Chapter Three
FITZ
Fitz stands at the window of his room in the Oceanview Home and stares down at the woman on the terrace. Even from a distance, he can see how the light seems drawn to her. She’s beautiful. As bright as a rose.
She’s been dead for decades, but no matter: there she is.
Heat pricks his skin. If he could yell down at her, he would, but lately he can’t open a jar of jelly, let alone a window.
He doesn’t usually mind. Of the things Fitz mourns, his strength is not one of them.
He’s always had a temper, and in his experience, strength combined with temper never gets you anything but trouble.
So he doesn’t yell. He just watches. He sees how she gazes directly at that Pike man from whom everyone else seems to scurry—well, everyone but Fitz.
She has a persuasive smile. Her sky-blue rubber boots stand out against the gray slate of the terrace as though painted in Technicolor.
Even from three stories up, he senses her charm.
She tucks a loose strand of her chestnut hair behind her ear and he remembers the gesture so clearly that it is like a hand reaching into his chest and clawing at his heart.
When she lifts her chin as though inhaling the scent of the air, Fitz finds himself inhaling, too.
He almost believes that he can smell the rich soil, the scent of growing things, the forest and the sea.
Beyond her, beyond the tapestry of ruined, walled gardens and the meadow of wildflowers and the fringe of forest, the ocean glints like a knife.
Fitz presses a hand to the window. The glass is cool against his open palm, steadying it.
All these decades later, and he can still feel the frantic beat of her pulse below his tightening grip, can still see the fury that flashed in her eyes in those horrible last moments.
A suffocating gray cloud gathers within Fitz’s chest. His memory swirls, churns, breaks apart and comes together again. His breath grows labored.
“Good morning!”
The voice is both muffled and shrill. Fitz gasps and rips his eyes from the ghost on the terrace to glare at the wall that separates his apartment from the next one.
“Marjorie.” He spits out the name like a curse.
Marjorie Swenson receives a call from her grandson every day.
Every. Single. Day. And the woman can’t do a damn thing, not even answer a call, without making an absolute racket.
Marjorie Swenson, with her parade of visitors and her cackles of laughter.
What in the devil could be so funny all the time?
Especially here, now, when they’re all old and stuck living side by side, hovered over as though they are misfit children in a boarding school dormitory.
Lights out, children. Lights on, children.
How many times has he demanded to switch apartments?
For so much of his life, Fitz told people to jump and they asked how high.
But not anymore. No one at the Oceanview Home bothers to offer more than a half-heartedly wrinkled brow when he voices his complaints.
It’s enough to make him question if he actually has voiced them!
His memory does funny things these days, mixing him up.
Being here, at the Oceanview Home, isn’t helping in the slightest.
It was his lawyer who recommended this particularly dysfunctional prep school for the dying to Fitz nine years earlier.
“There’s land,” Tyler Chadwick said. “A sea view. Gardens.”
Fitz scoffed. “Gardens? What do I care about gardens?”
“They say they’re good for the soul.”
Fitz did not reward this with a reply.
“Not for you, then,” said Tyler, whose patience had always felt like a rebuke. “For Tad.”
Fitz’s dog, Tad, was a tall, lean, twelve-year-old shepherd.
As it turned out, the Oceanview Home was one of the few retirement communities in the area that accommodated dogs.
This news swayed Fitz. It was Tad, after all, who had barked so loudly that his neighbors in San Francisco had called the police when Fitz had his stroke.
The dog had saved his life, but Fitz tried not to blame him.
In the hospital after his stroke, a social worker asked all sorts of irritating questions about his family and his friends.
My friends? Fitz scoffed. The woman was crazy and he gave her a look to let her know it.
He was eighty-two years old! He’d long ago fallen out of touch with the men from his brokerage firm, the only real friends he’d ever had.
“There’s no one,” Fitz told her.
The social worker narrowed her eyes. “No one?”
Fitz narrowed his eyes right back at her.
“Think about it,” she said at last, rising. “I’ll be back later.”
Well, that did it. He was not able to stand the thought of seeing her again, so he grumbled a bit before coughing up the name of his lawyer, Tyler Chadwick.
Soon he and Tad were living at the Oceanview Home.
It was an impressive old estate, and the staff was attentive (To a fault, thought Fitz, who vastly preferred to be left alone), and Tad did love the grounds.
And then, just as they were getting used to their new apartment, Tad went to sleep one night and never woke up.
Fitz certainly knew that that was how these things sometimes happened, but was it really too much to ask for a little warning?
A day or two of mild illness to allow him time to say goodbye?
Perhaps with a bit more time, Fitz wouldn’t now still look around for Tad throughout the day, calling for him, worrying that his dog has run off…
before the memory of his death lands like a punch to his stomach.
Without Tad by his side to remind him of the stroke, it sometimes takes Fitz a disorienting moment or two when he awakens in the morning to remember just how he ended up in this place, with its molding landscape and that hyena Marjorie Swenson in the apartment next door.
The stroke, he reminds himself then. The prying social worker.
Tyler Chadwick. Tad. All day, his thoughts jump around, darting unwisely into the past only to leap forward with a jolt, tugging him into knots.
He looks down at the terrace now, remembering… but she is gone. Again.
Fitz smacks his palm against the window, and the sharp sting that travels out along each of his fingers so undeniably roots him in the present that it comes as a sort of relief.