I step behind a tree but the thin trunk leaves me exposed. I crawl into the mulch behind the shrubs but this isn’t a sufficient place to hide either. I listen into the dark night but hear nothing, not a footstep, not the opening or the closing of a door. Nothing but a hum in the air, an anticipation of something I can’t put my finger on. The hum intensifies. A whisk and a tick. With a sssssssh-chk-chk-chk sssssssh-chk-chk-chk, sprinkler heads emerge from the ground. In an instant my clothes cleave to my body like a second layer of skin.
Voices. They linger, nameless at first, then my mind shifts into reality. I recognize the silhouette. I think I recognize the silhouette. The way he walks, moves. It’s Edward. As peculiar as this is, on the borders of my consciousness, there’s another voice. Marleen’s. Then they’re gone.
I root the lawn, scan the courtyard, then the breezeway. I part the bushes and shrubs. I turn around quickly as if I’m attempting to catch someone standing behind me. There’s no one, not in the breezeway where the man swept up the dead birds, not down the path. I turn again, just to make sure, but the walkways remain deserted and not a soul is about this time of night. Farther down, the silvery sidewalk fades between the buildings, disappearing into complete and utter darkness. I make a run for the breezeway and go back inside. I lock the door behind me.
I should have followed the voice. Should have confronted Edward right then and there. Should have. Could have. Would have. Was it Edward after all? I’m reminded of the night I woke and thought I was still living with Edward at Hawthorne Court. It was a bewildering feeling, like memories competing for priority. Getting out of bed there was a straight shot, but here the bathroom door is off to the side and so I stood with my hands pressed against the wall and felt my way around. A moment of confusion, like feeling disorientated by accidentally getting out of a hotel elevator on the wrong floor.
I must admit at times I jostle with recollections of Hawthorne Court and Shadow Garden. They overlap. My brain plays with both before settling on the correct one. Losing my former life is a difficult thing to come to terms with and sometimes I struggle to find the right memory but in the end my brain resolves the conflict.
Marleen’s voice? While I’ve been busy organizing and moving in, getting my life down to a schedule that resembles some sort of existence, the voices I heard have confirmed what I’ve been thinking for a while: I no longer trust her.
When I allow myself to state it so matter-of-factly, it sounds menacing. I wonder what’s easier: to be confronted with the facts or to forever imagine the worst.
* * *
• • •
The next morning, to occupy my mind, I look around the living room as if I’m seeing it for the first time. My apartment at Shadow Garden is a beautiful place, I have to admit as much; the fireplace to my right, carved marble with soft beige undertones and veins swirling together, is slightly too small for the room but that’s not what bothers me: the mantel appears disjointed, off balance. A vase. The one I nearly dropped last night. It’s a tacky thing I don’t recall purchasing or having received as a gift. It sits on the left side, shoved to the back, throwing off the symmetry of the pillar candles on the right. It’s ugly and maybe I ought to get rid of it altogether.
A leather-bound book on the coffee table strikes me as foreign, an intruder in my familiar surroundings like a visitor’s forgotten umbrella leaning in a corner, but then I recognize it, the cover embossed with a golden globe. I open it and a sudden rush of excitement surges through me as the veillike glassine sheet crumbles, then comes to rest.
The pictures are decades old: in one my hair is long and parted in the middle, before Penelope was born, on our honeymoon; the cabin in New Mexico; sitting on a rock at the edge of a lake, snowcapped mountains in the back, Colorado maybe? Some photographs have a bluish tint to them, taken before there was digital photography, when pictures came out the way they came out and you got what you got and you didn’t complain. We had a camera with so many functions it boggled my mind and I eventually bought a point-and-shoot camera.
A series of images on a beach. I can almost smell the salty air, feel the wind in my hair, my skin dry, my lips cracked. Penelope, about four, building a sand castle with her legs folded up under her. Edward is scooping sand in a bucket. They both look into the camera, happy, carefree. I don’t recall the moment but I probably said smile, or maybe I just caught them in a moment of happiness. Penelope’s mouth is open as if she is saying something to me.
Most of the photographs are overexposed, the sun like a floodlight streaming in from the back, beaming rays not meant to be a special effect but a failure on my part. But still, the images are beautiful, anything but perfect, but beautiful. Look at those boats bobbing on the waves! The colors are striking, the pale sand and the waves whitecapped in the breeze, like brushstrokes placed by a painter. I’m not ready to abandon this scene to memory just yet, but a vibrant color catches my attention: the trip to a strawberry farm. Penelope clutches a basket full of berries, puny little things, barely a third the size of the ones in supermarkets. Red smudges around her mouth, smeared across her cheek with the back of her hand. Penelope’s outfit was ruined that day, but the fun we had.
Like a gift from an unknown benefactor these photographs are conduits to the past, stuck to cardboard pages with glue, separated by flimsy paper to keep them from becoming worn and damaged.
I’m not naïve. Photographs are a world of make-believe. You have to look beyond the colors and the setting, the smiles, to recognize what they’re really about. I turn the page and there it is. A portrait of Penelope. I stare at her face caught in a moment of perfection. Focusing on her eyes, I’m taken aback by how they glisten with the twinkle of laughter. The happiest memories hurt the most, cut the deepest. I clutch the album tight against my body.
The photographs remind me of what I’ve lost and that’s all it takes for me to burst into tears. This is all that remains of those days, of our happiness. Marleen pries the album from my hands. Her eyes are wide and glaring, her eyebrows raised.
If I didn’t know any better I’d say she’s mad at me.
* * *
• • •
Later that afternoon, at my physical therapy appointment, I follow the instructions given to me. I stretch and extend, adduct, abduct. I complain about a lack of range of motion in my hip.
“You’ve been making super progress compared to where you started,” the physical therapist, a stout blond man with a red beard, says and furrows his brows. His name is Jed and he wears L.L.Bean jackets. I feel compelled to roll my eyes every time he uses the word super.
“I’m still not where I want to be,” I say as I turn on my side, knees bent to provide support. I straighten my top leg and slowly raise it. I hold for five, lower it, relax, and repeat. He doesn’t know how well I am. Keeping my recovery a secret, I wonder what the point of it is.