The Guilty One (21 page)

Maris surveyed the bounty, wondering what she was supposed to do next. She would have to make a pile for things like the recipe cards and address book that Norris might wish to keep, or at least see one last time: memories of his mother's most intimate if ordinary moments. She was suddenly hit with the sort of longing for her own mother that came rarely. By the time of her mother's death, Nadine had converted most of her documents to digital; she'd been a pioneer of the paperless office. She'd never owned a souvenir spoon or a souvenir of any sort at all; she redecorated her rooms on a constant rotation, unsentimentally donating old furniture and accessories to the St. Francis shop.

Maris thought about Calla's room. It was untouched, the door closed on the mild disarray from Calla's last day alive, the bed made haphazardly, two abandoned shirts laid out on the comforter. The corsage from her junior prom was still pinned to the bulletin board. Her books going back to middle school lined the bookshelves. The top of her dresser was home to two American Girl dolls that Calla could never bear to part with, a piggy bank she'd decorated in Girl Scouts, and a ceramic tray into which she tossed her bobby pins and barrettes and hair elastics. The elastics had strands of her golden hair in them.

This, of course, was one of the main reasons Maris had been unable to face the prospect of selling the house, and Jeff knew it, and she'd blamed him for being too weak to name it when he pressured her. But deep down she'd known it wasn't only her who paused outside that door a dozen times a week, who occasionally opened it an inch or two just to stare inside, who caressed the doorjamb because picking up the dolls and holding them to her face would unleash the sort of crying fit that would take a day to recover from.

Maris pressed her lips together and breathed in until her lungs couldn't hold any more. Then she let the air out slowly. She'd been hired to do a job and she would do it; it wasn't Norris's fault that he didn't know what Maris had been through. This was either the worst job for a person in her circumstances or maybe, weirdly, exactly the right one. Who else, she thought as she carefully picked up the recipe box and address book and carried them to the far corner of the room, the start of the for-Norris-to-go-through pile, would understand that every chipped cup, every wrinkled towel, every scrap of paper bore the mark of a moment that would never come again?

BY THE TIME
the sun had crossed the house's roof and mercifully left the room in shade late that afternoon, Maris had sorted through six of the boxes and organized the remaining eleven. Lining the wall opposite the beds, she'd created several piles, using the boxes she'd emptied to store the sorted objects. In addition to the things she'd set aside for Norris to look at, she had identified several other categories. She had already filled a couple of bulging trash bags with the things that were worthless, like a tarnished can opener and an old-fashioned ashtray with a leaking beanbag bottom. There were also items of no great value that could be donated to charity, and things she thought she might be able to sell. In this latter category were some older Hummel figurines that she thought might be valuable, some collectors' books with old dimes and pennies pushed into the slots, as well as dozens of pieces of costume jewelry that, though only plated and set with faux gems, were in good shape and would be appealing to collectors.

She was saving the paperwork for another day, having decided to pick up some clasp envelopes and file folders to help organize it. Maybe even some of those banker's boxes that held rails from which you could hang folders. She realized that Norris and she hadn't even discussed what he might pay her, and the supplies were a cash outlay Maris hadn't really planned on, but the project had become personal almost before she began. It wasn't just that it was the first useful work Maris had done in over a year; or that she had a heightened sense of the value of the mementos of a loved one who'd passed on. It was also important to Maris, in a way she couldn't have anticipated, that she do a very good—no, a
superb
job of this task. She wanted to excel at something, to exceed someone's expectations. To exceed her own.

It wasn't like any of this wasn't obvious; Maris didn't need Nina to throw around words like compensation and transference to know exactly what she was up to. But she also didn't think Nina could understand how very satisfying the work had been, and how much she had missed that kind of satisfaction.

She was knotting the top of one of the trash bags when she sensed rather than heard the presence of someone else in the room. Turning, she saw Norris standing in the doorway, frowning.

