I was standing in the middle of Mom's room, the king size bed stripped down to the mattress cover, the dresser cleared of flowers, the night stand emptied of medication, the closets bursting with the pastel polyester slacks and oversize blouses Mom obsessively acquired from the Home Shopping Channel after she became housebound.

Sitting in the living room with her oxygen tank, Mom made Shirley, HSC's mid-day hostess, her last best friend. I sat in the backyard every day, painting the pool, trying to get the blues just right, while I listened to Mom talk to Shirley on the telephone. "Yes, I purchased two of those cubic zirconia pendants for my granddaughters just last month.

They're so lifelike. I just have to have the matching rings."

That was before I dragged Mom away from the T.V. and into innumerable games of gin rummy, Pinochle, double solitaire, backgammon and chess. It was finally less painful for me to sit across a game board from Mom, listening to the ice tinkling in her Manhattan glass while she spun out a litany of Darlene's and Jim's recent triumphs -- the new house, the new pool, the kids' piano and dance recitals -- than it was to see her buy the last friendships of her life with her Gold MasterCard.

Still, I kept a few afternoon hours for myself while Mom kept her appointments with Oprah and Donahue and Sally Jesse Raphael. I was painting the pool's reflection of the sky's daily reconfigurations. I was trying to find the color of transparency, to paint the smell of the chlorine.

The clang of pots and pans from the kitchen pulled me out of my reverie. "You've got to get a move on, April," I ordered myself. "Snap out of it. Just start somewhere. Do anything." If I started with the chest of drawers, I could sit down on the floor, have a cigarette, and sip my drink. I needed an ashtray.

Darlene was down on her knees in the kitchen, pulling Mom's new All Clad pans from the cupboards below the stove, meticulously noting each piece on her legal pad. She looked up at me and frowned. "What do you want now, April?"

"An ashtray, I'm looking for an ashtray Darlene. You have a problem with that?" I was throwing the cupboard doors open and slamming them shut again, suddenly overtaken with anger and frustration, not even bothering to look for what I was looking for.

"Just like Dad," Darlene muttered to the shelving. "Irresponsible, uncontrolled, self-centered." She stood up and turned toward me, her hands on her hips, the muscles in her jaw tightening. "I can't believe you're going to smoke a cigarette in this house."

"Well, believe what you see, Darlene. Believe what you see," I said, pulling a saucer from the cupboard and escaping the room.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Mom's maple dresser, cigarette in hand, I hesitated before slowly pulling open the bottom drawer. I don't know what I was afraid I might find. But the first drawer contained only scarves, at least a hundred of them jammed together as tight as a fist. There were sky blue polyester squares, blood red silk rectangles, lemon yellow woolen triangles, circles of fabric the consistency of meringue and linen the color of prawns.

Buoyed by the richness of my find, I began pulling scarves out of the drawer like a magician drawing rabbits from a hat, with great flourishes and whispered "ta-da's." I stood up and draped them around my neck and shoulders, posing in front of the dresser mirror, mysterious and pouty one minute, light-hearted and laughing the next. I tossed the scarves up in the air and let them flutter to the floor. I held the gauzy squares up to my eyes and watched the room turn pink and blue and tangerine.

Giddy from the alcohol and Mom's familiar scent -- stale cigarettes and Chanel No. 5 -- I grabbed a pin cushion from the dresser and began pinning the scarves I liked the best to the curtains. I spread the silkiest ones over the surface of the bed and made vibrant piles around its perimeter. When I finally collapsed on the floor, I felt relaxed for the first time since Darlene arrived.

When I looked back down at the open drawer, an edge of blue metal was peeking out from beneath the last woolen scarf. It was a safe the size of a shoebox, a safe I remembered Dad giving out to his customers. I had one once, with its five-tumbler combination lock just above the legend "PRUDENTIAL INSURANCE COMPANY -- YOU'RE SAFE WITH THE ROCK."

Because Mom had gone over the "important papers" with me time and time again during those last few months, what they were and where they could be found (in a safe deposit box at Home Savings) I suspected this old tin safe held papers of little consequence. My letters home, perhaps. I picked up my drink, stubbed out my cigarette and crawled up on the bed to try and crack the combination. I rolled the tumblers to Mom's birth date, mine, Darlene's, and Darlene's kids'. None of them worked. Mom's Lotto numbers. No go. I grabbed my pack of Marlboros, lit another one and let my mind drift. Children, parents, grandparents, anniversaries, birthdays, holy days.

Sisters.

I thumbed the metal numbers to the date my eldest sister arrived, stillborn, into the world -- 4/22/50. The safe opened, revealing an old black photocopy with white lettering, headed "Certificate of Live Birth." It was dated April 22, 1950. "Name: April Sue. Hair: Blonde. Eyes: Blue. Sex: Female."

Live birth, live birth, live birth. The words rolled around in my head like a ball on a spinning roulette wheel, clattering past all of the possible resting places. The only other document, a yellowing envelope bearing a three-cent stamp, was wedged underneath a piece of cardboard, cut to fit the bottom of the safe. It was addressed to "April Reeves, c/o Mary Reeves, Forest View Road, Greenwich, Connecticut."

It was postmarked April 22, 1954, the year before I was born, the year April, my namesake, the strangled blue baby, would have been four years old. The letter had been returned unopened, "Addressee Unknown" scrawled in faded blue ink across its face in what appeared to be a neat woman's hand.

My hand was trembling. The roulette ball was about to drop into place. I had never even wondered why my parents named me "April" when I'd been born in May.

Aunt Ruthie's voice was humming in my head: "strangled in the womb; shouldn't have been painting; reckless girl," a voice that grew softer and softer in competition with the papers I held in my hand.

Why would Mom put her first-born child up for adoption? Too little money? No, my grandparents would have seen, always did see, that Mom and Dad had enough. Was "April" not my father's child, but a love child, conceived before he'd asked Grampa for her hand? Was that story true, the story of how they'd met and fallen in love? But how could my mother have given up her baby? How could her own sister make up a story as cruel as the stillborn tale just to cover up an even more painful one?

If I had another sister, carrying my name, alive in Connecticut, I wasn't certain I wanted to know. I couldn't even deal with the sister I had.

Darlene was sitting at the kitchen table staring at a stack of my watercolors when I came back into the kitchen and pulled the bottle of Absolut from the freezer.

"Whatcha doin'?" I asked, trying to keep my voice casual and light.

"They're beautiful," Darlene said, looking up at me with appreciation for the first time in my life.

The last time Darlene had seen my artwork, I'd been in elementary school, pasting torn pieces of colored tissue to sheets of white construction paper, finger painting giraffes at the zoo.

I leaned against the sink, sipping my drink. "Well, Darlene, your opinion isn't entitled to much weight, is it? Last I knew, they weren't teaching art appreciation in law school." The ice jingled in my glass.

"I suppose the critics might say they're derivative," Darlene continued, as if I hadn't just insulted her. "But it's not subject matter that's important, is it?" she asked, turning her face up to me, open and vulnerable. "I mean, Hockney didn't corner the market for swimming pools, did he? There are only so many things you can paint -- people, landscapes, mountains, flowers, trees. . ." She trailed off, looking at me tentatively now, as if seeking my approval.

First a live dead sister, carrying my name and the right birth month. Now Darlene, an art critic. I needed to get out of the house before everything else turned upside down.