Now, as she sat poised at the edge of her bed, listening to Lisette’s silence and her father’s limping voice, she waited for her sister to pipe up in her breathy little baby squeak and frame the inevitable questions: Dad, Dad, how cold is forty below? And: Dad, what’s diphtheria?
The sun had crept imperceptibly across the deck, fingering the cracks in the varnished floorboards and easing up the low brass rail Marcy was using as a backrest. She was leaning into it, the rail, her chair tipped back, her elbows splayed behind her and her legs stretched out to catch the sun, shapely legs, stunning legs, legs long and burnished and firm, legs that made him think of the rest of her and the way she was in bed. There was a scar just under the swell of her left kneecap, the flesh annealed in an irregular oval as if it had been burned or scarified, and he’d never noticed that before. Well, he was in a new place, half a glass each left of the second bottle and the world sprung to life in the fullness of its detail, everything sharpened, in focus, as if he’d needed glasses all these years and just clapped them on. The gull was gone but it had been special, a very special gull, and there were sparrows now, or wrens, hopping along the floor in little streaks of color, snatching up a crumb of this or that and then hurtling away over the rail as if they’d been launched.
He was thinking he didn’t want any more wine — two bottles was plenty — but maybe something to cap off the afternoon, a cognac maybe, just one.
She’d been talking about one of the girls who worked for her, a girl he’d seen a couple of times, nineteen, soft-faced and pretty, and how she — her name was Bettina — was living the party life, every night at the clubs, and how thin she was.
“Cocaine?” he wondered, and she shrugged. “Has it affected her work?”
“No,” she said, “not yet, anyway.” And then she went on to qualify that with a litany of lateness in the morning, hyper behavior after lunch and doctor’s appointments, too many doctor’s appointments. He waited a moment, watching her mouth and tongue, the beautiful unspooling way the words dropped from her lips, before he reached down and ran a finger over the blemish below her kneecap. “You have a scar,” he said.
She looked at her knee as if she wasn’t aware it was attached to her, then withdrew her leg momentarily to scrutinize it before giving it back to the sun and the deck and the waiting touch of his hand.
“Oh, that?” she said. “That’s from when I was a kid.”
“A burn or what?”
“Bicycle.” She teased the syllables out, slow and sure.
His hand was on her knee, the warmth of the contact, and he rubbed the spot a moment before straightening up in the chair and draining his glass. “Looks like a burn,” he said.
“Nope. Just fell in the street.” She let out that laugh again and he drank it in. “You should’ve seen my training wheels — or the one of them. It was as flat”—flaat—“as if a truck had run me over.”
Her eyes flickered with the lingering seep of the memory and they both took a moment to picture it, the little girl with the wheel collapsed under her and the scraped knee — or it had to have been worse than that, punctured, shredded — and he didn’t think of Lisette or Angelle, not yet, because he was deep into the drift of the day, so deep there was nothing else but this deck and this slow sweet sun and the gull that was gone now. “You want something else?” he heard himself say. “Maybe a Rémy, just to cap it off? I mean, I’m wined out, but just, I don’t know, a taste of cognac?”
“Sure,” she said, “why not?” and she didn’t look at her watch and he didn’t look at his either.
And then the waiter was there with two snifters and a little square of dark chocolate for each of them, compliments of the house. Snifter, he was thinking as he revolved the glass in his hand, what a perfect designation for the thing, a name that spoke to function, and he said it aloud, “Isn’t it great that they have things like snifters, so you can stick your nose in it and sniff? And plus, it’s named for what it is, unlike, say, a napkin or a fork. You don’t nap napkins or fork forks, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, and the sun had leveled on her hair now, picking out the highlights and illuminating the lobe of one ear, “I guess. But I was telling you about Bettina? Did you know that guy she picked up I told you about — not the boyfriend, but the one-night stand? He got her pregnant.”
The waiter drifted by then, college kid, hair in his eyes, and asked if there’d be anything else. It was then that he thought to check his watch and the first little pulse of alarm began to make itself felt somewhere deep in the quiet lagoon of his brain: Angelle, the alarm said. Lisette. They had to be picked up at school after soccer practice every Wednesday because Wednesday was Allie’s day off and Martine wasn’t there to do it. Martine was in Paris, doing whatever she pleased. That much was clear. And today — today was Wednesday.
Angelle remembered waiting for him longer than usual that day.
He’d been late before — he was almost always late, because of work, because he had such a hectic schedule — but this time she’d already got through half her homework, the blue backpack canted away from her and her notebook spread open across her knees as she sat at the curb, and still he wasn’t there. The sun had sunk into the trees across the street and she felt a chill where she’d sweated through her shorts and T-shirt at soccer. Lisette’s team had finished before hers and for a while her sister had sat beside her, drawing big x’s and o’s in two different colors on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, but she’d got bored and run off to play on the swings with two other kids whose parents were late.
Every few minutes a car would round the turn at the top of the street, and her eyes would jump to it, but it wasn’t theirs. She watched a black SUV pull up in front of the school and saw Dani Mead and Sarah Schuster burst through the doors, laughing, their backpacks riding up off their shoulders and their hair swaying back and forth as they slid into the cavernous backseat and the door slammed shut. The car’s brake lights flashed and then it rolled slowly out of the parking lot and into the street, and she watched it till it disappeared round the corner. He was always working, she knew that, trying to dig himself out from under all the work he had piled up — that was his phrase, dig himself out, and she pictured him in his office surrounded by towering stacks of papers, papers like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and a shovel in his hands as if he were one of those men in the orange jackets bent over a hole in the road — but still, she felt impatient. Felt cold. Hungry. And where was he?
Finally, after the last two kids had been picked up by their mothers and the sun reduced to a streak that ran across the tile roof of the school and up into the crowns of the palms behind it, after Lisette had come back to sit on the curb and whine and pout and complain like the baby she was (He’s just drunk, I bet that’s it, just drunk like Mom said) and she had to tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about, there he was. Lisette saw the car first. It appeared at the top of the street like a mirage, coming so slowly round the turn it might have been rolling under its own power, with nobody in it, and Angelle remembered what her father had told her about always setting the handbrake, always, no matter what. She hadn’t really wanted a lesson — she’d have to be sixteen for that — but they were up in the mountains, at the summer cabin, just after her mother had left for France, and there was nobody around. “You’re a big girl,” he’d told her, and she was, tall for her age — people always mistook her for an eighth grader or even a freshman. “Go ahead, it’s easy,” he told her. “Like bumper cars. Only you don’t bump anything.” And she’d laughed and he laughed and she got behind the wheel with him guiding her and her heart was pounding till she thought she was going to lift right out of the seat. Everything looked different through the windshield, yellow spots and dirt, the world wrapped in a bubble. The sun was in her eyes. The road was a black river, oozing through the dried-out weeds, the trees looming and receding as if a wave had passed through them. And the car crept down the road the way it was creeping now. Too slow. Much too slow.