You Were Here Read online

  It was a lot for an only child. And though his father claimed it was ridiculous to have this much house, he loved it for the glimmer it cast in his wife’s eyes, and never, not once, thought of parting with it. Irwin and Isadora. Names like an opera, William always thought. Step softly, a dream lies here is the epitaph on their ivory headstone.

  When he arrives, he turns off the car and waits, cherishing the seconds before the weekend twists to its other side. Through the distant dining room window, he sees a light blond curled head of hair. Ketty, the Danish housekeeper who joined his parents after the Great War. For a second she’s gone, then appears in the next window. It’s established what time he arrives on Saturdays, and he knows the table is set and the food will be hot, just as it was when his father pulled in the drive. In some ways William feels as if his life here, in his parents’ house, is merely a skewed continuation of their lives. That is, with one dark-haired, blue-eyed, red-lipstick-wearing difference. He smiles just thinking of her, her infusion of life, like a black-and-white film blazing into Technicolor.

  Ketty freezes when she sees him through the kitchen window. Within seconds she’s at the car, pulling open the door. This is not an act of kindness. The Great Dane was the nickname he gave her when he was an adolescent and she was at her fiercest. For hours he could be in the tunnel, but all it took was one comment from Isadora that he’d gone missing and off stormed Ketty, straight into the tunnel and back out, dirt on her shoulder and him in tow.

  She follows him into the house. “Salmon in dill sauce,” she says. Saman in deal sush. Even after all this time, her accent is thick, her words hard to understand. She’s in her fifties now, and her face is heavily lined. Seeing this, the progression, makes him uncomfortable, as if witnessing a starlet slowly smear the makeup from her face.

  At the table, he sits with the napkin on his lap. Quickly he flakes a bit of salmon, just a small corner, eats it, and sets the fork back in its former position. He stares at the crystal chandelier, wishing he were back in Rochester, wishing it weren’t Saturday.

  There’s a slight commotion in the other room and Ketty’s voice shoots through the silence. Still he sits there. The mother-of-pearl knife rest gleams.

  Finally the door swings open and he stands as Claire enters the room. She nods, her eyes immediately finding his plate, the place where a bit of salmon is missing. His wife’s new ability to home in on transgressions is something that unnerves him more and more.

  “You must be famished,” she says.

  “Not particularly.” He sits again and waits till she starts eating.

  “And your drive?”

  “Fine. Road was silk. It’s actually a very pretty time of year.”

  “You say that as if it shouldn’t be.” She smiles and picks up her fork.

  He digs into his lunch, starving. Flaking fish, scooping potatoes, swallowing and talking. “Dixon submitted our bid for a job on Elm. There’s not a doubt in my mind, not one, that it was under Guy McPherson’s bid. But at the end of the day, Jimmy claims we’re the ones who are over, by three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars. Hardly an accident. McPherson’s Jimmy’s second cousin. Crying collusion isn’t much of an option.”

  He looks up as he reaches for his glass and sees that she’s gone. Physically she’s there, but he can see in her eyes that she’s veered from the path of their conversation. He takes a sip of his water and watches her, not sure she’s realized he stopped talking. She wanders frequently. This both annoys and intrigues him, as who or what captures her attention? Where does she go? Is she mixing glazes in her mind? A pot left in the kiln?

  “Enough about my week,” he finally says. “Tell me of yours.”

  She tilts her head. “Uneventful. Ketty’s picked a fight with the butcher again, so I suspect we’ll have fish for a while.”

  “Not surprising.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Always on about something.”

  The tips of her blond eyelashes hold the light. She looks confused. Has she left again?

  “What’s the latest in the saga?” A product of the war, his mother used to say about Ketty, as if that explained the fights she picked with all the help and her simmering dislike of just about everything. And certainly it did bear some responsibility, as Ketty’s father and two brothers—fishermen and not even a part of the Great War—were both killed on a boat in the North Sea, and only a year later her mother prepared and consumed a beautiful, lethal meal of foxglove and lily of the valley. Ketty, having herself just barely survived an accident at the garment factory where she worked, had nothing left and came to the States. Who wouldn’t be familiar with the failings of the world after such loss?

