The Only Child

Liv’s mother was eighty-nine when she got her hip replacement. A healthy eighty-nine. Minus the hip. Liv, who was fifty-eight, was also healthy. Minus nothing.

Waiting for the surgery to be over, Liv wondered why she hadn’t brought something besides her phone to occupy her time. But she’d been busy with her mother, with tending to her pre-surgery needs by ensuring she remained positive enough, ate the right foods, and didn’t get up from chairs too fast or put on pants by herself. She hadn’t considered what she would do while standing by, trying not to worry.

Liv slouched into the hard back of her chair and studied the empty waiting room. It was covered, floor to ceiling, in linoleum, a vaguely blue linoleum, like the blue of Liv’s or her mother’s lips when cold—they had the same thin, sensitive lips. The chairs were made of plastic and were also blue, but not the same blue. It’s exactly the level of thought, Liv realized with distaste, that’s put into designing a room like this. The hasty attempt at cohesion brings to mind a person, overworked and not very important, who finds herself charged with picking the colors for a hospital waiting room. She chooses blue, thinking “a calming color.” But there the planning stops, the hand of human design falters, and the blue of the walls and the blue of the chairs—they end up not the same. One greenish and the other purply, together they produce a discordant, clashing quality, an air of neglect and wooziness. Why, Liv asked herself, are things like this allowed to happen in the world?

She crossed her legs and then uncrossed them and then crossed them again. She stood up and sat back down. She tried to play a game on her phone but was unable to concentrate and abandoned the attempt. Finally, the door swished open, stirring the air. Her mother’s surgeon entered, reeking of rubbing alcohol. He was a solid mass of white lab coat, pale skin, and buzzed blond hair. Here, she thought, is a person with nothing attempted or hasty about him, an orderly, independent person. She straightened in her chair and gripped her phone.

“Come with me,” he said, turning back toward the door.

He led her out of the waiting room and down the hall, taking swift steps while Liv hastened to keep pace. As they walked, thoughts Liv had managed to keep at bay in the waiting room overtook her. She anticipated what she might find when she reached her mother: a slab of waxy skin, drooping eyelids, and sagging mouth. Her mother deflated, nearly gone.

Finally, the doctor stopped at a door and swung it open. Pulse thumping, Liv followed him into a dark recovery room. As her eyes adjusted, Liv saw a machine, softly beeping; a bed, guardrails raised; and her mother, substantial beneath her hospital gown, feet splayed, the mound of her stomach spreading over the bed. She was staring at the surgeon with eyes narrowed, looking displeased.

“Your mother,” the surgeon said, “is doing fine.”

Yes, Liv thought, appraising her. She did look like she was doing fine. Liv was relieved to see a little fire in her gaze, a little ire. She welcomed the familiar expression, the one that said, Why the hell am I still here, listening to you talk? The one, Liv realized, reserved for people her mother thought were assholes.

“You’re still coming off the anesthesia,” the surgeon said, answering her unspoken question. “So you’ll feel a bit underwater, ma’am.”

This did not appease Liv’s mother, whose eyes narrowed more, into slits. Liv wondered whether she agreed this man was an asshole. He could be, she thought. But she’d exchanged only a few words with him before the surgery and then followed him down a hall and into a room. She hadn’t had time to draw a conclusion.

The surgeon took no notice of her mother’s expression and asked a series of questions: What year is it? What’s your name? Who’s the president? She answered each correctly, in a low grumble.

Then he asked her another question: How many children do you have?

“Two,” she sighed.

Liv laughed. She was an only child. “Seems she’s still foggy, doctor.”

The surgeon pressed on: What are the names of your children?

“Olivia and—and …”

Liv almost said, See? But then her mother added, “And Jane.”

There was a pause, during which the machine continued to beep, and Liv asked herself, Who the hell is Jane?

She didn’t understand just then, which was only natural.

The surgeon raised his eyebrows as if to say, Well, this is awkward.

