THE BEACH IS deserted. The reeds are dancing to the sound of the northwesterly wind. The sand makes little whirls on the dunes. It’s cold, even though it’s early September. A man is standing on the shore, hypnotized by the sea. I can’t see his face. I don’t need to see his face. His hair is disheveled and frizzy from the salt breeze. He’s barefoot, with khaki pants rolled up a few times. The waves break with a wild beauty. The receding surf traces furrows around the soles of his feet. I come over slowly, as if I want to surprise him or am worried I’ll a frighten him. I’m naked, except for a baggy turtleneck sweater that hangs almost to my knees. I think I just made love to the man, and the sweater is his. The neighing of wild horses. A seagull suspended in the air. Peace is what I feel. Love for the man. That’s why I don’t want to scare him away. I reach him and embrace him from behind. His shirt is unbuttoned. I wrap my arms around his waist and play with the hair on his stomach. I know he likes it. He grabs my hands. Softly. Entwines his fingers with mine. And he squeezes tighter and tighter. What seems like a gesture of love, of togetherness, becomes unsettling pain, anguish. He turns. You’re hurting me, Chris; let me go, I think, but I don’t say anything, because his face, as he looks at me, terrifies me. His face is bloody after the accident. What are you doing here? he shouts at me. What are you doing HERE?!
When I awoke, I thought at first I’d had the dream at the same time as I got the call from the woman from emergency services telling me about Chris’s accident, 12:01. But no, it was 3:24 in the morning. After Chris’s death, I dreaded the thought of waking up at exactly the same time as that call. I normally went to sleep earlier, but if, for whatever reason, I was still awake at that time, I paused whatever I was doing. It wasn’t a tribute to Chris. It was pure superstition. Irrational fear that some other tragedy would occur. And once the clock struck 12:02 and that fateful minute was over, I would simply go back to my activity as though nothing had happened.
I felt paralyzed the first few days, defeated, penitent, surrounded by packed boxes, barely able to go outside—the atrocious fear of being discovered was still very present in my mind. I had only unpacked Ruby’s things and a few boxes for Olivia with her toys and paintings. The rest of the boxes stayed literally right where the movers had left them.
When the doorbell rang, I was still disoriented from my nightmare. I didn’t react, in part because I had never heard it before, and I thought: There it is; they’ve caught me. Only when the chiming was followed by a few friendly taps did I go over to open up. It was Miriam, the owner of the real estate agency that had sold me the house. She had a lovely basket of purple New England asters.
“I picked them myself, the island is full of them at the end of the summer.”
“They’re beautiful,” I said, accepting the bouquet. “Thanks so much.”
“This isn’t a gift from me as your real estate agent. I already got the money out of you; I don’t have to suck up anymore. This is a gift from me as a neighbor. I mean, really we’re all neighbors here, but I count the most.” She lived on the same street, a few hundred feet away. “I was going to come by earlier to give you the official welcome, but I said to myself: Miriam, let a few days go by, let the girl get settled, give her time to breathe after the move. You know how the psychologists say it’s one of the most stressful things, along with a divorce, getting fired, and losing a loved one.” She stopped when she realized she had slipped up. I had told her my husband had died, but a few months before it actually happened, and in a flying accident, in a prop plane, something almost impossible to track down and corroborate. There were around five air accidents a day and more than five hundred deaths a year in America. I had looked. “Oh, I’m sorry . . .”
“Don’t worry,” I said cheerfully, so she wouldn’t feel bad. It hadn’t bothered me. In fact, I was happy to see her, with her wavy blond hair, her enormous smile, and her purple asters. I knew we were going to be friends. You have to be good friends, Alice; you need allies, information; you need to dig into everyone’s life. “You can see that as far as arranging things, really arranging them, I haven’t made it too far.” I realized I hadn’t invited her in. “Sorry, come in if you like.”
“No, that’s fine, I already know the house well enough. And I’m not a typical snooping neighbor. I suppose you’re planning to go to the Labor Day picnic on the beach. You know there’s a picnic, right?”
“Yeah, I saw a couple of posters for it. But I don’t know; I’ve got so much going on . . .”
“You feel awkward, right?”
No, I feel scared, terrified.
“A little, yeah.”
“Like, I don’t know anyone, what will they think of me, widowed mother with two kids, and all that stuff.”
That they’re going to catch me. That they’re going to catch me.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Alice.”
