OWEN WAS A MAN accustomed to administration and power—having most recently developed a circle of debt-collection agencies that took a “modern” approach, hounding their targets through e-mail and social media—but he had long forgotten how to earn it. Adeleine could sense his impatience building, observe how he stored it in his shoulders and forearms. She felt unsure of which role to play, given her lack of concrete theories about Thomas’s precise location and long-term intentions. He had stopped calling several days before, like an appliance that ceases to function without fanfare, leaving memories of its usefulness fresh, its malfunction confounding.
For the twentieth time since Owen had escorted them upstairs, a grandfather clock she’d found and restored rang out to signify the hour. Owen took a blue silk scarf from the closet and daubed it along the back of his neck, plucked a red whistle from a bookcase and slipped it in his pocket. The women sat on the chaise while he moved about the room as though it were a museum, pausing frequently at pieces of interest to lean and squint.
Edith’s command of language seemed to have vanished with the sleep she and Adeleine had shared in the still, dark hours before he’d arrived. The only communication she offered her son was an occasional gob of spit, which she gathered in the back of her throat with visible effort and launched with a quick, deep grunt. After wiping the phlegm away, Owen would retrieve the whistle and blow wearily, a kid bored with a game, producing a shrill note that cowed his mother.
A detainee in her own home, Adeleine paid circumspect attention. She couldn’t determine whether it was tenacity that drove Edith to spit at her son again and again, despite knowing the consequence, or some aspect of dementia that named all moments independent, unsupported and unaffected by those that preceded and followed.
Adeleine had never felt any tug of clairvoyance, had generally lived by passively observing the present and only in the fallout of disaster looking for the parts of the past that had led her to it. But in this instance, the quiet that begged her attention, she sensed the impending: eventually, Owen would swivel his attention upon her.
Losing interest in his mother’s outbursts, Owen placed the whistle on the coffee table in front of them. When she hissed or bellowed, he only closed his eyes and exhaled. Tension played at the pulse points of Adeleine’s body, which felt as though it were filling and hardening.
Owen approached Adeleine and crouched before her, like a gardener inspecting a pattern of decay.
“You and I both know,” he said, “that this way is getting us nowhere. I just need to know exactly where he is, and after you tell me that, we can all part ways.” His gaze fell down her ancient crinoline blouse, the finicky top two buttons that had slipped halfway out of their enclosures. After he frowned and adjusted them, he cupped her shoulders with his supple palms.
“You are a pretty girl. Very strange, but very pretty.”
The phlegm struck his face with the sound of things joining, like the commencement of some dramatic chemical reaction. Edith spoke for the first time in hours, and the words escaped in slow jolts. “Don’t. Owen.” That his mother had spoken his name seemed to touch him, and he looked her over, the wobbly jaw and milky eyes, before he returned to Adeleine.
His index finger stiff, Owen traced the crinoline where it met Adeleine’s linen skirt, the tight line of her waist, then hovered his right hand over her torso, as though waiting for the kick of a baby. “Leave,” he said. “Why don’t you just go?” His palm reached the underside of her jaw, and his eyes closed and his mouth parted, and he looked to her then like a person finally alone. She took his suggestion and stood.
Halfway to the door, Adeleine looked back at Edith, who had her hands folded, her head down. Her recent protest had evaporated: she was swimming in her own head again, immersed in it, far from air.