THEY WERE SO ordinary, the photographs.
They were objects.
There were so many objects in the world. Her car, this book, that table, these photographs. What they had in common was their separateness, that they could be touched but never taken in, there was no need to absorb them, no possibility of absorption. The torn photographs she’d found that time. Found and put away from herself, from her mind, and now sitting in front of his fire, she saw herself again barefoot, running and running, with those torn photographs in her hand although she had never held them again. In this vision she was running and she was standing still. She was two women. Who was this woman in front of the fire, with these photographs in her hand?
The woman in the photographs. Her mother. How the body does not lie. Looking at the photographs like looking into a glass.
Janet could still feel the wetness between her legs. His wetness and hers. She had not washed.
She could throw the images into the fire. Then they would never have been. Then nothing would exist. It was like the temptation, when standing on some high place, to jump. She knew she would not. Carefully she set them down beside her, just to her right, one overlapping the other as if they were playing cards. Then she turned her head away, rested her cheek on her knees. He still stood. Tom. She could see his shins, his ankles, his feet—he was dressed, of course, now, as she was; but she recalled the sensation of his bone against the flesh of her calf, her heel kicking against his in that bed, that bed over there.
“I don’t remember where they were taken,” he said, finally. “I don’t know who took them. You think I’d remember something like that, someone must have given them to her. We didn’t have a camera or anything. Ever. She didn’t care about those things. It’s queer how people go through life, don’t you think, always taking pictures, insisting on souvenirs, like they have to prove they exist. Look, I can show you, here, I’m real. But there they are. I guess I’m glad I have them, now.”
“Were they here in this house? When you came here?”
“No,” he said. “I had them with me. I don’t keep much. But I kept these. I don’t really know why. Well, yes I do. Like I said. Proof.”
She was listening to him speaking as if she would listen to anyone else. She felt hollowed out. He sat down again, close to her, and she was glad of it, his presence, his solid shape, there, against her shoulder. Not desire. Desire was not the name for this. But it behaved as desire behaved, scooping at her gut and making her skin prickle, raising the down on her arm, on the back of her neck. She did not look at him but let her eyes get hot from holding them wide at the fire which devoured itself, which demanded more, which cracked and spat from scarlet, to gold, to fierce, empty white.
“I was a boy when we came here,” he said. “It was after that. After these pictures, whenever they were. I was older. Not much, but older than that.”
She adjusted the pictures at her side, for something to do. “I guess that’s you,” she said. Janet reached up and ran her bandaged hand over his strawy head. Left a track.
She was looking into his eyes. She wanted to look into his eyes, they were the same as the fire. She stared and couldn’t stop staring. “Look,” she said, glancing down at her clotted bandages. Blood had begun to seep through again. “It hurts.”
When he had worked on her it felt like a ritual. Like something he had always done and would always do. They had stood side by side at the stone sink as he unwrapped her and ran freezing water from the tap over the cut until it all ran clear into the drain. She could imagine standing here when she was an old woman and he was an old man, bent and shriveled, still tending her unhealed wound. Tending his, too: the only difference was that his, you could not see. Her heart, her hand, her whole body. She could have tried to push him away. He was what she was, herself. That, she could not push away.
Metal in her mouth.
“Christ,” she said, and held his arm. Why was there only weakness here? She had come for strength.
“What?”
“The same as before. As when—”
“When you came?”
Christ, Christ. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Leave me alone. Don’t go, don’t.”
“Which is it?”
“Don’t go.” And he held her again, in front of the streaky glass with the sea outside, the rough wall of gorse outside, the wild garlic on the path outside, it was all outside and she was here, tight against him. She held him hard, and the sucked shell of her rage splintered against his ribs. The sea receding, the seizure receding, leaving her flat and blank as wet sand.
She let go. They both did.
“What is it like?” he asked.
“I can’t tell you more than I did. Like another place. I used to have them when I was a little girl. They went away. Now they’ve come back. Not too long ago, they came back.”
“It frightens you.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Yes. It shouldn’t, they shouldn’t. I know what they are. I think it’s because of where they happen. Happen in my brain, I mean. It’s like—like leaving. Not for anywhere pleasant. But then it goes, so—it doesn’t matter.”
