The Lowland

dissertation. She’s about to hand it in.
    Her mother spent her days, even Saturdays and Sundays, in the spare bedroom that served as her study, working behind a closed door. It was her office, her mother told her, and when she was in it Bela was to behave as if her mother were not home.
    Bela didn’t mind. She was happy to have her mother at home instead of in Boston for part of the week. For three years her mother had gone to a university there, to take classes for her degree. Leaving early in the morning, not getting back until Bela was asleep.
    But now, other than the evenings she taught her class, her mother almost never left the house. Hours would pass, the door not opening, her mother not emerging. Occasionally the sound of a cough, the creak of a chair, a book dropping to the floor.
    Sometimes her mother asked if Bela could hear the typewriter at night, if the noise of it bothered her, and Bela said no, though she could hear it perfectly well. Sometimes Bela played a game with herself as she lay in bed, trying to anticipate when the silence would be disrupted again by the clattering of keys.
    It was with her mother that she spent most of her time during the week, but there was no picture of Bela’s time alone with her. No evidence of Bela watching television in the afternoons, or working on a school project at the kitchen table, as her mother prepared dinner or read through a pile of exam booklets with a pen in her hand. No proof of them going to the big library at the university now and again, to drop borrowed books into bins.
    There was nothing to document the trips to Boston she and her mother had made once in a while, during her school vacations. They’d taken the bus there together, then a trolley, to a campus in the middle of the city, sandwiched between the Charles River and a long busy road. No proof of the days Bela had spent trailing behind her mother through various buildings as her mother met with professors, or of the time Bela was taken to Quincy Market as a treat.
    Here she is, Bela said as her grandmother came to the next picture.
    Her mother appeared in it inadvertently. The picture was of Bela from several years ago, posing for the camera in their old apartment, with the linoleum floors. She was dressed up as Red Riding Hood for Halloween, holding a bowl heaped with candy to give away.
    But there in the background was her mother, leaning slightly over the kitchen table, in the process of clearing the dinner plates, wearing slacks and a maroon tunic.
    So stylish, Deepa said, looking over her grandmother’s shoulder.
    Her grandmother handed the pictures to her father.
    Keep them, Ma. I made them for you.
    But her grandmother gave them back, loosening her grip so that a few of the pictures fell to the floor.
    I’ve seen them already, she said.
    For the past few years Bela had heard the word dissertation and not had any idea what it meant. Then one day, in their new house, her mother told her, I am writing a report. Like the ones you write for school, only longer. It might be a book one day.
    The reality had disappointed Bela. She’d thought until then that it was some sort of secret, an experiment her mother was conducting while Bela slept, like the experiments her father monitored in the salt marshes. Where he took her sometimes to see the horseshoe crabs scuttling across the mud, disappearing into holes, releasing their eggs into the tide. Instead she realized that her mother, who spent her days sequestered in a room full of books, was only writing another one.
    Sometimes, when she knew her mother was out, or when she was taking a shower, Bela stepped into the study to look around. A pair of her mother’s glasses sat discarded on the desk. The smeared lenses turned things indistinct when Bela raised them to her face.
    Cups containing cold puddles of tea or coffee, some of them sprouting delicate patterns of mold, sat forgotten here and there on the shelves. She found crumpled sheets of paper in the wastebasket, covered with nothing but p ’s and q ’s. All the books had brown paper covers, with titles that her mother had rewritten on the spines so that she could identify them: The Nature of Existence. Eclipse of Reason. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time.
    Recently her mother had started referring to the dissertation as a manuscript. She spoke of it as she might speak of an infant, telling her father one night at dinner that she