The Fate of Mercy Alban (4 page)

As if Jane could hear my thoughts, she said: “You go upstairs and unpack. Your room is all made up with fresh linens. I’ll have supper ready at six o’clock.”

“Unpacking and dinner.” I smiled at her. “Sounds like a plan.”

I dragged my suitcase up the stairs to the second floor and set off down the long hallway toward my room. The family’s bedrooms were clustered in the second floor’s east wing in an effort by my parents to make the enormous house seem smaller and more intimate. In generations past, children always slept on the third floor. But when my mother married my father and they moved into Alban House with his aging parents, she made it clear she didn’t like that arrangement. She wanted her family all around her, close. No nannies required.

As I walked down the hallway, I was remembering winter days when the boys and I would run down its length. The image of Jimmy, wearing those ratty old blue sneakers he loved so much, whooshed through me and down the hall, where, at the end of the west wing, we had set up a chalkboard to tally how many times we had made it back and forth. The sensation was so real—I could feel the breeze as he ran past me—that I turned to look down the hallway to see if the chalkboard was there, too, jagged tally marks in white and all. But the image faded as quickly as it came, and I was alone again in the hall.

I poked my head into the boys’ old room, now used by Amity when she visited, and found my daughter flopped onto her stomach on one of the beds, her iPod so loud that I could hear its tinny music from where I stood at the door. A phone was in her hand and she was texting at rapid speed. I walked over and tapped her foot. She snapped her head around, her eyes wide.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that,” she said, furrowing her eyebrows at me and pulling the earbuds out of her ears. “I didn’t know you were there.”

“You need to turn the music down, honey,” I told her. “Then you’ll hear people. Besides, that’s ruining your ears.”

She shot me a look and went back to her texting. Why did I always do that? I knew better than to think that kind of motherly badgering did any good with my headstrong daughter.

Trying again, I sat down on the bed next to her. “Jane said dinner is at six,” I said, rubbing her back. “Tomorrow’s going to be busy, but we could take a walk along the lakeshore tonight. Or we could go to the malt shop. Or shopping …?”

“Nah,” she said, sitting up and shrugging off my touch.

Defeated, I stood up and began to walk out of the room. “Maybe we’ll watch a movie later?”

“Yeah, maybe,” she said, dissolving back into her texting.

I closed the door behind me. Where was the cheerful little girl who had hung on my every word not so long ago? Who was this sullen, moody changeling?

I shook my head as I made my way down the hall to my old room. Opening the door, I saw that the same white linens were on the bed, the same sheer white curtains framed the windows. The room was largely unchanged from the day I left it.

But a certain strangeness hung in the air here, too, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And then it hit me. Emptiness. When my mother was here, even after what happened with the boys and my dad, every room in this house felt alive, warm, and loving. Now it was as cold as a tomb.

I unpacked my clothes and stuffed my empty suitcase into the back of the closet, then slid my feet into the decades-old slippers that had stood sentinel, waiting for me all this time.

“Here I am again,” I whispered into the air. The walls seemed to sigh a tired welcome in response.

Back out in the hallway, I padded down to the master suite and stood outside the door. I knew I’d have to go inside—my mother kept all of her important papers in the study just off her bedroom, and I needed to find the instructions for her funeral, at the very least. But I was having trouble summoning up the courage to face the memories I knew were waiting for me there.

As I stood there leaning against the door, I felt a surge of warmth swirling around me, a soft tickling on my skin. A scent wafted through the air—lake water mixed with morning rain and the minty aroma of the type of bath soap we used as kids.

“Jake? Jimmy?” I said aloud, turning around in a circle, almost expecting to see them standing behind me, their quirky, impish grins firmly plastered on their freckled faces. “Are you here?”

I felt it then: Water. Icy cold. As though it was rising, first around my feet, then calves, then thighs—

“Who are you talking to?” Amity’s voice startled me out of whatever was happening.

“Oh, honey.” I scrambled, holding her wide-eyed gaze and trying to think of something plausible to say as she made her way down the hall toward me.

In the end, I admitted: “I guess I was talking to my brothers. I know it’s silly, but being back here, in the house where we all grew up, and now having to go into Grandma’s room …” My eyes began stinging with tears. I tried to brush them away, but Amity grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

“It’s okay, Mom,” she said to me, taking my hand, her face radiating the maturity and serenity of an old soul. “I get that this is really hard for you.”

Teenagers
, I thought.
Hellions one minute, angels the next
.

I wrapped her in my arms and held her tight. “Oh, Amity,” I said into her hair. “I’m the one who should be comforting you. I’m the grown-up here, and you’re grieving for Grandma, too.”

“Nonsense. It couldn’t matter less who comforts whom. What’s important is that we’re standing together as family,” she said in a voice not quite her own … or maybe I thought she said it?
Nonsense? Whom?
Amity’s teenage vernacular didn’t typically include those words. As I stood there holding my daughter, a chill shot through me. Was it my mother speaking?

I broke our hug and looked her in the face. She smiled, back to the teenage girl that she had been moments before. “I used to like sitting with Grandma in her study,” she said to me, putting her hand on the knob. “There’s nothing so scary in there.”

With that, she pushed open the door.

The faint scent of my mother’s perfume still hung in the air, her cardigan still lay on the end of the bed, a collection of mail sat next to the letter opener, waiting to be read. Mom had touched all these things just days ago, left her imprint. Her energy still radiated there. But it was fading, and soon everything would be cold.

“I should probably go through this mail to see if there’s anything important, but …” My words disintegrated into a sigh.

“I know,” Amity said, picking up a letter and putting it down again. “It feels weird. Like you’re snooping or something.”

