12.

THE DAYS STREAMED BY, rippling and skittering, drawing me along in their current. I had been thinking of the Nauk as a kind of Sleeping Beauty’s castle (though with the princess herself mysteriously absent), an enchanted stillness fixing the very air so that nothing breathed, no dust gathered, no spider threaded a web across any sunny corner of the silent building protected by invisible thorns. But of course, that wasn’t what it was like at all. While in the southern wing of the museum the galleries had stood empty, on the north side Agnes and Sloan and even sometimes Bernard had continued to work. The board of directors had to be dealt with, the building kept up, bills paid, and email answered. Even Jake and the public outreach coordinator, a tall, quiet, weathered man who wore his prematurely gray hair in a ponytail tied with a piece of string, came in from time to time, though what they found to fill the hours during those long, slow months wasn’t exactly clear. Still, what had Louise done besides read the papers and talk on the telephone? Not much. And of course, during all that time—the time since Alena had disappeared—inquiries and proposals from artists kept coming in, and requests for images from past shows, and people wanting catalogues, and other people wanting to rent out the building for weddings, not to mention journalists wanting information about Alena and floating absurd and speculative stories, based on ghosts of rumors picked up from dubious and untraceable sources, about how she died. There was a theory that she’d been the victim of one of a series of shark attacks the authorities were hushing up, another about a pagan ritual, conducted at night on a driftwood raft, that had taken a tragic turn. There was an elaborate and persistent story about a secret party held on a yacht out in the bay—booze and drugs and naked partygoers, wasted off their gourds, with painted bodies and glitter-encrusted hair, leaping from masts into the black, churning ocean—all of them making it back aboard but one.

Whose yacht? Why painted bodies? How was it there were no witnesses to this glittering carnival? Nobody could say.

If only news of exhibitions traveled half as widely, or generated a quarter of the interest! It seemed clear to me—as Sarabeth had suggested in Venice—that by closing after Alena’s disappearance the Nauk had wasted the kind of publicity that comes perhaps once in a lifetime, and which might have been leveraged to bring a small flood of first-time visitors through the door. Even if only one in ten actually took in the art, that would have been something! Of course, had I known it, we would have more than enough of that kind of curiosity before long.

In the mornings, the sun woke me early. The thin curtains were no match for the strong pink light that pooled on the floor shortly after five, then spread and shifted, pink going to apricot, to butter, then bleaching to dazzling bone. I would lie for a while on the lumpy mattress, my hand tracing the curves of the painted metal headboard, breathing in the smells of must and sun and salt. Mice scrabbled in the walls—I could hear them if I woke up in the night—and innumerable spiders, small, almost transparent, spun webs in every corner and were efficiently replaced by their relatives, or rivals, after every vacuuming. Every morning I woke with the sour taste of anxiety on my tongue, dimly aware of chaotic, exhausting dreams. Before heading up to the chilly, humidity-controlled office of the Nauk, where Agnes would either be waiting for me, making a dumb show of her patience, or would shortly swim into view full of false, effusive apology, I climbed up through the sharp, whispering dune grass and stumbled down through the soft sand to the beach.

Bernard had left Nauquasset almost as soon as we arrived. He maintained, in addition to his large house on the Cape, an apartment in Manhattan, another one in Boston, and a lodge (that’s what he called it) in Aspen for skiing. He spent at least half his time elsewhere, and he seemed surprised that I was surprised about this. As though I could have had any idea what a life like his was like!

Another thing that became clear almost at once was that, although Bernard was the Nauk’s nominal director, and though Barbara had suggested that I would be in charge, it was Agnes who ran the place. All the strings for all the systems were held in her pale plump hands with their sharp crimson nails. She kept the accounts, created and tracked the budgets, processed payroll, paid the bills, supervised the staff, kept the contracts, and, of course, was the holder of the keys. There were a surprising number of locked doors at the Nauk, especially considering how small the staff was—how small the whole place was. I had seen inside some of them—one was a file room, one a storage room for cartons of Nauk publications, one held AV equipment, and one was a janitor’s closet. When, occasionally, I asked about one or the other of the doors, Agnes would say, “Of course we can arrange for you to examine everything from top to bottom when you have the time.” Or, “I can assure you, there’s nothing remotely interesting in there, but of course, if you insist on seeing for yourself, you need only say so and I’ll arrange for it immediately.” But insisting was not something I was able to do. Instead, I would nod, blush, and change the subject, as though I had done something to be ashamed of. Agnes had a great bouquet of keys on a length of green leather that she must have kept in her office somewhere. Every now and then she carried it looped around her wrist, and then she clanked as she walked, like a Victorian ghost.

