SO JANET sat at the table—his table, except that it couldn’t be his—in the dark which was beginning to pull itself around the walls of the house. The sea merged with the sky, gray leaking into a thread of mauve at what could barely be discerned, through the window glass, as the horizon; it was as if earth, air and water were cupped in a bowl. She kept her palms pressed together, as he had told her; she let her gaze travel from the window to the lamp and rest on its flame until, when she looked away, there was a dark spot in her vision where the light had overwhelmed her eye.
His movements were quick and sure as he bent to sweep the glass from the floor with a pan and a brush he’d fetched from the little scullery. The steel lip of the pan scraped against the flags of the floor; she moved her legs as he reached to brush beneath the table, the fragments of glass clicking like beads as they were gathered up. Back to the scullery, the rain of splinters and dust into the bin; and then she kept her back to him, not moving, but heard him begin to light the fire where she had felt the warmth from last night’s embers: paper, the crack of breaking kindling, the little roar of the first flame.
She should have turned to face him, because she was afraid of him; but she was afraid too to show that, to give him anything at all. His touch, when he had bound her opened palm, had been gentle—a contradiction, for she felt in the pressure of his fingers no wish to harm her, and yet in her mind was the certainty that he would. Holding her wrist, spreading her fingers so the tape could pass between them, sealing the wound. She had never had stitches, not once in her life; she had been lucky. He had told her she would not now; but why should she believe him? He might let her bleed to death here, in her own house. Her own house. She felt warmth between her palms and peered in. The blood was beginning to soak through the gauze.
She heard the fire take; then, she turned. Shadows in his deep-set eyes, orange light on his curious, pale halo of hair that was thickened with wind or salt. He looked at the fire, not back at her, leaning into it and breathing in its heat, breathing out its life. He crouched, his heels raised; stood, got another cup from the kitchen, poured the whiskey—the bottle was still open on the table—sat, and drank, and so did she.
“I’m not a thief,” he said.
When she’d parted her hands to pick up the glass, there was a smear of blood on her unhurt palm, transferred from the leaking gauze. “It’ll clot up,” was the next thing he said. “Don’t worry.”
What did he sound like? Even after all this time, she was not good at that; from the north, certainly, but from where she couldn’t place. Would she know the sounds they made here? She would not, though she tried to recall the voice of the man in the petrol station; that did not help.
Janet looked around the single room. It was hardly a house, this; it was a shelter, solid, but a shelter all the same. How long had he been here? It was impossible to tell. It smelled clean, and aired. She had thought that the place—whatever it was—would be shut up, dead, powdered with dust and hung with cobwebs and spiders’ webs. Unwelcoming. But this, in its spareness, was not welcoming either. The sticks of furniture, only the table and chairs, the bare bed, a white mirrored dresser the only hint of something decorative—there was nothing to grasp. The mantel over the tiled fireplace bare, except for a candle stump and a metal…mask, she would have said, Aztec in its ferocity, but blank and forbidding. She had been imagining taking possession of her property in the usual way—wiping, polishing, washing, scrubbing, buying a broom, finding old rags, digging out grease, up to her elbows in rubber and soap. That would have given her time to think, and, she was convinced, would have taught her something about how and why she had been left this place. She would have been able to discover (on her hands and knees, her head under a sink) what it might mean, her legacy, and what she could learn.
But here he was, an orderly stranger who’d stood in her way, stolen her house, bandaged her hand and poured her a drink. Who said he was not a thief but had a thief’s closed and unreadable face.
“I don’t believe you,” she said finally. “I don’t believe anything you’ve said.”
“Why don’t you go?” he asked. “You’ll be fine to drive. You could go back to the town. Or I could drive you there. I don’t mind walking back.”
“There isn’t a car here.”
“In your car, I meant.”
She laughed. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” she said, “I am.”
“Good,” he said. “So am I.”
Of course I ask my father for stories. My favorite is how they met, he and my mother, because in it there are ships, and icy cold, and the possibility that none of this would have happened at all, and so I would never have existed. Chance. Grace, my father calls it, not chance—a kind of gift. It can be very simple: why Ruth had moved from another school and so was available to be my best friend. What if she hadn’t left that other school? Would someone else be my best friend? Would I have somehow found Ruth anyway? That seems very unlikely. My friends are my friends from school. It is hard to imagine Ruth walking around in another part of the city with a different friend. I know this ought to mean I’d have a different friend too, but somehow this is harder to reckon with: I usually end by thinking that this change of chance, or Grace, would mean I’d have no friends at all. Grace can take as well as give. Grace had taken my mother. That’s how Grace works. You can’t know what she’ll do.
