It’s the last thing she needs to hear right now, so it’s probably for the best that Teddy hasn’t gotten back to her.
She isn’t being reckless, accepting a stranger’s dinner invitation. She’s being proactive, hoping New York might offer the one thing she’d lacked in California: friendship.
She had a social circle there—the girls’ pals’ parents, Keith’s colleagues’ spouses, workout buddies, neighbors. There were plenty of people she could count on for a favor, people with whom she’d shared meals and celebrations and even vacations over the years. But they weren’t true confidants, and she won’t miss any of them.
Anyway, Heather no longer seems like a stranger. They’ve been texting back and forth ever since Friday evening, when Nora sent a message asking about neighborhood restaurants. Heather recommended the local Moroccan place where the Howells dined that first evening, and the Asian-Cuban one in Manhattan where they’d had a late dinner last night. Both were excellent, as promised.
If you ask Heather about best places to eat—or buy school supplies, or open a bank account, all questions Nora posed to her—she’s the kind of person who shares interesting or funny anecdotes along with an efficient, comprehensive list of options.
Keith comes into the kitchen wearing khaki shorts and a light blue linen button-down, sleeves rolled up. He’s freshly shaven, not one to let stubble linger if there’s a razor available. Nora has always found his clean-cut good looks appealing, though here in New York, he could do with a little more edge.
“Turned out pretty,” he comments, indicating the arrangement of roses, sunflowers, and Peruvian lilies in splashy shades of scarlet, orange, and yellow. She’d cut the blooms from the garden, bought the wrap and ribbon at a stationer’s on Edgemont, and the turquoise Fiestaware vase at an adjacent vintage store.
“Thanks.”
She ties a fat symmetrical red satin bow around the cellophane and fluffs out the loops, conscious of his eyes on her.
“What?” she asks, not looking up.
“What?”
“Why are you just standing there watching me?”
“Can’t I admire your handiwork? And you?”
It’s the kind of thing he’d have said before things changed, and she’d have found it sweet. Now the words don’t ring true. Now she’s certain it wasn’t admiration: it was scrutiny.
She hears footsteps on the stairs, heavy and methodical. Not Piper, who tends to prance down.
Stacey appears in the doorway. Like Nora, she’s dressed all in black, from her bulky hooded sweatshirt to her sneakers.
“Okay, I guess I missed the death notice,” Keith says. “Are we going to a funeral?”
Stacey rolls her eyes.
Nora notices that her hair is brushed, brunette kinks tamed into a low ponytail. She’s wearing her contacts, and she appears to have helped herself to Nora’s cosmetics. It’s an expensive brand, but the foundation is a shade too dark for her untanned skin, casting her in sallow shadow. The amethyst liner was meant for blue eyes, not brown, and was applied with a heavy hand.
She just doesn’t know what to do. I should help her.
But before Nora settles on a tactful way to phrase the offer, the floor creaks directly overhead: Piper, on the move.
She bounces in like a sunbeam, face glowing and blond hair flowing beneath oversize burnished metallic sunglasses propped on her head. A yellow romper bares her tanned limbs and matching sandals reveal coral-polished toes. Delicate gold jewelry glints at her ears, neck, wrists, and one ankle.
“Are we going?”
Nora smiles. “We are. Is that the outfit you bought last week on Melrose, Pipe?”
“Uh-huh.” Piper twirls around. “How does it look? Too short?”
“No, it’s perfect.”
“Thanks.”
Piper’s gaze flits to Stacey, taking in her sister’s appearance. She looks as though she wants to say something—searching for a compliment, maybe, and then realizing it would come across as perfunctory, same as anything Nora herself might say.
Nora picks up the vase. “Hey, Stace, can you carry this?”
“Let Piper. The flowers match her ensemble.” She emphasizes the last word with an exaggerated French accent.
Piper laughs as though it was intended as a sweet little joke. “They do! Here, I’ll take it, Mom.”
“Thanks, but I asked your sister.”
“And my sister offered,” Stacey shoots back.
“I don’t mind. Really. No big deal.” Piper holds out her hands and Nora gives her the vase.
Keith catches her eye and she shrugs. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be a girl like Stacey, at that age. So many things he doesn’t know . . .
Nora turns away and pulls on her sunglasses before stepping out into the warm summer evening.
Jacob
Jacob had returned to Glover Street on Saturday, confident that the owners of the row house across from Anna’s were spending the weekend on Long Beach Island. He’d lounged on their bottom step for an hour, armed with cover stories in case someone came along, recognized that he didn’t belong, and confronted him.
He’d correctly guessed that wouldn’t happen in a city populated by hurried, harried residents who mind their own business. The few neighbors passing by had failed to give him a second glance.
Across the street at 104, all was quiet. The front windows were closed, curtains and shades drawn, and he wondered if he’d imagined what he’d seen on Friday. Not just the moving van, but her.
When night fell, he walked around the block and accessed the rear shed roof again, thinking of the binoculars buried in the thorny hedge below. It didn’t matter. There was nothing to see at 104. The shades were drawn and Anna’s room was dark.
Back home in bed, he’d dreamed about Anna. It wasn’t the first time, but she was so vivid, alive again.
“Do you believe in ghosts, Jacob?” she kept asking him in his dream, as she had in real life so many years ago. “Do you? Do you believe in ghosts?”
He reached for her, expecting her to vanish, but his hands touched warm flesh. She was really there. He held her close and wept into her soft brown hair.
“I’m so sorry. Please forgive me . . .”
The dream stayed with him today. As shadows filtered the fading sun, he bought a thick Sunday New York Times and returned to the stoop across from 104 Glover.
Now he watches the house over the top of the open Sports section, chain-smoking and slapping flying insects that stick to his sweat-dampened skin in the humid dusk.
He should leave, and yet . . .
The shades are open. Maybe someone is there. Maybe Anna . . .
Do you believe in ghosts?
She’d asked him that question after his grandmother’s death, not long before her own.
“No,” he’d said. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever seen one?”
“No. But . . .”
She murmured something that sounded like I’ve been one.
When he asked her if that was what she’d said, she shook her head. “What? No! Why would I say that?”
“Then what did you say?”