had some wistful idea that the five of us would cozy up in the living room for a late-night chat (“I could use a nightcap—Hugo, what happened to that odd bottle of stuff that we brought you from Sicily? Or Melissa, would you rather some—”), but my father—baggy-eyed, fumbling at a cufflink—put a stop to that: he needed to go to bed, he said gently but definitively, family was the best thing in the world but also the most tiring, and if the rest of us had any sense we would do the same. Hugo, with me and Melissa at his shoulder, waved from the top of the steps as the others got into their cars and drove off, chatter and laughter and car-door slams dissolving upwards into the dusky sky. I was glad of the dimming light; the day had exhausted me to the point where my leg was wobbling almost uncontrollably, and when I waved my hand flopped like spaghetti.
At some point when I wasn’t looking, someone—one of my parents, presumably—had hauled our cases upstairs, which would have infuriated me if my head hadn’t been too full and whirling to have space for anything more, or if the Xanax had finished wearing off. Instead I let myself go along with Melissa’s wave of delight at seeing my old holiday room, which had been my father’s room when he was growing up and which was still more or less how I had left it the last time I’d stayed there, the summer before college— “Toby! did you draw this? I didn’t know you could draw . . . Oh, the fireplace, it’s beautiful, those flower tiles . . . Was this yours? You did not use to like Nickelback! . . . I love imagining you as a little five-year-old looking out this window . . . Oh my God, is this your school rugby jersey?”
Through her eyes, the room lost the secretive, desiccated feel of some little-seen exhibit—too many years of sun fading streaks into the unmoving curtains, of the furniture legs wearing dents into their fixed spots on the floor—and took on a shy, bittersweet charm. As she skimmed around, she flicked things out of our cases—she had packed for me, so unobtrusively that I had barely realized what was happening—and glanced to me for permission to put them in place, here? here? so that by the time she came to rest the room was fresh and lively and ours, her hairbrush and my comb side by side on the old chest of drawers, our clothes neatly hung in the wardrobe with its cartoon-car stickers scraped patchily off the doors. “There,” she said, with a quick look at me, half pleased, half anxious. “Is that all OK?”
“It’s great,” I said. I had been leaning against the wall, watching her, both because I enjoyed it and because I was too shattered to move. “Can we go to bed now?”
Melissa sighed, satisfied. “Definitely. Bedtime.”
“So,” I said, as she pulled her dress over her head—wonderful vintage dress, pale blue and twirly, it had spun among the shining oak and worn Persian carpets of the house as if it had been made for the place. “How was your day?”
Melissa turned to me, dress in her hands, and I was startled by the glow of happiness on her face. Melissa had always romanticized my family—she didn’t have much of a family life; her mother drank, not flamboyantly but with real dedication, and much of her childhood had been made up of isolation and damage control. To her, the cheerful chaos of my family and the Ivy House had been like something out of a fairy tale; she used to ask me for stories about them, listen enthralled with her fingers curled in mine. “It was lovely. They’re all so nice, Toby, it’s such a hard time for you all but they made me feel so welcome, like they’re genuinely glad to have me here— Did you know your aunt Miriam was in the shop, last year? She bought a set of those plates with the deer on them. She never realized it was me!”
Yellow light from my little bedside lamp shone velvety on her cheek, the turn of her bare shoulder, the supple curve of her waist into her hip. Her hair was a golden haze. “Come here,” I said, reaching for her.
She let the dress fall to the floor and kissed me back, strongly and joyfully. “What about you?” she asked,