The Opposite of Drowning

by Erin McRae

  Had she accidentally sent him a text meant for someone else? Something told him no. She was too careful and precise for that. He jabbed at the screen to text her back. If you mean what the fuck am I doing in Connecticut wondering why you’re texting me on a weekend, I have no idea.

  Visiting family? came her reply.

  Harry tugged his towel a little tighter around his waist and sat down on the edge of the tub. Texting one’s colleague – no matter how temporary – while essentially naked in a bathroom probably violated all sorts of puritan workplace ethics considerations. But it was the twenty-first century, which was persistently terrible, and as long as he didn’t actually inform her of the setting of their chat it was, he supposed, fine. At least for her.

  Sort of, he texted Eliza. What’s going on? Assuming you didn’t mean to message someone else.

  Philippe. What the fuck?

  Harry smiled at the persistent profanity. He hadn’t expected her to be foul-mouthed, and he was delighted by it. While clarifying, please, clarify more, he typed back.

  I just got off the phone with him.

  Hahahahahaha.

  You’re not helping, Harry.

  I know. Sorry. Why were you talking to him outside of business hours? What did he do? And what do you need?

  I wish I knew, her reply came.

  He had expected a screed about the food truck issue, but this, in all its quiet, pulled him up short. “So do I,” Harry muttered at his phone. “So do I.”

  Eliza

  “WHO ARE YOU TEXTING?” Marianne asked. She was sitting with her tablet in the somewhat battered armchair, while Eliza sat cross-legged on her bed, her phone and laptop on the duvet in front of her. A bottle of wine and two glasses sat on the nightstand between them.

  Eliza wished, not for the first time, that she was alone. I should have considered the implications of inviting my sister to stay for the night with me in my studio apartment, she thought.

  “A coworker,” she said.

  “Wasn’t that awful call enough? It’s a Friday night. And you just started working there. Is this really necessary?”

  “I’m keen,” Eliza said drily.

  “No, you’re a book nerd with workaholic tendencies. Different issue.”

  “Okay, well, keen and annoyed. I asked Harry for an author to be a test case, he gave me Philippe, and I’m pretty sure I’m getting pranked.”

  “I take it Philippe’s side of the conversation was worse.”

  “Considerably.”

  “What does he write?” Marianne asked.

  “Cookbooks, duh!” Eliza said.

  “Well, that would explain the food truck angle.”

  “But I am not getting him a food truck,” Eliza stated.

  “Can’t he get his own food truck?”

  “You’d think. He’s Philippe!”

  “Philippe who?” Marianne asked.

  “Philippe Philippe. You know. The French guy with the jarred sauces and those ridiculous TV commercials.”

  “Oh him!” Marianne said. “I didn’t know he worked with your publisher.”

  “They’re not my publisher, they’re my client. And yes, he does. I knew Harry was going to be a pain in my neck, but I didn’t expect him to be quite so thorough about it.”

  “So you were texting...?”

  “Harry,” Eliza supplied.

  “Mhmmm.”

  “What?” Eliza looked over at Marianne to see her faint smirk.

  “Is this the same Harry you went out with for a beer breakfast in Frankfurt?”

  When had Eliza told her that story? Inviting her here was definitely a mistake. “Yes,” she admitted.

  “Excellent!” Marianne bounced out of the armchair and onto the bed next to Eliza.

  “Excellent what?”

  “Not only have you met a dashing bookseller, you’ve met one you’re going to see every day!”

  “Which is good...why?”

  “Because he sounds lovely,” Marianne gushed.

  “I’ve hardly told you a thing about him, and he’s really not.” But he is, a part of her mind argued. Infuriating and confusing and lovely.

  “Mm. Interesting, then. And you need an interesting man in your life.”

  “I have Cody,” Eliza reminded her sister.

  Marianne shook her head. “Cody isn’t interesting. He’s appropriate, and that’s different. And where in the guide to making advantageous marriages does it say your fiancé has to be interesting? Nowhere.”

