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as it did when Mother, feeling lonely one night, called me in. It surprised me to learn that she could be lonely, too. She never lets such emotions show. She’s either cool or amused, when she isn’t furious.
    That night, she looked sad, as if it was all too much effort to be, what? Perfect?
    I’d never seen her without makeup. I liked her better without it and told her so. She gave a little what-do-you-know laugh. And I remember thinking,
Why can’t we always be this way, just natural?
She told me a little trick to do with my hair. (My impossible hair!) And that made me brave enough to mention something I’d always wondered about: those little points of light she sent out over the audience during her magic shows.
    She hesitated. “It’s a secret.” But then she threw me a sidelong look. “It has to do with elementals,” she said in a low voice, as if the drapes would overhear. “The astral light’s full of them.”
    “But how do you make them
do
things?”
    “They warm up. I don’t know how else to put it. They warm up if you concentrate in a certain way.”
    “Show me.”
    She shook her head. “That’s what Asa’s always saying. He’d love to know my secret. But he’ll never get it out of me.”
    I looked down. There was suddenly a big sadness in me. Why did it have to be this way?
    She caught my look. “Here. Hand me that bottle.”
    I brought her a slim blue bottle from the vanity.
    She shut her eyes in concentration, and soon a dozen “elementals,” as she called them, hovered in front of me. She uncorked the bottle, and several tiny lights slipped in. She recorked it and handed it to me. “In case you need a night-light,” she said.
    A present. My mother giving me a present! I couldn’tstop staring at it, the tiny lights circling and weaving in their little blue world. “Oh, thank you!”
    She nodded. “That’s fine. Now you’d better run along. It’s time for me to get my beauty sleep.”
    I was being dismissed without so much as a hug. But with an amazing present. I’ve kept it on my night table ever since.
    Now, all these months later, entering the outer chamber—what she calls her sitting room—I trail my hand along a silk table runner. She loved elegant things, like the bronze sculpture of a rearing horse on the mantel. Beside it stands the vase with the white rose. On the floor beneath lies a puddle—the water I spilled on my burning hand. I stare at the rose. This is the flower that was calling me through the maze. Calling, as if it had a voice. Mother’s voice. Yet all I can feel is her absence.
    Only once—on that special night—was I allowed into the innermost chamber. I enter it now, heart hushed. It’s her vaulted bedroom, the ceiling lost in dimness, the whole room suffused with reddish light, like a cathedral. I realize I have never seen the room in daytime. The glow is from sunlight pulsing through the red draperies.
    I fling open the drapes for better light, and the room comes blindingly into focus. I’m searching for signs of the full-length mirror that used to live in the corner. Had I imagined it?
    Wait. The crisp daylight reveals four sharp dents in the carpet. Yes, that’s where it stood! So she
did
take it with her to Trieste!
    Next to the canopied bed hangs the full-length portrait of Mother in a satin gown. And there’s her walk-in closet. Is the gown still there?
    Don’t open the door. You have no right
.
    I fetch an oil lamp from the vanity and step into the closet, finding myself faced with rank upon rank of dresses, gowns, furs, hatboxes, shoes. Battalions of shoes.
    How far back
, I wonder,
does the closet go?
    Holding the lamp carefully, I move along the narrow aisle, dresses brushing against me on either side: “Shhhhhh,” they say.
    Is this a closet or a tunnel?
    Halfway back, I notice a pure white evening gown, with a line of diamonds running down the side. Imagine wearing such a thing!
    No one’s looking
.
    As I drape the dazzling dress over