Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

2018

Thursday

After dinner, Erica drove Mia to Lucy's home, a small, split-level house on a tree-lined, unpaved street that backed on to the rocky shore of the Long Island Sound. Mia got out of the car and grabbed her suitcase.

"Are you sure you won't stay with me tonight?" Erica said. "It's going to be super sad inside. Dylan already left for Stamford for his brother's bachelor party this weekend, so it'll be just you and me. You're sleeping over tomorrow night anyway, so why not tonight, too?"

"No, I'm fine," Mia said. "I need to spend tonight on my own. I'll see you tomorrow after you finish work, okay? I'll be at your house at three thirty."

"And we're off for the mountains first thing Saturday morning!" Erica said with a cheery lilt in her voice.

Mia nodded and waved as Erica drove off. She reached into her bag for the ring that held the keys to her grandmother's house and car, and wheeled her suitcase to the door. The house was dark, and it was hard to find the keyhole with only the dim light of the streetlamp, but after living with her grandmother so long, she was used to that. And she was relieved that Erica had accepted her decision without a fight. She needed tonight to search every nook and cranny in the house—that had become clear when Milt called last week to ask about a storage unit renewal notice in her grandmother's mail.

"It's the oddest thing," he'd said. "I handled everything for her—taxes, utilities, bills, you name it. But she never mentioned renting space in a storage facility…I had no idea she kept anything in storage at all until I started going through her forwarded mail.

"I suspect the key to the unit is somewhere in the house," he continued. "I can go and try to find it. But as long as you're coming to town next week, Mia, maybe it's best if you take a stab at it. She always said that if anything was missing, you'd be the one to know where it was."

It was that conversation that had spurred Mia to decide to spend the night in the house alone. Her grandmother had been meticulous about her affairs, and she'd entrusted Milt with everything. If he didn't know about the storage unit, then she'd held that information back intentionally. And the last thing Milt had said, that Mia would know where everything was—she couldn't help but believe it was her grandmother's way of signaling that the contents of the storage unit were for her eyes only.

Inside the house, she switched on the lamp on the front hall table. Thanks to the cleaning service that had continued to come weekly, the place looked spotless and smelled faintly of eucalyptus, her grandmother's favorite scent. Looking away from the lamp, she found herself studying the four small family photos on the little table—the only decorations in the house. The most recent one was Mia's college graduation picture from a decade ago, which sat alongside her high school one—both images of Mia alone in cap and gown taken by the respective school's photographer, as Lucy liked neither snapping photos nor appearing in them.

The only exception was the third photo—her grandmother's black-and-white wedding picture from more than 60 years ago. She was wearing a plain white sheath dress, and her short, wispy hair, then dark brown, was pushed behind her ears. In her hand was one long-stemmed rose. Her gaze was sideways and her expression impatient, as though there were a dozen things she'd prefer doing than posing for the camera. Mia's grandfather, an older, dapper man with slicked-back hair and a mustache, looked at his bride with amusement—most likely, Mia thought, because he knew exactly what she was thinking.

The fourth photo was of Mia's mother, taken in the backyard when she was maybe seventeen or so. She was a beauty, with golden hair that draped down to her slim shoulders. She looked as though she'd been fun, like someone Mia would have been friends with had they met as teenagers. But Mia never knew her mother at all. Or her father either, for that matter. Her parents had died in a car crash when she was just an infant.

Mia picked up her grandmother's wedding photo and held it for a moment, running her fingers along the edges of the rectangular silver frame. She looked far from a joyous bride. It wasn't the first time Mia had observed that her grandmother never appeared truly happy. And yet as Mia had grown up, she'd come to recognize those quiet moments when her grandmother seemed…well, if not unabashedly happy, then untroubled and content. There was something in her bearing that showed that emotion—an alertness, an uplifted brightness, like a far-off star glittering in an otherwise dark sky.

Mia had always been on the lookout for that expression and would bask in it when it appeared: during her high school and college graduation ceremonies; when she'd received her first job offer as a research tech at a lab on Long Island; when she'd garnered her next job, as lab manager at Weill Cornell Medical in Manhattan; and whenever she'd come back for a visit after moving to an apartment in Manhattan near her job. Lucy's deepest contentment came when Mia was happy, and it filled Mia with guilt that her grandmother had never seemed truly happy herself.

She studied her grandmother's face in the photograph for another moment. Erica was right—she really didn't look much like her grandmother at all. Her face was round and her cheeks full, while Lucy's cheeks often appeared flat, even sunken. And Mia's hair was thick and straight, while Lucy's was fine. Mia remembered how hard her grandmother would work to comb the knots out of her freshly washed hair when she was young. "Goodness, Emilia, such hair!" she'd sometimes exclaim when the knots were particularly stubborn, as she'd press the trigger of the detangler spray and then went back to combing.

"Emilia?" Mia would demand, looking up at Lucy in the bathroom mirror. "I'm Mia!"

"Yes, yes, Mia," Lucy would say. "Keep your head straight so we can get this done."

With a sigh, Mia returned the frame to the table, then grasped the handle of her suitcase and climbed the first flight of stairs. Leaving her suitcase at the entranceway to the living room, she went into the kitchen and over to her grandmother's most prized possession—her telescope—perched on a stand. She gingerly touched the smooth metal. How many nights had she and her grandmother spent together out on the patio, staring at the sky and contemplating how far away the stars were?

