Mrs. Emerson said, “Gillespie. Gillespie.” Elizabeth jumped and said, “Oh,” She wasn’t used to this new name yet. She wondered how it felt to have Mrs. Emerson’s trouble. Did the words start out correctly in her head, and then emerge jumbled? Did she hear her mistakes? She didn’t seem to; she appeared content with “Gillespie.” “I’m—” she said. “I’m—” Her tongue made precise T sounds far forward in her mouth. Elizabeth waited. “Tired,” Mrs. Emerson said.
“I’ll put the board away.”
“I want—”
“I’ll lay your pillow flat and leave you alone a while.”
“No!” said Mrs. Emerson.
Elizabeth thought a minute. “Do you want to sleep?” she asked.
Mrs. Emerson nodded.
“But you’d rather I stayed here.”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth put the chess pieces in their box, tipped her chair back, and looked out the window. She kept her hands still in her lap. From her months with Mr. Cunningham she had learned to lull people to sleep by being motionless and faceless, like one of those cardboard silhouettes set up to scare burglars away. Even when Mrs. Emerson tossed among the sheets, Elizabeth didn’t look at her. If she did, more words would struggle out. She imagined that coming back would have been much harder if Mrs. Emerson could speak the way she used to. Think of what she might have felt compelled to say: rehashing Timothy, explaining those years of silence, asking personal questions. She shot Mrs. Emerson a sideways glance, trying to read in her eyes what bottled-up words might be waiting there. But all she saw were the white, papery lids. Mrs. Emerson slept, nothing but a small, worn-out old lady trying to gather up her lost strength. Her hair was growing out gray at the roots. The front of her bathrobe was spotted with tea-stains — a sight so sad and surprising that for a moment Elizabeth forgot all about those students that she was missing. She rocked forward in her chair and stood up, but she watched Mrs. Emerson a moment longer before she left the room.
Matthew was in the kitchen, eating what was probably his breakfast. He had shaved and dressed. He no longer had that uncared-for look that he had worn asleep in the armchair, but his face was older than she remembered and a piece of adhesive tape was wrapped around one earpiece of his glasses. “Can I pour you some coffee?” he asked her.
“No, thank you.”
“How’s Mother?”
“She’s asleep.”
“How does she seem to you?” he asked her.
“Oh, I don’t know. Older.” She wandered around the kitchen with her arms folded, avoiding his eyes. She didn’t feel comfortable with him anymore. She had thought it would be easy — just act cheerful, matter-of-fact — but she hadn’t counted on his watching her so steadily. “Why are you staring?” she asked him.
“I’m not staring, you are.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth said. She stopped pacing. “Well, the house seems terrible to me,” she said. “Much worse off than your mother. How did it get so rundown? Look. Look at that.” She waved to a strip of wallpaper that was curling and buckling over the stove. “And the porch rail. And the lawn. And the roof gutters have whole branches in them, I’m going to have to see to those.”
“You’re not the handyman here anymore,” Matthew said.
She thought for a moment that he had meant to hurt her feelings, but then she looked up and found him smiling. “You have your hands full as it is,” he told her.
“When she’s napping, though. Or has visitors.”
“I’ve been trying to do things during the weekends. I mow the grass, rake leaves. But it’s a full-time job, I never quite catch up.” He looked down at his plate, where an egg lay nearly untouched. “Before she got sick I’d just finished cleaning out the basement,” he said “Shoveling it out. All that junk. Remember our wine?”
“Yes.”
“I found it in the basement six months after you left. White scum on the top and the worst smell you can imagine.”
“I wondered what you’d done with it,” Elizabeth said.
A younger, shinier Matthew flashed through her mind. “When the wine has aged we’ll go on a picnic,” he had said. “I’ll bring a chicken, you bring a …” As if that picnic had actually come about, she seemed to remember the sunlight on a riverbank and the flattened grass they sat on and the feel of Matthew’s shirt, rough and warm behind her as she leaned back to drink from a stoneware jug.
“What would it have tasted like, I wonder,” Matthew said.
She knew she should never have come back here.
The first time she realized that Andrew was home was at supper. They ate in the dining room — Elizabeth, the two sisters, Matthew, and Susan. Elizabeth kept hearing clinking sounds coming from the kitchen, separated by long intervals of silence. “What’s that?” she asked, and Mary said, “Oh, Andrew.”
“Andrew? I didn’t even know he was here.”
“He’s going back on Sunday.”
Nobody pretended to find it odd that he should be eating in the kitchen.
That night, from the army cot that had been set up for her on the sunporch, she heard Andrew cruising the house in the dark. He slammed the refrigerator door, creaked across floorboards, scraped back a dining room chair. He carried some kind of radio with him that poured out music from the fifties — late-night, slow-dance, crooning songs swelling and fading as he passed through rooms, like a bell on a cat’s collar. In the morning when she went upstairs his door was tightly shut, sealed-looking. When she returned from the library with a stack of historical romances for Mrs. Emerson she found florists’ roses by the bed — nothing any of the others would have thought of buying — and the smell of an unfamiliar aftershave in the air. He ate his lunch in the kitchen. That weighty, surreptitious clinking cast a gloom over the dining room, but no one mentioned it. “We seem to be missing the butter,” Elizabeth said, and Mary rose at once, letting a fork clatter to her plate, as if she feared that Elizabeth would go out to the kitchen herself. “Sit still, I’ll get it,” she said. But Elizabeth hadn’t even thought of going. She avoided Andrew as much as he did her. Otherwise, even in a house so large, they would have had to bump into each other sometime. She kept an ear tuned for the sound of his approach, and circled rooms where he might be. Why should she bother him, she asked herself, if he didn’t want her around? But she knew there was more to it than that: she didn’t want him around, either. He had passed judgment on her. Once or twice, during the afternoon, she caught glimpses of him as he crossed the living room — a flash of his faded blue shirt, a color she associated with institutions — and she averted her face and hunched lower in her chair beside Mrs. Emerson. She should have gone right out to him, of course. “Look here,” she should have said. “Here I am. Elizabeth. You know I’m in the house with you. I feel so silly pretending I’m not. Why are you doing this? Or why not just go back to New York, if you can’t bear to see me?” But she already knew why. He had summed her up. He was afraid to leave his family in her hands. He alone, of all the Emersons, knew that she was the kind of person who went through life causing clatter and spills and permanent damage.