“Oh!” she said. “I didn't hear you come in.”

“What's all that?” he asked, pointing in the corner. On the top of the pile of things Maris had set aside for him was a leatherette wedding album that had belonged to a couple named Matthew and Dolly; the black-and-white photographs looked like they were from the fifties, many of them on the steps of a pretty brick church.

“Oh.” His tone hadn't been especially encouraging, but Maris went and picked up the album, and presented it to him. He didn't take it from her, just stared at it as though she was offering him something unpleasant.

She held it up, pointing to the couple's photo on the front cover, the woman with a tiny pillbox hat attached to her veil, the man caught in a moment of laugher. “Were these your—”

“You can just throw that out.”

“But—” Maris looked into the corner, where all the objects were mounded that she thought might have sentimental value to Norris. “I thought you might want to look through the—”

“Mary, the whole point of you doing this is so I don't
have
to look at it. Any of it.” His voice was tight and controlled, his jaw stiff.

“But some of that stuff—”

“Didn't we talk about this? Just—just save paperwork that might be important. If there's something you think you can sell, by all means sell it. If there's anything in that junk you think someone else could use, I don't mind you dropping it off at the Goodwill. And the rest of it, I hired you so I don't have to look at it again. No letters, no photos, none of that—if it's not about money I don't want to keep it. I already went through this stuff with my sister and we each took what we wanted. The rest—well, she hasn't come back for it and so I guess she don't want it and I don't have any use for it, either. Bunch of dusty old pictures . . . everyone in there's dead anyway,” he said, jabbing a finger in the direction of the album.

Maris frowned, feeling both embarrassed and deflated. “I'm sorry if I, if I overstepped,” she said.

“Yeah, no, it's all right,” Norris mumbled, turning to go. “You can— I guess that's enough for one day.”

It was her cue to go. Maris quickly replaced the album on the stack, then covered the pile with an old tablecloth she retrieved from the charity pile. She was almost positive the photo album had belonged to Norris's parents. Why wouldn't he want it? What could have happened that was so bad that didn't even want a keepsake photograph of them?

When Maris had been wandering through the house last week, thinking about the dreaded task of dividing all their possessions, then packing up the house, she had thought dimly about the things that she would end up getting rid of. She would be headed for somewhere much smaller, eventually; a condo or a tiny rental house where she could start over, and even though the words
start over
were as terrifying and foreign to Maris now as they had been the first time Nina had gently uttered them many months ago, she knew that she would take only the most scant collection of belongings with her.

But first on the list would be the photos. All of them, including the ones with Jeff in them—their courtship, the early days of their marriage, the annual portrait with Calla between them, as she grew. She hated Jeff right now, but she didn't plan to always hate him so much. Eventually, she expected to soften in her feelings for him the way Alana had softened toward her own ex. “It's the natural order of things,” Alana had explained, when she ran into Creighton at a work function and ended up going out to a boozy dinner with him. “You have to hate them for a while until you manage to forget the worst parts of being together.”

And Maris couldn't imagine parting with a single memento of her mother, as there were so few. Her father . . . well, she and Alana were both the product of sperm donors and her mother had a remarkably unsentimental attitude about their identities, which she had never bothered to research. But if Maris had something—a blurry photo, a broken watch, an awl with a wooden handle worn from use (for some reason she pictured her biological father as a gentle man who worked with his hands, while she imagined Alana's donor to be as cool and removed as their mother)—that had belonged to him, she would cherish it.

Norris wanted her gone, so she would go. But tomorrow she was coming back here and digging in further. She would do as Norris asked; she would save for him only the things he wanted saved. But she meant to satisfy her curiosity about his past. It was the first problem in a year that she'd had any enthusiasm about solving.

As she dusted off her hands she noticed one more photo, sitting on the windowsill where she had set it aside. It was an unframed print, a little blurry, and it had fallen out of a much-used cookbook. She picked it up and carried it with her. Norris was standing at the counter, washing tomatoes. His shoulders tightened when she came into the room.

