Chapter 23 #6
They ate at the table by the window while the fog came the rest of the way in from the water, and neither of them got up to turn on a lamp when the overcast sky threw shadows throughout the room.
Wren ate like somebody who hadn't been eating.
Cordelia watched her go back for more and passed her the bread when her plate got low.
"Remy sent me the memo," Wren said, halfway through. "This morning at seven. Before anybody else saw it."
"Did she?"
"She wanted to know if the third paragraph was too much." Wren pulled a shell apart with her thumbs. "It wasn't."
"No, it was very well written."
"She asked me not to tell you she'd asked, though."
"Then the secret is safe," Cordelia said.
Wren laughed at that.
At seven this morning, her daughter had sent the memo draft to a woman who was supposed to be on leave, because Wren was the one she wanted to hear feedback from. Cordelia sat with that and found she didn't mind at all.
By the time they finished, the fog had come up the garden as far as the bottom step and stopped there.
Cordelia cleared the plates and put them in the sink and left them, which she had never done before.
Then she picked up the bottle from the counter and two glasses by the stems and pushed the porch door open with her shoulder.
The porch was cold now. Cordelia took the blanket off the back of the second chair and handed it over before she sat down, and Wren put it across her knees. Cordelia poured wine for both of them. They couldn't see the water anymore, but they could still hear it under the headland.
"Eleanor bought this," Cordelia said.
"I know she bought all of it."
"No, the second row was different." Cordelia turned her glass a quarter turn on the arm of the chair.
"The front row was for everyday drinking.
The second row she bought for things that hadn't happened yet, like Remy finishing school or some anniversary or other.
She'd come back from town with a bottle, put it at the back, and tell me what it was for, and I'd say she was being ridiculous. "
"How many are left?"
"Nine."
Wren looked at her glass and didn't drink from it.
"I haven't opened one since she died," Cordelia said. "I couldn't figure out what any of them were for anymore."
"And tonight?"
"Tonight I didn't try to figure it out."
While they sat there the fog came up over the bottom step and as far as the glass. Wren pulled the blanket higher.
"I want to ask you for something," Wren said.
"All right."
"Two things, actually. The small one first, because I'll lose my nerve if I do them the other way around.
" Wren turned in the chair to face her. "Lillian calls me every Sunday at three. It’s only for about twenty minutes, and she's been doing it since my grandmother died.
I'd like you to say hello to her sometime. "
Cordelia had been braced for something she would have to negotiate. "Yes," she said. “I’d like that.”
"You could have thought about it first." Wren chuckled.
"I did."
Wren smiled and then put her glass down on the boards beside the chair. "Okay, the other one." She took a breath and let it out. "I know what it's called. What you do, I mean. Eleanor had called it the executive coma."
Cordelia didn't move.
"Remy told me on the night of the leak, at Lavender's.
" Wren said it steadily and kept going. "She came out in the rain to find me because she'd heard the day was bad.
She said Eleanor used to make a joke of it at breakfast. ‘She's in the executive coma; she'll be back Thursday.’ She told me it stopped being occasional after Eleanor died and that I shouldn't take it personally because it isn't personal. "
Cordelia set her glass down on the arm of the chair. "She had no right to do that," Cordelia said.
"She had every right. I'd written my resignation that afternoon. It was sitting in my drafts."
Cordelia looked out into the fog.
"She told me one more thing." Wren had gone quieter. "She said Eleanor could bring you back. That she'd put a hand on the back of your neck at the sink and you'd come into the room again. Remy never figured out how she did it. And after Eleanor died, there wasn't anybody left who could."
"No, there wasn't."
"That's what I'm asking for." Wren stopped and started again. "I'm not asking to be her. I couldn't be, and you wouldn't want me to. Let me try it my own way when I see it happening. And when I do it, you don't get to be polite to me about it. You just come back."
"I don't know if it would work," Cordelia said, honestly. "It might only have worked because it was her."
"Neither do I."
"Then you're asking me to let you find out."
"Yes." Wren pushed the blanket off her knees. "Starting now, if that's all right. You've been somewhere else for about a minute."
Wren got up. She came around the arm of Cordelia's chair and put her hand flat on the back of Cordelia's neck, under her hair, and left it there.