I can’t let myself go, no matter how much I like you right off the bat.
“I just got separated.”
Why did they separate? Could it have something to do with Chris?
“And I have a baby, Chloe, who’s about to turn one,” she added, showing me her baby monitor.
Chris has a cousin named Chloe. Or was it an aunt?
“I still haven’t told anyone, but here on the island, everyone knows everything.”
Everything? We’ll see about that.
“And I don’t want to go because I can’t bear how gossipy these people are, and especially, because I don’t want to talk about things that are painful for me. But if I don’t go, it’ll be even worse. Because I’m sure my asshole ex will already be there downing beer after beer and telling his side of the story to his friends and badmouthing me. So I’ve got a proposition for you: let’s go together, with our daughters, that way you won’t feel out of the loop or overwhelmed. We’ll stay a little on the outskirts. I’ll introduce you to people, because everyone’s going to be there; and I’ll catch you up on who’s who; and since I’ll be with you, no one will ask me things I don’t feel like talking about. A win-win situation for both of us. What do you think? By the way, I love your new haircut,” she added, in case that would sway me.
But there was no need. She already had me hooked. My second day on the island, I was going to meet all the inhabitants, and even better, I’d hear something about their lives. Two months’ work in a single day.
After she left, I made sure my phone was fully charged and opened a few boxes to look for a macramé bag I had made myself, a perfect place to put my cell phone and record conversations. I even tested it out in the house to be sure the sound made it clearly through the holes in the bag.
I felt like I was back at my first day of school. Agitated, nervous, excited, afraid. Each year as a teacher I would still smile in sympathy when I saw the frightened faces of the new students. But now I was the newcomer, the one who had to make friends, get good grades and be popular. And like a little girl, I felt small and inadequate sitting next to Miriam on our towels under a beach umbrella with my sunglasses, a Boston Red Sox cap, SPF 50 sunscreen, Olivia beside me, and Ruby in my arms. All to shield myself from everything and everyone. The slightest noise startled me. The barking dogs running in the sand, the seagulls searching for scraps of food, the waves breaking softly on the shore, the shouting children scampering and the laughing adults conversing. The Frisbees, kites and beach balls seemed like weapons. As if, instead of at a pleasant beach, as its name indicated, surrounded by people having a good time, I was at the epicenter of a dire battle, surrounded by enemies.
“The two people stationed by the barbecue are Karen and her husband, John. Karen is the owner of the only inn on the island: Karen’s Petite Maison. She opened it because she felt lonely. John’s an engineer with the navy and spends several months a year away from home in a submarine. Almost all of us are thankful for it, but her especially . . . and their son, Rick.”
“Rick, what did I tell you?!” John yelled at his son, who was playing an improvised game of football with other boys more or less his age.
“Let him be; it’s just one day,” Karen rebuked her husband.
“One day is all it takes to get hurt. Stop playing those stupid games and come help us with the burgers.”
Miriam explained to me that Rick was the captain of the high school’s sailing team in Nantucket and that his father was determined to make him an Olympic medalist. It was his senior year, and he was hoping to receive juicy scholarship offers from top universities, but to do so, he had to have a good season, with no injuries and lots of trophies. Rick obeyed his father with his head lowered, somewhat humiliated at being treated like a child in front of his friends, who didn’t try to disguise their mockery of him. It reminded me of the kind of pressure Chris’s father made him suffer with tennis. I suddenly had the urge to cry.
“Sooner rather than later, Karen will invite you to dinner at the inn,” Miriam went on, “to introduce you to her brother, Keith, who lives by himself in a castle, on a private island next to Martha’s Vineyard. He’s loaded and single; his sister doesn’t get why and is always trying to remedy the situation.”
A spectacularly pretty and lively girl in a loose-fitting tank top and short shorts that showed off her ass cheeks walked over to the grill to grab a couple of hot dogs.
“That’s Summer Monfilletto. Just turned eighteen. She’s the island’s official babysitter. All the boys are wild about her. Not to mention their fathers. She was expelled from school in God knows what state in the Midwest, and her mother shipped her off to her aunt’s house on the island for a while so she could get her act together and make a little money taking care of kids in the process. It looks like she’ll end up staying. Rumor is, she’s pregnant. We’ll know soon enough.”
