—
THOMAS KNOCKED with the volume of a man with a full body: nothing. He pressed his head, lightly, to the doorframe, and wished angrily to return to thirty-six hours before, when the situation hadn’t yet demanded he assume a position of competence. Or eight hours before, in the locked position with Adeleine, the moment so flawlessly lit and enfolded he believed he could bear the chill forever. The prospect of what might happen next exhausted him, brought a leaden weight, and he leaned still more heavily on Edith’s door.
It opened, had been unlocked all along.
He found her in the bedroom, hands tightly clasped in her lap, sitting in an unevenly stuffed armchair, covered minimally by a cocktail dress, which, he realized with dread, he could smell: the odor, like the damp underside of rotted wood, rushed in and out of his nostrils. Its blue lace, variously faded, held a raised system of wrinkles, and from under it came forth a jagged spray of tulle. The back, undone, struggled to remain on the shoulders, and her flesh fell slack, in lumps, to the root of the zipper.
“Oh! I’ve been waiting for you,” she said with a choked warmth, as though practicing words recently acquired in a foreign language, emphasizing syllables arbitrarily. “A little chilly for summer, huh!”
Thomas moved closer, aware of his irregular heartbeat.
“Dear,” she said. “It’s about time we make it to the market, or they’ll be out of the things you like.”
He finally understood, with an uneasiness that made his ears ring, how lost she was. Thomas crouched down and began to speak, articulating each sound.
“Edith.” She leaned forward and clutched her elbow around his neck, placed a tremor-ridden hand on his cheek.
“I knew you were just down the street the whole time—”
“Edith.”
“And I said that to June, but she said, ‘Oh, probably out carousing again, charming the world and leaving his own house empty.’ Long distance she calls to say!”
“Edith!”
He put his arms around her and whispered the facts in her ear—“It’s me, Thomas, I live upstairs, it’s Thomas from upstairs, you’re Edith and we drink tea together sometimes on my sofa by the window, I ask you about your life, Declan isn’t here anymore but I am, it’s me Thomas”—and continued in spite of her warbling, gripped the limp, gelid skin, the bones of her shoulders, tried with every portion of available energy to focus. Finally, she stilled and looked up at him, horrified, as though surveying a car she’d just crashed from the driver’s seat. On her nightstand was a dingy legal pad, open to a blank page, and a sponge and some keys; around her feet were a series of shoes, a lone violet heel, vinyl yellow rain boots, braided leather sandals. He pulled a faded rose blanket from her unmade bed and wrapped it around her.
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Edith arranged for the boiler’s quick repair, and asked Thomas not to phone her son, though he assured her it had never been his intention. She apologized recursively for the “incident,” as she liked to refer to it—her language for catastrophe made mild by the era she’d come of age in—and branded it a onetime slip, simply the product of too much time on her hands. Indeed, she seemed, in some ways, renewed; she moved with new agency and a brand-new hot-pink feather duster, lifted vases and pots to get at their other angles. But he sensed an uptick in her speech and body that nagged at him: where was the slowness about her that had so comforted him before? One afternoon she put on a Bobby Darin record and insisted on dancing. The formal pose of the waltz was stiff and foreign to his body, but familiar as a prized memory on her light hands and proud back. Her eyes traveled with unfocused brightness as she pressed herself closer.
When that shark bites, with his teeth, babe.
“Oh you,” she murmured. “Let’s make a party!”