The Objects of Her Affection

by Sonya Cobb

  “Danny keeps telling me I’m going to get in trouble,” said Becca, sticking her tongue out at him. “He says I’m careless.”

  Danny walked back to the chopping board without responding.

  “Nice artwork,” Sophie said, looking around the walls of the eating area, which were covered from floor to ceiling in framed pictures drawn, apparently, by Mina and Takashi.

  “Their dad literally frames everything they draw,” said Becca, pushing the tray toward Sophie. “He’s really into art.” Sophie took one of the balls, which was starchy and subtly sweet. She pinched off a piece and tried to interest Elliot in tasting it, but he remained focused on the Goldfish.

  After the snack, Becca led them up the dizzying central staircase to the third floor. “We can hang out in here,” she said, breathless from the climb. “Can you believe this playroom?” They entered a ballroom-size space lined with dark wood shelves and cabinets neatly stocked with baskets of toys. The high front windows looked out over the park; under Sophie’s slippered feet a plush, pale green carpet fit perfectly within the wood floor’s inlaid border. While Becca went to get her laptop, Sophie wandered around the room, peeking into cabinets and admiring the toys, which were the expensive European kind—sleek and glossy, cleverly crafted of wood and enameled tin. There was a sumptuously painted Noah’s ark, with dozens of carved animals; an Italianate dollhouse strikingly similar to the house they were in; a bin filled with nothing but windup robots. One set of shelves displayed an impressive collection of vintage toy fire trucks. It was foolish, Sophie decided, to feel jealous of two small children. But the fact that they probably weren’t even aware of their privilege, had never been afforded the opportunity of comparison, somehow made it worse. She combed her fingers along the carved fluting of one of the wooden pillars that edged the cabinetry, wondering if it was original.

  “Let’s sit over here,” Becca said when she reappeared with her computer. Sophie joined her on a love seat and went to work setting up a new WordPress account. She showed Becca how to pick a theme, post a new entry, assign tags, and manage comments. “It’s really not that complicated. Just make sure you post a lot, to keep your readers interested. Do you want to learn how to add pictures?” While she led Becca through the process, finding photos on her hard drive, uploading them, and writing captions, Sophie’s mind worked its way toward her next move. Maybe she would ask for a tour, or sneak away during a trip to the bathroom. She needed to get a look at the rest of the house.

  Elliot had found a wooden train set and was methodically assembling track, but Lucy, after pawing breathlessly through several toy baskets, had apparently become paralyzed by the number of choices. Now she was pressing herself against Sophie’s knees, staring at her over the screen of the laptop. “I’m bored.”

  “You’re bored. In the world’s most fabulous playroom. That’s the most ridiculous…” Sophie trailed off, then set the computer aside. “How about a game of hide-and-seek?”

  “I love hide-and-seek!” cried Becca.

  “I’ll count,” Sophie said. “Elliot, you can stay with me. Everybody else go hide.”

  After counting slowly, to give everyone a chance to run to the furthest corners of the house, Sophie carried Elliot from room to room, whispering, “Do you think they’re in here?” as she peeked inside closets and chests and wardrobes. “What about here?” she said, sliding open a desk drawer in a small study.

  “Nooooo Mommy! Too small.”

  “Here?” She eased open a filing cabinet.

  “Maybe.”

  The house was impressively absent of clutter, and most of the walls were bare. In the drawers and cabinets she found neatly organized files and office supplies, but nothing resembling a work of art. She checked the kids’ rooms, the minimally furnished master bedroom, a small gym. She went downstairs and searched quickly through a media room and a sitting room, then pushed through a pair of double doors to find herself in the cavernous shadows of a large library.

  Darkly furnished with leather sofas and club chairs, the room was lined with mahogany shelves tightly packed with books. Here and there, glass-fronted cabinets glowed among the bookbindings. Behind the glass, like babies in incubators, shapely objects gleamed under recessed lights: vases, statues, chalices. Sophie’s eyes skittered across the shelves. Bowls, more vases, a jeweled dagger.

  Elliot pointed to a corner of the room. Sophie heard giggling, but couldn’t tell where it was coming from. She walked toward the sound. In the shadows, where the shelves met the wall, a narrow, nearly invisible door was tucked into the woodwork. She ran her hand down its edge, finding a recessed metal plate. With a light push, the door slid behind the bookshelves.

