Laura crouched in the upstairs hallway. I was told to play with her in order to keep her out of harm’s way, but she didn’t want that. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees and her chin on them, and a thoughtful, secret expression, as if she were sucking on a candy. We weren’t allowed to have candies. But when I made her show me, it was only a round white stone.

During this last week I was allowed to see Mother every morning, but only for a few minutes. I wasn’t allowed to talk to her, because (said Reenie) she was rambling. That meant she thought she was somewhere else. Each day there was less of her. Her cheekbones were prominent; she smelled of milk, and of something raw, something rancid, like the brown paper meat came wrapped in.

I was sulky during these visits. I could see how ill she was, and I resented her for it. I felt she was in some way betraying me—that she was shirking her duties, that she’d abdicated. It didn’t occur to me that she might die. I’d been afraid of this possibility earlier, but now I was so terrified that I’d put it out of my mind.

On the last morning, which I did not know would be the last, Mother seemed more like herself. She was frailer, but at the same time more packed together—more dense. She looked at me as if she saw me. “It’s so bright in here,” she whispered. “Could you just pull the curtains?” I did as I was told, then went back to stand by her bedside, twisting the handkerchief Reenie had given me in case I cried. My mother took hold of my hand; her own was hot and dry, the fingers like soft wire.

“Be a good girl,” she said. “I hope you’ll be a good sister to Laura. I know you try to be.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what to say. I felt I was the victim of an injustice: why was it always me who was supposed to be a good sister to Laura, instead of the other way around? Surely my mother loved Laura more than she loved me.

Perhaps she didn’t; perhaps she loved us both equally. Or perhaps she no longer had the energy to love anyone: she’d moved beyond that, out into the ice-cold stratosphere, far beyond the warm, dense magnetic field of love. But I couldn’t imagine such a thing. Her love for us was a given—solid and tangible, like a cake. The only question was which of us was going to get the bigger slice.

(What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves—our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. Now that I’ve been one myself, I know.)

My mother held me steady in her sky-blue gaze. What an effort it must have been for her to keep her eyes open. How far away I must have seemed—a distant, wavering pink blob. How hard it must have been for her to concentrate on me! Yet I saw none of her stoicism, if that’s what it was.

I wanted to say that she was mistaken in me, in my intentions. I didn’t always try to be a good sister: quite the reverse. Sometimes I called Laura a pest and told her not to bother me, and only last week I’d found her licking an envelope—one of my own special envelopes, for thank-you notes—and had told her that the glue on them was made from boiled horses, which had caused her to retch and sniffle. Sometimes I hid from her, inside a hollow lilac bush beside the conservatory, where I would read books with my fingers stuck into my ears while she wandered around looking for me, fruitlessly calling my name. So often I got away with the minimum required.

But I had no words to express this, my disagreement with my mother’s version of things. I didn’t know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge, and no chance to throw it back at her (as would have been the normal course of affairs with a mother and a daughter—if she’d lived, as I’d grown older).

Black ribbons

Tonight there’s a lurid sunset, taking its time to fade. In the east, lightning flickering over the underslung sky, then sudden thunder, an abrupt door slammed shut. The house is like an oven, despite my new fan. I’ve brought a lamp outside; sometimes I see better in the dimness.

I’ve written nothing for the past week. I lost the heart for it. Why set down such melancholy events? But I’ve begun again, I notice. I’ve taken up my black scrawl; it unwinds in a long dark thread of ink across the page, tangled but legible. Do I have some notion of leaving a signature, after all? After all I’ve done to avoid it, Iris, her mark, however truncated: initials chalked on the sidewalk, or a pirate’s X on the map, revealing the beach where the treasure was buried.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?

At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

The day after Mother’s funeral I was sent with Laura out into the garden. Reenie sent us out; she said she needed to put her feet up because she’d been run off them all day. “I’m at the end of my tether,” she said. She had purply smudges under her eyes, and I guessed she’d been crying, in secret so as not to disturb anyone, and that she would do it some more once we were out of the way.

“We’ll be quiet,” I said. I didn’t want to go outside—it looked too bright, too glaring, and my eyelids felt swollen and pink—but Reenie said we had to, and anyway the fresh air would do us good. We weren’t told to go out and play, because that would have been disrespectful so soon after Mother’s death. We were just told to go out.

The funeral reception had been held at Avilion. It was not called a wake—wakes were held on the other side of the Jogues River, and were rowdy and disreputable, with liquor. No: ours was a reception. The funeral had been packed—the factory workmen had come, their wives, their children, and of course the town notables—the bankers, the clergymen, the lawyers, the doctors—but the reception was not for all, although it might as well have been. Reenie said to Mrs. Hillcoate, who’d been hired to help out, that Jesus might have multiplied the loaves and fishes, but Captain Chase was not Jesus and should not be expected to feed the multitudes, although as usual he hadn’t known where to draw the line and she only hoped nobody would be stampeded to death.

Those invited had crammed themselves into the house, deferential, lugubrious, avid with curiosity. Reenie had counted the spoons both before and after, and said we should have used the second-best ones and that some folks would make off with anything that wasn’t nailed down just to have a souvenir, and considering the way they ate, she might as well have laid out shovels instead of spoons anyway.

Despite this, there was some food left over—half a ham, a small heap of cookies, various ravaged cakes—and Laura and I had been sneaking into the pantry on the sly. Reenie knew we were doing it, but she didn’t have the energy right then to stop us—to say, “You’ll spoil your supper” or “Stop nibbling in my pantry or you’ll turn into mice” or “Eat one more smidgen and you’ll burst”—or to utter any of the other warnings or predictions in which I’d always taken a secret comfort.

This one time we’d been allowed to stuff ourselves unchecked. I’d eaten too many cookies, too many slivers of ham; I’d eaten a whole slice of fruitcake. We were still in our black dresses, which were too hot. Reenie had braided our hair tightly and pulled it back, with one stiff black grosgrain ribbon at the top of each braid and one at the bottom: four severe black butterflies for each of us.