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from his pocket. “Oh, maybe the first few nights, but I expect you’ll get used to it after a while, to the point that you’ll find it hard to sleep without them.”
    I took one last look at the long row of wind chimes, wondering whether I’d need to go buy a stepladder so I could remove them, then stepped past Mr. Williams holding open the large door and into the foyer of my new home.
    My first impression was of vastness, of high ceilings and thick baseboards, of a wide and deep foyer with four tall, thick doors opening on two sides, a narrow hallway leading toward the back of the house. A delicate banister of dark wood held aloft by slender spindles curved its way to the second floor, cradling an enormouscrystal chandelier that had more cobwebs than working lights. It smelled of dust and age and neglect, and I finally understood Mr. Williams’s reluctance to allow me to move right in.
    But I saw beauty, too, hidden under the dust and dark shadows. I saw it in the intricately carved ceiling medallions and door cornices, in the broken inlaid wood floors of the dining room and marble pilasters that separated the two parlors. It was there in the graceful sweep of the solid-wood banister and in the tall rice poster beds of the bedrooms upstairs.
    Everything reeked of dust, but I couldn’t help remembering the feeling I’d had staring up at the house, as if it were considering me as much as I was considering it. The sense of expectation, of us both waiting for something to happen. The feeling dogged my steps until I realized I was holding my breath and imagined the house doing the same thing.
    Mr. Williams opened a door to the main bathroom upstairs, and I stayed back, having already been warned—and knowing from seeing just inside the door the chipped marble floor tiles and antiquated claw-foot bathtub—that although the house had modern plumbing and electricity, nothing much had changed in a very long time.
    “Which was Cal’s room?” I asked, my voice sounding loud in the quiet house.
    “This one,” the lawyer said as he moved to the end of the hallway and pushed open a door. The heat poured out of the room, keeping me at the threshold just long enough to see the twin bed and a large chest at its foot. LEGO models covered bookshelves and a small desk under the window, sharing room with school textbooks. A dog-eared copy of
Huckleberry Finn
sat on the nightstand. I stared at it, not recalling ever seeing Cal read a book.
    “It’s like he never left,” I said, unaware I’d spoken out loud.
    “When he left so suddenly, it broke Edith’s heart. She’d neverbeen a happy person, but her grandsons brought a lot of light into her life.”
    “What about Gibbes—Cal’s brother? Did he have a good relationship with Edith?”
    We stepped out of the room and Mr. Williams closed the door, pausing with his hands on the doorknob for a moment while he thought. “They did. Up until Cal left. Gibbes was only about ten at the time, but I think he blamed Edith for making Cal leave. As soon as Gibbes went off to college and med school, he barely came home. Sometimes he would stay with us instead of staying here on his school breaks—he and my sons were good friends. And I don’t think it was all his choice, either. After Cal left, Edith just sort of . . . closed up shop, I guess. She told me . . .” He stopped as if remembering to whom he was speaking.
    “She told you what?” I asked. “I’m sorry to be so blunt, but Cal was my husband. I’m just . . . I’m trying to make sense of all this.”
    He nodded slowly. “She said that Gibbes was better off with us than with her. That she’d failed twice to raise good men and she wanted Gibbes to have a chance. This was still his home, but Edith made sure that he spent a lot of time with us. She thought that we were his only chance to have a happy, normal life. I’m not sure I agreed, but there was nothing I could do to persuade her otherwise. And Gibbes seemed