  “You found us!” shrieked Lucy, Mina, and Takashi.

  “What is this?” Setting Elliot on the floor, Sophie entered a windowless room, about the size of a generous walk-in closet. A low-slung swivel chair occupied the center of the floor. All around, from floor to ceiling, the dove-gray walls were covered, in the same jigsaw manner as the kitchen walls, with paintings. Taking in the mosaic of thinly crackled portraits, lush landscapes, and dark religious scenes, Sophie felt her eyes choking on the overly rich, unexpected feast.

  “It’s the hiding place,” Mina said.

  The children were clustered in front of a low, utilitarian glass case. Sophie crouched, gently pushing Lucy aside. The glass shelves were lined with objects: a golden stag; a set of enamel boxes; a strikingly familiar silver tazza. In the middle of the top shelf, its glass a winking oval of light, stood the Jamnitzer mirror. Sophie sucked in her breath. She’d forgotten how beautiful it was.

  “Found you,” she whispered.

  “You guys?” Becca’s voice floated faintly from another part of the house.

  Sophie stood up. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be—”

  “In here!” shouted Mina and Takashi, jumping up and down. “We’re in the hiding place!”

  Becca’s face appeared in the doorway, her youthful features sharpened by worry. “Oh geez, what are you doing in here? Everybody out. Mina, Takashi, you should know better. Oh my God.” She shooed them into the library, where Mina and Takashi started chasing Lucy around the sofas, giggling wildly. Becca waved her hands at them, frantically shushing. Then, somewhere deep in the house, a heavy door thudded shut.

  “Daddy!” cried Mina and Takashi, running into the hallway.

  Becca wiped her upper lip with a shaking hand. “Okay. Okay. Oh my God. Okay.”

  “Becca.” Sophie put a hand on her arm. “What’s wrong? Are you sure that’s him?”

  “Nobody else would come in the front door like that. Crap. I’m so dead.”

  “It’s fine, we’ll just wait in there.” Sophie pointed toward the hidden room. She used her extra-calm, mother-in-a-crisis voice. “You come tell us when the coast is clear, and we’ll zip out the front door. He’ll never know we were here. I promise.” The voice seemed to be working on Becca. She nodded, put her hand to her forehead, briefly closing her eyes, then hurried after the kids.

  Back inside the hidden room, Sophie set Elliot in the chair and gave Lucy a quick squeeze. “Let’s be quiet, okay?” she whispered. “We’re playing hide-and-seek with Mina and Takashi’s daddy now.” Lucy nodded with a sly smile. Sophie went to the door and put her ear against it. She heard Becca’s chattering voice come close and then recede.

  Sophie turned; the wall to her left was dominated by a large, dark picture of a ship in a storm. Tiny contorted men clung to the heaving boat. The rabidly foaming waves; the whipping clouds; the torn sail lashing a timid beam of light…the scene was troublingly familiar to her, although she didn’t know why. As she stared at it, she could almost hear the crack of the violently flapping sail as it threatened to knock the sailors into the water’s black depths.

  Maybe Harry was right: they were all just thieves stealing from thieves. Who could
ever know where the mirror had come from in the first place—how often had it been bought, sold, stolen, bestowed, lost, found, treasured, ignored. On the subject of provenance, the mirror was silent. The only truth it could tell was the artistry of its maker, the deftness of his hand, the whimsy of his mind. She slid open the glass cabinet, pulled out the mirror, and turned it over to look at the maker’s mark: a proud W hovering above the head of a fierce lion. “This is mine,” the mark seemed to growl.

  “What are you doing?” Becca was standing in the doorway, her mouth puckered with worry. “Put that back!”

  “This belongs to someone I know,” Sophie said, clutching the mirror to her belly. “I’m taking it with me.”

  “You can’t!” Becca gasped. “Put it back! He’s upstairs now—you have to go.”

  “We’re going,” Sophie said, clumsily lifting Elliot out of the chair with her free arm. Becca reached out to grab the mirror, but Sophie held it tight against herself. Elliot whimpered, his arms clamped around her neck. “Stop it, Becca,” Sophie said. Becca was working the fingers of both hands around the edges of the mirror, her face turning red. “He’s going to hear us. Let go.”

