As on previous nights, she felt utterly alone in her father’s bed. She pictured Esther and Ben, reassuring herself that somewhere, she still belonged to someone, and reached for her phone on the nightstand. She had to tell Esther that she’d never again leave her in her time of need, if she could possibly help it.
“Aw, I forgot she was going to have dinner at Julia’s,” Paul said, when Gina asked to speak to Esther. “How’d the rest of the day go?”
Gina described their visit with Annie and Lester, but her conversations with Cassie felt too convoluted to talk about. “I wanted to prepare Esther for the funeral,” she said. “I’m afraid she’ll feel . . . I just . . . I hate not being there with her now.”
“You can’t be in two places at the same time,” Paul said. “Esther knows that. And I’m here.” He took a breath. “Gina . . .”
In his protracted pause, Gina heard everything he wanted to say: you worry too much . . . you don’t have to be the perfect mom . . . it’s okay for them to grapple. Things he’d told her over and over again, but she didn’t buy.
“You need to worry about yourself,” he said now. “Right? If you’re very anxious, how about taking the Xanax I gave you?”
She was too exhausted to call him on his paternal tone. “No,” she said. “Whatever. Just tell Esther she can get ahold of me anytime if she wants.”
After they’d hung up, Gina thought about how attending to her children always made her feel strong. Now, feeling small and vulnerable in her childhood room, she realized that comforting her children soothed the confused and inconsolable child within herself. Was there something wrong with that? With her? Maybe Paul was right: she needed to find a different way to ease her anxiety
She lay awake for an hour, listening as Cassie locked the front door and thumped upstairs to bed. When the house was silent, she tossed in her father’s exile bed for a few more minutes until she could stand it no more. There was no way self-comforting was going to happen in this bed, in this room, in this house!
She jumped out of bed, shivering with a violence a blanket wouldn’t fix, and crept into Cassie’s room. “Can I sleep with you?” she asked.
Cassie slid over in the double bed, and Gina climbed in beside her as she had so many times before.
“You’re shaking,” Cassie said. “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t want to sleep in there?” She caressed Gina’s shoulder, and they were both quiet for a while. Finally, Cassie said, “I’m sorry about earlier. You know, it’s different for me, being in this house. I couldn’t have spent so much time here if I hadn’t had a couple of blowouts with Mom. It’s why I can laugh about it all and you can’t.”
Gina rolled onto her side, her back to Cassie. Since they were very young, the sisters had bonded over struggles with their mother; now, the distinction Cassie had made caused Gina to feel even more isolated. The defenses she’d been keeping up for days were weakening. But she wouldn’t let them; there was still too much to get through. When Cassie hugged Gina close and cried, her warm, minty breath puffing into Gina’s back, Gina sensed that although her sister claimed to have “let it go,” her shuddering was not just about the sudden death of their parents—though that would be enough—but also a mourning for what had come before, here in the house.
In the sagging bed, Gina was alone on an island in the dark, dreary night with the one person who understood.
Cassie stopped crying and rolled over. Soon, her icy cold feet found their way to Gina’s calves, as they always had when they slept together as girls.
Gina folded the pillow over her head. When Cassie said something, she peeled it away. “What?”
“You haven’t cried the whole time we’ve been here.”
Gina had felt the tears, swelling inside her. What Cassie didn’t know—because Gina hadn’t yet found the words for it—was that even before their abrupt and monumental loss, something else had been stealing from her, something more insidious and stealthy. “I can’t,” she said. “Not yet.”
“You still always sleep with a pillow wrapped around your head?”
“Yup.”
“I’m sorry you ended up with the bedroom next to Mom’s.”
“It’s not your fault.”
A house: a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. A receptacle for light and sun. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life.
A room: a surface over which one can walk at ease, a bed on which to stretch yourself, a chair in which to rest or work, a work-table, receptacles in which each thing can be put at once in its right place.
The number of rooms: one for cooking and one for eating. One for work, one to wash yourself in and one for sleep. Such are the standards of the dwelling. Then why do we have the enormous and useless roofs on pretty suburban villas? Why the scanty windows with their little panes; why large houses with so many rooms locked up? Why the mirrored wardrobes . . . the elaborate bookcases . . . the consoles, the china cabinets . . . ?
Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture
The morning after the funeral, Paul, Esther, and Ben piled into Cassie’s car so that she could drop them at the airport on her way back to Providence, where she had an evening event to cater. Watching her family drive out the driveway, Gina felt a frantic urge to run after them and jump in the car. But there was still much to do, and she owed it to Cassie to stay a couple more days.
The auction man arrived at ten-thirty to pick up the house’s more valuable furnishings. “There’re some real treasures here,” he said. “You might be surprised by what they fetch.” Sliding open the drawer of a Banton family desk, he asked, “Have you gotten everything out of these drawers? Oh, wow! Look at these!” He plucked out several small, worn frames. “Sixth plate daguerreotypes. Signed ‘New York, 1841.’ Wonderful!”
Yesterday, Gina had seen the daguerreotypes but hadn’t even taken them out to look at them. They’d been tucked in that drawer for as long as she could remember and had become fixtures over time, like faucets and hairbrushes. What excited her were the piece of George Washington’s cloak and the lock of Martha’s hair, now tucked in her carry-on bag. She and Cassie had decided not to even mention this fresh discovery to the auctioneer until they’d researched the best thing to do with them. Since Cassie’s house had been broken into recently, she insisted that Gina take them with her to San Francisco.
Neighbors and friends had picked up most of the rest of the furniture and now that the auction items were cleared out, the house was nearly empty. Even the ship’s and lighthouse clocks had been packed away, their voices silenced. Without Cassie’s big personality to fill up the rooms, Gina experienced the echo of death even more acutely.
She went upstairs and sat on the toilet lid, looking for solace in her email. She opened the last of five from her clients, Mitzi and Jeff Stone, whose two voicemails she’d neglected to answer. She’d brought their drawings with her, expecting they’d want to talk and finally made a date with them for a Skype conference the next morning. She spent most of the afternoon answering the string of emails from clients and contractors that felt like a lifeline.
At five o’clock, she loaded up her parents’ car with more boxes and bags and headed out Halsey Road to Goodwill. She made her drop, trying not to think about her mother’s tiny cardigans and tiny shoes and the hardly-worn wool trousers of her father’s that were stuffed beneath the knot of the black plastic bags. It seemed indecorous that owing to size and convenience, trash bags had become the default carry-all—for life, for death, and everything in between, like garbage.
When