The Drowning Tree (37 page)

“And there was broken glass all over the place.” Neil reaches out, takes my hand, and turns it over. I hope he doesn’t feel the tremor that runs through me when he traces the little crescent-shaped scar at the base of my right thumb. “You cut yourself on some broken glass that was on the floor.…”

His voice trails off and I know he’s remembering how I cut my hand.
We’d been making love and I had reached out across the floor—for what? to grab onto something? I can’t remember, only that I’d felt something slice into my hand and screamed, but Neil hadn’t realized I was hurt until later.

“Come upstairs,” I say, wishing my voice didn’t sound so gravelly. “I’ll show you something.”

On the window ledges the shards of glass are glowing in the last sunlight, copper and violet, citrine green and gold-flecked rose—like peacock feathers or dragonfly wings.

“They’re from Penrose’s opalescent vases done during his art nouveau stage when he was copying Tiffany’s Favrile glass. I found shattered pieces all over the floor in here, as if someone had smashed a hundred vases. We’re lucky we didn’t get torn to shreds.”

Neil’s looking around the loft. Of all the guests I’ve had here recently—Christine, Kyle, Detective Falco—none of them saw it the way Neil can, with the image of the present loft superimposed on how it looked that night when we climbed up to the roof from the railroad tracks and came in through a broken skylight that had been overgrown with vines. The moonlight cast the shadows of the vines onto the floor, turning the loft into a shadow jungle, and lit up the crushed iridescent glass like sand from a tropical beach. Neil looks up at the stained-glass panels in the skylight—at the pattern of leaf and vine I’ve set into them—and then down at the tiles on the floor, which I glazed in a swirl of iridescent colors that I copied from the glass shards I found here.

“You’ve made it the way it looked that night,” he says.

“Remember what you said? That you wanted us to live in a ruin—”

“And you said only if there was adequate plumbing and heating. You’ve done it, Juno, you’ve made a livable ruin.” He smiles the way I remember—an upward lift of the left corner of his mouth that seems to tug at some corresponding muscle deep inside me.

I turn away and pull out the plates of food and put them on the counter for him to snack on while I cook, then turn on the burner underneath the iron skillet (which still has a little bacon fat in it) and under the pot of water. Neil nibbles at the the prosciutto and melon while wandering
around the loft, stopping to look at pictures of Bea and asking me how old she is in each one and the occasion of the photo. Fifth grade graduation, third grade play, her bunkmates at the Adirondack camp she went to for five years—a compendium of life events he’s missed. It must get depressing for him because he stops asking until he gets to a shot of Bea and Christine taken last year in front of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.

“Christine said she was grateful for the time she got to spend with Bea,” he says, “that it made up a little for not having her own child.”

“Really?” I look up from the bowl of eggs I’m beating. “I never realized until the last time we talked that she missed not having a kid. She was always so independent.”

Neil comes over to the counter and picks up the knife from the chopping board and starts mincing the onions that I’ve already cut into finer pieces. When we used to cook together he always did the chopping because he thought I wasn’t thorough enough. I’d have to stop him sometimes from pulverizing the vegetables.

“I think she had always been afraid of having a kid because of the bouts she’d had with depression. She thought it would make her a bad mother. I think she was afraid, too, that there was something wrong with her that she’d pass on.”

I think of how horrible it must have been for her to find out that her baby had Tay-Sachs. “She was pregnant when she died,” I say, turning to Neil to take the onions from him so that he can’t help but meet my gaze. His eyes widen, but whether from surprise or the onion fumes I’m not sure. I slide the onions into the skillet. The crackle they make in the hot grease is the only sound for a few minutes.

“I thought maybe there was something like that going on,” Neil finally says, “from the questions she asked me.” He picks up a chunk of parmesan and grates it into the eggs while I sauté the onions.
How easily we’ve fallen into the old patterns
, I think, watching the white flesh of the onions turn translucent in the skillet. This was a dish we often cooked together. Neil loved that it was a recipe that I’d gotten from my mother and the story that it was a dish that coal carriers ate in Rome.

“I thought you said she mostly asked you questions about Clare Barovier?”

“Should I put the pasta in?” he asks because the water’s come to a boil. I tell him yes and he adds a pinch of salt without asking whether I’ve salted the water yet because I’d told him once that it was an old Italian superstition that it was bad luck to salt the water before it boiled. “It was the kind of questions she asked about Clare,” he continues, stirring the spaghetti noodles into the boiling water. “Had she recovered her sanity in her last years? Could she have done all those paintings if she were still crazy? And then she started asking about my recovery. How long had I been taking the Pieridine? Were there any side effects? How widely had it been tested? What would I do if the drug stopped working? Mostly she seemed interested in figuring out if a person could truly recover from mental illness. I thought she might be asking for herself. It was her biggest fear I think—that she was unbalanced and she might someday go insane.”

“And what were your answers?”

“To which questions? The ones about Clare or the ones about me?”

The pot of boiling water I’m carrying to the sink is heavy, but still I pause for a moment. I’m not sure myself what I want to know anymore. My interest has shifted suddenly from Christine to Neil.

“The questions about your recovery. I want to know how you’re doing.” I pour the water and pasta into a colander and step back as a wave of steam rises from the sink.

“I told her the truth—that the Pieridine has been a miracle for me, but that there were no guarantees. It hasn’t cleared Phase II testing yet and it’s only been field tested at less than a dozen facilities. Since it’s a new drug there aren’t any long-range studies on its effectiveness over time. I told her I was trying to make the most of the clarity it’s given me while I can.”

