Chapter 8: Millicent's Room

I did not sit down on the bed.

I stood in the doorway with the laundry basket against my hip and let her talk.

"I'm only teasing," Blythe said, and smiled. "Mom has had so many people tell her things this week. You wouldn't believe the things people say."

She hugged my old pillow.

"Do you know what I like about you?" she said. "You can't say anything. It's restful."

I looked at her without any expression.

I had spent fifteen years learning to read her face, and now I was a stranger she could look through.

"Mom's fond of you already," Blythe said. "That's good. Useful people get to stay in a house like this."

She stood up and set the pillow back where it had been.

"I'm going to the funeral home with Chad," she said. "Do the floors. Don't touch the closet. It's full of her things, and it upsets me."

She passed so close that her hair brushed my arm.

Lemon soap.

I waited until the front door shut and the car pulled out of the drive.

Then I closed the bedroom door and leaned my forehead on it.

The room had been repainted.

My yellow walls were a soft gray, and my photographs were gone from the corkboard.

My trophies had been packed into a box by the window with the lid half on.

I opened the closet, and every hanger of my clothes had been pushed to the left to make room for hers.

She had moved in the same day I disappeared.

I knelt at the head of the bed, where the headboard met the wall.

When I was fifteen I had taken the plywood panel off the back of it, cut a pocket in the foam and glued the panel on again with a single screw.

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