My father tucks me up in bed. Maybe it is winter, and the heating whirrs comfortingly. I like the sound, and will turn it on again in the night if I wake up and find it’s turned itself off: the room will get too hot. I am, perhaps, eight, but this can be any night in any number of years. A little humidifier breathes steam to counter the dryness. DeVilbiss is the brand, I will always remember that later, years later: why should that be when so much else goes? DeVilbiss, and I’ve covered it with stickers I trade in class. I have a sticker book with leaves made from waxed paper so the stickers can be peeled off, restuck, stuck again.
Tell me about the ship, I say. How you went on the ship. I have seen ships like the one he went on in the harbor, the big liners, but I haven’t been on one myself and they scare me a little. I think of ships and I think of shipwrecks, though I don’t think of airplanes and plane crashes.
So he tells me. His voice is clear in my head, though it’s less his voice than the images his voice makes, which are so distinct to me it’s as if I were there myself. He was an architecture student—he was twenty, at college, a boy, a boy so much younger than I am now, an American boy with American parents. No one in his family had ever been to Europe, not, at least, since someone must have come from there generations ago—but theirs wasn’t a family interested in that kind of history. He’d worked nights in a bar up by school to save for his fare; it was a place on the wide avenue where his professors would come sometimes for beers. Pouring beer, he tells me, was mostly what he did those nights, but he bought himself a book (he didn’t really have the money but he told himself it was an investment) and learned to mix drinks. I like to make him say their names, even though I can’t imagine the taste of them. They wouldn’t taste nice, I know that, but the taste of the words in his mouth and then—whispered back—in mine is like the taste of neon, or mink. Gibson, Martini, Manhattan, Singapore Sling, Whiskey Sour. Some drinks had maraschino cherries in them; I like those. We have a jar in the fridge.
So he’d saved his money, but it wasn’t enough. His father—whose drugstore nearly went belly-up in the Depression, my grandfather whom I never met—gave him two hundred dollars. I’d never been so surprised by anything, my father says. The ship was named after a queen; it was June when he sailed, on the afternoon tide. Passengers pressed close against the rail and—it was just like in the films—waved their handkerchiefs and the crowd on the quay waved their handkerchiefs back. Some people had confetti, and little party horns. No one had come to see my father off. He was alone, but he didn’t mind that, he says.
You weren’t lonely? I ask.
Just because you’re alone doesn’t mean you have to be lonely, he says. You can be your own good company, you know that. The pleasure of solitude.
Solitude. This is a new word.
Maybe I was a little lonely, but I liked that, he says. I was with people all the time, at school, when I was working, with my family, I knew everyone all the time. Now I was going where I didn’t know anyone and I could be anything I wanted. It was like being in a story, a story I was making up every day. You understand? I nod.
It took nearly a week to cross the sea. A whole ocean! Mostly the weather was fine and he would stand at the rail, watching the blue-black water slide by, or the ship slide by the water: you could become hypnotized wondering which was which. He was traveling third class, sharing his windowless cabin with a nearly silent Pole who just once showed my father black-and-white photographs of his family, a woman and a little boy. It was impossible to tell, my father says, how old the photographs were; and possible to wonder if these people were still alive, but he couldn’t ask. Later when I think of this story, of course, I know that this was less than twenty years after the war—and the story my father’s shipmate was trying to tell was most likely not one of reunion but of permanent, awful separation.
It was like a bridge between two worlds, this voyage, my father says. You know how we walk across the bridge into the city, he says, and there is that time when you are up on the walkway, high over the river, and you are not in one place and not in the other, just on the bridge, the place between? It was like that. What was behind was behind but he didn’t know what was ahead. He used to go sometimes in the evenings to a room where there was a vast jigsaw puzzle—I think it had five thousand pieces! my father says—with a table all to itself. It was an Alpine scene: complicated mountains, pale blue sky, lots of grass and a few cows, not an easy puzzle and not a very exciting one either. But he would get a glass of brandy—his daily extravagance—and for a little while shift the pieces about, trying to see if this shade of cerulean blue was the same as that shade, whether male and female (he tells me that’s what you call it when one piece can be inserted into another piece; I like the matter-of–factness of this) would lock together. He would not have done a jigsaw puzzle on land. I never used to think of anything while I was doing it, he says. It was very calming. I mean, just the puzzle. But I wasn’t really thinking of it; just feeling my way around, and I could hear the ship’s engines and maybe feel it moving, that sense of moving forward but you didn’t know into what.
