When dinner was finished, and the plates had been cleared, Emily hesitated in the doorway, and Jonah came out to see her. Then Sonja sidled up to Emily, and Jonah slipped away again, back into the kitchen.
“You know, lovie,” said Sonja. “When your Bubbie Blima and I were young, we thought it was our job to visit every person who came to the lodge and ask them if they were having a good time. ‘Has your stay been marvellous?’ and ‘We hope that your stay has been just marvellous,’ that sort of thing. That’s what we said. That’s what was done then. We started when I was just three years old.”
“That’s cute.”
“I think it’s nice for people in the family to visit.”
“Oh,” said Emily. She folded herself in the little space where the two walls met, exactly where she’d stood with Jonah. Only, it wasn’t warm now. It wasn’t cozy like it had been, didn’t smell sweet like coconuts.
“You could make up for your mother who never comes, who never helped.”
“Right.” She wouldn’t be like her mother. If her mother hadn’t helped, then she would. She’d be good to her family.
“Especially if you’re thinking of helping out in the lodge, lovie,” Sonja was saying. “I think it’s nice for the people who want to help out here to make sure that everyone’s having a nice time. Especially if she’s a beautiful girl like you.”
“I guess I should mingle.”
“You go check on all those guests.”
“You mean Mackie and Mr. Baruch.”
“That’s a good girl.”
Emily found Doran Baruch on the veranda. He fit into the shadows, or the shadows fit him, and he looked like a misshapen leather glove. “Mr. Baruch,” she said quickly, before she could talk herself out of it.
“Doran,” he said simply, and, suddenly, Emily had no idea what to say next. “How has your stay been?” she asked. “I hope it’s been just marvellous.”
“Of course.” He sat down on the steps.
Emily sat beside him. She felt the wet seeping through her pants, through her underwear, right into her skin. Had it rained? “Do you really remember everything?”
“I used to remember nothing,” he said slowly.
“Yeah.” She could probably warm to a guy who liked to wind up her family. “That makes sense. Blima doesn’t really remember anything either. I used to bug her about it.”
“About Russia?”
“All she could remember was a white room, with a cupboard that she crawled into one time.”
“A cupboard?”
“She remembers being yanked away from it. But she grabbed onto a drawer handle and it opened as she was pulled. There were glass bottles in it and she burst into tears.”
Doran nodded slowly. “You remember what she told you.”
“I’ve been interested. I’ve been kind of interested in your family history also.”
Doran lapsed into a sort of heavy silence, and Emily became intensely aware of the sound of her own breathing. He wasn’t answering, but she hadn’t really asked the question either. How could she ask? Do you know anything about your family? That sounded crass, mean, in fact, if the answer was no. Some people knew about their parents and that was it, and he’d had to escape from Russia. That would make genealogy rough. Wait. Hadn’t he come by himself? Where had his parents been then?
“The last time I came here, it was in this time of year,” Doran said suddenly. “But it was different. There was snow, the first few days. But that was years ago. Decades.” He exhaled, and his breath lit up the night all around them. “It snowed more then, I suppose. I thought, if one thing would stay the same, that would be the weather. But things in this world are not immutable.”
Then he pointed. Emily saw a band of darker black and followed it to the swing set. It was lit by moonlight, the bars winking dully.
“Those were there, then,” said Doran. “There was snow from the ground to the rubber seats. Then on them too. It looked like there were dead bodies slumped on the swings. There weren’t bodies though. It was just snow, and it wasn’t covering anything. I checked, of course.”
Emily still didn’t know how to ask. Had he come to Canada alone? He would have been young. That must have been terrifying.
Doran shook his head. He looked like a weird, ambulatory shadow. “I don’t know why I said that I remember everything. My first memory used to be at the lodgehouse. I was lying on the floor under the dining-room table, looking out the window. There were adults in the room. I could hear them whispering. I knew that they were talking about me, but I didn’t care to listen. I covered my ears.”
Emily put her head on the banister. “My first memory,” she said, and she thought about a hill, a lampstand, a bookshelf. “I’m drunk again.” She always drank too much when she visited the lodge. These dinners were insidious, everyone always filling glasses.
“But since I turned seventy,” said Doran, “I have been remembering things. Before the lodgehouse. Before this country. There’s a memory that I have. I’m inside a room. It’s a hidden church. There’s a very tall man in front of me. He shows me a wafer and says, ‘This is the body of Christ.’ I’m terrified that Jesus will come. I got it the wrong way around. I pictured the wafers making up the man.”
“Oh.” Emily pictured a monster made of crackers. “Where was this?”
“Russia,” said Doran. “Or what was Russia then.” And then, “You have a friend here.”
“What?” said Emily, still picturing twitching sacks in the pantry, monstrous things crawling out of cupboards.
“You and Jonah are close.”
