Clara Voss arrived the day after the burial, carrying a suitcase that seemed useless against the size of the town’s quiet. The bus let her out where the pavement thinned into gravel and the air tasted of damp brick and wood smoke. On the walk to her childhood home the town looked as if someone had left pages of it open and unattended: the bakery awning hung like a tired mouth, the hardware store’s window displayed an obedient parade of tools, and the green at the center where children once played was a patchwork of browned grass and leaning benches. Everything was the same enough to be crushing.
She had left ten years before with a scholarship and a neat list of reasons to go: a city job, a rented flat with room for a proper desk, shelves that would hold books without complaint. She had not expected to return as a messenger. Her mother’s death had been precise in its smallness—a collapse in the kitchen between stacking dishes, a call to an ambulance and the kind of paperwork that divides a life into tidy boxes. Clara had filed the dates and pills and doctors’ names in her head as if she were cataloguing an exhibition. That was the particular cruelty: grief kept producing shapes she could not classify.
The house stood the way houses do when they have been lived in and kept: brick grown soft with time, windows like tired eyes, a porch that sagged on one side as if weary. Clara found herself waiting every few steps for Noah to appear—his gait, the way he tilted his head when he was listening to people in the room and deciding whether they were worth keeping. He had liked small mischiefs that left no real harm. She told herself he might be late, at a friend’s, on the way back from a trip into the market. But the seat at the bus shelter held only a damp newspaper, and when she reached the porch the door opened on an air that smelled of lemon oil and forgotten afternoons.