Noah kicks the ball with a tump and it soars into some azalea bushes. The effortless physicality of his son always astounds him. Where did this kid come from? Then he remembers—from Ginny. Noah digs the ball out from the bushes and talks to Livi, who balances on some decorative rocks that border the lawn. She’s left her instrument case on the covered porch. Noah passes the football from one hand to the other with a relaxed, confident stance. Livi says something to him, her face close to his. She makes a dramatic gesture with her arms outstretched, and he laughs. Then she threads her arm around his waist.
Mark balks, and fights the urge to duck behind the dashboard. It feels like he shouldn’t be watching and yet he can’t look away.
Peter appears, finally, wearing green track pants and a sleepy expression. His right shoe is only half on and he stomps the ground to wedge his foot in. He holds up his hands. Noah disengages himself from Livi so he can toss Peter the ball.
Livi stands on tiptoe to whisper something in Noah’s ear. Without the ball in his hands, Noah’s less assured, less agile. He looks more like Mark. Not in his face, but in his bearing. Seeing it, Mark feels a mixture of pleasure and pain.
* * *
—
Inside her parents’ kitchen Samara opens a cabinet full of her mother’s too-bright Fiestaware dishes and pulls out a mug the color of pool water. She turns on the electric kettle and stares out the kitchen window at the wet pavement and shifting pine trees. Her parents’ new neighbor Cass walks by with her furry black dog, and her oversized raincoat flaps in the wind.
The kettle clicks off. Outside Mark reverses his dirty Jeep into the cul-de-sac, his son Noah in the backseat. Samara tugs the blinds closed. She can’t watch Dr. McDonnell’s family going about their day, like everything’s normal. Everything’s not normal. Her mother, Ashmina, is dead. She went into the hospital a month ago and never came out.
She opens the fridge, still packed with gifted casseroles and platters, including an uneaten loaf of marionberry bread from Mark and Ginny, and closes it. She hears her mother’s voice in her head, urging her to get going. She has a listing appointment in a few minutes, a meeting scheduled by her mother six weeks ago, with the expectation she’d be able to go herself. She wants to cancel, but her mother’s voice says no. She says, Go on, Sammy, it’s better to stay busy.
Samara opens a cabinet and a mountain of tea boxes and tins falls onto the counter. Green tea with jasmine, green tea with lemon, raspberry leaf, garden mint, Moroccan mint, Ceylon, three tins of Assam, two of gunpowder, and chamomile with valerian. She chooses the Ceylon, pours the hot water, and puts the containers back, one by one.
She takes her mug to her bedroom and nudges Shawn, who’s still asleep under her old dahlia-flowered duvet. “You need to get out of here before my dad gets up.”
He raises his head from the pillow and squints. “Really?” His voice is gruff with sleep. “He knows I’m here.”
It’s true. She and Shawn have been seeing each other, off and on, since she moved back home ten months ago when her mom got sick.
“I know. But still…” She opens the closet and tries to pull a skirt and shirt from a tangle of her mother’s clothes, overflow from the master bedroom closet: dresses and pants and skirts in every color of the rainbow, scarves with twisting nautical knots or jaunty-looking parrots with flashing black beads for eyes, and saris in coral and aubergine and cadmium yellow, triangles of glass twinkling at their hems.
“So are you going to give me an answer?”
“About what?” Samara says into the folds of a dress printed with pink orchids that smells of sandalwood and orange peel. In her head, her mother’s voice says, I always liked that dress.
He puts his elbows on his knees. His bare chest has just one patch of blondish hair, right in the center. “About when you’re going back to Seattle?”
She turns and hugs her simple pink shirt and gray skirt against her body. She doesn’t tell him she has nothing to go back to. That she gave up her job—an entry-level position she never liked much anyway—when her mom got sick. That her apartment in Seattle was a sublet she couldn’t afford. Instead she appraises his broad forehead, short-cropped hair, and small, clear blue eyes. He looks nothing like he did when they were growing up. Back then he was tall and skinny, and always wore the same baggy athletic shorts. His family had a Ping-Pong table in their basement, and he used to try to talk to her while she and his sister played. If he had a friend over too, they’d play doubles. In her mind she hears the snap of the little white ball against the tabletop; she smells damp carpet and potato chips and strawberry gum.
