Chapter 23 #5
At five, she carried clean bed sheets up and stopped at the door at the end of the landing.
Her hand went to the handle and stayed there long enough that she felt foolish standing in her own hallway, and then she carried the sheets back downstairs, put the kettle on, and stood in the kitchen while it boiled.
She carried the sheets upstairs again and forced herself to open the door.
The room smelled of dust, and under the dust, there was the scent of salt and old cedar, the same as the rest of the house. She had been afraid it would smell of Eleanor, but it had stopped doing that years ago. There had been nobody living here to notice when.
Eleanor's sketch hung by the window in a frame the size of a paperback—Eleanor at four, hair in her eyes—and Cordelia stood in front of it, trying to figure out which drawer downstairs she would put it in.
She left it where it was instead. She put both hands under the window pane and shoved upward.
It had swollen in the frame and stuck, then lifted up all at once.
Wind off the water breezed in and moved the dust sheet on the bed.
She stripped the dust sheet off the bed and dropped it on the landing of the stairs.
She made the bed, hospital corners, the way she had been taught at nineteen.
She found a certain kind of comfort and satisfaction in doing something the same way each time, meticulous and exacting.
In the closet, she found two pillows. She grabbed one and slapped it twice to shake off the lingering dust, then threw it on the bed before grabbing the second and doing the same thing.
When she was done, she straightened and fluffed both pillows on the bed.
Downstairs, she pulled a wine bottle from the second row, Eleanor’s row, and opened it, leaving it to breathe on the counter. Then she called Astoria, who picked up on the second ring.
"Is something wrong?" Astoria answered.
"No, why?"
"Cordelia, it's five o'clock on a Friday and you've called me."
"You told me to."
"Okay, you’ve got me there. I did tell you to." Astoria laughed at her. "Give me a second. I'm adjusting."
"Take your time."
"I saw the press release at eleven. Remy sounded like she's been doing this for ten years."
"Remy wrote the note to everyone at the company herself. She brought it in for me to look at before she sent it out."
"And?"
She took a breath. Was she about to admit this out loud? "I reached for a pen to sign it." Wind came down the length of the upstairs hall. Cordelia stayed rooted to the spot. "But there were already three names at the bottom. There wasn't anywhere to put mine. It was…"
"Oh, Cordelia."
"It was better than the one I'd written."
"Well, of course it was. You raised her."
"You know, Wren is driving up to my house on the coast at six," Cordelia said.
"I know. Remy told me before she got her coat off."
"Honestly, I don't know what she's coming to say."
Astoria didn't answer that. Cordelia crossed to the window at the end of the hall and looked down at the beans she'd tied an hour ago, the only real work she'd done all day.
"Okay," Astoria said. "One question, and then I'm hanging up because if I stay on the phone you’ll start to tune me out eventually."
"All right, I’m listening."
"What are you hoping she says?"
Below the headland, the tide pulled back off the rocks. "I… I hadn't gotten that far."
"You've had five days to figure it out, Cordelia!"
"Yeah, I know."
"Well. You've got until six." Something shifted on her end, a cup going down on a table. "Thursdays. Seven o'clock. We're dead serious about it." And she hung up before Cordelia could ask what she meant.
There were still forty minutes left, and she had done everything she could to prepare.
She walked down the stairs and went out to the porch to sit.
Low light came through the glass and lay flat across the boards.
Along the coast, the fog lay in a long, gray line far out, and under the headland the water went on lapping at the rocks.
She listened to it and closed her eyes while leaning back in the chair.
She could not remember the last time she had sat anywhere without a reason to be sitting there.
At exactly six o’clock, a car turned in off the main road along the cliff, and the sound came up through the firs before she could see the headlights. Cordelia stood up and walked out across the porch and to the gravel driveway to meet her.
Wren stayed in the car a few seconds longer than she needed to before she opened the door. She had her hair down and wore a shirt Cordelia had never seen, and she looked like she'd been sleeping again. A canvas bag lay on the back seat. Wren shut the door without grabbing it.
