The crash jolts me from my desk, the thwack and rattle of glass. A bird has collided with the window, perhaps a robin or mourning dove. I scan the balcony, the tree tops, the yard below. On the window, tufts of feathers quiver. I see the faint imprint of a wing.  Downstairs, I scour the yard, my terrier beside me. The bird is nowhere. I tell myself it lives and bemoan the fact of glass.

I return to my desk, distract myself with an online article telling me to “click on the masterpieces.” The woman bathing dissolves beneath my cursor to reveal a bearded man wearing a jacket and bow tie—Picasso’s Blue Room. Beneath Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass appears the scarf-wrapped head of a Dutch peasant. A homely woman glowers behind Allori’s gentle Isabella de Medici. I am transfixed. Underpaintings revealed by infrared x-rays, abandoned and painted over. 

I click out of the article and a photo from our trip to Israel appears on my screen. My mother gazes toward a lapping Mediterranean, face resplendent. We are in Jaffa, her birthplace, on a tour of the Holy Land. It has taken seven decades for her to return. She was 12 when bombs shattered the King David Hotel, the explosion reverberating for miles. Her parents bundled their seven children into the car. A precautionary few days away. No backward glances at her dolls, her piano. She remembers the coat she wore, the smell of damp wool. She does not remember we have spoken twice by phone today. The day is long.

My husband is asleep when I slide under the covers, the moon shining through the plate-glass doors. I lie propped too high for sleep, thinking of the bird, the shock of wings against glass—and of my mother, the shock of memories gone. I want to sort it out, as if life can be paired, folded, and stacked in drawers.

We never know our mothers except as mothers. They come into being only upon our birth. It is through no fault of our own. We do not possess infrared vision. That they pre-exist us is of little relevance, until we start to lose them. 

For seventy-one years, she refused to return. Too dangerous, she said. The rockets of a thousand enemies threatened. I do not point out the direct hits of cancer, divorce, and—now—the erosion of memory. Bits of herself loosen, peel, flake off, lay waste the portrait. The only longing to return seemed to be mine, a sacred pilgrimage across time, her childhood my holy land.

At eighty-three, dazed by the collision into time, she forgot her fear. 

The moon illuminates the bedroom, a heavenly light on a blue planet. We fix our eyes on the seen, but it is the unseen that tells our story. I think of Picasso.

Clouds shaped like mythic gods sweep above the German Colony, a tree-lined neighborhood outside the old city of Jerusalem. We jostle beside the stone wall fronting her childhood house, the Arabic taxi driver waving us into a pose, see too late that my mother has pushed open the hunter-green gate, is crossing the leafy courtyard, approaching the front door, our protests unheard. “This is my house,” she says. The young man—a caregiver—offers a kindly smile, and beckons. We—children and grandchildren—follow, first through the house and then into the yard. Beneath the scudding clouds, the portrait of a mother at dusk dissolves to reveal a curly-haired child at play among the chickens. From gnarled branches, her brothers pelt a nearby house with apples. Her sister has toppled into the pond, her bucket too heavy. The clouds break. My mother is bathed in a burst of sun. 

My husband stirs, settles, eyes masked against an alabaster sheen. Who we are, time takes. But I do not lose heart. Glass is no barrier to heavenly light. 

Within the pages of newspapers, spun across seemingly disparate facts, unseen threads spool out, span and tangle, weave stories that glisten into sight only rarely. And usually without poetic aesthetic. Take this: two items reported three months apart but occurring on the same day: 

Notice of trustee’s sale: The property at 125 South Tassajara Drive may be sold at a public auction to the highest bidder. Date of Sale is April 20, 2015. 

April 20, 2015, 11 a.m.: Firefighters respond to a house fire on South Tassajara Drive. 

A month later, two months, four, and her house stands still, boarded up, plywood nailed against the windows, against the front door, planks fastened against the curious, the brazen, emits an acrid seep of smoke. Faded crime scene tape sways across the vacant driveway. On the roof, tarps slap and ripple, filmy edges loosed in gusts, flapping, twisting, expose the rips in the shingles, the descent into flames. Behind the house, twin pine trees soar, unsinged. A crack splits the front retaining wall, dives beneath the concrete sidewalk, disappears beneath the house, a metaphor. Against the porch railing, a vase holds limp daisies and a scrawled note. A late spring rain has blurred the words. 

April 20, 2015, 3:00 p.m.: Woman found in burning SLO home has died, official says.

She was the Miss Emily Grierson of our neighborhood, the Boo Radley, the Norma Jean, owing not taxes to Jefferson in Faulkner’s south, but a mortgage on a second, right here on our street, her house in foreclosure yet again, the house she twirled batons in as a child, the house she refused to leave for a fiancé, the house that held her father’s and then her mother’s ashes. The neighborhood watched her vanish by bits, finally lock herself away behind closed curtains, slipping out on the occasional moonless night to sit on her front porch, an empty wine glass betraying her at dawn. Youth had not completely left her yet, a faded beauty should anyone catch a glimpse of her on a rare Saturday morning walk to the corner market, under her broad-brimmed hat hints of alabaster skin, arched brows, honey blonde hair—a ringer for a Hollywood starlet once, with sin-red lips and fitted sweaters, said those who knew—though illness had blanched and bloated her, rotted her teeth, bulged her eyes, taken her mind, some said, unraveled her—so the whispers went. Our whispers. Her whispers. 

