by Ashley Ream
“I need you to make notes,” she said. “Anything you feel, even if you’re not sure it’s related or relevant, write it all down.”
“Weren’t you listening earlier?” he asked. “I can hardly make little musical notes on a page, and those are just dots and lines.”
“You’ll have to find a way,” she said, holding him to the same standard she held herself.
She took a breath. It sounded wet and ragged filling up her chest, and she didn’t expect that. Testing it on herself was one thing. Giving it to someone else—
“No one else knows about this,” Rachel said.
Harry got his cane maneuvered around under his left hand where he liked it. At least he had hurt his right leg. The right leg was bad anyway.
“I know,” he said, pushing his weight away from the wall but keeping his right hand out, as ineffectual as it was, to help with his balance. He started his many-point turn toward the master bedroom for that nap he’d fought so hard for. “First rule of fight club: Don’t talk about fight club.”
Rachel didn’t know what a fight club was, but it sounded right. She nodded, but Harry wasn’t paying her any attention. He didn’t have any to spare. She watched until he made it to his bedroom door. Back in her own room, she scooped up the second half of the solids batch from the centrifuge. She took that herself and waited for it to kick in.
* * *
There was a bigger, newer Groceries “R” Us kind of place with full-size carts and eighteen kinds of orange juice on the other side of the island, but its presence irritated Tilda. Her market or, as she thought of it, “the” market, the real one, was downtown just a block from the bookstore. The sign said OLLOO’ET DRY GOODS AND GROCERY. It wasn’t big enough to have or need wheeled carts. The shelves were made of real wood, and the whole store smelled a little like ripe cheese and patchouli, which might have also been the teenage clerks smoking weed in the back. There were two kinds of orange juice—pulp or no pulp—and that was fine with Tilda.
She wasn’t in any particular hurry. In fact, she was trying very hard not to hurry and have to go back to the house too soon. She had known that coming back to take care of Harry would be a mistake. At least part of her had known it. Part of her remembered how he was—how insular and difficult and single-minded and so willing to do what he wanted when he wanted no matter what might follow later. Their friends had dismissed this as his “artistic temperament” during their marriage. Tilda had met plenty of artists. She was pretty sure Harry was just an ass.
The other part of her, the part that had agreed to come, felt that Harry was unfinished business or maybe just business finished poorly. It wasn’t that she had stopped loving him as much as it had turned to something else. After Becca died, things had not been the same. Harry had blamed himself, and Tilda had blamed him, too. It had been an accident. No one thought that it hadn’t been, but just because something is an accident, doesn’t mean there isn’t fault. And forgiveness, it turned out, was something that had to be given all over again, every single day. And it had to be accepted on that same schedule. There were probably people who could do it. People who were better than they were, but it had been easier to move away from each other, to stop bumping into each other’s hurt parts quite so much.
But now Harry was dying. He needed her. He needed her to be close, and those hurt parts were still there, getting bumped all over again. And now she was in the grocery and dry goods store wandering up and down each of the aisles, so she didn’t have to go back too soon.
She was in the personal care section even though she couldn’t think of a single thing she needed there. It seemed the store did a booming business in overpriced boutique soaps and candles that she was sure were popular with tourists but were far too foo-foo for her to buy. She looked at them anyway and recognized little round lavender soaps that were in bathrooms on the second and third floors of Harry’s house. Tilda wondered if the housekeeper bought them or if they were left over from Maggie.
Tilda was smelling some lemon verbena soaps—square and not wrapped in the floral paper like the lavender—which made them possibilities in Tilda’s mind, when her cell phone rang.
“I think I’m supposed to wait a certain amount of time before calling,” Tip said on the other end. “But I couldn’t remember how long that was.”
“Is that how you usually say ‘hello’?” Tilda asked, trying not to sound too much like she was smiling.
“Not when I’m calling my dentist if that’s what you’re asking,” he said. “Where are you, and what are you doing?”
“I’m thinking about buying soap, but only if it isn’t wrapped in floral paper. And I’m at the little grocery downtown.”
“Can you wait there for fifteen minutes?” he asked.
“Probably. Why?”
“Trust me,” he said and hung up.
Tilda had the lemon verbena soap in one of the square wicker baskets the store provided for shopping. She’d also picked up some tomatoes on the vine, even if they were horribly out of season, and a pound of peppered bacon. She was trying to decide if she would walk down to the coffee-shop-slash-bakery for bread or if she would just buy it here. Part of that decision depended on what Tip had in mind, and she had no idea what he had in mind, and the uncertainty over whether or not to buy the bread was starting to get just a little annoying when she heard his voice over her shoulder.
“What’s a pretty lady like you doing in a dry goods shop like this?”
She turned around. He was wearing a brown suede jacket with off-white shearling around the collar, and he was holding a bouquet of flowers. They were white, and there were different kinds, none of which she could have said the names of with any certainty. They were arranged with bits of fern and greenery and a couple of sprigs of pussy willow, too. They looked natural and wild but still beautiful, which meant that someone with a lot of talent spent time making them look that way. He handed them to her.
