“Why not?”
“She didn’t want to get into it. And, I guess I wasn’t that curious.”
The wind had begun to kick up, the rain turning into a storm of interesting proportions. Lightning flared behind the windows, which rattled to the thunder. For a moment, it seemed as if the sky was coming apart.
“Nikki was terrified of lightning,” Adrienne remarked.
“She never said.”
“Really? She used to put on tennis shoes when she was a kid—for the rubber soles. Then she’d hide in the basement.”
A shutter tore loose outside and the wind bashed it against the house, smacking the wall over and over again. Duran headed outside to fix it, but Adrienne stopped him at the door, tugging at his arm. “Are you crazy?” she asked, and they laughed like kids, giddy with excitement.
Her hand was still on his arm, and for a second it seemed as if a kiss might happen. But then the air exploded like a bomb outside the windows—the lights blew, Adrienne jumped, and the house was plunged into a dark and sudden twilight.
When she caught her breath, Adrienne gulped and said. “Well, there goes the power.”
Duran grinned. “For a second, I thought it was the Rapture.”
So they played chess, which seemed safe enough, and didn’t require a lot of light. Duran improvised some missing pieces, using bottle caps as pawns and saltshakers for rooks. Adrienne wasn’t much good at the game, and Duran beat her in just a few minutes, playing in an effortless and distracted way.
“I think you’ve played this game before,” she remarked.
Duran shrugged. “Seems like it.”
“Take it from me,” she said, setting the pieces back in their squares. “I’m not much of a player, but Gabe…”
She stopped herself. “I had a friend once who was pretty serious about it—I mean, he was in a club or something. Anyway, he tried to teach me, so… it’s not like I’m an idiot at it.” She thought for a moment, then swivelled the board around and replaced the pieces she’d lost. “This time,” she said, “you play black. And don’t be so polite. See if you can really kill me.”
He did. And it didn’t take long. In fact, the only time it took was the time that Adrienne took to think through her moves. Duran’s moves were almost automatic, as if he knew every situation by heart—whereas she had to think her way through every pitfall and trap-that he’d set for her. After her ninth move, he looked at her and said, “Mate.”
She stared at the board, then shook her head. “I don’t see it.”
He shrugged. “It’s there.”
She looked at the board and frowned. “Where?”
“Coming right at you.”
Her eyes darted from piece to piece. Finally, she looked up, suspicion dawning in her eyes. “What are we talking about?” she asked.
Duran gave her a look of puzzled innocence. “Chess,” he told her. “What else?” Then he took her pawn, en passant, and in so doing, placed her king in check. Two moves later, and the game was over.
It was in the middle of the fourth game that the shutter blew off. Torrents of water gusted against the glass, surging with the wind. “Do me a favor,” Adrienne asked, sitting back in her chair. “Close your eyes, and tell me what comes into your mind when you think about chess.”
Duran humored her. Closed his eyes, and thought.
“Well?” she asked.
“The board,” he said. “And the pieces.”
“Right, but—”
“Black and white. Red and black.”
“What else?”
He thought some more. Said, “Rum.”
She blinked with surprise. “Rum?”
“Yeah. The way it tastes. Sharp. And the… the bouquet, like cognac, the way it fills your lungs.”
She didn’t know what to say.
For a moment, he could feel the heavy glass in his hand, see the dark surface of the drink, a single small ice cube floating in it, melting to oblivion.
“What else?” It was as if her voice were being piped in from far away.
“Heat. I remember playing where it was hot, somewhere hot—my shirt sticking to my back.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. It’s not really a memory. It’s more like a… like a memory—of a memory.”
“What else?”
“Music.” He even cocked his head, as if somehow this would allow him to hear it, but the motion broke his concentration and he opened his eyes and looked at her.
“Stay with it,” she told him.
He tried, but it was gone and, finally, he said so.
By now, the rain had slackened, and the sky was brightening to a jaundiced gray. “That was strange,” Duran said. “Like being at a seance.”
She leaned back in her chair and regarded him, tumbling a rook in the fingers of her left hand. “And that was all you got? Rum, heat, and music?”
He shook his head. “I was free-associating, and it was more a sensation than anything else. But, yeah: that’s what I got.”
Adrienne frowned and, in her lawyer’s voice, asked, “Don’t you think it’s weird that Nikki had this prolonged amnesia—and all these phony memories—and you do, too?”
Duran looked confused, as if he wanted to answer her, but couldn’t. Finally, he said, “We have different points of view.”
“You listened to yourself on tape, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Well?”
He sighed. “You think I have amnesia?”
“I hope you do.”
Duran’s brows dipped. “Why do you say that?”
“Because it’s the lesser of two evils,” she replied.
As the afternoon headed toward evening, Adrienne sat with her sister’s laptop. After an hour or so, the battery light began to flicker, and she switched it off.
“What about her credit card statements, and her checking account?” Duran asked. “If she went out of town in October…”
Just before five, Adrienne called her sister’s bank, and requested copies of the last six months of statements and checks. The clerk was reluctant to comply, but her supervisor finally agreed to mail the documents to the client’s “address of record.” It was the best they could do.
Listening to the conversation, Duran was impressed by the way Adrienne refused to take no for an answer.
“You’re tough,” he told her, as she hung up the phone.
“Like you said: I can be a bitch.” Then she smiled, and added, “Let’s go out.”
Leaves were everywhere—and branches and limbs of trees, strewn across the streets and lawns. Raw gouges of bright blond wood on the dark trunks of trees marked the places from which they’d been ripped. Sirens howled in the distance. And the air fizzed with the rinsed feel that sometimes follows a downpour.
They took their shoes off and walked along the beach, the sand littered with debris tossed up by the thunderous surf: horseshoe crab skeletons, strands of rope and fishing line, ragged hunks of Styrofoam, driftwood, fish.
When they returned to the cottage, Adrienne went out for a run. Duran had neglected to buy running shoes so he stayed by himself, sitting in the kitchen, trying to come to grips with the sense of loss he’d felt when they’d turned the corner and come to a stop in front of Beach Haven—and it was not there. He couldn’t articulate the way he felt, but it was as if he’d stepped onto the landing of a flight of stairs, only to find that there were no stairs—and that he himself was suddenly in free fall, plummeting through space. The only thing he could trust, really trust, was the here and now. The world in front of him—not as it had been or would be, but as it was.
The kitchen. This moment. Even the memory of playing chess with Adrienne, as rich in detail as it had been—as recent as it had been—was unreliable. His memories of “Beach Haven” had also been rich with detail. And yet, Beach Haven was a figment—as imaginary as “Jeffrey Duran.” Which left him with the possibility that Adrienne might also be an illusion. As might yesterday, and the day before. Nico. De Groot. And the Towers. All of it: a figment of his own imagination. Or God’s.