Close by her now, he put two more dry branches on the licking flame. She could see that the day, which had begun blue, was beginning to close over, the sky whitening. She had been here—how long? Only hours, hours. Stephen would be…she could not imagine. How she had used to think of his day, her day, separate and united, glancing at the clock at the center and knowing that he would be arriving in a studio, or at a theater, or a school, or sitting in their kitchen or crossing the street. She recalled the noise of her cell phone cracking under her bootheel. That was not the reason he was lost to her, now.
Strange, how clean the realization was, on this ordinary morning where everything was changed. Standing in the cold, in the black night, by the sea: the word in her head, the word for what she sought. It could not have been mother. She had allowed him to take her: and he knew. Not mother. Brother. And now there was no going back. It was simple, obvious. If it was awful—what was the point of thinking that? Awful. Aweful.
She tried to bring Stephen’s face into her mind. Nothing came. Was it her choice, or had he turned his back to her? It did not matter. He was gone. That was the only truth there was.
There were the photographs, where she’d left them.
“My father,” she said. “My father said she died. My mother. I was three years old. She went out, one evening, just around the corner from our house, just to buy something, just an ordinary evening, and a drunk driver jumped the curb and killed her. Like that. In an instant. People say, people said when I was older, of course they didn’t say then, at least she didn’t suffer. I don’t remember her. My father—”
Again they sat side by side. Hidden from everything and everyone, in this stone shelter. She could have believed that with her brass key she had called it into existence, summoned it, that it had not existed before her arrival—except there had been the ash in the grate, the whiskey and the broken glass, Tom, his pale head and dark eyes. They were nothing alike. But the taste of him had been the taste of herself. That she had known all along.
“My father loved her so much he wouldn’t talk about that, about the end. He said I was enough for him, I was her daughter, she was still there, with us. In me. Not that we were the same, but—well, that’s what he said.” She was not speaking to Tom, although Tom was listening. “I never thought that before. Whatever you grow up with: that’s how it is. That’s normal.”
When she picked up the photographs again the deckled edges vibrated, as if they would call a note out of the air, the music of the past.
“I don’t know what she looks like. I mean: I didn’t know what she looked like. Everyone I knew had photographs, pictures on the bookshelves or in albums, Christmas cards—we didn’t. I never thought it was strange or anything. Like you said. No pictures, just life, going on, not stuck into pictures you could keep, that showed you how happy you were. People never have pictures of themselves when they’re sad, I don’t think. The pictures are only to show you how happy you are.” Then she said: “How old are you?”
He told her. Four years between them. Four years, an ocean, another life.
It is a summer night and he is sitting at the edge of my bed. Sometimes he smooths the covers, tucked over me, or loops my hair back behind my ear. This story of how they met: why do I want to hear it, over and over again? I like beginnings. I am not interested in endings. I think I know something about endings, that they are unlikely to be good. I like potential, the power that’s there at the start, before entropy kicks in.
She’d lost her key, he says. Standing on the frozen steps in a short wool coat and heavy black shoes. I remember her shoes. My father is not looking at me, he is looking out the window, as if he can see her there, just beyond the glass, walking in the air. They were like men’s shoes, he says, the best she could do against the cold.
Blast, she was saying, and the air was so still her voice carried in the dark. Everything was hushed up with the cold and her voice seemed loud. She didn’t even have a hat. Her hair was very dark, like yours. She had black wool gloves and she put a black hand on her forehead. Her white forehead.
There were six steps to her door. Funny what you remember, isn’t it? Like the shoes. I counted when I went up. One, two, three, four, five, six: Can I help? Or something like that, I must have said. See, I remember the steps, but not exactly what I said to her. To your mother. Funny.
She lived in a little flat on the first floor, which is what they call it there, we’d call it the second floor, but I was just learning all that then. (Lying there in my pajamas, looking up at him, I try to store this away, some fragment of truth about her. It is a solid piece of information that I could feed into myself and—what? Become her? If, like her, I would say the first floor when I meant the second?)
We went and had a drink. There was a pub around the corner, a bar, it was called The Engineer. She was shivering, her gloves were no good and underneath them her fingers looked like twigs, white, stripped of bark, pink at the tips. I got two glasses of whiskey because if you’re cold, whiskey is the drink, and when I sat down across from her, her hands were on the wooden table with its colored beer mats and I picked them up in my two hands and blew on them, to warm her.
