by Owen Sheers
The Parsons end-of-year photography show was held at a gallery in Chelsea. A broad industrial space on the first floor of a decommissioned warehouse. Ryan accompanied Samantha, moving through the crowds like a fish in the wrong shoal. They were going out for dinner afterwards, and Samantha was painfully aware of how angular his suit looked among the hoodies and T-shirts, and how exposed she felt in her own strapless top. She watched him look. He paid close attention to the hung work, his eyebrows raised in quizzical amusement, as if everything he saw held a secret joke. When Samantha saw him nod at another student’s father as they crossed in front of a print, she’d felt more like his daughter than his lover.
Before they’d left for dinner Ryan bought one of Samantha’s Mirage prints: Manhattan’s skyline miniature on a far horizon, escalating between two hackberry leaves, gigantic in the foreground, an ibis taking flight across the South Tower of the World Trade Center. “For Greenwich,” he’d said, as they’d stepped onto the street. “It’ll look good there.” He swung his jacket about her shoulders. “Above the fireplace, or maybe in the kitchen.”
When they’d woken the next morning, Ryan had asked Samantha to accompany her photograph. It was time, he said, for him to move out of the city, and he wanted her to move with him. His place in Greenwich had been empty for three years. They were lying in bed in his apartment, the hum of the air-conditioning already contending with the heat outside. From where she lay she could see the tops of the trees in Central Park. “It’ll be great,” Ryan said, running the knuckle of his forefinger along her jaw. “C’mon, trust me.”
Samantha said yes, as much because she didn’t know what else she’d do if she didn’t as through any desire to stay with him. Her father, having neglected the child of his first marriage, was now absorbed in the lives of those from his second. Her mother, meanwhile, had broken it off with the doctor and returned to Britain. In the apartment on MacDougal they’d all talked about finding assistant positions, of sending portfolios to photo editors. But so far nothing had come of it. After three years of studying, the months ahead of Samantha were empty, unknown. Ryan was offering to fill them. They moved to Greenwich the next month. A few weeks later, on a bench beside Long Island Sound, Ryan proposed, and again Samantha said yes.
Whenever she travelled back into Manhattan to visit her Parsons friends or her old flatmates, Samantha felt fortunate. Many of them were working in retail stores now, or waiting tables. Some had found jobs in galleries, organising private views, sitting for long hours at front desks in cavernous spaces. One of them was stripping in a lap-dancing bar. Life after university had been pared of the certainties of their student days. The aspirations they’d once fostered seemed suddenly out of reach. In comparison, Samantha had few worries. No rent to pay. A steady relationship. And time. This is what Ryan had also promised her. Time to pursue her photography, free of the constraints of shifts in a diner or a cocktail bar, or any of the whole messy business of living.
But on her return journeys to Greenwich, twisting the engagement ring on her finger, Samantha often found herself staring for long minutes through the train’s windows. How had she come to call the destination on her ticket home? It was not her home. And it wasn’t Ryan’s, either. The house was too large, too unlived in. Like all the houses in their neighbourhood, it felt outsized, as if it had been built for a larger species than humans. Their neighbours were older, polished, and settled. Some had children of Samantha’s age, or even grandchildren who came to stay on vacations. When she and Ryan visited them for drinks, her heels sinking into their soft lawns, Samantha had to resist breaking the scene. She wanted to scream or tear off her clothes, just to see what would happen when their calm waters were disturbed.
From Monday to Friday every week Ryan woke at six-thirty a.m., showered, dressed, and drove his Porsche Boxster down Interstate 95 to work in the city. Sometimes he stayed there overnight too. Samantha would get up later, alone in the echoing house. She began making plans for photographic projects.
―
“I wanted to try and get under its skin,” Samantha said, shifting a leg from under her. “Have you ever been there? Greenwich?”
Michael shook his head. “No.”
“It’s beautiful. But—” She broke off, frowning. “It’s as if the place is vacuum-sealed. Like there’s no way in.”
―
For a few weeks she tried photographing the wives in their cars: tiny women lost in monstrous SUVs, their painted nails clutching the steering wheels like the feet of caged birds. Stopped at the lights, checking their lipstick in the parking lot. But Ryan soon put a stop to that. A member of his country club said something to him after a tennis match. It was a passing remark, but enough, about his wife preferring to look at paparazzi photos rather than be in them. “For chrissakes, Sam,” Ryan had said when he’d come home. He was still in his shorts and T-shirt, a sweat patch between his shoulder blades like the map of a long country. He poured himself a neat bourbon. “Set up a darkroom, hire a studio, do whatever you need. But just leave their fucking wives alone, will you?”
―
“I should have known, really,” Samantha said, laughing at her younger self. “But I was so naïve. For a bit, anyway.”
“Known?” Michael asked.
The TV was playing in the kitchen. Josh was watching a sports quiz. The intermittent sound of buzzers and applause reached them where they sat in the front room.
