“Come on, Sage,” Ruby said, her voice lilting like a lullaby. “I’m waiting for you.”
“What you do,” Rachel was saying when Olivia walked into the kitchen, “is walk up this spiral staircase, and there’s a door at the top that leads right to the roof. From there, you can see both bridges—”
“The Golden Gate Bridge? Really?” Ruby said.
“And the Bay Bridge, yes. And you can see Alcatraz and the Bay. Everything really. It’s one of the reasons I bought the house. The view.” As she talked, Rachel drew on a napkin: long parallel lines for the bridges and a circle for Alcatraz, and little v’s for the water.
“You know,” Olivia said, sitting across from the two of them, “in the winter, when the trees are bare, you can see the ocean from my bedroom window. Just a sliver of it.” She held up two fingers to show how small a piece.
But Ruby and Rachel stared back at her as if she was the intruder here, when really neither of them had been invited guests exactly. Olivia frowned. Even though she was simply across the table from them, she felt as if she were on another planet—a planet somehow spinning away from theirs.
Rachel cleared her throat and began to clear away breakfast dishes. While she slept, Rachel and Ruby had had a feast, apparently. Food, Olivia knew, was the way to Ruby’s heart.
“I was just telling Ruby about my house,” Rachel said as she cleared eggy plates, plates with crumbs and smears of red jelly. “It’s one of those special places that you find and have to have. Of course, it’s funny to be in it alone. It’s meant for a family. It’s practically screaming for one. I suppose that’s partially my fault, the way I painted it and arranged all the rooms.”
She glanced around at the disaster—unpainted, hardly any furniture—that was Olivia’s house.
“We had big plans for this place,” Olivia explained. “We loved it. We really did. And now, well, now I don’t know.” She felt awkward and embarrassed by the house suddenly, with all its bad memories. Why, she could almost see David walking out this door the day he died, could see the shadow of his back right there in the spot where morning light spilled now. She could remember how the sheets felt when she rolled back into them after pushing him away from her and suggesting he go jogging. If only she had given in to his touch, his searching fingers, his lips. “Good idea,” he’d said, disappointed. “Better than a cold shower.” And she’d been happy to go back to sleep.
Rachel stopped, a coffee cup in each hand, and said, “‘One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it.’”
“Wow,” Ruby said. “Did you just, like, make that up in your head?” She looked at Olivia accusingly. “She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met.”
“I can’t take credit,” Rachel said, returning to her efficient table cleaning, now swiping a damp sponge across the top. “Jane Austen said it first.”
“Cool,” Ruby said. “I love her. She wrote that movie with Gwyneth Paltrow in it, right?”
Olivia didn’t like the way Rachel’s mouth turned up at the corners, satisfied. She didn’t like the woman’s tanned bare legs and khaki wraparound skirt, the way she’d tied her sleeveless white blouse so carelessly around her waist. She tried to imagine her with David. She’d seen pictures, the two of them always frozen in some athletic moment: in skis or on bikes, triumphant on top of mountains, both of them sturdy and sure, wrapped in fleece or Gore-Tex or down.
Her David, Olivia thought, had let her try new hat designs on him, sat in bubble baths until his fingers and toes grew raisinlike, ate in bed and slept late. This woman isn’t even mourning the right guy, Olivia thought angrily.
“I brought coffee from Guatemala. There’s a fresh pot,” Rachel said. She inhaled sharply, then blew it out in a fast exhale. “I know how much David liked his coffee. Do you know that he never went camping without Peet’s coffee and a Melitta one-cup?” She pressed on her temples. “Jesus,” she said.
“We didn’t do much camping,” Olivia said. “It’s hard to pitch your tent in Washington Square Park.” She had meant it as a joke, but it came out flat. All right, she admitted, Rachel had had him longer. But she hadn’t had him better.
“I think,” Rachel said evenly, “it’s time for me to leave.”
Later, after Rachel had cleaned the counters and scrubbed the sink with Ajax, after she had put the Guatemalan coffee in an airtight container, after she’d gotten in her rented Geo and driven away, and the day grew hot and muggy and long, Olivia could only wonder why Ruby would not let go of that stupid napkin with the childish drawing of a floor plan and a view from a place she would never go.
When Ruby had wandered outside, waving good-bye to Rachel like an idiot, like an old friend, Olivia had thrown the coffee grounds onto the wall, where they scattered and settled like a colony of ants.