Every morning the beach was made anew. The patterns of seaweed, of shells, of the dark damp sand of the lower beach and the paler, finer sand of the upper—of the gaping and shutting holes made by mole crabs, and the clusters of geometric tracks of little birds, and the ribbons of rounder, deeper tracks left by dogs—all these were different each day than they had been the day before. Looking out toward the horizon, I waited to see great whales breeching, spouts like giant geysers squirting white into the sky. I imagined wooden ships from the days of the explorers, their sails pregnant with wind.

Even as early as six I was seldom alone. Occasional joggers huffed along the shore, leaving dark tracks. Women in hooded sweatshirts, with bare brown legs and floppy hats, exercised ambling Labradors and trotting shih tzus, and the occasional surf caster, strong-armed and patient to the point of indifference, whipped his line again and again into the teeming white-laced waves, reeling in nothing but the wet salty air. Sometimes an old man—white hair blowing around his ravaged face, as thin as a blade of grass, in sweat-stained shirt and jeans the color of the sky—stood at a portable easel painting the scene: blue sea, pale sand, pink clouds, and the distant shimmer of land on the horizon as the arm of the Cape turned back on itself.

The beach was long and pale and striped at low tide, and black crinkled seaweed lay in dark ranks, the water glittering gold and navy blue. I left my towel on the sand, waded into the cold water, and dove into a gathering wave. The clean chill washed through me. I could feel the sharp outline of my body as I moved through the water, arm over arm, out past the surf to where the swells rose and fell in gentle humps, my warming body strong and easy in the sunlit bay. I turned and swam along the shore, tingling with exertion, reminding myself not to swim too far in this direction. The powerful tide was with me now but would be against me when I turned back. The water turned green as the sandbar came up underneath me, then blue again as it fell away. I stopped to tread water, looking out to the horizon. Birds dove around the wreck of the Lady Margaret, its rusting iron hull a feeding ground for fish, the tops of its black chimneys just visible at dead low tide. And beyond that was the Plunge, the kettle hole in the ocean floor created, as I understood it, by a large chunk of stagnant ice that had lingered as the rest of the glacier had receded after the last ice age—exactly the process that had formed southern Wisconsin with its constellations of shining lakes.

One morning on my walk I ran into Chris Passoa. In an old gray T-shirt from which the message had faded, aqua swim trunks, and old black sneakers, he had apparently been running on the beach. Now, though, he was just walking, his tall shadow knifing across the sand. His pale hair caught and held the yellow light, and his legs were tan and muscled. I had just finished my swim, and my hair dripped onto my shoulders and down my back, the salt drying on my flushed skin.

“How’s the water?” he asked as we stopped to say hello.

“A little warmer than yesterday. And yesterday was a little warmer than the day before. By Labor Day it should be almost pleasant.”

He smiled. “And teeming with tourists as well.”

I couldn’t picture the beach as anything but mostly empty. “I love how easy it is to swim here. How the salt holds you up.”

He held up a finger. “You have to be careful. Especially if you’re not used to the currents.”

Must every action—every word and thought—recall Alena? Swimming, currents, beaches, exhibitions, artists, parties. How long until my bodily presence had half the substance her absence did?

I told Chris Passoa about my Lake Michigan summers, how the great lake was as powerful and unpredictable as any ocean. He listened with an attentive skepticism in his sky-blue eyes, the sun setting the hairs on his brown arms alight. He reminded me of the men of my childhood, friends of my father and of my older brothers, who could split a cord of firewood in an easy afternoon, shoot a rabid skunk at dusk, chow down half a pork roast at supper, and whistlingly ease a cow through a hard labor at midnight, no effort or muck or animal stupidity or human failure ruffling their steady competence. There was a kind of uniform tranquillity, an ageless, timeless sufficiency about them—about him—that consoled me, though I had fled from it not so very long ago.

“I can’t imagine a lake that big,” he said.

“Don’t tell me the stereotype of policemen having no imagination is true.”

“Well. It’s hard to compete with you creative types.”

“I’m not a creative type. I’m an academic.” I poked at the sand with my toe. Gritty at the surface, it was cool and fine underneath, almost silky. There were small stones buried in the sand, brown and beige and muddy white. “Of course, some people are both.”

