around Dorothy’s bed, reading silently or chatting together in low voices, even attempting Scrabble at one stage (though not for long—Iris never could play a full round without blowing up in the face of Rose’s remarkable knowledge of tricky two-letter words), but most of the time, they took turns just sitting in quiet company with their sleeping mother. It was right, Laurel thought, that they’d brought Ma home. Greenacres was where Dorothy belonged, this funny old big-hearted house she’d discovered by chance and recognised immediately as one she must inhabit and possess. ‘I always dreamed of a house like this one,’ she used to tell them, a broad smile spreading across her face as they walked in from the garden. ‘For a time I thought I’d lost my chance, but it all came right in the end. As soon as I saw her, I knew she was the one …’
Laurel wondered if her mother had been thinking of that long-ago day as they drove her up the driveway on Friday; whether she’d seen in her mind’s eye the old farmer who’d made tea for her and Daddy when they knocked on his door in 1947, the birds that had watched them from behind the boarded-up fireplace, and the young woman she’d been back then, holding firm to her second chance as she looked to the future and tried to escape whatever it was she’d done before. Or had Dorothy been thinking rather, as they wound up the drive, of events that had unfolded that summer’s day in 1961 and about the impossibility of ever truly escaping one’s past? Or was Laurel being sentimental, and had the tears her mother shed in the passenger seat of Rose’s car, the soft silent tears, been simply the effect of great age and faulty plumbing?
Whatever the case, the move from the hospital had evidently tired her and she slept most of the weekend, eating little and saying even less. Laurel, when it was her turn at the bedside, willed her mother to stir, to open her tired eyes and recognise her eldest daughter, to resume their conversation of the other day. She needed to know what her mother had taken from Vivien Jenkins—it was the crux of the mystery. Henry had been right all along, insisting there was more to his wife’s death than met the eye, that she’d been the target of shady con-artists. (Con-artists plural, Laurel noted—was it merely a turn of phrase, or had her mother acted with someone else? Could it have been Jimmy, the man she’d loved and lost? Was that perhaps why they’d been driven apart?) She would have to wait until Monday, though, because Dorothy wasn’t talking. In fact, it seemed to Laurel, watching as the old woman slept so peacefully, and the curtains fluttered in the light breeze, that her mother had passed through some invisible doorway into that place where ghosts from the past could no longer touch her.
Only once, in the wee hours of Monday morning, was she visited by the terrors that had nipped at her heels in recent weeks. Rose and Iris had both gone back to their own homes for the night, so it was Laurel who woke in the dark with a start and stumbled along the corridor, feeling about the wall for light switches as she went. The thought came to her of the many nights her mother had done the same thing for her: been woken from her sleep by a cry in the dark, and rushed down the hall to chase her daughter’s monsters away, to stroke her hair and whisper in her ear, ‘Hush, little wing … there now, hush’. No matter Laurel’s conflicted feelings towards her mother these days, it seemed there was a privilege in being able to do the same in return, particularly for Laurel, who’d left the family home in such a fraught way, who hadn’t been there when her father died, who’d spent her whole life beholden to no one but herself and her art.
Laurel climbed into bed with her mother, holding the old woman firmly but gently. The cotton of Dorothy’s long, white nightdress was damp with the labours of her nightmare, and her thin frame trembled. ‘It was my fault, Laurel,’ she was saying. ‘It was my fault.’
‘Hush, hush,’ Laurel whispered. ‘There now, everything’s all right.’ ‘It was my fault she died.’
‘I know, I know it was.’ Henry Jenkins came again to Laurel’s mind; his insistence that Vivien had