The floral wallpaper, yellowed with age, was peeling in places. The wide pine plank floors were once painted white but were now worn down to bare, splintery wood.

Immediately to the left of the attic door a rack held old coats. Beneath it, a heavy cedar chest. Opening it, I found it stuffed full of linens—tablecloths, curtains, a wool blanket, and a worn yellow-and-white baby quilt. I closed the trunk and turned to see the brass bed shoved against the wall, still covered with a white sheet. I held my breath as I whipped the sheet off, half expecting… what? A fossilized old woman? A jar of chattering teeth?

Of course, there was nothing but a stained old mattress.

Something moved behind me. I turned slowly. The coats were moving, swaying on their hangers. Someone was there behind them.

“Hello?”

Pig jumped out, and I screamed, stumbled backward.

“Damn it, Pig!”

He brushed up against my leg, purring, evidently quite pleased with himself.

Sunlight filtered in through a big half-circle window. I made my way to it, kicking aside stacks of paper and photos. Beneath the window was an old folding table Lexie had been using. Tubes of paint, uncleaned brushes, palettes caked with layers of crusty mixed colors. Abandoned teacups and small plates of crumbs. More joints stubbed out in saucers. And then, three objects I recognized immediately: an old cut-glass doorknob, a tarnished silver fork, and a porcelain faucet handle with the word COLD on it in black. The treasures from the old hotel that Lexie and I found in the woods when we were kids!

The day we found the doorknob, buried in leaf litter, we thought it was a giant diamond. Then Lexie had picked it up. “It’s a doorknob!”

“It must be from the old hotel,” I said. We looked at it, took turns holding it, wiping the dirt off. “What do you think it was like? The hotel? It must have been pretty fancy, right?”

Lexie looked around the woods, squinting. “Maybe,” she’d said with a smile, “maybe it’s still here.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe somewhere there’s a magic door leading to the hotel,” she said.

“What, like in another world?”

She nodded. “Like a fairy world, and now we’ve got the knob, so we’re the only ones who can open it,” Lexie said. “It’s in these woods somewhere, hidden. That’s where the peacock comes from!”

I laughed. “Right. A fairy-world peacock? Makes perfect sense, Lex.”

Now I picked up the doorknob from Lexie’s art table, turning it in my hand, watching the way the cut glass caught the light coming in through the window. I held my breath. The room was utterly still.

No magic door opened.

Pig mewed, looking up at me as if to say, What did you expect?

There was a pencil sketch of the doorknob on the table. I set down the knob and stepped toward the wall, where sketches and watercolors were tacked up: the silver fork, the faucet handle, flowers, a view of the garden, a sketch Lexie had done of her own left hand.

I reached up and lightly touched the fingers, tried to imagine it was actually her hand I was touching, not charcoal lines that my fingers left smudges in.

I pulled my fingers away, realizing I was ruining her drawing.

Maybe I shouldn’t have come up here at all.

It felt invasive, like I’d found a private corner of Lexie’s that I wasn’t meant to look at. If she’d wanted me to know about her painting, she would have told me.

I would have told you if you’d picked up the phone.

To the right, an easel was set up with a half-finished painting of a peacock, his body a vivid, almost iridescent blue, his tail feathers spread, the green spots on them terrifying eyes, his beak open in a scream. It was unsettling.

I reached for a beat-up-looking sketchbook and flipped through it. Though my father always said she had the soul of an artist, I never thought of her as one. When had she started drawing and painting? Had she mentioned it to me? Had I forgotten? Or worse, wasn’t really listening? How many things were there that had slipped through the cracks because she talked a mile a minute sometimes, while I drifted off, saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh”?

What else had I missed?

The trouble with you, Jax, is you don’t know how to live in the moment. You don’t appreciate the here and now.

My sister was right. She lived inside each moment, sucking all she could from it, while I was only half-present, preoccupied with how annoyed I was to be listening to her share some crazy theory when I had other things, important things, I needed to be doing. And it was too late to promise to do better.

Her sketchbook was nearly full of pencil and charcoal sketches, some dated, most not. Most seemed to be from earlier in the summer. A drawing of the kitchen sink with a china teacup in it, a used Lipton tea bag wadded up inside. Random scenes from around the house: the dining room chairs, the circle window in the attic, the old claw-foot tub, a dress hanging on the back of a door. Then the flower pictures began, some labeled with dates and the names of the flowers: forget-me-nots, bearded iris, sweet william.

I turned the page again and came to a drawing of a woman I didn’t recognize. She was in the pool, Sparrow Crest in the background. Her dark hair was cut in a bob, her large dark eyes had a mischievous light. She had a small scar under her left eye. It felt like she’d been teasing my sister, an inside joke that the two of them got, that seconds after the drawing was done, they’d both broken down in fits of giggles. In the lower right corner, my sister had penciled the date: June 10.

Who was this woman? I was sure she hadn’t come to the memorial service—I would have remembered such a striking face. I flipped ahead. Nasturtiums. Lilacs. Phlox. Roses. Page after page of roses. And another sketch of the dark-haired woman, this time reclining by the pool, naked. It was nighttime—the patio cast in dark shadows, the pool pure darkness behind her. Her skin seemed to glow, to radiate. Lexie had scribbled in the corner: A nap after night swimming. I stared at this drawing, at the woman’s closed eyes, the dark areolas around her nipples, the soft triangle of pubic hair. It felt voyeuristic. There was a certain intimacy in the drawing, and a sense of longing. Were Lexie and this woman lovers? Had Lexie shown her the drawing? Or had she kept it to herself?

I turned the page again. Here were close-up sketches of the front door and some of the windows on the house. The gate to the pool. The entire house as viewed from the bottom of the driveway. Lord’s Hill and Devil’s Hill looming behind it. The thick woods where we’d found our treasures from the old hotel and where Lex had insisted she’d seen the peacock.