Sundown Over Empty Ground

The suitcase was sitting by the service entrance when I came downstairs for breakfast. A soft-sided navy bag, the kind my mother had owned for fifteen years, its seams frayed at the corners, its zipper pull tied with a scrap of red ribbon because the metal had broken three winters ago. I recognized it before I recognized the smell of coffee and something sweet baking in the kitchen. I stopped at the bottom of the staircase and stared at it. My mother was standing beside it, her hands folded in front of her like a child waiting to be scolded. She was wearing the beige cardigan she wore when she didn't want to be seen, and her hair, which she had always kept long and heavy, was pulled back so tightly it made her face look smaller than it was. "What is this," I said. She didn't answer. She looked past me, toward the dining room, where I could hear the clink of a spoon against porcelain. "Mom. What is this." "Vivian," she said, and her voice did that thing it did when she was trying to make bad news sound like good news. "It's just for a few days. Just until things settle." I walked over and unzipped the bag. Inside: her toiletry case, two blouses, a pair of flats, a framed photograph of my father that she had kept on her nightstand since the day he died. The photograph was face down, wrapped in a dish towel, like contraband. "This is everything," I said. "This is your whole life in one bag." "It's not everything." "It's enough of everything." I zipped it shut and stood up. My hip ached from the fall I'd taken three weeks ago, the one that had left me on crutches for ten days and still made my leg unreliable on stairs. "Where is she." "Don't," my mother said. "Vivian, please. Let it be." "Where." She didn't have to answer. I could hear her heels on the marble floor of the dining room, a sound I had learned to identify over the past two years the way an animal learns to identify a particular set of footsteps in the dark. Eleanor Bellamy. My father's second wife. My stepmother, though she had never once called me her stepdaughter, and I had never once called her anything but Eleanor. She appeared in the doorway with a cup of coffee in her hand. She was forty-eight, slim, silver-blonde, dressed in a cream silk blouse that probably cost more than my mother's entire wardrobe. She had the kind of face that had been beautiful when she was young and had learned to stay beautiful through maintenance rather than luck. She looked at the suitcase, then at my mother, then at me. "Going somewhere?" she said. My mother flinched. It was a small movement, but I saw it. "She's not going anywhere," I said. "She's staying. I'm staying. You're the one who moved her things." "I didn't move anything." Eleanor took a sip of her coffee. "Ida packed her own bag. Nobody asked her to leave." That was true in the way a technicality is true. Nobody had said the words. But over the past six months, Eleanor had made it clear in a thousand smaller ways that my mother's presence in the Bellamy house had become a problem. The way she rearranged the sitting room so there was no comfortable chair for my mother to sit in. The way she stopped including her in dinner invitations. The way she referred to the "guest room" where my mother had slept for eleven years. The way she looked through her, past her, around her, as if my mother were a piece of furniture that had mysteriously become inconvenient. "Ida," Eleanor said now, and she smiled. "I'm not asking you to leave. You know that." My mother looked at the floor. "I don't want to be a problem." "You're not a problem." Eleanor's voice was warm. It was always warm when it was aimed at someone she was about to discard. "But Vivian has been sick. The fall, the medication, all of it. Maybe she'd be more comfortable somewhere quieter. Somewhere less." She paused, considering the word. "Complicated." I understood then. It wasn't just about my mother. It was about me, too. The fall I'd taken, the hospital stay, the way my father's old lawyer had started calling me instead of Eleanor. Three weeks ago, I had found the first discrepancy in the trust documents. Two weeks ago, I had requested the originals. One week ago, Eleanor had stopped looking me in the eye. She wanted both of us gone. She wanted the house empty of anyone who had a legitimate claim to it. And she was moving my mother out first because my mother was easier to move. I picked up the suitcase with my free hand. My other hand was on the cane I still used in the mornings, when my hip was stiff. I had been the one to fall, but my mother was the one Eleanor was pushing down the stairs. "Mom," I said. "We're going. Now. Get your coat." My mother looked at me with her worried eyes. "Vivian, your hip. I don't think you should be carrying anything." "I can carry a bag." "Tomorrow morning. Just wait until tomorrow morning. You still haven't finished your antibiotics, and you look so tired." "No." "Vivian." "Mom." I set the suitcase down and put my hand on her arm. "Get your coat." Eleanor stepped forward. She moved fast, the way she always did when something was slipping out of her control. She stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell her perfume, something expensive that smelled like a garden I couldn't afford to visit. "Vivian," she said. "You're making a scene. There's no need for this." "There's no need for the suitcase either." "Your mother is tired. She's been under a lot of strain. You both have. You should be thinking about her health, not about where you're going to sleep tonight." "I'm thinking about her health," I said. "That's why we're leaving." She raised her hand and laid it flat on the suitcase. It was a gesture that said what she hadn't said out loud. The suitcase was hers to control because everything in this house was hers to control. "You're not taking anything that doesn't belong to you," she said. The words sat between us. I looked at her hand on the bag, at the diamond on her finger, the one my father had given her the same week he had told my mother he wanted a divorce. The diamond that, if the trust documents were what I thought they were, had been paid for with money that was supposed to be mine and my mother's. "I'm taking my mother," I said. "That's all I'm taking." I picked up the suitcase and offered my other arm to my mother. She looked at me for a long moment. Then she took my arm, and I felt how thin she had gotten, how much weight she had lost in the past six months, the way grief and humiliation eat a person from the inside. "Mom," I said. "We're going." She nodded. Her eyes were wet but she didn't cry. She never cried in front of Eleanor. That was the one rule she had never broken in eleven years. We walked past Eleanor toward the front door. My hip throbbed with every step. I could feel my stepmother watching us go, could feel the weight of her silence. When I reached the door, she spoke again. "Vivian." I didn't turn around. "What." "Your father wouldn't have wanted this. He would have wanted you to be reasonable." I turned around then. I couldn't help it. She was standing in the middle of the foyer, framed by the morning light, looking like the lady of the house, which she was, which she had been since the day she married my father, which she had always believed she deserved to be and my mother never did. "My father," I said, "would have wanted you to stop stealing from his daughter." Her face didn't change. That was the thing about Eleanor. She had spent so long performing innocence that even her surprise looked rehearsed. "I don't know what you're talking about." "You will," I said. I opened the front door and walked my mother out into the cold morning. The sun was barely up over the trees, and the air smelled like winter, like the end of something. I helped my mother into my car, the old sedan I had bought with my own money and paid for with my own job, and I put the suitcase in the trunk. Then I got in behind the wheel and started the engine. They came for the money that afternoon.