Esther had stopped wearing dentures the day after her hundredth birthday—“the hell with them!” she had said with finality, throwing them to the floor. Nobody had dared disagree with the decision. As her nose and chin had grown toward each other in her finely wrinkled face, she had come to resemble the frightening dried-apple doll on a broom that some union friend of her grandmother’s had given Rebecca when she was a child. She had never known what she was supposed to do with it. It wasn’t a doll you wanted to play with. It didn’t go with her other dolls. It was not cuddly, this witch in a calico babushka astride a twiggy broomstick, her spindly legs of twine with ugly wooden shoes dangling at the ends, and Rebecca had hung it from the latch on her bedroom window, keeping it well apart from her other dolls and stuffed animals. The way Esther now resembled that witch gave Rebecca an uncanny feeling of déjà vu. Whatever had become of that doll? She wished she had it now. No, she didn’t. In repose, Esther’s face wore an expression of puzzlement, as if she were trying to work something out.

Rebecca gazed around the familiar room. Although her grandmother had inhabited this room for several years, it was uncluttered and sparely furnished, unlike most of the other rooms on the floor, in which were stuffed lifetime accumulations of knickknacks and family artifacts and too much furniture—heavy, dark pieces that had for years filled houses and apartments, now much too big for these small rooms. The little television set was on, but the sound was off. There were three framed photographs on her grandmother’s dresser: Rebecca’s college graduation portrait—that hair!—next to a very old photograph of Esther with Rebecca’s father, Isaac, when he must have been about ten, a very serious little ten-year-old boy standing beside his seated widowed mother, posed in a photographer’s studio in Union Square beside an incongruous potted palm. Esther’s long dark hair was loose for the portrait, covering almost the entire left side of her face, hiding her burn. In a smaller, tarnished oval frame, apart from the other two photographs, was a formal studio portrait, their rosy cheeks hand-tinted as was the fashion, of the two Auerbach sisters, Pauline and Esther, dressed alike in white, high-collared shirtwaists, with ballooning sleeves and tailored waists, above dark skirts, like two Jewish Gibson girls, as Esther always said—the only photograph of the two sisters together that Rebecca had ever seen, taken just a month before the fire.

“She’s playing possum,” Clara said from the doorway. “She was awake not five minutes before you got here.” Clara strode into the room. She was from North Carolina originally, and her speech refused to acknowledge the latter half of her life spent in New York City. She approached the bed and spoke loudly, taking Esther’s hand in hers.

“Miz Gottesfeld, you don’t want to be sleeping while Rebecca is here to see you, do you?” Esther’s eyes didn’t open but Rebecca and Clara both saw the corner of her mouth twitch into a small smile. “Can you open your eyes for me, sweetheart?” Clara asked, a little more softly. She winked at Rebecca.