Everyone assumes we sold it.
It is the first question, every time, from everyone. You moved, obviously. Said as a statement, never a question, because of course you would. Of course you would put that house on the market the same week and take whatever you could get and never drive down Mercer Street again.
We did not sell it. We are still in it. Ellie is nine now and it is the only home she remembers, and the window seat in the back bedroom currently holds about forty soft toys arranged in an order that I am not permitted to alter.
I want to explain that, because I know how it reads.
The first thing we did was practical and immediate. Dan boarded the gable end from the inside and fitted a proper hatch in the hallway ceiling with a lock on it, which is the thing that house should have had since 1961. There is a light up there now. There is a smoke detector up there now. We changed the lock on the garage the same week, and then, because I had become a different kind of person, we changed every lock on the property including the one on the gate.
The second thing took much longer.
For about four months I could not be in the kitchen at night. Not would not — could not. I would get to the doorway and my body would simply decline. Dan brought me water upstairs every night for a season and never once made me feel ridiculous about it, and I want that recorded somewhere, because he is not the hero of this story and he behaved like one.
It came back slowly. It is mostly back. There are still nights — maybe six or seven a year — where the boiler makes a noise at the wrong hour and I am awake and rigid until it gets light. I have stopped expecting that to end. It is not a large tax to pay for a house we love.
She got fourteen months, suspended, with probation and conditions.
The burglary charge was reduced. The judge, from what I was told, spent a considerable amount of time on the fact that the property taken amounted to groceries, and a considerable amount of time on the fact that there had been a five-year-old asleep in the house, and arrived somewhere in between. There was a mandatory no-contact order and a stay-away order covering the property and a radius around it.
I was asked whether I wanted to give a statement. I wrote one and then I did not read it out, and instead I said four sentences, and the fourth one was that I did not want her to go to prison. I have been asked more than once whether I regret that. I do not. I am also aware that I was in a position to be generous — nothing was taken from me that could not be replaced, and nobody was hurt — and that if the ending had been different I would be a different person writing a different thing.
Aguilar told me, months later and unofficially, that Marisol had got into a supported-housing programme in a different county and was working. That is the last thing I know. I have deliberately never looked for more.
Here is what I actually think about, though.
Not the cough. Not the nest, or the buckets, or the rolled sleeping bags. Not even that first night with my back against Ellie’s door.
I think about the tin.
A woman lost her mother and then lost her house within ninety days, and what she took with her — the entire portable remainder of a life — was a biscuit tin with photographs of a building in it. Not of people. Of a building, over thirty years, the cupboards changing colour, the paddling pool becoming a shed.
And I live in that building. I put my coffee down on that step. We repainted the orange cupboards without knowing they had ever been orange. Every improvement we have made to this house has been, from a certain angle, the deletion of somebody’s childhood, and we did it cheerfully, on weekends, because it was ours and it was forty thousand dollars under market and nobody would tell us why.
I do not think we did anything wrong. I want to be clear about that. We bought a house that was legally for sale from an executor who was legally entitled to sell it, and what happened afterwards was not a thing we caused.
But I have never been able to shake the feeling that the house did not entirely agree.
Dan found something last spring, replacing a rotten fascia board on the north gable — the same end, six feet from where the vent used to be.
Pushed into the gap behind the board, wrapped in a freezer bag, folded twice: a photograph of two women on a back step in 1994, one of them holding a baby.
There was no note with it. There is a stay-away order and I am certain it has never been broken; the fascia board had been rotten for years and could have been put there at any point before August, and the simplest explanation is that it was left in July by someone saying goodbye to a house.
It is in a frame now, in the hall, and when people ask I tell them it came with the place.
Which is true.