Chapter 24 Boxes

Two days after the teacup, I was standing on the front step of 9 Lantern Row with a twin in each hand.

Gideon's apology for the cup had been too long and too bright.

He'd been on his knees on the hospital linoleum picking up the pieces before I could stop him, cutting his finger on the rim, saying *God, sorry, I'm such a klutz, I'm so sorry, Granddad, I'll get you another one, Mom's got about a thousand*, and laughing in a high cracked way that had nothing to do with anything funny.

The tea had gone across the floor in a pale fan. Edmund had watched him the whole time without blinking. When I'd cleaned and taped the cut at the sink, Gideon's hand had been cold and shaking, and he hadn't met my eyes once.

I'd told myself it was nerves. A boy who'd dropped out of college, meeting his brother's ex-wife in a hospital room, fumbling a teacup. I'd told myself that twice on the drive home and once again in the bath.

The house hadn't changed. It was a tall brick house on the best street in the Heights, with black shutters and a fanlight over the door and window boxes someone was paid to keep full.

I had lived in it for three years. I had walked out of it on a Tuesday morning five years ago with Helen's photograph in my coat and almost nothing else, and I had not stood on this step since.

The door was the same. Glossy black, with a brass knocker shaped like an anchor. I'd polished that knocker myself, once, the first month, because I hadn't known yet that someone came on Thursdays to do it, and I'd wanted to be useful.

Rhys had asked on Thursday night, by text. *Could I have them at the house. Saturday. A few hours. Only if you agree.* I'd stared at it until two. I'd typed *no* four times. At 9:58 on Saturday morning, sitting in my car at the end of Lantern Row with the engine running and the twins asking why we'd stopped, I'd texted back *yes*.

"Is this his house?" Pippa asked. "It's very big. Is it a castle?"

"It's a house."

"It's big for a house."

Felix was counting the windows. I could hear him under his breath. "Seven. Eight."

I lifted the anchor and knocked.

---

Rhys opened the door before the second knock, which meant he'd been standing in the hall.

He was in jeans and a dark sweater with the sleeves pushed up. I had seen him in jeans perhaps four times in three years of marriage. He took in the twins, then me, then the twins again, and for a second he didn't seem to know what to do with his hands.

"Come in," he said.

The hall was the same and not the same. The same black-and-white tiles, the same staircase curving up, the same long mirror. But the runner was new.

The hall table where he'd laid the divorce papers and the freezer bag was gone, replaced by a narrower one with nothing on it but a bowl for keys. On the floor by the stairs sat a child's booster seat still in its box, enormous, with a picture on the side of a grinning ten-year-old.

"I bought that," Rhys said, following my eyes. "For the car. It's wrong. It's for older children. The man at the store said it was the best one."

"It's for a child who weighs twice what they do."

He regarded it with dislike. "I'll take it back."

"What's for lunch?" Pippa asked. She'd let go of my hand and was standing in the middle of the tiles turning in a slow circle, taking inventory.

"Spaghetti," said Rhys. "I bought spaghetti." He seemed to think this needed more. "And sauce. In a jar. And cheese."

Pippa stopped turning. She gave him a look of grave approval.

"We're having pasketti," she informed Felix.

Rhys opened his mouth, presumably to correct her, and caught my eye, and closed it.

"Noted," he said.

---

I left them for four hours.

That was the arrangement. Ten to two. I gave Rhys the list I'd written on the back of an envelope.

*Felix's valve is nothing to worry about, he can run and climb like any child. Pippa will tell you she's allowed things she isn't. No sharp knives, no balconies, no baths. They both like their spaghetti cut up, not twirled. Felix won't talk to you, don't make him. Call me for anything.*

Rhys read it twice standing in the hall and folded it into his back pocket.

Pippa kissed me goodbye at the door without much interest. Felix held onto my coat for a second, as he always did, then let go and went to stand beside his sister.

I drove to St. Ansel. I parked in my space in the staff garage on level three and sat there with the engine off, staring at the concrete wall, for twenty minutes.

Then I started the car again and drove back to the Heights and parked around the corner from Lantern Row, where I couldn't see the house, and sat there instead. Then I drove to the harbor and bought a coffee I didn't drink and walked along the seawall where Felix had sat on the ledge and held out his earpieces.

At one-forty I gave up and went back.

---

He opened the door with a dish towel over his shoulder and a smear of tomato sauce on his sweater.

"You're early."

"I'm early."

From the kitchen at the back of the house came Pippa's voice, raised in a lecture about something, and the clatter of a pan. Rhys stood back to let me in and let it pass without a word.

"They ate," he said. "Most of it. Pippa told me the sauce was too red. Felix ate all his, cut up. Then he ate Pippa's cut-up pieces while she was explaining the sauce to me." He paused. "We played a game with the salt and pepper. I'm not sure what the rules were. I lost."

"Pippa makes the rules up as she goes."

"I noticed."

Felix appeared in the kitchen doorway at the end of the hall, in his socks. He saw me and came down the hall at a walk, not a run, and leaned against my legs. His hands were tucked up inside his sleeves and he was hugging his elbows.

