The House Sitter

Chapter 6 — The Photograph

The rain started on the fifth day, drumming against the clay roof tiles in a rhythm that made the whole house feel like it was breathing. Maya had claimed the library as her studio annex, spreading trace paper across the partners desk while the sky bruised purple beyond the French doors. She was supposed to be drafting sections for her thesis project — a community arts center in Boyle Heights, all daylight and reclaimed timber — but the Ashfords’ library kept pulling her attention sideways. First editions with cracked spines. Architectural folios the size of tombstones. A globe in the corner with the Soviet Union still on it, the world frozen the way someone had needed it to stay.

The center desk drawer stuck. She jimmied it with her thumbnail, and it gave all at once, spilling its contents across the leather blotter.

Photographs. Dozens of them, loose and unsorted, the way people keep the pictures that matter too much to frame and too much to throw away. The Ashfords at galas — Richard silver-haired and craggy in black tie, Evelyn luminous in pearls, the kind of couple that made wealth look like a personality trait. The Ashfords on a sailboat, wind in Evelyn’s scarf. The Ashfords cutting a ribbon outside something with columns.

And underneath, folded in quarters, a photograph that had been handled so many times the creases had gone soft and white.

Maya unfolded it.

A lawn — this lawn, she realized with a small cold click, the slope behind the house with the jacaranda tree. Richard and Evelyn, twenty years younger, kneeling on either side of a little girl in a white dress. The girl was laughing, her head thrown back, dark curls bouncing off her shoulders. Richard’s hand rested on her shoulder. Evelyn’s cheek was pressed to the top of her head.

The girl’s face had been scratched out.

Not torn. Not blurred or cropped. Someone had taken something sharp — a pin, a knife, the tine of a fork — and gouged the emulsion away in furious crosshatches, down to the white paper beneath. The violence of it sat in obscene contrast to the joy everywhere else in the image: the laughter, the sunlight, the small hand clutching Evelyn’s sleeve.

Maya’s chest hurt.

It wasn’t a metaphor. It was physical, a fist closing around her sternum, her breath snagging halfway down like she’d swallowed wrong. She pressed her palm to her breastbone and waited for it to pass, confused and faintly embarrassed, as if her body had mistaken someone else’s grief for its own.

Grace. It had to be Grace — the daughter who’d died at seven, twenty years ago, in the car accident Carol Finch had mentioned on Maya’s first day with the careful delicacy of someone handling a live wire.

She told herself that was all it was. Empathy. The obscene little violence of the scratched-out face. Anyone would feel something, standing in a dead girl’s house holding the picture someone couldn’t bear to look at and couldn’t bear to destroy.

But her hands were shaking as she refolded the photograph along its soft white creases, and she noticed — in the way you notice things when your body is louder than your thoughts — that the other photographs were crisp and glossy and barely looked at, while this one had been opened and closed, opened and closed, a hundred times. Someone had carried it in a pocket. Someone had needed it near, and needed the face gone.

She slid it back under the others and shut the drawer harder than she’d meant to, the slam swallowed by the rain.

The orchids on the mantel were new.

She hadn’t consciously registered them until that moment — a spray of white phalaenopsis in a celadon vase, buds still tight at the tips, the lower blooms open and flawless, not a single brown edge. But the orchids in the sunroom, the ones Evelyn had supposedly prized above everything, were dying. Maya had been watering them on the schedule taped inside the pantry door, and they were declining anyway: leaves yellowing from the base, aerial roots gone papery, two spikes collapsed entirely like they’d given up overnight.

So who was replacing the mantel flowers?

She texted the agency — Dana, who’d given her the keys and the three-page list of rules — a photo of the orchids with a single question mark.

The reply came in minutes: Florist service. Thursdays. Don’t worry about it!

It was Tuesday.

Maya stared at the three exclamation points until they stopped looking friendly. Then she told herself she was being ridiculous. Schedules shifted. Dana probably had the days mixed up, or the florist came twice a week for clients like the Ashfords, people who summered in actual Europe and had opinions about grout. Rich people had flower people. That was a thing. Everybody knew that was a thing.

She ran her finger along the mantel beside the vase. No dust. The whole shelf had been wiped recently, the lemon-oil smell still faint in the wood.

She went back to her trace paper, but the sections wouldn’t resolve — walls meeting at wrong angles, light falling where it had no business falling. Twice she caught herself looking at the desk drawer. The third time she got up, opened it, took out the folded photograph, and took a picture of it with her phone: a strange, furtive act she immediately felt stupid about, like photographing someone else’s wound.

Her mother called while the rain was still going, and Maya almost told her about the photograph — almost said, there’s this picture here, this little girl — but what would she have said after that? So she talked about the thesis instead, and the rain, and the jacaranda tree, and her mother told her to eat something green, and Maya said she would, and neither of them mentioned that Maya had sounded, for one unguarded second, like a much younger person.

That night the rain kept up, and the house made its settling sounds — the tick of cooling wood, the sigh of the old pipes — and Maya lay in the guest room (she’d never moved into the primary suite; it had felt presumptuous, like trying on someone else’s wedding dress) with her phone glowing in the dark, zooming in on the scratched-out face until the gouges filled the screen.

A face-shaped hole. That was what it was. And her chest ached around it, she thought, the way your tongue keeps finding a missing tooth — the shape of something that should be there, insisting on itself.

She deleted the photo. Then she sat up in the dark, restored it from the deleted folder with her heart hammering like she’d been caught, and set the phone face-down on the nightstand as if it had bitten her.

Sleep took a long time.