Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Текущая страница: 36 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

As for me: the official story—printed in a number of sources, accepted as truth—was that I’d been rooms away from The Goldfinch when the bomb went off. Over the years a number of writers had tried to interview me and I’d turned them all away; but numerous people, eyewitnesses, had seen my mother in her last moments in Gallery 24, the beautiful dark-haired woman in the satin trenchcoat, and many of these eyewitnesses placed me at her side. Four adults and three children had died in Gallery 24—and in the public version of the story, the received version, I’d been just another of the bodies on the ground, knocked cold and overlooked in the hubbub.

But Welty’s ring was physical proof of my whereabouts. Luckily for me, Hobie didn’t like to talk about Welty’s death but every now and then—not often, usually late at night when he’d had a few drinks—he was moved to reminisce. “Can you imagine how I felt—? Isn’t it a miracle that—?” Someday, someone had been bound to make the connection. I’d always known it and yet in my drugged-out fog I’d drifted along ignoring the danger for years. Maybe no one was paying attention. Maybe no one would ever know.

I was sitting on the side of my bed, staring out the window onto Tenth Street—people just getting off work, going out to dinner, shrill bursts of laughter. Fine, misty rain slanted in the white circle of street light just outside my window. Everything felt shaky and harsh. I wanted a pill badly, and I was just about to get up and make myself a drink when—just outside of the light, unusual for the coming-and-going traffic of the street—I noticed a figure standing unaccompanied and motionless in the rain.

After half a minute passed and still he stood there, I switched the lamp off and moved to the window. In an answering gesture the silhouette moved well out of the streetlight; and though his features weren’t plain in the dark I got the idea of him well enough: high hunched shoulders, shortish legs and thick Irish torso. Jeans and hoodie, heavy boots. For a while he stood motionless, a workmanly silhouette out of place on the street at that hour, photo assistants and well-dressed couples, exhilarated college students heading out for dinner dates. Then he turned. He was walking away with a quick impatience; when he stepped forward into the next pool of light I saw him reaching in his pockets, dialing a cell phone, head down, distracted.

I let the curtain fall. I was pretty sure I was seeing things, in fact I saw things all the time, part of living in a modern city, this half-invisible grain of terror, disaster, jumping at car alarms, always expecting something to happen, the smell of smoke, the splash of broken glass. And yet—I wished I were a hundred percent sure it was my imagination.

Everything was dead quiet. The street light through the lace curtains cast spidery distortions on the walls. All the time, I’d known it was a mistake, keeping the painting, and still I’d kept it. No good could come of keeping it. It wasn’t even as if it had done me any good or given me any pleasure. Back in Las Vegas, I’d been able to look at it whenever I wanted, when I was sick or sleepy or sad, early morning and the middle of the night, autumn, summer, changing with weather and sun. It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark—a thing made of light, that only lived in light—was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy.

I got a glass of ice from the kitchen, went to the sideboard and poured myself a vodka, came back to my room and got my iPhone from my jacket pocket and—after reflexively dialing the first three digits of Jerome’s beeper—hung up and dialed the Barbours’ number instead.

Etta answered. “Theo!” she said, sounding pleased, the kitchen television going in the background. “You calling for Katherine?” Only Kitsey’s family and very close friends called her Kitsey; she was Katherine to everyone else.

“Is she there?”

“She’ll be in after dinner. I know she was looking for you to call.”

“Mm—” I couldn’t help feeling pleased. “Will you tell her I phoned then?”

“When are you coming back to see us?”

“Soon, I hope. Is Platt around?”

“No—he’s out too. I’ll be sure to tell him you called. Come back to see us soon, all right?”

I hung up the phone and sat on the side of the bed drinking my vodka. It was reassuring to know that I could call Platt if I needed to—not about the painting, I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him with that, but insofar as dealing with Reeve about the chest. It was ominous that Reeve had said not a word about that.

Yet—what could he do? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed Reeve had overplayed his hand by confronting me so nakedly. What good was it going to do him to come after me for the furniture? What did he have to gain if I was arrested, the painting recovered, whisked out of his reach forever? If he wanted it, there was nothing for him to do but stand back and allow me to lead him to it. The only thing I had going for me—the only thing—was that Reeve didn’t know where it was. He could hire whomever he wanted to tail me, but as long as I kept clear of the storage unit, there was no way he could track it down.

