by Owen Sheers
When Michael had first met them that winter, there were already undercurrents pulling at Samantha and Josh’s marriage. In their differing ways, despite apparently having achieved all they’d hoped, both were honeycombed with disappointment. In the last couple of years that internal fragility had begun to show. Josh, Michael came to learn, beyond his public bonhomie, could be spiteful and demeaning to his wife. Samantha, meanwhile, met his outbursts with a deepening silence, an ingrained resentment that increasingly manifested itself in an outward disregard for Josh and his work. They both drank, Samantha for solace and reward, Josh to rediscover the optimism of his youth; to feel the muscle memory of when his life was just that, his. The first time Michael had heard them arguing through the conjoining wall of his building and their house he thought maybe a burglar had broken into their home. But then he’d recognised Josh’s accent in the muffled shouts, Samantha’s pitch in her tearful retorts.
For both Samantha and Josh, Michael appeared at this stage in their lives as someone unattached to their pasts, or to any of the areas of their marriage in which its stresses were bred. He wasn’t a work colleague of Josh’s, a university friend of Samantha’s, or a parent with a child at Lucy’s nursery or Rachel’s school. He was free of association with their histories, and as such their only shared acquaintance. All their other friends were either Samantha’s or Josh’s before becoming “theirs.” It often felt as if in Michael’s presence Samantha and Josh were able to forget their married past, and yet remember the best of themselves, too, and that this was why, beyond anything he ever brought himself, they’d become so attached to having him in their home.
In a similar way, Michael was surprised to find relief in Samantha and Josh’s unfamiliarity with Caroline. Josh thought he may have once seen one of her reports when staying at a hotel in Berlin, but he couldn’t be sure. What was certain was that neither of them had ever known her in person. Her death, for Samantha and Josh, was just another fact of Michael’s life. Something with which he’d arrived at their door along with the rest of his past, rather than a loss with which he’d been burdened, as some of his older friends had seen it. To Samantha and Josh, Caroline existed only in Michael’s telling of her. When he talked about her with them, he found himself speaking about her life, not her death. So for them, there was no “before” Caroline, but just this echo of a person, still sounding in the man sitting at their table, not as an absence, but as a part of him.
Over those first few weeks after meeting Josh and Samantha, Michael came to realise that rather than avoiding the questions of strangers, perhaps he should have been seeking them all along. In the Nelsons’ lack of familiarity with Caroline he’d discovered a taste not just of what his life might be like in the years to come, but also what it had been like before her death, and even—and at this a sharp guilt would stab through him—of what it had been like before her.
―
“Michael Turner? The Michael Turner who wrote BrotherHoods?” Tony pumped Michael’s hand harder as he said yes, that was right, he’d written BrotherHoods.
When Michael and Josh had reentered the party Michael had said he thought he should be going after all. But Josh had been insistent. He must meet Tony. He was taking over the digital arm of a company here. He’d love him; he was a great guy. Josh had known him since sophomore year. Michael was a writer, Tony was a publisher. So of course he should meet him. With a hand on Michael’s shoulder once more, Josh had guided him back into the talk and the drink of the front room.
Tony Epplin was a tall, balding man with the hollowed cheeks of a distance runner. On being introduced to Michael, described by Josh as “our writer neighbour,” he’d extended a polite but wary hand. On hearing Michael’s name, however, his expression discovered a new vitality.
“It’s great to meet you,” he said, finally letting go of Michael’s hand. “That was a great book. I loved it, I really did.”
“You two know each other?” Josh asked, looking up at Tony from between them.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Well, no. Not each other. But Michael’s book? I know that for sure. It was a big deal. Everyone knew it.”
Michael thought he saw a glimpse of their teenage dynamics in Josh’s reaction. Smiling and nodding, he turned to look at Michael as if seeing him for the first time. “Yeah? That so? You should have said!” Tony, Michael felt, had long been in possession of a taste to which Josh aspired, perhaps since those early sophomore years.
“Hey, Maddy? Maddy?”
A woman, as tall as Tony, turned towards them. Michael had never seen her before, but he still felt he knew her, having often met women like her in Manhattan, at drinks parties on the Upper East Side, or sleek in evening dress at the Met. She was slender-necked, the crow’s feet about her eyes somehow a mark of knowledge more than age.
“Maddy? Can you come here a moment?” Tony said to her. “Guess who Josh’s neighbour is?”
Maddy came over, parting the bodies between them with fingertip touches on their backs. She wore many rings, mostly gold, with emeralds and amethysts inlaid in their galleries. Michael saw Samantha tracking her approach from over another man’s shoulder. She seemed alert, ready to intervene at the first sign of trouble.
“This is my wife, Maddy,” Tony said. “And this,” he continued, laying a hand on Michael’s shoulder, “is Michael Turner. The guy who wrote BrotherHoods?”
“Oh,” she said, offering her hand. “Yes. What a wonderful book.” Her voice was as self-possessed as her beauty, slow and natural. “Weren’t they making a film of it?” she asked.