“I haven’t decided,” she says finally.
“I think you should stay.”
“In Clearing? It’s where we grew up.”
“I live here.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
Out the window Samara hears the industrious taps of a woodpecker. Get a move on, her mother’s voice says. You’re going to be late. “I don’t know. It just is.”
The extendable ladder rattles from the front yard, and her father yells, “Shoo bird—”
She sighs. “My dad’s awake.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s fighting with a woodpecker.” She pulls on a fresh pair of underwear. “Where are you today?”
“The remodel on Woodland Avenue. What about you?”
“I have a listing appointment.”
“You should come over later.”
“I don’t get having that big house all to yourself—”
“It’s not just me. I’ve got my dogs.”
“Maybe.” She buttons up her shirt and pulls on her boots. “But go out the back door when you leave, okay?”
* * *
—
She has to hurry to reach the address on Arden Street on time, but when she gets there no one answers the door. She remembers the house; it’s where her piano teacher used to live, Mrs. Kells. The exact inverse of her parents’ 1959 ranch, the front door stands to the right of the garage instead of the left. The mountain, rising a few streets away, is a wall of green that cuts the bright gray sky in half.
She peers into the front windows, but can’t see past the heavy curtains. When she took piano lessons she only saw the blue-wallpapered living room where the shiny piano stood. She recalls the tinkling sound of the high notes and the feeling of the hard pedal under her small foot. Mrs. Kells died when Samara was still in high school. She wonders if the piano is still inside.
Finally her phone buzzes inside her jacket pocket. It’s Ben Kells, saying he can’t make their appointment. He had to take his dad to the hospital in the middle of the night. Can she let herself in and evaluate the property alone? There’s a key hidden in the side yard.
“Of course, no problem at all.” She borrows her mother’s sharply cheery phone voice. “I hope your father improves.”
She follows a mossy concrete path around the house, finds the ceramic pot Ben mentioned, and tips it over far enough to slide a key out from its damp underside. She teeters in her boots for a minute, rights herself, and then makes her way back to the front porch. She tries the key in the unfamiliar lock, this way and that. Finally the dead bolt slides loose. The air in the entryway is close and warm. She tries to identify the smell: not mold or rot, but damp fabric, like an upholstered couch left in a basement too long.
She’s surprised to see the house is empty—her mother had said it was wall-to-wall books. She crosses the living room, past a deep indentation in the carpet where the piano used to stand, on the lookout for anything unexpected. “Sammy,” her mother told her once, “Watch your ankles. You never know what’s hiding in an empty house.” They were visiting a prospective listing on the other side of town, about five months ago. “One time a raccoon scurried across my feet.” Ashmina laughed and t
he beads at the ends of the scarf wrapped around her bald head clicked together. “I went into the kitchen, and there he was. I remember his wild, furry face. And his eyes—” She circled her hands over her eyes in pantomime. “You don’t want a face like that jumping out at you in the dark.”
But nothing scurries from any corner of the Kells house, not yet anyway. Samara slides the door to the back porch wide open and lets in the cool breeze, and with it, the backyard smells of pinesap, bark mulch, wet grass.
The layout and square footage of the house is almost exactly the same as her parents’ home, but it’s amazing how much space there is when you take away all the furniture and lamps and pillows and potted plants and framed Audubon Society prints and stacks of hardback thrillers and bags of knitting yarn. She makes a circuit of both floors, pausing for a few minutes in each room. Everything’s original, the limestone fireplaces, the steel kitchen cabinets, the gold-flecked linoleum floors. Her mother would have hated it. A tough sell, Sammy, she would have complained. No updates. But Samara likes it. The pink tiles in the upstairs bathroom are cool lozenges under her fingers. The mesh fireplace screen makes a sound like wshhh, wshhh when she pulls the cord. The drawers of the built-in banquette smell like cinnamon and cloves.