  “Give it to me. Give it back.”

  “No. Becca, listen to me right now. That’s enough.”

  “Give it. Give it!”

  “Stop it!” Lucy howled. “Stop fighting!”

  “Shhh!” Sophie and Becca both hissed. Becca backed away, looking like she wanted to cry. “Get out of here,” she pleaded, holding out her arms, her hands open, spread wide and helpless. “If he sees you, he will literally kill me.”

  “Becca, literally means—oh, never mind.” Sophie grabbed Lucy’s hand and led her out of the library into the hallway, urging her down the steps, the mirror digging uncomfortably into her chest as she held it between herself and her son.

  “Mommy,” protested Lucy, who, for some reason, still descended the stairs like a toddler: two feet together, one foot down, two feet together.

  “We have to hurry,” said Sophie, sorely tempted to try carrying both children. After another moment she released Lucy’s hand, hurried down the stairs, and set Elliot in the entrance hall, then ran back up, two stairs at a time, hoisted Lucy into her arms, and rushed back down, panting, the mirror still clutched in one hand.

  “Mommy, my slipper fell off!”

  “Don’t worry about your slipper.”

  “Becca said I could keep them!”

  “She was kidding.”

  “No, she wasn’t. I want my slipper! My slipper!”

  Sophie had the stroller out of the closet; she shoved the mirror into the diaper bag, along with their shoes. She opened the vestibule door and heaved the folded stroller through it. Lucy headed back toward the stairs, but Sophie caught her by the arm.

  “I WANT MY SLIPPER!!! IT’S MINE! I GET TO KEEP IT!” screamed Lucy.

  “Lucy, hush!”

  High above them, a man’s face appeared over the banister. It disappeared, then reappeared as he rounded the staircase from the second floor, stopping to pick up Lucy’s slipper. Sophie stared up at him, choking back her breath, which was rushing out of her chest in hoarse gusts.

  Yoshiro Hansei’s skin was dark, his features thick without being fleshy. Short, sparse eyebrows angled upward like accents, but they were so disengaged from his eyes they did nothing to add levity to his expression. A mustache pronged sharply downward around his full, stern lips, which sat atop the sheer cliff of a chin. He finished descending the stairs and offered Lucy the slipper. She snatched it, shooting Sophie a triumphant look.

  Sophie swung her diaper bag over the shoulder closest to the front door. “I’m so sorry,” she said, taking Elliot’s hand. “We didn’t mean to disturb you. My kids…we’re friends with Mina and Takashi.”

  “Friends?” He said the word curiously.

  “We go to Music for Me together.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a music class. For little kids. It’s…awful. Anyway, we just had to use your facilities.” Hansei furrowed his brow. “Becca asked us to leave right away. You know, she is a wonderful nanny. You’re very lucky. Your children are in excellent hands.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We’re going now.”

  “It’s chilly outside. Where are your shoes?”

  “In my bag,” said Sophie, yanking the front door open. “We’ll put them on outside. We’re late.” And with that she hauled the stroller down the front steps, threw it open on the sidewalk, strapped both kids into their seats, and set off down the street, her slippers scuffing flimsily over the purplish-gray slabs of slate.

  Twenty-Two

  Shadyside Orchards, Sophie had heard, trucked in pumpkins from Maryland and scattered them in their drought-ravaged fields, then charged people to ride out there in a wagon and “pick” them. This was where she drew the line. This year, she decided, they would drive around Bucks County until they found a farm with no haunted corn maze, no pumpkin catapult, no loudspeakers; just a barn and some dirt and a few actual pumpkin plants. Brian had agreed to the plan, possibly seeing in it, as Sophie did, a chance for the four of them to knit something back together in a photogenic context. Brian drove, and since he hated 95 he decided to take Broad Street all the way out of the city—a bleak, halting journey that increased Sophie’s impatience to leave Philadelphia behind. The once-grand avenue led them past the toothless, swaying remains of the Divine Lorraine Hotel and the Metropolitan Opera House, then into the optimistically scrubbed bubble of Temple University, then back into the desolation of North Philadelphia, where every row house window was filled with plywood, trees, or charred black emptiness.