As Tony and Maddy told him how much they’d enjoyed certain passages of BrotherHoods, and how Tony had once missed his subway stop while reading it, Michael became aware of the room’s interest contracting around their conversation. Tony’s voice was strong and confident, rising above the other talk. His attention to Michael began to draw the attention of others, too. In the focus of his and Maddy’s questions, and in the ripples it sent through the other guests, Michael felt a resonance once more of the success to which the lives of Nico and Raoul had led him.
Samantha came to join them. Out of the corner of his eye Michael saw Josh turn to say something in her ear. She slipped an arm about his waist, giving him a squeeze as if to congratulate him on his discovery.
“How did you first meet them?” Tony asked, giving a twitch of his chin in professional interest. “Was it a commission?”
Josh had left them to get a couple of drinks. As he returned he handed Michael another glass of wine. Michael thanked him, took a sip, then began telling Tony about his trip up to Inwood Hill Park that day, about the cop on Dyckman and the story he’d told him about two brothers who’d left Arden Street glittering with smashed glass and car alarms. “I think it was the name of the street,” Michael said, when Tony pressed him on why he’d followed that particular story. “It seemed so incongruous. And yet suitable, I suppose.”
“Why?” Maddy asked from her husband’s shoulder.
“I don’t know. I’ve always associated Arden with the forest in As You Like It. A transgressive environment, a place to break the rules.” He laughed at himself. “A bit of a stretch, I know, but—”
“Stories breed stories!” Tony said, turning to Maddy. “Isn’t that what I always say? Stories breed stories. Always have, always will.”
Maddy closed her eyes and gave the slightest of nods to confirm her husband’s assertion. When she opened them again she was looking directly at Michael. He felt adolescent in her gaze.
Soon Josh and Samantha were asking him questions too. They’d both lived in New York when they were younger. Josh had lived on the Upper West Side when he’d crossed the river from New Jersey, and Samantha had studied at Parsons downtown. Michael was surprised to learn she knew many of the streets he was talking about. How did he conduct his research? She wanted to know. Did the police ever accuse him of being implicated?
Someone else—Janera, the young lawyer—cut in, explaining
that journalists, and therefore writers, she guessed, had a right not to disclose their sources. Michael wasn’t convinced this would have applied to him and Nico and Raoul, but he stayed quiet as the conversation moved on. When Josh asked him what he was working on now, Michael told him about Oliver Blackwood. The older blazer-wearing guest said he’d known Oliver at university. “He was,” he said, “an annoying little shit, even then.”
Perhaps it was the drink, or just the relief of having been asked the question he’d feared for so long, but as the talk opened up—to Oliver, neuroscience, other books and writers—Michael, held in a cat’s cradle of voices, and with an end-of-day light washing the room, felt something give within him. It was a subtle slippage, no more than a flake dislodging from a cliff. But it was movement nevertheless, a falling away. He was still far from at ease in these surroundings. In New York, at this type of gathering, it had always felt as if the occasion’s energy was fuelled by questions. The people around him had been on quests, searching. The effervescence of their enquiries had always settled him, made him less anxious about his own unanswered horizons. At the Nelsons’ that day, however, the party appeared to comprise those who’d found their answers. Whatever they’d set out to discover was now theirs. Their search was over, and as such, despite their praise for him, Michael, as he had in Maddy’s gaze, felt juvenile in their presence.
He continued to field their questions, answering Tony, Josh, Janera as fully as he could. He hadn’t talked this much for months. As he did, his imaginings of what Caroline would have said, too, had she been there, shadowed his words. And then what she’d have said later too, as they walked home together, or got into bed, what she’d have said about the people they’d met. How she’d have described them, judged them, done impressions of them: Maddy’s imperial stance, Josh’s eager hosting.
Whenever Michael thought of Caroline like this, projecting their past into an impossible present, although he had trouble seeing her he could always hear her voice clearly. Even now, beneath the crowded talk in the Nelsons’ front room, he could hear her, like a subterranean stream running under a city. Her laugh. Her migrating swallow of an accent, her low whisper in his ear, telling him it was time to go.
―
The morning she’d left for Pakistan, Michael hadn’t seen her leave, only heard her. The taxi had come at four in the morning. He’d wanted to be up with her, to kiss her good-bye at the door. But Caroline had got ready without waking him, so the first he’d known of her going was a kiss on his forehead, followed by her hushed voice, telling him simply, “See you in a couple of weeks, love.” And then she was gone.
The front door of Coed y Bryn closing, the taxi turning on the gravel drive. Then, as Michael turned too, under the duvet, the cab’s engine thick in the dawn, before thinning away between the hedges. That is how she’d left him. With words and sounds. So maybe that was why, as he half listened to Tony telling another anecdote, Michael could still hear her voice so clearly. Because it was the last he’d known of her, and so was the last he held of her.