  “Oh, William,” Claire says, “I don’t know. Elizabeth, Edith’s sister, had twins last week. A girl and a boy.”

  He smiles. “One of each. Right off the bat.”

  “A lot of sleepless nights, is what it is.”

  “But good sleepless. Not bad.”

  “Well. That might depend on whose view you take.”

  They resume eating in silence. When his parents first brought up her name as someone he might like to take to dinner—the daughter of someone Irwin greatly respected—he hadn’t known who she was. You’ve met her, his mother said. Years ago, at her debut, at the Nicollet? And many times since then? But it was only later, after his parents passed, when he sat across from her at Jax Café, halfway into his Tom Collins with fresh fruit and two jiggers of gin, that he really saw her. You do ceramics? he asked. As she spoke, he saw in her the love she had for what she did—a passion, really—and that in itself made him sit closer. Her hands moved in the restaurant’s dim light, forming the clay as she spoke, and from her love for her craft emerged an exquisite heart-shaped face, startling peacock-blue eyes, a nicely shaped mouth, and a delicate nose—all such beautiful features on their own that somehow melded into one another and lost to the general appearance of someone faded and unremarkable.

  Will you show me? he asked. And she did, letting him sit at the corner of the table as she jotted down notes on glazes, studying pieces until they silently spoke of their colors. But forming the clay, the actual work she did at the wheel—that he’d have only one glimpse of. Eyes closed, hands before her, she was a medium of sorts, responding to a command, before she stopped, embarrassed. A few months after they were married, he understood this shyness, this instinct to protect, when he overheard her mother reprimanding her for her “dabblings.” Only a fool would waste day after day hiding in a cave. Such unladylike endeavors. Claire had said nothing, and so it was William who spoke, his voice startling them both from the hall. Her studio, he said. Claire does her pottery in her studio.

  And though he loved her, he saw it then, in his wife’s eyes, that what he felt for her could never equal what she felt for him. Love, a word with definition contingent upon experience. This was the closest he’d ever been, and he’d thought it real and magnificent until he glimpsed the height her own heart had achieved. So he’d told himself to be good to this woman with her fragile, reaching love, and yet he’d gone and done exactly the opposite.

  Now Claire is back at the window, watching the dark lake, thinking of Artus Van Briggle, told by his doctor to take daily walks. She pictures him in the dry Colorado air, discovering feldspar and kaolin, so many things he’d use for his experiments with glaze. Then he stops to cough, and in her mind she holds the frailty of his shoulders.

  The phone rings. She doesn’t move. After a bit, she hears her name.

  “Claire.”

  She doesn’t move. Perhaps if she refuses to turn, no one will be there. It would be her name, again spoken by invisible lips. A simple manifestation of her recent loneliness, a distance she has felt for months that now makes sense.

  “Claire,” William says again.

  Still she studies the dark water. “When?”

 
“Monday. I’m sorry to leave early, but there’s an issue with the Sandler job.”

  Her eyes refocus and the lake is gone, the image of the parlor snapped into the glass. William stands in the doorway, and even in his faint reflection she can see and almost feel the excitement he tries to mask. It’s as if he’s about to spring from himself, as if his body cannot contain him. All to go back to Rochester, to leave her. And she knows why. Once she’d seen it she couldn’t work, her hands heavy, refusing to let up, refusing to let the clay take shape, as again and again she saw him kissing another woman, a faceless, nameless woman who—unbeknownst to William—had left a smudge of red lipstick by his ear. Not in the location of a polite kiss on the cheek.

  Does he love this woman? Her William, her William whom she’s been trying, with every day, to love a little less? Granted it’s for her family’s sake she needs him, but it was for herself, for her own eager heart that she married him. Never in her life had she thought she’d get exactly what she wanted, and yet there he’d been, on bended knee.

