ONLY THROUGH TRIAL AND ERROR did Thomas learn that Jenny—or Song, as he’d tried to start remembering her—meant precisely what she said. No one punished him for speaking—not when he addressed her, or any of the men who arrived with plates of grainy cornbread and boiled, dirt-caked spinach and fried eggs over brown rice—but his words didn’t seem to make it any farther than his lips. They didn’t glare at him or admonish him when, during the first twenty-four hours, he continued to ask, “Would it be possible for me to bathe? Could I make one phone call?” But neither did they acknowledge the sound; they only gazed and blinked, as though waiting for some unseen photographer to press down a button. It’s either like checking into a hostel where no one speaks your language, Thomas thought, or regressing into preverbal infancy, conceiving that care will be bestowed without even grasping the concept of trust. Neither option seemed ideal, but then neither seemed impossible to master. The discomfort of it was like a pulled muscle, unnoticed if he remained still.
By hour thirty-four, he had consigned his old urgency. He dipped his feet into little pools of memories, walked in and around them, trying to absorb every side. A nameless and cinnamon-scented teenage babysitter guiding Thomas’s tiny fingers into pots of primary-colored paints, then across the page. His mother at her happiest, alternately darkened and illuminated by a romantic comedy at the multiplex theater, her hand hovering over an unending bag of popcorn, sometimes squeezing his in delight, calling him my love. His high school biology lab partner, a red-haired girl who had undressed in his bedroom while his back was turned and insisted he draw, instead of the assigned feline skeleton, her. The variously svelte and pilled couches he slept on his first months in New York, the friends and acquaintances to whom they belonged. An afternoon he draped himself across the parquet after he had hidden all his art away, trying to forgive it for leaving. His ear pressed to the wall to better hear Adeleine’s song. The end of a film moving across her face. He entered and exited these rooms blithely as the hours passed, sometimes dozing off under a thin blanket, sometimes waiting, with a flat, simple hope, for food.
ADELEINE WANDERED through Edith’s apartment, determined: the sleep had felt clean and efficient, and she wanted to keep that, bend her body to it. She opened windows and took in scents in all their elements, the exhaust of buses breathing under the loose summer sap, and she ran her hands over bright jars of old buttons and white doilies gone brittle. She turned her face towards lamps, nearly kissed the heat of the bulbs. She tilted an ear to the obsolete, yellowed plastic radio on the kitchen counter Edith always kept turned on but low, and she listened.
She could hear Edith, snoring in the next room, and she settled onto the couch, which had the color and smell of a rose left out and starved of water. She began on the important work of imagining herself capable: by the time Thomas returned, she would have plumped and dusted and shined and scrubbed and generally exhumed the apartment. Edith would grow used to resting under the breezes Adeleine let in, to the cool cloth placed gently on her forehead. As her confused words spilled out and jumbled, Adeleine would nod and rearrange them. If she had committed herself to honoring Edith’s life at its end, she had only barely considered that this effort might mean instilling some new worth in her own. Though she knew the power she felt was mania, she thought she could shape it, polish its rampant energy and send it to work for her. When her moods went running, she could dispute them from a frightened distance or turn herself over.
As she dreamed from an upright position, Adeleine wrapped one arm around her waist, remembering how Thomas had held her. It was then that Owen entered, holding a key ring in one hand and a bag of oranges in the other. He cleared a space for them on the kitchen table’s stiff lace tablecloth, much of which was obscured by stacks of unopened mail, individually wrapped candies in decorative bowls, a single wool glove left out since winter. As though she were a colleague whose face he had memorized in boredom, he nodded at Adeleine, flopped his hand in a kind of wave. “Come here and have a seat,” he said.
IN A MOTEL ROOM at the base of the Appalachians, one they’d checked in to at Edward’s insistence, was a television with the sound off but screen bright, the decade-old smell of cigarettes, and two beds covered in faded outlines of peonies. Paulie was in the shower with suspiciously soft plastic walls, surfaces that bent when pressed, audibly enjoying the miniature soaps and shampoos. Edward sat on the end of one mattress, examining the toes of his bare left foot with curiosity and disgust, and Claudia sniffed. The lull of the day enfolded them. Moments were lost, extended in the observation of afternoon light as it stretched in shadows across the nubby carpet.
“Sometimes I wish I had taken up smoking,” she said. “You know?”
“Nope.”
He flipped the mute screen to its next iteration. An ash-blond reporter pushed her breasts forward and said something about the several ambulances next to her, the cosmetic sheen of her face compromised by the red lights that periodically flashed onto it.
“A vice, you know? But a manageable one. Convenient. Just a quick mistake between meetings. I never really let myself explore, is the thing. Always responsible. Sensible shoes! Early bedtime!”