the events of the day. I had come here to tie up my memories like a box of old photos, so I could put them away once and for all. But the memories would not be neatly bound up; questions kept unraveling.
I didn’t know what time it was or where I was, except far beneath the surface of a river. The river bottom was thick with sea grass and I swam in near darkness. Someone called my name, Laur-en, Laur-en, the voice rising and falling over the syllables as my mother’s once had. I followed the voice, swimming through the long weed, feeling it flow over my skin like cold tentacles.
“Lauren! Lauren!” It was my mother. She was panicking.
I swam harder, trying to find her. I needed air, but somehow I continued scouring the bottom. The sea grass wrapped itself around my arms and legs, entangling me.
“Lauren, come quickly!”
I broke free and kept swimming. I could feel her fear as if it were my own. I knew she was sinking into a place where I couldn’t reach her, an endless night.
The banks of the river narrowed. Both sides were walls of tree roots, roots like long, arthritic fingers reaching out to catch me. I fought my way through them. But as her voice grew near, the river walls pressed closer together, threatening to swallow me alive.
“Where are you?” I cried out.
“Here.”
Ahead of me was a deep crack where the two banks joined, a long and jagged fissure.
“Here, Lauren,” she called out from the fissure. “Lauren, dearest, come to Mother.”
But I didn’t want to go where she was. I hesitated, and the crack closed, sealing her in forever.
I woke up sweating. My heart pounded and I gulped air as if I were emerging from deep water.
Laur-en.
I turned my head toward the hall, thinking I heard the same voice. Silence.
I climbed out of bed and tiptoed to the door. When I opened it, the door to my mother’s old room creaked.
Someone had left it ajar.
I crossed the hall and laid my palms against the door, listening a moment, then pushed it open. At the other end of the room a glass door to the porch suddenly closed. I started toward it and the door behind me slammed shut.
I screamed, then muffled it. A draft, I told myself, a draft running through my room and this one blew the doors shut. I wondered if it had been caused by someone making a hasty exit through the porch door.
I strode across the room, opened the doors to the porch, and leaned out. No one was there. Of course, if it had been Nora, she could have easily slipped into her room, the next door down.
Inside, I turned on the floor lamp and glanced around. It looked as I remembered it, with oak furniture similar to my own and a red-and-green quilt on the bed. Spiders had made themselves cozy here and dust coated the bureau top, but the dresser had streaks on its surface, as if someone had been using it recently. One of its drawers wasn’t closed all the way.
I walked over and opened it. Inside were several old newspapers, tabloids that were badly yellowed. I spread them out on the dresser top. I guessed what was in them; still, the pictures of my mother shocked me — those horrible flashbulb photos that could make the prettiest woman look like a witch.
Had she put them here? Not unless she wanted to torture herself, I thought. The only other thing in the drawer was an empty packet of marigold seeds.
I opened the next drawer. My mother’s favorite pair of earrings lay on top of a scarf she had loved. I touched them gently. At the town house in Washington, my mother’s personal things had been put in safe storage or thrown out soon after she died. I still had her jewelry box in my room at school, but it seemed like mine now more than hers. These items were different — barely touched by anyone else. I halfexpected to smell her perfume on them.
In the corner of the drawer were snippets of photographs.
For a moment I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at, then I saw they were pictures from that last summer, with my mother cut out. Not exactly subtle symbolism, I thought. In the third drawer there were more empty seed packets and a pile of plant catalogs that had been mailed to Nora.
Were all these things Nora’s? Some of the garden catalogs were dated the summer of the current year, which meant Nora had opened the bureau recently; it wasn’t as if she had forgotten these things were here. I found it unsettling to think that anyone would keep the rag-paper photos of my mother seven years after her death. Equally disturbing was the possibility that, after all this time, Nora could have mimicked perfectly the intonation of my mother’s voice. This was the behavior of someone obsessed with a person, obsessed with a dead woman.
I left everything as I’d found it, planning to show it to Aunt Jule, then turned out the light and left.
“Is everything all right?”
“Holly!” I hadn’t expected her to be in the hall.
Nora stood behind Holly, her dark eyes glittering in the soft light. I was too tired to confront her now and wasn’t sure I’d get anywhere if I did. The person to talk to was Aunt Jule.
“Everything’s fine,” I answered Holly.
“Are you sure?”
“I had a bad dream and got up to walk around — to shake it off — that’s all.”
Holly turned her head, glancing sideways at her sister, as if suspicious of something more, then said, “Nora, go to bed.”
Nora moved past her sister and peeked into the room from which I had just come.
“Nora,” Holly said quietly but firmly. Nora returned to her bedroom.
Holly guided me into mine. “You look upset,” she observed as she turned on the lamp. “Do you want to talk?”
“Thanks, but it’s awfully late,” I replied.
“I’m wide awake,” she assured me, sitting on my bed.
She must have wondered what was going on, especially if she heard my muffled scream.
“Nick told us Nora locked you in the boathouse,” Holly continued. “I don’t know what to say, Lauren, except I’m sorry it happened. Please don’t take it personally.”
“What if it was meant personally?”
“Just do your best to avoid her,” Holly advised. “And next time Nora starts making trouble for you, tell me. Someone has to keep tabs on her. Since Mom doesn’t, I’m the warden of this asylum.”
“Holly, what’s going to happen to Nora when you go away to college?”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” she said. “But Nora is a long-term problem. Right now I’m more concerned about you. It has to be hard coming back and seeing things you associate with your mother’s death.”