  In the reflection she sees him nod, and wonders what he’s affirming. “I’m going to bed,” he says. “Will you come up?”

  She forces herself to smile. “I think I’ll do a little work.”

  “How is that glaze you’re creating?”

  “I’m making it, not creating it. It’s been done before.”

  He nods. She waits. Then he turns from the room and disappears. She sits in silence, patient, until sure enough, there’s the faint sound of her husband making another call. Distant. She can’t hear his voice, but knows he’s whispering.

  Once more she turns to the window.

  3

  Now

  FOR A MOMENT Abby thinks she hears them. Voices, footsteps in the hall. Sunlight through a stained-glass window hits the floor in jeweled tones, dust thick on every surface but the picture frames. The son reaches for another box. This ring, Victorian, rose gold with seed pearls and two bloodred garnets, comes with a story. As he conjures his memories, Abby takes notes, though after a moment she turns once more toward the hall, imagining the slow shuffle of the father before he died, slippered feet upon the rug, a heavy lean on the doorknob before he entered an empty room. Only empty rooms. His wife had passed just a year prior, after a marriage over seven decades long. He’d bring a chair to her grave, the son tells her, and eat his dinner from their Tupperware.

  Later that morning, back at the jewelry store, Abby types up the memories, prints them on ecru paper, and cuts them into strips that are then folded into velvet boxes. Some customers won’t care, won’t even want them, but those who wish to see beyond this moment will appreciate the tales. Kept for ten years in a biscuit tin in France, behind a fake wall, she’s written, or Handed down over three generations, this ring has lived in ten states and seen twelve great-grandchildren. She is, she understands, the last vestige of a great story no one may ever tell again, and it’s this love of the past, the unseen fingerprints of long ago, that drove her into this field. All begun when she was a child with her grandmother’s ring, but reignited in college when she first set foot into this shop, résumé in hand, the glint of diamonds like flashes of sun on a lake.

  She’s tired. Another dream last night, the fourth in a row. Mondays, however, leave little time to recover lost sleep, so the coffees she’s been drinking are thick with sediment, acidic jolts that leave her tired yet antsy. That the dreams are worse than before and this frequent is like being dropped before a black tunnel in the mountain—there could be an end that’s unseen, or maybe not. Maybe this is how it will always be.

  The name, however, has not returned. Not since that Friday night, and for that she’s thankful. Forgetting it, however, is not an option. Burned within her, branded in her mind. Claire Ballantine. Beautiful, really, nothing that should evoke fear. And yet it had.

  “Sorry,” a customer says. “You said there was a history? To the ring?”

  The soon-to-be fiancé holds the doorknob, his desire to leave the store and be back in the safety of sunlight and cars and sidewalks so palpable that Abby almost feels angry. Then don’t talk about marriage, she wants to scream, don’t make promises. But then she sees his wrist, somehow too delicate for a man, and she thinks he could be a good man: He could let his girlfriend have first crack at the crossword puzzle when the paper arrives; he could run baths for her and call his mother without being reminded. She doesn’t know. This could be a good man.

  But then the man turns to his girlfriend. “Wasn’t it you who said that’s the problem? You don’t want to wear someone’s tragedy on your hand?”

  On the underside of his wrist is a purple birthmark, like a thumbprint, and for a moment Abby pictures the doctor pulling him when he was born, a good grasp on the baby’s arm that forever left a stain. Abby herself has a birthmark on her abdomen, near her lungs, but it’s straight, a line, like a surgical scar. She was born via C-section and has always blamed the doctor, though her mother laughs at the thought. As if I wouldn’t have noticed that the doctor nicked my baby.

  Now the woman’s mouth is opened like a bird’s, about to protest, but Abby steps in. “Why would it be a tragedy? These rings were bought out of hope and love. That’s what they hold. To me, at least.” She smiles, a smile for the man, and continues: World War I and II, flashes of prayers that lengthened in the night, the Depression, the rings a reminder of a better time, of hope, of love, of a moment when nothing mattered but beauty and promise. Children, even. “How often did you watch your mother’s hand tucking you in, running a bath, making dinner? People kissed these stones. There’s life and emotion and love that you’ll never find in a new ring.”