Liv decided that he was indeed an asshole.

Liv hadn’t only been busy immediately before her mother’s surgery. She hadn’t merely ensured things were in order, and, on the designated day, risen from her mother’s living room couch in the blue-black dark and hustled her mother into her clothes, her shoes, and the car. For months, Liv had prepped, preened, practically wetted her finger with her tongue and pressed down at her mother’s rough edges, trying to smooth them out. Certain parts were easy, like arranging the initial meetings with the physical therapist and buying the recommended antibacterial soap. Others caused Liv stress and confusion, like the physical therapist’s insistence that she get her mother “in shape.” When Liv had asked for specifics, the therapist replied, “A few pounds lighter. Better upper-body strength so she can get around more easily with a walker.”

Liv was struck by the image of a frenzied training montage, like the one in Rocky. One-handed push-ups, punches thrown into sides of frozen beef, and miles and miles of hard asphalt disappearing under ever-swifter feet. “Okay,” she said.

“Is there a pool you can use? Get her in a pool and give her some light weights to hold,” the therapist suggested.

With this guidance, Liv settled on a workout regimen consisting of coaxing her mother into the tepid water of her community pool at Valley Gardens three times a week. Wading into the water, Liv held out little red weights like they were somehow enticing. The last time she’d done this was the day before the surgery. It was March and already hot, the pool a bright rectangle surrounded by concrete and a few parched eucalyptus trees. Liv paid special attention to her mother’s body as she gripped the rails and took her shaky, bad-hip steps into the water.

Her mother’s hip had become increasingly unreliable, giving out randomly and causing her to buckle over. She no longer trusted herself in the shower. And even though she had nurses to bathe her, they were rough, leaving red marks on her skin where they rubbed hard with the cloth or used scalding water. Liv had taken over the task that winter, driving down from the high school where she taught world history. Exhausted by pain and fear of falling, her mother had not protested, even though Liv could still remember what happened when, as a child, she had tried to wrap her arms around her legs or climb onto her lap. While she didn’t shove Liv away, she also didn’t embrace her, didn’t cradle or soothe her or stroke her hair. Instead, she went into a kind of full-limbed stillness. Liv became accustomed to circling around, waiting for crumbs of affection to fall.

But over the last few months, Liv had filled a bowl with warm, sudsy water and dipped into it a soft, yellow sponge and watched the sponge darken. She rubbed her mother all over with the sponge and dried her off with a worn, gray cloth, catching droplets as they ran down her skin. Liv came to know every curve and divot of her body, every mound and fold. She came to know the clusters of freckles on her shoulders and the big purple veins running up her inner thighs. And she learned to avoid the soft white arches of her feet, which were ticklish and, if touched, caused her to kick. This process sated a rough, hungry part of Liv. She rarely touched another body besides her mother’s. She didn’t know how to reach that point of intimacy with anyone else.

“Would you stop staring? Jesus.”

Liv handed off the weights, unable to respond. The next day, her mother’s body would change. There’d be stitches and then a scar. And there’d be a foreign object, a strange synthetic hip in place of the one that had been with her mother all her life and had, until recently, served her well. Over the past few weeks, she had gotten a little stronger, a little steadier, but the grand, dimpled look of her hadn’t changed. Liv was grateful for that.

Her mother started off, lifting the weights to her shoulders and down again. The entire pool had a depth of four and a half feet, and it took a few long minutes for her to get from one end to the other. As she moved, Liv followed close behind, noting where the water lapped her mother’s bathing suit, leaving a dark line.

When her mother reached the far end, she dropped the weights on the concrete and rested her elbow on the edge of the pool. Liv gestured in the other direction, urging her on. Her mother was undeterred. She sighed and squinted at Liv through the midday glare. “Have you sorted out my taxes?” she asked.

