A widowed mother showed up at a reclusive old woman’s gate with two children and nowhere to sleep—then told her, “You need someone to care for you as much as we need a home.”

Chapter 6

That night, Elsie did not eat.

Nora found her in the rocking chair in the dark and stood in the doorway, holding the lamp low. “I’ve come for the plates.”

“There are no plates. Leave me alone, woman.”

But Nora did not leave. She set the lamp on the table, wiped her hands on her apron, and sat down in one of the four chairs, in the dark, without a word.

Half an hour passed.

“Your daughter told me I’m going to die,” Elsie said at last.

Nora closed her eyes. “Oh, God.”

“Don’t scold her.”

“I won’t.”

The old woman’s voice was suddenly firm. “She’s right. I’m going to die. It’s the only certainty I have left. And that child has already lost a father and a grandmother. She’s not willing to lose another old woman. She’s clever.” Elsie rocked forward and back, forward and back. “Cleverer than you. Cleverer than me.”

Nora ran a hand over her face. “She doesn’t say everything she thinks. Since her dad died, she hasn’t cried once. Not at the wake. Not at the burial. Not when Mr Varley threw us out of the shack and she had to leave her rag doll behind because it wouldn’t fit on the donkey.”

Elsie raised her head.

“A rag doll,” Nora said softly. “Her father made it for her. Button for an eye. She left it in the shack and never said a word. I pretended not to see, because if I said anything I would break too — and I couldn’t break.” She stopped, and her throat moved. “I couldn’t afford to.”

Elsie rocked in silence. The lamp flame crooked and straightened.

“Go to the pantry,” she said. “Under the tablecloths, there’s a key.”

Nora froze.

“Bring it to me.”

“Which key?”

“Just bring it.”

Nora went. She lit the lamp properly, lifted the folds of tablecloth in the pantry drawer, and there it lay — an old black iron key with a tongue worn thin and smooth as glass. She picked it up, and it felt heavier in her hand than it had any right to. When she placed it in Elsie’s palm, the old woman closed her fist around it and shut her eyes.

“Eighteen years,” Elsie murmured.

“Elsie — that’s the door. The room at the back. The one that’s always been closed.”

“Eighteen years.”

Nora looked at the shut door and understood. “Do you want me to open it?”

Elsie shook her head. She took up her walker and got to her feet, slower than slow, because she was doing everything she did now in the time it truly took her, and not the time she pretended it should take. “As with everything, I want to open it myself,” she said. “But I want you behind me.”

The two women crossed the kitchen. Tick, tick, tick — the walker and the small shivering light of the lamp, and the child asleep in the shed beyond the window, and the rain beginning again, soft as breath, against the glass.

The key went into the lock stiffly. Elsie’s hand shook so badly that Nora had to lay her own hand over the old woman’s knuckles to help her turn it. The mechanism yielded with a rusted groan. And the door swung open on its own weight — and the smell came out.

Dust. Old wood. Stored linen. And underneath it all, faint as a memory pretending to be imagination, lye soap, and iron parts, and children’s hair. The smell that houses keep locked in their walls and let out fifty years later, as if nothing at all had happened in between.

Elsie gripped the doorframe. Nora lifted the lamp high.

The room was small. Two brass beds, one against each wall, made. Someone had pulled those quilts flat eighteen years ago, and there they still lay, grey with dust — but flat, even, tucked. Between the beds, a little table with a candle burned down to its plate. On the far wall, a single nail. From the nail hung a white cotton dress with blue flowers embroidered at the collar, so small and so careful that Elsie’s breath caught. And on the floor, beside the left bed, an open wooden box — a hand-carved rocking horse, a spinning top, a slingshot, a wooden cow with one leg snapped off.

Elsie took a step. Then another. She stopped at the left bed and stood looking down at the toy box, and then, very slowly, with a pain that had nothing to do with her hip, she bent — reached — lifted the rocking horse out. She ran her thumb along its back, brushing away the dust.

“Bert made it for him,” she said, “out of a piece of ironbark. Tom was nine. He took it to school and the teacher took it off him, and he’d cry, and I’d march down there and come home towing him by the ear.” A ghost of a laugh. “Then he grew up and got ashamed of the little horse. Kept it in here, never took it out.” Her grip tightened. “And then he drowned in the creek at seventeen. And I came in here and found it under the bed, and put it in this box.”

She looked up. “Then Edie died, and I hung her dress on that nail. And then Bert died — and I closed the door.”

Nora’s eyes were full. She did not dare make a sound.

“People think you close rooms out of grief,” Elsie said. “No. You close them out of fear. Because as long as the door is closed, you can tell yourself that everything is still in there. That if you opened it, they would be there.” Her voice cracked, and she pressed the rocking horse to her chest. “They’re not there, Nora. They never were. They’re in the ground at the Reston cemetery, under three crosses I haven’t visited in eight years, because I can’t walk that far.”

Nora crossed the room and laid a hand on her shoulder. And Elsie — who had not let anyone touch her in eighteen years — did not move away.

“I’ll take you,” Nora said.

“Where?”

“To the cemetery. On the donkey. I’ll help you up, and I’ll help you down.”

Elsie was silent for a long, long time.

“I’m heavy,” she said at last, and the shame in her voice was terrible. “I’m not who I used to be. I weigh a lot.”

Nora squeezed her shoulder. “I carried my husband from the roof to the house alone — eighty kilos, and him still alive and still complaining the whole way. I’ll get you onto a donkey.”

And something inside Elsie — something enormous, something made of stone — split cleanly in half.