I'm Taking This

Emily lifted the glass apple from the lip of the china cupboard. Flakes of gold sparkled in the sunlight when she gave the apple a little shake. The sun caught an edge of glass in the stem and flashed a rainbow of prismatic sunlight across the wall. Glittering joy quickened Emily’s despair. Only her quickened breath intake made a sound in the quiet house.

Her mother was dying. She had in-house hospice care with on-site care givers. Her older sister Sara was buying the house to help finance the cost of the caregivers. It was a nice alternative to a nursing home, but it gave power to Sara, thought Emily. 

She had been spending time before the death casing the contents of the house. There were decades of valuables and beautiful objects both inherited and collected by her mother and placed just so or hidden away. There was no way Sara was going to get those things, not over her mother’s dead body.

Mom was Emily’s best friend, that’s what Emily thought. Sara had the jobs, hobbies, a social life, albeit a limited one since she was an artist, like her mother had been, and there was only so much time in a day, she had once told Emily. Emily went upstairs to her mother’s room and waited. When Mom awoke, Emily came up with a few words of small talk and then cut to the chase, and as time unfolded it did indeed become a chase. The chase was Emily’s hunt for valuables. Chase, acquire, research; it became a ritual.

She asked her mother if she could have the gold-flecked apple. Her mother gave her a weak smile and told her background behind the apple. She told Emily she could have it. Emily felt the jump of elation, the satisfaction of a win.

This became routine. Emily collected valuables from the house – Wedgewood, Waterford, Portmeirion, Royal Albert, Royal Copenhagen - and the stories behind them. Her mother seemed to enjoy relating memories through objects. For both Emily and Mom it and made the oncoming death seem less real, or at least less awful. A void was being filled. When Emily left the house with each valuable in hand, carefully wrapped, often hidden, she felt a frission of delight.

She set a routine for this. Every other day she went into the house. Quietly she opened a drawer or a cupboard of an Early American lowboy or hutch. She made mental or written notes of inventory. She returned home with a precious object. She researched another object from her notes for her next visit.

She would prize a precious vase or tea cup and saucer from its decades long place of rest and ask her mother about it or just take it. When she took things without asking secreting them out of the house, she felt a thrill, a rush. Her heart beat a bit faster, her thoughts sharpened.

The bolder move crushed her insecurities about not achieving all the things Sara had achieved. At the same time Emily was secretly scoring what she considered to be a piece of the house. The secret in itself was a delightful, little victory.

***

Emily sent the text from the six mile market on Route 62. She didn’t bother to pull over to the side of the road. She just typed the letter one-handedly to her older sister Sara. There was a good chance that sending the text from that dead spot would delay Sara’s receipt of the message by about an hour. In the town Emily lived in the cell phone service was predictably erratic. Anyway, it was afternoon; Sara was probably engaged in some activity important to her like work calls or drawing or painting, sewing, the list was so long.

The text read, “Going to Mom’s. Are you?”

The house was quiet as Emily walked around inside. She glanced at the kitchen wall clock: three-ten. The caregiver was probably resting. The safety monitor on the kitchen table displayed her mother was sleeping.

Emily noticed a mirror on the downstairs hallway wall. It surprised her that she had never noticed it before. It wasn’t large. It was a portrait mirror with a dark frame decorated with gold-leaf stencil, another one of her mother’s meticulous and beautiful projects.

Emily looked at her reflection: dark brown hair cropped short in wavy layers, her father’s pale blue eyes. Richard Clement had died five years ago, quickly, unexpectedly: his heart just stopped. There was a medical term for it but Emily could never remember the jumble of words. In the mirror Emily was proud to see that her eyes looked bright, her make-up wasn’t smeared, any smudge of fatigue under her eyes was skillfully concealed. The top button of her shirt was properly undone and the collar straight.

She lifted her hand to the framed edge, tracing the outline of the gold pattern with a finger. Her hand rested on the frame. A flash of thought said, “Take it.” She caught her reflection again and thought, “No, not this. It will be noticed. After all, it’s a mirror.”

Less than an hour later Emily was leaving the living room when she looked up and saw Sarah by the stairs, that mirror behind her. How did she get into the house unheard? It was just like her to sneak in and suddenly appear.

Sara, as usual, looked like she had just blown in on the wind. The layers of her wavy copper hair were thick and long, wafted and whirled all over her head and shoulders. Her loose crocheted top was askew and one arm of it was rolled up, the other fell loose. The cuffs of her boyfriend jeans were uneven and she was wearing scuffed, black ankle boots., Emily thought, Sara’s the one that needs a mirror.

“What’s that?” Sara asked, nodding toward Emily’s hands.

As she was turning the frame to show Sara, Emily said, “Isn’t this nice? Mom said I could have it.” It was a bold lie. Emily was brave now. She had done her research; she had put in the time, she deserved these things, this thing. And at least she was put together properly. Emily paid attention to detail.

