The Woman in the Window

by A. J. Finn

  Nothing from across the room, even though—or perhaps because—he knows this, knows all of it, has heard it over and over. And over.

  “I keep wishing it wasn’t. Weren’t. I keep wishing it had been Ed’s idea. Or no one’s. That we’d never gone.” I knot my fingers. “Obviously.”

  Gently: “But you did go.”

  I feel singed.

  “You arranged a family vacation. No one should feel ashamed of that.”

  “In New England, in winter.”

  “Many people go to New England in winter.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “It was thoughtful.”

  “It was incredibly stupid,” I insist.

  Dr. Fielding doesn’t respond. The central heating clears its throat, exhales.

  “If I hadn’t done it, we’d still be together.”

  He shrugs. “Maybe.”

  “Definitely.”

  I can feel his gaze on me like a weight.

  “I helped someone yesterday,” I say. “A woman in Montana. A grandmother. She’s been inside for a month.”

  He’s accustomed to these abrupt swerves—“synaptic leaps,” he calls them, even though we both know I’m willfully changing the subject. But I steam ahead, telling him about GrannyLizzie, how I shared my name with her.

  “What made you do that?”

  “I felt she was trying to connect.” Isn’t that what—yes, there it is: Isn’t that what Forster exhorted us to do? “Only connect”? Howards End—July’s official book club selection. “I wanted to help her. I wanted to be accessible.”

  “That was an act of generosity,” he says.

  “I suppose so.”

  He shifts in his seat. “It sounds to me as though you’re getting to a place where you can meet others on their terms, not just your own.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “That’s progress.”

  Punch has stolen into the room and is circling my feet, eyes on my lap. I hitch one leg beneath the other thigh.

  “How is the physical therapy going?” Dr. Fielding asks.

  I scan my legs and torso with my hand, like I’m presenting a prize on a game show. You too can win this disused thirty-eight-year-old body! “I’ve looked better.” And then, before he can correct me, I add, “I know it’s not a fitness program.”

  He corrects me all the same: “It’s not only a fitness program.”

  “No, I know.”

  “Is it going well, then?”

  “I’m healed. All better.”

  He looks at me evenly.

  “Really. My spine is fine, my ribs aren’t cracked. I don’t limp anymore.”

  “Yes, I noticed.”

  “But I need a little exercise. And I like Bina.”

  “She’s become a friend.”

  “In a way,” I admit. “A friend I pay.”

  “She’s coming on Wednesdays these days, is that right?”

  “Usually.”

  “Good,” he says, as though Wednesday is a day particularly suitable for aerobic activity. He’s never met Bina. I can’t picture them together; they don’t seem to occupy the same dimension.

  It’s quitting time. I know this without consulting the clock hunched on the mantel, just as Dr. Fielding knows it—after years in practice, both of us can time fifty minutes almost to the second. “I want you to continue with the beta-blocker at the same dosage,” he says. “You’re on one-fifty Tofranil. We’ll increase it to two-fifty.” He frowns. “That’s based on what we’ve discussed today. It should help with your moods.”

  “I get pretty blurry as is,” I remind him.

  “Blurry?”

  “Or bleary, I guess. Or both.”

  “You mean your vision?”

  “No, not my vision. It’s more . . .” We’ve discussed this—doesn’t he remember? Or have we discussed it? Blurry. Bleary. I could really use that drink. “Sometimes I’ve got too many thoughts at once. It’s like there’s a four-way intersection in my brain where everyone’s trying to go at the same time.” I chuckle, a bit uneasy.

  Dr. Fielding knits his brow, then sighs. “Well, it’s not an exact science. As you know.”

  “I do. I know.”

  “You’re on quite a few different medications. We’ll adjust them one by one until we get it right.”

  I nod. I know what this means. He thinks I’m getting worse. My chest tightens.

  “Try the two-fifty and see how you feel. If it gets problematic, we can look at something to help you focus.”

  “A nootropic?” Adderall. The number of times parents asked me whether Adderall would benefit their kids, the number of times I turned them down cold—and now I’m angling for it myself. Plus ça change.