He’s talking to himself, not to me. I don’t mind. I like to listen. I don’t really want to go to sleep, I wouldn’t mind if he talked all night. A fire engine goes by outside. It’s not an ambulance, or a police car. They make different sounds. My dad teaches me to notice the difference in things.
Time to go to sleep, he says. Enough of the ship. More tomorrow night. Okay, I say. I close my eyes, but I don’t sleep. I imagine myself in the windowless cabin, the bed narrower even than mine, steel walls, the water outside, the ocean, moving forward, but you don’t know into what.
Noises in the scullery. She had not seen a refrigerator; there didn’t seem to be any electricity, although there was water. He returned with a wooden board that he set on the table; there was a shoulder of brown bread on it, and a piece of yellow cheese. A knife in his hand, a big open jackknife, hinged like a jaw. It had a black-dappled six-inch carbon blade and a wooden handle with a topaz sheen; a metal collar held the blade in place. He cut four slices from the bread and left her there; she heard a can opener, the rattle of a pan, and the click and hiss of the little stove she’d seen attached to a canister of gas.
She was very hungry. The sight of the yellow cheese and the bread made her saliva run; suddenly the drink of whiskey she’d poured into her stomach turned into a knot. She didn’t wait, there were no plates, but she cut a slab of the cheese with her good hand; it crumbled into curds, sharp and rank when she dropped them on her tongue. Her left hand she kept on her lap, palm up.
She heard a spoon against the sides of a saucepan. She wondered, if anyone had walked in, what they would make of the scene. Something perfectly ordinary: a man and a woman in companionable silence while one of them prepared a meal and the other sat by the fire. That was precisely how it was with her seizures, she thought: it looked ordinary, but was not. What are they like? people asked her sometimes. It was very difficult to describe. Once, she tried this: Imagine you come into a room. It looks like a pleasant room. The furniture’s nice and it’s clean and orderly. It seems comfortable and even homely. Now, go out of the room again. The person—your friend, or a stranger—who’s led you into the room now reveals what had been kept hidden before: not long ago, there was a murder in that room. All the evidence has gone, of course, but the echo of the act remains. That kind of stain can never be truly erased. Go back into the room. What do you think of it now? It is not so comfortable, not so homely. You want to leave and you turn to go but you find that your friend—or the stranger—has locked the door from the outside. There is no escape. You are imprisoned with the echo of disaster; you can only wait it out. Perhaps the door will be unlocked, perhaps it will not. There is no way to know.
Still, it wasn’t right, this description. People tried to envision it—police line, do not cross—but mostly, she thought, they could not. Is it like a dream? they asked. No, not like dreaming. Not like dreaming at all. And neither was this: the bread and the cheese so actual, the burn of the whiskey. She would like a glass of water. She remembered the glass of water Stephen had given her at the wedding: did she wish it was Stephen who would hand her a glass of water now? What if it were Stephen who came out of the kitchen with the saucepan of soup?
She shouldn’t have drunk any of the whiskey, to be thinking those things. She could call Stephen. She could say: Come and get me, something terrible has happened. I’m stuck. I’m stuck with a—a madman? Stephen would laugh. Not at her, but he would not believe his capable Janet would be stuck with a madman. She didn’t want to hear that laughter; did not want even to imagine it. She should want to hear it, its reassurance, its sound the sound of her own life. Her phone was in her bag, in the boot of her car. Then she doubted there would be a signal here, anyway.
She did not wish for rescue. She wished for answers, and those she would have to find herself. If this man had a key, he might have those answers, or some of them, and maybe he was not a madman anyway. Why shouldn’t he think this was his house? She had not known it existed—had not known this story existed, a woman alive where a woman was dead. A woman walking in the world as she walked in the world now, who perhaps stood at the edge of the water as she had stood at the edge of the water, who had put her hand flat on the green paint of the door as she had put her hand there, had seen all this, drunk from this glass, sat by this fire. Or had not, and this was a madman, a thief, the Devil with gentle hands.