They’ll try to break through the front door. It is a moonless night, past the witching hour, and she is wrapping duct tape around the gate latch to the front porch, the gate latch to the side yard, twisting and braiding. She tramps through weeds and dead branches, careful not to muss a patch of earth sheltered beneath a rose bush. Mere weeks ago, we helped bury her Gigi, a Yorkshire terrier wracked with diabetes, my husband shoveling the hard dirt over the taped shoebox, my teenage daughter and I quieting her rising hysteria. Now two dogs bark from inside the den, beyond them on the cluttered desk her beloved Abyssinian, watching. 

They’ll shatter the glass. She steps across the deck, opens the sliding glass door, drags an exercise bike across the room, pushes it against the door. The rear frame catches on the carpet, knocks over the can of acetone. They’ll think they can put it out. She splashes the liquid recklessly, backs through the doorway into the kitchen, sets the can on the counter. They’ll try to yank open this door. She jams a chair beneath the handle, ropes them together, wraps and knots. Picking up the can, she pours out more liquid, splashes a path through the cluttered hallway, stops short of the bedroom. The walls are covered floor to ceiling with paintings, oils and watercolors signed in her mother’s neat hand, seascapes, tall-masted sailboats, wheat fields and farmhouses, on the coffee table piles of unopened mail, dated magazines, stained teacups, a novelty book, its cover a photo of Marilyn Monroe. Sponge curlers lie scattered beside stacks of romance novels, silk flowers, shoeboxes teeming with prescription bottles. Decades of hoarding barricade the front entry. She traps herself free. Her dogs yap at her heels, her cat slinking past. 

The fire smoldered for hours. 

She killed her animals first. We don’t know how. It took the police three weeks after the fire to find them, carrying them in bags from the backyard. They wouldn’t tell us, though we were the ones who’d told them. 

Who is she? How old is she? Does she have family? 

She’s Miss Emily Grierson, Boo Radley, Norma Jean. She’s 47. Her family is three dogs and a cat. We buried Gigi last month. 

After her mother died the summer before, she no longer let them outside. Her house reeked of urine and feces and failed chemical warfare, a choking ambush should she crack open the front door for a plate of cookies, the stench woven into her clothes. When she killed them, she killed herself. The fire was merely a formality.

My daughter calls me from Panera, where she has gone with friends. “I miss her,” she says through sobs. “I brought her here so many times. We were going to shop at Forever 21, and she was going to illustrate my book.” My daughter drove her to doctor’s appointments, treated her to burgers and shakes, followed her into thrift stores, returning home with fashion finds right off Madison Avenue. During late-night phone calls over boyfriend woes, my daughter would find a veritable Dear Abby: “I tell you, he’s working my last nerve,” she’d say. 

We’d surprised her with a birthday party in November, the neighbors gathered in our kitchen to celebrate her 47^th year, a year that lasted five months. She knew then what we didn’t, blushing as we sang to her, blowing out the blazing wishes on her cake. 

Tipped off by our mail carrier, we saw the notice in January’s Tribune, whispered among ourselves, watched her house anxiously, wondered when she would come out, and if she did, what we would say. Email messages went unanswered, phone calls never returned. And then Gigi took ill.

“All suicides are sad,” writes my older daughter from her home in England, “but it sounds like she picked quite a statement way of going out, taking her house with her. Shows a certain strength of mind.” Or a mental illness, according to the next-door neighbors. “What she did was a cruel and selfish act—but we can forgive her—she was so mentally fragile.” They are far more charitable than I. If she weren’t already dead, I’d kill her myself. It’s a rage unknown. In suicide, I discover, there is always a murder of another. This initial rage, the shocked recoil of the unnecessary, the unthinkable, dissipates by the time we hold her celebration of life. “She made our lives so much richer despite her pain,” we say to the somber few who attend—six neighbors, a grocery clerk, and her one-time fiancé—and we mean it. “We wish our love had been enough.” And that is it, after all. We weren’t the highest bidder.

Shortly after moving into our house, we told our next-door neighbors we’d invited her for Saturday morning coffee.

“Why?” they asked. They’d long ago chalked her up to her own destiny.

Why? Aren’t we our brother’s keeper?

“My mother always told me, ‘It’s your life to screw up.’” We sat on our balcony, table crammed with coffee cups and scones, captivated by her improbable stories, her Estonian mother, escaped from a concentration camp, her father, the South African novelist, her first fiancé on his doomed flight over Devil’s Peak, the color of her nails. “I wanted a happy color today.”  

They smelled the smoke, my husband and our neighbor, the two Giants’ fans commiserating out front over Sunday’s game, Dale fumbling for his cell phone, my husband running across the street. He tore the duct tape off the porch gate easily enough, kicked in the front door, but staggered back at the billowing smoke, the exploding flames. Running to the side gate, he ripped off more duct tape, threw a flowerpot at the sliding glass door, hurled a brick, hurled and hurled. Struggling past the broken glass, the exercise bike, he yanked at the kitchen door, tethered from inside, but again smoke poured out, the flames knocking him backward. 

After they’d taken her away in the ambulance, a firefighter asked me if she was suicidal. 

She lived in the past, I said. And today her past went on the auction block.

“It was completely unnecessary,” her attorney tells me over the phone months later. “We’d gotten a postponement on the auction—we just hadn’t gotten around to putting a letter in the mail.” 

The firefighters found her lying on her bed, on her bedside table a pocket leather Bible and a bottle of nail polish.