  “Cody’s interesting.”

  “Mmph.” Marianne clearly disagreed. “If he’s talking about himself, then sure. Otherwise....” She let it hang there.

  Eliza was torn between offense on Cody’s behalf and a not-so-small amount of relief that someone else had voiced what she had so often thought. Even if it was her sister, who had terrible opinions about everything.

  Eliza loved Cody, she did; he wasn’t perfect, but then who was? No one else she had ever met, that was certain.

  “You don’t disagree,” Marianne said to the silence.

  “What’s your goal?” Eliza asked. Agreeing with her sister about anything was unsettling. “Cody and I are getting married. That’s not going to change because you think – what? That he’s boring?”

  “Oh, I’m not trying to break you two up,” Marianne said breezily. “I think he’s an absolute trophy for you, even if maybe you’re having the wedding too soon. But he has his career to think of and everyone likes married politicians.”

  “The wedding’s not ’til next summer!” Eliza protested. Weddings of the sort they were having took a while to plan, and they were far from rushing things.

  “Yes, and you’ve been engaged since last year,” Marianne said. “Cody certainly knew a good thing when he saw it, and made sure to lock it in. If I worry about anything, it’s that you’re not cut out for what he’s offering.”

  “I’m not cut out for your life, if that’s what you mean,” Eliza said, somewhere between offended and angry at the world for setting out such expectations for the both of them. For all women, really.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Marianne said.

  “Are you sure? Because wife of a politician with a very bright future, and the ability and security to do whatever I want? I think I am cut out for that.”

  “Yes, but.... Eliza.” Marianne looked at her seriously. “Like you said. This tiny little apartment excites you. And while I don’t understand it, I do see it. So I wonder, a bit, about what you’re doing.”

  Harry

  “YOU’RE UP EARLY,” STEVEN said the next morning, when he found Harry once again leaning on the railing on the back deck.

  The sky was the violet of dawn before the sun came up, and mist flooded the space between the house and the woods fifty yards behind it. It was cold, beautiful, and miserable, and Harry wished he could stay here and stew in his thoughts forever. Maybe this was why Steven had chosen godforsaken Connecticut to live out the rest of his days.

  “So are you,” Harry said irritably.

  Steven gave half a shrug and came to stand beside him. “‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ sort of has new meaning this month.”

  Harry said nothing.

  “That was supposed to be a joke.”

  “It wasn’t very funny.” He could hardly sulk, though. Steven had never been good at jokes. There was absolutely no reason to expect dying would make him funnier.

  They stood in silence for a long time. Harry wondered if Steven was working up to something or if he was waiting for Harry to finally make useful words himself. But what was there to say? That he wished Steven weren’t dying? That he could imagine a world where this house was theirs? That here, in the quiet morning damp, he knew Steven could imagine it too?

  “How are you coping?” Harry eventually asked. “Actually.”

  “Sometimes there’s a lot of crying. Sometimes I forget it’s going on. It’s like anything, really.”

  “That sounds tediou
s.”

  “It’s all tedious. Like your job, Dennis’s bad attitude, and the cagey way Meryl conducts her personal life such that I never know what I’m supposed to talk to her about other than people she dislikes.”

  “Which is a bit of a sore point, I’d imagine.” By now the great Mallory Email Mishap was almost funny, but it wasn’t yet, and probably was never going to be. When this was all over, Harry suspected Mallory would never speak to any of them again.

  “Tell me about the girl,” Steven said.

  “Why? It was a thing I brought up to distract from your little announcement on the list.”

  “Well, now I’m bringing it up because we’re abysmal at having this conversation, and I want to change the topic. I also don’t believe you.”

  “She’s business-dinner-fluent in French and German, she has a Breton last name, and I’m absolutely sure I’ve met her somewhere before,” Harry spat out, suddenly as irritated with Eliza’s existence as he was with Steven’s dying.

