He tapped out a jar of skeleton keys, and the rusted browns and grays fell like birds that dive into water; he held up records to read their labels, then sent them into flight; he removed a stack of age-bloated postcards, their backsides filled with tight, extinct cursive, and he flicked his thumb across each as he dealt them onto the floor. With a fine moisture growing on his upper lip, he shifted his focus to the rows of books, lower down: he took some poems by A. A. Milne and tore off leaves of the plain ink drawings, the verses about introverted mice, the place halfway up the stairs, the vanishing of glamorous mothers. His vision snagged on the stacked Pyrex and skillets of the kitchen, and he crossed to touch them.
With a snap, the stuck knob of the oven reached its highest setting, and on the middle rack he placed her ceramic coin banks, tiny dachshunds that leapt through hoops with pennies in their mouths, hand-painted golfers forever poised to putt. In a brief, cheerful stretch, he bent his knees, then moved to the bathroom, where he raised the toilet seat, pissed for a full minute, and jiggled himself dry. He turned on the bathtub’s hot water with a flick of his wrist as purposeful as a plumber’s, and he made several trips to the living room, forming aslant stacks of novels and journals that he wedged under the stubble of his chin.
Submerged under the steam, the books resisted a minute before releasing inky gasps of black and gray.
Adeleine, ankles crossed, eyes closed, was visiting a place she had been with her parents as a child on vacation: a summer cottage in a small Massachusetts beach town—a modest structure, made mainly of windows, that stood on stilts above an overgrown lawn. To counter the sounds of her life combusting, she replayed the moment when her mother finally pronounced the dusky light insufficient and flicked the switch, spilling yellow through the mesh windows and out onto the uneven grass. Adeleine had insisted on sitting outside to watch this, the whole house suddenly so bright, as if built then and there, the round wooden dining table and blue painted chairs and overstuffed couch appearing as if summoned by a magician.
She could sense Owen growing still, surveying the room he had laid to waste, but she remained in the tall blades of grass, eleven years old and very thin, devouring the smell of wet dirt, an odor that was in equal parts the determination of growth and the languid pace of rot. She knew that soon she would stand, say good-bye to the chorus of fireflies that lingered in the bushes below the house, make her way up the uneven stairs, past her parents where they sat reading, down the low hall to the bed with a time-softened quilt. She would lie quietly with childish dreams of bicycle rides, of the pink-cheeked boys who might kiss her.
By the bell she had hung there with a brief, fleeting optimism for a future full of comings and goings, she heard the apartment door of her adult life close. Adeleine sat up from the twin mattress in the wood-paneled room, heard the laughter of her family nearby, saw the clear rubber sandals and fluorescent-thread bracelets of girlhood. She put them away in her past, and returned to the vestiges of her home.
Adeleine could smell her books, the aged scent of them more pungent with moisture, like a futile weapon dispatched to combat their drowning; she could feel the heat of the oven, her precious items roasting and cracking. Around her feet were pieces of things she’d loved, the gilded circular plate of a rotary telephone, the wheel of a wooden airplane, splayed strings of violet and oak-colored yarn unspooled from their perfect globes. A herd of marbles lolled, mapping the slant of the floor. Next to her, Edith repeated the ends of sentences, pieces of conversations that twirled in her head like wind chimes, revealing one glinting part and obscuring another. “. . . About two blocks down,” she said. “Expensive side,” she said. “And what a view.”
Adeleine positioned herself gingerly on the edge of the cushion and leaned in to touch Edith’s uncombed, colorless hair. She was acutely sad to smell the hour-old sweat on her own body—an odor stiff like the air of a revolving door, the perspiration she had worked up just by thinking herself away—and she reached over and up to unfasten the peeling white latch and let in the weather. She had feared for her body, but instead he had exposed the tableau she had built to protect her mind, the tokens she had appointed as mediators between her and sanity.
With the window open, she felt the change in pressure as though it were some communication, a phone ringing or a package slipped under a door.