Emily noticed Sara’s eyebrows lift for a second when she saw what the frame held. Then Sara’s face returned to her usual inscrutable expression as if she was a seasoned poker player.

Sara said, “She told you could have the frame?”

It was a nice frame: polished walnut with a graduated series of moulding. The walnut framed a sampler embroidered on linen, a color scheme of green, brown, golds. There were a few lines of verse with the name Walt Whitman above a simple scene of two deer, trees, birds. It looked very nineteenth century but it was in pristine condition.

Emily couldn’t read anything else in Sara’s face. It had relaxed back to its typical peaceful but focused façade. Emily knew it was a façade. No one was that calm. No one could read Sara but the woman certainly had a lot going on and a lot of opinions.

Emily’s heart started to pound rapidly. Panic. This was not part of her ritual. Her ritual had been conducted quietly and secretly, methodically with no interference. She never should have texted Sara. Sara wasn’t part of her ritual.

Emily said, “I’m taking this.”

Sara said, “I don’t think so. If Mom said you could have that she made a mistake.”

Emily dug in. “Ah, yes, I am. We’ve been going through some things. You’re buying the house but not all the contents, you know.”

Sara said, “There’s a Will to take care of all the stuff. This isn’t the time to take things.”

The surge in Emily was like a hot wave. “Well, this is for me.” Even she could hear the loud demand in her voice.

Sara put her hands on her hips. Emily could read that posture. “Is it signed?” Sara asked. “Good artists sign their work discreetly. Mom told me that forever ago.”

Emily turned the piece toward her and searched for the artist’s signature or initials. The force of blood pounding through her head momentarily blinded her. How could she not have seen the signature? She had been enjoying the thrill of the chase, the find, the take. She had missed a step. There it was, “Sara Clement, 2012.”

Emily spit words out with disgust. “She must have mistaken this for something else,” Emily said. She reached out and tossed the piece onto a Belmont-style accent chair upholstered with white damask fabric. “I’ll go upstairs.” Her ritual so harshly interrupted Emily couldn’t wait to get away from Sara.

She didn’t get halfway up the stairs before the caregiver appeared and spoke from the top step. “She wants to see Sara,” she said. “Is she here?”

Emily gripped the handrail and turned. Her own voice echoed in the stairwell as she went back down. “Sara, you, upstairs.” She turned at the bottom step toward the living room where Sara was looking out the bay window. “She wants you upstairs,” Emily said. “Are you deaf?”

After Sara had gone upstairs Emily went into the kitchen, and the caregiver came in behind her. “I’m getting an afternoon tea ready. Would you like some?” the caregiver asked her.

Emil declined and swiped the safety monitor off the kitchen table, went into the dining room and shut the paneled doors. She set the volume of the monitor just so, placed it on the table, and opened the top door of a hutch to look busy. She’d already been through this one before.

Bored she listened to the small talk as she poked through linens, coasters, until she heard her mother say, “I don’t think I have much more time.”

Emily looked at the monitor. Her mother looked gray, tired, sad.

There was some comment by Sara muffled by the monitor’s audio since it was set to pick up her mother’s voice clearly.

“Yes, I know,” her mother said. “Just listen. You’ve been buying this house. I want to tell you something.”

Emily couldn’t believe what came next. Her mother told Sara a story about Emily when she was a young teenager. Something about Emily walking to the local shop in town to buy a proper blue shirt for school photos. She had money Mom had given her, bought the shirt, came home, showed her mother. Her mother had glanced at the receipt.

“May I have the change?” her mother had asked.

Emily had responded that there wasn’t any.

Mom told Sara, “It didn’t take a math genius to know Emily should have returned over ten dollars to me. The story goes on, but do you understand what I’m telling you?” Mom asked Sara. Emily saw that sharp bird-like look her mother could still pull off as she looked at Sara.

After Sara confirmed that she had gotten the point, Mom continued. “I may be confined here, but I know what’s going on in my house,” she continued. “So you won’t be surprised, I want you to know that I changed my Will. It’s all done. It’s all legal. I want you to know the terms are greatly in your favor.”

Emily heard only a static impaired muffled response from Sara. She was surprised she could hear anything. Blood was pounding in her head and echoing in her ears. Her mouth had gotten dry and her right hand had cramped around a pretty but worthless pottery vase.

Her mother continued talking about this unfair betrayal behind Emily’s back. Emily knew what she was entitled to. She was the one that visited all the time. Sara was like a leaf in the wind, blowing in quietly every now and then. How could her mother do this?

Then she heard Mom say, “Emily has benefited from her petty actions and theft. It helps her process what’s going on here. But she can’t possibly keep all those items in her small house, not in the limited cupboards or displayed. She’s bound to sell things if she hasn’t already. What I’ve done is only fair.”

The End