Sunlight poured in through the wall of windows and fell through Iris’s thin white hair, the wisps like scraps of mist against her pale scalp. Her eyes were just like mine, like Blake’s, that vivid blue. The skin was stretched thin over the bones of her hands.
“Yes. I knew Rose Westrum. She was a friend of the people who took me in. She sent me a note just after I was married, saying she had known my family. I never answered her. Why would I? Why would I dredge up all that past?
“I’d run away, you see, when I was fourteen. That’s the year that your grandfather was born. My mother—Cora—was not young. She must have been in her forties by then. She must have given up the idea of having children. I remember the kind of surprised silence that settled over the house when we knew she was pregnant. Still, I wasn’t paying very much attention. I’d come home from school and bring her tea on a tray, and I had to do the shopping. Everything was quite still and suspenseful all autumn long. But the baby was born healthy. He was a very sweet and docile baby, and I liked taking care of him.
“Cora was a very gentle mother to him. Very loving. She’d been the same to me when I was a child—indulgent, really—but as I grew older we fought. She said I was willful, a blunderer. It’s true that I was clumsy, and larger than she liked, and that I outgrew my clothes so quickly. Sometimes she reminded me that she had taken me in when my mother left. So I’d feel beholden and do what she wanted. And I suppose it’s true that I was willful, as she claimed. I had ideas about my life, and dreams and wishes, just like any young person does, and she found me forward, too radical in my thinking. She’d press her lips together so hard they nearly disappeared in a little line. I was not good, I made a game of seeing how many times a day I could make her do this.
“I suppose there had been talk of my future before the baby was born, but that was suspended, too. Everything hung still, frozen like vapor in the winter air. I was nearly fifteen, when he was born, and many of my classmates had already left school to take work in the factories along the outlet. It wasn’t uncommon in those days, you have to understand, for people to leave school. Almost everyone did. I didn’t know a single girl who went to college. They were needed on the farms or to help earn money. Or they fell in love and got married.
“So that summer after Joseph was born I took a job in the knitting factory downtown, partly to get out of the house. It was as if I’d disappeared from the face of the earth, anyway. At least that’s how I felt. I was young still, so maybe I was just envious. I tried hard to be useful, certainly, to please them. But when he was born I felt like an old doll, set aside. That factory is long gone now, of course, but it used to sit on the outlet across from the glass insulator factory. I remember because I could look out the big windows, across the water, and see all those people working at their machines like I was working on mine, and I wondered if they were bored, like me, and if they had dreams of other lives, the way I did. I couldn’t look long, though. I couldn’t be distracted from my own machine. It would be costly to make a mistake and even dangerous. My first day Mrs. Tadley got a finger caught in her knitting machine and there was blood everywhere, and then there was a meeting to warn us not to do the same. She had ruined five sweaters’ worth of yarn.
“My machine made socks. It was shaped in a circle and the needles all around it flashed so quickly my eyes couldn’t follow them. The sock came out from below and I cut it free, passed it to the right so the next person could sew the toe and send it on. At first it took all my attention to fit my rhythm to the swift pace of the machine, but later my hands moved almost by themselves, so I could look around a little. There was Sally Zimmerman in the next seat, head bent, running one sock after another through the machine to seal the toes, and beyond us were the windows and light filtering in through the clattering noise and the filaments of dust and fabric that filled the air. At night I’d brush my teeth and spit out blue threads. My ears and my nose gathered lint, as well.
“The days were long and I worked every day but Sunday. I’d walk the few blocks home so tired I could barely move my feet, and fall into bed. Later that summer, we moved to the lake house.
“This is what caused all the trouble, in the end.
“I was so tired, you see. Just asleep on my feet, most of the time. But I always got up and tried to help around the house. Sometimes I’d go out and sit by the lake in the sun and listen to the waves and maybe fall asleep.
