John went looking for Nina in early November. She said she was off to take her regular walk, but she had been gone for an hour, then two, then three, and John put on his shoes, and followed the path she always took. Down their street, then left, left, left, right, four long streets to the outdoor Olympic-size pool at the community center, where she touched the fence and turned back.
He walked slowly, feeling the autumnal breeze, expecting to see Nina in a second, her face lighting up when she spotted him, running like a gazelle to close the distance between them, wrapping her arms around him, sticking her tongue deep into his mouth.
He turned each corner, walked down each street, and she wasn’t there with her smile.
He reached the pool and the gate was open, and he saw Nina’s sparkly pink shoes atop the ten-meter diving board, upright at the very edge, as if a sudden wind had lifted her clear out of them.
Then he was running and climbing and crossing the springy plank, cradling her shoes to his chest. And it must have been a trick of the mind, because when he looked down, he saw only that the pool was drained of water.
Standing at the lip, he looked in, and saw what his mind had refused to take in: Nina’s body on the chalky bottom.
His single thought: how did she manage to fall so neatly? Her summer dress was gathered nicely around her, her eyes were open and clear, her lips curled in a smile, the rhinestone tiara she put on that morning still perfectly poised on her head. A princess who went for a walk ended up in an infinite nap.
He entered from the shallow end, lifted her pale feet and slid her shoes back on—
It took me fifty minutes to read a story that raced from love to death. Every sentence I read made me wish, again, that I could write as Ashby wrote. I thought of how I had transported my Henry stories from Rhome to Silicon Valley, back to Rhome, and then here, and had never looked through any of them since I abandoned him when I was eleven.
On top of my desk, under the detritus of magazines and unopened mail, were folders of new stories I tried writing after fleeing venture capital and before being hired by Think Inc. Not long before I went home to Rhome that pivotal June weekend and found my mother’s secret, I had read a few paragraphs of one, the whole of another, half of a third, the beginnings of two more, thinking they mirrored my life: strong out of the gate, stuck in the rustic middle, failing to find an exit, as if I were nothing more than some cud-chewing cow too dumb to find the pasture with succulent, nourishing grass.
Then rain cracked through my thoughts. The sky was black. The trees were shuddering. Water was sheeting the street, jumping the gutters. Smoke coiling from the town house chimney across the way disappeared instantly into the clouds. Something dropped on the hardwood floor above my head. Some nights, most weekends, I heard something heavy being rolled, pushed, or pulled up there. That morning it sounded like a rolling pin flattening a dense object into submission. It ceased a few minutes later. I had no idea who, or if anyone, lived above me. I never heard footsteps, or traveling sounds, like water in the pipes, a hammer against a wall, television or music too loud. From the turn of the century, until gutted to the studs and refashioned into luxury apartments, this building had been a Catholic girls’ school, and I wondered if one of the schoolgirl ghosts had stayed behind, the noises telling me when she was at some hurtful form of play.
One more story, I said to myself, then food, before I pulled out the bottle of good eighty proof. “Away from Home” opened like this:
Robbie thought she would love their Bora Bora honeymoon. She and Luke spent their days on the blinding white sand, their nights in a thatched hut surrounded by azure water, attained only by rowing out from the beach. The days were fine; she was happy in the light. But once Luke was asleep, there was a nightly whir of thousands of tiny wings in the air—she imagined protruding eyes, thin-as-thread legs searching for a way in through the net that hung like a crown over the bed. She could never tell whether she slept, but at sunrise she was strangely alert, listening to Luke’s snores and searching for torn-away wings in the fine mesh, but she never found any.
In those solitary dawn hours, Robbie drank cups of strong coffee out on the balcony and watched the fish below in the sea. Childhood visits to an aquarium had terrified her; she had been certain the fish would drown. In this paradise, it disturbed her again, seeing their gills riffling open, their mouths gasping for the sky. She knew now, of course, that fish turned water into oxygen, but the process still struck her as painful.
In the late afternoons, Robbie put on her sunglasses, and Luke laced up his running shoes, and she watched his long legs splash through the white foam at the edge of the water until he was gone. Then she stared at their honeymoon hut out in the water and wondered why her need to live in small spaces had not translated to that small island space. The hut was no larger than her current home, than the other minute places she had inhabited.
Luke did not know her reasons for living what he called her nesting-doll life; she had never told him how she fled to New York as instinctively as fish convert one element into another, a critical oxygenation for the still-vital pieces of her that remained glued together, wanting only from that new city a small space in which to live, a place so small that people, love, and words could not be misplaced, would never disappear, where her secrets would always be within reach. She had not moved in with Luke before the wedding, and even while he toasted their future night after tropical night, she wondered if she ever would.
I looked away from the page and wondered whether Robbie’s new husband would ever see beneath her surface, understand the mangled, tangled reasons for her anxious self-containment. And whether anyone had ever seen beneath mine.