I’ve brought a bottle of wine to Patrick’s house tonight. Glossy pink chicken under plastic, a glass bottle of brined capers, two lemons, olive oil.
“What are you making?” he asks.
“It’s a recipe my mother used to make.” I open one of the low cabinet doors beneath the oven range, searching for a pan. All the dishes inside have a furred skein of dust settled in their depths; a spider scuttles away from the sudden press of light.
When I straighten again, Patrick watches me. “Are you and your mother still close?”
I realize that I’ve mapped out a portion of my distinct history, diverging sharply from where I first met Patrick in March. I remember myself as a little girl with a long, melancholy face, hair so pale it looked white, like a photographic negative of a dark-haired child.
When I don’t answer, Patrick speaks up, tentative: “I said the wrong thing.”
I smile an apology, shaking my head. “She lives far away,” I offer. “We don’t talk often. Not for any reason. Just life getting in the way.”
Patrick’s eyes turn thoughtful. “I haven’t seen my family in a long time. You look up one day and it’s been a year. More. It’s easy to lose track of people.” A pause. “Easy for them to lose track of you.”
He speaks lightly, but the very lightness of the words is wrong, as if he’s so accustomed to this isolation that it’s no longer strange. Standing in the kitchen, I think of the photographs, my first introduction to the Braddocks: so many faces spread across those images. A whole rotating cast of bit players, supporting roles. All those people thickened out the Braddocks’ lives, reflected their beauty and happiness back at them. Eyes like mirrors.
In contrast to those infinitely populated photos, Patrick’s current life is astonishingly empty. His echoing house; his solitary body moving through the rooms. No photographs displayed on the walls other than Sylvia’s. No envelopes bearing return addresses in the intimate handwriting of friends, parents. This must be why the sight of the dark-haired woman hit me so hard. She’s such an anomaly that she’s forced into uneasy significance.
Patrick picks up one of the lemons, rolling the pebbled neon yellow between his palms.
“It’s not so bad, losing touch with people who aren’t there for you anyway,” I say. The Damsons flash through my mind. “I find it’s better to focus on the future.” I peel away the plastic veil clinging to the chicken: the pink meat shimmers with crystals of ice.
“Wise woman,” he says.
I’m silent, thinking of those faces. Something else occurs to me, a hard punch of a realization. Each smile in those photographs must mean something specific to Sylvia, a trail of beloved memories. Her friends, cousins, college roommates—they’re scattered across the city, across the globe, mourning her. Navigating the flat, unending landscape of grief, running into unexpected reminders of her absence. Sylvia is coming back into a world without these other lives. Her life, this time around, is narrower. Only big enough for the two of them. Him and her.
Patrick leans over me to reach for a glass. His body tight against my back, his breath in my ear, and I’m penned in. I can’t move. His arm presses tight against my shoulder.
The bathroom has high ceilings, eggshell-pale walls. A trace of ammonia sours the air, and the bar soap next to the sink is hardened and warped.
The muffled rush and clink rises through the floorboards as Patrick washes dishes downstairs. He still hasn’t mentioned the stranger. I’ve been looking around, furtive as a suspicious wife, for some remnant that could open up the conversation. Blotched lipstick on the rim of a glass, a black hair curled on the sink drain. But it’s as if she was never here. She walked through these rooms without shedding a trace of her physical presence.
I open the medicine cabinet, the mirrored doors cutting my reflection in two as they swing open. On the shallow shelves inside the cabinet, I find a razor, an empty prescription bottle. A sleep aid. Crouching, I pull open each drawer beneath the sink: nothing, nothing, nothing. And then, at the bottom, a lone object. The movement of the drawer has sent it rattling wildly from one corner to another. A single earring, a simple gold stud.
I reach for it. This proof that a woman was here, in this house, intruding on my space. I imagine going downstairs, laying this piece of evidence between us, forcing Patrick to account for her: Who is she? Why is she inside my life?
But confusion washes through me. Maybe the earring is mine. Maybe I wore it a few weeks ago, forgot it here. Or maybe it belonged to Sylvia, a leftover, neglected for years. I drop the earring back into the drawer.
When I go downstairs, back into the kitchen, Patrick glances around from the sink. “Get lost up there?”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“You know I’m only teasing,” he says. “My home is your home.”
I can’t speak. I go to him, wrapping my arms around his waist and feeling him still at my touch. Leaning my head against Patrick’s shoulder, I’m shocked at how neatly we slide into place. As if I’ve worn grooves in him, as if he’s carefully shifted the shape of my body during my sleep.
I wake up in a stranger’s bed. His face next to mine is gaunt and somber; his eyes shift beneath the tissue-fine membrane of his eyelids. His hand on my hip is heavy enough to pin me down.
I struggle to my elbows. A hard thud of panic slams over and over into my brain: get out get out get out.
I look for the door. Beside me, the stranger mumbles, shifts.