Her glass was empty. She had drunk all the whiskey. He came out with two bowls of tomato soup, very plain, from a tin, and two spoons. He set them down. She would ask him.
“Can I have a glass of water?”
“Of course.”
He had sat, but rose again. The running tap. He brought it in a big white china mug and she drank. “Thank you,” she said.
He nodded, sat again and began to spoon up the soup. He blew on it, sipped. She would say he looked almost feminine, only that wasn’t quite right; yet there was something delicate about his mouth. The planes of his face were broad, though, almost coarse. His eyebrows were as pale as his hair, and so almost invisible. She wished to think he was an ugly man, but could not quite bring herself to form this thought. She supposed he was about her age.
“You’re not curious?” she said at last.
“About what?” Eating steadily and tidily.
“My key.”
“It’s a simple key. Easily made, easily copied.”
“Why would I have copied it? How would I have got hold of yours? Why do you think yours is the original?”
“Three answers,” he smiled with his mouth closed. “I don’t know; I couldn’t precisely say; and you don’t know that I do.”
“This is my house,” she said.
They had finished their soup. The chipped bowls were rimmed with pink scum. He cut two more pieces of bread and then pushed the blade through the rest of the cheese. He divided the food up between them.
“‘My house,’” he said. “Who’s ‘me’? Who are you?”
Why did she need to explain herself to him? Because he was here. Because there was nothing else to do.
“Janet,” she said. “My name is Janet. Who are you?”
“I’m Tom,” he said. So they exchanged their names, very common and plain. First names, which could have been inventions. Yet the words passed between them and for an instant made a drawn thread, something tight. It was hard to tell the color of his deep-set eyes in this light: they might have been black or green or blue. Her left hand stiffening now, inert, like a tool she had no idea how to use. She was suddenly very tired, her back aching from the drive. At the thought of going anywhere else she shivered, with exhaustion, with uncertainty, with too much knowledge and too little held together in herself, battling. Now the bread and cheese tasted of nothing, and her mouth was very dry, but she made herself eat it, and drink the water in the mug. She looked away from his steady gaze, at the table, the food, his own hand and wrist, no watch, no rings, resting broad and blunt by the knife and the heel of the bread. It was plain what she had to do, if she could drag herself to do it.
“I will call the police,” she said. “I told you. This is my house. I inherited it. It was my mother’s and now it’s mine. I have papers. This is the truth. I don’t know who you are, but it will be easier for you if you leave now.” Saying this, sitting there, damaged and barely able to move, but the words came as if she were still in her city office, or her home, her own place. Yet she could feel this was not her place. Her claim was flimsy and useless.
“Your mother’s house?” The tilt of his head against his otherwise perfect stillness. “Then why are you only here now? Your mother died so long ago.”
More tomorrow night, my father says, the story of the ship. But I can’t sleep. I am eight, or eleven, or fifteen, or twelve, always in the same bed, my bedroom, my home. This most familiar place, the place where I started and where I think I will always be, with him, with my father. The venetian blinds never quite closed, I don’t like them closed, I like the nighttime light from the city to slip between the slats and keep me safe from my dreams. After the seizures this is even more important; sometimes they come before morning. They don’t wake me, at least, that’s not how it seems: I am allowed to waken and then they begin, pressing in on me, spinning me away from myself, dividing me, becoming me. When I have a seizure, where am I? This question occurs to me quite soon after they began. Do I become the seizure? I feel that I do, that I am vaporized metal, electricity, air, that I could be a bright hot gas flame with all of my senses burnt away by fear, burnt away by myself.
The ones that come at night make me cry: I don’t sob, I am not unhappy, but my streaming tears wet my cheeks, the pillow, the white sheets old and soft with washing and washing and washing. Until I am thirteen or fourteen—I am not sure—and decide I am too old to do this, when the night seizures come I will get up, walk the wooden hall to my father’s room and get in bed beside him. Usually he will not wake. He always sleeps on the same side of the bed, of course, most people do, by the window, his round bedside table, its books, his narrow reading glasses, the plain solid chain for his keys, his worn black billfold, a glass of water, all the things that are perfectly ordinary and could be anyone’s except they are not, they are his and they are him. I crawl under the covers. Was this my mother’s side? I never ask. Or if he moved to her side when she’d gone. The list of questions I have never put into words. In his bed until I know I am too old, and I don’t anymore, and work it out alone, the metal vapor and the tears.