Bending, he picked a flat stone out of the sand, measured the waves, then skipped it out across the water: five, six, seven, splash. A wave ran up the beach as far as our feet, its white foam boiling then receding, sinking into the sand. A gull glided by on a current of air, its shrill lament tumbling down the sky. “They treating you well up there? Up at the Nauk?”

“Yes,” I said politely. “Everyone’s been wonderful.”

“You getting along all right with Agnes?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You know, she was very close to Alena.” The syllables of her name, with their long open vowels, sounded like an incantation on the morning air.

“Oh?” I said. I wanted to know—I burned to know—but I would not let him see me burning.

He picked up another stone, also flat and perhaps five inches across, though when I looked at the beach all I could see, aside from broken slipper shells and eviscerated crabs, were large bumpy pebbles. Five, six, seven, eight, splash. “They grew up together. In Oregon somewhere. The story is that Alena helped Agnes out of a situation—an abusive boyfriend, maybe. Or it might have been something that happened when they were kids. A drunken father? An older cousin who . . . ? Something. And then, when Alena’s father died, Agnes asked her parents to take her in, and they did. Otherwise she would have had to go back to Russia. Her mother had died long before, when Alena was very young. So, if Agnes is slow to warm up to a newcomer, you can understand why.”

The sun edged higher in the sky, hotter. Terns circled and dove in the chop beyond the wreck. A noisy family with an enormous spotted dog was settling in for the day with blankets and deck chairs and insulated coolers. Was Chris Passoa asking me to feel sympathy for Agnes, with her stony eyes and her vampire style, her obstructive obsequiousness? To pity her, even? “I imagine she’ll warm up to me sooner or later,” I said doubtfully.

“Of course she will. Once you show her what you’re made of.”

And what was that?

He bent again, plucking a thin white stone with an elegant vein of dark gray out of the sand. “Your turn.”

Our fingers grazed as I took the flat slab. Distractedly, I hurled it out over the chilly waves.

One, splash.

Although a general impression of those days stays with me—a mood, a muffled, foggy adumbration despite the fine weather—I remember very little of how I actually spent my time once I got into my office, which didn’t feel like my office at all. Always when I went through the door in the morning, there was a moment when I had to force myself to remember that I wasn’t trespassing, and it was always a relief to find the gray chair empty and to see the pool of cold sunshine on the floor and my little stack of notepads and pens on the empty shelf where I had left them, as though I half expected someone to have moved them in the night. But what I did when I sat behind that finlike desk I can neither remember nor quite imagine, though I know I must have sat there for hours at a time.

I do remember that from time to time I went to the exhibition wing to walk through the galleries—to stand in them, measuring the walls with my eyes, and to feel the way one space moved into the next: what the space itself suggested, accommodated, perhaps denied. I loved those galleries immediately—inordinately—and every day I came to love them more. I loved the way the outside light fell, by way of the colonnade—obliquely, delicately, creating a golden glow that invested the rooms, even when empty, with something of the vibrancy of art. Visiting at different times of day, sometimes staying a long while, I learned how that glow brightened over the course of the morning and into the afternoon; how different walls lightened and dimmed as the hours passed; where the shadows collected. I loved the way the sound of the waves cast a mood, varying as the weather varied, so that both sound and sight brought the landscape of the outer world into the galleries. Somehow, instead of the sensation of time standing still, which I had felt so often in the great museums of the world, here at the Nauk the movement of time was more present to me than it had ever been before, as though I could feel the earth turning slowly under my feet.

From the bright colonnade running the length of the galleries, one looked out and down not only on the surging ocean and the wide stretch of beach, but also onto the dunes themselves, where the pale green beach grass waved, interspersed with black patches of dried seaweed and large shells and the long swaths of weathered fencing intended to prevent erosion. Although the galleries were on the first floor, from this side—the back, ocean-facing side of the building—we seemed to be quite high up. As I began to understand that the Nauk was built into a hill, I wondered what was underneath the galleries. Storage rooms? A shop? Boilers and pipes and dehumidifying compressors? There must be stairs somewhere, I thought, leading down. And one day, perhaps my second week at the Nauk, I noticed for the first time a door at the far end of the colonnade. It was an odd sort of door, made to blend into the wall, with a C-shaped recessed handle instead of a knob. I went over to it and pulled, but, like so many other doors here, it was locked.