Chapter 10.

The Idiot

i.

“OH, THEO!” SAID KITSEY one Friday afternoon shortly before Christmas, plucking up one of my mother’s emerald earrings and holding it to the light. We’d had a long lunch at Fred’s after having spent all morning going around Tiffany’s looking at silver and china patterns. “They’re beautiful! It’s just…” her forehead wrinkled.

“Yes—?” It was three; the restaurant was still chattering and crowded. When she’d gone to make a telephone call I’d pulled the earrings from my pocket and laid them on the tablecloth.

“Well, it’s just—I wonder.” She puckered her eyebrows as if at a pair of shoes she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to buy. “I mean—they’re gorgeous! Thank you! But… will they be quite right? For the actual day?”

“Well, up to you,” I said, reaching for my Bloody Mary and taking a large drink to conceal my surprise and annoyance.

“Because, emeralds.” She held an earring up to her ear, cutting her eyes thoughtfully to the side as she did it. “I adore them! But—” holding it up again to sparkle, in the diffuse luminance of the overheads—“emeralds aren’t really my stone. I think they may just seem a bit hard, you know? With white? And my skin? Eau de Nil! Mum can’t wear green either.”

“Whatever you think.”

“Oh, now you’re annoyed.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes you are! I’ve hurt your feelings!”

“No, I’m just tired.”

“You seem in a really dire mood.”

“Please Kitsey, I’m tired.” We’d been expending heroic effort searching for an apartment, a frustrating process which we’d borne in mostly good humor although the bare spaces and empty rooms haunted with other people’s abandoned lives kicked up (for me) a lot of ugly echoes from childhood, moving boxes and kitchen smells and shadowed bedrooms with the life gone out of them all but more than this, pulsing throughout, a sort of ominous mechanical hum audible (apparently) only to me, heavily-breathing apprehensions which the voices of the brokers, ringing cheerfully against the polished surfaces as they walked around switching on the lights and pointing out the stainless-steel appliances, did little to dispel.

And why was this? Not every apartment we saw had been vacated for reasons of tragedy, as I somehow believed. The fact that I smelled divorce, bankruptcy, illness and death in almost every space we viewed was clearly delusional—and, besides, how could the troubles of these previous tenants, real or imagined, harm Kitsey or me?

“Don’t lose heart,” said Hobie (who, like me, was overly sensitive to the souls of rooms and objects, the emanations left by time). “Look on it as a job. Sorting through a box of fiddly bits. You’ll turn up just the one as long as you grit your teeth and keep looking.”

And he was right. I’d been a good sport throughout, as had she, powering through from open house to open house of gloomy pre-wars haunted by the ghosts of lonely old Jewish ladies, and icy glass monstrosities I knew I could never live in without feeling I had sniper rifles trained on me from across the street. No one expected apartment hunting to be fun.

In contrast, the prospect of walking over with Kitsey to set up our wedding registry at Tiffany’s had seemed a pleasing diversion. Meeting with the Registry Consultant, pointing at what we liked and then wafting out hand-in-hand for a Christmas lunch? Instead—quite unexpectedly—I’d been knocked reeling by the stress of navigating one of the most crowded stores in Manhattan on a Friday close to Christmas: elevators packed, stairwells packed, flowing with shoals of tourists, holiday shoppers jostling five and six deep at the display cases to buy watches and scarves and handbags and carriage clocks and etiquette books and all kinds of extraneous merchandise in Signature Robin’s Egg Blue. We’d slogged round the fifth floor for hours, trailed by a bridal consultant who was working so hard to provide Flawless Service and assist us in making our choices with confidence that I couldn’t help but feel a bit stalked (“A china pattern should say to both of you, ‘this is who we are, as a couple’… it’s an important statement of your style”) while Kitsey flitted from setting to setting: the gold band! no, the blue! wait… which was the first one? is the octagonal too much? and the consultant chimed in with her helpful exegesis: urban geometrics… romantic florals… timeless elegance… flamboyant flash… and even though I’d kept saying sure, that one’s fine, that one too, I’d be happy with either, your decision Kits, the consultant kept showing us more and more settings, clearly hoping to wheedle some firmer show of preference from me, gently explaining to me the fine points of each, the vermeil here, the hand-painted borders there, until I had been forced to bite my tongue to keep from saying what I really thought: that despite the craftsmanship it made absolutely zero difference whether Kitsey chose the x pattern or the y pattern since as far as I was concerned it was basically all the same: new, charmless, dead-in-hand, not to mention the expense: eight hundred dollars for a made-yesterday plate? One plate? There were beautiful eighteenth-century sets to be had for a fraction of the price of this cold, bright, newly-minted stuff.

