I always know when you need me, she’d said. Same heart.
It felt like early summer in Redbud, humid and drowsy. The afternoon air was heavy with the rattle of cicadas, the burn of sprinkler system chlorine, a dusty trace of charcoal from backyard grills. The front door displayed a small handwritten sign: NO SOLICITORS. I gave a stab at the doorbell, loose in its joint. After a few minutes, the door creaked open and a face appeared, partially concealed by the shadows.
“You read the sign?” A woman’s voice, roughened at the edges.
My heart fell. It would have been so easy to find my mother right away. To have her waiting right behind Door #1, Monty Hall smiling at us.
“I’m hoping to speak to … Emily.” I nearly asked for my mother outright, veering away at the last second.
“Emily.” The woman sounded as if she’d never even heard the name before.
“Emily French? Is she here?”
“How d’you know her?” The woman had opened the door wide enough for me to make out only a few details. Sharply highlighted hair, a jutting chin.
“Family friend.” Not exactly a lie.
The woman examined me before opening the door wider. She was all angles, knobs of elbows, cords in her neck. She squinted. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
I’d been asked questions like this a thousand times in my life, and I never knew what would follow. A request for my autograph—a request to buy my underwear—unending follow-up questions, plying me for memories I could barely scrape together. I always had to quickly decide between my options. Fight, flight, play along.
She snapped her fingers and waved her hand to physically coax the information out of me. “You’re Margaret’s girl.” The easy intimacy of it made my breath catch. “I’m Wanda. I was a friend of Tami’s before—well. Come in.” She turned brusquely, and I just managed to slide through before the door swung shut.
Wanda marched ahead as if she expected I’d find my own way. The air in here was close, soupy. It had sounded as if Wanda already knew my mother. I looked around eagerly, like she might materialize from a hidden hallway or side room.
“She’s gotten worse,” Wanda said over her shoulder. “A lot damn worse.” I nodded, a needle of panic working into my brain. Worse? Worse how?
“Emily’s having a hard day,” Wanda went on. So we weren’t discussing my mother. I was relieved; I was disappointed. “I’m not sure you’ll be able to get through to her.”
Walking through the living room, past a Styrofoam cup abandoned on the deep-set windowsill of a stained-glass window, we reached an unassuming door. Wanda extracted a small key from her pocket. She fit it into the lock, turned the knob, and secreted the key in one practiced movement.
“What’s that for?” I asked, uneasy.
“Just keeping Emily safe.”
I peered around her at a long, thin stairwell, choked with shadows. From somewhere above us, a groaning creak. A woman’s voice, too low to hear.
Wanda started up the stairs, then turned, like she’d known I’d be hesitating at the bottom. “Lock that door behind you, would you, sweetie?”
I felt my way up the stairs, following the confident staccato of Wanda’s footsteps. When she opened the next door, light flooded the stairwell. I took the last few steps in a rush, stumbling into the attic. A large room with low-hanging eaves, illuminated by a single window at one end, the glass clouded with plastic sheeting.
A woman’s voice, louder this time. “They’re burning, burning. Just her dress is left now.”
There was a cot in the corner with spindly metal legs and trailing sheets. A girl lay curled on the mattress, her bony back to me. Dark hair tangled on the pillow. A plate of food sat on the floor near her—untouched, spaghetti sauce congealed. Several cups of water at varying levels of fullness stood nearby, speckled with dust. The attic smelled intimately sour, like unwashed skin.
I hung back near the door, itchy with embarrassment. “Is it okay for me to be up here?”
Wanda leaned over the bed, and something maternal in her posture made my heart ache. “Emily? You have a visitor, baby. Get up and say hello.” She was speaking in that falsely bright voice I’d heard parents use with stubborn children, more for my benefit than Emily’s.
“The birds.” Emily’s voice slid between sleep-tinged and alert. “They’re falling.”
The birds. The bird outside my mother’s house. The crunch of its bones.