The Dutch House(95)

“I didn’t come for a long time,” Sandy said guiltily, holding onto my hand, her thick white hair still pinned in place with barrettes. “But I missed your mother. I kept thinking of Maeve, what she would have wanted me to do. No one’s getting any younger.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

“I just come by for lunch sometimes. Sometimes there’s something I can do to help out. The truth is it’s nice for me. I fill up Norma’s bird feeders in the back. Norma loves the birds. She got that from your dad.”

I looked up at the high ceiling, into the chandelier. “Lots of ghosts.”

Sandy smiled. “The ghosts are what I come for. I think about Jocelyn when I’m here, the way we were then. We were all so young, you know. We were still our best selves.”

Jocelyn had died two years before. She had the flu, and by the time anyone realized how serious things were, it was over. Celeste came with me to the funeral. The Norcrosses came. For the record, Jocelyn never had forgiven my mother, though she was nicer about it than I was. “She left us there to raise you but you couldn’t be ours,” she said to me once. “How am I supposed to forgive a thing like that?”

Sandy and I went to the kitchen and I sat at the little table while she made coffee. I asked about Andrea.

“A toothless beast,” she said. “She doesn’t know a thing. Norma really could move her out of here now and sell the place, but there’s always this feeling that Andrea’s going to die any minute, and what would be the point of seeing her through all these years just to shuttle her out at the end?”

“Unless it isn’t the end.”

Sandy sighed and took a small carton of milk from the refrigerator. The refrigerator was new. “Who knows? I think of my husband. Jamie was thirty-six when he got an infection in his heart. No one knew why. And then Maeve, who was stronger than all the rest of us put together. Even with the diabetes, Maeve should have lived to be a hundred.”

I had never known what Sandy’s husband died of, nor did I know his name. I didn’t know what had killed Maeve for that matter, though there were a wealth of options. I thought of Celeste’s brother Teddy at Thanksgiving all those years ago, asking me if I had to perform autopsies. I had performed plenty of them, and I would never let anyone subject my sister to that. “She should have outlived Andrea at the very least.”

“But that’s the way it goes,” Sandy said.

I found it a comfort to be in that kitchen with her. The stove and the window and Sandy and the clock. There on the table between us was the pressed-glass butter dish that had belonged to my mother’s mother in Brooklyn, a half-stick of butter inside. “Look at that,” I said, and ran my finger along the edge.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on your mother,” Sandy said.

Wasn’t that what I was always saying to May? “I don’t think I am.” We had overlapped very little in our lives, my mother and I. I couldn’t imagine it was much of a loss for either of us.

“She’s a saint,” Sandy said.

I smiled at her. No one was kinder than Sandy. “She’s not a saint. Taking care of someone who doesn’t know you doesn’t make you a saint.”

Sandy nodded, took a sip of coffee. “I think it’s hard for people like us to understand. To tell you the truth, it’s unbearable sometimes, at least it is for me. I just want her to be one of us. But when you think about saints, I don’t imagine any of them made their families happy.”

“Probably not.” I couldn’t remember the saints themselves, much less their families.

Sandy put her small hand on top of my hand, squeezed. “Go upstairs and say hello.”

And so I went up to my parents’ room, wondering why a man with a bad knee would have bought a house with so many stairs. There on the landing was the little couch and the two chairs where Norma and Bright liked to sit with their dolls so they could see who was coming and going. I looked at the doors to my room, to Maeve’s room. It wasn’t hard. I had the idea that all of the hard things had already happened.

Andrea was in a hospital bed by the window, my mother sitting beside her, spooning in bites of pudding. My mother still wore her hair short. It was white now. I wondered what Andrea would have thought had she known that this was her husband’s first wife feeding her, and that the first wife had often had lice.

“There he is!” my mother said, smiling at me as if I’d come through the door right on time. She leaned over to Andrea. “What did I tell you?”

Andrea opened her mouth and waited for the spoon.

“I was in the neighborhood,” I said. Wasn’t that more or less how she’d returned all those years later? I could see now how much she looked like Maeve, or how Maeve would have looked like her had she lasted. That was the face she would have grown into.

My mother held out her hand to me. “Come over here where she can see you.”

I went to the bed and stood beside her. My mother put her arm around my waist. “Say something.”

“Hi, Andrea,” I said. No anger could survive this, at least no anger I’d ever had. Andrea was as small as a child. Thin strands of white hair spread out on the pink pillowcase, her face was bare, her mouth a dark, open hole. She looked up at me, blinked a few times, then smiled. She raised the little claw of her hand and I took it. For the first time I noticed that she and my mother wore the same wedding ring, a gold band no wider than a wire.