Of course he takes my hands in his to show me, even though it is summer, even though it is hot, too hot. My hands outside the covers now, cupping my fingers in his own and blowing, puff, puff, puff. It tickles. It makes me laugh.
See? he says. Just like that. She laughed.
How old am I, this telling? A little older. When I was younger he would just tell me the story. He wouldn’t tell me how he felt. Now he says: She was so beautiful. Her head right back, laughing. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful. Well, he says, looking down at me, smiling, until I saw you. My little girl. Not so little. I’m so proud of you.
For what? I must have said.
Just for being you. We have to love each other, he says, for what we are. Not for what we want to be, or what we want other people to be. They can’t be any different. Not in their true hearts.
Silence, a little.
The whiskey revived us, he says, and maybe she forgot I’d held her hands but I didn’t forget. She told me her name was Margaret, that she worked in a bookshop, and I could tell from her voice that she didn’t come from where we were but I didn’t know enough to be able to hear where it was she came from. She told me she had a downstairs neighbor, the neighbor on the ground floor, we’d say the first floor, who had a key to her flat too but the neighbor was away.
I asked her if she had a friend she could call. Yes, she said, I do, and so when we’d finished our drinks I walked her to a telephone booth, a call box, and I don’t know why, I’m sure she had money, but I gave her change to make a phone call and stood outside the metal and glass door while she dialed, while she dropped the coins into the slot. She hadn’t even bothered to put her gloves back on, they were useless, her wrists were so white in the darkness, the cord from the telephone curling down by her ear. She was smiling at me through the glass, my father says to me, and I was standing close to the glass so my breath made fog on it, melted the ice crystals that formed and reformed in the freezing night. It was night now, or nearly. Nearly.
And it’s night now, here, for me in my bed. I want him to go on. I don’t say anything because if I do he’ll realize it’s late, that he should tell me good night, let me read a little while on my own. I listen to records, too, before I go to sleep. I have a record player that holds up a stack of three flat black vinyl disks, and if I am falling asleep the pause, click, drop of the next record will pull me back into wakefulness, just a little. The records are ready to go. Kids’ songs, I listen to, only there’s one record I like too, my father’s, I wish I still had it: the sound of a double bass that makes me think of the ocean, or a cave, somewhere deep and safe.
She said, No one’s home, when she came out of the phone booth. She rubbed her hands together, rubbed her own red cheeks, standing there.
(Later I will wonder if this is true. Only later, much later. What if she never called anyone? What if she had made another choice, there, in the pub, out of the cold, with my father, a stranger, another choice for another life? Right there, right then. In an instant everything can change.)
So, my father then says, almost lightly, as if it is nothing, so, I said, well, why don’t you come home with me? Just for a little while. Then you can call your friends again. I told her I had some soup, or something, some bread and cheese, we could eat that and then she could go out to the phone box outside and try again. I didn’t have a telephone of my own. Almost no one did, even people who weren’t renting rooms like I was.
I remember, my father says, how asking her back to my room was the first thing that made me feel like I belonged in this place, in this city, even though I knew I didn’t. Normally, when you come to a strange place, people help you, that’s how it is, and usually for quite a long while. Like when Miss Marshall moved into the upstairs apartment a couple of years ago. You even took her out to the deli once, didn’t you? Well, you went out together, I knew you’d be safe with her, but you showed her the way. Now she knows the way. But I suppose she was helping you too, that time, taking you out.
Listen to my father, talking to himself, not really talking to me, I am the vessel he pours himself into, he holds his memories by tipping them into me. But he believes I am a small cup. He will only pour so much. He worries I will spill.
It was good to be able to help her, Margaret. Margaret who had lost her key. So that was how we met, you know that, your mother and I. That was how we met. It was so cold. She couldn’t get into her house. I took her to my place. You know, my father says, I didn’t have any soup. It didn’t seem to matter.
Night slipping in through the blinds. The hiss of the turntable, the music’s caress in my solitary sleep, so warm, so happy, alone in my narrow bed. Dreaming of two sets of footsteps, side by side on an icy pavement, walking forward into the future. My future.
