“I can open it?” she asked.
“It’s yours,” I said.
She didn’t open it. She stood there, feeling the screen through the plastic, and I reached in my backpack for a second evidence bag, containing the pill bottles from the attic.
“I don’t need those,” she said.
“Right, but they were his, so I’m required to return them to you.”
I wondered if she’d notice the Risperdal. But she tossed the bag on the table with a clatter. “Anything else?”
The third and final bag contained the crystal whiskey glass her father had been holding when he died.
“I don’t want it,” she said.
I hesitated.
“I mean it. I don’t care what you’re required to do. Get it the fuck away from me. Those, too.”
I tucked both the pills and the tumbler in my backpack.
She stepped abruptly to the sideboard and lifted the wine bottle. “Do you want?”
“No, thanks. I should hit the road.”
Perhaps I’d made her self-conscious; she stopped at a quarter glass. She took a quick sip and set it aside, sanding her palms. “Before you go, do me a favor, while you’re here? In the basement. I could use a pair of hands.”
I followed her through the kitchen and into a service porch, down plank stairs lit by a bare forty-watt bulb.
“Watch your head,” she said.
I ducked a jutting two-by-four, stepping down into a long, fusty space that stank of rotting wood. Along one wall ran the wine racks Zaragoza had mentioned. The floor was raw concrete, showing concentric traces left by water pooling and evaporating, time and again. Tatiana continued to the far end of the room, where sat a pair of gigantic gravity furnaces, arms flying off every which way. Lodged between them, like an outmatched referee, was an X-braced steel shelving unit, walling off a group of three boxes pushed into the basement’s rear corner.
“That’s all that’s left,” she said.
“More instruction manuals.”
She smiled tiredly. “Yeah. And this guy’s completely stuck.” To prove her point she grabbed one of the shelving unit’s uprights, yanking it back and forth to no effect.
I gave it a tug: wedged in there pretty good. “We can try brute force, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You’ll scrape the ducts up, and you don’t want to do that.”
“Why?”
“They’re covered in asbestos.”
She recoiled.
“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s harmless as is. You just don’t want particles getting into the air. Did he kept tools somewhere? We could take it apart. That’d be the easiest way.”
“I think there’s some upstairs.”
“WD-40 would be great, too, if you have it.”
She disappeared, bringing back a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, and a blue-and-yellow spray can. “Ask and ye shall receive.”
Disassembling the shelves made for an acrobatic enterprise, me wrangling my long body into position to access the rusted rear bolts, while Tatiana hung on with the pliers for dear life. One particular bracket would not move for love or money.
“Forget it,” I said. “We’ll leave it and do that one instead.”
She rested on her haunches, shook out her wrists. “I need a break.”
I backed out on my hands and knees and sat cross-legged on the concrete.
“I can’t wait for this to be over,” she said. She was staring through the bars of the shelving unit at the trapped boxes. “But it’s sad, too. You know?”
I thought of her apartment, stripped down to its essentials, the lack of attachments, a reminder to herself that her return to California was supposed to be temporary.
I said, “You think you’ll move back?”
She looked at me quizzically.
“To New York,” I said.
“Why would I do that?”
“To dance.”
She shook her head. “I’ve missed my window.”
“Come on.”
“That’s how it is. You get a few good years and then it’s over.”
“I hear that.”
“Mm.” A smile. “Look at us. Washed up at thirty.”
I smiled, too.
She said, “People ask me what I do and I tell them I dance. That’s what I told you. But I don’t, not often enough to call myself a dancer. I teach dance. I teach yoga. So that makes me a teacher.”
“Why does it have to be one or the other?”
“You can call yourself anything you want,” she said. “That doesn’t make it true.”
“Sure it does,” I said. “This is America.”
She snorted.
We fell silent, our breath returning in short, flat echoes that shrank the space surrounding us. Then one of the furnaces roared to life.
“Holy shit that’s loud,” she said, palming her chest.
I reached for the screwdriver. “Ready?”
We got back to work.
Eventually we loosened the unit enough to toddle it out. I carried the three boxes upstairs. They were badly wrinkled and stank of colonizing fungus. Tatiana told me to leave them in the service porch, out of reach of her sinuses.
My shirt was dark with sweat, my knee dangerously tight. Sipping on tap water, I followed her to the dining room so she could pour herself another half glass of wine. She was patched under the arms, too, both of us smeared with grime and rust. I needed to sit, to take some weight off my leg, but I didn’t want to soil the nice leather chairs, so I leaned on the table to relieve the strain.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Of course.”
“You’ve been really kind throughout. Beyond the call.”
“No big deal,” I said.
“But it is,” she said. Her voice was raw. “It’s a big thing. A great big thing.”
I made a gesture of demurral.
That seemed to anger her. She turned away and gulped her wine and grabbed for the bottle. Then she reconsidered and set it down with a clunk and took two hungry strides toward me, her body sliding against mine as she lifted her face and rose up on her toes.
It wasn’t going to happen. Not without my help. At six-three, I had a good eight inches on her. I was going to have to become an active and equal participant.
I did. I bent down, and we met where we could.
The kiss didn’t last long. I drew back with salt on my tongue.
She remained pressed against me, her back in a tight, gorgeous arch; peering up at me with those green eyes, her rib cage biting into my stomach, her slight frame bearing down on me with a paralyzing heaviness. She was waiting for me to move, to move back toward her, and when I didn’t, she began searching my face. I could see her taking me apart in her mind, realization dawning, followed by discontent.
She broke away from me and went for her wine.
I said, “I don’t want to do the wrong thing here.”
“What’s the wrong thing?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
She said, “Let me know when you figure it out.”
She drained her wine and set the glass down hard on the sideboard. She still had her back to me. She put her hands on her hips, kicked at the nearest box, one of many. “Help me, please.”
Chapter 14
We managed to fit eight of the eleven remaining boxes into the Prius, leaving the three rotted ones behind.
“Are you okay to drive?” I asked.
She ignored me and got into her car.
Sitting in my own car, engine off, I watched her brake lights fade.
The case was closed, or would be soon, with one click of a mouse. On paper, Tatiana and I would revert to being strangers. That could create opportunities. Or destroy them.
We’re not a delivery service.
I started the car, swung a three-point-turn, and eased toward the driveway, cresting the top and immediately jamming on the brake.