“Maggie—” Evelyn begins, mortified at having upset her friend so.
Maggie snatches up the yellow booties. “Please just stop talking about it, okay? Make your own plans, do what you want, to find a way out. But I can’t ride along on the coattails of this delusion of yours, Evelyn. I’m sorry. Good night.”
And she waddles from the room, leaving Evelyn alone.
CHAPTER 7 Nancy
SPRING 1980
“Did I ever tell you about the cloak I made your mother for her wedding day?” Grandmama asks Nancy.
From her perch on a hard chair beside her grandmother’s bed at the nursing home, Nancy smiles. “No, I don’t think you have.”
She has, on a number of occasions, but Nancy plays along.
Her grandmama’s health has been declining for years. Back in the fall, after a serious incident involving a set of lace curtains that caught fire and nearly burned the house down—and much passive-aggressive posturing—Grandmama and Nancy’s mum agreed that a nursing home was the best place for her to live out her remaining years. Alternating between a very English stiff upper lip and a trembling lower one, Grandmama moved into St. Sebastian’s Home for the Aged. Nancy visits her every Tuesday night for a cup of tea and a chat, which almost always involves examinations of The Past.
Grandmama refers to it that way, too, the capitalization clear in her reverent tone and the way she waves her withered hand through the air as though casting a spell when she says it.
The Past, my dear.
All the many memories, the regrets and triumphs, joys and sorrows, incidents and mundanities that are stitched together by the threads of time and bound into the great tapestry of one’s life. The Past, depicted one square of fabric at a time. The squares that Grandmama likes to take out and examine whenever Nancy visits her.
Nancy often thinks Grandmama wants to review The Past with her more than anyone else because her granddaughter is an impartial judge. Whenever Grandmama presses her for an analytical eye, Nancy always stays neutral. What would it accomplish to criticize her grandmother’s decisions at this point in the old woman’s life? It’s not as though she can change them, and calling attention to glaring inconsistencies or times when her grandmother was unnecessarily harsh or unfair serves no purpose other than to distress a dying octogenarian.
“It was a freezing cold winter day when your parents got married,” Grandmama says now. “An evening ceremony, you know. In January. I told your mother a June wedding was more fitting, like her sisters had, but she wouldn’t agree, of course.”
Nancy’s mother and Grandmama butted heads about almost everything. Evidently, obstinacy is a proud family tradition.
“It was so soon after your father proposed at Christmastime, but I suspect she wanted to get going on having a baby. Didn’t want to wait any longer. And we all know how that turned out,” she adds, reaching a papery hand over to pat Nancy’s knee. “At any rate, I told her that if she simply insisted upon winter nuptials, she must at least allow me to make her a cloak to wear over her dress.
“White silk on the outside, it was, with a big hood, and I sewed a beautiful emerald velvet lining into it. When they came out of the church and stood on the front steps, the snow had just started falling. It was quite a sight, I must admit. Nothing compared to the sun and blooms of a June wedding, but still lovely in its own way.”
“It does sound lovely, Grandmama,” Nancy says. “I’ve seen photos, but she isn’t wearing the cloak. I think they were taken inside the church.”
“Your parents had the reception back at our house, your Grandpapa and I,” Grandmama continues. Nancy isn’t even sure she heard her reply. “A simple affair, but that’s what people did in those days. They didn’t have a house of their own yet. They were about to move into that little one out in the Danforth—tiny thing it was, too.”
Nancy half listens as her thoughts start to wander to the schoolwork waiting for her at home. An essay on the Vietnam War.
“It took another few years before they were able to afford that nice place in the Annex. I think that was right around the time they got you.”
Nancy’s mind is pulled back to the present. “Got me?” she asks. “You mean had me?”
As Grandmama has gotten closer to The End （also capitalized）， she’s displayed less and less restraint while sorting through The Past. Lately, she hasn’t been careful with the delicate memories, and has let several fall and shatter at her own feet before muttering, “Never mind, dear, I didn’t mean that,” as she does now.
This time, though, Nancy is undeterred. “No, Grandmama, what do you mean by that? What do you mean ‘got me’？”
“Oh, Nancy,” Grandmama says, brushing away the incriminating words still lingering in the air between them. “I meant when they had you, of course. I misspoke. I’m tired, my dear. I think it’s best that you head home now. I’ll see you again next week. Come give us a kiss, now, and be on your way.”
But as Nancy descends the creaking staircase of the old manor house, a deeply uncomfortable suspicion begins to stir within her being. Because these disjointed pieces all add up to something. Questions to her mother that went unanswered as a child. The fact that she doesn’t really look like either of her parents—a reality her mother has continually written off with an airy wave of her hand as she chuckles. “Genes do sometimes skip a generation. More tea, dear?”
It’s just a series of gut feelings Nancy can’t seem to connect with anything stronger than the weakest thread.
Until now, the idea was just an undefined, shapeless shadow in a dark corner of Nancy’s brain. But her grandmama’s comments echo in her mind as she boards the subway car that takes her back to her apartment. The thoughts continue to whir when she arrives home and shuts her bedroom door behind her.
It’s as though something dark has latched onto her heart. She already knew it was there, though she couldn’t sense its edges yet. But when she crawls into bed still fully clothed, Nancy can finally feel the prickly outline of the shadow, a truth she had previously been determined to ignore.
* * *
Three days later, Nancy finds herself standing on the front porch of her parents’ house, staring at the familiar silver door knocker, a large M wrapped in twists of ivy. She considers the name for a brief moment, contemplates her own identity with it.
Of course you’re a Mitchell, she tells herself. This is ridiculous. You should just turn around and go home.
But a persistent voice in Nancy’s mind argues back.
Then why can’t you let this go? Why haven’t you just dismissed it as the ramblings of an old woman whose mind is on the decline?
And the truth is, she’s already starting to regret this plan. When she learned that her parents would be going out to dinner tonight with their friends the Morgensterns, she invited herself over for afternoon tea, telling her mother she needed a quiet place to study for the evening.
“I’m just going to do some homework here, Mum, if you don’t mind,” she’d said on the phone. “It gets too loud here at the apartment, and I really need to get down to work on this final English paper.” She crossed her legs at the ankle then, to keep her feet from jiggling with nerves. “Besides, your couch is way more comfortable than mine.”