“One afternoon Cora had to go out, and she came to the dock and told me to listen for the baby and get him up if he cried, she would be home within two hours. The sun was warm and I’d dozed off, I suppose, for I woke up hearing his cries, thin and small, floating over the lawn. He was teething, and fussy, and so I got him a bottle and changed him and brought him outside, where Cora had a play area set up under the willow tree, right near the water. Is it still there, I wonder, that tree? It is? Those low branches swept over the lawn and the leaves were also so beautiful, but such a mess when they fell. He liked to sit there and play, passing toys from one hand to the other, and after half an hour or so he’d slump over and start to cry. So I settled him in the shade with his toys. I was right there. I had my book. I sat down in the lawn chair and read about five sentences. The sun was so warm. I remember the sound of the waves. I closed my eyes.
“I don’t know what woke me up, or how much time had passed. I sat up, feeling groggy, and looked over at the blanket beneath the tree. It was empty. I kept looking at it, panic so great it froze me in place, but then I heard a sound and turned. He was ten months old and he’d figured out how to crawl. I didn’t know, I’d been away, working. I hadn’t been paying attention. While I’d slept he’d crawled to the edge of the water, crawled in. The waves were touching his chin. He was laughing, but then he slipped and fell face-first. I jumped up and ran to him. It was probably the longest minute of my life. He wasn’t crying or anything, just moving his hands in the water, floating, but his face was down. I swept him up in my arms, I was shaking.
“I didn’t see Cora right away. She was standing by the barn, shading her eyes, a terrible look on her face. She’d seen it all. So. That was the beginning of the end for me. She never forgave me, or believed it was an accident. Eventually, I ran away.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ned said. “It
was
an accident. And he wasn’t hurt.”
“No. He was laughing. He was so little he didn’t understand danger.”
I was thinking of Max, standing over the rushing water, turning back to smile at me as if nothing were the matter at all.
“What did you do?” Yoshi asked. “After you left, what did you do? Where did you go? It must have been hard, you were so young.”
“Yes. It was hard. Though when you’re young you don’t think about that so much. You don’t realize you’re setting a pattern for your life. They found me—I was staying with a friend—and when I said I didn’t want to come back to the house, they sent me here, to Elmira, to a Mrs. Stokley, who needed a boarder. So I went. I took a job in one of the glass factories. I wanted to be a teacher, but of course I didn’t have the training. When I was twenty-one, I met John Stone at a company picnic. He was an engineer, like Ned. He was flying a kite that day.”
“My father,” Ned said. “They were married for fifty-seven years.”
“And you never saw Joseph again? Neither your uncle or your cousin?”
She shook her head. “My cousin, no. My uncle did come to visit. Just once. It must have been near the end of his life, goodness knows—I was in my fifties. He brought a photo from his childhood, and he took me to lunch, and he indicated that I’d be remembered when he died. I didn’t put much faith in it, of course. And of course, since I never heard another thing about it, I knew I’d been right.”
While we’d been talking, the door in the foyer had opened and shut again, softly, and a young woman dressed in shorts and a white tank top had taken a seat on the step down into the living room, resting her chin on her hand and listening intently. She had long hair pulled back in a ponytail. As the conversation paused, Carol introduced her as Julie, their youngest daughter.
Julie smiled and said hello. I replied, taking her in. Since Ned and my father were second cousins, Julie and I must be third cousins, if there were such a thing. Even if there were, did it matter? That was the sort of cousin you might not know about even if you grew up in the same town. She was tall, not quite as tall as me, but nearly so. I stood and she shook my hand.
“So you’re a hydrologist,” she said. “That’s so interesting.”
“I like it.”
“And you work in Japan?”
“Well, not exactly.” I glanced at Yoshi. “We were living in Japan, but we’re on leave right now. Thinking about the next thing, whatever it might be.”
“I know what you mean. I’ve done my share of that.”
“Julie is a teacher,” her father said. “But she has a passion for animals. She rescues them. That’s her real love.”
I didn’t know what to say—in this way we were not at all alike. I wondered if her apartment was full of stray cats.
“Exotics,” Julie said, as if reading my mind. “I rescue exotic animals whose owners didn’t know what they were getting into and finally abandoned them. So far I’ve adopted a boa constrictor, two monkeys, and three iguanas. The monkeys aren’t at home, of course—there’s a great facility in Kentucky that takes them.”