  “Let’s discuss it as and when,” he says. He slashes his pen across a prescription pad, peels away the top sheet, offers it to me. It twitches in his hand. Essential tremor or low blood sugar? Not, I hope, early-onset Parkinson’s. Not my place to ask, either. I take the paper.

  “Thank you,” I say as he stands, smoothing his tie. “I’ll put this to good use.”

  He nods. “Until next week, then.” He turns toward the door. “Anna?” Turning back.

  “Yes?”

  He nods again. “Please get that prescription filled.”

  After Dr. Fielding leaves, I log the prescription request online. They’ll deliver by five p.m. That’s enough time for a glass. Or even deux.

  Not just yet, though. First I drag the mouse to a neglected corner of the desktop, hesitantly double-click on an Excel spreadsheet: meds.xlsx.

  Here I’ve detailed all the drugs I’m on, all the dosages, all the directions . . . all the ingredients in my pharma-cocktail. I stopped updating it back in August, I see.

  Dr. Fielding is, as usual, correct: I’m on quite a few medications. I need two hands to count them all. And I know—I wince as I think it—I know I’m not taking them as or when I should, not always. The double doses, the skipped doses, the drunk doses . . . Dr. Fielding would be furious. I need to do better. Don’t want to lose my grip.

  Command-Q, and I’m out of Excel. Time for that drink.

  17

  With a tumbler in one hand and the Nikon in the other, I settle down in the corner of my study, cupped between the south and west windows, and survey the neighborhood—inventory check, Ed likes to say. There’s Rita Miller, returning from yoga, bright with sweat, a cell phone stuck to one ear. I adjust the lens and zoom in: She’s smiling. I wonder if it’s her contractor on the other end. Or her husband. Or neither.

  Next door, outside 214, Mrs. Wasserman and her Henry pick their way down the front steps. Off to spread sweetness and light.

  I swing my camera west: Two pedestrians loiter outside the double-wide, one of them pointing at the shutters. “Good bones,” I imagine him saying.

  God. I’m inventing conversations now.

  Cautiously, as though I don’t want to be caught—and indeed I don’t—I slide my sights across the park, over to the Russells’. The kitchen is dim and vacant, its blinds partly down, like half-shut eyes; but one floor up, in the parlor, captured neatly within the window, I spot Jane and Ethan on a candy-striped love seat. She wears a butter-yellow sweater that exposes a terse slit of cleavage; her locket dangles there, a mountaineer above a gorge.

  I twist the lens; the image sharpens. She’s speaking quickly, teeth bared in a grin, her hands a flurry. His eyes are on his lap, but that shy smile skews his lips.

  I haven’t mentioned the Russells to Dr. Fielding. I know what he’ll say; I can analyze myself: I’ve located in this nuclear unit—this mother, this father, their only child—an echo of my own. One house away, one door down, there’s the family I had, the life that was mine—a life thought lost, irretrievably, except here it is, right across the park. So what? I think. Maybe I say it; these days I’m not sure.

  I sip my wine, wipe my lip, raise the Nikon again. Look through the lens.

  She’s looking back at
me.

  I drop the camera in my lap.

  No mistake: Even with my naked eye, I can clearly see her level gaze, her parted lips.

  She raises a hand, waves it.

  I want to hide.

  Should I wave back? Do I look away? Can I blink at her, blankly, as though I’d been aiming the camera at something else, something near her? Didn’t see you there?

  No.

  I shoot to my feet, the camera tumbling to the floor. “Leave it,” I say—I definitely say it—and I flee the room, into the dark of the stairwell.

  No one’s ever caught me before. Not Dr. and Rita Miller, not the Takedas, not the Wassermen, not the gaggle of Grays. Not the Lords before they moved, nor the Motts before they split. Not passing cabs, not passersby. Not even the postman, whom I used to photograph every day, at every door. And for months I’d pore over those pictures, reliving those moments, until at last I could no longer keep up with the world beyond my window. I still make the odd exception, of course—the Millers interest me. Or they did before the Russells arrived.

