brought something for you.” She smiles, dipping a hand into her bag. “It’s cold, too.” A sweaty bottle of Riesling. My mouth waters. It’s been ages since I drank white.
“Oh, you shouldn’t—”
But she’s already chugging toward the kitchen.
WITHIN TEN MINUTES we’re glugging the wine. Jane sparks a Virginia Slim, then another, and soon the air wobbles with smoke, rolling overhead, roiling beneath the ceiling lights. My Riesling tastes of it. I find I don’t mind; reminds me of grad school, starless nights outside the taverns of New Haven, men with mouths like ash.
“You’ve got a lot of merlot over there,” she says, eyeing the kitchen counter.
“I order it in bulk,” I explain. “I like it.”
“How often do you restock?”
“Just a few times a year.” At least once a month.
She nods. “You’ve been like this—how long did you say?” she asks. “Six months?”
“Almost eleven.”
“Eleven months.” Pressing her lips into a tiny o. “I can’t whistle. But pretend I just did.” She jams her cigarette into a cereal bowl, steeples her fingers, leans forward, as though in prayer. “So what do you do all day?”
“I counsel people,” I say, nobly.
“Who?”
“People online.”
“Ah.”
“And I take French lessons online. And I play chess,” I add.
“Online?”
“Online.”
She sweeps a finger along the tide line in her wineglass. “So the Internet,” she says, “is sort of your … window to the world.”
“Well, so is my actual window.” I gesture to the expanse of glass behind her.
“Your spyglass,” she says, and I blush. “I’m kidding.”
“I’m so sorry about—”
She waves a hand, lights a fresh cigarette. “Oh, hush.” Smoke leaks from her mouth. “Do you have a real chessboard?”
“Do you play?”
“I used to.” She slants the cigarette against the bowl. “Show me what you got.”
WE’RE WAIST-DEEP in our first game when the doorbell rings. Five sharp—the pharmacy delivery. Jane does the honors. “Door-to-door drugs!” she squawks, shuttling back from the hall. “These any good?”
“They’re uppers,” I say, uncorking a second bottle. Merlot this time.
“Now it’s a party.”
As we drink, as we play, we chat. We’re both mothers of only children, as I knew; we’re both sailors, as I hadn’t known. Jane prefers solo craft, I’m more into two-handers—or I was, anyway.
I tell her about my honeymoon with Ed: how we’d chartered an Alerion, a thirty-three-footer, and cruised the Greek Isles, pinballing between Santorini and Delos, Naxos and Mykonos. “Just the two of us,” I remember, “scudding around the Aegean.”
“That’s just like Dead Calm,” Jane says.
I swallow some wine. “I think in Dead Calm they were in the Pacific.”
“Well, except for that, it’s just like Dead Calm.”
“Also, they went sailing to recover from an accident.”
“Okay, right.”
“And then they rescued a psychopath who tried to kill them.”
“Are you going to let me make my point or not?”
While she frowns at the chessboard, I rummage through the fridge for a stick of Toblerone, chop it roughly with a kitchen knife. We sit at the table, chewing. Candy for dinner. Just like Olivia.
LATER:
“Do you get a lot of visitors?” She strokes her bishop, slides him across the board.
I shake my head, shake the wine down my throat. “None. You and your son.”
“Why? Or why not?”
“I don’t know. My parents are gone, and I worked too much to have many friends.”
“No one from work?”
I think of Wesley. “It was a two-person practice,” I say. “So now he has a double load to keep him busy.”
She looks at me. “That’s sad.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Do you even have a phone?”
I point to the landline, lurking in a corner on the kitchen counter, and pat my pocket. “Ancient, ancient iPhone, but it works. In case my psychiatrist calls. Or anyone else. My tenant.”
“Your handsome tenant.”
“My handsome tenant, yes.” I take a sip, take her queen.
“That was cold.” She flicks a speck of ash from the table and roars with laughter.
AFTER THE second game, she requests a tour of the house. I hesitate, just for a moment; the last person to examine the place top to bottom was David, and before that … I truly can’t recall. Bina’s never been beyond the first storey; Dr. Fielding is confined to the library. The very idea feels intimate, as though I’m about to lead a new lover by the hand.
But I agree, and escort her room by room, floor by floor. The red room: “I feel like I’m trapped in an artery.” The library: “So many books! Have you read all of them?” I shake my head. “Have you read any of them?” I giggle.
Olivia’s bedroom: “Maybe a little small? Too small. She needs a room she can grow into, like Ethan’s.” My study, on the other hand: “Ooh and aah,” says Jane. “A girl could get stuff done in a place like this.”
“Well, I mostly play chess and talk to shut-ins. If you call that getting stuff done.”
“Look.” She sets her glass on the windowsill, slides her hands into her back pockets. Leans into the window. “There’s the house,” she says, gazing at her home, her voice slung low, almost husky.
She’s been so playful, so jolly, that to see her looking serious produces a kind of jolt, a needle skidding off the vinyl. “There’s the house,” I agree.
“Nice, isn’t it? Quite a place.”
“It is.”
She peers outside a minute longer. Then we return to the kitchen.
LATER STILL:
“Get much use out of that?” Jane asks, roaming the living room as I debate my next move. The sun is sinking fast; in her yellow sweater, in the frail light, she looks like a wraith, floating through my house.
She’s pointing to the umbrella, leaning like a drunkard against a far wall.
“More than you’d think,” I reply. I rock back in my chair and describe Dr. Fielding’s backyard therapy, the unsteady march through the door and down the steps, the bubble of nylon shielding me from oblivion; the clarity of outside air, the drift of wind.
“Interesting,” says Jane.
“I believe it’s pronounced ‘ridiculous.’”
“But does it work?” she asks.
I shrug. “Sort of.”
“Well,” she says, patting the umbrella