When Farley woke, sunlight filled the hall, but the house was cold and still sleeping. The smell of coffee was absent from the air. Her mother’s boots were by the back door, and the library sofa was empty. As quietly as she could in her bare feet over the creaking floor, she crept to her mother’s room and found the bed sleeping alone.
The covers swirled like the nests made of thin grass and twigs that blew out of the tops of the trees during wind storms, and it was just as sad and empty.
Listening, Farley couldn’t hear any sounds coming from her mother’s office on the second floor. Where was her mother? Backtracking, Farley returned to the closed door across the hall from hers. “You mean the guest room,” her mother would say, laying her own words over Farley’s like a lid over a boiling pot, but no one was listening in her head, so Farley called it what it really was: Ollie’s room.
There was a trick to turning the brass knob without making the horrible scratching squeal like fingernails down a chalkboard. You had to hold the loop of the tiny key that stayed in the keyhole and turn the handle with your wrist moving up, not down. Once, Farley had asked Ollie why he didn’t fix it like he fixed all the other broken things in the house. He had said, “Because it’s not broken, it works just fine. Old houses just have a lot to say.”
Quietly, Farley opened the door and peeked in. The room peered back, black and unblinking. Slowly the darkness stepped aside, and she could make out the shapes of the furniture. Inching down the center of one of the wide planks, she moved towards the bed.