She’d hoped to move far away. She hugged her knees. Now that she couldn’t go, she desperately longed for college, any college. Maybe she really wasn’t as smart as Walter. His friends had talked about national economies while her friends talked about boys. She should have applied to UC. Everyone did. Sending in only three chances had seemed a way to dare the universe to give her what she wanted. The universe had called her bluff.

  She ate by rote. Donnie had no idea. Julie breezed in the back door at seven, and Lina’s chest clenched when she said, “It’s April fifteenth.” But then Julie made a joke about taxes: “Who knows the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector?” This must be what it was like to be in prison, Lina thought, when you’d secretly believed you were a princess.

  * * *

  —

  “What about Berkeley?” Lauren asked, her voice shrill. “You had to get in there.”

  “I didn’t apply.”

  “You didn’t apply? Lina!”

  Mrs. Anjani stood at the blackboard wearing a full, thick wig. “So where are you going?” she asked the class. People shouted out their colleges, looking at the slanted desktops. UC San Diego! Colorado! Mills! Santa Cruz! Lauren mumbled New Jersey.

  “How about you?” Mrs. Anjani asked, standing in front of Lina.

  “Nowhere,” Lina said.

  “Yeah, right,” the teacher said, and the class laughed. They loved her nimble sarcasm. Mrs. Anjani was ancient but fluent in their demotic.

  “It’s true,” Lauren whispered, with an ominous tone.

  Mrs. Anjani’s face turned all business. She told Lina to stay after class.

  * * *

  —

  “What is your grade point average?” Mrs. Anjani asked. “How could UC not take you?”

  “I didn’t apply. I’m on the wait list for Barnard.”

  “Barnard is a fine school, but the wait list is a wait list. Why didn’t you apply to UCLA? I graduated UCLA.” Mrs. Anjani talked about a library where she’d done her homework that had record players with headphones and Persian rugs.

  Lina shrugged. “I’ll just stay here and work.”

  “That’s a terrible idea. Tonight I’ll write to a woman I know who took her degree at Barnard. I have another friend who is a lecturer at UCLA. Come to my house on Saturday. I see the doctor at one thirty. Be there at four.” She wrote down her address.

  * * *

  —

  Scrubs grew up against the dirty stucco of the small house. Lauren drove here once a month to file the teacher’s insurance claims. She’d told Lina that there was no evidence of any Mr. Anjani.

  Mrs. Anjani opened her door wearing a caftan, her head bald, a kitten in her hands.

  “I would make tea but I’m not feeling well today. This is for you.” She held out the animal. A plastic tub by the door contained a bag of litter and cans of cat food. “I’ve made mistakes in my life, but my only real regret is waiting until my fifties to adopt a pet.”

  The small, warm thing clutched at Lina and rooted under the bib of her overalls, its claws sinking through her T-shirt into skin. “Oh, I can’t. I’m moving in with a family friend who already has cats.”

  “Your guidance counselor thinks you should write a letter. I’m drafting one for you to sign. I’ll mail it; I’m not taking any chances. Absolute madness for a California student not to apply to UCLA. The best bargain in the world. I called my friend who lectures in history. There’s not a thing she can do. Not a thing. Not even if you were her own daughter.”

  Lina pulled the kitten off herself.

  Mrs. Anjani folded her arms. “Try. I’ll take him back. See how you feel in a week.”

  * * *

  —

  What would she do with a cat? Lina spent all her free periods in the art room now. She liked the feeling of centering clay as the spinning metal sawed down her fingernails. All day, she smelled slip in her hair.

  32.

  “That’s not bothering you, with your allergies?” Lina had brought along the kitten, with the litter box on the back-seat floor, and Julie—the cat lover—was not charmed. From the rearview mirror, she detected the creature hanging by its claws from the upholstery and told Donnie to keep a hold of it. But when Lina set it on the polished floor of the ward, their mother danced toward the tiny animal, a flicker of her old self. She made small noises as the kitten rubbed against her bootie. The ward was unusually quiet until, from down the hall, there came a piercing scream.

