The House Girl by Tara Conklin Page B

they must be holding Oscar’s right hand under the table—look at how closely they were sitting, look at the intimacy. Oscar seemed so young—no beard, his hair shaggy and falling into his eyes, his smile exuberant. Grace was turned toward him, a smile there too, one visible eye shining, looking up at him with love and pride. The photo was taken after Oscar’s first important show, a group show, but the gallery was trendy, and he had sold a painting. One painting! It had seemed impossible, amazing, like they were on their way, Oscar had said. Nine months later, Grace was dead.
    A wintry sweep of road, going where? The car—what kind? A tree, a telephone pole, a concrete divide. Grace alone. Had she been alone? Blood on the front seat, a splintered windshield, a body thrown, dark hair fanned across red-spotted snow. It had been years since Lina had thought about her mother’s death, really wondered about the specifics that once had seemed so essential to know. But Lina’s imagination now unfurled these images in vivid color and excruciating detail.
    For years, from late childhood and into her early teens, Lina had followed dark-haired women she passed on the street or saw on the subway. She looked for those who seemed about the age her mother would have been—mid- to late thirties—and she stalked them quietly, harmlessly, down Manhattan sidewalks, into the post office or the bank, as they shopped for groceries or sat in a café with friends. It was something she did with a complicated thrill of fear and excitement and guilt. She never bothered them. She took nothing from them. She spoke to only one, a woman wearing a long dark-green coat whom Lina followed one late afternoon of the winter she turned fifteen, a bitterly cold day, the air heavy and gray and smelling of metal. She had seen the woman first on the subway, exited behind her to the street and followed her east along Seventy-seventh Street in Manhattan. Snow was falling, restless flyaway snow that scattered across the sidewalk and onto the arms of Lina’s coat and her bare head. She followed the woman as the sidewalk disappeared under shifting layers of snow and Lina’s hair crackled with ice. Suddenly the woman stopped and turned to face her. The block was empty, apart from the two of them, and the woman’s eyes were wide and frightened.
    “Why are you following me?” she asked.
    Lina had been so startled by the sound of the woman’s voice—high and nervous—that she almost turned and fled. “I’m—I’m not following you,” she stammered.
    “Yes, you are,” said the woman, seeming less afraid now. “You’ve been behind me for blocks. I saw you on the subway. I saw you looking at me. Why are you doing this?”
    Now that the woman faced her, Lina could see that she was in fact much older than Grace would have been, hair threaded with gray, her face lined around the mouth and purple beneath the eyes. And it was this that made Lina say, “It’s nothing. I have to get home now,” and she turned and walked back, past the silent brooding brownstones of the Upper East Side, to the subway stop where she had first exited, some five paces behind the woman, wanting to see where she would go, wanting to see the life that she—this woman who looked like Grace—was leading.
    The sound of water rushing through creaky pipes filled Lina’s room—Oscar brushing his teeth—followed by muffled thuds from below of drawers closing, floorboards groaning as he prepared for bed. Lina heard the oddly distinct click of his bedside lamp turning off, and then silence. Again she looked at the photo of her parents, at her mother’s shining gaze. She remembered the snow on that day, and the shock at seeing the lined, frightened, tired face of the woman and realizing that no, this woman was not her, this woman could never have been my mother.

Josephine
    J osephine became aware of Missus’ voice, a faint repetitive calling, almost like a bird, but with a sharp