Imprints

I stay in the sitting room while Janet’s lawyer, Mr. Huebner, opens the door to her children, Grace and Ben.

“Well?” a woman’s voice travels down the hall.

“Hello, Grace. Nothing yet, I’m afraid,” says Mr. Huebner.

The usually quiet hallway is filled with commotion as coats and scarves and boots come off.

“Jesus it’s cold in here,” says Grace.

“I haven’t lit the fire. The utilities have mostly been turned off,” says Mr. Huebner. He is still wearing his coat.

“Mostly?” says Grace, as she spears her beanie onto the coat rack’s highest prong. “I’ll do yours, Lauren,” she says, reaching out for the cat-eared beanie perched on her daughter’s head.

“No. It’s cold in here.”

“Fine. Find a spot and get your homework out, please. We won’t be long.”

“I’ve left the water on for a few days,” says Mr. Huebner. “For Abner. He hasn’t moved from her side. From where she was found,” he corrects himself.

“Why are you whispering?” says Grace. “She wasn’t murdered. She died peacefully of old age.”

“Hello, Abner,” Ben, hollers down the hall to me.

“No. Of course not,” says Mr. Huebner.

“I suppose we’ll have to drag him out of here at some point,” says Ben. “What’s with the microwave?”

It is sitting beside the coat rack, brand new and still in the box. He drops his shoes on top of it.

“Apparently it was outside on the front step yesterday when your mother –”

“Right,” says Grace. “Back on task, please. Shall we each take a room? Work our way through? I’ll take the kitchen. Ben– bedroom.”

“I’ll carry on in the study,” says Mr. Huebner.

They split up, their footsteps working the ancient floorboards.

“God, I haven’t been here in ages,” Grace says from the kitchen. “It’s filthy. It’s going to take forever to clear it out. Lauren, phone away please and do some work.”

“What are you even looking for?” says Lauren.

“For Granny’s will. A piece of paper, or a notebook with her handwriting on it. Could it be on an envelope, Harold? How basic are we talking?” She thumbs through a stack of Christmas catalogues, bills and local notices on the counter.

Mr. Huebner’s voice comes from the study, “Could be. Did she have a special place for storing important items?”

Grace is silent. She hasn’t heard. Or perhaps she is pretending not to hear. Perhaps she doesn’t know.

“Is there anything to eat in here?” says Lauren.

*

“Abner, my honey,” Janet had said. We were in the sitting room, which was small and dark, but warmer than the others because it opened onto the kitchen where the fireplace was.

Janet had a busy morning tidying up. She’d had a premonition, she said, though she didn’t elaborate. Hours earlier she had gone to midnight mass, said her prayers and made a donation. The service was wonderful, she said. The priest spoke about love, and it made her think of me, and of our life together. And she had seen the garbage man there with his wife and child. They’d had a chat and it had all been unexpectedly pleasant. She was tired from her late night but she still got up and dressed and made us lunch, which was broken up biscuits for both of us, and a tea for herself. She had cooked every day for sixty years, she once said, and that was enough. She still walked to the local grocery store once a week as she always had done, only now she selected items that did not require her to do more than unseal and plate.

That day the stores were closed and nobody was expected to visit, and so she did not know that she had been gifted a microwave, but I knew it. I saw the young garbage man through the glass, laying it down in the early morning while Janet slept. We looked at each other and he waved and mouthed, “Merry Christmas.” I hoped my moony eyes weren’t too obvious in the dark.

*

The frenzy of activity in the house lasts for several hours, until the revelation that Lauren’s voice lesson has come and gone disrupts their momentum. There is a brief argument in the kitchen and then the three of them move into the only remaining room, my room, and sit together in frustrated silence. My bladder is bursting, but I find if I focus on one object at a time it dulls the feeling and I can stay a while longer. They are not used to being hungry, and the disappointments of the afternoon have caused Grace’s cheeks to flush and Ben to collapse on the settee. Only Mr. Huebner can be heard in the back room, still fossicking quietly amongst Janet’s papers from her late husband’s desk chair.

“Maybe it’s in the microwave,” Ben says at last, and Grace lets the suggestion hang in the silence. They are all out of ideas. The sun, low and weak, streams through the windows, illuminating her hard little jaw, which is set now like stone. The upper half of the room glows and the garden outside turns pink as a shell.

*

“They were rather nice to me last night,” Janet had said, draining her cup and wiping away the watermark beneath it. “What do you think, Ab? Shall we make a friend?”

All that afternoon she felt poorly. She longed for a bath, but I knew she would choose a nap in her chair instead. The bath was original to the house, with a deep basin almost as high as her hip, and she was afraid of being too weak to get out again.

“Not today, Ab,” she said. “Not like that.”

I lay by her feet. It was extra cold in the house that day. The fire was burning and she had switched on the Aga, leaving the door open to try to warm us up. When she woke at half two she was in a strange way, groggy and in bad spirits. She made a note in the small black book she used as a diary, then rang her lawyer, Mr. Huebner.

“I’m tired,” she said after she put down the phone.

Three hours later the doorbell rang and I listened from her feet as the young microwave garbage man and his wife knocked and called out to her about a plate of Christmas dinner, until eventually the wife lifted the letter plate with her finger and peered down the hall.

*

Ben squirms around and drags an ancient hassock towards himself with his heel. It is more substantial than he thinks, and he ends up using both feet and scoring four slim lines along the floorboards in its wake.

“Just move the cushions,” says Grace.

“Why is everything in this house always so flipping hard?” says Ben, thrusting himself up on one elbow. He pulls a tough little appliqué bolster from under his kidneys and flings it across the room. It bounces off my feet just as the clock strikes six and it is then, at last, that I stand. Ben looks at me for a moment, then buries his face in the crook of his arm and declares he is taking a nap.

In the kitchen Janet’s things are mussed up and strewn about, the cupboard doors open, the drawers sagging on their rollers. Everything lifted and overturned and still. Not everything– some things remain in place. The cast iron kettle, inherited from her grandmother, hanging over the fireplace, a hard little dining set, and a fridge magnet featuring tulips from the Netherlands. These things still have her warmth, her imprint on them. I walk past a bowl I know to be empty and enter the garden, where I relieve myself beneath the camellias. I look up at the moon.

*

The phone had been quiet on the hook all day, and I had watched as the diary slid out of her hand and down her lap over the course of an hour.

*

I stretch in the moonlight and feel the impression of it still there on my ribcage. The garden is dark, and it has started to snow.

A shriek comes from inside the house.

“Oh my god!” says Grace.

Footsteps litter the hall. Mr. Huebner’s, I guess.

“What the actual –.”

“What is it? Speak!” yells Ben from the sofa.

“She’s left it all to the council!”

“What? How much?”

“If I may,” says Mr. Huebner.

I return to the dark kitchen.

“All of it, Benjamin. Every single penny. Oh wait. No. Forgive me.” She emits a terrible sound, a laugh, I think, like a whine of steam. “Not all of it. $20,000 goes to the dog.”

The hearth is cold, the fire long out. I curl up on my mat, willing myself to sleep.