The Mask

On the twenty-sixth morning after the long holiday, Eric left the study door open.

Luna saw it from the foot of the stairs, with the laundry basket on her hip and a damp towel over her shoulder. The house was quiet. Eric had gone to the office at seven-twenty, as he always did, and Adam had left for school at a quarter to eight with his bag on one shoulder, looking at nobody, and Tomas had not slept in his room over the garage for two weeks. She had stood at the bottom of the stairs a long time, as she did every morning, feeling through her feet the small settling movements of the house, the faint tick of the furnace, the shift of a board under the weight of nothing.

And then she had looked up the stairwell and seen the door at the end of the upstairs hall standing a hand's width ajar, with a line of ordinary daylight on the floorboards in front of it.

She did not go up at once.

In fourteen years she had never seen it so. The study door was shut when Eric was in it, and shut when he was out, and shut on Saturday mornings when he cleaned it himself with a cloth and a bottle of spray. It was shut as the lid of a piano is shut. She set the basket on the bottom stair. She went up slowly, with her hand on the rail, one step and then another, and the wood told her nothing, and at the top of the flight she stopped and stood with her back to the wall.

He forgot, she thought. He has never forgotten anything in his life.

But the door was open. She had to put the towels away, and the linen cupboard was next to it, and the light from the study window lay across the hall like a spilled drink. She would only close it. That was all. She would pull it to, and the latch would catch, and he would never know.

She went and stood at the threshold.

…

It was a small room, and a plain one.

There was a desk against the far wall, under the window, with a lamp and a pen tray and a black computer with its screen asleep. There was a bookcase of gray binders, each labeled with a year. There was a straight wooden chair, and a rug, and a radiator, and a clock on the wall that told her it was twenty to nine. There was a faint smell of lemon polish, and under it a smell she knew from the bedroom, from his collar, of soap and starch and something clean and cold.

It was extraordinarily tidy. It was so tidy that she found herself, absurdly, looking for the crumb. She looked for a speck of dust on the sill, a fingerprint on the glass, a curled sheet in the wastebasket. There was nothing. Everything lay where it ought to lie. Even the light, falling across the desk, seemed to have been arranged.

And in the front of the desk, on the left-hand side, the second drawer stood open about an inch.

She saw it only because she had been looking at the pen tray. A thin shadow lay in the gap, black as a mouth. Everything else in the room was shut, flush, squared; and the drawer was open by the width of a finger, as if somebody had pulled it, and been called away, and had not pushed it home.

She felt her heart begin to beat in her ears.

She was a woman who had learned, over forty years, a particular economy of attention. She had learned not to look at what was not hers to look at. She had learned that a mop did not need to know what was in a bucket. She had learned, in the school for the deaf, in a long cold dormitory, in the dark, to hold very still and see nothing, because nothing was safer, and because the matron's hand on the light switch was a thing that could not be reasoned with. It was her gift. It had kept her alive.

She went across the room to the drawer.

She did not decide to. That was the strangest thing. Afterward she tried to remember the moment of deciding and could not. There was only the rug under her shoes, and the light, and then her hand on the little brass handle, and the drawer sliding toward her with no sound at all.

…

There was a cloth inside.

It was a plain white cloth, of fine linen, folded in thirds and then in thirds again, into a flat neat parcel about the size of a book. She knew the cloth. It was one of his handkerchiefs. She had ironed it. She knew the exact crispness of its hem, because she had pressed a hundred of its fellows, in the laundry room, over fourteen years, and folded them the way she folded everything, the edges true, the corners square.

The folds were hers.

She stood looking down at it, and a thin cold pleasure moved in her, that he had kept it so, and then that moved away, and was replaced by something else. The parcel was not lying flat. It had a slight curve, a slight rise at the center, as a cloth rises over a bowl. Something under it held it up.

She put out one finger and turned back the top fold.

The mask lay in the linen like a face in a cradle.

It was white. It was of a hard smooth plastic, such as are sold in costume shops at the end of October, a plain oval with two narrow curved slits for the eyes and a faint ridge for the nose and, below it, nothing at all. There was no mouth. The artist, if there had been one, had left the lower part blank and smooth, as a stone is smooth, and in the dim light of the drawer it had a pale gleam like the inside of a shell. It was not frightening. That was what she thought, first. It was not a thing that anyone would have been frightened of. It was only a mask, a rather bad one, white as milk, and it looked up at her from its nest of clean cloth with its two thin slits, patiently, and it seemed to her that it was waiting for her to say something.

She had seen it before.

She knew where. She had seen it in the corner of a screen, one night in the winter, a small round white face on a black ground, no larger than a coin, in the light that came from beneath the study door. She had been kneeling on the landing with a wet mop. She had seen it through the keyhole of her own sleep a hundred times since.