  His friend grinned. “Oh, this is so much better than a midlife crisis! You’re being crazy again.”

  Harry gave an exasperated sigh. “Why does no one remember that it was Dennis who almost got trampled by the ghost horse? I’m just the guy who assigned linear narrative to all that batshittery.”

  “No,” Steven said. “You’re the guy who paid for all the booze on that trip. You’re still absurd. The lot of you. It was a real horse and some fog. That’s it. And now you’re going to drag some twenty-something into it because of her last name and your bad memory.”

  “My memory is very good.”

  “Was very good. You’re getting old. Nothing is more annoying to me than the fact that I am going to die, and then I will just be dead, and therefore unable to tell you that you’re crazy and wrong about everything.”

  Harry, Meryl, Dennis, and Steven had all gone to Europe one summer while they were still in college. That had been thirty years ago now, but it had been the foundation for so much that had happened since. Meryl had broken up with Harry on that trip. And Harry and Steven had gone on to do... whatever it was that they’d done. Harry still didn’t have a label for it, and for a man at ease with his own queerness that had always bothered him.

  They’d been in Ducey, walking along the Sélune by the bridge, when they’d encountered the now-infamous ghost horse. The night had been both dark and foggy, and Harry had heard the beast before the rest of them. And he had heard it, he was sure of that. Fog could play tricks with sound, but that horse wasn’t one of them.

  He’d gotten out of the way, Dennis very nearly hadn’t, and Steven and Meryl both swore neither of them had seen anything. Harry had, though: A tall, grey horse, trotting through the swirling mist, with neither saddle nor bridle. He’d reached out to touch its mane as it went past, and while the horse had turned its head and fixed Harry with its gaze his hand had passed right through it. There had been nothing physically there, except maybe a colder, damper, more solid patch of fog. Goosebumps still broke out up and down his arms whenever he thought of it.

  That horse was the reason Harry had become so enamored with Brittany and its ghost stories, why Anika found repping him so frustrating, and why Eliza’s Breton name had struck him so forcibly. Coincidence was a thing that happened – forty-nine years of life was more than enough experience to teach him that. But this was, he felt, something different.

  What it was though, he didn’t know. So he stood at the porch railing with Steven, watched the morning fog lift from the Connecticut woods, and was cold.

  THE RETURN FROM STEVEN and Mallory’s was even grimmer than the journey out, and Harry felt heavy in body and spirit by the time he opened the gate to the New York City mews which held his house. One of the last such alleys in the city, Harry normally enjoyed this moment of celebrating his long-ago victory over the horrors of New York real estate. But tonight the clink of the metal behind him as he disappeared onto a street most of the city didn’t even know existed felt lonely.

  He made his way down the row to the brick carriage house second from the end. A light came on in the house across the way. His neighbor also lived alone, but unlike Harry was constantly interested in everyone else’s business. A house out of time that strangers couldn’t pass without permission seemed an odd place for a busybody, but what did Harry know? No matter how well he understood places and words, people were confounding.

  With a shake of his head he unlocked his front door and flicked on all the lights. The house was bright and airy during the day, but at night it sometimes felt too wild, the small yard behind it alive with something dark of the woods long vanished from Manhattan island. Tonight not all the 100-watt bulbs in the world could keep loneliness and ghosts, much less Steven’s cancer, at bay.

  He hooked his keys onto the dark wood peg that stood out against the salmon walls with white trim and set his overnight bag down in the entryway. He could deal with it tomorrow. Right now, he wanted to wallow. But like a paperback mystery purchased at an airport, he wasn’t sure if the murder of his sorrow should be handled with a scotch on the rocks in the library or a rare joint while he sat in the bath.

  Harry slipped off his shoes and walked past the stairs and down the hall to his kitchen where his answering machine blinked at him, indicating a message. It was archaic, yes, and he used his cell phone for most communication, true, but there was something to be said for calls made and received without the illusion of urgency. Because there was an intimacy to it, Harry gave out the number sparingly.

