she stayed here her whole life. All because the floor disappeared. Or was pulled out from under her. But that disappearing floor didn’t seem to stop her. She wrote and collected family history and married the man she loved and protected and guarded the home she loved. It’s Tillie I want to know more about.”
“Me too. I think part of it’s not knowing why she died. And part of it’s not being able to get to know her because she didn’t leave us any clues.”
“Have you heard the ghost stories?”
She is on her knees now, hands in a file box. She stops sorting and looks at me. “No.”
I recount the real story of Tillie—the one Miah told me. How she died of a broken heart due to losing her baby and her brother and her mom. Then I tell her how Jeremiah Crew and I got locked in the basement of Rosecroft.
Mom sits listening, and when I’m done, she says, “Well, that’s something, at least, that we know about her.”
And I can feel the slightest bit of helium filling me and lifting me off the floor.
She says, “You know, that happened to me a long time ago. Getting locked in the basement of Rosecroft. Unfortunately, I was by myself and not with a cute boy.”
She tells me then about the first time she came to visit Aunt Claudine, back when the house still had a ceiling and floors and all its walls were intact. While the grown-ups did boring grown-up things, my mom wandered off alone and found herself in the basement. She says it was used as storage then too, and she picked through old books and clothing until she heard her mom calling her. That was when she tried the door—the same one she’d come in, the one that led up to the hallway—and it was locked. She said she banged on the door and shouted her head off, and eventually she hoisted herself out a window. When she was back inside the house, she asked why they hadn’t let her out, and they said they’d never heard her, and besides, the door was unlocked.
“So I tried it myself and it opened. Just like that.” She sits back on her heels.
“Do you think it was Tillie?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, but I do think we’re all made up of energy, and it makes sense we would leave some of that behind, especially in the case of someone who died so tragically. I always think of it as leaving an imprint.”
I look around me, not just at this room but at the island outside the windows, and wonder if I’ll leave an imprint after I’m gone from here.
For four hours we talk and read, and at some point I look up at my mom, at the way her hair is falling over the page of the book she’s thumbing through, at the way she blows it out of her face now and then, not bothering to brush it aside with her hands, which are too busy with papers.
“Mom?” I say.
She looks up. “Yes?”
“Thanks for introducing me to this side of the family.”
She smiles, and suddenly she looks like the mom I’ve always known my whole life, the one who chased nightmares away and had the answer to every question, no matter what I wanted to know.
“More than words,” she says, which is shorthand for I love you more than words.
“More than words,” I say.
DAY 16
(PART TWO)
A black truck sits in the road outside Addy’s house. I walk past it, up the path, my mind still back at the museum with my mom and Tillie and Claudine. Miah is waiting for me on the porch steps. I’m surprised and not surprised, glad but irritated to see him. He sits like an old man, hunched over in the sun. The moment he sees me, he changes into Miah again, up on his feet, stretching, smiling down at me.
I say, “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve got a surprise for you.”
I look past him at the truck.
“It’s important, Captain.”
And his smile wavers, like he can barely hold on to it. Every part of me—well, almost every part—wants to tell him no, but there’s something in his voice and that wavering smile, and more than that, there’s me not wanting to be the person who worries for the rest of her life that the boy she’s seeing is having sex with another girl or being swallowed by an alligator