Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

We weren’t thinking about Naomi, either; she meant little to us and when we noticed her it was always as Miles Fairchild’s driver, Miles’s little friend. That New Year’s Eve she was alone in her room, looking out the dormer window toward the same crescent moon but acutely aware of Eudora’s absence. She lit a candle and swore that she’d be someplace else before the year ended. With Eudora or without, she would leave her mother’s house and find a new place to live, where she could do something interesting. Something that used her talent for drawing, perhaps. She might make sketches for a clothes designer, illustrations for a magazine. Drawings for an architect: did she need to go to school for that? Last week she’d made sixteen sketches of Leo’s face, from memory. Profile, three-quarter view, his eyes cast down or looking up; each one better than the last. For Christmas, Eudora had given her a thick pad of drawing paper she’d ordered specially. “You have such a gift,” she’d said — but what she’d really meant, what had filled the pause after that, was: Why don’t you draw something other than Leo?

Because I dream about him at night, Naomi had wanted to say. Dreamed about him, woke up thinking about him, served breakfast thinking about him, started the Model T and ran the errands and sorted mail for the boarders thinking about him every minute. Inside her head they had conversations in which he spoke and she responded, the clarity of what she felt and heard exactly mimicking her memories of actual conversations. How was a person to keep straight what she truly remembered, and what she remembered inventing?

Back in Chester, in the field behind her family’s house, there’d been a space she sometimes visited, not far from the hedge where the deer used to sleep. The tall grass was pushed to the ground, the stems bent over and swirled to make a clearing shaped like an egg. When she could find it — it was almost invisible until she was right on top of it — she sat there for hours. The grass beyond the clearing moved in the breeze. The sun came in and the bent grass where she sat was damp and fragrant, sometimes tufted with pale hair. Always she’d fall asleep there, and when she woke there’d be a moment when she didn’t know where she was, or even that she was: only the smells and the sounds and the movements and the feel of the sun on her skin. After her move to Tamarack Lake, nothing had made her feel that way again until she saw Leo — and that, she knew, was why she was so miserable. It wasn’t just the holidays and her mother’s frenzy and all the extra work, the special meals and extra decorations and the boarders’ private parties. It wasn’t just Miles, who’d been clinging to her like a tick. And it wasn’t even that she missed Eudora, who swore she wasn’t avoiding her but was never around and talked, when she could be found, only about the X-rays.

A few days ago, when the brakes on the Model T needed adjustment, Naomi had arranged to meet Eudora at the garage where Eugene worked and to take a walk with her while he did the repairs. Only after Naomi was already there had Eudora telephoned to cancel. Annoyed, Naomi had waited on the bench by the door, complaining until Eugene said he’d hardly seen his sister lately either. Busy all the time, he said. Ernest, who was back from New York for a couple of days, walked in, leaned over to inspect the brakes, and joined the conversation.

“Runs in the family,” he added, handing Eugene a wrench. “When one of us gets interested in something we really get interested .”

As if she didn’t know that herself. Later, while Eugene was fiddling with a cable, Ernest had offered her a cigarette. She’d only smoked a few before and so she puffed at it cautiously while he talked about New York. There was nothing like the city, he said, straightening his handsome shirt. Movies every day if he wanted; the docks and the markets and the people in the streets, men working in caissons beneath the river while others moved through ironwork high in the air — just being there was exciting. And who would have expected that all the hours he’d put in with his father and his great-uncle in their taxidermy shop would have helped him get a job he liked so much!

“You’re lucky,” she’d said, unable to hide her envy.

He’d given her a look and leaned in toward her, his hair hanging softly over one eye. “Why don’t you think about visiting sometime?”

Weakly she smiled and then coughed on the smoke from his cigarette.

ON THE SUNDAY after New Year’s Day, which was bitterly cold and completely still, a dead hawk appeared in the low mound of garden centered, like a bull’s-eye, inside our circular driveway. From our breakfast tables we couldn’t avoid the sight of the corpse among the stiff white stalks. Irene, who hadn’t seen the bird herself, heard about it from Leo, who arrived five minutes early for his tour of her laboratory. He chattered nervously while she showed him both her X-ray apparatus and the older equipment Eudora was playing with.

“Since when does it get so cold here that birds fall frozen from the sky?” he said. “You’d think we were in Siberia.”

Irene shrugged, smiled, and pointed toward the new Coolidge tube. “Did you ever use one of these?”

“Not that one exactly,” he said, “but earlier versions, of course. Where I went to school, we had all the usual gadgets for studying electricity. You must have too — you studied in Kraków?”

She nodded. “A long time ago, though. Everything I’ve learned about the rays, I learned in this country.”

“I learned it back there,” Leo said. “What little I know. I was six when the Roentgen rays were discovered; by the time I was in school we took the rays for granted and were more interested in what we could do with them than simply in producing them.”

“We couldn’t imagine such a thing, when I was in school,” Irene said. “Twenty years — what a difference that makes.”

Leo looked at the cabinets filled with glass plates, the long rows of chest films filed on the shelves that wound around the room, the darkroom, the chemicals and the glassware. “ Ten years makes a difference,” he said tensely. “Two. What really made me feel old were the discoveries Moseley made in Rutherford’s laboratory. That’s when I realized I’d never catch up.”

“X-ray spectroscopy is really astonishing, isn’t it?” Irene said. That there should be a way, now, to identify elements by their X-ray spectra and confirm their positions on the periodic table: this seemed as magical as peering through the envelope of human flesh. The papers demonstrating that each element had a specific number of electrons had been brilliantly clear, but still she was startled to think that Leo might understand them.

“You’re familiar with Moseley’s experiments?” she asked.

He shook his head again. “I was already in New York when he did his work,” he said bitterly. “Already no one. No lab, no books, no colleagues…”

“Such a waste,” she said, meaning Moseley’s death at Gallipoli but then embarrassed that Leo might think she meant him. “Why,” she couldn’t help asking, “did you come to America?”

He rubbed his thumb repeatedly down the inside surface of his index finger, a gesture she hadn’t been able to make in years, and said, “Didn’t we all come for similar reasons? We thought it would be different here, that we’d have a better chance.” Again his eyes wandered around the laboratory. “It worked for you. For me, it didn’t.”

His hand reached toward but didn’t touch three Erlenmeyer flasks drying upside down on a wooden rack, and when she saw the hunger on his face she rummaged in the shelf of books near her desk. Absently, as if the gesture meant nothing, she handed him two worn green volumes.