  He pressed play.

  “Harry. Darling.” Meryl drawled sarcastically from the machine. “My ivory tower has seen fit to send me north. Call me back and tell me you want to have drinks on Tuesday.” There was a kissing sound, also somehow sarcastic, before she hung up.

  Harry frowned at the short notice and the timing. Neurotically, he wondered what she knew about Steven’s condition that he didn’t. After all, at Yale they had all referred to her as their witch.

  Chapter 4

  In This Company of Exiles

  Eliza

  MARIANNE LEFT SUNDAY afternoon. Eliza ordered takeout from a Mexican restaurant down the street and ate it sitting in the recliner, her legs tucked under her and her e-reader balanced on the arm of the chair. As the sun set – later than it had in Wales or Germany, but still early; fall was definitely sliding into winter – Eliza lay down on the bed and stared out the window. She watched, enjoying nothing so much as the silence and isolation of this room so many stories up, as the sky faded from orange to deep blue.

  She was squinting, trying to figure out if a faint light in the sky was a star or an airplane, when her phone rang. A quick glance at the screen showed that it was Cody. Probably home after a weekend at some big campaign event and wanting to talk about his latest fundraising numbers.

  Eliza was about to pick up the call, her thumb hovering over the answer button, when she realized she didn’t have to. She could call Cody back later and apologize for being asleep or busy with work or a hundred other excuses. He wouldn’t mind, not really. And this night, so quiet and lonely, could keep being hers.

  She muted the ringer and dropped the phone on her nightstand. Then she stood up, pulled her pajamas out of the dresser that was wedged tightly between the bed and the window, and shut herself in the bathroom. She was going to take a long, hot bath, and then she was going to sleep, and it was going to be glorious.

  AS THE WORKWEEK BEGAN Eliza was glad she’d taken some quiet time. Monday morning was a flurry of meetings and phone calls with people who either didn’t take her seriously or expected her to be the company’s savior. She wasn’t sure which was worse. Then there was the weekly staff meeting, full of her new colleagues being self-important, having no sense of time management, and being wildly skeptical of everything Eliza was there to suggest. Which irked her no end, though she did her best to maintain a polite and professional demeanor. Yes, she knew that no one at the company had considered using digital games
or apps or indeed any social media platform founded after 2010. That was why she was proposing those ideas now. If the limited digital marketing they were doing now was actually working, they wouldn’t have hired her.

  Through it all Harry was there, sitting across from her at the table. Though he turned to face whoever was speaking, his face was drawn as if he was tired or worried. When he spoke, there was a sharp edge of irritation to his words.

  What’s wrong? Eliza wondered.

  Being back in New York and jetlagged would be enough to ruin even the sunniest disposition, which Harry decidedly did not have. But after their strange morning encounter in the pool in Frankfurt, and their breakfast afterwards, she felt a concern towards him that went beyond what a few short days of acquaintance via business trip might usually inspire. She suspected that whatever was going on with him now it wasn’t merely about the dreariness of a Monday at the office. She hoped he hadn’t gotten any more bad news about his friend.

  He was the first one out of the room when the meeting was over, so at least Eliza didn’t have to decide whether to say anything to him. She returned to her desk, silenced her phone, and spent the rest of the afternoon lost in work.

  “DON’T TELL ME PHILIPPE has you burning the midnight oil. Again.”

  Eliza looked up from her desk, realizing two things as she did. One, it had grown fully dark since the last time she took a break from her work, and two, she should have closed her office door after her last foray out for tea. Harry was in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with his arms folded easily across his chest. He still wasn’t ebullient, but whatever had been bothering him earlier seemed to have gone from his face.

  “Not quite,” she admitted, finishing a sentence without looking at the keyboard and hitting the period key with a particularly victorious tap.