Chapter 3 - The Woman Who Mopped the Floors
I didn't sleep. I sat at the kitchen table with the key in front of me and the note beside it and read those four words until they stopped being words.
Someone had slipped that note into Maddie's bag during the school day. Someone who knew Maddie belonged to me. Someone who'd gotten close enough to an eight-year-old to hand her a forty-year-old sweater, and then sat back to see what it shook loose.
At 11:40 I called Karen.
"Mom? It's almost midnight." Her voice was furry with sleep.
"I need everything Maddie knows about the new cleaning lady at school. Her name, what she looks like, anything Maddie's said about her."
A beat of silence. "What is going on with you?"
"Please. Ask her in the morning, before the bus. I'll explain when I can."
She said okay, but I could hear she didn't like it.
I picked the key back up. It sat dead center in my palm. The head was a plain oval, the way old ones are. Three teeth along the blade, and the edges of them worn round and smooth.
That was the thing I kept coming back to. This was not a key that had spent forty years in a drawer. Somebody had been putting it in a lock, over and over, for a long time.
I got maybe two hours of sleep.
Karen called back at seven.
"Her name's Marta. She started about three weeks ago. Maddie loves her because she always says good morning and sometimes sneaks her a cookie from the break room."
"What does she look like?"
"Gray hair, in a braid down her back. Quiet. Older — Maddie figures she's somebody's grandma." Then Karen's tone changed. "Mom. You're scaring me a little. What is this?"
"Soon. I promise. Does Maddie know her last name?"
"No. But Mom — there's something else." She hesitated. "Maddie said the cleaning lady asked her once whether her grandma had a twin sister."
My kitchen went dead quiet.
"She asked about me."
"She asked if you were a twin. Maddie said yes. And Maddie said the lady didn't say anything back. She just kind of nodded and went back to mopping."
I was already pulling my coat off the hook.
Glenwood Elementary was twenty minutes away. I got there before the first bell. The woman at the front desk had her reading glasses shoved up into her hair.
"I need to talk to someone on your custodial staff," I said. "A woman named Marta."
"Is there a problem?"
"No. She gave my granddaughter something that belongs to my family. I want to thank her in person."
The receptionist picked up the phone and murmured into it. I stood at the counter and watched down the long hallway, past the trophy case and the bulletin board of paper leaves.
A couple minutes later a woman came around the far corner pushing a yellow mop bucket on wheels. Gray braid. Green work shirt. She walked slow, with her shoulders rolled in — the way people stand when they've spent a whole life trying not to be noticed.
She hadn't seen me yet.
I took a step toward her, and she looked up.
And the floor dropped out from under me.
Because her eyes — dark brown, wide-set, with that little crease at the outside corner — were the eyes I'd been looking at in the mirror every morning for fifty-six years.
They were my eyes. They were Diane's eyes.
Her hands went still on the cart. Neither of us moved.
"I wasn't sure you'd come here yourself," she said quietly.
"Diane?" My voice came out like a little girl's.
May you like
She shook her head. Once. Slow.
"My name is Marta," she said. "But you and I need to go somewhere with a door that closes."
