The road into Harrowfield folded like a tired ribbon between marsh and sea, a single lane that remembered the wheels of every towncar that had ever come back. Naomi Hale drove it slow, the funeral flowers on the passenger seat smelling of lilies and the damp of the coast. Her hands kept finding the seam of the steering wheel as if to anchor herself to something solid. The town had not changed its posture: narrow cottages leaned toward one another, porches held a dozen different kinds of weathered chairs, and fishermen's lines hung like stubborn punctuation against the gray. She had left when she was twenty-two with a camera bag and a list of reasons to stay away; she returned at thirty-one with a suitcase of grief and the impression that returning was a kind of audition before the past.
Her mother's funeral was small. The church smelled of beeswax and the cheap perfume that people thought appropriate for mourning. People hummed as if remembering how to be sorrowful around someone else's body. Naomi stood at the back because she knew the faces in front—the faces of neighbors who had taught her to tie a knot in a fishing line, the faces of women whose children had once played with Jonah. There was a softness to their eyes that ached; they traded glances as if cataloging what was allowed to say, and what was better domesticated into silence. Naomi watched them and thought of the way the language of a town sometimes took on the qualities of its architecture: hypocrisy muffled under clapboard and painted trim.
When the benediction ended, the scattered congregation came out like tidewater easing away. Naomi lingered to press her palm to the side of the church, to feel the cooled brick, and for a small ridiculous moment she wished the house where her mother had lived to be unchanged—as if a place could hold a person like an heirloom. She had imagined scenes of confrontation and confession, the tearing open of dusty boxes that might contain a single clear note from Jonah hidden in his handwriting. In the colder light the house looked smaller than memory; the garden had surrendered to sea grass and a fence leaned with the fatigue of unrebuilt storms. Her mother’s place smelled of boiled tea and old paper. The furniture had the inevitable, comfortable scatter of a life lived in small increments: magazines with turned corners, a kettle left half-run over on the stove, a mug whose lip bore a ring of mineral stains.
Instead of the confrontation she had rehearsed, Naomi found a kind of domestic silence. Her cousin Etta fussed with a doily as if arranging the burden of familial grief into an acceptable pattern; Etta's hands moved the way someone learned to fold memories away. Naomi moved through the rooms like someone checking the rooms of a house she thought she already knew by touch. There were photographs on the mantel, lined like small altars—a wedding day, a funeral in which her mother looked younger than Naomi remembered, and then the family portrait that had been taken at a summer fair. It was here that she first noticed the absence.