She stoops down to the baseboard in the living room and pokes at the corner of the carpet. She gives it an experimental tug, and it comes free with a sound like tearing out the stitches of a dress. She sneezes and runs her hand over the unmarked hardwood floors.
She hears her mother’s voice, telling her to stop wasting time, to get on with the task at hand. Ashmina had a way of doing things, developed over thirty years in the business. She always walked through a house chatting about unrelated topics—what Samara was going to do with her life, how to attract more hummingbirds to her garden, a recipe she planned to make for dinner. All the while she was deciding which parts of the house added value, which parts detracted. Her internal calculator clicked as fast as her eyes could move, adding, subtracting.
In the past Samara has tried to imitate her. But as she walks through the Kells house she doesn’t add and subtract in her mind. She doesn’t jot down phrases to use in the MLS description—well-maintained appliances, a patio perfect for entertaining, minutes from everything. She doesn’t do anything except visit each room, and when she’s done, she starts again.
She imagines the people who lived here. She’s never met Mrs. Kells’s husband, although she knows he teaches philosophy at the university and used to sometimes appear on the PBS show Great Minds in History. All she can distinctly recall of Mrs. Kells herself is her voice, clear and firm over the sound of Samara’s scales. But she finds little clues here and there in the house. Bobby pins inside a drawer in the master bathroom. The dusty outline of thick books in the built-in bookcases. A newspaper clipping inside the pantry:
ROAST A TURKEY, BY WEIGHT:
Weight Cook Time (Unstuffed) Cook Time (Stuffed)
4½–7 lbs. 2–2½ hrs. 2¼–2¾ hrs.
7–9 lbs. 2½–3 hrs. 2¾–3¾ hrs.
9–18 lbs. 3–3½ hrs. 3¾–4½ hrs.
18–22 lbs. 3½–4 hrs. 4½–5 hrs.
22–24 lbs. 4–4½ hrs. 5–5½ hrs.
She pictures a middle-aged man standing, tongs in hand, at a charcoal grill out on the square stone patio. In the air the char of steaks cooking. Long-limbed teenage boys loitering around the weather-beaten basketball hoop in the driveway. Their whooping voices and the smack of the ball against the hoop’s backboard. She imagines a newly married Mrs. Kells, dressed for bed in a long pink nightgown, lying crosswise on a wide living room couch, her husband’s lap cradling her feet. They both hold books, and the stillness of the room is punctuated only by the occasional turn of a page. Then the picture transforms, and it’s her in the pink nightgown, and Shawn holding her feet. She shakes her head. What made her think of that?
Her mother’s voice tells her to stop daydreaming. She’s not here to appreciate the house, to imagine herself in it. She turns off the lights, closes the sliding door, and retrieves the keys from the kitchen counter. She’s spent nearly an hour and has accomplished next to nothing. She pulls her hood up and runs to her car.
THREE
CASS LISTENS AT her daughter’s nursery door, the dog’s breath hot against the backs of her knees. A minute goes by, then two. The whimper she heard through the baby monitor has ceased. The only sound is the swish of Bear’s tail.
She lets her shoulders relax a little and soft-steps back to the spare bedroom she’s using as her study, past the moving boxes that line the hallway. Leah woke before five, and Cass has nursed her three times since then. The Incredible First Year says the baby’s fierce hunger is normal for an eight-week-old. But nothing about it feels normal: Cass’s eyes are gritty with lack of sleep; her breasts are chafed and tender.
In her study, she sits down at her desk, presses the baby monitor to her ear, and holds her breath.
Sweet silence.
She tucks her feet under the chair, the wooden rungs cool against her toes, and gulps her lukewarm coffee. Bear settles with a low grunt on the carpet, and she taps out an email to her husband on her phone. He won’t be able to read it or respond, not for at least a week, because he’s on a five-week research trip to collect marine bacteriophage samples for his new lab at Oregon University, and there’s no Internet on the ship. But she sends it anyway.