“But you can’t like all of it exactly the same! And yes, absolutely, I keep coming back to the Deco,” Kitsey said to our patiently-hovering saleswoman, “but as much as I love it, it may not be quite right for us,” and then, to me: “What are your thoughts?”

“Whatever you want. Any of them. Really,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets and looking away when still she stood blinking respectfully at me.

“You are looking very fidgety. I wish you’d tell me what you like.”

“Yes, but—” I’d unboxed so much china from funeral sales and broken-up households that there was something almost unspeakably sad about the pristine, gleaming displays, with their tacit assurance that shiny new tableware promised an equally shiny and tragedy-free future.

“Chinois? Or Birds of the Nile? Do say, Theo, I know you must prefer one of the two.”

“You can’t go wrong with either. Both are fun and fancy. And this one is simple, for everyday,” said the consultant helpfully, simple obviously being in her mind a key word in dealing with overwhelmed and cranky grooms. “Really really simple and neutral.” It seemed to be registry protocol that the groom should be allowed to select the casual china (I guess for all those Super Bowl parties I would be hosting with the guys, ha ha) while the “formal ware” should be left to the experts: the ladies.

“It’s fine,” I said, more curtly than I’d meant to, when I realized they were waiting for me to say something. Plain, white, modern earthenware wasn’t something I could work up a lot of enthusiasm for, particularly when it went for four hundred dollars a plate. It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments filled with smoked-glass and chromed-steel furniture that, in the seventies, they’d purchased through their decorators for the price of good Queen Anne—but (I was responsible for telling them, reluctantly) had not held its value and could not be re-sold at even half what they’d bought it for.

“China—” the bridal consultant traced the plate’s edge with a neutrally manicured finger. “The way I like for my couples to think of fine silver, fine crystal and china—? It’s the end-of-day ritual. It’s wine, fun, family, togetherness. A set of fine china is a great way to put some permanent style and romance in your marriage.”

“Right,” I said again. But the sentiment had appalled me; and the two Bloody Marys I’d had at Fred’s had not wholly washed the taste of it away.

Kitsey was looking at the earrings, doubtfully it seemed. “Well look. I will wear them for the wedding. They’re beautiful. And I know they were your mother’s.”

“I want you to wear what you want.”

“I’ll tell you what I think.” Playfully, she reached across the table and took my hand. “I think you need to have a nap.”

“Absolutely,” I said, pressing her palm to my face, remembering how lucky I was.

ii.

IT HAD HAPPENED REALLY fast. Within two months of my dinner at the Barbours’, Kitsey and I were seeing each other every day practically—long walks and dinner (sometimes Match 65 or Le Bilboquet, sometimes sandwiches in the kitchen) and talking about old times: about Andy, and rainy Sundays with the Monopoly board (“you two were so mean… it was like Shirley Temple against Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan…”) about the night she’d cried when we made her watch Hellboy instead of Pocahontas, and our excruciating coat-and-tie nights—excruciating for the little boys anyway, sitting stiffly at the Yacht Club, Coca-Colas with lime, and Mr. Barbour looking restlessly around the dining room for Amadeo, his favorite waiter, with whom he insisted on practicing his ridiculous Xavier Cugat Spanish—school friends, parties, always something to talk about, do you remember this, do you remember that, remember when we… not like Carole Lombard’s where it was all booze and bed and not that much to say to each other.

