hovering somewhere up above, looking down upon those shining, spacious rooms. None of my failures haunted me from up here—no string of lost jobs, no wrecked cars, no waking up with that fullness in my chest, those drumming words: you’ll never do it, you’ll never do it, you’ll never do it. Even the house itself felt like it had never been Mama’s, but ours alone, as if Laura and I had designed the floor plan ourselves. It didn’t even matter that we’d never picked the clocks and bowls, that we’d been too worried to move a thing since the house had been given to us. For in touching them with the cloth, I was recognizing the forgotten. I was refreshing them with promise and light, and, in turn, joining myself to their makers.
I still couldn’t believe that we were living in such a place. Sometimes I woke up at night with the voice of Craig Luckland, the cop from down the street, ringing in my eardrum: “There’s been a mistake. You have three hours to get out or your stuff will be sent to France.”
“Do you mind if I help?” Laura said.
I hadn’t known she’d been watching me. Laura stood at the doorway, arms crossed, in a thin, pink Led Zeppelin T-shirt, with tiny holes splitting her sleeve. Always that armful of gorgeous black hair. The question so delighted me I didn’t have an answer. These days, I took care of the house. It was the least I could do, now that the accident had put me out of commission, and she was driving forty-five miles each way, in stalled traffic, to run her music shop in Ocean Ridge.
She might as well have told me that she loved the space between my front teeth.
“You look like you’re enjoying yourself.”
“Just cleaning up.”
She walked over to me, kissed the crown of my woolly head and picked up a cloth. “You’re not going to fuss if I miss something?” She said it in that voice, that low voice that always got my attention.
“Me? Fuss?”
Life was here again. She’d seemed to be putting some weight back on. Had Joan talked to her about seeing the doctor? I wasn’t going to broach it, at least not yet, if only because, why tempt things when the gods, even if it’s just for a minute, are all of a sudden on our side? Laura glowed like someone who’d run seven miles up and down the boardwalk and beach, face lifted to the sun. Even I stopped feeling like shit about staying at home. My broken hand was healing, and I knew I’d be back to fixing cars within days, doing the thing that mattered most to me.
We squatted, stood, squatted again. We waxed. We sprayed. We oiled. We scraped. We polished. We worked our cloths in wider and wider arcs, almost sighing when we came upon that space behind the bookcase, the cobwebs so soft they might have been bandages. By the time we looked up, the sky outside the windows had turned eyecup blue. Soon enough we wouldn’t be able to see without bringing extra lamps to the room.
“This feels nice,” I said.
“It is nice,” she answered, eyes concentrating on the tabletop.
“We’re always running around. Everybody’s always running around. What’s up with all that? Why are we always so afraid of standing still?”
“Could I ask you a question, honey?”
I folded my cloth over the arm of the chair.
“Has Joan’s moving in been stressful for you? It’s funny that we’ve never talked about it. What’s it been, like, four months?”
The question was so direct that it stopped me. I didn’t know what to do with it. It was like the lost child we’d never have, so stealthy and shy that our indifference to him ashamed us. But I was hardly the one to bring up the issue. On my wages, we couldn’t have lived within fifty miles of the bay we loved, and doesn’t that sorry truth worm through everything? So Joan had been kicked out of her apartment. So we had the space for her, courtesy of their mother? What was I to say to that?
“Well,” I said, “I was afraid that it was going to be weird. But it’s really turned out for the best. Who would have ever guessed such a thing?”
In truth, I knew that things would never be the same once she moved in with us. I don’t care what you say: circumstances like that can bring out the ugliness in people. I’d always loved Joan. I’d always loved the way she’d brought vividness to a room. Even the walls seemed to shiver awake when she passed in front of them. When she was nearby, I’d start to notice things that hadn’t caught my eye before: a loose bristle painted into the cabinet, the tall ebony pitcher with the cracked handle. And you could never predict what would come out of her mouth. She seemed determined to lift the screen that made our lives so careful and tidy, and until she sat between us on the sofa, we hadn’t known how much we’d been secreting away. I didn’t want to lose that. It felt unbearably valuable, of the highest currency; the fact was Joan was still young in a way that we weren’t. She had the faith that life could still change. I mean, look: it was no small thing that she was giving up all her spare time to try to stand up against those builders. I wouldn’t have seen any of it if she hadn’t told me what their project meant for us: filthy water in the lagoons, more cars on the streets. And do you really want to wake up in the morning to silence instead of the birds you’re used to taking for granted?
“You never said that you were nervous.”
I said, “You’re not happy about things?”
“Listen, it’s great that she’s here. I love her company. I do. She’s my sister, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t know how much I missed her until she moved in with us. It’s just—” She pulled in her lips, struggling. “You do sort of seem happier than you’ve seemed in a long while.”
The dimmest memory: a taste of bloodied cotton, the dentist’s dry fingers pushing in my mouth. “I don’t understand.”
Her eyes filled to the lower lid, careful not to spill down her cheeks. Her face stayed perfect, absolutely serene. For a moment, I thought, shouldn’t I be the one who’s crying here? Until I felt bolder and brighter, like the lamp I’d been holding.
I always thought that we all have a story that we play out, in large and in miniature, through every interaction of our lives. Joan’s story was that she’d tried to rescue lost things, only to be left behind by what she thought she’d saved. Laura’s was that she’d seek out the brightest fire, only to find her own fuel swallowed up to feed the other. My story? I don’t want to sound crude, but if you talked with the highest power, I believe you’d be told that my need to touch and be touched would lead me to hurt the ones I cared about.
What a terrible thing.
That was all I knew. Where else wasn’t I stepping outside of myself, listening to how I talked, watching how I moved? Here was generosity. My skin and my soul one and the same, so I didn’t have to think about me and my terrible punishing hopes. I was shoehorned into my body, which fit like the finest leather loafer, no rubbing or space behind the heel. And how I was able to walk and walk, as if the world went onward and up, to infinity.
I led her down the hallway, by the hand.
I lay on top of her, weight resting on my elbows. When I held her face between my hands, her mouth parted, the quiet so deep that the world was struck dumb. First the baseboards with their tappings and clicks. Then the currents in the fusebox. The scrub pines, the cardinals, the bulkheads sipping water: they went silent too. Somewhere, at the bottom of the world, a young man churned inside his lover for the very first time, burning up inside the body that enclosed him. And Laura in Mama’s bed, already beyond reach.
CHAPTER 2
The new house ate up every square foot of its lot. Copper roofing, copper flashing, copper downspouts: every last detail crying out, notice me, notice me, keep up with me. Exactly the kind of house Joan would have despised, with good reason. Dozens of these were sprouting up on street after street, replacing the tidy modern ranch houses on the water. The houses were little, I know. But did anyone these days have a clue they were once sold fully furnished, all the way down to the toothbrush, from