She loved them, and she loved even more that he had surprised her with them, and she was afraid if she showed that a little too much that something vulnerable and bad would happen, so she took them and said, “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“Pay for that stuff,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
She did, and when they walked out the door together, she carrying the flowers and he carrying her groceries, she asked, “Are we driving or walking?”
“Walking,” he said. “It’s just around the corner.”
They walked east, the opposite direction of the bakery and the bookstore and the restaurant he ran. This way was toward the end of the commercial strip, and if they went too much farther, they’d be on streets lined with old houses, most of them Victorian or something kind of like it, which had been turned into bed and breakfasts or dental offices. Just beyond those were the real houses—nice but less showy and historic—where real people lived. They turned left, away from the water, and went half a block.
They passed a children’s clothing store called Two Birds. It had an old-fashioned Christmas scene done up in the window, but instead of ornaments, the tree was decorated with little socks. They passed a florist that didn’t bother with a window display but just let you see right in to the buckets of flowers and potted plants, including red and pink and white poinsettias. Tilda wondered if that was where he picked up her flowers. And then they stopped.
Tip turned and faced this shop front. There was no sign over the door or on the windows, and in fact, the windows had been covered on the inside with newspaper. Tilda looked at the storefront, and then she looked at Tip, who looked at her with full dimples, as though this were the greatest surprise of all.
“This is it,” he said.
“Okay.”
He turned and faced her and did it so sincerely that she stopped looking at the shop and turned to face him square on, too.
“I want to rent this space and open my own restaurant. It used to be a café, so it already has a kitchen. The remodel would
be minimal, and if I started now, I could have it open in time for the high season.”
“That’s great,” she said. “I’m excited for you.”
And she was. His food was delicious. The restaurant business was notoriously fraught, but that wasn’t her business. It was his, and good for him for pursuing it.
“I’m working out the financing now. I really think this could be something.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said.
“Anyway—” He shoved his hands in his pockets, the plastic bag with her groceries still looped over his wrist. “I just wanted to show you the space. I hope no one takes it first.”
Tilda didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t been asked for anything, and the niggling feeling under her skin might be for nothing at all. “I hope they don’t, too,” she said.
“Do you have plans this afternoon?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Good,” he said. “It’s my night off, and I love bacon.” He held up the bag. “Let’s go back to my place.”
19.
They had managed to get the bacon in the fridge, which meant that now, several hours later, they didn’t have to worry quite so much about trichinosis. Not that anything so unpleasant was on Tilda’s mind.
She’d picked up his denim work shirt from the floor and followed him into the kitchen, putting it on, buttoning a few of the buttons, and rolling up the sleeves. He hadn’t bothered picking anything up from the floor or putting on anything at all, which was fine with Tilda. His wasn’t a gym body. He didn’t have a pack of anything or melon-shaped biceps. He was slender like a swimmer, and he had a small patch of dark fur at the base of his tailbone, just above his butt, but very little anywhere else. Everyone here lived under ten months of cloud cover and, because of it, had the pallor of the Irish, including Tip. But when her fair arm had lain across his fair chest, she had seen that his skin tended toward pinkish where hers was far more yellow. It made him seem vulnerable somehow, having that pinkish skin, like he would be prone to windburn and blushing while she would toughen in the outdoors.
Tip had scoffed at her out-of-season tomatoes and left them on the counter to ripen to whatever substandard level of flavor might be possible and instead laid the strips of thick, peppered bacon in a cold skillet and turned the fire up to medium to render. Tilda had never gotten around to buying bread, and he took a loaf of his own from the bread box and sliced off four pieces, neither too thick nor too thin.
“What kind is that?” she asked.
“Sourdough.”
While his biceps were not large, his forearms were ropey, and the muscles went right down into his hands. It made Tilda consider for the first time that being a chef must be physical work—hard beyond the scars from cuts and burns she’d noticed before, some of which had gone white with time and some that were still new enough to be pink and tender looking.
He spread butter on one side of each of the slices and threw them into the oven to toast. His movements were economical, as though he’d practiced this meal in this kitchen and had spent time editing out every unnecessary step. When Tilda cooked, which wasn’t often, she was forever going back and forth to the cabinets and the refrigerator and the sink and the drawers. He had everything he needed at his elbow and rarely, if ever, retraced his steps.
When the bacon was done—cooked but not too crispy—he removed it to a paper towel–lined plate and cracked two brown eggs into the still-bubbling fat. While they went to over easy, he pulled the toast from the oven, flipped the slices over, and spread a bit of sour tamarind chutney he had in the fridge on their naked sides. Then on went the egg and the slices of bacon and a small bit of greens she didn’t recognize. Tip brought the two sandwiches to the kitchen table where Tilda had been watching, her knees pulled up with her feet in the seat of her chair.
When she bit into the sandwich, it was all she could do not to moan. The yolk ran and mixed with the bacon fat. The chutney was a tiny bit sweet but mostly sour and cut through the richness, along with the peppery greens, so nothing was too heavy. The bacon was salty, and the sourdough held up to all of it, keeping the whole thing together. Tilda had never put that much thought into a sandwich.
