Nell parked with the engine still warm and sat a long time staring at the house as if it might rearrange itself into something less like a decision. The drive from the city had been clotted with rain and the kind of gray that holds its shape for hours; the town lay under it like a bruise. She had not expected to feel the shape of Mae's absence the way she did: not only a missing person but a whole room of air that would not stop moving. The funeral had been two days ago — a short service, a wooden coffin, names read in a voice she barely recognized as belonging to people who had not known her on the days she needed to be known. Now there were the practical things left over: deeds and keys, a list of bills, a house that smelled of all the small things a person collects and never throws away.
The house waited with crooked teeth of porch boards and a front step that leaned. Its paint, once pale, had retreated in flakes; shards of pale color trembled in the gutters. The lawn had surrendered to whatever grew when no one bothered to name it. Nell thought of the swing at the far side of the yard — a chain hanging like an old promise — and of the way light used to fall through the high upstairs window and make an oval of warmth on the stair. She had been away the night Cal vanished; she had been away too many nights then. The drive had given her enough time to rehearse excuses and apologies; they tasted like dust.
Inside the foyer a clock hung, stopped at a quarter to three, the hands frozen like two accusing fingers. Dust lay in a measured quiet across the banister, and the wallpaper had peeled back in a soft, deliberate way that suggested time had patient claws. The smell was not only mildew and old wood; there was a bright thread of citrus, the scent of the oil Mae used for polishing frames, and underneath it a faint, sticky tang like spilled syrup. Nell moved through rooms that were hers and not hers at all: the parlor where a half-knit blanket sat abandoned on the armchair; the kitchen with the kettle still on the stove though its burner had been cold for days; a stack of unpaid notices tucked in a cracked ceramic dish by the telephone. The house kept to its manners but had stopped pretending to be whole.
She had come prepared with boxes and gloves, a worklist on a page smudged by rain. She began with the bedroom she had insisted on: the room with the built-in cupboards that had once been Cal's. His bed had been stripped years ago and there was only a mattress that dipped like a question. On the windowsill was a small jar of marbles — not the perfect, museum pieces she conserved in city archives but the cheap, hard spheres children prize. They were dusty, arranged like a congregation. Nell reached for one more out of habit than hope and felt at the bottom of the jar a tiny weight that wasn't dust. It rolled into her palm with a cool, surprising heft: a blue marble, its surface cloudy but catching a light as if it were wet. The pattern inside the glass made a miniature storm. She frowned; the marble had belonged to Cal once, years ago, a thing lost in some long-ago game. There were scuffs on it that looked like a child's scraped thumb, and carved into its curve — faint as breath — were tiny notches as if someone had tried to leave a name.