  And that Opteka zoom is better than binoculars.

  But now shame live-wires through my body. I think of everyone and everything I’ve caught on camera: the neighbors, the strangers, the kisses, the crises, the chewed nails, the dropped change, the strides, the stumbles. The Takeda boy, his eyes closed, fingers quaking on his cello strings. The Grays, wineglasses aloft in a giddy toast. Mrs. Lord in her living room, lighting candles atop a cake. The young Motts, in the dying days of their marriage, bellowing at each other from opposite ends of their Valentine-red parlor, a vase in ruins on the floor between them.

  I think of my hard drive, swollen with stolen images. I think of Jane Russell as she looked at me, unblinking, across the park. I’m not invisible. I’m not dead. I’m alive, and on display, and ashamed.

  I think of Dr. Brulov in Spellbound: “My dear girl, you cannot keep bumping your head against reality and saying it is not there.”

  Three minutes later, I step back into the study. The Russells’ love seat is empty. I glance at Ethan’s bedroom; he’s in there, crouched over his computer.

  Carefully, I pick up the camera. It’s undamaged.

  Then the doorbell rings.

  18

  “You must be bored as hell,” she says when I open the hall door. Then she folds me into a hug. I laugh, nervously. “Sick of all those black-and-white movies, I bet.”

  She surges past me. I still haven’t said a word.

  “I brought something for you.” She smiles, dipping a hand into her bag. “It’s cold, too.” A sweaty bottle of Riesling. My mouth waters. It’s been ages since I drank white.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t—”

  But she’s already chugging toward the kitchen.

  Within ten minutes we’re glugging the wine. Jane sparks a Virginia Slim, then another, and soon the air wobbles with smoke, rolling overhead, roiling beneath the ceiling lights. My Riesling tastes of it. I find I don’t mind; reminds me of grad school, starless nights outside the taverns of New Haven, men with mouths like ash.

  “You’ve got a lot of merlot over there,” she says, eyeing the kitchen counter.

  “I order it in bulk,” I explain. “I like it.”

  “How often do you restock?”

  “Just a few times a year.” At least once a month.

  She nods. “You’ve been like this—how long did you say?” she asks. “Six months?”

  “Almost eleven.”

  “Eleven months.” Pressing her lips into a tiny o. “I can’t whistle. But pretend I just did.” She jams her cigarette into a cereal bowl, steeples her fingers, leans forward, as though in prayer. “So what do you do all day?”

  “I counsel people,” I say, nobly.

  “Who?”

  “People online.”

  “Ah.”

  “And I take French lessons online. And I play chess,” I add.

  “Online?”

  “Online.”

  She sweeps a finger along the tide line in her wineglass. “So the Internet,” she says, “is sort of your . . . window to the world.”

  “Well, so is my actual window.” I gesture to the expanse of glass behind her.

  “Your spyglass,” she says, and I blush. “I’m kidding.”

  “I’m so sorry about—”

  She waves a hand, lights a fresh cigarette. “Oh, hush.” Smoke leaks from her mouth. “Do you have a real chessboard?”

  “Do you play?”

  “I used to.” She slants the cigarette against the bowl. “Show me what you got.”

  We’re waist-deep in our first game when the doorbell rings. Five sharp—the pharmacy delivery. Jane does the honors. “Door-to-door drugs!” she squawks, shuttling back from the hall. “These any good?”

  “They’re uppers,” I say, uncorking a second bottle. Merlot this time.

  “Now it’s a party.”

  As we drink, as we play, we chat. We’re both mothers of only children, as I knew; we’re both sailors, as I hadn’t known. Jane prefers solo craft, I’m more into two-handers—or I was, anyway.

  I tell her about my honeymoon with Ed: how we’d chartered an Alerion, a thirty-three-footer, and cruised the Greek Isles, pinballing between Santorini and Delos, Naxos and Mykonos. “Just the two of us,” I remember, “scudding around the Aegean.”

  “That’s just like Dead Calm,” Jane says.

