“Obviously no,” he mumbled.
“You know it’s mildew, right? That’s what you’re smelling.”
“It’s not mildew,” he said, raising his voice slightly, then lowering it when he realized he was getting defensive about books. “It’s the chemical breakdown of . . . You know what? It’s none of your business.”
“You’re going to get high off ink.”
“I’m not even talking about this with you,” he hissed.
I looked out the window instead, alarmed to find that we were already there, already pulling into her driveway. I tried hard not to imagine her on the front porch, waiting for us, with slippered feet and feathery blond hair piled in a bun on top of her head.
I hadn’t been here in a while.
Aunt Helen had gone into the hospital and stayed there for the last few weeks of her life. There wasn’t enough time to get hospice care or attempt to move her. We made her room as cozy as we could and every day we watched her slip further and further away from us. I kept hoping for a miracle. And then I stopped hoping for a miracle and just hoped, at least, that it would be painless.
When she died, I texted Em over and over, standing in Aunt Helen’s hospital room as everyone took their turns saying good-bye.
What do you think happens when you die?
Do you think it hurts? I mean, do you think every single death is painful?
Do you think about it ever? Like just the fact that we are all definitely, absolutely going to die one day?
Is life even worth living?
What are any of us even doing here? Is there a point to any of this?
“Well, here we are,” Mom said after we’d already been there for two or three minutes, none of us talking to each other, the car still idling. She reached over my father’s leg and shut the engine off.
“Here we are,” he echoed sadly.
Aunt Helen’s house was a white Victorian with a wraparound porch and turrets and gables. Like something out of a haunted house storybook, only not at all frightening. Or at night maybe a little frightening. Right now: sad and empty.
I got out of the car first and went around back to get the key, which was under a plant on her deck. It was a spare key, just the single one on an old and tarnished brass keychain, a Mickey Mouse head. I unlocked the back door of the house and walked slowly to the front, where my family was waiting. I just wanted a minute by myself.
The house was big and still and slightly stale—although maybe I was only imagining that. But the air tasted off, and I opened a few windows as I went, pulling back curtains and letting the sunlight in. We could live here if we wanted to. Harry had made it clear that we could take whatever we wanted, and I’m sure that included this house. Or any of Aunt Helen’s houses. Or any of her things. But I knew we’d never live here, because it was an hour from our own home and because it was too big and we were used to much less. And because any time we woke up, any time we walked around, we’d be pushing through her ghost. A hundred of her ghosts. We’d eat cereal with her and water the flowers with her and read books with her breathing down our necks. No, the house had to move on. The house was meant for someone else.
“Good-bye, house,” I whispered tentatively into the front entranceway.
But my words fell flat and didn’t hold any meaning.
I opened the front door; Mom and Dad were on the porch and whispering to each other impatiently, coming up with an attack strategy. Abe was still on his phone, his fingers flying across the touch screen at a speed I’d never managed. Texting Amy, probably.
“We’ll start upstairs,” Dad said, gesturing to himself and Mom. “Abe, you want to check out the basement? And Lottie, you can wander around down here?”
He meant the first floor, which consisted of a kitchen, dining room, living room, solarium, library, three bathrooms, and probably four or five more rooms I was forgetting.
Dad handed out the sticky notes from Harry. I got blue; Mom got red; Abe got purple; Dad kept green.
“Don’t go crazy,” Mom said lightly. “We have room but not this much room. If there’s any furniture or anything big . . . Just run it by us first.”
“What, you don’t think the grand piano will fit in my room?” I asked. I meant it as a joke, but then I remembered how Aunt Helen had taught Abe to play, patiently running through the different scales and explaining the differences between white and black keys.
“Count them,” I’d heard her say once. “If you count the keys yourself, you’ll never forget how many there are.”
Eighty-eight.
I’d counted them myself because, although I had no interest in learning piano, I didn’t want to be left out.
Abe put his phone in his back pocket and blinked a few times and then smiled weakly at me. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s fine.”
We split up. Occasionally I heard my parents talking or arguing upstairs and at one point there was a particularly loud crash from the basement, but otherwise I felt entirely alone. I started in the library (so empty now that the movers had taken all the books) and made my way through her study and into the solarium, which was at the back of the house and filled with plants she had managed not to kill. I put sticky notes on things that made me miss her or things I didn’t want to see sent to auction. A paperweight shaped like Earth—when you looked inside, you saw galaxies. Her collection of fountain pens. A small potted bonsai with a miniature metal table and chairs set in the dirt underneath it, like fairies had come for tea and left just before I’d gotten there. A stack of photo albums. A dozen small, framed cloth canvases that featured the needlepoints she’d done as a teenager: flower scenes and trees and bridges and a sun with many faded orange rays.
Eventually I made my way into the backyard, needing air, hoping for a breeze.
“Do you think I need a croquet set?” Abe asked, coming up behind me. I jumped a mile and shrieked again, and he held his hands up like whoa, calm down.
“Geez, Abe,” I said.
“I mean, would you play croquet with me?” he asked. He held the croquet set out to me, an enormous vintage suitcase that held the pieces of the game inside it.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll play croquet with you. As long as you don’t bury me in the ground.”
“Ah, good reference,” he said, setting the case on the deck and adorning it with a purple sticky note. “Come on, you look like you could use a glass of water.”
We went back inside the house and he got me a glass of water, and then he left to do more looking around. I drank the water at the breakfast bar. I felt emptied out, scooped clean, exhausted from the party last night. In the books, Alvin and his sister are immortal and don’t need sleep. They can sleep, and they do sometimes, out of habit. Eternally thirteen (Alvin) and eleven (Margo). That didn’t sound so bad to me at the current moment.