I crossed the street again. I saw police tape stretched across my mother’s front stairs. It zigged and zagged all the way to the top, through the iron rails. I kept walking. The holly my father had planted when they’d first moved in obscured the house from the side, but even so, I knew where the three slate stepping-stones were. During my father’s life, he had kept these shrubs trimmed back so he could carry large sheets of plywood back to his workshop. Now the stones were hidden. They had been the three slate steps Mr. Forrest had backed over that day in the yard in the months following Billy Murdoch’s death. I bent down where I remembered them and pushed my way into the prickly hedge. Small, rigid branches caught at my hands and face.

I had grown to believe there had been countless signals left by my father. I thought of my mother and me counting down the days until he returned from what Natalie eventually helped me realize must have been a mental facility.

“What do you remember?” she had pressed me.

“Only that he hurt himself in his workshop, and he went to the hospital for a long time.”

And Natalie had looked at me long enough for me to realize what that had meant-not an accident with a screwdriver or skill saw as I’d initially thought, but that he had been the agent of what had happened to him.

“And the guns,” I’d murmured.

Natalie had merely nodded her head.

I heard my father say the universal words again: “It’s a hard day, sweetheart.”

It was the afternoon. My mother was still in her nightgown. My father had retired from the Pickering Water Treatment Plant and spent his days at home, conscientiously leaving at least once a day on either real or created errands. He found it helpful as a way of staying connected to the outside world.

He bought stamps. He stopped by Seacrest’s on Bridge and High to buy a paper or have a briny coffee at the lunch counter. He kept the house well-stocked with cleaning supplies and bouillon, instant Jell-O, and eggs from a farm stand run by an Amish family. He waited patiently on the old wooden benches that ran along the walls of Joe’s Barbershop, chatting to Joe about items from the paper. Eventually, he would have to get in his car to come home.

By the time he shot himself, he must have known that leaving the house each day was not enough. Standing in the sun-if he could find it-for his required fifteen minutes of vitamin D was not going to do the trick, whatever that trick was.

My mother came out of the kitchen. She’d taken to eating Marshmallow Fluff on carrot and celery sticks in the afternoons, craving sugar and licensing it with vegetables. My father had left the house that morning but had returned quickly and gone upstairs to lock himself inside the spare room.

“I slept in,” my mother had told the police. “He was in his room when I got up. I read. We mostly talked in the evenings.”

I watched the policeman silently nodding his head. At some point during the questioning, Mr. Forrest arrived, then Mrs. Castle.

He had stood at the top of the stairs, my mother said, and called her name three times.

“I was rereading The Eustace Diamonds. I was two paragraphs from the end. I called out for him to give me a minute.”

He waited. Then she laid down her book on the round table next to the wing chair and went to the bottom of the stairs.

“Are you done?” he’d asked her. The gun was already at his temple.

“I reached my arm up,” my mother told us-and there on the carpet was a celery stick with its Marshmallow Fluff now pink instead of white-“but he…”

I held her as she shook, and I shook too. I would not allow myself to wonder what exactly, if she had baited him, she might have said in the end. Her head was against my chest, and mine was tucked over her shoulder. I had vowed to hold her more from that day forward and to come and care for her, because we were what remained.

The police asked her if she had a mortuary she preferred, and Mr. Forrest mentioned Greenbrier’s on Route 29. I nodded my head. In that moment, I could not have realized what had just happened to me. My father had exited stage right, and in I had walked, seeing it not only as my duty but as perhaps the greatest gift I might give him posthumously, to take forever the burden of my mother.

Now as I left the border of my parents’ property, I knew that it had been his house as well as hers. It had been his illness as well as hers. She just garnered more attention. She was always-day in, day out-there. My father had been pity to her blame, warmth to her cold, but had he not, in the end, been colder than she? She had fought and blubbered and screamed, but hadn’t the two of us sat together for years?

Last night I had left her rotting in her own basement, and now she was in a metal locker somewhere, having been autopsied. Sarah knew. Emily would know soon, if they had not already told her. And Jake-Jake had even seen her body and stayed.

There was no Mercedes in the driveway. Only the timer lights along the front walk and at the four corners of the house shone out from Mrs. Leverton’s lawn. Why not call her by her first name now that she was gone? Beverly Leverton and her late husband, Philip, neighbors to my mother for fifty years.

Unlike my mother’s house, where single-pane glass still prevailed, which I could easily have smashed with a tap of a good-size rock to each corner, Mrs. Leverton’s house had windows fitted by her son with thick thermal glass and a trigger-point alarm. But Mrs. Leverton had disconnected the alarm, and Arlene, her Jamaican cleaning woman of long duration, had kept a key in the basket of a concrete bunny statue under a pine tree just off the back porch. I often stood in my mother’s backyard and saw Arlene carefully bending to retrieve the key. I had even noted recently that doing this was getting harder and harder for her. As old ladies grew older, so did their maids.

The bunny key was there, under a loose concrete egg. I looked to my left and right; the roof of my father’s workshop was barely visible through the trees. It was odd to be in a neighboring yard from mine, where completely different lives had been lived, and to know almost no one now but those who had died.

Ultimately, even with a valid passport, I could never have escaped to Jake’s converted mill house in Aurigeno, or even hitchhiked west. I had told Jeanine that Greenland was a big piece of land and was composed of nothing but greens. Green people eating green food on green chairs at green tables in green houses. And then we moved on to Iceland, where everything was ice. And China, where the people and the places all had a porcelain sheen. I had made her scream with laughter as I spun the globe. “In Oman,” I said, “there are men shaped like Os! Australia is ‘ausome’ and India, in!” In Madagascar, I thought…

I opened the screen door, turned the key in the lock. No alarms went off. I stumbled in the dark of what I knew to be Mrs. Leverton’s kitchen. I could see dark shapes around me, and with ease I saw the phone, its old-style cord twirling down to the floor and back. Tsvetaeva could have hung herself easily enough. I thought of Arlene wiping down the counters, the stove, the sink, each week entering and leaving another person’s house, learning that person’s habits and regimes. At least, I thought, she was smart enough to get paid.

I knew I could not turn on the lights for fear of being seen. I would take a moment and adjust. That’s what I thought, but I heard a mewling outside, and I jumped.

I took my purse into the half bath to the side of the kitchen and closed the door. It felt safe to risk a light inside the windowless room, but I was unprepared for who I saw.

There I was in the mirror, the strap of my purse cutting into my shoulder, weighing me down. The gun heavier with each step I’d taken since leaving the car. I saw my face, puffy from lack of sleep, my hair jutting out in all directions. My lips were dry, the creases above them puckered and hard. I looked into the mirror, and I saw the thirteen-year-old Helen. I touched the plywood figures along the walls of a once-drowned house. I looked at my father on the rocking horse, saw the solitary mattress on the floor.