Samantha sighed. “Let’s just say Ryan wasn’t very good at choices.” She paused, correcting herself. “No, actually he was good at choices. Very good. He just never saw them as exclusive, that’s all. I mean, when he bought that place in Greenwich he didn’t sell the apartment in Manhattan. And when he couldn’t decide between a Lexus and a Porsche? He just bought one of each.”
She smiled weakly, looking down at her feet. “And when he proposed to me he carried on screwing his secretary.”
―
There’d been something in the woman’s voice that had made Samantha ask her directly. Something in the way she’d responded when she’d told her who she was. A knowledge. Ryan was in a meeting, the girl said, but could she take a message? Samantha paused for a moment, then asked her outright. “Are you,” she said, trying her best to keep her voice calm, “fucking my fiancé?”
There was an intake of breath at the end of the line, a brushing of fingers across the mouthpiece. “It’s all right,” Samantha had reassured her. She was sitting in the kitchen in Greenwich. A sprinkler on the lawn was spraying the window with dashes of water. The droplets caught the light with the fire of diamonds. They were probably about the same age, Samantha remembered thinking, she and this girl sitting at her desk high above Manhattan. She wondered what she looked like. Had Ryan wanted something different? Dark hair, dark eyes? Or, if they’d ever met, would Samantha have seen echoes of her own features, her own colouring? Another her, but there, not here. “Really, it’s okay. But I do need to know,” she said. “Now.”
When the girl answered, her voice was quiet. “Yes,” she said. Then, her composure breaking, “I’m so sorry.”
But Samantha had already hung up. Three hours later a Lincoln Town Car was taking her to the airport, her bags in its trunk and her Mirage print with its distant, lost skyline, angled between her legs.
―
“I got that bit right, anyway,” Samantha said.
“What do you mean?” Michael asked her. “Right?”
“The leaving. I did it like in a film. Cut up some of his suits, soil on the carpets.” She said this without emotion, looking away. There was no suggestion of anger in her telling. She took another sip of her Baileys. It was another woman’s story now. From another life.
“And then what did you do?” Michael asked her.
She turned back to him, as if he’d disturbed her. “Oh,” she said. “Came back here. To London. Had to earn some cash, so started temping.”
“And the photography?”
Josh appe
ared at the door. He looked irritated. “Honey?” He held a hand towards Michael. “Sorry, Mike,” he said, before turning to Samantha again. “Lucy wants you.”
Samantha raised her eyebrows, as if to say This—this is what happened.
She put her glass on a side table and rose from the sofa. “Okay,” she said. “Tell her I’m coming.”
“I should be going,” Michael said, also getting up from the sofa.
Josh leant into the hallway. “Mummy’s coming, honey!” he shouted up the stairs. “You know how it is,” he said to Michael as Samantha passed him, laying a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Have to get the kids down.”
Out in the hallway, as he was going to the door, Samantha turned and came back down the stairs. She waited until she was close to Michael before she spoke. “Josh told me about your wife,” she said, looking up at him. Without her heels, she wasn’t much taller than Caroline. She took his hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her eyes searching his, as if looking for the debris of Caroline’s death.
“Thank you,” Michael replied.
She gave him another smile, a tired acknowledgement, and Michael recognised again that she was far from sober. How much, he wondered, had she meant to tell him? Letting go of his hand, she returned to the stairway, Lucy’s cry drifting down from above, “Mummy!”
“Coming, sweetheart,” Samantha called up to her daughter. “Coming.”
―
As Michael had climbed his own stairs next door he couldn’t help seeing, in his mind’s eye, the Nelsons’ staircase tracing his ascent on the other side of the wall. Unlike theirs, his was communal, shared with the other occupants of his building. On each landing he passed two numbered red doors, each leading to the homes and lives of others. Through the bare wall beside him the Nelsons’ stairway, with its dark wood banister and red carpet runner, rose through their lives only. The girls’ bedrooms, Samantha and Josh’s bedroom, a playroom, the bathrooms, a spare room. On the top floor, Josh had mentioned, a study.
They were the same generation, Michael and the Nelsons. Samantha was a year younger, Josh a few years older. And yet to Michael their lives might as well have been decades apart. Everything he’d lost in the shipwreck of Caroline’s death had washed against the shore of Josh and Samantha’s thirties with ease. The house, the children. Their grounded life, solid and settled in comparison to his own, newly cut loose as he was, living in a set of rented rooms four stories up in the air.
Reaching his door, Michael turned the key in the lock and opened it. His flat was dark, the scent of its air still not his own. He went into the kitchen without turning on the lights. A TV in the flat below played a Saturday-night talent show. His head was fuzzy with the long afternoon of drinking. He ran himself a glass of water from the tap, drank it down, then ran himself another. Taking the glass to the long windows at the end of the room, he looked out over the Heath. The lamps lining the path had come on, the branches of the trees lit along their undersides. This was the view he’d looked out on every day since first moving in. The dark waters of the ponds, the suggestion of a swan drifting along one of their banks. The concrete path, the foot-worn tracks, the wind-stripped trees. In the distance, more of London’s streets, edging in on the Heath’s green. The same view, and yet that night, as Michael looked over it again, drinking his water, somehow different, shared as he now knew it was, with the Nelsons next door.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TURNING FROM THE desk, Michael took another glance over the side tables in the front room. The screwdriver was nowhere to be seen. He thought about where else Josh might have put it. In his study? In a drawer in his bedside table? But he couldn’t very well go searching the house. It was one thing for him to be there, another again to start rifling through bedside tables. He would just have to do without his French grip. He could ask to borrow one of Istvan’s, but he already knew what he’d say.
