Next week.Oh shit, I think. I cross to the window and peer through the boards. There is an icy breeze, tantalizing and close,kissing the tips of my fingers. Outside, paper-white birch and elm are luminescent in the gloom, circling the farmhouse like ghostly sentinels. Farther back, among the stately oaks and pines, shadows deepen. A fine, glittering snow is beginning to fall, seeming to hang in the air like sea spray. It will be dark soon.
“You can see for miles,” Maria tells me as I move to another of those long windows and peer through the gaps.
I can just make out the corner of a small building tacked onto the main house. I point toward it. “What’s in the shed out there?”
“Generator. You can hear it some nights. It hums like a bee. A bee came in through the roof last year and started building a nest. My brother had to smoke ’em all out!”
“A hive, not a nest. What time will he come back today?”
“Not till morning.” Maria looks at me sullenly.
It must be tough for her, I think. She just wants a friend, someone to talk to. I can’t imagine being her age, locked up and isolated.
I soften my voice as I reach out and touch the soft bristles on her head, lowering myself onto the bed. “Do you shave this yourself?”
She shakes her head, fingers tugging at the covers.
“Your brother does it? Why?”
“He said it’s better that way. Neater. Saves time on washing.”
“I’ll bet it gets cold in the winter, though, right?” I give her a smile, to show her I am joking. Sitting among all the stuffed toys with their glittering, glassy eyes, she looks like a little doll.
“Will you be my mother, Hazel?”
I stare at her in surprise. I hadn’t been expecting that, a question I feel all the way to the pit of my stomach. I’m hot and breathless, like I’m experiencing altitude sickness.
“What is it you think a mother does, Maria?”
“‘A mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.’”
“That another one of your quotes, huh? You’ve got one for just about every occasion.”
It’s a trite thing to say, and I immediately regret it. After all, it wasmeMaria had hurried to just an hour ago, banging on the cellar door and crying,It was all tangly hair!
I get up, walking over to the shelves that line the wall beside the windows. There, collections of small trinkets are arranged: a Japanese coin with a square hole right through the middle, a single wood shaving in a perfect spiral. The skull of a rabbit, turning brown with age. I pick up a heavy lump of granite studded with quartz crystals.
“My mother gave it to me,” Maria tells me. “She said it had magical powers.”
Outside in the hallway that runs the length of the upstairs, a floorboard creaks. I catch a whiff of some sour smell, briny and rich. A pool of seawater in the back of a dank cave, where no light reaches.
“Maria, when you were in the bathroom, did you hear anything else? A voice, maybe?”
She shakes her head. She’s looking at me like I’m crazy. Maybe she’s right. Maybe all that time in the cellar with the irriguous, unsettled dark has tipped me over the edge. I think of Leprazine, of my trainers with no laces in.
I wait, but the only sound is the wind whispering through the eaves. I put the skull carefully back down. Beside it, flattened to a perfect rectangle, are the two bright Wonderland gum wrappers I’d given her. Apple and cherry. These are Maria’s treasures, I realize. Her serving-knees. Sadness wells up in me.
“Do you remember being in hospital, Maria? You would have been very young.”
She shakes her head.
Undeterred, I press on. “My husband—my ex-husband, Joe—he had the same operation you did. It’s called a cleft lip. I’m only asking because—”
Another creak. I pick up the screwdriver from the desk and move slowly toward the door, peering through the crack out into the dingy hallway. I feel like there is a mainspring being tightly wound in my guts.
“Hazel?”
I hold up a hand. The hallway is empty. Cloudy glass lampshades throw out a weak electric light, flickering slightly as a gust of wind rattles the eaves. Finally, I lower the screwdriver and turn to Maria, feeling itchy and out of sorts. There are mushrooms growing in here, along the skirting-board. Thin and brown and moist.