What a mix of emotions I felt at that moment surging and frothing through me the way the ocean surged and frothed on the beach below. What was I doing here in this place of empty rooms and locked doors? Why had Bernard brought me here only to strand me as though on a sandbar while he ran off in pursuit of money, or distraction, or sex, or whatever it was that kept him moving, as though he were a molecule of ocean water rather than a man? Why had I not been able to so much as get a front door key? Why couldn’t I stand up to Agnes, or even to Sloan, to insist on a key, or a desk with drawers, or a detailed copy of the budget, or Alena’s Rolodex, which had, according to Agnes, been temporarily misplaced? Something was wrong with me. I was the curator, it should have been simple. I shut my eyes against the tears that began to fall—more salt water in this watery world—angry at myself for crying but too despondent to stop, when I had the sudden, sickening conviction of being watched.

And when I opened my eyes, there was Agnes, standing at the far end of the colonnade.

She was dressed, as always, in black, her hem just brushing the tops of her boots. She had changed the pink streaks in her glossy hair for electric blue, and she stood fixing me with her stony eyes, her head cocked to one side like a giant crow. I blinked at her, determined not to show how much she had frightened me. I had no idea how long she had been there. “I was wondering where you were,” she said. “You weren’t in your office.”

“I was looking at the galleries,” I said. “It’s so important to get to know the space.” I sniffed hard and wiped my fist across my nose.

“It looks to me,” Agnes observed, “like you were trying to open that door.”

I turned back to the door, which stood blankly, blandly shut, like a wall of snow. “I just happened to see it,” I said. “I never noticed it before, somehow, the way it’s built into the wall.”

She moved toward me, her high-heeled boots making surprisingly little noise on the hard floor. “Of course,” she said, “it’s designed not to be noticed, isn’t it? The eye—most people’s eyes—slips right over it. But you have sharp eyes, don’t you? Eyes that have been trained to notice. That’s what they teach you at curator school, isn’t it?”

I nodded, though it wasn’t. The curatorial studies programs were about art history, and theory, and individual research—presumably one knew how to see already. Not that skills didn’t get honed there. Not that there weren’t many kinds of seeing. “Of course, I only went to community college,” Agnes said, stepping closer, “but I notice things too.”

My mouth was dry. She continued toward me down the hall, growing larger, blocking out the light, her starburst of keys jangling on their leather strap.

“Do you want to know what’s behind there?” she asked. She was so close that I could smell her: the burnt chemical odor of her hair, and the sweetness of incense, and the pungency of old cigarette smoke and cloves.

I shrugged. I didn’t care what was behind the door, not anymore. I wanted to get away from her, but I knew I had to stay.

“Why don’t I show you.” Agnes drew nearer still. Heat radiated from her body in the cool hall. She was standing far too close to me. I took a step back and she took one forward, and now I was pressed up against the door. There was nowhere to go. She chose a key from her dangling bundle and shook the whole bunch at me until my slow brain understood that she wanted me to move aside.

The key turned silently in the lock. Agnes put her hand out and pushed the door inward, motioning for me to go first. When I hesitated, she smiled. “Don’t be frightened,” she said. “This is the way to Alena’s rooms. You didn’t know she had her own special rooms in the building, did you? In case she didn’t want to go home. Or if there was someone she wanted to entertain privately. Or if she and Bernard wanted a quiet place, you know, to have a few drinks.”

I moved through the door into the shadowy stairwell lit by dim LEDs on the walls, small square fixtures arranged in a cascade of staggered columns following the spiraling stairs down. The stairs themselves were steep and slippery. “Careful,” Agnes said. “You don’t want to fall.”

Down we went. I could smell earth, and damp, and something else, an overripe odor I couldn’t identify, like the smell of my mother’s kitchen when she was making jam. At the bottom of the stairs, another door with another lock. I don’t know how Agnes found the right key in the near dark. Maybe she knew them all by touch.

