Eleanor closed the locket. The click was soft in the quiet room. The wooden birds of the mobile turned slowly overhead, though there was no draft; she had closed the window years ago.
She thought about the cremation within days. She thought about the sealed records, the incident summary, her husband's signature at the bottom of every page. She thought about the fact that she had never seen a body — not then, not ever — and that the one person who had seen whatever there was to see had spent twenty-three years making sure she never asked.
The man who signed. That was Richard. That had always been Richard.
Eleanor stood up from the rocking chair. Her knees ached; she was fifty-eight years old, and grief, she had learned, lived in the joints as much as the heart. She crossed the nursery and stood in the doorway for a moment, looking back at the bassinet, the yellow blanket, the whole preserved museum of five days.
Then she turned off the light, and closed the door, and went downstairs to her study, and opened the drawer where she kept the stationery, and began to write down everything she remembered about the night of the fire — every detail, in order, while it was still sharp — because she understood, finally, that she could no longer look away.
Whatever Richard had signed, all those years ago, she was going to read it herself.
Chapter 5: Saint Mary's Door
The bus smelled of wet wool and diesel, and Emily pressed her forehead to the window and watched South Boston come up to meet her: the triple-deckers with their porches like stacked teeth, the corner stores with their painted awnings, the church spire that had been the first thing she'd learned to draw. She'd been drawing it badly since she was four, crayon on butcher paper, and Agnes had hung every version on the refrigerator with magnets shaped like fruit.
She got off at Eighth and walked the two blocks, her apron folded in her tote bag, her hair smelling faintly of the restaurant's kitchen — butter, shallot, something scorched. The light was on in Agnes's front room. Emily let herself in with her key.
"There's soup," Agnes called from the kitchen, not looking up from the stove. "You eat at that place? You never eat at that place."
"I taste things," Emily said. She dropped her tote by the door and crossed to kiss the top of Agnes's head. The woman's hair was white and pinned up, and she smelled of bay leaf and the lavender soap she'd used for as long as Emily could remember. "Did you take your pill?"
"At six, with dinner, like every day of my life." Agnes ladled soup into a bowl and set it down. "Sit."
"That woman came back, didn't she," Agnes said, and Emily stopped with the spoon halfway to her mouth. "How do you know about that."
"Sofia stopped by. She said you'd had a strange one." Agnes sat down across from her with her own tea. "Rich lady. Silver locket. Birthmark." Agnes wrapped her hands around the mug. At seventy-four her knuckles were thick and her fingers still strong. "Tell me what she said to you, Em."
Emily set the spoon down. She told it plainly: a woman alone at table nine, the long look at her wrist, the locket opened like a demand, a faded photograph of a baby with a mark like Emily's. A daughter who died. A hospital that burned.
Agnes listened without moving. When Emily finished, Agnes said, "And what did you say."
"I said I grew up at Saint Mary's and nobody came for me." Emily's voice caught and she hated it. "I was polite. Sofia says I was polite."
"You were," Agnes said.
"She wants to meet," Emily said. "She gave me a card. I don't want to meet her."
"Why not."
"Because rich people collect stray causes, Agnes. Because a woman with a locket doesn't get to look at my wrist and decide I'm her dead daughter, and what am I supposed to do with that? Tell her sorry about her grief and go back to carrying plates?" Emily pushed the soup bowl away. The broth had gone still and filmed over. "Because if she's right it means somebody threw me away, and I don't want to know that either."
Agnes reached across the table and turned the card over with one finger. She studied it for a long time.
"You were left at Saint Mary's door," she said finally. "That's what Father Byrne told me, and it's the truth as far as anyone in this room knows it. A March night. Raining. You wrapped in a blanket and nothing else."
"I know."
"Do you?" Agnes looked at her. "You've never once asked me to go looking. Not once in twenty-three years. You've worn that like it didn't matter."
Emily stood up and took her bowl to the sink, her back to the room, because there was a thing on her back she didn't want looked at, even by Agnes. The scar sat high on her right shoulder blade, a thumbprint of puckered skin, pale and silver-pink. She'd had it as long as she had memory. Agnes had told her once, when she was seven, that it was probably from something hot when she was a baby, and Emily had never asked again. She'd learned to choose shirts that covered it.
"It mattered," Emily said to the window over the sink. Her reflection was thin and tired. "It just didn't have anywhere to go."
Agnes came up behind her and put a hand, warm and heavy, between Emily's shoulder blades — not on the scar, exactly, but near it, the way she always had, like a benediction. "Then give it somewhere to go."
Emily turned. "You think I should see her."
"I think you're afraid, and that's fine, but don't dress it up as principles."