Chapter 1: The Drawer

Chapter 1: The Drawer

The house smells the way it always smelled, which is the first surprise. Mira had braced for the staleness of a closed-up place, the particular sourness of three weeks without a person in it, but instead it is woodsmoke gone cold, and lemon polish, and the salt that comes off the bay and works its way into every fibre of the curtains no matter how often Helen washed them. Helen washed them often. The curtains are clean. They move slightly now, in the draft from the door Mira has left open behind her, as if registering the change in occupancy and finding it acceptable for the moment.

She sets her bag down on the bench in the hall. She does not take off her coat.

The light in early November on this part of the coast is the colour of weak tea, and it falls on the floorboards in long unfinished rectangles. There is mail on the side table, neatly stacked, which means Mrs. Doherty from next door has been letting herself in. There are two pairs of shoes by the door, both her mother's. There is a sweater on the newel post. None of this should be a surprise either, and yet each item is a small administrative shock, a thing that asks to be decided about. Mira does not decide. She walks past them into the kitchen.

She has not been in this house in four years. She has not been in this kitchen in longer than that, because the last two visits, both brief, had taken place largely in the front room, where her mother had wanted to sit, and where the conversation had been about practical matters and the weather and a cousin's wedding. The kitchen is unchanged in the way only the kitchens of careful women are unchanged. The same blue tin of loose tea by the kettle. The same calendar on the wall, turned to October, with a tide table and a watercolour of terns. Helen had died on the eighth, and someone, presumably Mrs. Doherty, has not had the heart to flip the page.

Mira flips it. November shows a lighthouse she does not recognise. She flips it back.

The photographs

In the front room, the photographs on the mantel are face-down. All of them. She had not noticed this when she came through the hall, because she had not looked, but now, returning for reasons she cannot name, she stands in the doorway and counts them. Seven frames, all laid on their faces, like cards in a game whose rules she does not know. She knows what is in them. Her father, dead nineteen years. Herself at six and at twelve and at her college graduation. Her mother and a friend on a beach Mira cannot place. A wedding photograph, small, in a silver frame.

She does not turn any of them over. She wonders when her mother did this, and whether it had been all at once or one at a time, over weeks, over months. She wonders whether her mother had meant for someone to find them like this, or whether she had simply, on some afternoon, stopped wanting to be looked at by her own dead.

Mira understands the impulse. She has lived alone long enough to understand a great many small private acts of refusal. She leaves the photographs where they are.

The kettle

The kettle on the stove is cold, of course. It has been cold for three weeks. But she puts her hand on it anyway, the flat of her palm against the dull steel, and what she feels, foolishly, is the absence of warmth as a positive thing, a presence in itself. As though her hand can register the heat that should be there and is not. Helen drank tea constantly. Helen drank tea the way other people breathe. The kettle in this house was never cold for long, in any year Mira can remember, and to feel it cold now is to understand something she has been resisting understanding since the phone call in October.

She fills it anyway. She lights the gas. The blue ring catches with its small soft thump, and she stands at the counter and listens to the water begin its slow conversation with the metal.

She is thirty-eight. She works at a branch library in a city six hours south of here. She catalogues, mostly, and runs the Tuesday reading hour for children, and lives in an apartment with one window that gets sun and three that do not. She has not been married. She was, for a time, going to be, but that is a closed drawer of its own and she does not open it often. Her colleagues think of her as quiet, which is accurate, and as kind, which is sometimes accurate. She has come here with two weeks of bereavement leave and an empty suitcase, because the lawyer said the house needed sorting, and because there is no one else.

The kettle whistles. She makes tea in her mother's pot, with her mother's tea, and sits at the kitchen table without taking off her coat, and drinks it.

The drawer

It is the third drawer down, on the left of the sink, and it has always stuck. This is the kind of fact a child knows and an adult forgets and a returning daughter remembers the instant her hand closes around the wooden knob. It stuck when she was eight. It stuck when she was sixteen. It is sticking now.

She is not looking for anything in it. She is looking, in a vague way, for a pair of scissors, because the twine on the bundle of mail in the hall has begun to bother her, and because doing one small useful thing seems necessary before she can do any large one. The scissors, she knows, live in the drawer beside the stove. But on her way to that drawer she passes this one, the sticky one, the one her mother kept what she called the everything in, and her hand goes to it without instruction.

It does not open. She pulls harder. It does not open. She braces her hip against the counter and pulls with both hands, and the drawer gives a quarter of an inch and stops, caught on something inside, the way it always was, the way Helen would say oh, that drawer and laugh and reach in from the top with two fingers to lift whatever had cocked itself sideways.

Mira reaches in from the top with two fingers. She feels paper. She feels the corner of something thicker than paper, a small book perhaps, or an envelope with stiffening inside. She works it down, gently, gently, and the drawer slides open in one long tired sigh.