How she wished her grandmother had lived long enough to see her save the money she needed so she could leave her job and go back to school for a PhD. It was Mia's dream to study at one of the top cardiovascular research programs in the country —Boston University, Columbia, or Duke—and then join a major academic research institute. They were alike in that way, she and her grandmother—both students of the natural world. But while her grandmother had been drawn to big things like the wide sky and the deep ocean, Mia gravitated toward tiny ones: cells and molecules, antibodies and enzymes. Still, Mia knew they'd both felt the same deep urge: to search the void for answers.

Opening the kitchen door, she stepped outside onto the raised stone patio and looked up, thinking that the sky appeared even darker now than when she was inside the train and the glare from the overhead light interfered with her view. She could hear the gentle lapping of the water just steps away. Her grandmother had loved living so close to the sound.

Back inside, she searched through a few kitchen drawers to see if the storage unit key was there. But, like everything in the house, the things in the drawers—gadgets, recipe books, a calendar, eyeglasses—were neatly arranged, and no stray keys were visible. Not that she'd expected to find it so easily. It must have been well hidden, if her grandmother wanted no one else to find it. But Mia knew her heart wasn't in the search tonight. She was tired and missing her grandmother, and wanted only to undress and go to sleep.

Retrieving her suitcase, she dragged it up the next flight of stairs. Before she reached her old bedroom, her gaze landed on the attic door ahead. The attic had been Mia's favorite place in the house, with its fascinating features—the steepled ceiling, the exposed beams, and the long casement windows that produced the most interesting shadows on the floor, their shapes changing by the hour as the sun crossed the sky. In middle school, she'd begged to be allowed to do her homework there, and so Lucy had set up a small desk for her.

Mia caught her breath. She suddenly knew that if her grandmother had wanted her and only her to find the storage unit key, she'd have stashed it in the attic.

Climbing into the attic, she switched on the light. The cleaning people never went up here so it was a little dusty, but everything was orderly, nonetheless. Her small wooden desk was still flush against the wall, the ladder-back chair pushed in. There were storage boxes around the room's perimeter, all neatly taped and labeled in her grandmother's angular handwriting: Photos; Mia's School Records; Books; Linens; Miscellaneous.

Still, something was off—and soon Mia noticed what it was. There was a small walk-in closet in the corner of the room, where her grandmother had kept their off-season clothes—heavy sweaters and wool scarves in the summertime, and sundresses and shorts in the winter. And the door was slightly ajar. In most homes, maybe this wouldn't seem strange—but Mia knew Lucy would never leave a door ajar unintentionally: drawers and closets were always closed after you'd gotten what you needed. There was no question in Mia's mind that her grandmother had known she'd come up here looking for the key, and she'd left the door open so Mia would look inside.

With even steps, she walked into the closet, feeling a chill run up her neck to the back of her scalp as she did. The space was almost entirely empty—so different from how it had looked for most of Mia's life, with clothes draped on hangers spaced evenly apart on the rods or neatly stacked on the grid of shelves. Now there were no off-season clothes at all. The only item inside was a gray fabric garment bag stuffed with something voluminous and hanging from the rod on the far wall. She walked in further and touched the bag with her fingertips. Then, slowly, she unzipped the bag—and gasped.

Inside was a wedding gown.

She slipped off the bag and let it settle on the floor, then studied the gown on its hanger, her hands gliding down the length of the garment. It was the most elaborate piece of clothing she'd ever seen. The bodice was covered in hundreds of tiny glittering beads, and the neckline and sleeves were constructed of lace, the skirt made of layers of fine tulle, the hemline scalloped. The zipper was hidden by delicate pebble-like buttons that shone with a faint, opalescent pink hue. The dress had clearly been made decades ago, as the silk was yellowed and the tulle felt aged to her fingertips, the section near the waistline missing some buttons. Still, it was the furthest thing in the world from the simple sheath dress her grandmother was wearing in the wedding photo downstairs. Whose wedding dress was this, and why was it in her grandmother's attic? And why had she wanted Mia to discover it?

She ran her fingers again along the bodice, which looked as though every bead had been handsewn, and wondered who had designed this dress. It looked not just beautiful but amazingly engineered, the way the different fabrics and textures held together organically, as though each section of the dress was a natural extension of the sections next to it. She slipped her fingers inside the neckline, wondering how a dress this delicate could possibly support the weight of all the beads…

And that's when she felt it—a little tissue-paper packet basted inside the bodice. Sure that her grandmother had intended for her to find this, she ripped the thread and unfolded the paper. Inside was a metal key attached to a small silver medallion with the words "Hempstead Self-Storage."

Mia shuddered as she held the key. Rewrapping it in the tissue paper, she held the packet to her chest and headed back downstairs. There was a story behind the wedding gown, she was sure of it, and the information had to be in the storage unit; otherwise, her grandmother wouldn't have sewn the key into the bodice. Tomorrow she'd go to Hempstead Self-Storage and see what she could find.

In her bedroom, Mia put the packet with the key on the night table. Her grandmother hadn't changed the room at all since Mia had graduated high school. The shelves by the window still held all her old science trophies, and the bulletin board beside it displayed her awards and certificates for outstanding school achievements. She pulled her phone out of her bag, and that's when she noticed she'd missed a message from her grandmother's lawyer, Milt, while she was at dinner. It was unusual for him to reach out to her in the evening. And when she opened the text, the words were even more surprising:

I know you're getting ready to head out with your friend to the Adirondacks, but can you work in a few minutes to stop by in the morning? There was something in your grandmother's mail that I think you should see.

***