Every Room Remembers

I considered getting up and looking for Cole and Mae, but stayed instead in the comfort of the shade, which was when I began to have the creeping sensation of being watched. I scanned the faces, looking. That was when I saw her: a shriveled woman, barely upright. There was something familiar about her, yet I was unable to place her. Her astute owl eyes, magnified enormously by her thick circular glasses, hinted at intelligence, even humor. Her dress was a diaphanous white linen that seemed to barely touch her body. I couldn’t look away. Our eyes met for a moment, and then she held out her spindly cane—the kind of polished twig found in a magical forest, I imagined, not something bought at the local medical store. She pointed it at me as if about to conjure up some hex, but her eyes were mirthful, no malice at all. Baby steps toward me; she kept her twig extended out as if it were a divining rod, and I was her clear spring of water.

She began to speak, almost laughing. “Someone’s been yammering in my ear about you for days. I keep telling him, ‘Shut up, shut up,’ but he doesn’t listen.”

I forced myself to look away, searching the crowd for Mae. Something about her intense gaze, as if no one else were near, unnerved me, but she kept moving forward in a direct line until she stood before me, not even five feet tall—an aged child.

“Do you hear me, Sarah Jane?” Her stick was now down by her side. White sandals, the kind bought for a child, peeped out from the hem of her dress, and a downy line of hair on her upper lip seemed to twitch with a sensory pleasure. Even when she wasn’t smiling, she smiled.

I looked at her. Though I sat in a lawn chair, we were eye to eye. “You know my name,” I said, half statement, half question. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

“Oh, yes you do, child. I know you, and you know me. I’m Rose, and you’re Sarah Jane, the woman returned from up north, here to reclaim her life. The great-granddaughter of irrepressible Willa, granddaughter of my beloved Auggie, and the daughter of the beautiful Vivian.” She patted me on the head three times, a touch that felt like a kind of benediction. “What I know could fill books.”

“Do you know my sister, Mae?” I asked.

“I know everyone here. The seen and the unseen.” She smiled once more, then said, “Come and see me, Ms. Sarah Jane. Come soon. We have things that must be discussed.”

I nodded, unsure of what I was agreeing to. I watched as a younger woman joined Rose’s side, offered up her arm, and escorted her into an idling Cadillac. I had this surreal sense of discovering a rock star or celebrity dressed incognito and watching them exit through the side door to their getaway car. I was tired—exhausted, really—and it was beginning to play tricks on me, that was certain. Such a strange encounter, I thought, and decided to leave it at that.