  The woman is nodding. Abby’s made this speech a hundred times, its practiced intonations fluid, voice lower on the Depression, higher on children. Luckily, this is one of the rings that comes with a history Abby has documented, and as she recounts the story, she watches the woman’s face, the slow grin of a decision made.

  “I love that,” the woman says, and the boyfriend nods in a way that Abby’s seen before.

  The door chimes as they leave. Abby puts the ring away and sits, needing a moment of nothing. The morning light is kind, submissive. She adjusts a couple of rings, angling them just so. The ring Abby wants was her grandmother Edith’s; a platinum ring from before the First World War, a European-cut diamond with clarity completely unusual for the time, made by I&I, a small company that seems to have produced only a few other pieces. It carries a secret, the ring. At least according to her grandmother, who lied simply to witness confusion, who butted heads with just about everyone, especially Abby. But her grandmother hadn’t wanted it and gave it to Abby’s mother, then demanded it not be worn until she’d passed, and that detail, that denial of beauty, of luxury, lent credence to the story: There was a secret to this ring. As a child Abby wore it on her thumb. The bathroom light was best, and the second her mother’s car left the driveway, Abby was in her dresser, feeling for the velvet, then standing beneath the fluorescents, washcloth covering the drain. An illicit meeting in the middle of the night, leaves crunching beneath feet, the ring in a pocket close against a racing heart—Abby’s mind skipped from scene to scene. There was no limit to the unknown.

  But when her grandmother passed during Abby’s sophomore year in high school, Abby’s mother left the ring where it was, hidden in her dresser. There was no reason for anyone to wear it, no pretense of romance or faith or shiny encouragement. The ring stayed dark, sandwiched between sweaters.

  —

  During a break, Abby retreats to the secret garden attached to the store. Long ago a narrow metal table had been shoved against a fence, and its base is now an explosion of orange and red nasturtiums that glow electric in the sunlight. To the right is a waist-high tree stump, all but lost beneath a curtain of black-eyed Susan vines, a thick yellow disordered gaze. A crow lands a few feet from the table, head cocked, studying
Abby as though he sees her potential.

  Claire Ballantine. The name sounds vaguely British. Ballantine. Ballantine. Mackenzie. Scottish. Was Aidan Scottish? Abby can’t remember, but figures he must have been somewhere in his lineage. Even in high school he had the hulking presence of a Scot, with green eyes the same shade as a gardenia leaf. Aidan. Always more than just a crush, and yet even that had intensified when one night she had a dream—a nothing dream, pointless, just him in an old car—that days later she overheard him repeating, almost exactly, as something he’d dreamed just the night before. Everything changed. To Abby it was proof. Evidence of a future, a twining of fate that would bring them together. Roots stretched deeper, infatuation grown as if with the touch of sun. Right after school she went home and wrote down the dream with as much detail as she could—the tree branches splayed upon the hood of the car, a squirrel that crossed the road, the way he smiled and yet the conflicting sadness she felt from him, so strong it practically singed the day.

  “Abby,” Candace calls from the doorway. “Another estate trip. Now, though. You’ll have to follow, but you can go home from there.”

  The heat presses and the pounding of a sledgehammer beats into the air. Abby waits at the crosswalk, her car parked in the small lot across the street. A few months prior, only a few feet away from this spot, a man had been standing looking at his phone when a car jumped the curb. Just like that, he was gone, and now she watches those who have no idea, their feet upon the exact spot of his last breath. The easily forgottens and the never knowns in life make her feel nervous, unsettled, a hazard in her line of work of extinguished lives. Write it down, don’t let them end. And she did, even for that man, though all she knew of him was what a reporter managed to fit into a column. Still, she printed his name and taped the tiny strip to the nearest post, where it remained until water seeped into the paper and the ink ran, making it appear as if he mourned his own loss.