Tip had not sat but went back to the fridge and came out with a bottle of prosecco. He brought it and two champagne flutes to the table while Tilda wiped yolk from her chin.
“This is incredible. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything this good,” she said.
“I’m glad you like it.”
He took the metal cage from around the cork and used a kitchen towel to pry the cork from the bottle. It was a subtle pop with none of the drink lost to an explosive burst.
“You should put this on your menu,” Tilda said.
He poured the pinkish golden prosecco into the tall glasses.
“It wouldn’t work,” he said. “This is an after-sex sandwich. You wouldn’t appreciate it quite so much otherwise.”
Tilda didn’t believe that.
He held up his glass, and she hurried to set down her sandwich and wipe her fingers before raising hers.
“To unexpected encounters,” he said.
Tilda took a sip. She would have said that the sandwich needed nothing at all, but as it turned out, the crisp, dry bubbliness was exactly what it needed. Now it was perfect.
* * *
Harry was hunched forward, head down over the keyboard, shoulders up like a buzzard perched on a limb. He told his fingers to dance and roll across the keys, all of them, and they did. Like crickets hopping across a hot skillet, his fingers moved across the board, coaxing out notes almost too fast for Harry to remember them. He ended with a flourish and sat back. Giving himself just one breath before snatching up the pencil and getting all of it—as much as he could remember—onto the blank score sheets.
Once he had to stop to wipe his palms off on his pants. He was sweating everywhere. His palms, his armpits, it was running off his forehead, and he could feel dampness in his shoes. He didn’t know if this was a side effect of the medication or a side effect of the speed of his work. Harry had done more in three hours than he had done in a month. It was like the surge of energy Tilda had described in the last weeks of each of her pregnancies. He felt there was so much to do, and finally he could do it.
The sun had fallen, and the room had gone dark around him. He stood up from the bench and reached for his cane. He took two steps with it, and then, just to see, he let it go. He left the four-footed thing sitting right there in the middle of the library, and he took a step away from it and then another and then another. He was stiff and stilted, and he still had some numbness in his right foot, but he could move. He did not fall but wasn’t ready to trust that he wouldn’t. Still he walked. He walked all the way over to the floor lamp next to Tilda’s collection of American history books, and he turned it on. Then he turned and walked to the other lamp, the one next to the blue and white gingham couch where he’d slept so many nights, and he turned that one on. Just like that. It was possible, and his whole library was a soft yellow to prove it. Shooby sat by his feet, upright and alert and dragging his tail across the floor like a windshield wiper. Even he seemed to know that something unusual was happening.
Harry didn’t know how long this would last, where Rachel had gotten it, and if she could get him more. It seemed terribly important to do as much as possible with what he had, and the desire to do everything was almost paralyzing. He could walk to the kitchen. He could make his own dinner and fill his glass all the way up without worry he would spill. He could change his clothes and not struggle with the buttons or take a shower, stepping over the lip of the tub like he did it every day. He did not have to wear slip-on shoes.
Shower, Harry decided, after a moment locking eyes with the dog. The shower was the most important thing. Harry looked over his shoulder at his cane still standing there in the middle of the room, alone and out of context, and with only a small niggle of doubt, he left it standing there and turned
to leave the library on two rather than three feet.
He was still turning when he saw her, and it happened so fast that he wasn’t sure he’d seen anything at all.
“Tilda?” he called out.
He went all the way to the door and leaned out to look down the hall. He heard the clock behind him in the library, and he heard the shhhhh of waves hitting rock out on the beach. He heard all the sounds he normally didn’t hear because he had heard them so much, but no one responded to his call. Not even Shooby.
“Rachel?” He spoke softer this time, more convinced that there was no one there but not so convinced he wouldn’t try one last time. “Dr. Bell?”
He walked down the hallway, his fingers trailing the wall along the chair rail. He didn’t need it, not right at that moment. But it felt good to have something, even a chair rail, under his fingers. He wasn’t used to being upright without training wheels anymore, and he was unsure of himself.
“Hey!”
He had made it all the way to the front of the house, the dining room, where they never ate, on one side of him and the entrance to the kitchen and the breakfast area, where they always did, on the other. And this time he had seen Rachel. He was sure he had seen her, and she was moving fast. He had just caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye as she disappeared up the stairs.
“Dr. Bell?” he called again, his voice sure this time.
There was no answer, and he didn’t wait for one. He kept right on going to the entryway and up the stairs. He climbed them one at a time with his hand around the railing. He raised one foot to the riser and then brought the other up next to it before mounting the next. It was the way a very young child might climb stairs, but he was not so brave as to try it any other way.
He called out Rachel’s name two more times on his way up to the second floor, glancing up from his feet each time he did so. Her door was shut. He had not heard it open or close, but it was possible to open and close doors quietly.
He wondered why she had come back. She was supposed to be on her shift down at the beach, and she had seemed very anxious to go. She had stuck her head into his bedroom before leaving to check on him after his dose. Less than thirty minutes had passed, and he had felt better, although not as better as he felt right then. He had told her he was fine, good, no side effects yet. She had left her cell phone number on his nightstand and told him to call her if things went sideways.