“It’s a relationship.” That’s what Istvan had told him as they’d zipped up their jackets at the beginning of their second lesson, his Hungarian accent eliding into his English. “Do you use other men’s wives?” he’d said, pulling on his glove. “No. Or if you do, you get into trouble, yes? So don’t use another man’s blade. It will only end up hurting you, not your opponent.”
Coming back out into the hallway, Michael paused at the foot of the staircase. The stairs were wooden, painted white, with a red carpet running down their middle secured by silver rods in the crook of each step. In all the months he’d known the Nelsons, Michael had never been up these stairs. All the dinners, conversations, drinks they’d ever shared had been confined to the kitchen and the conservatory. Only when other people had also come round had they ever moved into the front room. The ground floor had been the extent of his jurisdiction within their home.
Another car passed down the street. In its wake, Michael heard a pushchair trundling down the pavement. Standing in the hallway, he listened as its wheels grew louder, kicking over the edge of a paving slab prised up by a sycamore’s root. As the pushchair faded down the street he saw that root clearly in his mind’s eye, its bark polished to worn leather by the thousands of shoes that had stepped on it. Farther off, the ice-cream van started up again, a tinkling rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Closer, somewhere in the front room behind him, a fly was needling at a window.
Michael looked back down the hallway towards the open back door. He knew the front door beside him was secure, the tongue of its deadbolt buried in the mortise. Despite the heat of the day, he’d seen no open windows in the house. Would Josh really have left without locking the back door, too? What if he had, and it wasn’t just a mistake after all? Michael’s mind began working on this conjecture, making any number of scenarios suddenly seem all too possible. The Heath had been full of people ever since the heat wave began. From across the other side of the ponds the houses on this part of the street presented an attractive and vulnerable prospect. Over the decades, successions of owners had set more and more windows in their back walls, as if the houses were thirsty and could never quite get enough of their view of the water, the Heath. Looked at from the other way, however, these windows made a gallery of the houses, especially in the long evenings of summer. It wouldn’t be difficult, from far away even, to track the movements inside one of them.
A little farther up the street there was a tangle of hidden paths between the ponds and the gardens. Michael and Samantha had taken the girls looking for late conkers along them just a couple of weeks after they’d all met. Now, in summer, the foliage over those paths was overgrown. Someone could easily sit there out of sight for hours, watching a house for when its owners left.
Michael felt a chill at the back of his neck. He thought about calling out again, but if there was an intruder in the house he didn’t want to alert them to his presence. They’d have already heard him shout for Samantha and Josh from the door, but how much sound had he made since? Would they think he’d left when he got no answer? Or were they still waiting for him to leave now? Waiting to hear the back door close, so they might make their own escape?
He looked up the stairway towards where it turned, curving behind the wall. His pulse was beating in his temples. It was only right he should check the other floors of the house. To make sure.
As quietly as he could, Michael walked towards the stairs. As he climbed the first few steps, the carpet runner softening his tread, he stared intently at the turn above him, half expecting someone to appear around its corner. Which is when it happened.
A stab of recognition, so immediate Michael couldn’t say from where it had emanated. Whether it had been a taste, a scent, a touch, or a sound. All he knew, with a painful clarity, was that it was her, Caroline. As if, just for an instant, he’d woken beside her again and she was alive once more, as fully alive as he was.
Michael froze, stilling himself. He was breathing rapidly, his heart thumping in his ribs. All thoughts of an intruder flooded from him. He looked up towards the turn in
the stairs again, his mind trying to gain a purchase on what had just happened. The strength of the sensation had been such that now the only person he expected to come down the stairs was no longer a burglar, but Caroline, miraculously brought back from the dead. First her feet, then her shins, her thighs, her waist, her hands, her arms, her breasts, her neck, and, at last, her face, all revealed in the tantalising fractions of her descent.
But Caroline did not appear. She did not come to him. There was just the stairway’s red runner disappearing around the corner, the dark banister tracing the same curve, and the blank whiteness of the wall.
Michael listened. The ice-cream van in the other street had stopped its tune. The fly in the front room buzzed, paused, then buzzed again. But from beyond the turn in the stairs there was no sound. He shook his head, as if to wake himself. He did not believe in ghosts. In all the months since her death, never once had he thought Caroline was still with him. Her absence had been the most certain thing he’d ever known.
But she had been. Just now. He’d felt her, with absolute experience. And he still could. It was fading, the resonance cooling, but it was there, as if he were slowly walking backwards from a fire, retreating into a cold night. But he did not want to walk away. He didn’t want to grow cold. For all its painfulness, he wanted to feel that warmth again. Like touching a bruise or a half-healed wound, he wanted the pain of feeling her again.