After provoking the badly concealed stares of almost all the men she came across, Summer went over to a woman in her forties sitting in a nylon chair beneath a multicolored umbrella with a serene expression, as if she were the possessor of a secret no one else knew, which put her above everyone else, though she didn’t want to boast of it.
“That’s her aunt, Jennifer. She almost never goes out in public. Her husband, Stephen, has been confined to the house in a vegetative coma for the last three years. The chance he’ll come out of it is basically nil, but she refuses to unplug him. She takes care of him at home, all by herself. Lots of people ask—I mean, I do too—how a woman that pretty, still relatively young—she’s just forty-nine—can live in a prison like that.”
I hardly followed anything Miriam was telling me. The conversations, the introductions, the greetings, real life, were all nebulous, as if I was seeing everything through a pane of glass, disconnected and lethargic. I had my cell phone with its microphone on in my bag, but I didn’t think it could pick up what Miriam was saying. The test I had done at home hadn’t had any background noise, whereas on the beach the wind was roaring—at least, it struck me that way. But none of my anxiety must have been obvious, because Miriam spoke without stopping, not as a boor, not trying to be the center of attention, but cordially, kindly, instructively, like an audio guide in a museum. She spoke because I’d asked her to, and she was trying to please me and make my admission into the island’s society easier.
One woman must have realized that I’d been observing her for some time and looked back at me. I thought I knew her from somewhere. Far from looking bothered, she waved at me kindly from the distance. I returned the gesture, dying from embarrassment, and glanced away.
“I just waved at someone I must know, but I have no idea from where,” I told Miriam under my breath.
“Which one?”
“To the left, about sixty feet away. Ten o’ clock sharp,” I said without looking or pointing. “Brown-haired girl, with an older guy.”
Miriam looked in that direction before I could tell her not to.
“Thirtyish, very dark skin, with a long pony tail, eating a plate of pasta?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“That’s Barbara.” The name meant nothing to me. “And that’s her father, Frank Rush, next to her. He’s a veterinarian. He has a clinic and pet store on Grand Avenue. He owns the horse ranch, Horse Rush Farm, but since his wife, Rose, died a few years back, his daughter Barbara takes care of the ranch. She’s a vet too; she specializes in horses.”
“Oh, the girl with the horses,” I said, with a certain feeling of relief. I even dared to look at her discreetly. “She was there when I gave birth; she had a dentist appointment.”
A guy her age approached her. He had just been out swimming. He took his things, gave her a peck on the cheek, said goodbye to her father and rushed away.
“That’s her boyfriend, Jeffrey Sorenson. He’s a pilot. He has an air taxi service. He must have just gotten a call.”
I looked at Olivia. Well, really I looked for her, alarmed, thinking I had lost her, as if hours had passed and not a minute since the last time I had seen her. She was twenty feet away, playing on the seashore, making sand castles with other children her age. I couldn’t believe the ease with which she made friends—she had clearly inherited that natural gift for getting along with people right away from her father. She was with a dark-haired boy with green eyes.
Olivia: What’s your name?
The boy: Oliver.
Olivia: Oliver? I’m Olivia. Almost the same as yours. It was clear she liked the coincidence as well as the boy. Oliver, did you know my mom promised to buy me a pony so I would be happy because my father died?
“How easy everything is when you’re a kid, right?” Miriam realized I had disconnected from her monologue and was looking at Olivia.
I nodded. “You go over and say hi, you start playing, and then you’re friends.”
“Or boyfriend and girlfriend, you know they start earlier and earlier. That’s Oliver, Mark and Julia’s son. Mark you know, of course . . .”
Mark? What Mark? I thought for a few seconds, unable to recollect a single name from all the ones she’d told me in the hour and a half she’d been talking and introducing me to people. Then Miriam pointed discreetly with one finger to where he was. Mark, of course, what an idiot I am. Mark the dentist, the one who took charge of my emergency delivery, the guy who even smelled good when he sweated. He had his back turned to a woman, or maybe she had her back turned to him, and to everyone and everything else, because her gaze was focused out on the sea, completely estranged from the celebration. She didn’t even make the occasional gesture of checking up on her child, an involuntary action that all parents have embedded in our autonomic nervous system, like breathing. Mark ate in silence, without gusto; she hadn’t even touched her plate. The tension between them was obvious. Both sat under an umbrella in the same posture, with their backs turned, as though reflected in a mirror, two symmetrical realities, joined and separated by a single edge. They looked like they were posing for a magazine article on marital crises.
