“You can get used to anything eventually,” she surmised. “It all starts to seem normal after a while.”
“Not to me,” I said, rubbing at my fingertips, angry that I had held on to the glass for a moment too long, so that the hot surface had burned my skin, angrier still that Lucy had not rushed to agree with me, with my inane complaint. “Not this. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to drink this in such hot weather. I don’t think I’ll ever want to drink it in any weather, to be honest.”
She took a sip from her own tall glass. “Don’t you enjoy it?”
I shot her a look then—hysterical, I thought—though I quickly swept it away. “I would quite literally murder someone for a cup of builder’s tea at this point,” I told her.
A few heads turned our way, and I realized that my tone was wavering somewhere between lighthearted and serious, skirting the liminal boundaries between laughing and crying. Lucy extended her hand to me, but I did not take it. “Are you all right?” she asked again.
I considered, tired already of the question—of what I suspected was the truth.
“In New England,” Lucy began, abruptly, “my father had the most ingenious way of keeping us all cool during the heat waves.”
“And what was that?” I asked, the question curt, irritated by this shift, this change in conversation.
But if Lucy noticed, she only carried on, and I wondered then if it was because she could sense my flaring temper that she had introduced the topic—an attempt at distraction. “He used to bring out the garden hose—you have those in England, don’t you?”
I nodded but remained silent.
“Well, he used to take the hose and then walk around the house, watering the bricks.”
I frowned. “The bricks?”
“Yes, the bricks of the house.”
“Why on earth would he do that?” I questioned.
She smiled. “That’s where all the heat is—the bricks trap it all in. So, very carefully, my father would circle the house, spraying the water onto every inch, until the bricks steamed from the combination of hot and cold.” She stopped, and in her silence I imagined it, conjuring up the image of a tiny brick house, a father who cared for his daughter enough that he lingered on the bricks surrounding her bedroom window, making sure they were properly glistening before moving on.
“Did it really help?” I asked, my voice softer than it had been. I looked at Lucy and I wondered what she was thinking—if she was also imagining that small house in the middle of nowhere New England, or if she was thinking of somewhere else altogether.
“It did,” Lucy said, in a tone that I suspected was meant to assure me, to calm me. “I remember lying on my bed, listening to the water as it sprayed against my bedroom wall. And I could feel it. As I lay there, my eyes closed, the curtains drawn to keep out the sun, so the room was entirely lost in darkness, I could feel the moment the water hit, the instant relief it provided. As if someone had turned on a fan and placed it directly in front of me. Sometimes I would get goose bumps, it was so cold.”
I was quiet for a moment, thinking, imagining the cool breeze on my skin. I felt strangely calm, surrounded by the love of a father for his daughter, by the cool draft he had sweated and worked to provide for her. Something tugged at my memory. I remembered that day in Jennings Hall, all those years ago, and turning to Lucy, I lowered my sunglasses and said, “I thought you didn’t remember your father.”
A moment passed by, and another still, so that I wondered if she would ignore my words altogether. And then, she did not turn to me, did not take off her own sunglasses; instead she remained facing the ocean, her face as sturdy as the stone we had just stood upon. “I remember that,” she said, her tone a warning, a threat.
I turned away from her and remained silent.
IT HAD BEEN SNOWING HEAVILY that night. Of course, it was the Green Mountains, and in the heart of winter it seemed like it was always either snowing or threatening to snow, a blanket of ghostly white providing a permanent coat on the ground. But that night had been different. The snow stuck not only to the pavement but also to the lights, to one’s own person, so that everything passed by in a swirl as you fought and struggled to make your way through it.
Lucy and I had been fighting.
I had returned, earlier in the day, before the snow began, from a trip to New York. I had told everyone that it was an assignment for my photography class, but really it had been a chance for escape, a respite from the suffocating unease that had steadily crept between Lucy and me over the last year, so that it was suddenly all that existed between us. My aunt had not even been in town that weekend. I had arranged to stay at a boardinghouse in the city, one that I had passed numerous times and had deemed safe enough. I had thought, for a moment, of inviting Tom to join me, to make it a mini break rather than an escape, but in the end, I knew what I needed most was to be alone, from both of them, from the constant back-and-forth that I had begun to experience each and every day. As if I could actually feel it—my bones, my skin, being pulled between them, taut and threatening to break.
In New York, unlike Vermont, the air was neither clean nor crisp.
Instead it was heavy, laden with dust and grease and smoke. It seemed to hang, damp and thick, clinging to my skin. Stepping off the bus and into the city, I had smiled in relief. I spent the next two days roaming the streets, taking pictures. I finished all the rolls of film I had brought with me and ended up stopping into a camera shop to buy half a dozen more. Those, I finished too. There was something relaxing about being alone—finally alone—among a sea of people that I did not know and who did not know me. I lost myself in the facelessness of it all, thrilled to find myself surrounded by strangers. I sat on park benches, listening to the conversations that took place around me. I explored the stainless steel diners of the city, sitting at the counters, eating grilled cheese and sipping burned coffee, enjoying the weighty feel of the porcelain mug in my hand. And while rations were now a thing of the past, the notices still hung, fading and colored with grease—DO NOT ASK FOR BUTTER TODAY. NO HAMBURGERS, IT’S TUESDAY—an enduring reminder.
Returning to campus Sunday evening, I went straight to the darkroom to begin developing, not yet ready to shed the feeling of calm, of peace, that I had managed to summon amid the chaos of the city. I hummed quietly to myself as I removed the film in the darkened room, my hands moving with quick, memorized movements as I wound it around the spool, feeling for that little groove where the film would catch. I placed each one, gingerly, inside the canister, and once developed, hung them carefully on the line. Almost an hour later, the chemicals returned to the correct shelves, the negatives dry, I made a contact sheet of each, eager to see whether I had managed to capture anything worthwhile during my short stay.
It was then that I noticed her.
At first I thought it was only my imagination, or a trick of the light. Perhaps my eyes were simply tired. I told myself that there was any number of explanations for what I was seeing, that it was not real. That the evidence of her—the back of her coat, the profile of her face—could not in fact belong to her.
But then I found it: the one photograph where she hadn’t managed to step completely out of the way, where not only a glimpse of her could be seen but also the entirety of her face. It was her. It was Lucy. And she was there, following me—stalking me—present in each and every frame I had taken in New York.