have been hers.
When she moved in with the Harrisons, Regina almost thought she had died
and gone to Heaven, except she had her own bathroom, and she didn’t
believe anyone had his own bathroom up in Heaven because in Heaven no
one needed a bathroom. They were not all permanently constipated in
Heaven or anything like that, and they certainly didn’t just do their
business out in public, for God’s sake (sorry, God), because no one in
his right mind would want to go to Heaven if it was the kind of place
where you had to watch where you steps. It was just that in Heaven all
the concerns of earthly existence passed away.
You didn’t even have a body in Heaven; you were probably just a sphere
of mental energy, sort of like a balloon full of golden glowing gas,
drifting around among the angels, singing the praises of God which was
pretty weird when you thought about it, all those glowing and singing
balloons, but the most you’d ever have to do in the way of waste
elimination was maybe vent a liNe gas now and then, which wouldn’t even
smell bad, probably like the sweet incense in church, or perfume.
That first day in the Harrisons’ house, late Monday afternoon, the
twenty-ninth of April, she would remember forever, because they were so
ruce. They didn’t even mention the real reason why they gave her a
choice between a bedroom on the second floor and a den on the first
floor that could be converted into a bedroom.
“One thing in its favor,” Mr. Harrison said about the den, “is the
view.
Better than the view from the upstairs room.”
He led Regina to the big windows that looked out on a rose garden ringed
by a border of huge ferns. The view war pretty.
Mrs. Harrison said, “And you’d have all these bookshelves, which you
might want to fill up gradually with your own collection, since you’re a
book lover.”
Actually, without ever hinting at it, their concern was that she might
find the stairs troublesome. But she didn’t mind stairs so much. In
fact she liked stairs, she loved stairs, she ate stairs for breakfast.
In the orphanage, they had put her on the first floor, until she was
eight years old and realized she’d been given ground-level
accommodations because of her clunky leg brace and deformed right hand,
whereupon she immediately demanded to be moved to the third floor. The
nuns would not hear of it, so she threw a tantrum, but the nuns knew how
to deal with that, so she tried withering scorn, but the nuns could not
be withered, so she went on a hunger strike, and finally the nuns
surrendered to her demand on a trial basis. She’d lived on the third
floor for more than two years, and she had never used the elevator.
When she chose the second-floor bedroom in the Harrisons’ house, without
having seen it, neither of them tried to talk her out of it, or wondered
aloud if she were “up” to it, or even blinked. She loved them for that.
The house was gorgeouream walls, white woodwork, modern furniture mixed
with antiques, Chinese bowls and vases, everything just so.
When they took her on a tour, Regina actually felt as dangerously clumsy
as she had claimed to be in the meeting in Mr. Gujilio’s office. She
moved with exaggerated care, afraid that she would knock over one
precious item and kick off a chain reaction that would spread across the
entire room, then through a doorway into the next room and from there
throughout the house, one beautiful treasure tipping into the next like
dominoes in a world championship toppling contest, two-hundred-year-old
porcelains exploding, antique furniture reduced to match sticks, until
they were left standing in mounds of worthless rubble, coated with the
dust of what had been a fortune in interior design.
She was so absolutely certain it was going to happen that she wracked
her mind urgently, room by room, for something winning to say when
catastrophe struck, after the last exquisite crystal candy dish had
crashed off the last disintegrating table that had once been the