I pour the drained pasta back in the large pot and put it back on the stove on a low light. Neil pours the sautéed onions into it and then holds the bowl of eggs and cheese over the pot. This is the tricky part of making carbonara. Getting the eggs to cook just enough so that the sauce clings
to the pasta without clumping or curdling. I nod for him to start pouring. I stir.

“What about her last question?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the yellow sauce as it thickens around the thin, nearly transparent noodles.

“You mean what would I do if it stopped working?”

I nod. I hear Neil sigh, but I don’t look up.

“I told her I couldn’t go back. That I’d rather die than go back to how I was before.”

W
E EAT OUT ON THE ROOFTOP, THE FOOD LAID OUT ON A TABLE MADE FROM AN OLD
Rose Glass packing crate, a dozen candles lining the railing. Francesca lies under Neil’s chair with her head resting on his foot, but Paolo roams back and forth restlessly, disdainful of the bacon treats Neil offers him.

“You know we’ve got a Gatsby-Daisy thing going on,” he says, gesturing with his wineglass toward the dark hills across the river. (Another miracle of Pieridine, I’ve learned, is its compatibility with moderate alcohol consumption.) “The place where I’m living is almost directly across the river from here only it’s just below that hill. If I climbed straight up from my back door I could put out a green light and signal to you.”

“I thought all that land belonged to Astolat,” I say, deliberately
choosing not to enlarge on his reference to Fitzgerald’s star-crossed lovers. What amuses me, actually, is that he’s made himself Daisy in the analogy.

“The Beeches is the old gatehouse. Penrose donated it to Briarwood before he died to be used an an outpatient facility—a sort of halfway house for us recovering loonies. We’re not allowed to wander around the estate—”

“I bet that hasn’t stopped you.”

“Actually, Astolat is sealed off behind another wall beyond the gatehouse. A fifteen-foot stone wall with iron spikes and broken glass on top. The only person who goes onto the estate is Gavin Penrose. Some of the older residents of The Beeches say he roams the grounds at night looking for buried treasure.”

“Buried treasure?” I ask skeptically.

“Yeah, well, these are mental patients telling these stories. The caretaker told me that Penrose did in fact shoot at something he thought was a trespasser once, only it turned out to be a raccoon. Makes you wonder who’s crazy.”

I smile at the image of Gavin nervously prowling his grandfather’s estate. “Why do you think he’s so anxious to keep people off the grounds?”

“The caretaker says it’s to avoid lawsuits—you know, someone stumbles into an old basement, breaks a leg, and sues—but it does seem a little paranoid. Christine said she thought Penrose was a little crazy himself near the end of his life. The disposition of the estate was bizarre. Besides leaving The Beeches to Briarwood he stipulated that the rest of Astolat couldn’t be sold or open to the public until fifty years after his death. Christine had tried to get permission to tour the grounds, but she said Gavin Penrose refused.”

“I guess that’s why she was so intrigued when she heard Bea say you could get onto the grounds from the water. I wonder what she wanted to see so badly that she’d risk crossing the river in a kayak in the middle of the night.”

Neil shrugs and gets up, dislodging Francesca’s head from his foot. She follows him to the railing, where he moves a few candles aside so he can sit on the top rail. It makes me nervous to see him balanced above the
sheer drop to the train tracks, but I resist saying anything. It’s the type of warning that always used to make him angry and would push him toward doing something even more reckless.

“She probably just wanted to see the ruins of Astolat. I would, too. You say you can paddle right up the Wicomico?”

“Uh-huh. We didn’t get very far the day we found Christine, but Bea says there’s a spot farther upstream where you can beach and get out to walk around.”

There’s an awkward pause during which I wonder if I should suggest we do just that. Somehow we’ve managed to get through most of the evening without reference to the future. To our future. I guess a kayaking trip would be a neutral enough outing for us to take, but the thought of it opens up so many potentially uncomfortable situations—renting the kayaks from Kyle, my dad hearing about it, not to mention actually being out on the water with Neil again and revisiting the scene of Christine’s death. So instead of suggesting we make the trip I ask if he wants another slice of tiramisu.

Immediately, something in his face that had been open closes. It’s the way he used to look at the end of my visits to Briarwood when he realized that I hadn’t come to take him home.

“No thanks,” he says, sliding off the railing, “actually I’d better get going. We sort of have curfew—a voluntary curfew, they call it, whatever that means.”

I walk him down the side stairs and around to the front of the factory. Francesca comes with us, but Paolo stays on the stairs howling. It’s the first time I’ve seen the dogs more than six feet apart from each other.

“I’d better go back up,” I say, “before he wakes up the whole neighborhood.”

Neil looks up and down the deserted street, at the abandoned storefronts and disreputable-looking boardinghouses, the only sign of life the neon shamrock over Flannery’s bar across from the train station. It doesn’t look like a neighborhood that is easily disturbed.

“Thanks for dinner, Juno. I thought I’d never taste anything as good as your carbonara again.”

It’s such a simple compliment that I immediately regret not asking
to see him again—for missing that moment. “Maybe we could do it again sometime …” I say weakly, ashamed at how my voice trails off.

“Look,” he says, “I understand that you can’t just open up your life and let me in after all these years. And you shouldn’t have to deal with people talking about us … but there is something I wanted to do with you … a favor I wanted to ask you and it wouldn’t involve being here, so we could get used to each other before dealing with other people’s opinions …”

He takes a step forward and touches my face. His wording has reminded me of the Latin poem I translated for Portia, the one where Catullus tells his girlfriend that they shouldn’t care about the opinions of others and then asks her for a thousand kisses, so many that no evil person would ever be able to count their number.

“We could do it at The Beeches,” he says. “There’s plenty of room and light …”

“Do what?” I manage to ask, my voice so trembly that Francesca, who’s wedged herself in between us, looks up at me and whimpers.