  I swallow some wine. “I think in Dead Calm they were in the Pacific.”

  “Well, except for that, it’s just like Dead Calm.”

  “Also, they went sailing to recover from an accident.”

  “Okay, right.”

  “And then they rescued a psychopath who tried to kill them.”

  “Are you going to let me make my point or not?”

  While she frowns at the chessboard, I rummage through the fridge for a stick of Toblerone, chop it roughly with a kitchen knife. We sit at the table, chewing. Candy for dinner. Just like Olivia.

  Later:

  “Do you get a lot of visitors?” She strokes her bishop, slides him across the board.

  I shake my head, shake the wine down my throat. “None. You and your son.”

  “Why? Or why not?”

  “I don’t know. My parents are gone, and I worked too much to have many friends.”

  “No one from work?”

  I think of Wesley. “It was a two-person practice,” I say. “So now he has a double load to keep him busy.”

  She looks at me. “That’s sad.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “Do you even have a phone?”

  I point to the landline, lurking in a corner on the kitchen counter, and pat my pocket. “Ancient, ancient iPhone, but it works. In case my psychiatrist calls. Or anyone else. My tenant.”

  “Your handsome tenant.”

  “My handsome tenant, yes.” I take a sip, take her queen.

  “That was cold.” She flicks a speck of ash from the table and roars with laughter.

  After the second game, she requests a tour of the house. I hesitate, just for a moment; the last person to examine the place top to bottom was David, and before that . . . I truly can’t recall. Bina’s never been beyond the first story; Dr. Fielding is confined to the library. The very idea feels intimate, as though I’m about to lead a new lover by the hand.

  But I agree, and escort her room by room, floor by floor. The red room: “I feel like I’m trapped in an artery.” The library: “So many books! Have you read all of them?” I shake my head. “Have you read any of them?” I giggle.

  Olivia’s bedroom: “Maybe a little small? Too small. She needs a room she can grow into, like Ethan’s.” My study, on the other hand: “Ooh and aah,” says Jane. “A girl could get stuff done in a place like this.”

  “Well, I mostly play chess and talk to shut-ins. If you call that getting stuff done.”

  “Look.” She sets her glass on the windowsill, slides her hands into her bac
k pockets. Leans into the window. “There’s the house,” she says, gazing at her home, her voice slung low, almost husky.

  She’s been so playful, so jolly, that to see her looking serious produces a kind of jolt, a needle skidding off the vinyl. “There’s the house,” I agree.

  “Nice, isn’t it? Quite a place.”

  “It is.”

  She peers outside a minute longer. Then we return to the kitchen.

  Later still:

  “Get much use out of that?” Jane asks, roaming the living room as I debate my next move. The sun is sinking fast; in her yellow sweater, in the frail light, she looks like a wraith, floating through my house.

  She’s pointing to the umbrella, leaning like a drunkard against a far wall.

  “More than you’d think,” I reply. I rock back in my chair and describe Dr. Fielding’s backyard therapy, the unsteady march through the door and down the steps, the bubble of nylon shielding me from oblivion; the clarity of outside air, the drift of wind.

  “Interesting,” says Jane.

  “I believe it’s pronounced ‘ridiculous.’”

  “But does it work?” she asks.

  I shrug. “Sort of.”

  “Well,” she says, patting the umbrella handle as you would a dog’s head, “there you go.”

  “Hey, when’s your birthday?”

  “You going to buy me something?”

  “Easy there.”

  “Coming up, actually,” I say.

  “So’s mine.”

  “November eleventh.”

  She gawks. “That’s my birthday, too.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I am not. Eleven eleven.”

  I lift my glass. “To eleven eleven.”

  We toast.

  “Got a pen and paper?”

  I fetch both from a drawer, lay them before her. “Just sit there,” Jane tells me. “Look pretty.” I bat my lashes.

  She whips the pen across the sheet, short, sharp strokes. I watch my face take form: the deep eyes, the soft cheekbones, the long jaw. “Make sure you get my underbite,” I urge her, but she shushes me.