The Last of the Light

September held onto the summer, hugging a little piece of August tight against its chest even after August’s welcome was thoroughly worn out already. All the windows in Brooke's house were open. Through them, as she moved up the stairs, Edith heard someone mowing the lawn two doors down, and a handful of small children shouting in the sprinkler across the street.

Brooke met her sister on the second floor, already apologizing.

"You really don't have to do it all," she said hastily, her voice half-swallowed with embarrassment. She held her keys in one hand and a folder in the other — a thick folder, with writing scribbled on it in several places and a tab labeled in the block capitals that lawyers use. "I can get out the quilts and everything tomorrow. I don't mean to make you work just because you're here; I just need someone for Ivy —"

"Go," Edith interrupted, so lovingly that it didn't even sound sharp. "You'll be late, and lawyers bill you for being late."

Brooke laughed, which was exactly what Edith hoped would happen. Then she looked down the hall toward Ivy's door and made a face, small and anxious. Trying hard not to look crushed, because mothers can't afford to look crushed even when they are. "I hate leaving her when —"

"She'll be with me." Edith put her arm briefly around Brooke’s shoulders and, as she withdrew it, carefully lifted the worry off those shoulders and folded it into a small packet that she tucked neatly beneath her arm. "We'll be just fine. Won't we, Ivy."

From inside Ivy's room, they heard one of those vague noises that a nine-year-old makes instead of the words I guess so.

"There," Edith told her sister firmly. "Go. Get the custody terms sorted and done with. That's your job today. Ivy is mine."

So Brooke went down the stairs and out the screen door, which clapped once behind her. The car backed out into the warm, bright sunshine. The house seemed to sigh, settling onto its foundations with a tired slump. Edith rolled up her sleeves.

She started with the light, because there was a lot of it.

It came in strong at that hour of morning, a long slab of it lying across most of the floorboards. She folded it from corner to corner, the way you'd fold a sheet that's dried on the line, first this direction and then that, until the thing in her hands was small and plump, and the floor behind her had gone the ordinary gray of early autumn. 

She set the light in the box. Then she picked up the packet of worry that she'd taken from her sister's shoulders. She smoothed it into tenderness instead, for when it would be rediscovered next spring, and then she laid it into the box beside the folded summer light.

She stripped the top sheets that had been all anyone wanted since June and shook out the quilts instead, and while she was at it she folded up the warmth too — the heat that sat in the brick stoop at six in the evening, that you could still feel through your jeans an hour after the sun was down. She folded that precisely, along its creases, so it would lie straight when it was shaken out next year, and she settled it in the box.

There was a great deal to put away. She worked through it steadily, without haste -- because haste leads to errors, and a badly folded season can cause serious trouble in a later year. She wondered briefly if somebody had misfolded Brooke's marriage in some earlier summer... but that job hadn't been in her hands, whatever might have happened.

She got the fall school clothes out of the big trunk, and in their place she packed away the shorts and the swimsuits, and the halter tops in nine-year-old sizes. There was still room left in the trunk, so she rolled up the long evenings, the ones that hadn't quit until after nine. She wound down the sound the crickets made until it was small enough to tuck away in one corner. She was reaching for the smell of the tomatoes going red and soft on the vine, when she noticed Ivy in the doorway, sitting on the floor with her back against the frame, watching her with eyes too big and too shadowed for a nine-year-old.

Edith nodded at her — once, politely, keeping a respectful distance. She went on working.

The girl watched as Edith folded the flat white shine that noon throws off the driveway asphalt, and the sparkling blue that the pool down the road had shone beneath the hot afternoon sun, before the owners had drained it for the season. Ivy's eyes followed her hands attentively.

"You missed some," Ivy said, pointing.

Edith looked. Low in the southeast corner, where the wall met the floor, a little of the bright summer light was still caught — a loose, warm scrap, July-colored, that her eyes had gone right past.

She stopped and looked at Ivy.

Most people never saw her real work. She had done this in a hundred houses, with hundreds of clients who thought she was only helping them deal with their domestic clutter, and in all that time maybe a handful of them had felt the slightest draft of it. Her own sister had spent a whole childhood in the same bedroom with her and never once — not as a girl, and not now — had it occurred to Brooke in the least that Edith was anything but a successful organizer who got very good reviews. 

And here was Ivy, sitting on the floor with a brown side-braid and mismatched socks, pointing at the light in the corner that Edith had missed.

"So I did." Edith kept her voice calm and exact. She went and got the light, and folded it in. "Thank you."