Afterwards I lie still and make lists of things I’ve done and seen, things I want to remember. I don’t keep a diary. Ruth doesn’t keep a diary either. We have decided we don’t like diaries, with their flimsy fake locks anyone could pull apart, who cares about hiding the key, their padded covers, their orderly lines and dates. Dear Diary. We wouldn’t believe ourselves if we read again what we wrote down. The stories change in memory and breath. It’s what keeps them alive.
Stories I could make from fragments. There is no evidence; I know about destruction. This mild man, my father, who is gentle in every particular, who never raises his voice, whose assurance runs through my life with the fluidity and steadiness of an ocean current. He makes an omelet for supper: with a sharp crack he breaks the egg on the side of the bowl, with small swift flicks of his wrist he whisks the yellow and white together. The butter sizzles, welcoming, and at just the right moment he slides in the liquid, tilting the pan this way, that way, talking the while, buttering toast, tossing the salad. I sit at the kitchen table, maybe drawing, maybe telling him what I need for the next school trip; and maybe he is making spaghetti or stew. Each evening is particular, but each is the same, too, the ebb and flow of days and nights and days. We orbit each other, a planet and its moon, twin stars. Bodies drawn by the gravity of love.
He is an artist, my father. He makes technical drawings and models for architects. He makes me a dollhouse out of stiff paperboard and paints two walls as stone, two walls as clapboard wood, just as I’ve asked. I don’t like dolls; in the house live tiny, stiff-armed bears with soldierly shoulder joints. They don’t have names, the bears. There are four of them: a mother, a father, and two children of indeterminate sex. I do not endow them with any interior life. They are there to sit on the perfect furniture my father makes.
He makes everything from materials he keeps in a big closet just off our apartment’s front hall. It is like a cave, this closet, a treasure chest. He seems to be able to magic anything out of it. How many times have I asked, Dad, do you have—? And he will say, Let’s see, and find whatever it is or something better. A particular kind of glue, a globe, some old sheet music. He has never told me that the closet—which is a mess, really, stacked with sets of wooden shelves and metal drawers, cluttered with near-antique machinery (an ancient manual typewriter, a device for rolling cigarettes, even a bombsight from the Second World War)—is off limits. Has said things like, Wait, I’ll find that for you; but I can’t ever remember his forbidding me anything.
So there is no sense of transgression—I will never be able to recall such a sense—when, one afternoon, for something to do when he is out, I poke idly through one stack of rattly file drawers. What do I think I might find? I am eleven. Something worth having. A pair of dice, perhaps, a pack of cards, some button or medal or tool I will be able to ask about when he comes home. I had never intended to keep what I was doing secret from him.
Until I find those photographs. Color photographs, ordinary prints, a little faded but not much. They have been torn, not in half, necessarily, but always at the edge of a figure, seated or standing. It’s the first thing I notice, this tearing, because I have never seen my father tear anything. He cuts, and rarely, even, with a scissors: at his elbow is always an X-Acto knife and a straightedge, he will open envelopes that way or cut stars for birthday party invitations. Even a package of rice he won’t tear open, but insert the tip of a knife carefully into the perforations on the box.
I run my finger along the edge of the tear. It is soft against the ball of my flesh, yet also rough; my finger can imagine the smooth edge of a photograph untorn, not mutilated. I can feel what lies behind the softness, I can feel—as in a dream that just vanishes on waking, drawing itself out of reach—violence. There are seven photographs. I wonder how long it took: all at once, quick, in a row? Or action followed by regret, by a decision to mend one’s ways? I know that feeling. I remember stealing a china doll once, from my friend Molly’s windowsill; a little dog slipped into my pocket. It just happened. I would put it back. I didn’t. The next week, I took another. The memory of their eventual return (no hard feelings; we were still friends; these things happen) still makes my face hot. Was it like this, the tearing? I will never know. I will never ask. I hide this memory with the others, the list I keep, invisible, safe.
A rat we saw underground, waiting for a train. Looking down, my father said: See that? The dead man’s switch.
Squatting by the trunk of an oak, on a day in the country, an hour away from the city. The air shimmering silver, the firestorm of the turning leaves; a little fungus that blows a puff of dun smoke, its spores. Tap it. Just like that. Hiding in the ground litter, waiting to make itself again.
One day, a chalk circle in the park, two trees, a man in black on a unicycle; his stately, ridiculous grace.