There was a stack of software manuals at the back of the desk. As she tossed them in the current Books carton something fluttered to the floor. Stephanie picked it up. One of Jordan’s origami doodles. A tiny baby rat—no, a possum. She smiled and flipped through the manuals looking for more. He usually made them in bunches. He’d offer them up with the appropriate collective noun: a murder of little paper crows, a paddling of Post-it ducks. If there were more, she couldn’t find them. She tucked it into her purse with the picture.
When the desktop was cleared she moved on to the drawers. Pens and pencils, trash. Old phone logs, trash. She flipped through them first, not that she expected to see “Call back mistress re: early dinner and a quick fuck” written anywhere. All the other bills, receipts, letters and miscellany of life went into a Papers box, probably never to be seen again.
Halfway through the middle drawer on the right side she saw a faded bit of lined paper that looked familiar, like a favorite T-shirt from high school that turns up unexpectedly in a suitcase after a visit home. She pulled it out. It was a faded green and tattered at the top where it had been ripped out of one of the steno pads Jordan and Alex had used for phone messages at their Exeter Street apartment nearly twenty years before. On it, in her own neat and boxy hand, was written “TGG TGG! CTG GTG, ATG.”
She gasped for air as the sob rose from deep in her lungs and ripped through her. Tears filled her eyes and rolled unobstructed down her face as she sat silent and perfectly still at her husband’s desk, clutching a decades-old note from herself. The grief that had never seemed to come, through the search, the recovery, the funeral and the countless earnest whispered condolences, now inexplicably burst inside her, racking her body in shuddering waves.
* * *
It was dark when she finally locked up and left. Everything that had been in Jordan’s office, all that was left of him, was now stacked in nine sealed boxes in the hall except for a single photograph, one sheet of green lined paper and a tiny origami possum.
6
MCMXCV-LVM
Stephanie woke up from a catnap. Jordan lay beside her, watching. The room was streaked with sunlight coming through the slat blinds. She must have dozed off after making love for the second, or fourth, time depending on how you looked at it. They had come home late and pretty tipsy to find the apartment empty. The roommate, Alex, had left a message on the machine. People were laughing and yelling in the background so it was difficult to hear what he was saying but they did catch “New Hampshire” and “Monday.” That meant the place was theirs for two whole days. The goal was to christen every piece of furniture in the apartment. They had passed out in each other’s arms as the sun came up. She had woken up a few hours later with Jordan’s fingers delicately tracing the contours of her belly. She didn’t speak or move but her breathing betrayed her. They both held perfectly still at the end, trying to prolong the moment. After, Jordan had ordered breakfast from the Greek diner around the corner. It had come in minutes.
The delivery boy—just a kid, fifteen or sixteen—had stared wide-eyed from the doorway as Jordan, wrapped in a sheet, fumbled through his jeans pockets. When he’d gone they’d burst out laughing and devoured the containers of scrambled eggs with soggy hash browns, bacon and French toast. Full and content, they had begun a patient and scientific exploration of each other’s bodies, which at some point had lost its clinical detachment. And then she must have fallen back to sleep.
“Good morning,” he said, seeing her stir.
“Hmm...closer to evening it looks like,” she said.
“Do you know why you’re beautiful?”
“What time is it?”
“I’ve been studying you and I think I’ve figured it out.”
She propped herself on one elbow and studied him; his face was completely serious. “All right, Dr. Parrish,” she said, “let’s hear your theory—Darwinian bullshit, I’m sure.”
He allowed himself a half smile. “No, I know better. This is a purely aesthetic epiphany with, I humbly suggest, profound and far-reaching implications.”
“Oh, then, by all means.”
“Okay, we’ll start easy. What is your most attractive feature?”
“Ugh, please don’t say my eyes, that would be—”
“Oh God, no, I know,” he interrupted, “and false. That’s not where I’m going. Science. Come on, most attractive feature?”
“Are you being smutty and vile? I am a modest and delicate flower, Doctor, and won’t have you speak to me that way.”