After that, Ivy shared the work. She stayed in the doorway, and she watched the whole area with dark, careful eyes. When Edith's own eyes were full enough to miss occasional pieces, Ivy would say there's a bit by the window or under the chair, and Edith would go get it. They went on like that, room by room, the box filling slowly as the house cooled by degrees toward the fall.

Then Edith reached for the amusement pier, and the pier would not let go.

She had it by the edges — the hot, salt-wood smell of the boardwalk, the sugar and grease of the midway booths, the sand under absolutely everything. She folded it the way she'd folded all the rest. It sprang back open in her hands, warm and whole and categorically refusing. She tried to roll it up, which sometimes worked for things that didn't like to fold. It unrolled itself before she'd even finished the roll. It sat open in her hands, stubborn and bright and entirely summer. Edith, who had not fumbled a single fold all afternoon, stopped and held it and looked it over.

Then she looked at Ivy.

The girl sat with both arms wrapped around her knees, staring at the thing in Edith's hands as if it had a hook sunk deep under her ribs.

"Ah," Edith said softly. She set the pier down in her lap, where it lay still unfolded and glowing bright. "It's yours, this one."

Ivy didn't answer that directly. But after several seconds, her long brown eyelashes dropped low on her cheek. She murmured hoarsely, "Daddy was going to take me."

Edith waited.

It came out sideways, a piece at a time, between long silences. The Tilt-A-Whirl, which was the best ride, the one she always did twice, at the beginning and at the very end. The popcorn and cotton candy that you could smell all the way from the house when the wind was right. The way you walked on the sand instead of the boardwalk, because the boards were rough and hot under your flip-flops and the sand was better. 

He'd promised. That was the thing, more than the pier itself. Back in June, before (and here the silence was longest) before everything got the way it was now between Daddy and Mom. Then Daddy had moved out in July, and he was busy setting up his new apartment downtown. When he came to see her it was quick, with somewhere else he needed to be, and the promised visit to the pier had never happened. There was always going to be a Saturday for it. There just hadn't been one yet.

"And now it's September," Edith said, with real sympathy.

"Now it's September," Ivy agreed, very low.

Outside, the mower two yards over had stopped and the street was quiet, the day tipping over slowly into evening.

Edith did not say anything about Ivy's father. There were things she thought about saying, and she folded those away too — not in the box, where they would come out the next spring, but tightly inside her own head where they couldn't do any harm.

"That's a real loss," she answered finally, instead. "A day at the pier your father promised you. I won't tell you it's not important."

Ivy's chin was on her knees. Her eyes remained down, so that her eyelashes were all that Edith could see. They looked very faintly damp.

"The pier stays open until the end of October, on weekends," Edith reflected. "After that they shut down for the winter." She turned over the warm, bright thing once in her hands. "I can't give you the Saturday he promised. That one was for him and you, and it's gone, and I'm not him. I know that.”

She looked up at Ivy's dark, lowered lashes, and took a breath. “But I've got a car, and I'm not busy. I'd like to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl with you. Twice. If that's any good to you."

Then she shut up, difficult though it was. She did not reach either for the girl or for the thing in her lap. She just let it sit there, glittering, and her hands fell to her sides. 

Ivy looked at the pier in Edith's lap for a long time. Edith saw her weighing the small thing she could have against the big one that she couldn't; working out whether it counted, whether it was enough.

Then she got up off the floor, walked over, and took the pier from her aunt.

She folded it herself. The Tilt-A-Whirl first, both turns of it, with the corners tucked in. The popcorn-and-cotton-candy air that you could smell all the way from the house when the wind was right. The walk along the sand, because the boards were rough under her flip-flops, she folded in last of all. She was careful with the creases — more careful than Edith had been at her age — and she laid it in the box with all the rest of summer.

It went flat under her hands, and it stayed.

Edith said nothing at all. She closed the lid.

Downstairs the screen door clapped, and Brooke's voice floated up the stairwell, ordinary and tired. "Hi, you two. How'd you make out while I was away?"

Ivy looked at the closed box, and then at the window, where the light was now the thin, clean silver that means autumn has come round the corner and there's no calling summer back.

"Aunt Edith," she asked solemnly. “We can go on a Saturday?"

"We can go on a Saturday," Edith answered.

There was no word of promise, which Ivy would not have believed, but a calm intention in her voice that she thought the child would understand.

Ivy shook her braid back over her shoulder. “Can I bring the box down cellar?” 

“If you can carry it,” Edith answered, and was not surprised to see Ivy lift the big box capably, from her legs instead of her back, the way heavy things should be lifted. 

Edith went to the front hall, to ask her sister how the meeting had gone with the lawyers. And Ivy went down the back stairs, to put summer away in the cellar until next year.