When Liv confirmed that she had, her mother asked about other arrangements for her post-surgery life. Who would make sure the linens were clean? What if she wanted something, a book? What if her ankles started swelling again? Did Liv know exactly when her doctor’s appointments were? How would they get there? Liv had already performed most of these tasks, but she answered the questions anyway: I’ll wash them. Any book you want, I’ll get. I’ll massage your ankles, your joints, whatever. I know. By car.

Seeming to have exhausted herself, her mother sighed and looked at the water, at some vaguely middle point in the pool. “What if,” she said, letting out another huff of air, “it hurts?”

Liv laughed.

“I know it will hurt. For fuck’s sake. I mean, what if it hurts a lot more than they said? More than when you were born?”

“Mom.”

“They can say it won’t. But how do they know?”

Liv put her hand on her mother’s arm and said she didn’t think it would. From what she’d heard, nothing hurt worse than that.

Her mother moved away. To get to the other end of the pool, Liv thought.

Two years after the hip replacement, Liv’s mother died. At her funeral, Liv sat in the front row with her hands in her lap and waited to deliver the eulogy. When the pastor turned from the podium and announced that she would be speaking next, it struck her again, inconveniently.

Jane. Jane? Who the hell is Jane?

Liv couldn’t avoid the question; yet, somehow, she had avoided it. Not for one moment had Jane fully left Liv’s mind—not while she was brushing her teeth, or driving to and from her mother’s, or taking in the occasional musical at the community theater. At the same time, she never said a word to her mother, who seemed to have forgotten the mention of Jane the moment it left her lips. And she never hired a private investigator. She never even engaged in any internet sleuthing. She couldn’t manage life with her mother—full as it was with all-consuming duties—and confront the issue of Jane at the same time. So, for two years, Jane had skulked in Liv’s shadows.

But when Liv gripped the podium and looked out at all the somber people, she realized that her mother was no longer there to prevent thoughts of Jane. Of course, she’d known that her mother was dead. Intellectually. Consciously. In that moment, though, she realized it thoroughly—in her bones and spirit—as one must realize the death of someone they love. And she couldn’t help but think that Jane, if she existed, might be among the crowd. If Jane was another person to whom her mother had given birth, a sister or half-sister, she might have found out about the death and the funeral somehow. If so, she might have actually come.

Liv studied the audience as she delivered the eulogy. About thirty people were in attendance, mostly very elderly friends and acquaintances of her mother’s and a few distant relatives. Only five women appeared to be the right age, the age that Jane might be, which Liv figured was between one and ten years older than herself. Liv knew the first three—two Valley Gardens nurses and Carla, a trigonometry teacher and Liv’s only friend from the high school. The fourth and fifth she did not know. One was a slender woman with fine blond hair, sitting in the middle of the audience. Such a woman couldn’t share the genetics that had given Liv and her mother their wide hips and round stomachs, their big, brown manes. The other woman sat in the back, near the doors that swung out into the parking lot. Because of Liv’s nearsightedness, she couldn’t see the woman clearly, but her hair was wavy and dark and her expression—Liv thought it might’ve been more anxious than sad. Could she be Jane?

Liv wasn’t there when her mother died. It was early in the morning, and her phone rang. A nurse reported in a brittle voice that her mother had “passed away peacefully in her sleep.” As she planned the funeral, Liv had struggled to accept the reality of this cliché and conjured up all sorts of horrible circumstances—her mother asleep and vomiting, choking like a rock star but without even the benefit of first getting high or drunk; or slipping on the way to the bathroom and impaling herself on her doorstopper, an iron bunny with pointy ears; or rolling out of bed, knocking her head on her nightstand, and bleeding from the brain. The last thing had happened to Liv when she was nine. Except the bleeding brain part. She had fallen out of bed in the middle of the night and hit her cheek, giving her a dark bruise and then a dimple whenever she smiled, which her mother had said looked all right. It was her worst wake-up ever. After imagining all these things, Liv told herself, Just because it’s a cliché to pass away peacefully in your sleep doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It is a cliché because it does happen. She needed to believe this even though she did not believe it.