  In the backseat Lucy paged through a picture book while Elliot sucked his thumb and looked out the window, watching bricks turn into siding and eventually stone. Sophie followed their progress on a map and tried not to say anything about Brian’s driving. Sophie was an impatient driver, always seeking her advantage, blazing through yellow lights and weaving to the front of every line. When Brian drove, he would leave too much space between himself and the car ahead, or stay in a slow lane while dozens of cars streamed by and Sophie ground her teeth. This time, though, she had resolved to loosen her mental grip on the situation and simply enjoy the scenery, which was gradually improving.

  Loosening her grip: this was her assignment for the day. She hadn’t even researched pumpkin-picking spots ahead of time, or planned where they would have lunch. She was happy to make suggestions, based on the map she held on her knees, carefully folded around the area surrounding the northern end of 611, but only if asked. More importantly, she would not turn to Brian and say, “So,” or “I’ve been thinking,” or “Yesterday I looked at a one-bedroom on Mt. Vernon Street.” Today she was letting Brian drive.

  Abington. Willow Grove. Horsham. They were passing through places whose names were only familiar to Sophie from traffic reports. Office parks, strip malls, and car dealers stretched alongside 611, interspersed with houses that had trampolines in their front yards. Eventually, after Doylestown, they found themselves in real countryside, and at some point Brian turned off the highway onto a single-lane road. They began rolling through orange-carpeted forests, where cold sunlight stabbed through the last shreds of red and yellow clinging to the branches, and stacked stone walls grew out of the mossy ground and then sank back into it. They passed a few whitewashed houses, wing after added wing rambling along the roadside, but no pumpkin fields—they would have to find some open farmland for that.

  Something about the rise and fall of the road, the tight turns and sudden Ys and glimpses of houses set back in the trees, reminded Sophie of a drive she had taken when she was a child. Had it been in Washington? Missouri? She couldn’t remember how old she was, just the delicious lifting of her stomach as the car plunged over each crest, the swing of the curves, the smell of wet bark and dec
aying leaves. She was in the front seat, probably with no seat belt, Randall on one side of her, the open window on the other. He was driving fast, veering into the other lane on the turns, snapping the huge Chevy Impala out of the way when another car happened along. Sophie could remember the distinct feeling of picking up her fear and tossing it just out of reach, surrendering to the thrill of being entirely in her father’s hands.

  Brian was easing their car around the curves now, hugging the shoulder of the narrow road, so when they passed the yard sale Sophie had plenty of time to ask him to stop. She hesitated, though, wanting to let Brian have the idea; she could see him turning his head to scan the jumble of furniture and terra-cotta flowerpots and baby gear. But he didn’t stop, and finally, when they were around the corner and down a small hill, Sophie blurted, “Do you want to check it out?”

  “Why, do you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I didn’t know if you would want to.”

  Brian snorted and shook his head, then pulled into the next driveway and turned around. The sale was in the front yard of a small, squared-off clapboard cottage with a front porch and two dormer windows. There was a swing set off to the side, on a part of the lawn that pressed up against the woods. Lucy and Elliot ran straight toward it as soon as they were released from their car seats.

  “Do you mind if they play on it?” Sophie asked a gray-haired woman sitting on the front step of the house.

  “Not at all,” she answered, in a voice that rasped between the high and low registers. “I got it for my grandkids, but they’re too big for it now. I’m selling some kid stuff over there. Take a look.”

  The scene reminded Sophie of pictures she’d seen of a tornado’s aftermath: beds in trees, couches on roofs. Here there were two armoires standing in the unmowed grass, a deeply oiled Larkin’s desk, a collection of Windsor chairs. A patchwork quilt spread on the ground was strewn with rubber-banded bundles of old silverware, some pots and pans, and a toaster oven. Sophie contemplated a partially unrolled Persian rug, wishing she could remember the dimensions of her office. She wasn’t sure what Brian had decided to do about the floor in there. They needed to fix it soon, before the appraiser came through. Joshua Goldmeier had, miraculously, persuaded the bank to let them refinance. Whether the process had been hurried along by the threat of a lawsuit, she couldn’t be sure.