“Freud was right. You’re all harlots!”
She smacked his arm. “Fuck Freud! I’m not playing.” Then after a minute of feigned sulk, “Okay, what is my best feature, then, smart-ass?”
“Not best, most attractive. Pay attention.”
She groaned. “Stop milking it—you do have a point, right?”
“Your knee. Specifically your left kneecap.”
She burst out laughing. “Oh my God, you are so full of shit. Okay, I have a real theory. Ready? You know how most of your DNA is junk—it just sits there doing nothing. It doesn’t code for blue eyes or lovely kneecaps or anything—it’s just there? Huge waste, right? But wait...”
“No, you wait,” he said, “you’re dismissing my epiphany! I’ll spell it out in little words so you can understand. It’s all about curves and straight lines.”
“Deep. So anyway, what if God or aliens or people from the future or whatever hid secret knowledge in our DNA. You know, like in code. Like the monolith on the moon in 2001. So when we were sophisticated enough to read it we could find it.”
“It is deep,” he said. “Look at your knee. See how the top is almost a straight line, then it curves into sides that are totally straight but then underneath totally curved.” He traced the movement with his finger. “And the muscle of your thigh where it follows and exaggerates the arc of the knee... That’s beauty. It’s the balance between the curves and the lines, like a perfect tooth, straight yet bowed as a full sail. Or your cheekbone, a gentle arc that falls into a hard line, then softens and turns under at the jaw, another straight edge. And the collarbone—oh, the collarbone!—that little pocket between the collarbone and shoulder, a perfect half sphere formed by two straight lines. How can you not see it? It’s obviously an evolved aesthetic. You know, fitness, sexual maturity, all that stuff. There is clearly an ideal ratio of curves to straight lines in a physically fit, fertile, yet not over-the-hill woman, and that ratio is what we perceive as beautiful.”
He rolled on, encouraged by her arch smile. “You ever play that game with yourself? ‘At what age do I look most like me? As a child, an old woman?’ Of course as babies we all kind of look the same, like babies. Neoteny, Bambi, big eyes, little chins. And ditto when we’re old—eventually time takes similar liberties with everyone, right? But in between, where is the moment? You could argue for forties or fifties but I would say at that point your face is more a record of the life you have lived than an expression of ultimate you-ness. I think that at that knife’s edge between the curves of youth and the brittle lines of age there lies a moment of both greatest expression of your genetic essence and greatest beauty.” She rolled her eyes. He ran his fingers lightly down her entire length, sweeping around the curves and hollows for emphasis. “And for you, Ms. James, that moment is right now.”
Suddenly self-conscious, she pulled the sheet around her. “Nice. Used that one before?”
He held her eyes. “Never thought it.”
After a silence, she said, “Did you hear a word of my brilliant DNA as alien code hypothesis? I should warn you, mock at your peril, I got an A on it sophomore year.”
“Every word.” He smiled. “Junk DNA is really a hidden instruction manual from God or Xenu, right?”
“Exactly. Genius, huh?”
“No comment.”
“Good answer. I kn
ow it sounds pretty nutty but there are fascinating parallels out there. You know anything about kabbalah, or the sefirot? Numerology of the Hebrew alphabet?”
“Absolutely nothing,” he said with some satisfaction.
“Heathen. Well, I know you know how the four letters of DNA—G, A, T and C—code for the twenty amino acids that make us, right? So, what if you think of those amino acids as letters?”
“Okay,” he said, watching her lecture with a smirk.
“So, you’d have a twenty-letter alphabet, basically all the consonants without the vowels, an abjad like Biblical Hebrew. Then it’s like those posters on the subway—wait...” She grabbed the steno pad and a pen from the table and wrote out “f y cn rd ths y cn mk gd mny.” “Get it? You just have to plug in the vowels. Are you with me?”
Jordan took the pad. “I think so. So, alanine would be A...”
“No vowels, remember.”