They stopped a few feet apart on the gravel. For five days, Cordelia had refused to plan this exact moment, and now she was here and neither of them moved.
"You asked me to dinner," Wren said.
"I did."
"This is me saying yes to dinner."
"All right," Cordelia said, and heard how careful it came out, and didn't try to fix it. She had meant something more like a restaurant dinner, this worked too. "Come inside."
Wren followed her up the steps and stopped just inside the door, waiting to be told where to go, then she caught herself doing it and came through to the kitchen without having to be directed.
Four pounds of crab legs sat in the sink with enough sourdough bread beside it to last a week. Cordelia watched her take it in.
"How many people are coming?" Wren said, her eyes wide.
"I may have overestimated how much we’d need…"
"Cordelia." Wren laughed at her, her shoulders dropping into a more relaxed position. "This is at least nine pounds of crab."
"No, that’d be ridiculous. It’s only four."
"Only?" Wren laughed again.
Cordelia hadn't heard her laugh since before the leak.
She turned to the sink so Wren wouldn't see her face, and she regained her composure.
She gave Wren the lemons to cut into wedges and started in on the crab, boiling them in batches to make sure they cooked evenly.
They worked next to each other without talking for a while, which was the first easy thing that had happened all day.
Wren rolled each lemon under her palm on the board before she cut it.
Cordelia had watched her do exactly that in this kitchen on the night of the storm.
"Can I ask you something?" Cordelia said, "And then I won't bring it up again."
Wren kept cutting. "Sure."
"That Sunday, you told me there was something I didn't see." Cordelia put the pot on and turned the burner up. "I've been through that day about forty times. I can't figure it out."
Wren set the knife down flat on the board. "You wouldn't have been able to. It’s not that you’re not observant enough or anything, though."
"But what was it?"
She looked at her for a long moment, then said, "No."
The water came to a rolling boil in the pot. Cordelia looked at it and didn't ask again.
"It wasn't—" Wren stopped. She picked up the knife as if she was going to slice more lemons but then put it down again.
"You didn't do anything to me. Not one thing.
You said the kindest thing anybody's said to me in…
as long as I could remember. And I'm not going to let you turn it into a mistake. "
"You stopped talking to me after that day."
"I know I did."
"Wren..."
"I said something." She turned to look at her.
"One sentence, and I said it so it would sound like it was just me being a good assistant.
That's why you can't find it. There was nothing to find, and I made sure of that.
" She started again, quieter. "It took me a month to see what I was doing.
When somebody gets close to me, I turn into the job.
I've been doing that since I was twenty-three, and it isn't something you did to me. "
Cordelia turned the burner down.
"I said I'd only ask once," she said. "But I'm asking again. Tell me what it was and let me do something about it."
"That's why I'm not going to." Wren looked at her for the first time since the driveway.
"If I tell you, you'll feel like you did it.
You'll be checking my face before you say anything to me.
" She put both hands flat on the counter.
"I spent months making myself necessary so nobody could get rid of me. I did that. Not you."
She had spent two weeks getting ready to be told what she had done. Being told she hadn't done anything was worse, and she stood in her own kitchen and accepted it. Cordelia put the crab in and set the timer, and after that there was nothing left to do, and she stayed where she was.
"I want to say something," she said, "and it isn't enough."
"Go ahead."
"I've done a thing since I was thirty. Going somewhere else in my mind while I'm still physically in the room.
" She had never said all of it out loud to anybody, including Eleanor, who had figured it out without being told.
"I'm not going to grow out of it at fifty-three, and I'd be lying if I stood in this kitchen and promised you it won't happen again.
It will. It'll probably happen before Christmas.
" She made herself finish. "What I can do is try not to be that woman with you.
Try. That's all I have, and I know it isn't much. "
Wren didn't answer for long enough that Cordelia could hear the timer. "You've never told me something you couldn't promise," Wren said.
"No, because promises are important to me."
Wren picked the knife back up. "Okay." She got to the last lemon and lined up the pieces on the board. "Say it to me again in a year, and I'll tell you how you did."
A year. Wren had said it like it was already settled.