
ADELEINE WANDERED through Edith’s apartment, determined: the sleep had felt clean and efficient, and she wanted to keep that, bend her body to it. She opened windows and took in scents in all their elements, the exhaust of buses breathing under the loose summer sap, and she ran her hands over bright jars of old buttons and white doilies gone brittle. She turned her face towards lamps, nearly kissed the heat of the bulbs. She tilted an ear to the obsolete, yellowed plastic radio on the kitchen counter Edith always kept turned on but low, and she listened.
She could hear Edith, snoring in the next room, and she settled onto the couch, which had the color and smell of a rose left out and starved of water. She began on the important work of imagining herself capable: by the time Thomas returned, she would have plumped and dusted and shined and scrubbed and generally exhumed the apartment. Edith would grow used to resting under the breezes Adeleine let in, to the cool cloth placed gently on her forehead. As her confused words spilled out and jumbled, Adeleine would nod and rearrange them. If she had committed herself to honoring Edith’s life at its end, she had only barely considered that this effort might mean instilling some new worth in her own. Though she knew the power she felt was mania, she thought she could shape it, polish its rampant energy and send it to work for her. When her moods went running, she could dispute them from a frightened distance or turn herself over.
As she dreamed from an upright position, Adeleine wrapped one arm around her waist, remembering how Thomas had held her. It was then that Owen entered, holding a key ring in one hand and a bag of oranges in the other. He cleared a space for them on the kitchen table’s stiff lace tablecloth, much of which was obscured by stacks of unopened mail, individually wrapped candies in decorative bowls, a single wool glove left out since winter. As though she were a colleague whose face he had memorized in boredom, he nodded at Adeleine, flopped his hand in a kind of wave. “Come here and have a seat,” he said.

IN A MOTEL ROOM at the base of the Appalachians, one they’d checked in to at Edward’s insistence, was a television with the sound off but screen bright, the decade-old smell of cigarettes, and two beds covered in faded outlines of peonies. Paulie was in the shower with suspiciously soft plastic walls, surfaces that bent when pressed, audibly enjoying the miniature soaps and shampoos. Edward sat on the end of one mattress, examining the toes of his bare left foot with curiosity and disgust, and Claudia sniffed. The lull of the day enfolded them. Moments were lost, extended in the observation of afternoon light as it stretched in shadows across the nubby carpet.
“Sometimes I wish I had taken up smoking,” she said. “You know?”
“Nope.”
He flipped the mute screen to its next iteration. An ash-blond reporter pushed her breasts forward and said something about the several ambulances next to her, the cosmetic sheen of her face compromised by the red lights that periodically flashed onto it.
“A vice, you know? But a manageable one. Convenient. Just a quick mistake between meetings. I never really let myself explore, is the thing. Always responsible. Sensible shoes! Early bedtime!”
Paulie had stopped singing, and the pipes of the building hummed and coughed. The water continued in spurts.
“Claude,” sighed Edward, as though he had filled this role his whole life. “There is no shame in meeting the expectations of the people around you. In being dependable. Please take this earnestly from someone who once blacked out and pissed all over someone’s bedroom and tried to not clean his mess but absorb it by shaking baby powder everywhere.” Claudia put a hand over her face, her fore- and middle fingers parted so that she offered her distaste and amusement to Edward with one eye. They lay back on their respective beds and played a largely unsuccessful game in which he launched peanuts, underhand, in an arch over the space between them into her mouth.
Claudia, filled with the kind of comfort that comes from conquering so many miles in one day, curled up. She descended into a light doze, released cloistered sleep from her mouth and remained still within the uneven ring of peanuts that surrounded her.
When he saw her inert at last, Edward exited the room with attention to the door’s gentle close. He padded down the dingy, porous cement stairs, carefully opened the gate with the sign about pool hours, slipped off the drugstore flip-flops he’d bought ninety miles back, and descended the submerged steps into the glowing green-blue.
Paulie, now seated, brought his folded-up legs ever closer to his chest, quivering and murmuring half-words. The shower ran over the empty space of the tub, beating it with uneven sound. He didn’t know why he was crying, or why the space seemed impossible to exit, just that something wrong had set up a home in his body. One moment there he’d been, excited by tiny hotel toiletries, and the next his chest felt smaller, and the room didn’t look like a place a person could ever live, and he couldn’t remember what he deserved or why. Now he whimpered for his sister, and then Edward, and received no reply; now he reached for a phrase in the cache of those he knew and loved, but it wasn’t there.

PLIABLE IN THE HEAT, still softened by the rare optimism that had come her way, Adeleine had not been able to deflect his questions, and soon Owen had known: that the building was empty save the three of them, where Thomas had gone, for whom he was looking. The information had seemed to occur to him in stages, first sharpening the movement of his eyes and hands, until he was bloated with it, and his limbs just hung from the chair where he sat. “I need to move,” he had said. “I need to look at something else.” He’d led them up to Adeleine’s apartment with one hand on the back of his neck, one on his mother’s.
Edith took to fits of cursing and forgetting and sleeping, and her son remained collected, occasionally sighing out a bright, focused note. He sat hunched on a chocolate linen ottoman, his legs splayed. The women perched on the brocade chaise under the cracked parlor window, listening to the small sounds of his thumbs on his phone. Every few minutes, a breeze from outside tickled their bare necks.
“Oh, Mom. I wish we could just talk about it. Do you think I like to be here? Think my time is best spent in this strange woman’s apartment? Edith?” He wove his fingers together into perfectly tanned Xs and pressed them outward, stretched then straightened the curve of his back.
“This can be an easy conversation.”
His mother’s jaw worked violently; she looked like someone deep in a casino, lost in obsession, absorbing only the changing light of slot machines.
“Edith, you can sign the house over, or Adeleine, you let me know where your boyfriend has gone to converse with my vanished sister, and we can all go somewhere we’d rather be.”
He turned his body in the direction of Adeleine, tilted his head and considered her as though she were selling something. “Of course, your hands are not tied. You’re free to go. But something tells me you won’t.”
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