“Right, right, okay. Alanine is B, cysteine C, aspartic acid D...”
“What a quick student you are.” She stood up, dropping the sheet, and walked across the bed to press his head to her belly.
“This is kind of kinky, in a hot-for-teacher kind of way,” he said, voice muffled in her abdomen as he pulled her down.
Later, as he lay curled beside her, one leg between hers, twirling the fine hairs on the back of her neck around his index finger, he said, “I think I might be falling in love with you, Ms. James.”
For a while she was silent, then a sleepy and contented voice murmured, “What do you mean ‘might’?”
She woke in the dark. The clock said just before five. She slipped from the bed and dressed. She needed to protect this new happiness she carried like a water droplet swollen to its bursting point. She grabbed the discarded steno pad and quickly scribbled him a note. “TGG TGG! CTG GTG, ATG.” She folded it once and placed it on the pillow before soundlessly letting herself out.
When he woke, hours later, it took Jordan a couple of minutes to work out the letters WW! LVM, but most of the day to convince himself it could only mean “Wow! Love, Me.”
7
DAYS
The two men sat together watching the closed-circuit feed from the Kinect. Jordan was folding, intent, hands manipulating invisible shapes, mouth working as if he were talking. He seemed to be staring straight at them.
“How’s he doing, Dennis?” asked the older man. He had black horn-rims and wore his graying hair swept over to one side in a style that would have looked right at home in an early ’70s Brylcreem ad.
“Lousy,” Dennis said with an edge to his voice. Since picking Parrish up one hundred and nine days ago he’d been on twenty-four-hour call. “He’s burned.”
“Mmm,” the older man said vaguely.
Dennis pushed his chair back with a shrill scrape.
* * *
Of course it was all wrong, Jordan thought. The side chains were too close together and there weren’t enough hydrogen bonds to secure the backbone. But he was hungry. He clicked Done and swiped his hand impatiently to bring up the next puzzle. The door opened with a bang. Jordan flinched but forced himself not to turn. The puzzle flickered and was gone. He stood completely still until he heard the sharp clatter of the tray on the table.
One Miss’ippi, two Miss’ippi, he counted in his head. Then out loud, “Thank you, Dennis.” He didn’t move until he heard the door close and lock. Plain white soup and plain white bread.
There had been potatoes involved, and maybe some kind of albino winter vegetable. Like those fish that live too deep to be bothered with pigment. Schools of the blind. No glint of goldfish. No shoal of shads, or was it shad?
Still hot. He blew on it and his breath made a flapping pocket. He felt the heat of it all the way down.
* * *
When Dennis came back the man with the horn-rims was scrolling back through the logs and shaking his head.
“He’s working you.”
“What do you mean?” Dennis asked, leaning over to read along.
“See here?” the man said, his finger tracing several points on the graph. “We were stretching him, nearly twenty-eight-hour days here, but then—” he traced the line back down “—mid-November the error rate starts to go up at specific intervals. You see?”
Dennis nodded. His eyebrows furrowed as he scanned the chart and his jaw bunched.
“And now,” the man went on, “we’re back under twenty-five hours.”
“I followed protocol. When he started messing up—”
“No, I know, I know. I get it. But so does he.” He shook his head with a rueful smile. “He’s working you.”
* * *
Stephanie was instantly wide-awake. She didn’t think there’d been any sound; the house was certainly deathly quiet now. Outside she heard the constant buzz of the streetlight but nothing else. It was completely still. No breeze rattled the frozen yews beneath her window. But her nerves were electric; she was in full fight-or-flight. Someone was there. She could feel the presence as her fully dilated pupils swept the room. Then she saw it. A lumpy shadow in the corner by her door swayed slightly, then steadied itself. Stephanie’s heart was thudding in her chest; her mouth was dry and her ears were ringing as she strained all her senses toward the shadow.
“I’m sorry, Momma.”
“Sophie? Are you okay?” She tried to keep the hysterical edge out of her voice. Sophie stepped out of the shadow and approached the bed, head bowed, face hidden by her bangs. She was dressed in oversize green plaid pajamas and clutching a tattered stuffed rabbit.
