“Do you miss Punch?”
“Nope.” She didn’t get along with the cat, either. He scratched her one Christmas morning, flashed his claws across her wrist, two quick rakes north-south east-west; a bright grid of blood sprang to the skin, tic-tac-toe, and Ed nearly pitched him out the window. I look for him now, find him swirled on the library sofa, watching me.
“Let me talk to Daddy, pumpkin.” I mount the next flight, the runner coarse against my soles. Rattan. What were we thinking? It stains so easily.
“Hey there, slugger,” he greets me. “New neighbors?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you just get new neighbors?”
“That was two months ago. Two-twelve. The Millers.” I pivot, descending the stairs.
“Where are these other people?”
“Two-oh-seven. Across the park.”
“Neighborhood’s changing.”
I reach the landing, round it. “They didn’t bring much with them. Just a car.”
“Guess the movers will come later.”
“Guess so.”
Silence. I sip.
Now I’m in the living room again, by the fire, shadows steeped in the corners. “Listen …” Ed begins.
“They have a son.”
“What?”
“There’s a son,” I repeat, pressing my forehead against the cold glass of the window. Sodium lamps have yet to sprout in this province of Harlem, and the street is lit only by a lemon-wedge of moon, but still I can make them out in silhouette: a man, a woman, and a tall boy, ferrying boxes to the front door. “A teenager,” I add.
“Easy, cougar.”
Before I can stop myself: “I wish you were here.”
It catches me off guard. Ed too, by the sound of it. There’s a pause.
Then: “You need more time,” he says.
I stay quiet.
“The doctors say that too much contact isn’t healthy.”
“I’m the doctor who said that.”
“You’re one of them.”
A knuckle-crack behind me—a spark in the fireplace. The flames settle, muttering in the grate.
“Why don’t you invite those new people over?” he asks.
I drain my glass. “I think that’s enough for tonight.”
“Anna.”
“Ed.”
I can almost hear him breathe. “I’m sorry we’re not there with you.”
I can almost hear my heart. “I am, too.”
Punch has tracked me downstairs. I scoop him up in one arm, retreat to the kitchen. Set the phone on the counter. One more glass before bed.
Grasping the bottle by its throat, I turn to the window, toward the three ghosts haunting the sidewalk, and hoist it in a toast.
THIS TIME LAST YEAR, we’d planned to sell the house, had even engaged a broker; Olivia would enroll in a Midtown school the following September, and Ed had found us a Lenox Hill gut job. “It’ll be fun,” he promised. “I’ll install a bidet, just for you.” I batted him on the shoulder.
“What’s a bidet?” asked Olivia.
But then he left, and she with him. So it flayed my heart all over again when, last night, I recalled the first words of our stillborn listing: LOVINGLY RESTORED LANDMARK 19TH-CENTURY HARLEM GEM! WONDERFUL FAMILY HOME! Landmark and gem up for debate, I think. Harlem inarguable, likewise 19th-century (1884). Lovingly restored, I can attest to that, and expensively, too. Wonderful family home, true.
My domain and its outposts:
Basement: Or maisonette, according to our broker. Sub-street, floor-through, with its own door; kitchen, bath, bedroom, tiny office. Ed’s workspace for eight years—he’d drape the table in blueprints, tack contractor briefs to the wall. Currently tenanted.
Garden: Patio, really, accessible via the first floor. A sprawl of limestone tile; a pair of disused Adirondack chairs; a young ash tree slouched in the far corner, gangling and lonely, like a friendless teenager. Every so often I long to hug it.
First floor: Ground floor, if you’re British, or premier étage, if you’re French. (I am neither, but I spent time in Oxford during my residency—in a maisonette, as it happens—and this past July began studying français online.) Kitchen—open-plan and “gracious” (broker again), with a rear door leading to the garden and a side door to the park. White-birch floors, now blotched with puddles of merlot. In the hall a powder room—the red room, I call it. “Tomato Red,” per the Benjamin Moore catalogue. Living room, equipped with sofa and coffee table and paved in Persian rug, still plush underfoot.
Second floor: The library (Ed’s; shelves full, cracked spines and foxed dust jackets, all packed tight as teeth) and the study (mine; spare, airy, a desktop Mac poised on an IKEA table—my online-chess battlefield). Second half bath, this one blued in “Heavenly Rapture,” which is ambitious language for a room with a toilet. And a deep utility closet I might one day convert into a darkroom, if I ever migrate from digital to film. I think I’m losing interest.
Third floor: The master (mistress?) bedroom and bath. I’ve spent much of my time in bed this year; it’s one of those sleep-system mattresses, dually adjustable. Ed programmed his side for an almost downy softness; mine is set to firm. “You’re sleeping on a brick,” he said once, strumming his fingers on the top sheet.
“You’re sleeping on a cumulus,” I told him. Then he kissed me, long and slow.
After they left, during those black, blank months when I could scarcely prise myself from the sheets, I would roll slowly, like a curling wave, from one end to the other, spooling and unspooling the bedclothes around me.
Also the guest bedroom and en-suite.
Fourth floor: Servants’ quarters once upon a time, now Olivia’s bedroom and a second spare. Some nights I haunt her room like a ghost. Some days I stand in the doorway, watch the slow traffic of dust motes in the sun. Some weeks I don’t visit the fourth floor at all, and it starts to melt into memory, like the feel of rain on my skin.
Anyway. I’ll speak to them again tomorrow. Meanwhile, no sign of the people across the park.
A RANGY TEENAGER BURSTS from the front door of number 207, like a horse from the starting gate, and gallops east down the street, past my front windows. I don’t get a good look—I’ve awoken early, after a late night with Out of the Past, and am trying to decide if a swallow of merlot might be wise; but I catch a bolt of blond, a backpack slung from one shoulder. Then he’s gone.
I slug a glass, float upstairs, settle myself at my desk. Reach for my Nikon.
In