Why should it be different because of what she knows, knows now? That he is not a stranger. That he is her blood. That he must have known it as soon as he saw her face, her hands, her skin. Her feet when he unlaced her boots.
She had never tried to imagine what it would be like to have a brother or a sister. To be only was so much a part of her; it would have been like trying to imagine another limb. Why would you?
Could she have known the truth, too? Could she have prevented it? Why had she allowed him—not just him, anyone—to act as he had done? Something had happened to her here that was a force beyond her control. The force of her desire to find something, no matter what it was. Or perhaps, not quite awake to the figure who’d stood over her bed, she had been dreaming of Stephen. Had believed the present might be the past, the always irrecoverable past. Stephen. She had known it was gone, that easy past, as soon as she had stepped over the threshold of this door, the door she had called her own though it was not in her possession, though there had been fire in the abandoned grate and this white-haired spirit here in haunting.
Who was a spirit? Who was not? She had seen on the mantelpiece a mask, a mask made of rusted iron with a brazen mouth and the open slashes of its eyes where the metal had been heated, torn, stove in by accident or design, she could not tell. An abstract face, a woman’s face. It was the only object of decoration in this, her half-derelict, stolen inheritance. She had looked into its face and looked away. She had not wished to recognize it.
If she had been dreaming of that mask, that face, it was a dream so buried she could not retrieve it. Her injury, the whiskey, her exhaustion had made her plunge into sleep as soon as she had lain flat under the thin covers; Janet was lucky. In the worst of times she had always been able to vanish into her cave of sleep. She was a diver with oxygen, a man on the moon. She was beyond anyone’s reach. But her dreams came; and perhaps this one had been of Stephen. Sometimes the fantastical visions of her nights let her alone, and she was allowed something closer to simplicity or memory. She had let herself fall, this night, into the wedding that had tempted her for an instant—among the candles and among the guests—toward that whiteness, that daytime dream of a new beginning. The daytime dream that had made her mind close on itself, fire on itself, make its own world of sparks and shocks in order to effect an escape. Walking home beside him, in her dream her uninjured palm close against his, their fingers twined in a lovers’ knot of flesh. In her dream, then, the unlacing toward solitude. Walking away through the yellow night city, the pavement rough against the bare soles of her feet. And as she walked the blood flowing away from her, from between her thighs, swirling down into water, into the city’s dark river.
Her father had never been strict with her when she was a girl. It had been the two of them, they were a team. They made the rules they needed, though you could not have called them rules. I trust your judgment, he’d say, even when she was quite small. He was right to trust that judgment. Aware that something had been taken from her, something she could never replace, she kept herself within certain boundaries, as if to transgress would be to reopen the door through which fragility entered, through which loss had slipped through. She was very careful crossing the street.
Yet she had been aware that she could have asked for anything.
She had kept silent.
She thought of a time, years in the future, when those boundaries would blur, or vanish. She would feel safer. Then she could make any choice.
This choice.
Would he have stopped? If she had said: Do not. The choice, too, to keep silent, to lie still and look up in the half–dark and find him standing there, his eyes hidden in their sockets but their black light pouring down on her all the same.
When she was a little girl she had wondered, so many times, what would happen if you—
If you—
If you crossed the bridge alone, if you let go your father’s hand.
Tom held her down as if she would have fought or as if she were fighting, his grip on her so the blood came again to her palm. The pain reminded her of who she was, of her choice. She was shaking. She could feel her bones, her muscles, sinews, veins and arteries, moving against each other, her awareness of her own body the understanding that kept her from flying apart. When he opened her mouth with his own mouth she had tried to recall Stephen’s but that was gone, that was another life, there was no possibility of retrieval.
His hands at her clothes, pulling and tearing, this struggle in the dark that was clear as time. She put her lips on the flesh of his neck, her teeth scraping on his collarbone, and even this close, how queer, but impossible to catch his scent. There was nothing. The iron of her blood, her own sweat, her own sex—but from him a clean emptiness, only sensation. As if all her other senses had been canceled by touch. It flayed her, what she wanted, what she had to have.