The wake was held in her mother’s apartment. Liv drifted around, searching for the wavy-haired woman among the fruit and vegetable platters. Just as Liv spotted her leaning over the crinkle-cut carrots, Carla pressed a plate of vanilla wafers into Liv’s hands.

“Eat,” she said. “When my mom died, I forgot to eat for three days.”

“Thanks,” Liv murmured, peering over her friend’s shoulder.

The woman who might’ve been Jane, might’ve been a lost or hidden or forgotten sister, had moved on from the carrots and was fingering the white bread of a sandwich. Liv watched as she picked up the sandwich, peeled back a corner of the bread, and put it down again.

“Who’s she?” Carla asked, following Liv’s gaze. “Who is that?”

Now that Liv was seeing her from across a cramped living room, she gleaned what she could from the woman’s appearance. Her clothes were reminiscent of the eighties: she wore a tight, black dress; ankle-high, pleather boots; and plastic bangles that clattered noisily as she reached over the sandwiches for a hunk of cauliflower and plopped it onto her plate. Where, Liv wondered, do people find plastic bangles like that anymore? Who makes them, and why? Liv tried to imagine the factory where hulking machines huffed away, where melted plastic poured into molds from which popped all the bangles that no one—no one except this woman—could possibly want to buy.

“Liv?”

The woman could have been related to Liv—there were enough shared characteristics, like her wavy hair and general heft. But she also could have been unrelated. Her eyes were small; Liv’s were big. Her skin was lighter than Liv’s, less olive toned. And her hair, its dark color at least, didn’t mean much. She probably dyed it like Liv dyed hers.

“Not sure,” Liv said. “Someone my mom knew, I guess.”

Carla misinterpreted Liv’s distracted state and reached up, placing her hand on Liv’s shoulder. “It doesn’t matter.”

Liv looked down at her friend. “Thanks,” she said. When she looked back up, the wavy-haired woman was gone.

Once the wake was over, Carla lingered by the door, the last guest to leave. “Are you sure you’ll be fine cleaning up by yourself?” she asked.

“Yes,” Liv said. It was the third time she’d assured Carla she’d be okay.

Carla shook her head and hesitated, her hand on the doorknob, the question still on her face.

“I will be,” Liv insisted, louder and harsher than she’d meant to.

Carla flinched. “Well, call me if you need help.”

As the door clicked shut, a fleeting sense of regret flared in Liv. She understood that Carla was offering to be with her while she was still suspended in grief, while she was volatile and fractured. But Liv had never known how to accept Carla’s offers to extend their friendship beyond shared work lunches or an occasional drink at TGI Fridays. Before, Liv had told herself that she was too busy with her mother. Now what was the reason? Regardless, she didn’t stop Carla from leaving, didn’t swing the door open and say, Actually, I could use the help. Instead, she breathed in, nearly swooning, the absence of her mother’s thumping step, her gruff calls.

Needing to move, Liv began walking around the living room, tipping trays of stale food into a trash bag. She was watching an avalanche of bell peppers disappear when she heard a loud thump down the hall. Liv set down the trash bag and listened. Another thump.

As Liv moved down the hallway to investigate, she heard a muffled “shit.” The sound came from her mother’s bedroom.

She knew, on some level, what she’d find before she opened the door. The woman was there, the wavy-haired woman, rummaging through her mother’s things. The room was a mess—dresses and underwear and socks strewn everywhere, bed sheets twisted and pulled halfway to the floor. It was a wonder Liv hadn’t heard something sooner. She watched from the doorway as the woman yanked a wad of scarves from a dresser drawer.

When the woman turned to Liv, her expression was one of frustration, the frustration of expecting a task to be simple and instead finding it troublesome. A queer iciness swept through Liv when she realized that the woman, hand raised and clutching the scarves, barely seemed to see what was in front of her.

