The Lowland

worried about the pages being blown out an open window, or being destroyed by a fire. She said it worried her, sometimes, to leave them unattended in the house.
    One weekend, stopping at a yard sale, Bela and her father found a brown metal file cabinet among the odds and ends for sale. Her father made sure the drawers opened and closed easily, then bought it. He carried it from the trunk of the car into her mother’s study, knocking on her door, surprising her with this gift.
    They found her at her typewriter, holding her head the way she always did when she concentrated, staring up at them. Her elbows on the desk, the last two of her fingers pressed against her cheekbone, making a V, creating a partial triangle that framed her eye.
    Her father handed her a tiny key that dangled like an earring from a hoop. I thought you could use this, he said.
    Her mother stood up, clearing things off the floor so that Bela and her father could enter the room more easily. Where would you like it? her father asked, and her mother said that the corner was best.
    To Bela’s surprise her mother wasn’t angry, that day, that they’d interrupted. She asked them if they were hungry, and emerged from her study, and prepared them lunch.
    Every day Bela heard the drawers opening and closing, containing the pages her mother typed. She had a dream one night, of returning home from school and finding their house burned down to a skeletal frame, like the houses she would construct out of Popsicle sticks when she was younger, with only the file cabinet, intact, on the grass.
    One day in Tollygunge, pacing up and down the stairs, she noticed small rings bolted to either side of the landing. Black iron hoops. Deepa was wiping down the staircase. She was twisting a rag into a bucket of water, working on her hands and knees.
    What are these? Bela asked, tugging at one of the rings with her fingers.
    They’re to make sure she doesn’t go out if I’m not here.
    Who?
    Your grandmother.
    How does it work?
    I put a chain across.
    Why?
    She might get lost otherwise.
    Like her grandmother, Bela was not able to leave the house in Tollygunge on her own. She was not permitted even to move through it freely, to go down to the courtyard or to visit the roof without permission.
    She was not able to join the children she sometimes saw playing in the street, or to enter the kitchen to help herself to a snack. If she was thirsty for a glass of the cooled boiled water in her water bottle, she had to ask.
    But in Rhode Island, since third grade, her mother had let Bela wander through the campus in the afternoons. She’d done this with Alice, another girl around her age, who had lived in their apartment complex. They were told to remain on the campus, this was all. But the campus was enormous to her, with streets to cross, cars to be mindful of. Easily she and Alice might have lost their way.
    She and Alice had played on the campus as other children might have visited a park, amusing themselves by climbing up and down steps, racing across the plaza in front of the fine arts building, chasing each other on the quadrangle. They stopped in at the library, where Alice’s mother worked.
    They would go to her desk, sit at empty cubicles. Swiveling on chairs, eating snacks that Alice’s mother kept in her desk drawer. They would drink cold water at the fountain, and hide among the shelves of books.
    A few minutes later they’d be outdoors again. They liked to go to the greenhouse that flanked the botany building, surrounded by a flower garden filled with butterflies. They played in the student union on rainy days.
    Bela had prided herself on being unsupervised, finding the way home without having to ask. They were to listen to the clock chiming, to head back in winter by half past four.
    She’d mentioned nothing of these occasions to her father. Knowing he would have worried, she’d kept them a secret from him. And so, until they moved away from campus, these afternoons remained a bond between Bela and her mother, a closeness based on the fact that they spent that time apart. She’d given her mother those hours to herself, not wanting to fail at this, not wanting to threaten this link.
    By now Bela was old enough to wake up on her own, to retrieve the box of cereal left on the counter in the mornings, her hands steady enough to pour milk. When she was ready to leave the house, she walked unaccompanied down the street to