Beyond the door was a long low-ceilinged room. Old Oriental rugs in shades of garnet and pearl and sapphire stretched across the floors, some with patterns of gardens and others with spirals or paisleys. Low velvet couches sat plush, brushed, draped with scarves, and a square black-and-gold table supported cut-glass candy dishes and crystal vases and amber eggs and ivory figurines and malachite lamps with green silk shades. The walls were covered with what looked like tangles of seaweed, the thick, dark green, rubbery kind they call dead man’s fingers. You would have thought it was the worst kind of décor for a room so close to the ocean, subject to damp and mildew, but the museum’s climate control must have extended here too, for it was cool and dry, not even any cobwebs in the corners or dust on the crystal rims of the dishes or the smooth head of the plump jade monk. Crimson roses bloomed in a bowl, not a petal drooping, as though they had been arranged that very day. And along the wall that faced the bay, sliding glass doors, each like a living canvas, seemed carefully composed: pale green beach grass at the bottom, tossing in the strong breeze; then a wide strip of shifting blue-gray and green-gray that was the ocean; and above that, the robin’s-egg blue of the sky stippled with clouds. The air was still, but the sound of the ocean was like a living thing in the room: the long, low gathering of the swell; then the pause, like a suspended breath; and at last, after the aching delay, the falling off, the tumbling, the heaving collapse of the mercurial wave, foaming white onto the steadfast shore.

“It’s a beautiful room, isn’t it?” Agnes said. Again she fixed me with those sharp eyes, standing lightly like a big black bird on the glowing carpet, swinging her galaxy of keys.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

Agnes began to glide around the room, her fingers drifting down to straighten a violet glass dish that didn’t need straightening, to pluck a paling petal from a rose in the bowl, to graze the bald head of the jade monk with her fingertips. “Have you ever seen a room like this?” she asked. “Alena had extraordinary taste, didn’t she? She’d walk through a market in Istanbul or Tangier, and she’d see the one thing worth having.” She reached up and touched her own dangling earring, shards of ruby-colored pendants arrayed in tapering rows. “She brought these back from Malta for me,” she said. “I used to fill my holes with studs and rusty safety pins. Then Alena said, ‘Agnes, why do you want to wear all that junk? Aren’t the holes themselves more beautiful than that fistful of cheap hardware?’ And she gave me these. ‘Better one perfect thing,’ she would say, ‘than a hundred ordinary ones!’ And then she would laugh, because one perfect thing was never enough for her. She always wanted ten perfect things—a hundred—why not? When they called out to her the way they did, as though begging her to choose them. ‘Aggie,’ she used to say, ‘it’s like they have voices only I can hear. They cry out to me like lost souls. Who am I to turn them away?’ It was the same when we were kids at Woolworth’s and she’d come home with the best nail polish colors, the best lipsticks, hidden inside her shirt. ‘They were calling out to me,’ she’d say. ‘I couldn’t let them languish!’ No one ever caught her. She was always special, even then. She had a kind of glow that made you want to be near her. People were always giving her gifts—men were. Even when she was twelve. Women too. Once we were walking down the street and a woman in a fur coat gave her a diamond clip. Out of the blue! This will look pretty in your beautiful hair, the woman said. And it did. Alena wore it for a few days and then, when she got tired of it, she gave it to me.”

All the time she spoke, Agnes kept her eyes fixed on my face, but I couldn’t tell if she was seeing me or not. Out the glass doors, the ocean rose and fell—the same ocean you could see from upstairs or outside, but it looked different here, darker and wilder, as though somehow Alena’s spirit was touching everything, even the view, intensifying it, perfecting it—as though things themselves could be changed merely by being chosen.

“I guess you’re wondering why I’m telling you this.”

I shook my head. I knew why, even then, young as I was and afraid of her. I knew she was telling me because she had to tell me, showing me because she had to show someone. This room was her work as much as it was Alena’s. Alena might have made the room, but Agnes had conserved it—exhaustively, painstakingly—with all the care, patience, attention, exertion at her disposal. It was a task literally without end. Did the room exist if no one saw it? And if it didn’t exist, did Agnes?

“I remember the last time we were together in this room,” Agnes said. “Just before Venice. She was looking forward to the trip. She loved to travel, loved to dress up, to see and be seen. It was extraordinary that she stayed in Nauquasset as long as she did. She could have gone anywhere: New York, London, Zurich. But she stayed. She used to say, Where else could I have freedom like this? Where else could I answer to no one? Of course, nominally she answered to Bernard, and to the board. But Bernard never said no, and the board did whatever he told them to. And she loved the ocean! She swam like a fish, she could have swum to the Vineyard and back if she wanted to. And she sailed all the time, she was a wonderful sailor. Even the wind does my bidding, Aggie, she used to say.”

“Yes,” I said. I could picture it: Alena perched like a Nereid on a white boat, sheet in one hand and rudder in the other, her long ivory limbs impervious to the sun.

“You can almost see her, can’t you—here in these rooms?” Agnes said. “I can. I can see her sitting just there, on the sofa, her legs tucked under her, talking to me that last night. The night I was telling you about.”

