older Durham neighborhood of doctors, scientists, professors, and other professionals. The house was Federal-style, with slender white columns and dark shutters at the windows, austere against the two stories of white brick. Towering magnolias lined the brick walkway; Laurel could smell their faint and waxy perfume as she walked up the path toward the door, fighting anxiety. Her aunt and uncle might be blood relatives but they were virtual strangers to her.
Laurel’s mother had fled the South at seventeen, as soon as she graduated high school, and headed for Berkeley on a full scholarship to the biology department. It was 1965, but Meredith hadn’t been looking to join any hippie revolution—she’d just chosen a school as geographically far from the South as she could get without leaving the continent, and had never looked back. As far as Laurel had been able to glean, she herself was the unintended consequence of a graduate-school affair with a professor, and for some reason unfathomable to Laurel, Meredith had decided to keep her. Meredith had never married; had bounced around from university to university in the Bay Area with Laurel in tow until she landed a tenured position at Stanford, and Laurel had grown up in university day care and in magnet schools, with a brilliant and distant parent who was more like a roommate than a mother. In all of Laurel’s life Meredith had barely mentioned her family, and Laurel had met them only twice, when she was barely out of diapers. Meredith had always seemed to her like her own continent, not part of a family at all—it was the reality Laurel had grown up with and had not thought to question.
Laurel had only the sketchiest memories of those two visits to North Carolina: lush green fields and brilliant flowers, butterflies as big as birds, a grandmother she had adored who was as maternal as her own mother was not, a stern aunt who was, if it was possible, even more aloof than Meredith, and a sweet, vague uncle with a disarming smile.
Laurel flashed back to the phone call with her mother, when she’d told Meredith she’d accepted the Duke job. In that drawn-out minute of Meredith’s silence on the phone, Laurel had realized how very little she really knew about her mother’s childhood.
“Mom? Is something—wrong?”
“Of course not,” Meredith snapped. The silence continued.
“Well,” Meredith finally said. “It’s a fine school, no question. Congratulations on the job. Call Aunt Margaret when you get in—I’m sure she’ll introduce you around.” She paused, and then added dryly, “And stock up on insect repellant—you’re going to need it.”
Laurel had hung up with a sense of confusion, feeling distinctly odd about the phone call. There was something about the undercurrents there that went beyond her mother’s constant need for control. The feeling Laurel had gotten instead was a deep sense of unease, as unlikely coming from Meredith as finding her in the kitchen baking cookies. But that was quickly forgotten in the whirlwind of packing and selling, of arranging and departing. Now Laurel felt it again, that deep unease …
Why?
She looked up at her aunt’s house, took a breath, then stepped onto the porch and rang the bell.
The door was opened by an older and sterner version of Laurel’s mother, austere, trim to the point of boniness, but with the same auburn hair and blue eyes. Laurel tried to swallow her surprise, and saw that Aunt Margaret gave her an equally startled, appraising look before she reached to embrace her stiffly, with a brusque, “Welcome to North Carolina.”
She ushered Laurel in to a darkish entry with a curving staircase up to the second floor with a baby grand piano beside the landing. A double doorway to the right open into a formal dining room; the double doorway to the left led to an equally formal living room. The furniture was antique and somber. Laurel felt her back stiffening, her posture straightening just stepping into the hall.
“It’s a beautiful house,” she said aloud, dutifully, but in truth she found it weighty and depressing.
Life with her mother had had its awkwardness, but Meredith’s sprawling clutter of books and professional papers, and predilection for old California bungalows and disregard for mealtimes (or anything to do with food in general) had given their life a sort of casual disorder. Laurel felt the gloomy rigidity of her aunt’s house working on her senses and thought she finally had a glimmer of why Meredith had gone so far away and with such finality.