  “She likes the cat,” Shirley said, passing with her arm under the elbow of a young woman Lina didn’t recognize who stared at the floor.

  Their mother wanted to take the kitten outside. She stayed alert for an hour, without swatting the air or grinding her teeth. She held the kitten, petting him with her thumb as she walked through rows of bolted herbs. The kitten squirmed out of her hands under the leaves, and Donnie and Lina stumbled to recapture it. Lina slid the litter box underneath her mother’s white metal bed, in the long dormitory. The blinds here were cordless and couldn’t be lifted or lowered, so gauzy stripes fell over the blankets and on the floor. Lina dumped the clothes from her mother’s hamper and sat down to sort the white from the colored. Name labels she’d ironed on had curled up at the edges; some had fallen off. Another of her mother’s sweaters had shrunk. She made a separate pile of clothes she didn’t recognize.

  The laundry room smelled of bleach. She pushed the garments that weren’t her mother’s into a separate bin. In an hour, she would fold her mother’s clothes on the long metal table. She liked this. Her mind went smooth.

  When Lina emerged with a pillowcase of clean clothes, she saw the redheaded girl, Isabel, on a bike by the industrial kitchen, an aroma of bread in the air. Lina found her presence jarring, as if someone she’d made up during lazy hours alone had swelled to life. Lina remembered that she needed a white dress for graduation. The school had sent out a letter. “Where do you buy your clothes?” she asked.

  “I’ll take you there,” Isabel said.

  “Oh, I can’t leave,” Lina said.

  “It’s not outside.” Her voice had a laugh in it. “Hop on. Hold my waist.”

  From a moving bike, the hospital grounds seemed hillier. Isabel stopped in front of a round building with boarded windows and left the bike on its side. Lina held on to her clean laundry. The dim, round room was filled with desks stacked on top of each other and a tower of chairs. They climbed a rickety staircase, the banister replaced by rope, to an attic. There, the floor was strewn with suitcases, open like clamshells, their contents spilling. Lina hugged the laundry. Everything looked dusty. Trunks held name tags with addresses. Mrs. Fern Goodale, 28 Flintwood Avenue, Northridge. Miss Mabel Eason of The Arroyo, Jack Hammer, the Miracle Mile. “Whose stuff is this?” Lina asked.

  “Old patients.”

  “Please don’t take anything of my mom’s. She doesn’t have much.”

  “I would never touch a belonging of someone here.”

  The ink on the tags looked old, sepia. “Why didn’t these people take their things with them when they left?”

  “Some of them lived out their lives here. There used to be a cemetery. They dug it up when they sold the farm.”

  “But people don’t die here now.”

  “Only in Geri. You worry about your mom, huh? Has she always had problems?”

  “No. I mean, normal problems. Like everyone has.”

  “My mom died seven years ago. But I have my dad.” Isabel tossed a fur shawl to Lina with a head and paws on each end. Next, she held up a pink party dress.

  “This is all just yours?”

  “It’s like a vintage store. Mostly I take tops.” She opened a small cardboard suitcase, pulled off her T-shirt—she was wearing a pink lace bra—and put on one that said Marquette Makers in a swirly font.

  Lina felt the familiar downheartedness of shopping. That mimeographed paper said girls were to wear white dresses, no more than two inches above the knee. Before, Lina would have made fun of this pomp. But now that she wasn’t going to college, she thought she’d better wear a dress to graduation. If she told Julie she needed a dress, Julie would buy her one, but Julie paid for too much already.

  Isabel pulled the pink dress over her head and looked at herself in the cracked mirror, canting one leg. In every picture of Lina’s mother, she’d assumed that very same pose. She’d believed it slimmed her calves. “You’re not that into clothes, huh?” Isabel asked. Isabel’s panties made Lina’s underwear look like a grandmother’s.

  “I guess not.” Once, Lina’s mom had come home with a pantsuit for Lina, a Theodore knockoff. Lina had stuffed it in the back of her drawer. It mattered to her not to try.