“Norris . . .” Maris said. “I'm sorry if I . . . for not following your instructions better. But I just have to ask. I found this in a cookbook, maybe you didn't know it was in there.”

She held up the snapshot: in it, a much younger Norris sat on a couch with a toddler on each knee. The girls, around eighteen months old, were identical, with their hair in matching beribboned nubs; one wore a pink dress, the other lilac. Behind the couch was the torso of a woman with her hands on Norris's shoulders. Her head had been cut off by the photographer.

Norris looked at it stonily. “Didn't we just—”

Maris dropped her hands, pressing the photo against her shorts, covering it with her hand. “All right,” she said quietly. “But can you just tell me—are the girls yours?”

“Look.” Norris whirled around to face her, the knife clattering to the counter. “Can you do this or not? Because I've been as clear as I can be. This was supposed to make my life
easier,
and you've raised my blood pressure about a thousand percent since I walked in the door tonight. If you can't just—just follow instructions, then let's call this off, okay? I'll pay you for today—”

“No,” Maris interrupted. “Please don't, I'm sorry. I won't ask any more questions.”

Norris turned back to the counter and picked up the knife, severed a tomato in one decisive stroke. “This was a bad idea, okay? I'll get my sister to do it at Christmas.”

“No, I can do it. Please, I won't bother you anymore. I just . . . need the money.” Not a lie, not the truth, either.

“Okay, but only if you can stick to your promise. I really don't want to hear about this again until you're all done and you've got that room cleared out. Okay? Think about it and make sure you're up for it, because I don't want to have this talk again.”

He kept chopping, and after a moment Maris walked quietly from the room.

BY THE TIME
night fell, Maris had been sitting at her kitchen table for an hour, her computer in front of her, the remains of a Lean Cuisine pushed across the table. She had decided to start looking for a job in earnest, something in the South Bay, because this little respite of hers would be over in a couple of weeks and then she'd be left with a savaged bank account and time to fill, and it was clear she wasn't about to launch a career as a personal organizer. It wasn't a matter of
if
she would end up at Alana's, but
when
. If the appeal happened—she could hardly even bear to consider the possibility—she'd want to be as far away from Linden Creek as possible. Besides, now that she'd soured her relationship with Norris, he probably couldn't wait to be rid of her.

Maris hadn't looked at her LinkedIn account in over a year. She took her time updating it, drinking iced tea from a bottle and nibbling on chocolate-covered pretzels. By nine, she'd sent a couple of messages and marked a number of jobs that looked promising.

When she'd volunteered at Morgandale, she'd gotten to know a young substitute teacher who augmented her income by finding odd jobs on craigslist. The girl, who was only a few years older than Calla, had done an astonishing variety of things for money.

Twenty-five dollars to visit an elderly woman's home once a month and Windex all the mirrors and pictures.

Twelve dollars an hour for four hours every Thursday afternoon to sit in the living room of a house where an autistic teenager stayed in his room with the door shut.

Two hundred and fifty dollars—only once, because she said it was too creepy—to be photographed in her underwear holding a ceramic object that the photographer had made, which the girl said didn't look like anything at all other than a lump of glazed clay, but that she had the feeling was supposed to be art.

Maris reviewed the jobs she'd flagged. Most of them, she was unqualified for. She could always work as a substitute teacher herself, of course, but that would mean the end of her little ruse, since she'd have to go for her fingerprint test, and her married name would come up in the background check. Which was inevitable, anyway, once she gave in and let Alana help her . . . But for now, the job search was still part of the fantasy, of being someone else, or at least of pretending not to be who she was.

But still . . . if she were to take some little minimum-wage job where they'd just skim her application and check her driver's license, she could keep the ruse going. She imagined herself in a crisp white apron at the Container Store, dusting shelves of merchandise, answering questions and—