Dear Amar,
I made a mistake. Turn the boat around, so you can come home and make me toast with cheese. Making toast with cheese requires two hands. Then you can walk the baby around the block, and I can take a long shower during which I’ll hear no sound but the rush of the water past my ears.
Love,
Cass
Outside the window it’s raining, or rather misting, and the mountain is a deep green. A dormant volcano her real estate agent, Mrs. Mehta, was careful to call it. She’s now Cass’s next-door neighbor; she keeps bringing her things for the baby, little toys her daughter used to love. When she showed them the house, Cass wasn’t sure about the towering pines behind it. Or the way the mountain seemed to loom over the neighborhood, its jagged peak just visible above the dense forest. But Mrs. Mehta said they would wake up to the birds singing, and their baby would benefit from healthful air. She didn’t point out the placards Cass found, later, at a nearby trailhead: BEWARE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS. COUGAR, BOBCAT, AND BLACK BEAR ARE PRESENT IN THIS REGION. KEEP CLOSE EYE ON CHILDREN AND PETS. She also didn’t mention the slight vibrations that occasionally rise up from deep underground. Still, Cass likes the mountain. It smells good—like pinesap and crushed leaves.
She stands up and surveys the stacks of boxes that fill the room. Amar sliced the tops open for her before he left. They contain books from her unfinished Ph.D. in metaphysics at Oregon University, where she was writing a dissertation on the philosophy of counterfactuals, “if…then” statements like:
If I hadn’t been assigned a cubical in the sciences library, I would never have met Amar.
Or If I’d remembered to pack my birth control pills on our camping trip to the redwoods, Leah wouldn’t exist.
She takes Quine’s Theories and Things out of a box and opens its marked-up pages. She recognizes her own small, sinuous handwriting in the margins, but it feels like someone else wrote these words. Not her. She’s a person who can’t manage to put two words together when she goes out to buy diapers, whose thoughts move through her mind like wisps of fog.
She chooses a page at random. She forces herself to read one line. Just one, and to understand it. She scrutinizes the first sentence on page 34, once, twice, and then something catches. Something familiar, something strange, and the air seems to tighten around her head. She reads the sent
ence again. She scratches her scalp. She reads the note that hovers above it in the margin’s white space. It reminds her of something. No, not that. Another thing. Not something she’s thought before, or read before. Something new. Something—
An electronic whimper erupts from the monitor. Only one. But when she turns back to the page, the thought’s gone. The idea that seemed like something solid, that made her feel like herself for a minute, has evaporated so completely she questions it was ever there.
She puts the Quine back and flips through the stack of unopened mail on her desk, forwarded from their old apartment across town: their last electric bill, a notice that she can’t access her school transcripts until she pays $10.75 in library fines, and a thin padded folder. She starts at its return address: “From the Office of Professor Robert Kells, Department of Philosophy, Humanities Hall, Oregon University.”
Robert Kells—Robby—is her graduate advisor, mentor, and friend, a man whose mind is better than any book, dense and deep, full of surprises. Whose everyday observations pierce your brain like tiny fishhooks, towing your thoughts somewhere terrifying, or wondrous, or surreal. By the time Cass met Robby he hadn’t published anything substantial in years, since his wife died. But scholars are still grappling with his book Counterfactuals more than twenty years after its publication. Cass has been grappling with it since she met him as an undergraduate in Philosophy 305. But after years of talking to him nearly every day, she hasn’t spoken to him in months.
The last time they met they argued. She was seven months pregnant and wavering in her resolve to stay in school after her daughter was born. The bigger her belly got, the more unsure she became. She tried to picture what her life was going to be like, how it would be different. What particular details would change. Already it was different; spaces of her day that used to be for reading and writing and thinking were now taken up with napping and eating and doctor’s appointments. Walking across the grassy quad to Robby’s office, her swollen feet tight inside her shoes, she needed him to quell her doubts. She was in the midst of unraveling something vital in the field of metaphysics, building on his book Counterfactuals, but also developing an argument she hoped would be distinctly hers.
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