Not that Kitsey and I weren’t very different people, as well, but that was all right: after all, as Hobie had pointed out sensibly enough, wasn’t marriage supposed to be a union of opposites? Wasn’t I supposed to bring new undertakings to her life and she to mine? And besides (I told myself) wasn’t it time to Move Forward, Let Go, turn from the garden that was locked to me? Live In The Present, Focus On The Now instead of grieving for what I could never have? For years I’d been wallowing in a hothouse of wasteful sorrow: Pippa Pippa Pippa, exhilaration and despair, it was never-ending, incidents of virtually no significance threw me to the stars or plunged me into speechless depressions, her name on my phone or an e-mail signed “Love” (which was how Pippa signed all her e-mails, to everyone) had me flying for days whereas—if, when phoning Hobie, she didn’t ask to speak to me (and why should she?) I was crushed beyond any reasonable prospect. I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother’s death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren’t there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he’d spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?

It had been a conscious decision to pull free. It had taken everything I had to do it, like an animal gnawing a limb off to escape a trap. And somehow I had done it; and there on the other side was Kitsey, looking at me with the amused, gooseberry-gray eyes.

We had fun together. We got on. It was her first summer in the city, “my whole life, ever”—the house in Maine was closed tight, Uncle Harry and the cousins had gone up to Canada to the Îles de la Madeleine—“and, I’m a bit at loose ends here with Mum, and—oh, please, do something with me. Won’t you please go out to the beach with me this weekend?” So on the weekends we went out to East Hampton, where we stayed in the house of friends of hers who were summering in France; and during the week we met downtown after I got off work, drinking tepid wine in sidewalk cafés, deserted Tribeca evenings with fever-hot sidewalks and hot wind from the subway grates blowing sparks from the end of my cigarette. Movie theaters were always cool, and the King Cole room, and the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. Two afternoons a week—hatted, gloved, in Jack Purcells and tidy skirts, sprayed head to toe with medical-grade sunblock (for she, like Andy, was allergic to the sun) she drove out on her own to Shinnecock or Maidstone in her black Mini Cooper which had been specially fitted in the back to hold a set of golf clubs. Unlike Andy she chattered and fluttered, laughed nervously and at her own jokes, with a ghost of her father’s scattered energies but without the disengaged quality, the irony. You could have powdered her and drawn a beauty mark on her face and she might have been a lady-in-waiting at Versailles with her white skin and pink cheeks, her stammering gaiety. She wore tiny linen shift dresses, country and city, accessorized by vintage crocodile bags of Gaga’s, and kept her name and address taped inside the crucifyingly high Christian Louboutins she teetered around in (“Hurty-hurty shoes!”) in case she kicked them off to dance or swim and forgot where she’d left them: silver shoes, embroidered shoes, ribboned and pointy-toed, a thousand dollars a pair. “Meanypants!” she shouted down the stairwell when—three a.m., three sheets to the wind on rum and Coke—I finally staggered down to catch a cab because I had to work the next day.

She was the one who had asked me to marry. On our way to a party. Chanel No. 19, baby blue dress. We’d stepped out on Park Avenue—both a little looped from cocktails upstairs—and the street lights had snapped on the moment we stepped out the door and we’d stopped dead and looked at each other: did we do that? The moment was so funny we both began laughing hysterically—it was like the light was pouring off us, like we could power up Park Avenue. And when Kitsey seized my hand and said: “You know what I think we should do, Theo?” I knew exactly what she was going to say.

“Should we?”

“Yes, please! Don’t you think? I think it would make Mum so happy.”

We hadn’t even firmed up the date. It kept getting changed, due to the availability of the church, the availability of certain indispensable members of the party, someone else’s cup race or due date or whatever. Hence, how the wedding seemed to be gearing up into quite such a big deal—guest list of many hundreds, cost of many thousands, costumed and choreographed like a Broadway show—how this wedding seemed to be spiraling into quite such a production I wasn’t quite sure. Sometimes, I knew, the mother of the bride got blamed for out-of-control weddings but in this case anyway you couldn’t pin the rap on Mrs. Barbour, who could scarcely be prised from her room and the embroidery basket, who never took phone calls and never accepted invitations and never even went to the hairdresser any more, she who had once had her hair done every other day without fail, a standing eleven a.m. appointment before lunching out.

