I hear a buzzing noise and notice a dozen or so tiny moths fluttering against the window, trying to get out. I cross the room and nudge it open, careful to avoid a crack running down the middle of the glass, yet another thing to take care of. As I shoo the moths outside, I see that Sam’s car is gone. He’s probably off to the Y, where he goes during lunch sometimes, returning with a mop of wet hair.
Looking around, I consider my options. I could turn the study into a guest bedroom, but what’s the point? There are three spare bedrooms upstairs already, and who’s going to visit me here? Linda? I highly doubt anyone from the city would be enticed by a tour of the strip mall and the additions to the dollar menu at the Wendy’s on Route 9.
I decide to table the question and start with the papers, quickly realizing that this was a family that did not throw things away. Original drawings of the Lawrence House, designed by one of the most renowned architects of the time. Newspaper clippings from as far back as 1936, when Charles Lawrence was a confidante of FDR. Dozens of scrapbooks—stoic Europeans, posing straight-backed on the porch. I become so caught up in the family history—they made millions in oil and, later on, plastic—that it takes a few minutes before I register the noise coming from one of the boxes I’ve moved to the corner of the room.
A voice.
I stop reading. I’m not imagining it. Someone is talking.
I set down the folder I’ve been paging through and walk toward the window. Maybe it’s that neighbor from the brown house on the other side of the narrow bridge, the only other house on the street, coming to say hello. The one with swingy blond hair and that strange-looking dog, always peering over the hedges, trying to get a look at the house. Sidney Pigeon—that’s really her name. I got a piece of her mail once, some bogus car insurance offer, and looked her up. Three boys, their photos all over Facebook. From the window of one of the upstairs bedrooms I can see her front lawn, and I’ve watched her out there with her husband, the way she follows him around the yard, pointing out chores like he’s two weeks into a job at Home Depot and she’s the brand-new assistant manager. And when you’re done here in lawn care, Drew, I’ll have something for you in the plumbing department.
But there’s nobody on the street when I look outside, and I tell myself I must have imagined it. As soon as I return to the papers, though, it starts up again. I inch forward, closer to the boxes in the corner, the voice getting louder as I kneel down and rest my ear against the cardboard. “It’s time for the delivery of the day,” a man is saying. “When our friends at UPS surprise one lucky fan with a special delivery.”
I laugh out loud in relief. A radio inside one of these boxes must have gotten turned on somehow. I strip off the rigid tape and open the flaps, rooting through the contents. There’s no radio here, or in the second box I search, and yet I can still hear a faint voice. I move the boxes aside, and that’s when I see it, in the floor where the boxes were: a shiny flash of metal. A vent.
I lean forward.
“Jose Muñez up to bat, Silas James on deck.” Sports radio? I sit back on my heels and clasp my hand to my mouth, putting it together. I can hear downstairs, directly into Sam’s office. I rise slowly and look out the window. Sam’s car is in the driveway, parked behind mine.
I’m frozen, unsure what to do, when a red BMW appears at the top of the hill and turns into the driveway. A woman steps out. It’s Catherine Walker, a patient. I heard her answer her phone two weeks ago on the way out of her appointment—the type of woman who says her name rather than hello when she answers the phone. If Google can be trusted, she’s a rising painter from New York, Andy Warhol Lite, and lives in a house fancy enough to get her a feature in Architectural Digest (who knew acrylic paintings of lipstick tubes could sell so well?).
Catherine’s dressed casually today: black leggings and a white button-down shirt, ankle boots with a heel on them. I step away and press my back against the wall. I know what I should do. I should cover the vent, return to the business of cleaning, and tell Sam what happened later, at happy hour. I thought I was going crazy, hearing voices, but it turns out the thing I was hearing was you, downstairs in your office. We have to get that fixed.
I push up my sleeves and return to the folder I was paging through—financial documents from the family business—when I hear the faint buzz of Sam’s bell. A moment later, the outside door slams shut.
I hesitate. I should leave, find something else to do. But instead I put the folder down, walk quietly to the vent, and kneel down beside it.
“Hello, Catherine,” Sam says, his voice clear as day. “Come on in. Sit wherever you like.”
I slide onto my stomach and press my ear to the vent.
Just for a few seconds. Just this once.
Chapter 5
“It sounds like you’re feeling better, creatively at least,” Sam says. He crosses his legs and glances at the clock on the floor next to the couch, where patients can’t see it. Six more minutes.
“Yeah. That place has got good energy,” Christopher says. “Something about it unlocks me.” Christopher Zucker. Early thirties. Creative director at a new design firm colonizing the former paper mill along the river. Sam started seeing him after Christopher’s doctor recommended he talk to someone about his anxiety. He’s spent the last twelve minutes of the session telling Sam how he’s been working in the coffee shop on the ground floor of his office building, trying hard to overcome a creative block. “Great views, too,” Christopher says.
Sam nods. “Has a patio overlooking the river, right?”
“Yeah, but I mean the girls. Yoga studio on the second floor. If you time it right . . .” He winks—patient attempting to normalize habit of objectifying women through alignment with therapist—and then changes the subject to Sofie, the twenty-one-year-old Czech model he met online. Sam nods, forcing himself to acknowledge a sudden pang of irritation, tracing it back to the idea of Christopher and Annie being at that coffee shop at the same time. Annie mentioned this place to him the other day, telling him she stopped there for lunch after a run along the river, and Sam imagines the way Christopher would have checked her out, the look of disdain she would have given him in return. (She’d hate the guy—his comments about women, his adult scooter.)
Sam has to be careful not to let his mind wander—Christopher can be hard to follow, and staying engaged takes focus—but before he can stop himself, he’s back in Brooks Brothers in lower Manhattan at four in the afternoon on a cold afternoon last fall, where he saw Annie for the first time, standing at the tie rack in tight jeans and a tweed blazer.
“Let me guess,” she said when he approached to ask if she knew what “cocktail attire” meant. “You’re a bad boy turned cool/approachable academic who favors band shirts, but only if they’re ironic. You play basketball on your lunch hour with your nonacademic bros and then tapas and whisky with your colleagues. You’ve been invited to a wedding—his second—somewhere south of Fourteenth Street, and now you need a jacket.” She pointed toward the back of the store. “Wait for me in the dressing room.”
She brought him five different suit and shirt combinations, eight choices of ties, a classic navy blazer. Waited outside the room while he changed, stood beside him in front of the large mirror, swiping away lint and pressing wrinkles from his sleeves.