The House Sitter

Chapter 8 — The Journal

The orchids were dying faster.

It wasn’t her fault — she’d followed the schedule taped inside the pantry door to the letter, distilled water, the little green fertilizer sticks, everything — but the sunroom plants were failing anyway, leaves yellowing from the base up like the life was draining out of them from the roots. Maya had started talking to them in the mornings, which she recognized as a bad sign, the horticultural equivalent of rearranging deck chairs.

She went out to the garden shed for the good fertilizer, the serious stuff, the plant ICU.

The shed smelled of cedar and slow rot. Rakes hung in a row like patient skeletons. Under the potting bench, shoved back against the wall behind a bag of perlite gone hard as concrete, was a cardboard box warped soft with damp.

Maya shouldn’t have opened it. She knew that even as she did it — knew it the way you know you’re going to read someone else’s letter the moment you pick it up.

Inside, swollen and buckled, the pages stuck together in damp bricks, was a journal. The cover had gone wavy with water damage, the ink on the first pages haloed into blue ghosts. But the handwriting was still legible in places — loopy, girlish, the handwriting of a woman who’d learned cursive when it still mattered.

Evelyn’s handwriting. Maya would have known it anywhere; she’d seen it on the house rules, on the grocery list magneted to the fridge, on the little card tucked into the mantel flowers: Enjoy, darlings. — E.

She carried the journal into the thin October sunlight and sat on the overturned bucket and eased the pages apart with the care of someone defusing something.

March 3. The garden is the only place I can write this down.

March 3. She would be 27 now. I bought a cake. I didn’t light the candles. R. found it in the trash and we didn’t speak for two days.

The entries jumped — 2018, 2019, a fragment that might have been 2020, the dates bleeding into each other where the water had gotten in worst.

Forgive us. We did what we thought was best. God knows if it was.

R. won’t let me change a thing in there. Twenty years, and the room is exactly as it was. Sometimes I think he expects —

The rest was lost to a brown tide-mark, the paper fused into a single ridged mass.

She eased apart two more pages, the paper sighing faintly. A fragment, 2019: E. dreamed about the headlights again. I told her it was only a dream. We have gotten good at telling each other things.

And another, undated, in a shakier hand, as if written fast: If she ever comes back — no. Don’t write that. Don’t.

The sentence stopped there, the ink trailing off like the writer had set the pen down and walked away mid-thought. Maya read it three times. If she ever comes back. She told herself it was the language of grief, the bargaining stage, the things bereaved parents wrote to the dark when no one was reading. She told herself firmly, the way you press a lid down on something boiling.

Maya sat very still on the overturned bucket with the journal open on her knees, and did the math the way you do a sum you don’t want the answer to.

Grace had died at seven. Twenty years ago.

Twenty-seven.

She closed the journal. Her hands left faint damp prints on the warped cover. She felt like a trespasser, like someone who’d walked in on a prayer — and also, obscurely, like the prayer had been about her, which was ridiculous, which was grief by proximity, which was what happened when you lived three weeks in a dead girl’s house.

She photographed the “She would be 27 now” page before she could decide not to — the same furtive instinct as the photograph in the library, the same hot shame — and put the journal back in the box, and shoved the box back under the potting bench behind the concrete perlite, exactly as she’d found it.

The orchids got their fertilizer. She talked to them while she worked, quieter than usual, as if the garden might be listening.

That night the piano came clearer.

She’d heard it before — faint, dismissible, the kind of thing you could attribute to a neighbor or a memory or the wind in the eaves. Tonight it was unmistakable: a lullaby, simple and minor-keyed, picked out one note at a time like someone relearning it. It came from the west wing. It always came from the west wing, behind the locked door at the end of the upstairs hall, the one Dana’s rule sheet had covered in a single line: WEST WING CLOSED — DO NOT ENTER.

Maya stood in the dark hallway in her bare feet and held her breath.

The music stopped. Not faded — stopped, mid-phrase, the way a hand lifts off keys when a head turns toward a sound.

She waited, counting her heartbeats, for it to start again.

It didn’t.

She dreamed of the car crash for the first time that night.

Rain. Headlights swinging wild across a windshield, painting the inside of a car white-white-white. A woman screaming. Glass breaking like ice on a lake, a sound with a pitch to it, almost musical. The world going over.

She woke at 3:13 a.m. with her mouth tasting of copper pennies and her sheets damp with sweat, her heart hammering against her ribs like it was trying to get out.

It’s the journal, she told herself, sitting up in the dark, pressing her palms to her eyes until colors bloomed. It’s the sad cake nobody ate. It’s the photograph. Your brain is composting the day. That’s all this is.

But she left the bedroom light on until dawn, and when the gray light came she was still awake, watching the ceiling, listening for a lullaby that didn’t come.