“Won’t Mum be pleased?” Kitsey had whispered, jabbing me in the rib with her sharp little elbow as we were hurrying back to Mrs. Barbour’s room. And the memory of Mrs. Barbour’s joy at the news (you tell her, Kitsey had said, she’ll be extra happy if she hears it from you) was a moment I played and replayed and never tired of: her startled eyes, then delight blooming unguarded on her cool, tired face. One hand held to me and the other to Kitsey, but that beautiful smile—I would never forget it—had been all for me.

Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself? My moods were a slingshot; after being locked-down and anesthetized for years my heart was zinging and slamming itself around like a bee under a glass, everything bright, sharp, confusing, wrong—but it was a clean pain as opposed to the dull misery that had plagued me for years under the drugs like a rotten tooth, the sick dirty ache of something spoiled. The clarity was exhilarating; it was as if I’d removed a pair of smudged-up glasses that fuzzed everything I saw. All summer long I had been practically delirious: tingling, daffy, energized, running on gin and shrimp cocktail and the invigorating whock of tennis balls. And all I could think was Kitsey, Kitsey, Kitsey!

And four months had passed, and it was December, brisk mornings and a chime of Christmas in the air; and Kitsey and I were engaged to be married and how lucky was I? but though it was all too perfect, hearts and flowers, the end of a musical comedy, I felt sick. For unknown reasons, the gust of energy that had swept me up and fizzed me around all summer had dropped me hard, mid-October, into a drizzle of sadness that stretched endlessly in every direction: with a very few exceptions (Kitsey, Hobie, Mrs. Barbour) I hated being around people, couldn’t pay attention to what anyone was saying, couldn’t talk to clients, couldn’t tag my pieces, couldn’t ride the subway, all human activity seemed pointless, incomprehensible, some blackly swarming ant hill in the wilderness, there was not a squeak of light anywhere I looked, the antidepressants I’d been dutifully swallowing for eight weeks hadn’t helped a bit, nor had the ones before that (but then, I’d tried them all; apparently I was among the twenty percent of unfortunates who didn’t get the daisy fields and the butterflies but the Severe Headaches and the Suicidal Thoughts); and though the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.

Just why I felt so lost I didn’t know. I wasn’t over Pippa and I knew it, might never be over her, and that was just something I was going to have to live with, the sadness of loving someone I couldn’t have; but I also knew my more immediate difficulty was in rising to (what I found, anyway) an uncomfortably escalating social pace. No longer did Kitsey and I enjoy so many of our restorative evenings à deux, the two of us holding hands on the same side of a dark restaurant booth. Instead, almost every night it was dinner parties and busy restaurant tables with her friends, strenuous occasions where (jumpy, un-opiated, wracked to the last synapse), it was hard for me to make the proper show of social ardor, particularly when I was tired after work—and then too the wedding preparations, an avalanche of trivia in which I was expected to interest myself as enthusiastically as she, bright tissue-paper flurries of brochures and merchandise. For her, it amounted to a full-time job: visiting stationers and florists, researching caterers and vendors, amassing fabric swatches and boxes of petit-four and cake samples, fretting and repeatedly asking me to help her choose between virtually identical shades of ivory and lavender on a color chart, co-ordinating a series of “girly-girl” sleepovers with her bridesmaids and a “boys’ weekend” for me (organized by Platt?? at least I could count on staying drunk)—and then the honeymoon plans, stacks of glossy booklets (Fiji or Nantucket? Mykonos or Capri?) “Fantastic,” I kept saying, in my affable new talking-to-Kitsey voice, “it all looks great,” although given her family and its history with water, it did seem odd that she wasn’t interested in Vienna or Paris or Prague or any destination, actually, that wasn’t a literal island in the middle of the freaking ocean.

