“Can I knock?” Molly asked again, spinning around on one toe.
“Go on, then,” I said.
She thumped on the door and we waited for five breaths. I counted. There was no answer, and she looked up at me.
“Try again,” I said. She knocked harder, eight loud raps. We waited again. No one came. It hadn’t occurred to me that Mam might not be there. I had no plan for what we would do if she didn’t answer, and the thought of her absence was liquid lead poured into the cups of my lungs. Molly raised her fist to knock again, but I put a hand on her shoulder.
“Wait,” I said. We heard footsteps inside, the click of the door being unlocked, and a slow swish as it opened. The lead in my lungs set hard.
Mam had clearly been asleep. She was wearing a dressing gown and her face was puffy. When she had visited me at Haverleigh her hair had been dyed yellow, but badly, so the roots had splayed out from her parting in dark fingers. Now the color was grown out, and she was as much gray as black. There was no powder caking her face. I could see the freckles and pock marks. She seemed to have aged more than five years in the time since I had last seen her, but that made sense—I sometimes felt I was twenty years older than I had been when Molly was born. I couldn’t tell if that was what Mam was thinking as she looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she knew who I was.
“Oh,” she said.
“Hello,” I said.
“It’s you.”
“Yes.”
“Huh.” She looked at Molly, her mouth screwed like the gray star at the bottom of an apple. “She’s got a broken arm.”
“Wrist.” My mouth was horribly dry. Speaking felt like chewing on dead leaves. “It took us a long time to get here. Can we come in?”
Her eyes were still on Molly. She sucked her teeth. “Jesus. She’s just like you,” she said.
Something in me flared. I put my arm around Molly’s shoulders, and she scrabbled at my hand. It was a long time since the skin on our hands had touched. She was warmer than I remembered.
“Are we coming in?” I asked.
Mam stepped to the side and gestured into the hallway. “Not giving me much choice, are you?” she said.
The apartment was clean, but it had a strange smell: yeasty, like a fold of unwashed skin. It reminded me of when Molly had had tonsillitis and her throat had been webbed with yellow-white strings—the sweet-sour smell of infection. The couch and coffee table in the lounge had the look of objects sinking into the sea, because the blue carpet was inches thick. It was so thick that walking on it felt like treading on sponge. Mam was in front, but when we got into the room she trotted behind us and raked over the dents our feet had left with her heel. She tried to smooth over her own steps too, but she kept making more. I wondered how long she spent doing this when she was by herself: walking in circles, trying to hide her own trail.
Next to the telly cabinet was a mantelpiece crowded with frames. Up close, I saw that most of them weren’t filled with photos, but pictures cut out from magazines. There was a strong baby-animal theme: kittens and puppies and next to them a small painting of Jesus. I imagined Mam sitting at the coffee table, cutting around the pictures, sliding the crinkling squares into the frames. There was only one proper photo in the row—a black-and-white print of a woman and baby. I picked it up.
“Is this you and me?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“Who is it?”
“Me and my mam.”
I checked for frames tucked at the back. “Why don’t you have any of me?”
“Just don’t.”
“But why not?”
“I just don’t, Chrissie.”
I looked along the row of animals and Jesus. If we had been alone in the room I would have swiped my hand across the mantelpiece and swept the pictures to the floor. I couldn’t do it with Molly there. It would frighten her. She already seemed frightened, looking from me to Mam, her hand holding tight to the pocket of my jacket.
“Why does it smell so bad in here?” I asked.
“It’s damp,” said Mam. “They’re all damp. All the apartments on this level. We’re trying to get them to do something about it.”
“It’s disgusting.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“The furniture’s probably moldy.”
I could feel myself goading, trying to make her lash out and fit into the space I had carved for her. She seemed too heavy to rise to it.
“Don’t know what you want to do,” she said. She picked up a cereal bowl from the arm of the couch. “There’s some magazines there. There’s telly. I’ll go and wash this up.”
She left before I could ask why she was presenting her lounge like a waiting room. The magazines she had gestured to were on the shelf of the coffee table. Most of them seemed to be about horses. I flicked through the telly channels until I found a high-pitched kids’ program. Before I let Molly sit down on the couch I spread my jacket across the seat. I didn’t particularly want to do it, but I wanted Mam to see that I had done it.
“I need you to stay here,” I said.
“Where will you be?” Molly asked.
“Just in the kitchen. I’m just going to talk to Grandma.”
“She’s cross.”
“Yeah. Don’t come in. Shout if you need me. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
She had put her good hand under her cast, and was cradling it to her front.
“Is your wrist okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. She looked down at the plaster and rubbed her finger across an illegible message. “That’s what Rosie wrote. It says ‘Get Well Soon, Molly.’”
“That was a stupid thing to write. You are well.”
“My wrist’s not well.”
“Don’t come