“I don’t know if you know, but Mark was a big-time dentist in New York, the kind who takes care of billionaires and celebrities. But they decided to escape the rat race and came to live on the island. It was her decision, especially. Julia’s a writer. Have you read The Funeral Dress?”
“Julia Ponsky?” I asked admiringly. Miriam nodded. “Wow . . .”
Of course I had read The Funeral Dress. Who hadn’t? It was her first novel, and it spent weeks on the bestseller list.
“Well, for weeks she’s been depressed, and she can’t get out of it.”
“Writer’s block?”
Miriam shrugged. No one knew. She’s pretty, right, Alice? She could easily be Chris’s type. Is she depressed because Chris is dead? Ask Miriam how long she’s been down. Go ahead, do it. It’s an innocent question. Mere curiosity, worry for one of your favorite writers. It won’t seem weird or suspicious. Yeah, it would have been easy, but I couldn’t do it. I glanced mechanically at my phone, like a person looking for a new message, even though the ringtone hadn’t sounded. Did it have some time limit? Of course it had a time limit. Or maybe I had forgotten to touch the button?
“You see all the alpha males gathered over there?” Miriam asked, pointing out a group of men drinking beer. I nodded. “Well, in December, when the temperature’s below zero, they keep walking around in Bermuda shorts to show everyone how tough and macho they are. They just swap their sneakers for Timberlands and put on a down vest over their T-shirts. The blond one with his hat backward, the only good-looking one, is my ex, Mike.”
Though there was no way they could hear us, when Miriam said the word ex, Mike turned and glanced at us with a slightly disdainful air. He looked like a dangerous wounded boar, I thought of saying, but decided to keep my mouth shut. I had often seen friends or acquaintances badmouth their boyfriends or husbands, but watch out if someone in the conversation agreed or added a criticism—the friend or acquaintance in question would get pissed off and immediately go on the offensive.
“He’s on the rebound; his ego’s bruised; he’s waiting for me to fuck something up so he can take custody from me, just to get at me. Because he doesn’t pay a bit of attention to the girl. He has a waste management business. But as far as I’m concerned, he’s the real piece of trash.”
“So, I finally get to meet the redhead who set foot on the island and gave birth . . .”
Karen had come over to us with a bottle of white wine and plastic cups. Miriam introduced us.
“Karen, this is Alice. Alice, this is Karen.”
Karen, Karen . . . What did she do?
“Hi, Karen, pleasure to meet you.”
We shook hands. Firmly, both of us, which I liked.
“Likewise. Welcome to Robin Island. The best-kept secret in all of Cape Cod.” Karen touched Ruby’s nose with her index finger. “And this little creature?”
“She’s Ruby.” At least I could remember my daughter’s name.
“Well, we’re going to toast to your arrival. A little cold wine?” Karen winked at me and showed me the bottle.
I thought how nice a glass of wine would be, but I didn’t want to look like a bad mother since you’re not supposed to drink while you’re breastfeeding.
“None for me, thanks. I’m still nursing Ruby.”
Miriam and Karen looked at each other and laughed.
“Come on now! Don’t be old-fashioned! Oh, sorry, modern!” Karen said, pulling out the cork, which had been jammed halfway into the bottle. “Who runs things here, the mother or the baby? We’ve had enough nonsense. My mother knocked back plenty of shots of bourbon before, during and after she had me and my siblings. And look at us. Fit as fiddles.”
“I’m in,” Miriam said.
I didn’t know what to do. You have to be popular, Alice. You can’t be the wet blanket in the group. You have to fit in.
“Well, if it’s good for the mother, it must be good for the baby too, right?” I finally conceded.
“That’s what I like to hear!” Karen passed me a cup, which I held out so she could serve me. “You’re going to be happy on the island. You’ll see. And by the way, pardon the indiscretion, but I don’t see any men around here, so you came alone with the kids, huh? Does that mean there’s not a man in your life?”
“Karen, don’t pry; she’ll think we’re just a bunch of gossips here and get the wrong impression, besides Alice is a widow.” Miriam interceded ironically.