Still, I’d never felt so sure of the future; and when I reminded myself of the right-ness of my course, as I often had occasion to do, my thoughts went not only to Kitsey but also Mrs. Barbour, whose happiness made me feel reassured and nourished in channels of my heart which had stood scraped dry for years. Our news had visibly brightened and straightened her; she’d begun stirring about the apartment, she’d pinked up with just the tiniest bit of lipstick, and even her most commonplace interactions with me were colored with a steady, stable, peaceful light that enlarged the space around us and beamed calmly into all my darkest corners.

“I never thought I’d be quite so happy ever again,” she’d confided quietly, one night at dinner, when Kitsey had jumped up very suddenly and run out to get the telephone as she was apt to do, and it was just the two of us at the card table in her room, poking awkwardly at our asparagus spears and our salmon steaks. “Because—you were always so good to Andy—bolstering him, improving his confidence. He was absolutely his best self with you, always. And—I’m so glad you’re going to be an official part of the family, that we’re going to make it legal now, because—oh, I suppose I shouldn’t say this, I hope you don’t mind if I speak from the heart for a moment, but I always did think of you as one of my very own, did you know that? Even when you were a little boy.”

This remark so shocked and touched me that I reacted clumsily—stammering in discomposure—so that she took pity and turned the conversation into another channel. Yet every time I remembered it I was suffused with a glow of warmth. An equally gratifying (if ignoble) memory was Pippa’s slight, shocked pause when I’d broken the news to her on the phone. Over and over again I had played that pause in my mind, relishing it, her stunned silence: “Oh?” And then, recovering: “Oh, Theo, how wonderful! I can’t wait to meet her!”

“Oh, she’s amazing,” I’d said venomously. “I’ve been in love with her ever since we were kids.”

Which—in all sorts of ways I was still coming to realize—was absolutely true. The interplay of past and present was wildly erotic: I drew endless delight from the memory of nine-year-old Kitsey’s contempt for geeky thirteen-year-old me (rolling her eyes, pouting when she had to sit by me at dinner). And I relished even more the undisguised shock of people who’d known us as children: You? and Kitsey Barbour? Really? Her? I loved the fun and wickedness of it, the sheer improbability: slipping into her room after her mother was asleep—same room she’d kept shut against me when we were kids, same pink toile wallpaper, unchanged since the days of Andy, hand-lettered signs, KEEP OUT, DO NOT DISTURB—me backing her in, Kitsey locking the door behind us, putting her finger to my mouth, tracing it across my lips, that first, delicious tumble to her bed, Mommy’s sleeping, ssh!

Every day, I had multiple occasions to remind myself how lucky I was. Kitsey was never tired; Kitsey was never unhappy. She was appealing, enthusiastic, affectionate. She was beautiful, with a luminous, sugar-white quality that turned heads on the street. I admired how gregarious she was, how engaged with the world, how amusing and spontaneous—“little feather-head!” as Hobie called her, with a great deal of tenderness—what a breath of fresh air she was! Everyone loved her. And for all her infectious lightness of heart, I knew it was an extremely petty cavil that Kitsey never seemed very moved by anything. Even dear old Carole Lombard had got teary-eyed about ex-boyfriends and abused pets on the news and the closing of certain old-school bars in Chicago, where she was from. But nothing ever seemed to strike Kitsey as particularly urgent or emotional or even surprising. In this, she resembled her mother and brother—and yet Mrs. Barbour’s restraint, and Andy’s, were somehow very different from Kitsey’s way of making a flippant or trivializing comment whenever anyone brought up something serious. (“No fun,” I’d heard her say with a half-whimsical sigh, wrinkling her nose, when people inquired about her mother.) Then too—I felt morbid and sick even thinking it—I kept watching for some evidence of sorrow about Andy and her dad, and it was starting to disturb me that I hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t their deaths affected her at all? Weren’t we supposed to at least talk about it at some point? On one level, I admired her bravery: chin up, carrying on in the face of tragedy or whatever. Maybe she was just really really guarded, really locked-down, putting up a masterly front. But those sparkling blue shallows—so enticing at first glance—had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim.

Kitsey was tapping my wrist. “What?”

“Barneys. I mean, since we’re here? Maybe we should take a spin round the Homes department? I know Mother won’t love it if we register here but it might be fun to go for something a little less traditional for everyday.”