Trompe l'Oeil by Nancy Reisman Page B

church, but she did not sit on the bed with Theo and their mother. No one wants to leave the bed. Glasses of water appear. Katy will have to move from the spot beside her mother when her father and Molly come back, of course. The coveted space, the space she is always giving up; but where are they? It’s taking too long. If they return, she will relent, offer the space without complaint. There are splinters of hot light at the curtain’s edges, and she has to turn her head toward the pillow. She clings to her mother, and then her father returns without Molly. Every time he returns, it is without Molly. Here the story never alters, and here the same pinprick recognition: after the truck, the blood, how could she expect Molly back?
    With the little girls, Nora was worn out, but she had also returned—the playful Nora Katy had forgotten. Nora’s false laugh, the tinny one, erupted only around people she disliked, the real laugh until now a remembered thing they’d gone without. Katy waited for it to fill other moments, but nothing she tried made Nora laugh, and in the failure Katy found a thick clumsiness,and the sad puzzle as to why it took the little girls to bring her mother back, her own efforts doomed from the start. But the little girls called— Tee , Sara called her—and Delia reached for Katy, squealed when Katy entered the room. With them Katy too felt lighter, and part of her mother’s lightness. When the girls were sleeping and she occupied a room alone with her mother, she was no longer as light. She was simply Katy.
    And still there were moments when her mother faded out: you had to watch for lapses. She might start to make sandwiches, and then leave the room, forgetting, or might drive halfway to the market before turning and driving to the library. Dropping into the space that was what? Katy kept watch, herded the little girls whenever they went out. She would have liked to tell her father that her mother still dreamed in the middle of the day, but he was hardly home at all.
    Between her parents, a rising disturbance. Their Newton way of fighting had been looser, more dramatic and somehow less serious, airy, the big gestures also self-consciously cartoonish: eventually they’d made bug eyes at each other, or stuck their tongues out. But this fighting was different, guarded and tense, the low chattering of dinner plates on a heavy wobbling tray, a rapid clacking punctuated by a stomp or a word— no or lonely or go —and blown through with shushing. Katy and Theo listened together, the fight becoming an approaching train, moving closer and closer and reaching a crescendo only yards away, then—as if their eavesdropping were apparent—retreating, ssh clack ssh clack ssh .
    Weekends and evenings when her father was home his arms were full of baby girls, or he was reading his files, or speakingheartily on the phone. He was difficult to catch. In winter, Katy forwent the luxury of sleep and padded down to the kitchen just after 6:00 AM and found him alone with his coffee, already in his suit. He stood at the counter eating a muffin, scanning the paper. On good mornings he called her K-kat . K-kat, what’s up today? Some mornings he kissed her on the cheek. Some mornings he mussed her hair. Cereal for you? he offered. She shrugged and poured herself a glass of milk. Blueberry muffin? he said.
    It was the prize for getting up early, these moments with her father, the added prize of a muffin. But the moments were brief: the little girls woke early, and soon they were in the kitchen with her mother. Soon one or another of them was on her lap—Delia either cranky or lively, Sara quiet and vague—and Katy was coaxing them to eat Cheerios, trying to minimize the spills. The girls babbled and tossed Cheerios on the floor, and their city-bound father slipped away while Katy was distracted, forgetting a kiss good-bye.

NORA’S COLLECTION
    It began haphazardly and