I could, I could see it too. Alena sitting there, just as Agnes described.

“It was very late. I had finished her packing for her, even though she wasn’t leaving for another two days. I was taking a trip too, to visit my mother who was ill, and I had to leave before she did. But I always did her packing. It was good fortune that our trips overlapped, that if I had to be away, it would be mostly when she was too. I didn’t have to worry she would need something and I wouldn’t be there.

“Alena had just come back from a swim. She liked to swim at night off the beach here, she knew the tides and the currents. It’s a quiet stretch, no one ever bothered her. And then she’d come back up to shower and dress. Sometimes she’d sleep here if she didn’t feel like going home.”

I wondered where home was, where Alena had lived, what had happened to her house. I wondered what had happened to Agnes’s mother, whether she had gotten well.

“She sat right there,” Agnes repeated. “Her hair was wet, a dark fountain, and her skin glowed. She was talking about Venice. ‘Every year it gets duller, Aggie,’ she said. ‘The art world. More shiny and obvious. Oh, the artists are all so clever—they’d fuck with their brains if they could!’ She liked to say that—fuck with their brains—it made her laugh. She’d had enough of the mind, it was the body that interested her. The art she loved—the artists she loved—were the artists of the body. Marina , Catherine Opie, Carolee Schneemann. Art should be felt in the gut, she said. Art should scare you. It should take your breath—literally—away.”

I put my hand to my chest. My own breathing was coming and going, fast and shallow as though I had a fever. I thought of Marina lying still as a viewer cut her with a knife and licked the blood; of Catherine Opie inscribing her wish on her body in scars; of Carolee Schneemann choreographing a dance with naked bodies and raw meat. I was starting to feel uncomfortably warm. The room was crowded with objects: shiny, heavy, blind forms that seemed to me suddenly like living things turned to stone. I fanned my face with my hand, listening to the waves. Agnes was talking, her voice droning like a hornet. I could hear everything she said, but the words seemed to float into my mind from a great distance. “The last show had just closed,” she said. “Dessa Michaels, the dissection pieces. It got a lot of attention, Alena should have been pleased. But she had decided it was too distanced. Too abstracted. The thing itself was eclipsed, she said. She said that a lot about art that didn’t live up to her standards—The thing itself is eclipsed! She wanted to strip it bare, whatever it was. Like staring into the sun, or looking at the naked face of God! That was what she wanted—art so potent it would make the heart stop. I wish I could die from art, she used to say. Die from art! The ultimate consummation.”

She paused. The room buzzed with her words, my ears rang with them. I needed to sit down.

“You look pale,” Agnes said, watching from her height as I lowered myself onto the velvet sofa.

“I’m fine.”

“Probably you’re tired. You get faint, maybe you’re anemic. You should make sure you get enough rest.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Does talking about art like that upset you?”

“No. Of course not.”

She sat down beside me. “Do you like it too, then? Might we see some shows about the body from you?” The derision in her voice was unmistakable.

“I like all kinds of art.”

Heat shimmered off her in waves as if from pavement on a summer afternoon. “We sat right here,” she said. “She asked me to brush her hair. I always used to brush Alena’s hair, and braid it or put it up, from when we were kids. She had beautiful hair, thick and black and slippery as obsidian. Volcanic glass. I could French braid it by touch in the dark. So I did. I brushed it out for her, and she said, ‘Aggie, I don’t even know why I’m going. Maybe I’ll just change my mind and stay.’

“‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Stay. Why should you go? What’s there that’s better than what you have here?’ I meant it too. Art-world celebrities, super-rich collectors, jealous curators, everybody trying to look more successful than they were. Why did she need that? Why did she want it?

“But she always went, she was restless, that was part of who she was. But she always came back.” The ocean was restless too, surging forward and falling back, always clamoring for the shore but unable to possess it, like a ghost lover whose arms drift through the body of the beloved.

Always came back, Agnes said. But not this time. Did Agnes decline to believe that? Did she refuse, like the mother of a soldier reported missing in action, to look death in the face? Was that why she kept the room like this, immaculate? Did she believe Alena would return any day—any hour—and the Nauk would be ready, waiting for her like a bridegroom? “It’s been two years,” I said, or thought I said, but my syllables, like motes of dust, floated away and disappeared.

Agnes leaned close. “I’m telling you this because you need to understand.” Her words spiraled down through my ear, their tiny vibrations reverberating like thunder in the dark. “You’re only temporary here.”