  “You could be beautiful,” Isabel said.

  Lina and her mother had argued about clothes: her mother thought a beautiful woman was most beautiful in a beautiful dress. Lina thought in jeans.

  “I have to wear a white dress for graduation,” she said.

  “We could look in my mom’s closet. My dad saved her clothes for me.”

  “When they dug up the cemetery, where did they put the people?”

  “Some families moved their own relatives. A rabbi in LA took the Jewish bones. The rest are here. I’ll show you.”

  Lina rode on the back of Isabel’s bike again, feeling her hips move up and down, the laundry between them. They stopped at a small patch of land, backed by cypress. A patient had made copper plates with names of the dead and the dates they were born and died. It was a minimal cemetery, the very least that ought to be done for a life. The guy who made the plates was buried here, too.

  * * *

  —

  Lina sat inside Dr. Moss’s house. A man arrived, clomping through the swinging doors of the old-fashioned kitchen and, nodding incessantly, put two loaves of bread on the table.

  “Thank you, Artie,” Isabel called after him. Then: “He never talks.”

  She cut slices, dropping them into an ancient toaster. From the rounded refrigerator, she dug out celery, a cucumber, a carrot, and something Lina learned was dill. After avoiding it at the ice-cream shop, it had never occurred to Lina that tuna fish could taste good.

  “You grew up here?” she asked.

  “Until they sent me to school in Ojai. The other doctors’ kids were my friends. We never had babysitters. We ran everywhere. It was all fenced in. Patients wandered around the grounds. One guy used to walk reading a book.”

  She went upstairs and returned with an off-white Indian gauze caftan. “Her wedding dress. They were hippies.” From holding it up, though, they could tell it was too long for Lina.

  Maybe I won’t go to graduation, she thought. A girl in the clay room, who made neat coil pots, had already lined up a job in a department store.

  * * *

  —

  Lina had been away too long. She ran, tripping, into Ward 301, hugging the laundry, and found her mother sitting with Donnie watching TV. The kitten licked water from a bowl. She held the fresh clothes up to her mother, but her mother closed her eyes. Maybe it didn’t matter if her mother wore other people’s clothes. Maybe Lina’s efforts were useless. But her mother would care, if she were herself. Was this important, though, if the self was no longer here, or if it swam inside somewhere loose, unattached, beyond reach? Still, this morning she’d danced toward the kitten, singing Di-di-dit-di-di-da. If that melody was still inside, more must be. Maybe all was recoverable yet.

  Julie returned and they sat in the parlor that was nothing like a real living room. Lina asked about Julie’s Michigan brother. Talking to Julie took work. Still, if Lina had told her she needed a dress for graduation, Julie would have bought her one.

  When it was time to go, Lina bent down to collect the litter box and just then noticed Shirley’s shoes. Oxfords. “Are the booties only for patients? I thought they were to keep the ward quiet.”

  “No shoelaces,” Shirley said. “The cotton does polish the floors.”

  There was another woman now in the alcove.

  “Don’t let me forget to have you sign permission for your mother to work in the garden,” Shirley said, “so Sacramento knows we’re not making a slave of her.”

  Lina lifted the cat from her mother’s lap.

  “Why don’t you leave him?” Shirley said. “We won’t tell anybody.”

  Lina hoped Mrs. Anjani wouldn’t be mad that she’d given away her gift.

  * * *

  —

  “Where you been?” Mr. Riddle asked Lina. “Haven’t seen you for a season.”

  Later, she would think of this year as time not lost but spent, outside the normal course, days given to something she couldn’t name. She’d felt alive, though.

  “Nowhere,” she answered.

  Mr. Riddle told the room at large that he was getting the hair waxed off his back. “For the ladies,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Lina folded her mother’s dresses, which she knew by heart. They were finally packing. From the small box on the dresser she lifted out the familiar jewelry, tried on the gold bracelet. Three rings rested on her palm, making bars of light. Should she bring them to Norwalk, even if they could get stolen there? Maybe her mother would take pleasure in the colors. But her mother didn’t care about beauty now. Better guard them for later, when she became herself again.

