The House Where They Stayed

You know you have the wrong house because you buried your mother in her long, black jacket, and it’s currently hanging beside the door.

You can see it through the narrow gap you’ve opened. The hem brushes the umbrella stand, and one sleeve has turned inside out at the cuff, exposing the grey lining she always meant to have replaced. There is a button missing at the bottom.

You remember looking for that button before the funeral.

You stand on the step with your key in the lock. Rain is beginning to fall, ticking against the lids of the bins beside you. Behind you, a car moves slowly through the wet street, its headlights lifting your shadow across the wall.

You check the number.

The brass two is crooked. It’s been crooked since your father put it up, despite your mother pointing it out every time he came through the door. You’ve known this house all your life.

You were supposed to come tomorrow. Eleven o’clock, the estate agent said, and she would take the remaining keys and walk through with you one final time. You’d agreed without asking what there was left to see.

You emptied the cupboards yourself. You wrapped the plates in newspaper and found the good scissors in the drawer where your mother insisted they weren’t. You took her jacket to the funeral home.

Now it hangs on the second hook, beneath the shelf where she keeps her gloves.

You only came tonight for the height marks. The little pencil lines on the kitchen doorframe, the dates and numbers written in your mother’s neat hand. You wanted a copy before somebody painted over them.

From inside, you hear a teaspoon tapping against a mug.

You should leave. You know this. You should pull the door shut, get into your car and sit with the heater blowing against your hands until you can hold the steering wheel properly. Then, drive home and come back tomorrow to meet the estate agent.

Instead, you wipe your shoes, the mat catching at the loose sole of your left sneaker. You push the door open and step inside.

The hallway is exactly as you remember it, which is how you know you haven’t remembered it properly in years. There is a little hill beneath the runner where a floorboard buckles, and the cupboard door is held shut with folded paper. At the baseboard, a pale crescent shows where the vacuum has chipped the paint.

You’d forgotten how narrow it was. How everyone would come in with bags and be forced to turn sideways. How your mother would call from the kitchen before you’d even shut the door, asking if you’d eaten.

The air smells of dinner cooking.

You reach for the jacket.

You only wanted to touch the sleeve, perhaps to discover that it’s another coat, a similar coat, something you’ve mistaken in the poor light. But your fingers close around the wool, and there is the rough place near the pocket where she caught it on a gate. It’s warm at the shoulders and inside the fold of the sleeve, as though someone has recently taken it off.

Your mother calls your name from the kitchen.

You close your eyes.

You’ve kept her final voicemail on your phone. It’s been copied onto your computer and emailed to yourself twice, frightened that her voice would disappear.

In the message, she asks whether you want some potatoes because she bought too many again. Near the end, she turns away from the phone to yell an answer to the television, then returns to tell you there is no rush.

You know when she breathes. You know the little click before the recording ends. You’ve listened to it more times than you can count. And yet, she has never sounded this close.

“You’re letting the cold in.”

Your hand drops from the jacket.

You shut the door and slip the bolt across. The metal catches halfway, as it always does, and you lift it slightly before pushing it home.

“Sorry,” you say.

Your voice sounds too quiet for the house.

You follow the smell of onions frying. Your stomach contracts with sudden hunger, although you ate less than an hour ago.

Your mother stands at the cooker with a wooden spoon in her hand. For several seconds, you can’t look directly at her face. You look at her slippers instead, flattened at the heels. At the sleeves pushed above her elbows.

You grip the doorframe. Beneath your hand are the marks you came to save: six, eight, eleven. At eleven, you’d argued that your hair should count. Your mother had pressed it flat with her palm and told you to stop trying to grow by cheating.

Beside yours is another column. You remember that column ending at seven.

You remember being twelve and standing against the opposite side of the frame, refusing to be measured because it would mean another line above the place where his had stopped.

Now your fingers move past seven. Nine. Twelve. Sixteen.

The last mark is higher than your own.

“You look awful.”

You turn toward your brother’s voice. He sits at the kitchen table, peeling an orange. His head is bent, and you recognise the concentrated crease between his eyebrows before you recognise anything else.

You have to work around the beard and the breadth of his shoulders.

His sleeves are pushed up. There is a pale scar near one elbow and a plain ring on his left hand. His hair is shorter than you would have expected, thinning a little at the temples.

You doubt you would have recognised him in the street.

“You getting in, or what?” he asks.

Your mother looks over her shoulder. “There you are.”

She crosses the kitchen. You see unfamiliar glasses hanging from a chain around her neck and a small burn on the inside of her wrist, pink and shiny. Her hair needs cutting at the back.

She holds out your mug.

You take it, and she keeps one finger through the handle until she is certain you have a proper grip.

You’d forgotten that too.

“Your hands are freezing.” Her fingers touch yours.

You nearly drop the cup.

She frowns, catching the saucer beneath it. “Careful.”

“Sorry.”

You want to put the mug down and hold her. You want to press your face against the warm place between her neck and shoulder and stay there until she asks what on earth has gotten into you.

But you’re afraid of interrupting whatever this is.

You drink instead. The tea scalds your tongue. You swallow badly, cough, and feel it burn all the way down.

“You never learn,” your brother says.

You smile.