Her hand was warm and not steady. It was nothing like Eleanor's, but Cordelia sat under it and came back.
"Astoria asked me something this afternoon," she said. "She asked what I was hoping you'd say tonight. I couldn't answer her."
"Can you now?"
"I think I only wanted you in the house."
Wren didn't take her hand away. It was fully dark under the fog now, and neither had touched their wine in several minutes.
"Your bag's still in the car," Cordelia said.
"I know it is."
"Go get it."
Wren came back up the steps with the canvas bag over her shoulder and stood in the doorway with the fog behind her. Cordelia carried the glasses in and put them in the sink with the plates. She turned off the kitchen light and went up the stairs ahead of her.
At the top, she turned right, and Wren followed her.
The door at the end of the landing stood open. The window was still up from the afternoon, and the room was full of moving air off the water. Cordelia stopped just inside it. Wren had been in this house several times and had never once seen the inside of this room.
"I haven't slept in here since she died," Cordelia said. "I've been coming up all summer and I could never get that door open. I finally managed to open it this afternoon at five o'clock. I made the bed, and I put two pillows on it."
Wren set the bag down on the floor. "You didn't have to tell me all that."
"I know I didn't."
Wren stood there deciding what to do with it, and Cordelia waited and didn't help her. "The sketch," Wren said.
"Eleanor when she was four." Cordelia looked at it on the wall by the window and left it where it was. "It stays up. If this is too much, you're allowed to walk back down those stairs."
"I'm staying." Wren crossed the room to her. The floorboards gave a single low creak under Wren's bare feet, and then the only sound was the fog shouldering through the open window and the distant churn of water against the rocks below the bluff.
Wren stopped close enough that Cordelia could feel the warmth of her, the heat that radiated off her even now, even thin as she'd gotten. Her hazel eyes were steady and unblinking and entirely too pleased with themselves. The cold air moved between them. Cordelia could smell salt and faint cedar and, underneath both, Wren’s warm skin.
Wren lifted her hand and touched the top button of Cordelia's blouse. A shell button, small and white, precisely aligned with the one below it and the one below that. She rested her fingertips on it for a beat, then undid the button, slowly. Then the next one, and the next, working her way down with a slowness that was deliberate and unhurried and absolutely sure of itself. Her fingers were steady and she didn’t fumble.
She spread the fabric open a half-inch at a time, and when she got to the last button she stopped and looked up.
Cordelia looked back at her, meeting her gaze.
She was still in her body and felt every graze of Wren's knuckles against the bare skin of her sternum. And what was more, she didn’t have to fight to stay present with Wren.
She felt the cold air on the exposed skin between the open halves of her blouse, the heat of Wren's body close to hers, and the specific weight of Wren's gaze on her collarbones. She was here for all of it.
"Take this off," Wren said and pulled the tails of the blouse from Cordelia's waistband.
Cordelia reached for the buttons of Wren's oxford shirt, already half-undone from the way Wren wore shirts.
Her fingers found the second button and the third.
The fabric was soft from washing, and underneath it, Wren was lean.
Cordelia spread the shirt open and put her palm flat against Wren's sternum and splayed her fingers against her visible ribs.
Wren's heartbeat knocked against her hand, quick and hard.
"Your hands are cold," Wren said, smiling.
"I’m sorry."
"Don't be sorry. I like it." Wren pushed the blouse off Cordelia's shoulders. It caught briefly on her elbows, and Wren pulled it free and dropped it on the chair behind her without looking. Her fingers went to the clasp of Cordelia's bra and unhooked it with one hand.
"Show-off," Cordelia said.
"I have talents."
The bra came off and the cold air hit Cordelia's bare skin. Wren looked at her, all of her, with that open, greedy, unembarrassed look that was the thing Cordelia had noticed about Wren when they were together.
Wren shrugged out of her own shirt, and she pulled it off with both shoulders at once in a motion that was somehow the most Wren thing Cordelia had ever seen her do.
She reached for the leather strap on her wrist and stopped.
She turned to the dresser and slid the watch off and set it down with care.
Wren turned back, and her hands went to Cordelia's waistband. Cordelia's hands went to Wren's, and they undid each other's pants at the same time, standing at the foot of the bed in the cold July air, both of them undressing each other, neither waiting to be led.