The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [57]
“And,” he says, “I wanted to see your face.”
BACK FROM THE WIRELESS OFFICE, the first thing Bigelow does is look in the mirror. How has it changed him, this information? Is her return a secret, or is it written on him for everyone to see? The reflection stares back, his own features so strange to him that he reaches out, touches the glass.
Upstairs, in his observation room, he leans into the window facing the town, the grid of plots, the blocks of houses. To keep the binoculars from shaking, he has to prop them on an upturned box.
The house, exactly like its neighbors, is easy to find. Easy for him. Were the whole of Anchorage turned upside down, shaken, and poured out, houses tumbling like hundreds of dice from a cup, still he’d be able to find that house. Her house. He holds it in the magnified circle, watches as its black window is suddenly lit silver, like an eye opening.
A cloud has moved from before the sun.
HE RISES AT SIX to read his instruments, to fill a page of his log with numbers. Breakfast: coffee and a slice of bread sopped with molasses. He pushes aside his plate to compose the morning cable; he carries the page to the cable office, hands it to the operator even as the operator is handing him the one from Washington. “Hello,” he says, or “Good morning.”
“Thank you,” Bigelow replies, and he carries it home.
He translates it, he makes his map, he eats his lunch, then he walks back the way he came. He hangs his map on the wall of the post office.
“Afternoon.”
“Afternoon.”
How is it that no one notices?
For surely he must seem vacant, perfunctory. Each day he does a hundred things without any consciousness of them. The pen in his hand moves over the page without his notice, let alone his bidding.
She. She.
He thinks the word over and over, a small word—three letters!—like a key turning in a lock. Inside himself he feels doors spring open.
HE WALKS. He walks, walks, walks. Up the bluff, down the bluff. To the water’s edge.
Where he finds each rock glazed with ice, the sand a flat hard expanse, black and dully gleaming, like wet macadam. Wind whips off the water, and stinging needles of ice take flight, mortifying whatever flesh is left exposed. At his feet, sea foam is frozen into patterns of overlapping waves.
Not yet winter, but cold enough that the surf is slowed and slurred by ice. Waves push in, too thick to curl, too heavy to break. Blue-white and luminous with their burden of ice crystals, they make a drunken, blurred, and hushing sound as they approach over the beach. With his clumsy thick mittens Bigelow digs stones out of the sand and drops them into the slush, testing it.
When? he asks himself.
SHE HAS A PATTERN. As surely as he comes and goes at a particular hour, so does she.
After eleven, but before noon, she comes out the door, she turns right on the street, she walks, it takes her nine minutes, to the center of town, where she does a few errands: Getz’s (so Getz knows, he knows), and from Getz’s several times to a building five doors up, an undertaker’s and a dentist’s office, and she can’t keep returning to an undertaker, so it must be the dentist she visits. Bigelow peers through the office window; he lets himself in. The dentist, a mild man with spectacles, sets down the cup from which he was drinking.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
Bigelow shakes his head.
“Toothache?” The dentist stands to get to a pocket in his vest. He pulls out a watch. “I have an appointment at three, but I can take a quick look.”
Bigelow stares at him. Hard to imagine her in the tilting chair, submitting to the attentions of this man with his potbelly and foot-pedal drill. Bigelow considers knocking him down, leaves before he does anything stupid.
Her teeth: small, square, and evenly spaced, except for the one lower incisor turned, perhaps as much as ten degrees out of alignment. When she let him, he’d run his tongue along the surface of her teeth, eyes closed, bumping over the one crooked one, his tongue