“I told her not to paint over the cream,” Madeline muttered from behind me, and I turned in surprise. She had followed us inside, sunglasses pushed up into her hair now, revealing eyes so like my father’s it hurt to look at them too long. “It made the place look colder.”
It was the first honest thing I’d heard her say all morning.
Diana swept in after us. “As if your mother had exquisite taste.”
I stared at her. “You really cannot help yourself, can you?”
“Don’t start with me in this house.”
I laughed once, quietly. “Do you hear yourself?”
Evelyn entered then, along with one of the officers and the locksmith. The officer’s presence, I think, was the only reason Diana kept her voice down.
I moved from room to room, not quickly, not performing outrage, just seeing. That made it worse somehow. The kitchen still had the same windows overlooking the back dune grass and the same chipped tile by the sink where I had once dropped a glass jar of peach preserves when I was eleven, cried in terror, and been met by my mother’s laughter instead of anger. But the copper pot rack was gone. The blue-striped dish towels she loved were gone. The small brass bell that used to hang by the back door to call us in from the beach was gone.
The door to the pantry stood open, and I saw immediately that the top shelf had been reorganized by someone who did not understand sentiment and therefore did not recognize it when it was right in front of them. My mother’s glass jars of hand-labeled dried herbs, preserved for no practical reason after she died because none of us were ever going to cook with ten-year-old rosemary, had vanished. I had left them there on purpose, absurd and brittle and precious, because sometimes grief needs objects.
I put a hand on the pantry frame to steady myself.
Evelyn’s voice came from behind me. “Rebecca?”
“I’m fine.”
It wasn’t true, but it was close enough for public purposes.
There were more losses upstairs. My mother’s bedroom—later called the guest room by Diana, as if changing the name changed the dead—had been turned into some kind of “primary suite sitting room,” according to a brochure from a local furniture store lying on the dresser. The quilt my grandmother stitched by hand when my parents married was gone. So was the reading chair by the window, the one where my mother used to sit in a white cotton nightgown with her coffee while the sky lightened over the water.
I checked closets. Cabinets. The attic access panel. Every drawer in every room.
By the time I got to my old bedroom—still small, still facing east, still painted the faded pale green I had chosen when I was fourteen because I thought it looked like sea glass—I was shaking hard enough that I had to sit on the edge of the bed.
At least the bed was still mine. Narrow iron frame. Worn pine nightstand. A shelf lined with the ridiculous carved wooden gulls my father used to buy from roadside stands before Diana entered our lives and made him allergic to anything unsophisticated.
One of the gulls was missing its beak. I stared at it for a long moment, then realized the break was old. I had broken it myself at fifteen while trying to dust and balance an open paperback on my knee. My mother had laughed and said, “Perfect. Now it has character.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
This was what Diana never understood. She thought value existed where money had touched it most recently. She could not imagine a house being defended for reasons that had nothing to do with sale price or prestige or the chance to stage a better Christmas card. She didn’t know what to do with memory except bulldoze it and call the result an upgrade.
When I finally stood again and opened the closet, the breath left my body.
