Paulie had stopped singing, and the pipes of the building hummed and coughed. The water continued in spurts.
“Claude,” sighed Edward, as though he had filled this role his whole life. “There is no shame in meeting the expectations of the people around you. In being dependable. Please take this earnestly from someone who once blacked out and pissed all over someone’s bedroom and tried to not clean his mess but absorb it by shaking baby powder everywhere.” Claudia put a hand over her face, her fore-and middle fingers parted so that she offered her distaste and amusement to Edward with one eye. They lay back on their respective beds and played a largely unsuccessful game in which he launched peanuts, underhand, in an arch over the space between them into her mouth.
Claudia, filled with the kind of comfort that comes from conquering so many miles in one day, curled up. She descended into a light doze, released cloistered sleep from her mouth and remained still within the uneven ring of peanuts that surrounded her.
When he saw her inert at last, Edward exited the room with attention to the door’s gentle close. He padded down the dingy, porous cement stairs, carefully opened the gate with the sign about pool hours, slipped off the drugstore flip-flops he’d bought ninety miles back, and descended the submerged steps into the glowing green-blue.
Paulie, now seated, brought his folded-up legs ever closer to his chest, quivering and murmuring half-words. The shower ran over the empty space of the tub, beating it with uneven sound. He didn’t know why he was crying, or why the space seemed impossible to exit, just that something wrong had set up a home in his body. One moment there he’d been, excited by tiny hotel toiletries, and the next his chest felt smaller, and the room didn’t look like a place a person could ever live, and he couldn’t remember what he deserved or why. Now he whimpered for his sister, and then Edward, and received no reply; now he reached for a phrase in the cache of those he knew and loved, but it wasn’t there.
PLIABLE IN THE HEAT, still softened by the rare optimism that had come her way, Adeleine had not been able to deflect his questions, and soon Owen had known: that the building was empty save the three of them, where Thomas had gone, for whom he was looking. The information had seemed to occur to him in stages, first sharpening the movement of his eyes and hands, until he was bloated with it, and his limbs just hung from the chair where he sat. “I need to move,” he had said. “I need to look at something else.” He’d led them up to Adeleine’s apartment with one hand on the back of his neck, one on his mother’s.
Edith took to fits of cursing and forgetting and sleeping, and her son remained collected, occasionally sighing out a bright, focused note. He sat hunched on a chocolate linen ottoman, his legs splayed. The women perched on the brocade chaise under the cracked parlor window, listening to the small sounds of his thumbs on his phone. Every few minutes, a breeze from outside tickled their bare necks.
“Oh, Mom. I wish we could just talk about it. Do you think I like to be here? Think my time is best spent in this strange woman’s apartment? Edith?” He wove his fingers together into perfectly tanned Xs and pressed them outward, stretched then straightened the curve of his back.
“This can be an easy conversation.”
His mother’s jaw worked violently; she looked like someone deep in a casino, lost in obsession, absorbing only the changing light of slot machines.
“Edith, you can sign the house over, or Adeleine, you let me know where your boyfriend has gone to converse with my vanished sister, and we can all go somewhere we’d rather be.”
He turned his body in the direction of Adeleine, tilted his head and considered her as though she were selling something. “Of course, your hands are not tied. You’re free to go. But something tells me you won’t.”
THOMAS SAT on the uneven slats of Song’s wooden porch, observing a lone chicken cross a patch of dirt in a jagged line. He didn’t know where his shoes were. It was morning, and already warm, but with the extended absence of language also vanished observations about things like temperature and time. It had been seven days, although he didn’t know that; he’d stopped counting, or forgotten to measure, at four. When Song emerged and situated herself on the handwoven chair behind him, he reached to squeeze her left ankle, and she patted down the unruly parts of his hair. Pale as the early light, the chicken paused to investigate an unfamiliar plant. Two men appeared at the crest of the hill; Thomas and Song watched as their faces became clear, and nodded. The wood creaked to accommodate two more bodies. Mugs of tea, carried a mile, changed hands. The chicken moved in its rhythmic way, a step and a pause and a gawk, a step and a pause and a gawk, into a patch of cedars. Water rushed nearby: they could hear it.