In my apartment, I survey the place through new eyes. I’ve neglected my own home these past few months. A discarded blouse droops over the back of the couch, arms splayed like a crime scene outline. The TV plays an upbeat commercial jingle to the empty living room. The dishes in the sink give off a curdled smell.
In the shower, I shut my eyes. Fear jolts through my muscles: the memory of my time under the water. Then I relax, feeling her retreat like a watchful animal.
Patrick and I parted this morning without any mention of when we’d next meet. It didn’t occur to me to ask whether we’d see each other again. It feels natural now. A given part of my world. I caught the tenderness, almost reverence, in the way he’d look at me, the gentleness when Patrick kissed me good-bye.
I have dozens of lotuses. Enough to retrace a portion of a life. Erase the ugly parts and restart, step back into the sweetest moments. In my bedroom, drying my hair, I catch sight of the photograph that lies next to my bedside table. The Braddocks’ wedding portrait, all that hope shimmering behind Sylvia’s smile. It feels like the truest version of her, trapped behind the other women she became. The scared and frustrated and angry incarnations. The grieving mother, the fierce and heartsick woman wrapping her arms around Henry to forget everything else.
That first woman, all optimism. She’s the one I could bring back. The one I could lead from the darkness. I remember last night, in that distant universe we occupied at the lake. When Sylvia carried my body up to the surface of the water.
The moment she pushed back against the press of time, refusing to let this second body sink into the same lonely space as the first.
I press my hand against my cheek, the skin hot and beaded with moisture from the shower. I’m filled with gratitude that she would give me this chance. As much as I’ve been exposed to her secret heart, Sylvia knows mine too. She knows what I’ve done, the parts of myself I’ve hidden from everybody else. And yet she pulled the air back into my lungs. She strummed my pulse back into my veins; she breathed warmth onto my eyelids, coaxing them open like petals.
After my day at the Elysian Society on Monday, I’m tired. Even being gone for two days has damaged my ability to sink fully into the work. I feel like a new employee again. My clients’ steady stream of hope has sapped the oxygen from my brain. I’m ready to return home and sleep. When I see the silhouette of a man standing next to my car in the evening light, his face turned from me, I stop.
He looks up. It’s only Lee. He instantly adjusts his demeanor: shoulders back, a smile beneath serious eyes.
I move closer, fishing for my keys. “Hello, Lee,” I say. “What are you doing out here?”
“I wanted to talk.” The light is an uncanny sunset mix of dimness and brightness, everything brilliantly obscured. “I looked for you yesterday and I couldn’t find you.”
I slide my car key into the lock. “You must have just missed me,” I say.
“Tell me it’s not about Patrick Braddock,” Lee says.
I freeze.
“Maybe you aren’t seeing him here anymore,” he continues. “But I’m not naïve. I know that what goes on doesn’t always happen inside this building.”
I should go, leave Lee with his question unanswered on his tongue. But something holds me back. My heart blossoms with an unexpected affection for him. All these years, he’s been one of the few people to try to understand a version of me that extends beyond this white dress.
“I have been seeing Patrick,” I relent. “At his home, as his wife. As Sylvia.”
“And that’s what you truly want?”
I’m opening my mouth to say, Of course it’s what I want, but the certainty isn’t there. My desires betray me. Once I get what I’ve wanted, all that’s left is more wanting, the next desire slipping seamlessly into place like a demon jumping from host to host. I should have remembered that wanting is like this. Always leading further and further down a path of new complications, endlessly hungry. For a moment, I miss the former version of myself: the woman who’d taught herself how to stop wanting.
Lee’s face, backlit, is emotionless. “I hate seeing you caught up in this,” he says. “You’re better than what he can offer. You’re cut from a different cloth than the Braddocks.”
“Maybe you don’t know me that well,” I say.
“I know you’re in love with Patrick.”
I can’t open my mouth to deny it.
“And I know that Patrick might not be able to feel the same way.”
I consider hurting Lee, squeezing my hands against the dip in his throat. I’m shocked at the vividness of the image, unfolding colorfully inside my head. The streak of unexpected violence leaves me almost queasy.
“One of my clients worked with me since I first started,” Lee says. “A while back, she told me she was getting married. I wished her well and said my good-byes. The wedding was a few months ago. She’s come back a dozen times since to talk with her husband. Her first husband—I guess that’s what he is now. I don’t ask questions, but I worry. I’m not sure her new husband knows about her visits. Maybe he approves of it. Maybe he just tolerates it.”
A group of bodies leaves the building, moving close together, silent and bowed. One of them, an older woman, glances pointedly at me and Lee together.
“So what would you do?” Lee asks, soft. “If Patrick moves on, he remarries. Has children with someone new. If he kept on coming to see Sylvia, you’d be all right with that?”
“He wouldn’t do that,” I say.
“You have your own life, Edie,” Lee says. “You don’t need to share somebody else’s.” He touches my hand.
Lee is an ordinary life. An ordinary lover, unattached and undemanding. I stare at Lee’s hand on my skin: the absence of Patrick’s golden freckles. The absence of Patrick’s wedding ring. Uncertain and small, something comes awake inside me. Not the lust I feel for Patrick, engulfing me in a second flat, but a warm and vulnerable spark. One I’d need to nurture.
Quickly, I pull my hand away. “I need to go.”