Chapter 13 Shadow #2
Marco took the pen out of his breast pocket.
He uncapped it and wrote, under whatever the last thing on the list had been, and capped the pen and put it back.
He didn’t read it out. He didn’t say what he’d said at the desk in August, about autumn and races, and he’d had the whole path down to get it ready.
He turned and went back up the gravel with the board against his chest, and the boathouse was on the list.
The child came down the same path ten minutes later at the speed she did everything, and stopped at the edge of the boards because he’d put a hand up.
She had the cat over both arms like a bag of flour.
The cat had doubled since August. He’d been a wet scrap you could shut in one fist, and now she carried him with her chin on his back to keep him from pouring out of her arms.
“The dry end,” he said. “There. Where the boards are old.”
“These are old.”
“Older’s fine. Rotten isn’t.”
She sat down where he’d pointed, on the second board in, with her legs over the water and the cat across her knees, and the cat put his front paws over the edge and looked at the lake like he owned that too. Her sneakers hung a long way above the water. Next summer they’d hang less far.
“Is the water warm yet?”
“May.”
“Then in May you’ll teach me to skip stones.”
He set a nail. “In May.”
“Say it again.”
“In May.”
She nodded like it was written down now, his grandmother’s nod when a supplier finally named a price she could live with. He drove the nail home in three, and the new board took it clean and didn’t split.
Above them, on the upper path, the one that ran along the wall to the lower gate, the American came by with a housekeeper a step behind her.
The keys were on her belt, the whole ring of them on the bronze pear.
They went along with her everywhere now, a sound he could have picked out of the house from any room in it.
The housekeeper had towels over one arm, folded in thirds.
Neither of them came down. She didn’t slow where the path forked for the dock, and she didn’t look at the boards, and then she did, once, at the gap where the old plank had been and the new one was.
He took the nail out of his teeth. He didn’t get up. He said it up the slope.
“The blue room’s shutter is done.”
“Thank you.”
She went on along the wall, and the housekeeper went on after her, and the keys went with them until the corner of the wall took the sound. He picked up the hammer and didn’t use it.
Six. Two. He’d counted them, his and hers, without deciding to, and he sat there with the hammer in his hand and had no idea what the count was for.
“Alex.”
The child hadn’t turned around. She was looking at the water past the cat’s ears.
“Are you staying this time?”
There was a flat stone on the boards by his knee, gray, the size of his palm, come down out of the gravel path on somebody’s shoe. He picked it up and turned it once in his fingers and threw it low and sidearm along the water.
It hopped once and went under.
“Again,” Maddie said.
Kate
On the first Saturday in May the arrivals sheet ran onto a second page, which it hadn’t done since September.
I had it flat on the desk under one hand.
Marco stood at my elbow with his own copy, because Marco didn’t trust a sheet he hadn’t printed himself, and Romeo lay along the desk between the bell and the register with his tail over the edge, taking up the room of a third person.
The first ones came through the gate at ten past two, on foot from the guest parking outside the gate.
Two parents, three children, and more bags than five people had hands for.
The father had a duffel on each shoulder and a car seat by its handle.
The mother had the smallest one on her hip and a suitcase on wheels that were no use on gravel, so she was dragging it.
The two older kids wore backpacks bigger than their backs.
They stopped at the foot of the steps and looked up at the house, then around the forecourt for the man who was supposed to be coming down them.
The porter was on the ferry. He’d gone across at noon, and the two o’clock was a gray shape out in the middle of the lake that had never once in its life been anywhere by two. I’d known that since noon. I’d told myself since noon that the season didn’t start until the first guest was up the steps.
“I’ll go,” I said, and didn’t get around the desk.
Alessandro came across the gravel from the side of the house.
He’d been at the boathouse; there was sawdust down the front of his shirt and a pencil behind his ear.
He didn’t look at the steps or at the window or at the desk behind it.
He went to the mother and took the suitcase out of her hand, took the second one from where it leaned against the father’s leg, and then reached past the older girl and hooked her backpack off her shoulders, and she let him.
Three. He came up the steps with them, through the lobby, and up the stairs at the back, and the whole way his eyes stayed on the bags.
He went through the lobby without taking up any of it. Last August he’d stood in the gallery doorway and filled it.
The mother came in behind him with the child on her hip and called up the stairwell after him.
“Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Prego.” From the turn of the stairs. He didn’t stop.
She gave me the smile you give the desk and shifted the child to the other hip. To her he was the porter. A tanned man with sawdust on his shirt who carried bags and answered in one word.
Marco spoke to the wall past my shoulder. His copy of the sheet hadn’t moved.
“Last summer he told the signora to carry his.”
“I was there.”
“So was I. The door was open.”
He didn’t smile. He came as near it as I’d ever seen him come, which was that the line of his mouth stayed exactly where it was and he let a second go by before he turned the page. Then he asked the father for the passports in his correct English, and the father put the car seat down to find them.
I did the cards. The mother’s linen had the whole flight creased into it, and the card she put down for the deposit was in her name. A year ago I wouldn’t have looked. Now I read the name on the card before I read the face.
Feet on the stairs, coming down. He came past the desk on his way to the door for the last bag, the duffel the father had set on the gravel, and he didn’t stop and he didn’t turn his head.
“The Bella Vista window sticks. I’ll do it Monday.”
“Thank you.”
He went out, picked the duffel up by its strap, came back through, and went up, and none of it took longer than it takes to tell.
Nine. I hadn’t meant to count. I counted the way you count what a guest has left on the desk, after, when they’ve gone up, and it came to nine, and all nine were about a window. In April it had been fewer, about a shutter. None of them was my name.
Rosa was on the stairs. She’d been on the stairs the whole time, it turned out, at the turn where the light from the landing window came down, with her reading glasses on and one hand on the rail, and she’d watched all of it over the top of the glasses: the bags, the prego, Marco’s mouth, the nine words.
She looked at me and took the glasses off and folded them, one arm and then the other.
Then she went on up, and a minute later the sound of the Bella Vista window being tried came down from the second floor.
The handle turned. The frame pulled and held.
Pulled again, and the wood let go of the wood with a crack, and the window shut.
Romeo stood up on the desk. He did it in stages, as he did everything now that he weighed what he weighed.
He stepped down onto my chair and from the chair to the floor with a sound like a dropped bag, walked across the lobby past the family’s knees and Marco’s shoes, and went up the stairs after him.
One step at a time, tail up. He did that for two people in this house, and one of them was my daughter.
Marco had given him till autumn. I’d given him less. Romeo had never been in doubt.