"Felix is *cold*," Pippa shouted from the kitchen, though nobody had asked. "He said. The kitchen has a draft. The whole house has a draft."

I put my hand on his head. It was cool.

"Where's his jacket? We hung it up when we came in."

"Hall closet," said Rhys. "I put them in there."

I went to the closet under the stairs. I knew where it was. I'd hung my own coat in it for three years.

It was bigger than I remembered, deep, with a light on a pull-cord. Felix's small red jacket hung on a low hook beside Pippa's, next to Rhys's long navy coat. I took Felix's down. And then, because the light was on and the closet was deep and my eyes went where they went, I saw the boxes.

There were four of them, stacked on the floor at the back, under the hems of the winter coats. Ordinary moving boxes, brown cardboard, taped shut. Each one had a single letter written on the side in black marker, in a strong, slanting, impatient hand I knew better than my own. The hand that had signed the papers on the hall table.

*M.*

The top one hadn't been taped properly. One flap had lifted. I could see inside without touching it.

My anatomy atlas. The big one, the one Helen had given me for my eighteenth birthday, its spine broken in four places from being opened flat on the kitchen table in Old Harbor.

On top of it, wrapped in newspaper, the rims showing, two of Helen's mugs. The blue one with the chip on the handle, and the one that said WORLD'S OKAYEST NURSE, which a patient had given her as a joke and which she had drunk from every morning for eleven years.

And folded over the side of the box, in a dry-cleaner's plastic sleeve with the paper tag still stapled to the hanger, a gray dress.

Plain. Gray. Knee length. The dress I'd worn on the night of the gala. The one that had been stiff with his grandfather's vomit in the ICU family room. I'd left it on the floor of the bathroom at Lantern Row the next morning and walked away from it.

Someone had picked it up. Someone had sent it to be cleaned. Someone had folded it into a box with my anatomy atlas and Helen's mugs and written *M.* on the side and put it in the closet, where the winter coats would hang over it, and left it there for five years.

I stood in the closet doorway with Felix's red jacket in my hands.

Behind me, I heard Rhys stop in the hall.

I kept my back to him. I knew he'd seen me see them. He made no move to explain, or to come closer.

Neither did I.

I started humming, under my breath, the two notes Yvette had sung for Edmund. *Good mor-ning.* I hummed them twice. Then I pulled the cord and turned out the closet light and came out with the jacket and knelt down and put Felix into it, one arm, then the other, and zipped it to his chin.

Rhys was standing by the stairs with the dish towel still over his shoulder. His face was closed. His thumb was at his ring finger.

---

The front door opened.

There was no knock. There was the sound of a key turning in the lock, a smooth practiced turn, and the door swung inward, and a gust of April air came into the hall carrying a breath of perfume and warm butter.

"Darling, I brought those croissants you—"

Vivienne Sutter stopped on the mat.

She was in a pale blue coat with sunglasses pushed up into her honey-blonde hair, and she was holding a white bakery bag in one hand and a key in the other, a brass key on a little silver ring with a charm on it. Her lipstick was perfect. Her face, for a moment, was not.

"Oh," she said.

Her eyes went to me, kneeling on the tiles. To Felix in his red jacket. Then past us, down the hall, to Pippa, who had come out of the kitchen with sauce on her chin and was standing in the doorway with Admiral dangling from one hand.

Then Vivienne's smile came back on. "Well," she said. "Margot. Goodness. And these must be..."

Pippa was already moving.

She came down the hall at a steady march, not a run, Admiral swinging. She walked straight past me and straight past Rhys. She stopped in front of Vivienne, looked up at her, and held out her free hand.

Vivienne, startled, took it. I don't think she knew she was doing it.

Pippa turned her around, by the hand, toward the open door. She walked her back over the mat and out onto the front step, three steps, as calmly as Zoe Frost walking a child to the reading corner. Then she let go of her hand.

"You have to knock," Pippa told her. "This is a family house." She squinted up at her with Rhys's green eyes. "Bye."

The hall had gone so quiet I could hear the kitchen faucet dripping.

Vivienne stood on the top step with the bakery bag in one hand and the key in the other and her mouth slightly open. Then her gaze went over Pippa's head, to Rhys.

Rhys came down the hall. He didn't hurry. He stopped in the doorway behind his daughter, with one hand resting on the top of Pippa's curls, and he held out the other hand to Vivienne, palm up, and left it there.

Vivienne looked at the hand. Then at the key in her own fingers, the little silver charm. Then she laughed, lightly, a pretty camera-ready laugh, and dropped the key into his palm.

"Of course," she said. "Darling. Of course." Every part of her face was gracious except her eyes. Those were on me.

She turned to go. She went down one step, two, her heels clicking on the stone. Then, at the bottom, she turned back to take us all in, framed in the doorway: Rhys with the key in his hand, Pippa with sauce on her chin, me on my knees in the hall behind them with my hands on my son's zipper.

"Don't get comfortable, darling," she said, over her shoulder, to me. "This town already knows how your story ends." And she walked away down Lantern Row.