“Can I help you?” It was the first thing Liv thought to say. 

“Maybe,” the woman answered. At the sound of her own voice, her eyes seemed to clear, and her mouth turned down at the corners. “Sorry—I’m sorry. This must look—” She groped for the word. “Weird.”

With her silence, Liv agreed that yes it did.

“It’s just that—” the woman glanced at the contents of her hand and then back at Liv. “I can explain.” She didn’t explain, though. Not right away. She stared at Liv, and Liv stared back. The woman’s face was apprehensive, her eyebrows lifted slightly. She appeared to be waiting for Liv to decide what to do. 

Liv wanted to ask, Is it you, Jane? But she couldn’t yet. She pointed to the bed. “Sit down,” she commanded. Then she noticed the scarves still crumpled in the woman’s hand. “And please give me those,” Liv said, pulling the scarves away and fleeing from the room.

Leaning against the closed door, Liv felt her blood thrumming under her skin. Her neck and cheeks were hot; her scalp tingled. She was not afraid. She was excited. She opened her trembling hand and studied the tangled scarves. They were nothing—thin silks her mother rarely wore. She stuffed the bits of silk into her pocket and, making an effort to breathe slowly through her nose, returned to the bedroom.

She found the wavy-haired woman still waiting on the edge of her mother’s bed with her hands in her lap, her bangles hushed, her legs crossed at the ankles. She looked like a child in time-out.

Liv leaned against her mother’s dresser. Where to begin? she wondered. How straightforwardly? She decided to just come out with it. “I know you’re Jane,” she said.

For a moment, the woman remained silent and still.

Liv waited, hands opening and closing, fingernails marking her palms with white crescent-moon marks.

Then the woman closed her eyes and sighed—with relief, it seemed to Liv. “Yeah,” the woman said. “I’m Jane.”

Strange, Liv thought. While she had refused to think of the question of Jane directly, she’d also, she realized now, yearned for an answer and hoped it would simply manifest without her having to do anything, like when she was in junior high and had prayed she would do well on a science test even though she hadn’t studied. And now, it had happened. The answer had manifested. Liv didn’t have too much trouble guessing how. To her, the likeliest explanation was that Jane had been given up for adoption before Liv was born. At some point, Liv imagined, Jane had discovered who her birth mother was and cyberstalked her, debating whether to make contact or remain hidden. While struggling to decide, she set up a Google alert for her mother’s name and was notified when her obituary appeared online. Regret. Loss. But it was easy enough to get the information for the funeral. She created a fake account and emailed Liv for the details, said she was an old friend of the family. As Jane sat through the funeral, a desperate need to know something, anything, burned and burned and, at the wake, overtook her. Unnoticed, she slipped down the hallway in search of her birth mother’s bedroom.

Liv joined Jane at the edge of the bed, where they were surrounded by their mother’s dresses and socks and underwear. Liv was familiar with almost every item, having often washed and put them away. She felt an airless mix of superiority and emptiness at the thought that Jane was not. To Jane, they were just scraps of fabric.

“I didn’t know about you until two years ago,” Liv whispered.

“You didn’t?” Jane said.

“I had no idea Mom had had another baby,” Liv insisted, wanting to justify why she hadn’t searched for her. “I’d never even thought about what it would be like to have a sister. And the whole time, you were just out there somewhere.”

“Yeah, I was,” Jane said.

Shaking, Liv reached out and grasped Jane’s hands. The gesture felt foreign and clumsy, but she wanted the same physical connection she’d shared briefly with her mother before her death. She didn’t want to waste any time in getting it. “Jane,” she said. “Jane, you’re here.”

At this, Jane leapt from the bed, yanking herself free of Liv. “Wait,” she said, waving her hands in front of her like she was clearing the air of spiderwebs, her bangles clattering. “I am not Jane,” she said. “I’m not Jane.”

