Perhaps the best we could have hoped for is that she had left us: that sometime in the night she had made a decision and ridden away to a brand-new life, that somewhere, perhaps in a car with someone we didn’t know, perhaps in a bed with someone we didn’t know, she was feeling heartbroken, knowing all that she would miss about my father and me. She would miss that chestnut tree at the end of our street and the Christmas decorations she had collected. She would miss going to the Embassy Theatre, where she had just seen “To Be or Not to Be,” a comedy that was not so funny when you knew that Carole Lombard had died in a plane crash just before the movie came out. That’s what she had said at the time, and that is the kind of irony she would have seized on if she had had the power to send a message from the grave, to rise up like the wilis and circle round me: “I had a premonition, Lily.”

But that afternoon, I was still clinging to the possibility that maybe she had run away from home, gone to become the great dancer she thought she was destined to be, gone to walk someone else’s stairs in a home where I would one day find her and reconcile. She was in a car, the cold wind in her face, her scarf tied around her hair; she was in a warm bed, curled on her side in the way she always slept, eyes closed, hair mussed, her heart still beating.

Shelley

How can you possibly work on a grocery list while speculating about the case and still do your job? That’s probably what the judge will ask her, and she is still working on what to say: how it is like walking through a house where there are many televisions on and you tease out little threads from each, just enough to know what is going on even as you stay fixed and focused on the one in front of you. Come on down! She hears game-show applause and laughter and jingles. Then she hears: But I don’t understand. How can you carry the child of a man who was dead before you got pregnant? And then the soap opera music gets louder and louder, because it’s getting near the end of the hour and the end of the week.