  Once, long ago, her mother sat at the dining-room table, with piles of lined paper. “I’m writing a book about my life,” she’d said. “You’ll see.”

  Lina had felt afraid that inside the book she would be a bad daughter who backtalked. Now she looked through the bureau for written pages, the beginning of a story. She rampaged through drawers, first carefully, then becoming wanton, and found endless unused stationery, blank pages—with whom had her mother hoped to correspond? Her mother would never write a book now. Lina’s meanness would be forgotten.

  She found handwritten lists of prices for curtains, slipcovers, chairs. Bills stamped paid. So much that Lina had taken for granted her mother had struggled over and finally managed to bring home. And where would it all go? Julie was arranging for storage.

  Julie’s apartment was small; they could bring clothes, books, and their mother’s jewelry. For even this Lina knew they should be grateful.

  But it was tiring having to be grateful all the time.

  * * *

  —

  Lina finally told Walter about college. He thought of her as the type who always raised her hand. It would never occur to him that she could do something this stupid.

  “What about the wait list?”

  “Total long shot. I can apply again next year. I don’t think I will, though.”

  She told him about packing up the bungalow—his stuff, too.

  “I trust you,” Walter said. “Anything you think I’ll want, maybe put in a box.”

  Lina stretched the phone cord from the kitchen to the hall and surveyed the boxes, labeled Goodwill, Storage, and Apartment. He was in Berkeley with that fairy-tale bridge over the water. It did not seem right.

  “What doesn’t, Lina?” he said, and that did it, the hint of deliberate patience in his voice as if she were being histrionic.

  They screamed until she banged the phone into its cradle and leaned against the wall, stunned.

  Walter arrived the next day with Susan.

  “Put me to work,” he said, looking rumpled from the drive. It was like Walter to have a helper. They took what he intended to keep to Susan’s car. He could store it in her family’s backhouse, where Susan’s nanny once lived.

  33.

  Everything Walter dreaded had begun. For a long time, his family had been stuck. Now they were moving. He found Julie with his sister and brother, all of them dirty, among towers of boxes and goods from their previously private life strewn on the floor. Susan turned out to be talented at this. While Walter stared at old books, she emptied the refrigerator. In an hour, she volunteered to get sandwiches and took orders. Then she brought back more sandwiches, but also pickles, Greek salad, drinks, cheesecake, and extra cookies. A warm clutter. They unwrapped the food on the landlord’s heavy table. While they ate, Susan told them about the sorority party she’d missed to drive Walter down. She and Carrie had bought domino masks at the swap meet. People had to wear them and dress as a character from a book. Susan chided him for not having his license. Everyone was displeased with Walter. “Nothing’s stopping you,” Susan said. “You can borrow my car. Did you even get your permit?” He had not. When they finished eating, she suggested that they call it a night. Julie agreed; she wanted to get home to feed her cats.

  Susan offered to take the three of them to her parents’ house. She held within her the sense of a floor. Even misery only went so low. You still got to eat and rest, even when packing up the bungalow you’d dearly hoped to keep. Donnie and Lina wanted to sleep here one last night, so Walter stayed, too, on the boarder’s water bed, which sloshed when he moved. The place didn’t feel theirs anymore. It was as they’d found it: an old house with ugly furniture.

  He woke to the sound of his sister and brother talking. They’d always talked between themselves, and when he came near, they stopped. They cleaned the garage, throwing out their mother’s treasures. Hand-painted dishes. German stuffed animals. They were probably worth something, but Walter had no idea how to sell them.

  A truck arrived to take the furniture to a storage facility. Donnie scoured the bathroom. Lina started sweeping at the front of the house, gathering fluff, bits of paper, and dirt. She swept her pile to the back door, caught it in the dustpan and carried it out to the alley, then stood under the peach tree, laden with unripe fruit. They wouldn’t be here to eat the peaches this year.