“I am sorry about your husband. I wasn’t prying. Standard hospitality and courtesy. It’s getting to know a new person, and . . . OK, fine, I am a gossip.” She cackled. She was pretty lit. I could see her husband looking at us from a distance, smug and disapproving. “It’s just that you’re really pretty, Alice. You know my brother has a weakness for redheads? You need to meet him. One of these days I’ll organize a dinner at the inn. You’ll love it.” Ah, she’s the one from the inn! The one with the rich brother. “His name’s Keith and he has an island, Napoleon Island. With a castle and a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot yacht. All for him and the woman of his dreams, whoever she may be.”
Miriam and I exchanged glances.
“Whenever you want,” I told her. “I’d love to meet your brother.”
“Great.” Karen looked at Miriam. “Hey, you can come too. From what I hear, you’re back on the market. Or are you still in mourning?”
Before Miriam could answer or duck the question, a thundering sound drowned out any possible conversation. It was Barbara Rush’s boyfriend Jeffrey Sorenson’s seaplane, flying over the beach at low altitude, with an enormous sign hanging from its tail that read: “Amanda, will you marry me?”
There was great commotion on the beach. Catcalls. Hurrahs. Applause. Everyone turned toward the person of the hour: Young, probably just over twenty. She was soaking in the attention. I’d say she’d been in similar situations before. Local beauty queen, perhaps? Prom queen at the very least. She smiled and cried from emotion, squealing: “Oh my God! Oh my God!” as if she hadn’t expected it and wasn’t prepared. But obviously she’d been getting ready for that moment all her life. It was seven in the evening. The setting sun, warm and low, was the red bow that tied up that perfect moment. Then he appeared: Alex. Around the same age, mounted on the back of a majestic white draft horse. All the inhabitants of the island, who had been scattered all over different parts of the beach playing around, now gathered and, as if they’d rehearsed it, formed a passageway that led from him to her, adding to the feeling of collective catharsis.
There they all were, bunched together. All the mixed-up pieces of my treasure map. It’s not a treasure; it’s a sentence. And that key you always carry around as if it is an amulet, the Master Key, isn’t going to open anything good. It leads to the void, darkness, a black hole that’s going to suck you in, and you’ll never get back out. What are you doing here, Alice? That wasn’t my voice; it was Chris’s.
The first thing I noticed was a very high-pitched whistling in both ears that pulled me backward furiously, unleashing a wave that dropped from my head to my feet.
Tachycardia. Dry mouth. I clutched Ruby so my maternal instinct would drive away my panic.
Alex leapt from the horse and knelt in front of Amanda, who kept repeating, “Oh my God!”
Where is Olivia? I don’t see Olivia. I want out of here, off this island. My vision went blurry.
Alex took out a box with a ring. Amanda brought both hands to her mouth in a gesture of surprise.
I put my hand in my bag. I always kept a Xanax on me now. My hands were trembling. I couldn’t find it, even though I’d put it in a special pocket—together with the Master Key—so that I would know where it was in case of emergency. But my arms ignored me. All my extremities went rigid.
“Amanda Elizabeth Younker,” Alex pronounced ceremoniously, like a prince in a fairy tale. “You’ll need to answer the question from the hydroplane before the gas tank runs dry.”
To which she replied immediately with a shriek, “Yes, of course! Yessssss!!!”
“I’m leaving,” I said to Miriam, handing over Ruby. “Sorry, my little one . . .”
I faded to white.
Miriam took care of the girls. I insisted I was all right, that the heat had gotten to me—even though it wasn’t very hot. The emergency triumvirate—Ben the paramedic, Margaret the chief of police and Gail the chief of the volunteer fire department—wanted to take me to Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis. But Mark, who must have intuited that my problem was more psychosomatic than anything else, interceded, as though bringing Ruby into the world gave him jurisdiction regarding decisions related to my person. In the end they took me to the police station, where they kept an emergency kit—defibrillator, Duralone, adrenaline, atropine, IV fluid, a blood pressure cuff—to make sure I was OK. I had a red rash across my chest. Once they’d discarded anaphylactic shock, Mark, who had come along with us, offered to stay with me and take me home when I stopped looking so pale. That way Ben, Margaret and Gail could go back to the picnic. They were worried about the level of alcohol consumption at the party. “There’s always some joker who wants to start a brawl. It happens every year,” Chief Margaret said. Mark invited me to his dental office, right out front, where we would be more comfortable.
The blood pressure cuff beeped. Mark had taken my stats again. I was lying back in the chair and still felt nauseated. It was the second time I’d been there, and neither time had to do with my teeth.