The old sheet against her nipples now, her shirt pulled up, his breath in her ear and her other life, the past, suddenly whole before her. This was a mistake, but it was too late, her legs were open, his whole weight on her and she felt that strange, familiar smoothness—anyone’s prick, it could have been, but it was this one now, fitting as the moment did, isolate, pure. She closed her eyes, her arms stretched right above her. Details she would recall. Her good hand on the chipped enamel of the bedstead, how cold it was in her curled fingers. Her jeans crumpled on the stone-flagged floor: as he pushed himself into her she saw herself in the 6 a.m. light of her own bedroom, pulling them on, fastening the buttons, buckling her belt, sitting back down on the edge of the bed to draw on the pair of thick green wool socks she still wore, her toes flexing inside them as she shifted her weight under his, the bones of her hips pressing into the thin mattress. Feeling the suck from the cup of air opening up between the curve of his belly and the curve of her back. He bit at her ear, her left ear, a flare of heat from his teeth and his tongue. His breath and the sound of the breathing sea drew in and out together. Somewhere the pair of seals was diving, catching silver fish in their sharp teeth, breaking the surface of the water to turn their abyssal eyes to the land.
Here is where my father will talk about the next beginning, the newfound land. It is autumn, I am sure it is, the air is polished, shining with first cold. We are walking through a little park, hardly a park, a plaza, the leaves of the scraggly trees hanging on the branches as they turn and curl, baring their ribs, before winter. We are holding hands, swinging our arms, we are laughing as the path turns down onto a sidewalk and then down again into the shadow under the bridge. You can miss the steps if you don’t know they’re there, but I know, I can’t imagine not knowing this, and one day I am shocked when a stranger asks us, How do I get to the bridge? Even though we are standing right there. Here it is, my father says. Hey!
Up the stone steps which lead to the wooden walkway. Rising, rising, we are walking in step, it must be a Sunday morning and we are going to have dim sum over the river, which is something we like to do. We never ask what’s on the little carts, my dad never does, he just says, Yes, one of those. Let’s eat till we can’t see, he’ll say, and I still think this is funny. I don’t know why.
The wooden walkway that arches out over the river, this beautiful, eternal invitation. The walkway rises as the cables of the bridge rise in what my father has taught me is called a catenary curve, the perfect curve that is itself: how a cord would hang if you held its ends between your index finger and thumb. Wire laid against wire, wire coiled on wire, wire crossed with wire, and stone, limestone and granite, shouldering up out of the deep river’s bed. Cyclists stand on their pedals to surmount the ascent to the center; the ones coming the other way, toward us, coast and float downhill until they brake, swing their legs over saddles, hoist their bikes on their shoulders and carry them down the stairs. Someone, a woman in an orange scarf and no hat, her blond hair pushed back by the quick breeze, sits on a bench with a cup of coffee, looking as if in another moment it’s going to be too cold to sit here, to sit still, but she doesn’t want to leave yet. Not yet. We walk by her. My father is speaking. His voice sings in me and in the wires of the bridge. The city’s bay opens up, south of us, lapped with the possibility of the sea.
I brought her here, he says. The very first morning after we arrived. Another voyage across the ocean he’d made, only this time not in solitude, this time there was a groom and his bride, a man and his wife, to work away at the five thousand pieces of the jigsaw puzzle (it was the same ship; it was the same puzzle; not much progress had been made) and swirl glasses of brandy as they sat in two deck chairs under the round bold eye of a violet moon. I worried she would be seasick, he says, but she never was, even though the first two days it was so rough you had to walk, or try to walk, with your legs wide apart as if you were trying to straddle the whole ship, and stick close to the walls where there were rails to hang on to. In the dining room there were clips to hold the plates to the tables. The first night, in a bucket clamped to a table, there was a bottle of champagne for us from the captain.
The real captain of the ship? I used to ask. A mythical figure with a white beard and a pipe, standing at a great spoked wheel and keeping a weather eye out for pirates.
The real captain of the ship, he’d say, in those days. A bottle of champagne, because we were newlyweds. We finished it in our cabin. We didn’t even have a window. Only two bunk beds. Sitting on the bottom bunk, we drank it all. We got a little drunk. Your mother. Your mother and I.
We are not quite at the middle of the bridge. A stone tower ahead of us, invincible. How I love this place that is no place, that is a step over the void, that holds me steady and is never still.