But although her voice was with Michael in that room, Caroline herself was not. For the first time since her death, as he stood there in the middle of the party, he’d felt alone. Not because he was without her, but just simply alone. As a single man might be, or an only child. Alone and surviving. And this, Michael realised, as he got ready for bed later that night, is what he’d felt give. A loosening in his memory of her, in his dependency. Which was why, as he’d stood in their front room, talking with their friends, he’d felt such a flood of gratitude towards the Nelsons. Towards Lucy and her dolls, towards Rachel and her drawings, and towards their parents, Josh and Samantha, for inviting him into their home.
CHAPTER SIX
MICHAEL APPROACHED A desk in the corner of the front room. A pile of art books was topped with a paperweight, a blue butterfly suspended in its glass. A green-shaded library lamp stood beside the books. As far as he knew, this desk was where Josh had put the screwdriver he’d lent him. Michael looked around the art books and behind the lamp. There was no sign of it.
The desk, like the rest of the room, was prepared rather than used. Michael glanced around at the other surfaces: the side tables either end of the sofa, the bookshelves, the trunk in the centre of the room. The screwdriver was nowhere to be seen. Just the sculptures, photographs, paintings, and books of the Nelsons’ lives. The sunlight through the draperies lit shafts of slow-turning air. A car sighed down the street outside. Somewhere farther off, on another road, an ice-cream van began playing a tinny “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”
Michael didn’t want to start opening drawers, looking in the cupboards under the shelves. His hands were dirty and he would leave marks. He checked the time again. The broken blade was his only French grip. His fencing master, Istvan, had told him specifically to bring it this week. He went back to the desk and, hooking his little finger in the handle of its drawer, slid it open. Inside there was a pad of writing paper, a spool of Sellotape, two old chequebooks. He slid the drawer closed again.
―
The fencing lessons had been a suggestion of the bereavement counsellor he’d been assigned in Chepstow. At first Michael had resisted her idea. The thought that his grief might be sweated out like a fever felt crude, and somehow disloyal. At that stage he’d still been consumed with exposing those who’d killed Caroline, his energies channelled into sating his anger rather than assuaging it. But on leaving Coed y Bryn, he remembered what the counsellor had said and pulled out his fencing kitbag from under the stairs, trying not to recall the last time he’d opened it. “It can help,” she’d told him, as she’d made them coffee in her office behind the library. “And not just the exercise,” she’d said, bringing the two mugs to the table between them. “But also taking up a past activity.” She slid one of these mugs towards him. “Something from before.”
He’d found the club on the Internet, a small but dedicated group of fencers, mostly épée and foil, who met twice a week in a school sports hall in Highgate. The first time he’d attended a session was on a blustery night at the end of October. Banks of fallen leaves choked the kerbsides. Others swirled in eddies along the pavements. The hall, in contrast to the night outside, was bright, lit by strip lights buzzing overhead. His kit smelt musty, and his limbs were leaden, unfamiliar with the movements of his youth. But the counsellor was right. For a few seconds, maybe even minutes, he’d forgotten. For precious moments the parts of his mind and chest that had been constricted with Caroline’s death had relaxed. For the first time since Peter had called on him that afternoon it had felt as if he was breathing to the full depth of his lungs. So Michael returned the following week, and had continued to return every week since, finding, behind the mesh of his mask, the anticipation and clatter of the fights, the ache in his thighs and forearms, a release. An action that was neither past nor future, but purely present.
―
Michael had lent Josh the screwdriver a couple of days earlier. The night before Josh had broken his glasses. They’d been sitting in the kitchen after dinner, the remnants of a lasagne in the middle of the table, their wineglasses showing the tide marks of a bottle of red. The girls, after a round of good-night kisses, had already gone to bed. Having settled them upstairs, Samantha had returned to Michael and Josh in the kitchen, where, once again, they’d fallen to talking about New York, a city they’d discovered they shared twice, as somewhere they’d all lived, and then again as a memory.
“But where did they all go?” Samantha said, angling a piece of Brie onto a biscuit. “That’s what I want to know.”
Josh was bent over his glasses, trying to tighten a screw in their wire frames. “What do you mean ‘go’?” he said, not looking up. “Into shelters, hostels, given rooms.”
“But how do we know that?” Samantha countered him. “How do we know they weren’t just all shoved into New Jersey or the Bronx?”
“Because”—Josh lifted his head to look at his wife�
��“if they were, then I’m pretty sure New Jersey and the Bronx would have let us know soon enough.”
“Not if he paid them enough.”
Josh shook his head and went back to studying the wire frames. He’d changed into a loose-fitting shirt, one side of its collar frayed by the attentions of Lucy’s fingers. He was tired, and looked it.
“You have to admit,” Michael said, looking up from a Vanity Fair he’d been browsing, “it was pretty quick. When I first moved there people were still calling Bryant Park Needle Park, remember that? Then, in what felt like only months, they were screening films there, holding Christmas fairs.”
