The front yard had been gravelled over when he’d bought it, which had suited Niels because he’d hated mowing lawns and it had made a perfect parking place for clients. I’d parked tonight where I always did, under the huge sycamore that sheltered the front porch, my headlights shining into the more lush back garden of his only neighbour, Mrs. Bonetti. Behind me, on the far side of a tall and tidy myrtle hedge that ran the length of the front yard, was nothing but a wide expanse of parking lot belonging to a restaurant that, in all the time I’d been here, had been under renovation, so the lot was always empty.
Sometimes the emptiness spooked me a little, especially since my apartment in Albany had been one of five in a big old house right in the centre of town, so there’d always been someone close by.
But tonight I was glad of the fact there was no one to notice me wiping the tears from my face one last time as I dashed from my car to the porch in the furious rain.
Niels had “improved” the porch railing, which meant that it wobbled a bit as I raced up the steps and along to the side entrance, where he had added a fancy screen door that was fussy to open and took its time closing again, but I came through those obstacles without a mishap and, safely inside, took my coat off and shook it and added it to the collection that hung from the freestanding coat rack.
I turned to find Rachel, my niece, standing two steps in front of me. Though she was barely nineteen and petite, fully half a head shorter than I was, she still stared me down as though I was attempting to sneak in past curfew. She lifted one hand. She was holding my cell phone.
“You left this again.”
“I know.” I’d been at the museum before I had missed it, and by then there’d seemed no point in driving back here just to fetch it when I could as easily use the museum’s phone. “Sorry, I thought—”
“I was trying to call you for over an hour before I found this on your dresser,” she cut me off. “Gianni said there’d been an accident because of all the rain, and I heard sirens, and—”
I interrupted in my turn, but gently, because now I understood the reason for her irritation. She’d been worried. I was touched by that, and made a mental note to be more careful, more considerate. “I’m really sorry.” I’d have given her a hug, but Rachel wasn’t much for hugging.
She had always been an independent kid. She’d been a tiny thing, just seven, when I’d first moved down from Toronto to live with Niels in Saratoga Springs. He’d fixed up an apartment for me over the garage, and I had driven the half hour down and back to university at Albany, and in the evenings and on weekends I had paid him back, in lieu of proper rent, by babysitting Rachel.
I would never have won prizes for my babysitting. Usually we’d spent the time together sitting on my thrift-store sofa watching movies on TV. She’d liked the scary ones the best, back then. She’d take whatever blanket I had thrown across the sofa back and wrap herself up tightly in it so that she could hide her eyes if things got too intense, and she would do the same thing if we watched sad movies, so that she could cry without my seeing her.
She hadn’t let me see her cry at all since Niels’s death, not in the whole time I had been here, but I sometimes caught a brief glimpse of that kid beneath the blanket, trying hard to keep it all together.
Reaching out, I took my cell phone from her hand. “I’ll try not to do it again.”
“Okay.”
This little tiled area between the side door and the kitchen functioned as a mudroom and I left my wet shoes here as well, before I followed Rachel the few steps into the kitchen. Something smelled so good that, even if she hadn’t mentioned Gianni, I’d have known that he’d been over.
“Ziti?” I guessed.
“No, lasagne.”
Our neighbours were kind. At least once a week, Mrs. Bonetti made meals for us and sent them over with Gianni, her son, who at twenty-two still lived at home with her, working by day in the town’s main street deli. If I’d been my niece, I’d have fallen for Gianni the minute I’d met him—he was stunningly good-looking with nice manners and a cocky sense of humour—but it all seemed lost on Rachel.
“Have you eaten yet?” I asked.
“Not yet. I wasn’t really hungry.”
But she’d set our places at the table with the fancy cutlery and wineglasses and place mats, and I found that touching, too, because I knew her well enough to know that meant she wanted company. I switched my phone off, washed up, and took over, dishing the lasagne out and opening the bottle of red wine she’d chosen from her father’s stash down in the basement.
We hardly ever sat down at the table for a meal. It was partly a practical thing. There were only the two of us, and we were usually eating at different times, so it was simpler to pull up a stool at the breakfast bar and toss things right into the dishwasher afterwards. And partly it came from us both being far too aware of the chair at the head of the table, and why it was empty, and who should be sitting there.
Missing my brother, for me, was a physical pain. Three months on, it still felt as though some vital organ inside me had been ripped away and the wound stitched up badly, the edges too ragged to heal; but I hid that wound under my everyday clothing, and because I looked, on the outside, the same as I always had, nobody saw I was no longer whole. If my mother were here, she’d have probably noticed, but we hadn’t been in the same room since I’d gone up to Canada for the memorial service in May. And my parents, like Rachel, were dealing with wounds of their own. I’d be no help at all to them if I gave way to my grief.
So I angled my chair now to face it a little away from the head of the table, and smiled at Rachel. “So, how was your day?”
“Okay.”
“You applied for that course?”
She corrected me. “Seminar. And yeah, I emailed the instructor, so I’ll have to wait and see if she has room for me.”
“And what was it about, again?”
“Transgressive women in eighteenth-century British fiction.”
Which put an end to that, because there wasn’t much that I could bring to conversations about English literature. My own degree had been in history, and while I loved reading I read differently than Rachel did. She revelled in identifying themes and analyzing structures, and wrote papers that examined Dostoyevsky’s polyphonic style, on which I couldn’t offer an opinion.
We ate our lasagne in silence a moment, but I could still tell that she didn’t want silence. I’d always had an easy time interpreting her body language because she’d inherited so much of it from Niels. She didn’t look like him. She took more after her mother, who’d been Niels’s girlfriend and lived with him all through the years he was going to law school, before deciding she was not cut out for motherhood. She’d left them shortly after Rachel started kindergarten, and apart from Christmas cards from the West Coast the first few years, she’d dropped out of their lives completely.
I would have had trouble remembering what she looked like if it hadn’t been for the fact she’d gifted Rachel with the same rich auburn hair, pale skin, and petite frame.
But the shrug and partial eye-roll Rachel gave me, when I asked what else she’d done today, was pure Van Hoek. And I guessed who had earned the eye-roll even before she said, “Tyler called.”
She’d never had a high opinion of my boyfriend. It was mutual. Whenever they were in the same room, I felt like an arbitrator.
“Really? When was that?”
“At lunchtime. He ‘forgot’ today was your big thing at the museum.”
“Yes, well, he’s been busy with work.”
“So have you,” she said. “Don’t get me started. He said he’d be out tonight, he had some dinner or something to go to. He said you could Skype him tomorrow at two.”
I covertly studied her face while I sipped my wine. Her mouth had turned down at the edges, which meant that she was disappointed. And in more than just my choice of men. It was the same look she wore any time an outing she’d looked forward to was cancelled, or a treat she had been promised was forgotten in the rush of daily life. I cast my mind back over what we’d talked about this week, and what we might have planned.
And I remembered. I said, “It’ll have to be later than two. We’re still doing that whole Sunday brunch thing tomorrow, right? And checking out the new bookstore?”