The Cold House

Chapter One

My father was buried on a Thursday, and the man who put him in the ground did it very well, and I remember being grateful for the competence of it.

There were four of us at the grave. Myself; a verifier in the soft green of the kabol, who attended all unattached deaths as a matter of procedure and stood with her hands folded and her face arranged into the pleasant attentive calm they all wore; the man with the machine that lowered the box; and a woman I did not know, who stood a little apart, at the far end of the open grave, and who left before I could ask her name. I noticed her because she was the only one of us who looked at the box as though it had something in it. The rest of us looked at it the way you look at any task being completed correctly.

I did not cry. I want to be honest about that from the start, because everything that came after depends on it. I stood at my father's grave on a clear cool Thursday and I felt the thing I had been raised to feel, which was a mild and orderly acknowledgment that a process had concluded. A man had lived the expected span. He had died. The arrangements had been seen to. I was his next of kin and so certain matters now fell to me, the house chief among them, and I found myself, standing there, making a list of those matters in my head, and the list was a comfort, the way a list is always a comfort, because a list is a thing you can finish.

I was thirty-one years old and I had never once in my life been undone by a feeling. I did not know that this was unusual, because everyone I had ever known was the same. We were a calm people, a people who had things well in hand.

The official walked me back to the gate and gave me the document that made the house mine and another that listed the offices I would need to notify, and she was kind in the way the forms instruct, and she said the thing they say, which is that my father had completed a full and orderly life and that there was nothing further required of me but the practical. I thanked her. I meant it. I drove back to my own residence and I made my evening meal and I slept without trouble, and if you had asked me then whether I had loved my father I would have answered yes, because it was the correct answer and because I had no way of knowing it was not true.

He had been a strange man. I will say that much, because it was the one fact about him that had ever snagged in me, the one place where the smooth surface of my understanding caught on something it couldn't pass over.

He went away. All through my childhood he went away — for days, sometimes longer — and came back tired and full of a quiet I had no name for, and my mother received his goings and his comings with the same even face she gave to weather, and I learned to do the same, because that is how a child learns everything, by copying the faces around it. Where he went, no one said. That he went was simply a feature of him, the way some houses have a room that is colder than the others and you stop, after a while, even noticing the cold.

And he looked at me. That is the other thing. He looked at me in a way no one else did — too long, and with something working behind his eyes that I could not read and that, if I am honest, made me uncomfortable, the way you are made uncomfortable by a language spoken too close to your face when you do not know the words. Sometimes he would put his hands on either side of my head, gently, and look at me like that, and say nothing, or say small things in a low voice, and I would wait politely for him to be finished, the way you wait for any incomprehensible thing to conclude so that you can go back to what you were doing.

I did not love him. I know that now. I performed the daughter and he watched me perform it and I never once knew that the watching was grief.

He died alone in the house I grew up in, and it was eleven days before anyone knew, because no one had reason to check on a man who was managing his own affairs, and that — the eleven days — is the only part of it that the people at the various offices seemed to find regrettable, and even then what they regretted was the irregularity, the small failure of the system to notice a stopped clock. No one regretted the aloneness. Aloneness was not yet a thing I knew to regret. It was simply the shape a single life took at its end, and his life had been single in every way that mattered for a long time, my mother having concluded her own span a year before him, quietly, on a Tuesday, with the same orderly nothing that I would later feel at his grave.

I did not go to the house for some weeks. There was no urgency. The house would wait; houses do. And I had my own life, such as it was — my community, my place in it, my work, the even unbroken surface of my days, across which nothing ever moved that I had not placed there myself. I kept my home to the standard. I was in good standing, as everyone I knew was in good standing; it was not a thing you thought about, any more than you think about being upright, until something tips you and you discover how much of your life was only balance.

When I did finally go, it was on an afternoon in the failing part of the year, and I went meaning to spend a single day at it — to walk through the rooms, make my inventory, arrange for the disposal of what could be disposed of and the keeping of the little that the regulations required me to keep, and then to lock the door behind me and hand the whole matter to the office that handles such things.

I want to be clear that I went as the woman I have described. Calm. Whole. Well in hand. A woman who had buried both her parents without once breaking the surface of herself, and who believed, insofar as she believed anything about her own interior, that there was nothing under the surface to break.

I did not know there was a room in that house I had never been allowed into. I did not know what it would do to me, or how little of the woman who held those keys would be left by the time I was done.