Someone by Alice McDermott

with musty hair and black fingernails, with fallen hems and caramel-colored plugs of wax in their ears. But Gerty wore a new plaid coat and a new plaid tam-o’-shanter to her mother’s funeral at Mary Star of the Sea, and when I once again climbed the stairs to knock at her door—grateful to discover that therewas no fat woman in the hallway—she smiled to see me. Gerty smiled. Her teeth were still widely spaced, her freckles still vivid across her nose, her wild hair combed as neatly as it had ever been, her curls still thick and tightly woven. She put her hand to my elbow. An older woman in dark clothes stepped out of the kitchen to see who it was, but then stepped back in again.
    “Come see Durna,” Gerty said.
    We went around the polished dining-room suite and into her parents’ bedroom, where I had been before only to say the Rosary. It was filled with a curtain-diffused light. There was a white bassinet at the foot of the bed. The wallpaper was a close and crowded design of roses and green vines, and there were embroidered roses scattered across the bedspread. There was a tall brown dresser against one wall, Mr. Hanson’s doorman’s cap on top of it and, between the two windows, a dressing table with perfume bottles and jars of cream and a silver-backed brush still threaded with Mrs. Hanson’s black hair. The windows here were opened behind the curtains, and sunlight, as well as the metallic odor of sunlit air, filled the room. There was the sound of cars, of people passing by in the street. Gerty took my hand. Together we approached the little bed and peered in. The baby was fair-haired, only a hint of gold across her crown, and red-cheeked, with plump fingers and a mouth like two tiny rose petals, lips the color of a pink rose.
    The baby startled awake when I bumped the bassinet, and her eyes were deep blue, instantly serene. Lashes pale as wheat. She waved her arms. Her wrists and her little hands were fat and dimpled. And then a toothless smile, all for me, I thought, although Gerty, newly minted expert, whispered that it was only gas. There was sunlight pouring into the room. The windows were wide open, but there was no breeze, only the sounds of cars and carts and of some children in the street. When the baby began to fuss, Gerty reached into the bassinet and lifted her, theblanket trailing. She held her on her shoulder, ran her fingertips up and down her spine, as adept as any adult. And then Gerty scooted the quieted child into the crook of her arm. She put her lips to the pretty forehead.
    I felt such a rush of envy then—to be Gerty, to have such a lovely baby in my own care—that I shivered with the thought, well knowing that I had walked upon my mother’s grave.
    From the kitchen came the sound of a teakettle whistling and, behind it, the rattle of baby bottles clinking in a pot of boiling water. I could hear the lady in the kitchen muttering to herself, shutting the icebox, slamming the oven door. I caught the first scent of baking bread.
    Mrs. Hanson would never again be found in these rooms. Or seen waiting for Gerty outside the fence at school. Or met at the grocery, or in the crowds after Mass. Her comb and brush were here, the crystal bottles of her perfume, her children and her husband were here, this lovely baby, but she had vanished forever. And although the day would come when Gerty, sitting beside me on our stoop, would suddenly bow her head to her knees and weep without sound or explanation for what seemed the better part of an hour, at that moment, in the pretty room, with the lovely baby in Gerty’s arms, I believed only that the bright, bustling world had simply closed itself up over Mrs. Hanson’s disappearance, and that this, then, was the way of all sorrow—Gerty’s and the Chehabs’ and perhaps even Dora Ryan’s, once she found someone else—closed up, forgotten, vanished in the wink of an eye.
    In her own last days, my mother asked, on waking, “Am I home?” Because