“Julie,” Carol said. “Grandma Iris asked to get the papers out of the house safe earlier. The old photos and so forth? But we couldn’t seem to get it open. Your father has forgotten the combination, and we can’t find the place where we wrote it down. I wonder, do you think you could help?”
“I can try.”
Julie opened a door in the built-in cabinets and sat down at the safe, her ear pressed to the metal, her fingers resting on the dial. She closed her eyes, and my own heart quickened. The patterns of the internal mechanism flashed into my mind like a vision, the pins moving in their quiet patterns. Slowly, slowly, she turned the dial, listening to the voice of the metal. I knew how smooth and hard the safe felt against her cheek, how softly the tumblers shifted and clicked, each one like a breath released. She held herself still, listening, and then her face relaxed, breaking open with satisfaction. The feeling of success, of completion, welled up in me, too. She opened the little metal door and reached inside.
“Look at that,” Ned said, chuckling.
“It’s a gift,” Carol agreed. “She’s been able to do that since she was five years old. I don’t know where she gets it.”
“My uncle used to do that,” Iris said, her voice far away, her eyes not quite focused on the here and now, as if she were seeing the world through the dual lenses of the present and the past—like trying to navigate the world in 3-D glasses.
“Me, too,” I said, spreading my fingers. “I can do it, too.”
They looked at me, my outstretched hands, in surprise. Then Julie pulled out a stack of papers and handed them to her father, who sorted through what looked like bonds and wills and deeds until he came to a single yellowed photograph, which my great-grandfather had given Iris on his single visit. It was a family portrait, dated August 22, 1909—the year Geoffrey Wyndham drove into the village in his Silver Ghost, a year before the comet. There were notes in pencil on the back. Rose was in the center, wearing a dark dress with a pale collar and cuffs. The other family members, also dressed in formal black, flanked her: a stern patriarch with his white beard, the older brother and three older girls who might have been cousins, their faces serious in the presence of the photographer. Rose’s mother and an aunt and a grandmother sat stiffly on chairs in front of the others.
“What was the occasion?” I wondered.
“No one knows,” Ned said. “A wedding, or a funeral, or maybe just a photographer passing through the village.”
“Here’s Joseph,” Iris added, her finger tapping beneath the boy standing next to Rose, squinting into the camera as if trying to discern the future. She paused, her voice softer. “And that girl must be Rose, I suppose. My mother.”
I looked more closely, thinking of Rose’s letters, the girl who had stood at the ship railing watching her country recede into mist. She was so young in this photograph, just fourteen, her hair still down, falling around her shoulders. She wore a ribbon around her neck and she was half-smiling, as if about to turn and make a joke; she alone of all the family—the serious older girls, standing in a row, and the careworn parents and aunts, and the grandmother, as old in the photograph as Iris was now, wearing a black bonnet and a visage like a withered plum—Rose alone looked happy.
What was she was thinking in that moment? What did she dream, and how did she imagine her life? On a summer morning, surrounded by her family, she turned, about to laugh, unaware of Edmund Halley or his comet, a chunk of ice traveling through the coldness of space, whose arrival would cast such a strange light across her life. She did not know that a door was about to open in the world and she would walk through it, terrified and hopeful, into a future she could never have imagined.
“I’m tired,” Iris said. She’d put the folder full of letters on the sofa, and her hands were resting on the blanket in her lap, her fingers working the edge of the silky fabric. “I’d like to have a rest, I think.”
Ned was on his feet at once, reaching down to help Iris stand. She took his arm. I stood, too, and clasped her hand for a second. Her fingers were cold. I told her that I had something I’d like to show her, once she’d had a chance to read the letters and digest them. I explained about Frank Westrum and the windows and Rose, though I wasn’t sure how much she was taking in. Ned was interested, though, and he paused with Iris in the hallway.
“You say there’s a whole museum, full of stained-glass windows.”
“Yes. Rose helped design them. She knew the artist. They were very close, in fact. She modeled for him.”
“I see. Well, I think we’d all be very interested in knowing more, when my mother feels up to it.”