“Eighty over sixty, still really low. Is this the first time this has happened to you?”
“Hardly. I’m very prone to fainting.”
“No, I mean is this the first time you’ve had an anxiety attack.”
“No, this was just a drop in my blood pressure . . .”
“Alice, I pulled a baby out of you. You can trust me. Anyway, I’ve been taking Zoloft for three years; I can recognize an anxiety attack from miles away.”
The rash on my chest was starting to burn, a sign that I should give in to the evidence.
“My God, how embarrassing, doing that right when he was asking her to marry him.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll say you had an overdose of mushiness. Everyone will understand. Those kids were born with the object of becoming the happiest and most perfect couple on the island.”
It caught my attention how new everything in his office was, almost as if he hadn’t used his equipment yet.
“You must not have many patients here, huh?”
“No, this is a front business. I don’t whiten teeth; I launder money,” he joked. Then: “I go to New York once or twice a month. I have a clinic there with a partner. A week of endodontics with rich people on the Upper East Side goes a long way. Plus, it’s nice to get out of here once in a while. Islands can get really claustrophobic.”
Mark told me he was from Cedarburg, Wisconsin, a small, fairy-tale village close to Lake Michigan. His father was the only dentist in town. A homey, easygoing guy who caught salmon in the lake in his free time and made cheese and beer in his garage. He always wanted one of his two sons, Mark or his older brother, Paul, to take over the business and carry on the family tradition—his own father had been a dentist as well. But Mark didn’t want to be a dentist; he wanted to be a doctor, the kind that saves lives, a surgeon or something like that; and he wanted to get out of the village, which he found suffocating, idyllic as it was. So he felt a great relief when it became clear that Paul had the family vocation in his blood. Years later, the night of the prom, Paul, who had already been accepted to the pre-dental program at the University of Illinois, was in a car accident with his girlfriend, Samantha, and two other couples. The driver of the limo they’d rented, who later turned out to be drunk at the time, lost control of the vehicle, ran off the road, and smashed into a tree. Three of the occupants died. Paul survived, but he was blinded in the accident and suffered grave burns on his face and parts of his body when he tried to pull Samantha from the burning vehicle, where she was trapped among the twisted metal. He fell into a severe depression after the accident.
It was terrible for Mark. He loved his brother like crazy and wanted to make him feel better. He wanted to become his eyes, so his brother could live things through him. Maybe that’s why, a year later, when it was time for him to graduate, he changed his mind at the last minute and, instead of studying premed at the University of Michigan, he decided on the pre-dental program at the University of Illinois, where his brother had planned to study. There was little point in that praiseworthy gesture, because four years later, just three months before Mark graduated, his brother, who had gotten hooked on painkillers due to chronic pain from his burns and the loss of his girlfriend, killed himself with a lethal mixture of alcohol, tranquilizers, muscle relaxers and antidepressants. Their father followed him just five months later after a massive heart attack. They closed the father’s business; his mother went to live with her sister in Key Biscayne, Florida; and Mark left for New York, where he hoped to resume his plan of being a surgeon, but he still had to pay back the $60,000 in student loans he’d received to pay for his education. So he started working part-time at a dentist’s office while he did a master’s in clinical endodontics.
“Conclusion,” Mark finished his brief account. “What did I want to avoid? Being a dentist in an idyllic, suffocating village. What did I end up being? A dentist in an idyllic, suffocating village. Huge step, no doubt about it.”
I smiled while I thought, What does that remind you of, Alice? I already felt a lot better. Finally, the shaking in my hands and the tickling feeling in my head had gone away.
Before taking me to Miriam’s house in his golf cart to pick up the girls, he gave me several Valium.
“It works better than Xanax for anxiety attacks.”
The whole time, I had the feeling that Mark had managed to get me alone for the sole purpose of hooking up. No, I stand corrected, of flirting, of giving off signals without committing to anything. But maybe if I hadn’t been witness to that pained portrait of his marriage, if I had seen him and Julia saying sweet nothings to each other, I would have taken his flirting as a simple gesture of solidarity among residents. A good neighbor, with a certain knowledge of medicine. Period. So I decided not to overthink it, considered it a mere projection that had nothing to do with emotional or sexual desire—to which I was completely numb—but with the need for a good-looking, secure and engaging man to notice me and take care of me. It wasn’t longing for Mark; it was nostalgia for Chris.