She put out one finger and touched it.

It was cool. It was no cooler than the room. She laid the tip of her finger against the smooth blank place where a mouth should have been, and held it there for the space of a breath, and felt, under the finger, nothing. She could not have said what she had expected. A warmth. A pulse. Some small shudder of life, such as a hand feels when it touches a sleeping animal.

Nothing. It was a cold clean thing in a clean cloth.

She took her finger away.

She was breathing quickly. She found that she had her other hand pressed flat against her breastbone, and that her mouth was open, and she closed it. Her whole body had gone strangely light, as if she were about to float up from the floor. She looked down at the white face in the drawer, and the white face looked back.

There is a reason, she thought.

She thought it as clearly as if it had been written on a wall. There is a reason, and it is a good one. It is for work. It is for a show at the office, for the Halloween party, for something to do with the children of the staff. He is a man who is kind to people. He has a great deal of responsibility. It is none of mine.

She believed it. She believed it entirely, for the length of that breath, as one believes a hymn.

And then, with hands that were perfectly steady, she took the corner of the cloth between her finger and thumb, and folded it back over the mask. The top fold first. Then the two sides. Then the bottom. She smoothed the edge with her thumbnail, and pressed it flat, and turned it, a quarter-turn, so that the crease lay along the grain of the wood, as she had found it. She checked the corners. She set it in the drawer exactly where it had lain, with the same slight rise at the center, and the same small shadow on the left.

She slid the drawer to the width of a finger. Not quite closed.

She stepped back and looked. It was perfect. It was so perfect that no one in the world could have said that anyone had been there.

…

There was a small sound behind her.

She did not hear it, of course. She felt it, through the soles of her feet, in the rug, in the old floor, a faint settling, a weight come to rest in the doorway. She turned.

Adam stood on the threshold in his school jacket.

He should have been at school. It was twenty to nine, and the bell rang at eight forty-five. His bag hung from one shoulder, and his face was pale and smooth and perfectly still, and he was looking, not at her, but past her, at the open drawer. Then, slowly, as a camera pans, he brought his eyes to her face.

He raised his hands.

What did you see?

She had known he would. She had known it since the moment she touched the cloth. She stood in the middle of the rug with her hands at her sides, her heart going, and she made her face as it always was, soft and a little puzzled, the face of a woman who has come to put away towels.

Nothing, she signed.

Mother.

Nothing, she signed again, more slowly, so that he could not mistake it. She smiled. I was closing the door.

He did not move.

He looked at her for a very long time, with the flat, clear, adding-up gaze that she had never been able to read, and which she suddenly understood that she had never wanted to. He looked at her face, and her hands, and her mouth, and at the drawer behind her, open by the width of a finger, and at the patch of lit floor between them. There was no accusation in his face. There was no fear. There was only a kind of patient, unbearable attention, as of a boy at a window watching somebody in a field decide which way to walk.

Then he turned, and went down the stairs, one at a time. She felt each step in her heels, and the sound of the front door, and a long silence.

She stood alone in the study. She went out, and pulled the door to behind her, until the latch caught.

…

Eric came home at a quarter to six.

She felt the car in the drive, and the door in the hall. She was at the stove, with her back to the room, stirring a pot of rice. She did not turn. She heard nothing, of course, but the whole house told her: the step on the tile, the briefcase set down, the hook receiving a coat, the soft weight on the stair. He went up. She watched the steam rise from the pot. She counted the strokes of the spoon, one, two, three, and the house was silent.

When he came down, he was in his cardigan.

He came to the kitchen door and stood there. She turned the burner low. She wiped her hands on her apron and lifted her eyes, and there he was, tall and thin and gray, with his glasses glinting, with a look on his long face of mild, courteous interest, as of a man who has come in from the cold and found a room warmer than he expected.

He did not say a word. He looked at her. And she looked at him, and smiled.

It was the smile she had given him for fourteen years. She did not have to think. It rose in her face of itself, a soft round eager shy smile, a smile that said, you are home, and asked for nothing. She held it. She held it for a very long time. And she saw his eyes go over her face once, carefully, from brow to chin, as a man runs his hand over a table to feel for a crumb.

Then he reached into the pocket of his cardigan and took out a folded square of white cotton.

He laid it on the kitchen table, beside the salt.

It was a handkerchief. It was ironed and spotless, and she knew it for one of her own. He smoothed it once with two fingers. Then he moved his lips, slowly, turned a little toward her, so that she could not mistake the shape.

Thank you for tidying.

She nodded.

He smiled back. He went out. In the hall the clock struck six, and she turned to the stove and took the pot from the burner, with hands that did not shake, and set it down.