“Oh,” said Emily. “Yes. We used to be. It’s sort of a work in progress now.”
Doran nodded and nodded. “It’s difficult,” he said, nodding still.
“I want to be his friend. There has to be a way to go about it, to make someone like you. There have to have been experiments. Research. Someone must have developed methods.”
Doran was nodding still.
Emily felt herself blushing. Other people, she reminded herself, didn’t look to science to solve every single problem. “Well at least there are no more Seders,” she said.
“These ceremonies only come in twos. It always felt like there were more—”
“Because we celebrate for eight days.”
“—a calendar year maybe. Three-hundred-and-fifty-seven days of remembering, and then you can take eight days off. It always seemed to me that the Jewish culture had the better idea on the subject of how to grieve. You never say goodbye. You always remember.”
Then he stood, and bowed, and walked toward the lake, a monstrous stain leaking across the landscape. Emily hadn’t asked the question, but she had twenty-four hours respite, to rephrase, to think more about it. At least there was that. She’d established that he came from Russia, originally. That was something too.
Emily lay down on her back, then closed her eyes. Do you have any family? No, she couldn’t say that. Of course he had family, everyone came from somewhere. Do you know names, dates, do you have death certificates? This was stupid. Mathematicians should never have to deal with people directly.
She heard the door creak open, then footsteps and an expectant sort of silence, someone hovering in the doorway. She didn’t have to sit up to know that it was Jonah. “It’s nice out,” he said after a minute, and Emily felt the night open up a crack. Maybe he had been looking out for her all along. She heard a series of creaks as he sat down beside her.
“Is there something you wanted to talk to me about?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said, and she heard the crackle of paper. She stretched her neck and saw the outline of his nose. He was beautiful, but far away. “What’s a four-letter word that means audible bounce back?”
Luckily she knew that one. “Echo,” she said. She waited, but Jonah said nothing more.
There were things he could say. Why he was outside. Why he still worked at the lodge and didn’t want her to work here too. If he’d missed her. She didn’t even know if he had been looking out for her all these years, or if she’d been following him. It could be that she’d just sort of anticipated his trajectory, put herself in all the places he was going to be, a mathematician’s version of love, maybe, or of stalking. “I’ve never understood the expression ‘companionable silence,’ Jonah.”
She listened to his slightly arrhythmic breathing, the sharp exhalations that might have been a laugh. She sighed loudly. “Are you even a bit happy to see me?”
“I do plan to go to college,” he said.
“Oh,” said Emily. “And study what?”
“Management. Culinary science—it is a science, you know.”
“Like chemistry.”
“I’m not in a rut.”
Emily struggled to sit up. “I didn’t think you were.”
“Do you know where Doran is all the time?”
“What?” said Emily. “With Sonja?”
“Upstairs mostly, in the attic. If you listen, you can hear him creeping around like a cockroach. He’s going up now, I think.”
Emily closed her eyes, and she heard it, a creaking without a source, round and round it sounded like, sometimes cracking dully where Emily could swear there weren’t even floors, just sky. He must have gone back in the front. Then Emily heard another set of footsteps. She turned to look at Jonah. “Does Sonja go up there with him?”
“Sometimes I catch her looking through the keyhole.”
“They don’t talk,” whispered Emily. Sonja couldn’t connect either. And Sonja was so much more charming than she was. She always knew what to say, how to make people like her.
“Hey, are you holding your breath?” asked Jonah. “I’m the one who used to hold my breath. I used to pretend that you’d killed me. Remember? You used to get the mirror and hold it in front of my nose? You were pretty easy to mess with back then.”
Emily turned her head. She wasn’t the little girl who would cry all alone in dark rooms anymore. She wasn’t easy to mess with, she’d grown up. She was an adult, a scientist. Also, there were ways to make someone interested in you, she remembered with a start. There was research. It was all physiognomy, science. You could manipulate causality. All you needed to do was simulate the experience of falling in love, present yourself to the subject and presto chango, the brain mistook the cues and induced a love reaction. Scientists had pulled it off with a shaky suspension bridge, hundreds of feet above rapids. They’d put men on it, one by one, shaking it with invisible chords to make the subjects think they might fall into the churning water below. Then as soon as the men stepped off the bridge, safe, they made a pretty girl walk by. Ninety percent of the test subjects asked her for her phone number.
Emily could take Jonah down to the lake and push him in. She could jump into the bushes. Or she could arrange to meet him later, then jump out of the bushes to scare him, that would make him love her. She sat up on her elbows. But Jonah was gone. She hadn’t even heard him get up.
Emily crept to her room and checked her email. Russell was getting irritated. That wasn’t surprising. So she sent a reply: the reason he hadn’t found her was that she’d had a headache and gone home early. If he thought he could pin her down, he had another thing coming. She could keep this up forever.