Liv gaped. Not Jane? Not Jane.

“I’m sorry,” the woman went on. “I just thought it would be easier to say I was someone you were expecting. But I’m not that person. I’m not some long-lost sister or whatever the hell. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” She said all this in one breath.

At once blank and on the verge of panic, Liv’s mind sounded a faint alarm—an intruder!—but before she could respond, the woman reclaimed her spot on the edge of the bed. She put a hand on her chest as if worried about her heart and looked into Liv’s face with her tiny eyes, round like buttons. Liv sensed that the woman, while possibly unbalanced, was not an immediate threat.

“I’m really sorry,” she repeated. Then she said again that she could explain. “Can I?”

Liv nodded. She needed to hear. She felt as though the woman owed to it to her to describe how and why she was not Jane. Or she felt her mother owed it to her, but that the woman would have to do.

“Your mom wouldn’t give me back my necklace,” the woman said. “And it’s very important to me, the necklace. But she just wouldn’t give it back.”

The woman took a long, uneven breath and shifted more fully onto the bed, settling on its edge. Her fiancé, she continued, had given her a necklace, a little ruby on a gold chain, for her birthday. A precious red ruby. “Stunned,” she said. “I was stunned. We’d been fucking like crazy all day—excuse me, making love—when he dropped it between my boobs, just like that. He doesn’t make much and would’ve had to save and save for it. Never done something like that for me before. But then we had a big fight, and I kicked him out, said go sleep somewhere else. He ran into the bedroom right before he left, grabbed the necklace off my nightstand. We came to our senses in the morning—he always comes right back—but when I asked him for the necklace, he got quiet. Wouldn’t talk until I threw a shoe past his head. He pawned it, he said. Pawned the necklace. Not so bad, I thought. Only eleven in the morning, hour past opening, maybe. We’ll just drive to the shop and buy it back. But when we got there, we found an old lady with a walker—your mom—at the register. She dropped my necklace into a big purse. No problem, we told each other. When the old lady went for the door, we asked her how much. No answer. We’d give her twenty bucks more. No answer. Just hobbled out and managed to shuffle onto a bus. No answer, no answer. ‘Okay,’ we said. ‘What now?’ We bribed the cashier to see her name on the receipt, found her number easy, called and called, but she always hung up. Then we called one more time and got lucky—not lucky, no—but one day a nurse picked up and told us the old lady had died.”

The woman cleared her throat and, after a few seconds of silence, carried on. “We figured that was it, we were out the necklace, but my fiancé said, ‘Know what we should do?’ and when I said, ‘No, I don’t,’ he said, ‘We should just find out if the wake’s at her place and take it back.’ ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. I agreed but only if he’d let me have the car for the funeral, too, not just the wake, to be respectful. And that’s how that went down, that plan. I emailed you for the details—sorry—said I was a friend of your mom’s, and went to the funeral—the pastor was sort of dull wasn’t he?—then when I got here, I snuck down the hallway, into the bedroom, thought I’d find the necklace right away. Looked in the places it should’ve been, jewelry box on the dresser, container on the nightstand, but I still couldn’t find it. That’s when I sort of lost it, became kind of frantic. You walked in maybe five minutes later, maybe ten. Please don’t call the police,” the woman cried. “I’m so freaking sorry!”

As the woman told her story, Liv stared at one of her mother’s socks lying crumpled between her feet. It was a faded purple color and almost worn through at the heel. Before her mother died, Liv had planned to throw out the pair and replace them with new, purple socks. As Liv stared at the sock, a sense of confused awe rose in her, uncontrolled and unpreventable. The woman’s story had overwhelmed and shocked her. All that love and frenzied action and—and, yes, fucking—in this woman’s life. All that disregard for Liv’s mother. Such freedom.

“I didn’t mean it,” the woman added, gesturing at the mess. “I just wanted my necklace back. And that seems really stupid now.”

