At the signs of current life—dirty breakfast plates on the table, crayons scattered around them, a spill of milk on the floor—Kate relaxed. Theo had children, whom he fed and kept alive: he couldn’t be so bad.
Jemima ran into the center of the room. She raised the hem of her nightgown higher, spread the fabric like wings to get Kate’s attention, and turned in a wide circle. “I’m a bird!”
“You’re a very beautiful bird,” Kate said obediently.
“Oscar,” Theo said. “Come out from under there.”
Kate didn’t understand who Theo was talking to until he approached the table and bent down, and she saw that there was a boy sitting underneath with his knees drawn up to his chest.
“I told you,” Jemima said to Kate in a stage whisper.
“Jemima,” Theo warned, “I mean it.” He helped Oscar out from under the table. The boy was younger than Jemima, perhaps four or five, but with the same wild brown curls. His mouth bowed in nervously.
“He’s a little shy,” Theo explained.
“That’s okay.” Kate understood the desire to hold yourself apart, to see and not be seen. She would have crawled under the kitchen table too if she could have. “Hi, Oscar.”
He hid behind his father’s legs.
“Daddy said you’re here to look at the grandma papers,” Jemima said to Kate. “I love the papers. I’m going to look at them, too. Right! Now!”
“I don’t think so.” Theo collared Jemima before she could dart away. “Why don’t you take Oscar back to the living room and finish your movie?”
“I’m tired of the movie.”
“Then you can clean up your Legos.”
“I hate cleaning up my Legos.”
Theo raised his eyebrows. “Then I guess you should watch the movie.”
Cornered, Jemima let out a high-pitched shriek and blazed out of the room. Oscar gave Kate one final, curious look before following his sister. Theo rescued a plate teetering off the table and placed it in the sink, then grabbed a paper towel to wipe up the spilled milk.
“They’re sweet,” Kate said.
“Famous last words,” Theo replied. His voice was flat; she couldn’t tell if he was joking. The kids’ movie came on full blast in the next room.
Kate looked around the kitchen, trying to take everything in. A few weeks ago, she hadn’t thought about Miranda Brand since that Contemporary Art lecture in college, and now here she was inside the woman’s house. She remembered that last party in New York two days ago, the thickness of the summer midnight, the throwback playlist and the carefully shellacked story of her move, and she felt disoriented, as if she had missed a step while going down the stairs.
Theo dropped the towel in the trash can, wiped his hands, and turned to her. “Okay. Let me show you what we’ve got.”
* * *
In their first phone conversation, two weeks earlier, Theo had told Kate he was looking for someone to organize his mother’s papers, which were “kind of a mess.” Which Kate knew could mean anything. Every person organized their files differently. One of her old coworkers kept tabbed binders of research, while another placed all his hard copies in a single, wobbling pile. As for Miranda Brand—
“Holy shit,” Kate said.
It looked like a dump truck had backed in through the bay window and unloaded an entire town’s worth of recycling. Underneath the mess, Kate could see hints of a mahogany dining table and a truly terrible rug. Orange and blue paisley swirled with pastel pink, the kind of $10,000 atrocity that would receive prime placement in an avant-garde design magazine. Most of the floor had disappeared beneath a spill of papers and rubbish. Cardboard boxes of random sizes; stacked clear plastic boxes with negatives, unused film, discarded prints; a tall pile of notebooks that had slid sideways into a ruffled ramp of curled page edges.
“My mom was a pack rat,” Theo said wearily.
Pack rat was too cute a term for this.
Disorder had always stressed Kate out. That was one thing she could say for herself: she was neat. As a child, she had always put away her own toys. When she was six, she had asked her parents for a mini vacuum for Christmas. In college and after, she was the roommate who did the dishes on time, who folded everyone else’s strewn belongings into tidy squares and set them in front of their bedroom doors—at least until Natasha had told her it came across as passive-aggressive. Kate hadn’t meant it like that. She cleaned for her own comfort. Clutter gave her a