My father says: two lovers can sleep on the blade of a knife. And then he blushes. We don’t speak for a little while. One bicycle. Two the other way. Look up. Below a hollow cut in the stone high above, chalky streaks trail down the granite face, and there is the neat Horus head of the falcon who roosts there. I point, and my father tips his head back and just as he does the bird opens its wings and drops down into the air, catching the wind, dipping through the wires and away over the city.
When we got here, my father says, everything was new. To her, I mean, he says—but what that meant was, it was new to me too. Everything. How she would stand on the steps of a bus with her palm out flat, trying to remember what each silver coin was worth, which ones had ridged edges, which ones were smooth. She hated the milk. The milk was all wrong. (How could that be? Milk was milk. Of all the drinks in the world, how could there be any alteration, any difference, in milk?) Mostly, of course, she didn’t hate things, I don’t mean to sound—well, she wasn’t like that, but when you are away from home you miss familiar things. Even if you’ve wanted to get away. I suppose what you discover is—
Now we are standing together, looking toward the bottom of the city, the island, the tidal strait that pours and shudders between, under, the trusswork, the towers, another arch of steel suspended in the hazed distance, the raised torch unlit behind the ordinary orange of a passing ferryboat. If I close my eyes I will see this too, I know it so well, it’s imprinted in me, my father has put it there, I have put it there myself. It is ours. It anchors me. Sometimes, when the seizures come, it is this view I’ll try to capture, to recall, to bring me back. It never works. It stays separate. It is insulated, safe, unshocked by the electrics of my mind.
The cable sweeps up over our heads, shifting in its steel saddle, in tension, alive. The force in the wire I can feel in the steel beam against my belly, in the wood under my feet. My empty belly; I begin to think about dumplings and pork, the salty glaze of hoisin sauce. For a moment I’m not listening. Just for a moment.
I suppose what you discover is that you can’t get away, my father says. There’s always something to miss. Even the things you hate. Even the things you fear. They are just inside of you, right next to the things you love, twisted together with the things you love. He is not looking at the thin cables that drop vertically, diagonally, from the main cables to the bridge floor, but I am, and I see how they are twisted together, fused so they could never be unsealed. The things you love, the things you hate.
It’s not true, what I said before. Sometimes I hate that I have no mother, yes, I want to know; but I love my father. I love that he is mine, that we are ours, that there is no one between us. Twisted like steel cable, hate and love, love and hate.
You can’t get away, he says. What makes you what you are, holds you. He holds me now, his arm tight around me. You can’t escape. It will pull you back and you’ll have no choice.
Look how the sunlight glows in his eyes, makes them shine, as if with tears.
A while later, Janet and Tom walked out through the green door, back along the coastal path toward where the seals had been, and where they had been with the seals. It seemed long ago now, as if these hours had been their whole lives. The sky was sheeted as candle wax now, alabaster, high, a lid of cloud closed over them. She was waiting to hear him speak.
“The track you came along,” he said. “The brambles there. We picked blackberries, the first time I came. I thought that’s all we’d have to eat, blackberries. It was just this time of year.”
She wondered how old he had been then. She knew how old he was now. She put the calculation away, held it at a distance from her, what it meant. She didn’t ask him the question.
“I was just a boy,” he said, almost as if he had heard her, “little, not so little…I’m not sure. I didn’t know much, that makes you little. I just followed her. I followed her everywhere. Of course I did. But she went, is what I mean. Left one place and then another, as if she wasn’t at home anywhere. She left and left. We did, I mean. We were always leaving. She was never settled. She would get a job somewhere—I think—make money, somehow, and I would go to school, wherever it was, a town or a city, usually, and I wouldn’t know anyone and I wouldn’t know anything, and then we would leave again. I didn’t care much, I think. I was with her. It was all right. I would make things. I was good with my hands.”
“That mask,” she said. “Or whatever it is. Face. That doesn’t belong in the house.”
“It does,” he said. The push of his voice. “I made it. That’s what I do.”
“You’re a—a sculptor?”
The darkness that crossed his face. “No,” he said. “I fix cars. I work in a garage here. That’s how I live. You wouldn’t be imagining I was anything special, now, would you?”
His face was as pale as the sky, as unreadable. “No,” she said quickly. “Don’t worry.”
“I won’t,” he said.