The everything is still here. Rubber bands. A ball of twine. A tape measure. Three batteries of indeterminate charge. A church-fete pen. A pair of reading glasses with one arm missing. A packet of seeds, zinnias, from a year Mira cannot date. A small notebook with a pencil tied to it by a length of brown string. A receipt from the hardware store in town, dated June. A tin of mints. A button. Another button. A folded square of brown paper that turns out, when she lifts it, to be nothing, just a folded square of brown paper, smoothed and saved against some future need that did not arrive.

And underneath all of this, at the back, lying flat against the wood, an envelope.

The envelope

She lifts it out. It is cream-coloured, slightly foxed at the edges, the kind of envelope her mother bought in boxes of fifty from the stationer's in Rockland. It is addressed in her mother's handwriting, the upright careful hand Mira has seen on birthday cards and shopping lists and the labels of jam jars all her life. It is addressed to:

Mr. Thomas Vail

and then a street, and a town in New Hampshire Mira has never heard of, and a zip code. The handwriting is neat but not laboured. It was written quickly, by someone who knew the address well enough not to pause.

In the upper left, where the return goes, her mother has written her own name. Helen Wren. Not Helen Wren-Cassady, which she had been for thirty-one years, and which she had remained on every other piece of correspondence Mira ever saw her produce, even after Mira's father died. Helen Wren. Her name from before.

The envelope is sealed. It has a stamp on it, a thirty-two-cent stamp with a flag, which dates it loosely to the late nineties or thereabouts, a decade Mira can pin down only by the fact that she had been a teenager then and had collected, briefly, the stamps that came in the mail. The stamp has been cancelled. The postmark is smudged but legible enough: a town in coastal Maine, the same town Mira is sitting in now, and a date she cannot quite read, the ink having bled into the paper in the way old postmarks do.

The envelope has been mailed. The envelope has been cancelled by the post office. And then, somehow, the envelope has come back, or never gone, and has lived for upwards of twenty years in the back of the everything drawer in her mother's kitchen, under the buttons and the seed packet and the folded square of brown paper.

Mira sits down at the table. She places the envelope on the wood in front of her, square to the edge, and looks at it.

A great many things are possible. A letter can be returned unopened, marked no such address or deceased or moved, no forwarding, and a person receiving it back can put it in a drawer rather than throw it away, which would be the act of a sentimentalist or a coward or simply a tired woman at the end of a long week. A letter can be retrieved from a postbox before collection, though that does not square with the cancellation. A letter can be handed back, by the addressee, unopened, in some scene Mira cannot imagine. A letter can be a draft her mother decided, in the end, not to send, and then changed her mind about, and stamped, and addressed, and then changed her mind again. A letter can be many things. A letter can sit in a drawer for twenty years.

The fact that it is here, sealed, after her mother's death, means her mother either could not bring herself to destroy it or could not bring herself to send it. Mira is not yet sure which is sadder. She suspects the answer will matter.

Thomas Vail. She tries the name in her mouth without speaking it. It does not connect to anything. Not a friend of her father's. Not a cousin. Not a name she has heard at any Christmas dinner, any wake, any kitchen-table story. Helen had grown up in New Hampshire, of course; she had not come to Maine until she was twenty-four. The town on the envelope is presumably a town from that earlier life. Mira realises, with a small private shock, that she knows almost nothing about her mother's earlier life. She knows the outlines: a farm, two sisters, a college that did not finish, a job in a hospital, the move east, meeting Mira's father. She has never thought to ask for more, because her mother had not seemed to wish her to ask, and because the present had always been sufficient to fill the room.

The first line

She turns the envelope over. The flap is sealed but the seal is old, and one corner has lifted of its own accord, the way old glue does. She does not need to tear it. She can lift the flap with her thumbnail and slide the letter out, and she does, because she has come this far and because the alternative is to put it back in the drawer and live with not knowing, and she does not believe, any longer, that she is the kind of woman who can live with not knowing.

The paper inside is a single folded sheet, the same cream as the envelope. The handwriting is her mother's, smaller than on the envelope, more careful. The date at the top is in March of a year Mira will need to count back to verify. She does not count yet. She unfolds the sheet on the table and smooths it flat with the side of her hand.

She reads the first line.

Dear Thomas,

There is no good way to begin a letter like this, so I will not try.

She stops.

She does not know, yet, why she stops. Perhaps because the sentence is so plainly her mother's voice, the cadence of it, the small wry surrender, that to read the second line would be to invite Helen back into the room, and Mira is not ready to have her back in the room, not here, not in this kitchen, not on this afternoon with the kettle cooling and the photographs face-down in the next room and four years of not visiting standing between them like a third person at the table. Perhaps because she understands, already, that whatever the letter says next will rearrange something, and she would like, before it is rearranged, to sit for a moment in the shape of the world as it has been.

She folds the letter along its old creases. She slides it back into its envelope. She places the envelope on the table, square to the edge, and rests her hand flat on top of it, as she had rested it on the cold kettle, feeling for the heat that should be there.

Outside, the tide is going out. She can hear it, if she listens, the small retreating sound of a sea that has done this every six hours for longer than any letter has been waiting in any drawer. She listens. She does not move her hand.