Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

On his last night in Williamsburg, he’d slipped outside after everyone was asleep. Where the streets should have been packed with people trying to catch a breeze, the fire escapes carpeted with children lying on folded blankets, the rooftops covered with older people trying to sleep and younger ones hoping to find some privacy, instead he’d found almost no one. A few young men were drinking; piano music rose from the bars. By the waterfront he saw the flare of matches, three or four people sitting out on the wharves to fish and smoke cigarettes, and although it was nearly two in the morning he’d walked that way, through the gentle breeze, to the water. His last night, as he remembered it, of freedom.

HE MULLED OVER those experiences during his first, solitary week. Midway through the second week, after his temperature had come back down, he was allowed his first visitor: not Miles, thankfully, but Eudora. From his bed he saw her pause in the doorway, looking up and down the corridor as if to make sure she was unobserved. As she turned her head, a moth detached itself from the lampshade and drifted her way, passing so close to her neck that he could feel the touch on his own skin.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. “Better?”

“Better,” he agreed. When she smiled he felt, at first, only the pleasure of seeing her. Then he saw that she held one hand pressed over the side pocket of her blue wrapper, as if she had a pain there. Still working double shifts, six days a week — suppose she was getting sick? He said, “But how are you ?”

She shrugged, looking back toward the door. “Busy,” she said, “but fine. I was very relieved when Dr. Petrie said yesterday that you could have visitors.” With her hand flattened along the top of her thigh, she continued, “It’s not as if this is my first time — I came to see you a lot when you were first sick. Don’t you remember?”

“Not exactly.” He sat up a little straighter, smoothing the front of the white shift required in the infirmary. Beneath the blanket, his legs were humiliatingly bare. “I couldn’t always tell what I was dreaming and what was real. But I thought I remembered you sitting next to me, wearing a mask.”

She nodded. “I stopped by most days to see you and Irene. She still can’t talk, but she’s doing much better.”

“I heard.”

He waited for a moment, wondering when she’d ask him about what Miles had found, hoping she’d leap into the silence. Instead she looked around again and then drew from her wrapper pocket an oblong tin. “For you,” she said.

A smaller, more delicate version of the box Miles had taken from his locker — for a second, he wondered if she was mocking him. As he pried at the lid, she said, “I baked them.”

“Cookies,” he said, wonderingly.

She made a wry face. “I hope they’re all right; I’m not much of a baker but I wanted to make you something.”

He nibbled the edge of a tawny disk: gritty, buttery, not too sweet, scented with vanilla. Something like shortbread but not as rich. In another life, in another century, his mother had made a treat with ground almonds that had tasted faintly like this and had a similar sandy texture. His mouth watered, and then his eyes.

“Then you don’t believe what Miles has been saying about me?” he asked. After all, his relapse had been worth something. The moth flapped slowly back into the room, found a column of sunlight, and began spiraling up toward the ceiling, spacing its turns as closely as if it were moving through the coils of a still.

Eudora looked down at the tin. “No,” she said, more slowly than he would have wished. From that he knew he’d been right to fear the hum from our porches.

“The box belongs to a friend of Ephraim’s,” he said, sketching the story of Felix’s visit — but not, we have to note, telling her that the box had once held three pencils rather than two. On the other hand, she’d never admitted to him that she’d seen the box at all — and she didn’t admit that now. All she said, when he was finished, was, “I knew there was an explanation. Can I tell the others?”

He shook his head. “It’s too risky, the way Miles is acting. He has contacts all over the state. Maybe all over the country — I don’t want anything to happen to Ephraim or his family. And you know what it’s like here: tell one person, and everyone else knows in an hour. People here know me well enough; they ought to just trust me. You did.”

“But I’m not a patient here,” she said, startling him.

MILES COULDN’T PROVE anything, especially since he couldn’t question Leo further. But at both Tamarack State and throughout the village he voiced his suspicions. He told anyone who’d listen about Leo’s refusal of a room at Mrs. Martin’s house — some of us were indeed baffled by that, and others annoyed; no one offered us such things — and he harped on the box and its contents.

Finally, after Dr. Petrie found Miles discussing Leo with the milk delivery man, he asked Miles for a private meeting, much as Miles had once asked him. First Miles said he was too busy; then, relenting a bit, said he might be able to spare a few minutes but that he couldn’t come to his office. “In the village, then,” Dr. Petrie said. “Tomorrow, or the next day?”

“Tomorrow,” Miles said. “At Mrs. Martin’s house.”

“Not there,” Dr. Petrie said. They compromised on the picnic area at the lake’s east end, not exactly convenient but easy enough for both to reach.

It was raining that Wednesday, without a breath of breeze and still very warm; Dr. Petrie, arriving first, chose a bench and covered his end with half the piece of oilcloth he’d carried down the hill. Then he sat beneath the shelter of his old umbrella, carefully keeping the rest of the cloth dry. When Miles arrived, five minutes late, he unrolled the rest of the cloth and watched, bemused, as Miles perched at the farthest end of the bench and hid under his own umbrella. Briefly the ribs of the two umbrellas clashed, so that Dr. Petrie was forced another inch away.

“What is it you want?” asked Miles, looking straight ahead. “I have another meeting in less than an hour.”

“I want you to stop bothering Leo Marburg,” Dr. Petrie said. Out on the lake young gulls, speckled like eggs, were floating in groups of three and four, apparently more interesting to Miles than anything he himself said. “I’m asking you as one professional man to another,” he went on, trying to keep his tone calm, “to do what you know is right. You’ve seen Irene’s letter. Both Dr. Richards and I have explained the situation to you, as we understand it. Your accusations are based on nothing but your own anger.”

Beneath the umbrella’s scalloped edge, he could see only part of Miles’s profile: earlobe, nostril, mouth and chin, the lips drawn tight. Still, in the most annoying way, he kept staring at the seagulls.

“Miles?” Dr. Petrie said.

“You might,” Miles said distantly, “want to be a little more careful about how you talk to me.”

Dr. Petrie lowered and furled his umbrella so that the rain, falling more gently now, might cool his head. For this he needed calmness, clarity. He took two slow breaths, gripped his umbrella in both hands, and said, “You refer, I know, to your powerful friends, and to your committee. Then let me refer to them as well. What would they think if they knew you’d hired Naomi Martin as a driver only because of your infatuation? And that you kept her on — that you let her drive you to the most sensitive meetings, where she could see exactly who was present and even overhear certain things — long past the point when you knew she was untrustworthy?”

Miles’s umbrella dropped another two inches, obscuring everything but his chin. “They’d say nothing. Because that’s not true.”