The cord between them, first tight, then slack. Wound in her grasp, around her spine, around her heart.
“She would—I don’t know. All my life, my young life, when we were together she would—tell me stories. Awful stories, I guess you’d say, if you heard them, they weren’t stories for a child. Demons and spirits and—suffering. Or something.” His laugh was a harsh bark in the air. “I guess you’d say they were about love, if you could call it that. It gave me—maybe it gave me the wrong idea.” Did he look at her sidelong? A flicker in the corner of her eye, the possibility of his glance.
“Are you telling me you’re sorry?” She made her voice cold.
“No,” he said. “I’m not. I’m telling you what happened.”
She was quiet, let him be.
“The things I make. Sometimes I think they’re like those stories, though I don’t even know what that means. Like I could make them solid.”
“Like you could get her back?”
“Yes,” he said.
In that moment she loved him. They wanted the same thing. They were the same thing. She could never forgive him, but she loved him. What love or forgiveness was—they were only words. But the openness in her heart was real.
“Anyway, never mind what I make. Then we came here. It was different here. She knew this place. This house, it didn’t frighten her the way it frightened me. She said it was home. She’d never said that about anywhere, she didn’t believe in that, it never existed. And the place she wanted for home—I was scared to death of it.”
“I can’t imagine you scared.” An allowance made.
He looked at her then, but not at her, she thought, within himself, his gaze rocking back in toward that boy by the sea so long ago.
“I was,” he said. “What we found here—what she found—”
The wind skipped up off the water, flung itself in their faces, slapped at their coats. How simple it had been to walk past her car, parked so tidily there by the house, and at any time she could have unlocked its door, turned the key in the ignition, driven away, down and down, back to pavements, streetlamps, warm life. But the other key, the key to her mother’s house, seemed to cancel out the other, like magnets held so they repel.
“What was it?” she asked. “What did she find?”
“I think you find what you want, here. That seems to be the way. Don’t you think?”
The rocks stubbed up sharp beneath her feet, shoved through the earth of the path, wouldn’t be hidden, and the gorse was a yellow violence on the dunes. The sea pulled back from the shore so that it too was revealed, tangled wracks of stinking kelp, mussels yawning open, dead, a plastic bottle, a huddle of frayed polymer rope. Wreckage thrown up from the water, from where the black-eyed seals hid. Once you were here there was nowhere else to run. Here was the end of the hunt.
“My father was here,” he said after a while. “At least, well, he must have been, my father, the man we met. She never said in so many words. But it seemed she must have left him, and come back. He looked like me. Just like me.” He turned to face her. He stood too close. She wished he would stand closer. How did she become this, this creature of want and dread? Her hair, loosed from its plait, was gripped by the wind, loosed, gripped again, as she herself was loosed and gripped by whatever need had drawn her, the longing she’d pinned back for so long, tied into a knot whose heart was hidden even from her own soul’s gaze. All her father’s stories of beginnings, the beautiful beginnings, a new world, a new love. Here she stood at the end of things, at the edge. I dreamt I went to my mother’s grave. The wind that had blown through her in that dream as her beautiful mother, the woman with her own face, her own bones, her own translucent skin, had sat propped against the greening stone in her blanket of earth, waiting, waiting.
Waiting for this. Closer, come closer, she didn’t say to him, but he did come closer until they stood breast to breast on the path.
Waiting for you, he’d said.
She remembered once, when she had been six or seven, she had decided one afternoon just to look out of her bedroom window, look down the street, toward the corner. She had watched the lights change, over and over, red to green, green to red. She had seen taxicabs swish by and women with strollers and a boy who left a box on the sidewalk and kept walking. It felt like she sat there for hours and hours, watching. She jumped when she heard her father’s voice. What are you doing? he asked. Looking for Mom, she said. She was shocked herself, how clear it was in her now, at the words she made with her own mouth, but her father—he sat down, so fast it was as if someone had knocked the backs of his knees with a broom, bump on the edge of her bed. He looked at her, his child, for a long time. Then he got up, turned, and simply left the room.
She had lost that memory until now.
Waiting for you. Closer, come closer.
“You knew what you were to me,” she said. “You knew.”
“Yes,” he said again. His confirmation of her. “I don’t have any excuse.”
“No,” she answered. “But then—neither do I.”