The sleep dissolves from my brain slowly, then quickly, and I’m back in Patrick’s room. I’m naked, the covers wound around my ankles like weeds. On the bedside table, the envelope of lotuses is half open. Only two left. The depletion of the pills is as steady as an hourglass, ticking down until the moment I have nothing left to offer.
Out in the hall, I breathe more easily. Pulling Patrick’s discarded shirt around my shoulders, I move past the kitchen, past the living room. I automatically shift my hips to avoid the protruding corner of a side table. My foot knows which creaky step to avoid on the stairs.
And I know which unassuming door to open and enter on the second story of the house. The room is overcrowded. Boxes stacked haphazardly in one corner, disgorging a clutter of paper. I could open the boxes and find Sylvia’s body parts, labeled and bubble-wrapped, neat as a mannequin’s. Her slim torso, tiny waist, beautifully sculpted face, ready for assembly.
The first box holds a tumble of clothes, elegant colors and delicate patterns. Silky dresses, sweaters soft as fur, shoes dainty as a doll’s. I’ve never realized how tiny Sylvia was. Photographs gave me an abstracted sense of her body, but holding her clothes is a shock. Placing a lacy shirt against my own body, I see exactly where I diverge from her shape, the bone and flesh I’d have to trim away, stitch to my frame, to match her. The clothes release a light floral scent of detergent. At the edges, there’s the bitter breath of clothes that have sat untouched.
I look through the other boxes. Expensive jewelry tangled together, jewels choked by chains and earrings snagged like fishhooks. Cases for DVDs. Hardback novels: classics, titles that I vaguely recognize. A defunct phone, screen smeared with fingerprints. Everything looks as if it’s been swept into the boxes unceremoniously. In one box, a glass bottle of nail polish has cracked, leaving a red crust against a white sweater.
And I find a square book with a satiny cover printed with pastel daisies. I flip through the pages. Bare, marked with tiny motifs and scraps of words. First Memories. People I Love. A baby book. Something slithers out from between the pages, drops to the floor. Small and flat, shiny plastic. I reach for it, sliding it into Patrick’s shirt pocket.
When the noise comes in the doorway, I’m not even startled.
“There you are.” His voice is thick with fatigue, but holds a splinter of alertness. I suspect Patrick is pretending to be groggier than he is. He moves closer, crouches on the floor next to me. “I haven’t been in here for months.”
“You put all this in here?” I ask.
“Her mother was supposed to help me,” Patrick says. “After a while, I did it by myself. I couldn’t keep walking into the bathroom and finding her toothbrush.” The boxes hulk over us, their lids askew. “She left behind so much.”
I wonder if Ana’s client Rob has a room like this in his home. All the little pieces of his dead lover collected in one spot, waiting. Waiting for Ana to give the objects a purpose again.
“What are you doing in here?” he asks.
“I was looking for the room in the photo,” I say. “The one with the lipstick.”
Patrick searches my face. “She wore lipstick in a lot of photos.”
“It was a certain color,” I say. “The darker color. The color you gave me.”
Patrick shrugs, impatient.
“She was naked.” It’s only then that I understand just how much this has disturbed me: an itchy anxiety, a need for an explanation. “I remember it. A Polaroid, not like the rest. Most people don’t include photos like that. She was naked. Wearing that dark lipstick.”
Patrick drums his knuckles against the edge of the nearest box, a muffled staccato that worms into my head. “She was naked when they found her,” he says. “After she drowned.”
In the silence of the room, the moon and streetlight mingled white against the curtains, his words are exactly wrong. They’re heavy, abrupt as thrown punches.
“I didn’t identify the body,” Patrick says. “I didn’t want that version of her in my head.”
“Who did?” I ask.
“A friend,” Patrick says. “Her family hadn’t come out to the lake yet. I didn’t want to tell them until we knew. Henry had stayed behind after Viv went home. He volunteered.”
Shock moves through my skull. I imagine Sylvia’s bloated body, her face puffed into cartoon proportions, ugly for the first time in her life, and Henry staying with her in this vulnerable state. Recognizing her for the last time, giving her the dignity of a name. I’m suddenly furious at Patrick, that he couldn’t be the one to do this for her. The betrayal is as shocking as cold water rushing into my lungs.
how could you not look at me?
see me
“When I collected photos to send you,” Patrick says, “I was barely paying attention. It was too painful. I gave you whatever Sylvia had lying around. She always had too many. Our whole life documented.” He stands, stretches, the skin stretched against his ribs for a second. “Bring me that photo? Maybe I can figure it out.”
The anger still tight in my throat, I can’t speak.
In the doorway, Patrick pauses. I take him in: the long planes of his torso. The wiry muscles beneath his shoulders. Beneath the coldness of the fury that has grown over me, rooting me to the spot, I melt. I give, cracking open like ice.
“Are you coming back to bed?”
“Of course,” I say.