Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

again.
    I knew that neither Michelle nor Luke would understand my grief, Michelle because she blamed me for destroying our family, Luke because he blamed Mother for robbing me of my identity. But I grieved, for the simple reason that I had loved her. She’d been my mother for twenty-one years, and I had loved and needed her.
    With my aching arm pressed to my side, I climbed the stairs. In my room I found my blue canvas luggage lined up at the foot of the bed, along with several empty cardboard boxes. Rosario would pack all my belongings the following day and a mover would collect them and take them to Luke’s apartment.
    I knelt by the bed, felt under the mattress and drew out the book on locks. Somehow it seemed important that no one find it. I stuffed it into my shoulderbag, then went out to the hallway.
    Mother’s bedroom door was closed. When I touched the doorknob, I felt the same ripple of apprehension and shame that had gone through me when I’d sneaked in to look at the picture.
    I opened the door.
    The draperies were drawn and the room was dark and cool. I flipped the light switch. Everything looked as it always had, peach and blue perfection. In the air hung the faint flowery perfume of the sachet Mother used in her closet and drawers.
    The picture was gone from her dresser. Only Michelle would have removed it. What did she do with it? I wondered if she’d held it and tried to believe the child was her.
    I had to take what I was after and get out of this room. Opening the closet, I tried to ignore the neat row of dresses, the scent of sachet. Mother’s purse hung from a hook on the back of the door. The purse contained only a few things, and I found her keys quickly. 
    Downstairs again, I went straight to Mother’s study, without allowing myself so much as a glance at the kitchen. I unlocked the file drawer where I’d found the strange note on the night Mother was hospitalized. I pulled out the sheet of blue paper, leaving behind the folder that had held it. Although I didn’t know yet what it meant, I was certain this was a message from the past, a link to the life that waited to be discovered.
    …no regrets…the one beautiful thing I’ve got left.
    I read the words over and over until I noticed my hand was trembling. I folded the sheet, slid it into my shoulderbag.
    Next I moved to the closet, knelt and opened the box that contained the photo albums. Refusing to let myself dwell on the images, I flipped through one of the books until I found the posed studio portrait of the three of them: mother, father, little daughter. It was the same picture that had accompanied the newspaper account of the accident.
    For a moment I considered taking the albums away so Michelle wouldn’t stumble unprepared onto the photos of Michael and Judith Goddard and their real daughter. Like me, my sister was running on autopilot right now, and these pictures could bring her crashing to reality. The old urge to protect her, to cushion her fall, rose in me. But the time for that was past. I could not protect her from the truth of our lives.
    I laid the album back in the box and closed the lid.
    Unable to make myself go up to Mother’s room again, I left the keys on the desk. I went out through the front door and walked around to the back yard.
    The garden looked impossibly cheerful, neat, normal. Only five days had passed since I was last here, but if I’d found the blossoms shriveled, the foliage dried up, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, the dahlias and late roses bloomed on, oblivious to the absence of their owner, and a sweet powdery scent hung in the humid air. Cicadas droned in the trees, but the birds had fallen silent in the midday heat.
    I walked down to the edge of the woods, past the line of shrubs to the cages. The doors stood open, and when I approached a dozen sparrows burst out in a flurry of wings.
    The sight of the abandoned cages brought hot tears to my eyes. I drew in a long steadying breath. What needed doing here?
    Maybe some other rehabber could remove the cages as they were, load them on a truck and take them for his or her own use. But suddenly I was seized by a need to destroy them, to know they simply didn’t exist anymore.
    I dropped my shoulderbag on the ground and, almost running, returned to the house, entered through the front again, and clomped down the basement stairs and into the laundry room where the toolbox was kept. I grabbed a hammer and crowbar.
    Awkwardly