“So,” Liv said, looking into the woman’s face. “You’re not Jane.”

“No. I’m really sorry, though.”

“I’m alone,” Liv said to herself more than to the woman.

“Oh, oh,” the woman said. She laid a heavy hand on Liv’s shoulder.

For a moment, Liv let herself feel the weight of the woman’s hand, the cold metal of the bangles sinking through her shirt. Then she rubbed her face roughly and started to rise from the bed. “I guess,” she said, “we should find the necklace anyway. You can just keep it.” It wasn’t as if her mother could use it, Liv reasoned. It wasn’t as if—and this thought surprised her—her mother deserved it.

These words seemed to unnerve the woman, who grabbed Liv’s arm to stop her from standing. Liv gazed at her thick fingers and fake metallic nails. “Don’t you want to calm down?” the woman said. “Why don’t you sit a little longer?”

Liv shook her head and, as the woman watched from the bed, began looking through her mother’s things. She started off methodical and slow, opening drawers and sifting through them. But soon, she was tearing through everything, not caring what she might disturb or break or rip. Eventually, she found a jewelry box, a small one that the woman had missed, but it wouldn’t open. Liv yanked at the clasp, trying to pry it loose with her fingers. The metal cut her, and dark blood gushed from her finger. She cried out—a wild, animal sound—but didn’t stop. She kept trying to open the box even as it became slick with her blood. Finally, she grabbed the iron bunny doorstopper and bashed the clasp until it sprang open at last. The box contained an assortment of safety pins and nothing else. Not the necklace. Liv turned to the bed, intending to show the woman the near-empty box, but she was gone—scared off, Liv assumed, by the scream and the blood and the bashing.

Liv slumped to the floor and, for the first time since her mother had died, let herself cry. Her tears brought anger, and the anger was like a mallet striking her between her breasts. She couldn’t guess why her mother had wanted that necklace so badly. She’d hardly worn jewelry. There was so much Liv hadn’t known about her mother, that her mother had never allowed her to know. And yet she was the person Liv had known best. She was the person Liv had bathed and fed and shushed to sleep. So what did that mean for Liv, for how she existed—or failed to exist—in the world? It was possible that her mother had stolen something from her she could never get back or give to anyone else.

Her sobbing eased at last and gave way to a bitter calm. She crawled over to the bed and pulled herself up, sitting in the impression the woman had left behind. As she settled, she felt the tangled wad of scarves in her pocket. She removed them and found, wrapped in a green silk, a thin gold chain from which swung a small ruby.

She wished the woman was still there so she could give her the necklace. Really, she wished she was there so she could tell her own story. She would talk about her mother’s hip replacement and the anesthesia fog, and the surgeon’s questions about children, and her mother’s answers revealing she had not one child, as Liv had believed, but two. And that the other child was named Jane. She would tell the woman about how she put Jane out of her mind because she had to take care of her mother after the surgery, even more than before. And how her mother became sick, and then sicker. And then she died. Liv would admit that maybe Jane had been someone her mother made up in her anesthetized state. But, she would reason, it would be a strange thing to make up, a strange detail. She would conclude that it was probably true that she had a sister.

Surveying the mess of her mother’s sheets, her clothes, the evidence of her life, Liv reminded herself that she was responsible for deciding what to keep, boxing the items up, and bringing them back to her apartment. Otherwise, the Valley Gardens staff would simply throw everything out, and it would be like her mother had never existed.

Well, let them, Liv thought, tearing a ribbon of fabric from the green silk and tying it around her bleeding finger. Let them.

Leaving the necklace on the bed, Liv gathered her things and walked out the front door as the woman and all the guests, including Carla, had done.

Carla, she thought, while she journeyed down a hallway to the Valley Gardens lobby, through the sliding doors, and past a tacky fountain outside. She would call Carla after all. She would invite her over for a meal at her apartment, which hardly anyone besides she and her mother had seen.