Chapter 15 — One Year Later

On a Tuesday afternoon in December — almost exactly a year to the day from when they'd moved in — Nora was in the garden, which had been her project all year and was beginning to reflect that. The wilderness was becoming something intentional: beds, pathways, a kitchen garden along the south wall that had produced beans and tomatoes through the summer and was now bare and waiting.She was planting bulbs. Spring things — tulips, daffodils, the ordinary optimism of them.From inside, she could hear Owen and David arguing amicably about something involving football statistics. From Lily's window, the sound of music.She pressed a bulb into the earth and looked up at the house.The upper windows were ordinary. The light came through them in the regular way. No watching, no particular quality of attention.She looked at the attic window.Just a window. Dirty, still — she'd never gotten around to cleaning it from outside — and opaque in the way of old glass, but ordinary. Nothing at the glass. Nothing pressed.She went back to her planting.The weather vane on the roof was turning, she noticed. Moving in the wind for the first time since they'd arrived. The rooster swinging around to face south.She didn't attach meaning to this. She had learned, over the course of the year, to hold the two things separately: the house that had been, and the house that was. Not to read significance into weathervanes and quiet attics and the particular quality of winter light. Old houses breathed. Things settled. Weathervanes turned.She planted the last bulb and covered it over.David appeared at the kitchen door."Tea?" he called."Yes," she called back. "Five minutes."He went in. She stayed in the garden for her five minutes — hands in the cold earth, the light failing in that long winter way, the house at her back.She thought: I will always know what was in this house.She thought: and it will never come back.She thought: because I told it to go without wanting any part of it to stay. Because I was the first person in this house since 1887 who felt nothing toward it but refusal.She thought: some things are simpler than they look, and some fears are resolved by standing at a threshold and meaning exactly what you say.She stood up. She pulled off her gardening gloves. She looked at the house — her house, their house, the house that had been a lot of things before it was this and was now, finally, just a place where her family lived.She went inside.The door closed behind her.