“Mom’s not here,” Vee said. “She hasn’t left the house in weeks, and now suddenly she’s not here.”
“Enjoy the time off,” Lady said.
“We thought she might be with you.”
“With me? When has she ever walked the four blocks to see me?”
Later in the day Vee called her again.
It was not Lady’s choice to die the same way our mother had. The method Lady preferred had come to her almost immediately. She would hang herself in the basement laundry room of the Riverside Drive building. She might have done it in her own building, where there was no chance that her sisters would be the ones to discover her, but she was being a little selfish: she didn’t want to die among roaches and rats. The basement in our building was cleaner.
But although she debated over which building to die in, she never wavered when it came to the method. She was actually good with ropes and knots; she’d made a number of intricate wall hangings and plant hangers from rope over the years: the macramé craze.
Walking away from the river, she saw few people. The professional pyrotechnics of the holiday were over and done with. All she heard now were the occasional explosions of cherry bombs in nearby Spanish Harlem. Tomorrow, the last day of the long weekend, the last day of this wretched vacation, there would be newspaper articles about the accidental mutilations of reckless boys by reckless boys, about the deliberate mutilations of cats. She was glad she wouldn’t have to read any of it.
It was already tomorrow—the early hours of Monday—when she reached our building. She let herself in with the key she’d had since always, and boarded the waiting elevator. Without thinking—a muscle memory—she pressed the button to our floor. It was only when the doors opened and she heard music seeping out from under our apartment door—Buffy Sainte-Marie, all that vibrato, and the volume much too loud considering the hour—that she realized she’d gone up when she’d meant to go down.
For a brief moment she stood in the elevator, annoyed and uncertain. When the doors started to close, though, instead of letting them, instead of pressing B as she should have done in the first place, she extended her hand, and the doors reopened.
She stepped into the hallway and stood on the welcome mat, a little rag rug that had lain before the door for three generations, the fibers frayed, the colors rubbed away. She was unsure what to do next. Then she made a decision: she reached into her purse, retrieved her keys again, and let herself in. Leaving the door ajar, she stood inside the foyer, just stood there, as if she had no idea how she’d come to be where she was.
Vee and Delph, on the other hand, reacted as if they’d been expecting her. They were both awake despite the hour, and in the kitchen, Vee in a ruby-red Gap T-shirt and cutoffs, Delph in a calico granny dress, both in bare feet.
“Hey,” Vee said. “There you are.”
Delph was leaning against the fridge, eating a peanut-butter-on-pumpernickel sandwich. “Want some?” she said, advancing toward Lady, holding the sandwich out. “I’m eating it, but I’m not even hungry.”
“No thanks, and don’t get peanut butter in my hair.”
That this is what came out of her mouth surprised Lady as much as any of the other surprising things she’d done that weekend. Concern for her hair, her terrible wiry hair. Although the truth was that Lady had made a bit of an effort with her hair that night. She was hoping to look halfway decent when she was discovered. There’d be the broken neck, the Basenji-blue tongue, the bulging eyeballs, maybe (she was sorry to say) a horrid mess on the floor beneath her, but at least she’d be wearing a nice dress and her hair would look attended to, restrained with one of her leather barrettes, her turquoise earrings gently undulating back and forth.
By way of apology she said to Delph, “That is one very brown sandwich.”
Delph smiled. “It’s really dry too.” She took another bite as she closed the front door with her ass.
Lady dropped her purse on the hall chair. She stepped into the living room. “Is that my album you’re playing?” she asked.
“You’re the one who left it behind,” Vee said. “That old saw about possession being nine-tenths of the law? It turns out to be true.”
“I don’t want it back,” Lady said. “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m happy you like it. Mi shit es su shit.” She looked around. “Where’s Eddie?”
“Exhausted. Asleep.”
“I’m going to make you a sandwich of your own,” Delph said. “With jelly. I think you’ve lost weight. You look terrible.”
“Especially the way she has her hair pulled back,” Vee said. “So tight. She looks like Olive Oyl.”
“Well, she’s not that skinny,” Delph said.
We ate in the living room, Delph transporting two sandwiches, two glasses, and a bottle of Southern Comfort, managing everything at once, though this meant she had to carry her sandwich in her teeth and wedge the bottle under her armpit.
“Since when Southern Comfort?” Lady said.
Vee shrugged. “We’re listening to Buffy and drinking like Janis.” And when we were situated, the sandwich-eaters on the couch, Vee on the floor, she said, “Delph’s right, Lady. You do look like crap.”
“I got it. I didn’t think the Olive Oyl comparison was a compliment.”
“Look at your eyes. It’s like you’ve been crying.”
“When have you known me to cry?”
“Well, you don’t cook, so I know you weren’t peeling onions.”
“I cook,” Lady said.
“Spaghetti’s not cooking.”
“I cook things requiring peeled onions all the time.”
“So you were peeling onions?”
“No.” The record had ended. We listened to the sound of the needle lifting, returning to the first track, same side. “They’re painting the halls outside my apartment,” Lady said when the music began again, the song about the sexy woman who was pursued by every man in town. The three of us used to sing it together in Lady’s room, wiggling our hips, using roll-on deodorant bottles as microphones. “What’s hoochy koochy mean?” Delph would ask. “What’s oversexed?”
“Really?” Vee said. “The slumlord’s painting the halls?”
“The fumes are killing me. My eyes keep watering.”
“So stay the night here,” Vee said.
“Maybe I will.”
“Stay two nights. Stay forever. Come home. Nobody understands why you don’t.”
Lady looked down the hall to the master bedroom’s ever-shut door. We’ve long called that bedroom the Dead and Dying Room. Our grandmother Karin died in it after many years suffering with an unnamed illness we assume was cancer—cancer back in the day when no one said the word out loud. And a couple of weeks after she died there, our grandfather Richard died there too—although technically speaking he didn’t die in there, but from there: he’d opened the window, hoisted himself up on the sill, wobbled for a moment, then propelled himself forward. Our mother had been in her bedroom across the hall doing math homework when she heard the screams from neighbors as his body passed each floor.
Like her father, our mother hadn’t literally died inside the Dead and Dying Room, but it had been her bedroom when she drowned herself across the street.
“I don’t know,” Lady said. “Sometimes I do think about moving back. But it’s a little haunted house-ish here.”
Delph nodded. “Tell me about it,”