Once an hour Edith surfaced, called to them where they spoke with their hands on their hips in front of a crack in the plaster or raised board. “What kind of people are you? Can you not hear me? I own this place! Stop!” she said, and more quietly, “Who are you. How could this have — Declan will—”
At first they looked back, but after several episodes they didn’t turn at all from where they trailed Owen, quoting figures, running their hands over the banisters. “Mother,” Owen said, when she stationed herself halfway between the first and second floors, sitting with one arm against the wall and the other against a spindle, and keened.
“You need your rest.” He went to her and sat a step below, so that her face was above his, and he looked up. The blood vessels in his eyes branched violently, and he appeared, briefly, like a beggar not yet desensitized to the act of asking, extending a cup and saying, anything.
“I’ll rest when it’s safe,” she rasped, and pounded the flat of her palm on the warped line of the stair.
~ ~ ~
WHEN IT FINALLY HAPPENED WITH HER, it felt to Thomas so circumstantial that he mentally thanked every minuscule factor involved — the plants for needing tending just then, the finicky shower for only supplying hot water in the afternoon. They had been sharing a bed, arranging their bodies together intricately, but still he didn’t know the clear shape of her, had never seen her bare hipbones or tasted her saliva or speculated about the likeness of a birthmark to a comet.
She opened the door in a towel, her nose and cheeks scrubbed and red, her hair wet and thoroughly unconsidered, the whole of her bold and undone as he had never before witnessed. The curtains, as always, were drawn, but the windows let in a breeze, and the bits of moisture that remained on her shoulders trembled. She didn’t linger in greeting him but returned to the united voices of a Carter Family record, sang along as she traced the room’s borders with a red tin watering can, checking the hidden angles of the plants, turning leaves gently to find and nurture any fading green. The precision of her hands, the slow path to gold that her hair waged as it lost water and gained light, compelled him to kiss her.
In an action he later classified as specifically unlike himself, Thomas removed the can from her hands, felt the heavy thud of water against its sides as he placed it on the windowsill, unfastened the towel from its tenuous grasp on her body, and began to move the rough cotton over her head. At this she began to breathe differently, as though adjusting to a higher altitude and the vantage of familiar things made tiny.
In her bedroom he moved slowly, aware that a future version of himself wanted to remember this. He showed her where and how to lie, tried to cover as much of her skin as possible with his mouth, placed his working hand beneath her chin and tilted it once in a while to make sure she knew he was looking at her. Naked with another person for the first time since the change to his body, Thomas listened to himself carefully. He discovered that the inability of his left side lent an urgent creativity to the act, that leaning into her from his good side left him humming. Magnified and daubed with the glow of sweat, the colors of her grew vivid, and he saw finally that under the champagne and brown of her hair was the suggestion of red, that her shoulders retained a secret smattering of ripe, peach-hued freckles. Her hips accommodated his movements with a slight delay and a buck, each of them an assent, a continued urging.
After, she examined him, the soft tufts of armpit hair and his jagged collarbone, with a laugh in her throat and her pupils dilated.
“Where did you come from?” she said, her head on his bare chest.
“I’m a private investigator,” he said, and formed a monocle with his thumb and forefinger. “Came to find you.”
They laughed a little at his meager, placid joke, at the assured banter the situation had temporarily afforded. The sliding shadow of a passing car appeared on the wall and advanced over them. After a while she sat up, her elbows locked and hands splayed, and scanned her bedroom rapidly, as though expecting to find it rearranged.
~ ~ ~
PAULIE FELT BADLY FOR CLAUDIA, all crumpled on the couch for weeks on end. He wanted to help, didn’t always understand, knew that. Seeing her like that left him electric in the bad way, opening all the cupboards and closing them, throwing the pillows off his bed and then placing them back, running his hands under the hottest water he could stand. He had no idea what it was like to be her and didn’t know if this meant his love was insufficient. Once, when she came back from work and said it’d been a rough day, he started doing jumping jacks, told her to try, thought the funny waggling of the body could help, and she started to cry. He was confused and so he just kept going, faster and faster, and she wept harder, sounding out like a whale across a dark ocean.
She was staying with Paulie for the time being, she said. To take care of him. Also because she and Drew were fighting. Paulie asked why.
“Are you mad because in the morning he doesn’t ask you what your dreams are like or tell you about his?
“Does he forget to call at lunch?
“Does he talk over the ends of your sentences?
“Does he not take you to the zoo enough?”
“Some of that.”
Paulie could see her face doing an impression of a smile.
“He definitely does not take me to the zoo enough.”
At this, Paulie grabbed the head of lettuce that was sitting out for the dinner Claudia hadn’t yet started to prepare and got down on one knee. He held up the bouquet.
“Claudia, I’ve wanted to ask for a long time. Will you come with me to the zoo?”
Her head bowed in assent, then connected with the fan of green, the cool droplets of the water on its outer leaves attaching to her eyelids.
“I can’t hear you, lettuce head. Are you trying to get back into the ground or what?”
He remembered the end of a joke then, one that begins when a refrigerator door opens: “Lettuce alone! Lettuce alone!”
Claudia pushed her face deeper.
“Lettuce alone!”
~ ~ ~
BETWEEN MOMENTS SPENT wrapped around Adeleine, Thomas sat with Edith and tried to believe or recognize her. He moved like something deflating down the stairs, then rapped with the tops of his knuckles, breath held, hoping that she wouldn’t be home, would be out shopping with her old creaky bustle of efficiency.
Most days, she sat at her kitchen table, hands firmly planted on the soiled tablecloth, and spoke in platitudes. Nowhere was the nodding or eye fluttering that had meant her thorough listening, the careful gathering of information that had made him feel seen.
Thomas spoke to her at length, described the strange relationship that had grown up around himself and Adeleine — thick and ragged, hard to see out of — and how much time they spent together but how little they spoke of their lives before. He wanted Edith to cast a suspect glance in his direction, to get up and fiddle with something as she picked out her thoughts, but she only said, “Oh, wonderful! Marvelous! Very, very good.”