“I’m sorry, Momma,” she said again. As she stepped into the light from the window Stephanie could see her face and realized she wasn’t really awake. She had a furrowed brow and her mouth was working as if she were chewing on a piece of fish, feeling for hidden bones. Her eyes were open but she wasn’t seeing anything. Stephanie got up and gently guided her around the bed and helped her in. As Sophie’s breathing settled into a slow, shallow regularity, Stephanie cradled the head of thick brown hair, wishing she could draw her daughter back inside and protect her from the hurt that was beginning to reshape her sweet and gentle nature.
When Stephanie woke again the sun was shining clear and strong through the windows and Sophie lay pressed against her, chin slack and mouth open. Her cheeks were flushed and the sour heat of her breath, halfway between the milky sweetness of a child’s and the ripe funk of an adult’s, blew damp on Stephanie’s cheek. Haden lay across the foot of the bed, wrapped awkwardly in the bottom third of the duvet. She hadn’t heard him come in.
Their orbits were decaying. The loss of his father had made Haden fearful. He wouldn’t go anywhere alone. He made Sophie or his mother go with him everywhere, even to the bathroom. Sophie had been a champ. Without being told anything she had seemed to understand and had become her little brother’s constant guardian. She would take his hand and walk back up the stairs to get his favorite Red Sox hat or run back outside to the car with him if he forgot his knapsack. He had started sleeping on the trundle in her room but seemed to end up in his mother’s bed most nights. Stephanie never said anything, and even though he was a fitful bundle of pointy knees and elbows, she slept better when he was there.
She knew she needed to do something, to begin the climb back to normalcy. She couldn’t just let it all fall apart. She was the center; the holding started here. She wanted to hate Jordan, to curse him for dying, for abandoning her, for fucking someone else, for leaving his children to grow up without a father, but she couldn’t. She was stuck in the first stage according to the cheesy little pamphlet Father Gil had pushed on her. Denial. Not just a river indeed. Didn’t Kübler-Ross end up spending her final years trying to contact the dead, mediums and that sort of nonsense? It was all bullshit, Stephanie thought. She just needed to pull herself together, accept that he was gone and get on with it. And she w
ould. The annus horribilis was winding down. Good riddance.
She reached over and gently brushed the hair from her daughter’s face. “Wake up, sweet girl. It’s time.” As Sophie stretched and yawned Stephanie rubbed Haden’s back and began easing him, too, toward wakefulness.
8
ISABELLA
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was a mile and a half from the house, and yet, despite having driven past it thousands of times, Stephanie had never been. From the outside it didn’t look like a museum at all; if not for the discreet painted wood sign she would have simply assumed it was a private house. Inside she passed through a narrow, dimly lit walkway of arched brick. On her left, infrequent small windows revealed nothing of the house’s dark interior, but to her right the hallway suddenly opened onto a spectacular courtyard whose roof of leaded Victorian glass filled the space with a palpable winter light. She heard mizzling water and a Gregorian murmur of voices in the air. The walls rose four stories with balconies all around overlooking the garden and its massive tiled floor. All around the central mosaic were little walkways and statues, a mix of Asian and classical. At one end a pair of stone staircases rose to meet at a second-floor balcony thrusting into the courtyard like a pulpit. Gothic moldings in marble and stone adorned every available surface.
“Oh my God,” she whispered as she gazed up at nasturtium vines cascading down the side wall.
Alex was waiting. He said something to the girl in the green blazer manning the admissions desk and she hastily unhooked the rope and motioned Stephanie through.
She started to rummage through her purse to pay.
“I’m a member,” he said, taking her arm. “You’re my guest.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“You’ve never been? How is that possible?”
Stephanie shook her head as she continued to take in the garden. Stone benches habited by engrossed couples, solitary readers and breathless tourists ringed the courtyard.
Exit Strategy Page 3