A-Splendid-Ruin(52)

“What? No. No. Of course I didn’t. I found her this way. She was already here. I heard her scream. Shin—” I looked frantically around for the maid, who was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Shin?”

Mr. Au spoke quietly into the phone. He hung up the receiver and said, “They are on their way.”

“We took you in. We’ve given you everything, and this is how you’ve repaid us!” Goldie cried.

“I didn’t do this!” I protested.

“Mr. Au, if you please.” Uncle Jonny said.

The butler came to me, and the two of them took my arms and propelled me up the stairs, to my bedroom. I was too shocked to fight them. I didn’t believe it was happening.

I stumbled into the room. My uncle closed the door hard behind me; I heard the rattle of keys, the turn in the lock. I was numb and stupid. My aunt’s death, the accusations . . . I could only stand there in darkness. Finally, I pushed on the bedroom light, flinching at the brightness, then was vaguely surprised that I was still in my coat and hat, still dressed, boots on. Slowly, I began to come back to myself.

It was only then that I realized I was still holding the thing that had dropped from my aunt’s hand. It was a gold button.

I stared at it, and then, suddenly, I knew where I’d seen it before. My uncle’s vest, misbuttoned, but no, it hadn’t been. It had gaped across his stomach, the button not in the wrong buttonhole, but missing. This button here, the one in my palm.

The button that had fallen from my aunt’s hand.

As the hours passed, the house became even more eerily silent. Dawn, and then day, and again that sense of isolation and abandonment, only this time it was worse because there truly was an absence; the breathing of the house seemed to have changed. I was cold, and now afraid. It was all a mistake. This was not happening. Shin would explain that I was with her, that it was impossible for me to have pushed my aunt down the stairs. And then . . . then there was the button from my uncle’s vest. I tried to remember everything Aunt Florence had ever said to me. Her words seemed ominous now, warnings I should have listened to. Was it madness, really, or had I only believed what I’d been told? How could my uncle’s vest button have been in her hand when she fell—unless she’d grabbed it as she was falling?

Unless he’d pushed her?

I didn’t know what I was waiting for. The police? My uncle? Where was Shin? The bedroom sparkled and shone in the light, beautiful and cold and empty, like the prison I’d drawn at Coppa’s.

I was so attuned to every sound and movement that the shuffling at my door made me start, though it was hardly perceptible. I turned to see that someone had slid a piece of folded paper beneath my door.

It was only then that I remembered Shin had taken a folded paper from her pocket when in the kitchen. Had this been why she’d been waiting? Had it been this same paper?

I knew it before I picked it up, though I had not seen its color in the kitchen, in the lamplight. Cheap paper of pale blue. Yes, I knew it, though my mind refused to believe it. Here in this place it was a thing discordant, a slip back into time, into a boardinghouse room, Mama with piles of lace and pantaloons, sewing away while I studied French conjugations. “I should be helping you, Mama.” “You can help me better by learning French. Now, again—”

It was much worn and creased, as if it had been carried in a pocket for months. I knew, as I picked it up, that I would unfold it to see the address on the bottom, Central Shirtwaist Factory, Brooklyn, NY. I’d seen such paper many times before, with the items given my mother typewritten on the page, a signature beneath, 16 pantaloons, 43 yds lace trim on one side.

On the other, my mother’s writing, broken, hurried, dated only days before she died.

Florence—

I have waited some time for your apology, even as I knew it would not come, and I have understood as well why it has not. But I have grown tired of waiting, and I have received some news which says that for me, time has run out. I am dying.

I wish to believe that this news does not please you, that you do not find it comforting to know that I am to receive still more punishment, or to know how I have suffered, and how your niece has suffered because of your cruelty and your jealousy. I wish to believe, as I have always believed, that there is something fine and good in you, and that the years have softened you, and that you feel the regret that I feel. I can only say again that I am sorry Charles chose me over you, Flossie, and had I been able to keep from loving him, I would have, but then I would not have my darling daughter, my May, and she is worth everything. I know you will think it too, when you meet her.

I worried, when you married Jonathan, that you had found a man so like yourself that, instead of making you the better person I believe you could be, he might make you a worser one. At the time, you praised his cleverness, and I know too well how you turn cleverness to your advantage. I hope I am wrong about him. I console myself by remembering that you can love a good man—you too loved Charles, after all.

Yes, I know—you thought me a fool for believing in Charles. But it seems that of the two of us, I was the one who knew him best. He was an honorable man; I understood that when he decided not to involve his family in scandal, and I trusted him to keep his promise to leave an inheritance to his daughter, illegitimate though she was. He died two months ago. His family will obey his request to bequeath May, as long as we continue to adhere to my promise to Charles that we never contact them in any way.