Evelyn had imagined the house a hundred times on the long drives back from cities where people thought their histories began at the corner deli and ended at the subway stop. She had rehearsed the practicalities — which boxes to open first, which papers were likely to be important, how to keep the estate tidy until lawyers finished their slow rituals — but the moment the brass key gave and the door breathed open she discovered rehearsal and reality were different things. The air inside held a thickness she had only ever known as a child: a concentration of dust and lavender as if time had itself been folded and pressed between the walls.
Light slanted across the hallway and outlined familiar furniture in the way a photograph outlines a face: so much detail, so indistinct at once. Her fingers could not stop touching things. The banister where their palms had slipped a thousand times, the chip in the dining table that had always been explained away as an accident, the curtain tiebacks that smelled faintly of mothballs and something like citrus. She set a cardboard box on the carpet and sat on the floor like a person taking a small, precarious breath. The boxes were her mission; the boxes were her punishment.
Her mother had been methodical; Evelyn found lists written in careful, small script on the inside lids of some containers — grocery lists, names of friends, dates. Most of those lists read to her now like the actions of somebody clearing a life into compartments before the weather changed. She moved slowly through memory as if it were a room she had to make polite introductions to, like turning on lights in a house at night. Every object opened a small, quick door. A tea tin that meant a thousand afternoons. A sweater that smelled of a different winter. A plastic box with pressed paper cranes folded by hands she could not picture.
There was a narrow closet at the back of the hall that had always held seasonal things. Evelyn had shoved holiday decorations and old coats into it as a child and pretended it was a secret chamber. That day, on a shelf near the ceiling, she found a container wrapped in brown paper and twine, its edges softened by years. The twine snapped in her hands like a small surrender. Inside, carefully cushioned in tissue, was a tiny shoe — leather mottled with age, laces gone to threads. It was a child’s shoe in the kind of smallness that made her stomach go hollow. Beside it were several cassette tapes wound neatly together and a photograph tucked behind them, the paper softened at the corners as if touched many times before she saw it.