I leafed through the stack of envelopes—a few bills, several solicitations from charities, a thick envelope from what looked to be her financial adviser.

“Honey, will you run back to my room and get my purse?” I asked my daughter. “I might as well just get these bills paid right now. We don’t want the lights or water turned off.”

“Sure,” she said as she shrugged and walked out the door.

I continued to go through my mother’s desk, opening drawers, fingering the pens and sheets of monogrammed stationery. The bottom drawer was filled with hanging file folders, mostly bill and investment related, and I touched each one in turn until my hand came upon what I had been hunting for: a folder labeled
FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS
.

I lifted it from its place and opened it on the desk, finding contact information for the funeral director, the caterer, the venue for the service—our longtime family church, a hundred-year-old stone structure that stood on the lakeshore just a mile down from the house—and even the hymns she wanted to be played and the people she’d like to speak.

Both the service and the reception afterward were to be open to the public, but there was also a list of people she wanted to make sure were personally invited—the mayor, the governor, two senators, local businesspeople, university professors, artists whose careers I knew she had championed and supported. I gave silent thanks that she had left such specific instructions.

I folded that sheet and slipped it into the pocket of my cardigan, making a mental note to talk it over with Jane. Then it would be time to call the reporters, many of whom had already left messages for me. The death of an Alban in this town was big news. My head began to pound, wondering how I’d deal with their questions. That had always been my mother’s job. And before that, my father’s. Now there was nobody but me.

While I was sitting at the desk going through all this information, Amity had returned with my purse and was rummaging around in my mother’s closet.

“All this stuff still smells like Grandma,” she said, poking her head out the door. She held my gaze for a moment and went on. “It’s weird to be here without her.”

I closed the file. “I know, honey. It is for me, too.”

She shook her head and brushed away tears from her eyes.

“You’re a big help to me here, Amity.” I smiled at her, not wanting to let on how much trepidation I felt. “This isn’t easy, but I promise you, we’ll get through it.”

I went on: “And if we don’t, there’s Jane to scold us and pick up the pieces.”

This lightened her mood a bit. “All the things you have to do after somebody dies, they’re just really bizarre,” she said, flopping down on the chaise by the window and wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

I understood what she meant. “In a way, though, honey, those rituals are good things. You want to just shut everything out, but you can’t, because you’ve got to call the funeral director and make arrangements and then you’ve got to get dressed and go to the funeral and greet people and all of that. The rituals force you to put one foot in front of the other during the first horrible days after someone dies.”

I was thinking about how I walked around like a zombie after the accident with Jake and Jimmy, how my dad didn’t come out of his room for days, and how my mother somehow handled it all, arranged for everything, even attended a special candlelight memorial service put on by the boys’ school.

My mother soldiered on, with a permanent tinge of melancholy in her eyes, yes, but she went on nonetheless. Where she got that strength after the deaths of two children, I’ll never know, but wherever it came from, I needed to tap into some of it. I needed to be that pillar of strength for my daughter now.

“Why don’t you head down to the lakeshore?” I said to her. “Or take one of the bikes out of the garage and ride on the path to downtown? I’ll finish up in here and then we’ll have dinner out on the patio. How does that sound?”

She nodded and unfolded herself from her slump on the chaise. “I guess I’ll go down to the lake.”

She opened the door but turned around before going through it. “What are you going to do now?” she asked me.

“I might as well lay out something for Grandma to wear so it will be done. Her list of instructions says she wants to wear”—I quickly unfolded the sheet and glanced at it—“a blue Chanel dress, so I guess I’ll hunt around for that. I’ve also got to call the funeral director. Oh, and the florist.” I sat down with a thud. “Lots to do.”

“I’ll look for the dress,” Amity offered. “I know the one she means. I went shopping with her last summer when she bought it. You make those calls and then we’ll both go down to the lake.”

“You’re some kid.” I smiled at her. “You’ve got a deal.”

As I was looking for the funeral director’s number, Amity emerged from the closet, carrying the dress. She laid it on the bed, carefully smoothing out the wrinkles. “Does she want the hat, too? She wore this with a hat.”

“I’m not sure—” I started, rising from my chair just in time to see her turn back to the closet and reach up onto a high shelf, where several hatboxes stood in a row. Not quite tall enough to grasp them from her tiptoes, she jumped and grabbed, and the whole shelf of boxes came down in a clatter, a shower of hats tumbling onto the floor. Amity looked at me, wide-eyed, holding up the blue hat.

I chuckled. “Well, I guess you found it.” We both began to gather up the wayward hats, returning them to their boxes, careful not to rip the fragile tissue paper within.

“What’s this?” she asked, scowling at something on the floor. She picked it up and held it out for me to see. It was a worn leather satchel, a little bigger than a clutch purse.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “A purse to go with the hats, maybe?”

She handed it over to me. As I took it from her, I felt a tingling, a slight tremor. This wasn’t a purse, not one my mother would carry, anyway. I opened its outer flap and peered inside.

“It looks like … letters,” I murmured, and drew out a stack of two dozen or so envelopes, tied together with a faded pink silk ribbon. I flipped through them. “They’re addressed to Grandma.” To her maiden name, I noticed. These letters were written to my mother before she had married my father.

Amity’s eyes were sparkling. “Who are they from?”

“There’s no return address,” I said, quickly tucking them back into the satchel. “But anyway, these are Grandma’s private letters, so I really don’t think we should be reading them. Do you?”

“Probably not,” she said, rising to her feet, her interest waning as quickly as it had been piqued. “Is it okay if I go down to the lakeshore now?”