I’m sorry, Margaret said, again. I should go.
You have children? Marie’s mother asked suddenly.
One, Margaret said. I had a son. The past tense, unintended, shocks her. How easily her mind has accepted what her heart cannot. Have, she corrects herself. I have a son. But I won’t ever see him again.
A long pause between them, stretching and swelling until it wrapped around both of them, thick and plush. Then, to Margaret’s surprise, Marie’s mother reached out, touched Margaret’s wrist.
Welcome to the worst club in the world, she said.
* * *
? ? ?
The Johnsons’ house was cozy and tidy but everywhere there were signs of their daughter. Mr. Johnson, lips clamped shut, shook his head at his wife and disappeared up the stairs, but Mrs. Johnson led Margaret into the living room. On the mantel, a framed photograph of Marie in cap and gown, paper scroll in the crook of her arm like a sheaf of flowers. High school graduation, Mrs. Johnson said. Salutatorian. In the corner, a music stand, a flute case, sheet music covered in flurries of impossibly high notes.
She did marching band. But what she really loved was the classical stuff.
Her hand brushed the leatherette, wiping a fleck of dust from the latch.
I wanted her to keep it up in college. But she said she wouldn’t have time. She had so many plans.
Margaret still had not taken off her backpack; she was not sure if she was invited to stay. In this crowded living room she felt like a large and lumbering animal, every movement threatening to knock some part of the past to the floor. She held her breath, as if that might make her smaller and stiller, as if that might help anything.
Mrs. Johnson took a small china elephant from the mantel, turning it over. After a moment she found what she was looking for, held it up so Margaret could see: a thin seam of glue circling the uplifted trunk.
You see this? she said. My friend went on vacation, to India, and brought me back this. Marie was maybe seven, or eight? She loved it. She’d play with it, put it in her pocket, carry it around. One day I came home from work and she’d broken off the trunk. Did I give her hell. I told her she had no respect for other people’s things, didn’t I tell her to be careful, why didn’t she listen to me. No, Mama, she said to me, I wanted to see what was inside. She did it on purpose. I told her she was on punishment for a month. The next day I found it like this.
She tipped her palm where the little elephant stood, letting the light catch its curves.
She’d patched it back together. You can barely see where the break was. Only if you know where to look.
Gently she set the elephant back on the mantel.
That was Marie, she said. No one out there will remember those things. Just me.
The two women stood there in silence. In the shaft of light that sliced through the crack in the curtains, dust motes hovered.
Will you tell me, Margaret asked. She took the older woman’s hands between hers, and Mrs. Johnson did not pull back. A kindness that humbled Margaret, because it was one she had not earned. Will you tell me about her? she said. Who she was. What she was like.
I’ll tell you. But only if you promise to remember. That she was a real person, not a poster. That she was a child. My child.
* * *
? ? ?
She stayed for two days, listening. Letting Marie’s mother tell her anything and everything that came to mind. Mr. Johnson avoided her, eyeing her with brittle wariness, tucking his glasses into the breast pocket of his shirt before leaving the room.
He doesn’t trust you, Mrs. Johnson said, as her husband passed by in the hall. Not an apology; a simple statement of fact.
But Mrs. Johnson led her into Marie’s bedroom, where they sat together from sunup until darkness fell. Mrs. Johnson roamed the room, speaking softly, touching this and that, reminiscing. Picking up Marie’s hairbrush, her rings, the ocean-smoothed stones she’d kept on the windowsill, each awaking a memory like a talisman. None of the stories were important. A visit to an aunt in North Carolina, a day at Six Flags, Marie’s first trip to New York as a skinny, gawky adolescent: Mama, I want to live here. All the stories were unbearably important. The time, as a toddler, she’d farted in church, right after the minister had said Let us pray. The red shoes she’d loved so much she squashed her feet into them for months, refusing to give them up, insisting they still fit until they split at the seams. How, as a teenager, she’d clipped words she liked out of her magazines, saving them like confetti in a blue envelope—nebulous, muscovado, smithereens. I just like the way they sound, she’d said.