A hundred times, a thousand times, Rose would try in the following years to reconstruct her mother's life and mind, her mother's death. What was science for, if not for this? In her mother's closet she turned the same things over and over again. An old brown book, falling apart, filled with interesting drawings of fossils, but stubbornly silent regarding the nature of its path to Suky. A slightly less decrepit green book, Mosses with a Hand Lens, which Suky had consulted almost daily. The letters, the crumbling letters, among which a few leaves and lichens had been pressed. And incongruous among all that paper, one ancient, tiny lady's boot, black and moldy, balanced on a ledge as if the woman whose foot it once sheltered had scaled the inside of the closet, passed through the ceiling and simply disappeared.