You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [29]
Looking over it now, he wondered at the neutrality of the grass and the trees and the houses beyond, how in their stillness they neither judged nor forgave. He stared across the playing field a moment longer. And then, calmly, he crossed to the wardrobe and took down the box.
SITTING IN THE front room, Hillary heard her brother’s footsteps overhead and then the sound of his door closing. Her tears had dried and she felt a stony kind of calm, gazing into the wing chair opposite—an old piece of their parents’ furniture. Threads showed at the armrests, and along the front edge the ticking had come loose. At first they’d meant to get rid of so many things, the faded rugs, the heavy felt curtains, but their parents’ possessions had settled in the house, and then there seemed no point.
In the supermarket checkout line, she sometimes glanced at the cover of a decor magazine, a sunny room with blond wood floors, bright solid colors, a white sheet on a white bed. The longing for it usually lasted only a moment. She knew she’d be a foreigner in such a room.
She sipped the last of her wine and put the glass down on the coffee table. Darkness had fallen now and in the window she saw the reflection of the lamp and the mantel and the bookcase.
“Funny, isn’t it? How it happens.” That’s all her friend Miriam Franks would ever say if the conversation turned onto the topic of why neither of them had married. Hillary would nod and recall one of the evenings she’d spent with Ben up at the cottage, sitting in the garden, talking of Owen, thinking to herself she could only ever be with someone who understood her brother as well as Ben did.
She switched off the light in the front room and walked to the kitchen. Owen had wiped down the counters, set everything back in its place. For a moment, she thought she might cry again. Her brother had led such a cramped life, losing his friends, scared of what people might know. She’d loved him so fiercely all these years, the fears and hindrances had felt like her own. What good, then, had her love been? she wondered as she pulled the French doors shut.
Upstairs, Owen’s light was still on, but she didn’t knock or say good night as she usually did. Across the hall in her own room, she closed the door behind her. The little stack of letters lay on her bed. Years ago she had read them, after rummaging for a box at Christmastime. Ben was married by then, as she’d found out when she called. Her anger had lasted a season or two but she had held her tongue, remembering the chances Owen had to leave her and how he never had.
Standing over the bed now, looking down at the pale blue envelopes, she was glad her brother had let go of them at last. Tomorrow they would have supper in the kitchen. He would offer to leave this house, and she would tell him that was the last thing she wanted.
Putting the letters aside, she undressed. When she’d climbed into bed, she reached up and turned the switch of her bedside lamp. For an instant, lying in the sudden darkness, she felt herself there again in the woods, covering her brother’s eyes as she gazed up into the giant oak.
WAR’S END
HE HAS SEEN these cliffs before, in picture books. He has seen the wide beaches and the ruined cathedral. Ellen, his wife, she has shown him. In the taxi from the station, Paul looks over the golf course, and there is Saint Andrews: the bell tower, rows of huddled stone houses, the town set out on a promontory, out over the blue-black sea. Farther, in the distance, a low bank of rain cloud stretches over the water; waves emerge from the mist. He follows them into shore, watching them swell and crest, churning against the rocks.
Ellen reaches across the back seat and takes his hand.
They have come here for her to use a library at the university. They have paid for their trip with the last of her grant money and a credit card. Paul’s latest psychiatrist, the one they can’t really afford, has said a change of scenery might help,