At his feet are a pair of work boots, their soles leaving dry crumbs of mud beneath the chair. A heavy jacket hangs over the back. There are keys beside his elbow, attached to a bottle opener and a small plastic rabbit with one ear rubbed white.

Above the radiator is a photograph of him in a graduation gown.

You look for yourself beside him.

There you are, squinting into sunlight, your arm around his waist. Your mother stands on his other side, holding a handbag you’ve never seen. He has his head tipped towards yours, his mouth open in the middle of saying something.

You look older than you expect. Or, perhaps, simply different.

You study the hand resting against his gown.

You wonder what that hand did differently.

You remember cold water closing over your shoes. The pond was shallow at the edges, that’s something people said afterward, as though the depth near the bank ought to have helped. You remember reeds trapped beneath the ice and your brother moving farther out, testing each step before trusting it.

Then he was on his stomach. No longer laughing.

Someone told you to stay where you were while they went for help. You remember their hand clamping down on your shoulder and the urgency in their voice.

You remember staying.

For years, you have tried to make that part of the memory less clear.

“Sit down,” she says. “You’re making me nervous, hovering.”

You pull out the one empty chair. Its back knocks the wall, and your mother gives you the same look she gave you when you were ten.

“Mind the paint.”

You almost laugh, but the noise catches in your throat instead.

Your brother glances up. “You all right?”

“Yeah. Just a long day.”

He breaks the orange apart and begins complaining about a boiler installation. At first, you cannot follow any of it. There is a part that should have arrived on Tuesday, a supplier who insists it did, a customer who keeps phoning while he is underneath the sink.

He talks with half an orange segment tucked into his cheek. When your mother tells him to finish chewing, he rolls his eyes.

You sit with your hands around your mug and discover, with a grief so painful you have to lower your head, that you could have found him boring. You could have stopped listening, checked your phone, told him that everyone had problems at work.

There could have been whole evenings when you wished he would go home.

“What happened with the part?” you ask.

He looks pleased to have been asked, and he gives you a twenty-minute explanation.

You learn the movements of his adult face while he speaks. The way his mouth pulls sideways when he thinks someone is an idiot, the way he rubs his beard, then catches himself and drops his hand. You search each gesture for the boy you knew, finding him in a shrug or a brief, triumphant grin.

Your mother sets a bowl of grated cheese on the table.

He takes a pinch.

“That’s for dinner,” she says.

“Quality control,” he replies with a laugh.

“You’ve controlled half of it.”

You look down into your tea until you can bear to look up again.

His wife is called Ruby. You learn this when his phone lights up, and he turns it towards your mother to show her a photograph. Your niece has fallen asleep on the sofa wearing one Wellington boot. A pink rabbit is trapped beneath her cheek, its long ears darkened from being chewed.

The dry patches behind her knees have been keeping her awake.

“Is the new cream helping?” your mother asks.

“A bit,” he says. “Getting it on her is the problem.”

He passes you the phone.

The little girl has his eyes. You enlarge the photograph with your fingers, then realise both of them are watching you.

“She’s getting big,” you say.

“Unfortunately. She can reach the door handles now.”

You hold the phone a moment longer before giving it back. You want to ask her name, but can’t figure out how.

Your mother returns to the stove and lifts the lid from a saucepan. Steam clouds her glasses, and she makes an irritated noise as she takes them off.

Outside, the rain thickens against the window. For the first time since you entered, you let yourself imagine the next hour.

A plate in front of you. Your mother insisting you take more, and your brother leaving something behind before coming back for it.

“Will you stay for dinner?”

“Yes.”

The word comes out too quickly.

Your mother turns.

“If that’s all right,” you add.

She looks at you for a moment, then reaches into the cupboard for another plate. “Of course it is.”

You hear a key enter the front door.

Your mother glances at the kitchen clock. “You’re early.”

Your brother looks towards the hall, then back at you.

The key turns once. Stops. Turns back.

You remember slipping the bolt after shutting the door, an old habit your mother always hated. She said there was no need while people were still out, that someone would end up standing in the rain.

The handle moves.

From your chair, you can see along the hallway to the frosted glass. A figure stands on the other side. Your own coat and your own height. One shoulder raised against the rain.

You look at the coat half off your arm, at the dark patch where water has soaked into the cuff. Then you hear your voice calling from the step. It’s strange how rarely you hear your own voice without already knowing what it is going to say.

Your mother sets the extra plate beside the cooker.

Your brother starts to rise.

You catch his wrist. You do it without thinking, your hand closing around warm skin. He stops halfway out of the chair.

“You all right?”

Beneath your fingers, his pulse beats quickly and steadily. There is a small nick beside his thumbnail. Fine orange fibres cling to the hair on his forearm. His skin is warmer than yours.

You’ve gripped hard enough to whiten the skin beneath your fingers.

You let go.

For a moment, he stays where he is, staring at you.

You could tell him. You could point towards the door, explain the jacket, the height marks, and the photograph you have no memory of taking. You could stand up from a chair that belongs to someone who knows his wife’s name without asking and has held his daughter.

Someone who is expected for dinner.

In the hallway, the handle moves again.

Your mother says your name, and you cannot tell which of you she means.

Your brother is still waiting for an answer.

“You’ve got orange on your sleeve,” you say as you brush away a peel.

At the front door, you hear another knock.