Here She Lies

and patted her sweater pocket, where I had stashed the glass cats hours ago. Reaching in, I extracted the folded tissue and unwrapped it. One by one I laid the cats and kittens in Julie’s palm.
    She smiled. “I still have mine.”
    “I’m saving these for Lexy,” I said.
    “I’ll probably give her mine, too, since I won’t be having my own kids.”
    “You can adopt.” I had reminded her of this a thousand times since her engagement had broken up, but her response was always the same:
    “Alone?”
    “You can afford it easily, Jules. And really, you don’t have to wait for a man. Not anymore.”
    But the truth was, it was more complicated than that. Julie couldn’t have children of her own, a single bout of chlamydia in college having left her infertile. She had basically been told by the school doctor Tough luck, kid. There’s nothing you can do about it now with an insensitivity that showed he’d had it with promiscuous kids. She accepted it stoically and we re-dealt thecards between us, agreeing that I would provide our genetic children. Because presumably our DNA was as identical as our faces, Julie counted as Lexy’s genetic mother. She would never have to suffer the anxiety of being unable to procreate because I could do that for both of us. As for raising her own children, she could adopt. It would be okay. Then a couple of years ago, during her engagement to Paul, just before the printed invitations were to be sent out, he broke down and told her how much he wanted his “own” children and how it was eating away at him to think that in marrying her he would never have the chance. So she released him and he left. Last year he got a woman pregnant, married her and now they were expecting their second.
    “Well” — she glanced again at Lexy — “we’ll see. So, are you hungry? Or do you want to go right to bed?”
    “I ate on the road and I’m exhausted, but to be honest I don’t think I could sleep.”
    “I know what you mean.”
    “Let’s wait up for Bobby.”
    She closed her hand (those long fingers of ours) over the heap of glass cats and said, “Then come see my room.”
    I left the door open (I would plug in the baby monitor as soon as I got the suitcases up) and followed Julie back into the hall. She opened a door I hadn’t noticed near the Pinecone Room. Off a small landing hinged two narrow staircases, one up and one down.
    “Down goes directly into the kitchen,” Julie said. “Up goes to me.”
    The stairs to her room bent twice to reach their destination and I was reminded again of Italy (maybe itwas the handblown cats), climbing behind my parents up a coil of ancient stone stairs with a pole of empty space running from top to bottom. I hadn’t liked being able to see all the way down, the transparency of height frightened me, and walking up I had to resist an urge to freeze in place. But I didn’t; I was a good girl and I soldiered on. Then, at the top of that twisted ribbon of stairs was... nothing. That was the strangest thing: the stairs just ended, as if the architect had run out of ideas. We went back down and that was that. The memory made me think of Zara Moklas and how tonight, outside this very house, her life had ended as abruptly as the stone stairs in an ancient Italian ruin that was never identified (or not that I could remember).
    “Jules? Who do you think killed her?”
    Julie was a few steps ahead of me and she turned around. It was dark in the staircase and I could hardly see her face, but her hand on the thin wooden banister was lit up. I couldn’t see where the light was coming from.
    “I was just thinking the same thing,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
    “I wonder if it was personal, something against her brother, or something else.”
    “There are some nasty old rednecks around here. Or maybe it was someone just passing through. Random. Do you think?”
    Random murders scared me more than anything. “Personal, I hope. Right? Someone killed her, specifically.”
    Julie hesitated. “The thing is, A—”
    I knew what she was going to say, that Zara Moklas looked like us.
    “I know,” I said. “I keep thinking it, too.”
    She opened the door at the top of the staircase and suddenly we were in the huge open space that was her bedroom. It had a high ceiling shaped like the top half of an octagon (it was the old barn roof) with long beams crisscrossing in midair. Strips of lights illuminated the bottom part of the