“That’s not really how it works,” he said. But there was something encouraging in his smile, a pleasure in seeing a spark in me he’d thought was gone.
“Look who’s cynical now.”
I had a goal, a new possibility, a different way to keep track of time. I populated spreadsheets. I determined the proposition was risky but possible. I convinced David. We let our lease run out, sold off some of our furniture, packed up the rest in a truck, and set off for New England in the winter, leaving one cold climate for another. We’d counted on red tape in getting the proper permits and licensing and loans. We anticipated the surfacing of unseen structural problems. We had thought that time plus money plus will could result in achievement, but it turned out we didn’t have the right amount of each variable to resolve the equation.
The clouds threatened rain all morning, and when it came, sheets of it hitting the shutters, Stella and I were in her bunk, flashlights and an old lamp I’d found for her in the lodge glowing against the gloom. I’d turned on the bunk’s electric supply for her. We were playing jacks, the set she’d found on a shelf. She’d had to look up the object of the game on her phone. She needed to remind me, too, but though I’d forgotten the rules, the weight of the tarnished, pointed metal pieces was so familiar in my palms. The glinting green rubber ball hadn’t deteriorated at all. We scoured the floor for rough spots—there would be no splinters today.
Her nails were still that galactic blue, though it had come off a little. Time to repaint, she said. So that’s what we did when we’d had enough of jacks. She had two bottles of polish, the blue and a dark, glossy red. Crimson, she said, choosing for me. She expertly used only a minimum of polish remover on a cotton ball and then brushed on a fresh coat of the navy lacquer. I struggled to look as skilled as Stella. It took me forever to do one hand, the color going all over my fingers because I’d had no practice. I rarely did this.
“Here,” she said, taking my other hand, in a competent, caring, practiced manner, like I’d first taken hers, when removing that splinter, and she placed it on the floor in front of her. But there was also a tenderness in her touch. And—I don’t think I was imagining it—an electricity. Something transformative, too: In no time, my fingers seemed to belong to a woman with dark brows and cutting cheekbones, holding an apple to her open mouth, in a silk dress and the highest heels, in front of a camera lens somewhere in Paris in the 1980s.
“That’s totally your color,” she said.
“Really?”
“I mean, it’s the only other color I have. But yeah.”
She looked from my hands to my face and then my neck as if she were answering a question she’d asked herself.
“I think I have something that belongs to you,” she said, and she got up, opened the top drawer of her dresser, and turned around, holding out a gold necklace, a chain with a small disc imprinted with an “E.” It shone out of the low light. David had given it to me as a birthday present years back and I’d lost it a month or so before. By the water, I’d thought, though I couldn’t be sure.
“Yes, that’s mine.” I was relieved to see it again, but that relief didn’t squash a wrenching in my gut and a tightening I could feel across my face.
“I found it down by the lake. I figured it could have been anybody’s though probably yours. But at the time, I didn’t know how to return it to you without either letting you know I was here or totally creeping you out. Like, I mean, if I’d left it visibly on your porch or something, you’d be like, what the fuck, who put that there, right?”
“Right. Yeah.”
“Here,” she said, and because my nails were still drying, she moved behind me to put it around my neck, brushing my hair to the side. She didn’t linger when she hooked the clasp, she efficiently performed a task, like a hairstylist or a doctor or any other professional who might have cause to touch the back of your neck. But I’d never before replayed to myself—as I did on my way back to the house, when the rain let up a little—the motions, the positioning, the feel of any hairstylist or doctor who’d ever touched the nape of my neck.
“It’s so pretty on you,” she’d said, stepping around to look at me. And I’d lowered my gaze to the disc hanging around my neck, so I didn’t have to look at her looking at me.
Back at the house, I didn’t even get out of my raincoat, I went straight up to my room, taking the stairs in twos, to examine the tray where I kept a few bracelets, and with my glossy nails—polish made them feel different, more object-like—I opened a velvet-lined box. I didn’t own much expensive jewelry but what I had, a couple of pendants, an emerald ring from Aunt Esther, was all still there, exactly where I remembered it being. Stella was honest, I reassured myself. If there was dishonesty here, it was my own, I thought, out of breath, standing there with water dripping off my raincoat.
Later, David asked about my day. Any job prospects?
I told him I had a lead on something. A lie. I knew we’d eventually need another income if we wanted to keep living as we were and continue to pay off our medical bills (how could there be more medical bills? still?) and the debt we’d taken on to finance our plan for reviving this place. But I didn’t want to think too hard about it right now, about my employability or how necessary, how urgent it might be for me to find work.
I put my hands on the kitchen table, daring David to know something was up, but he didn’t notice, or he pretended not to notice, what I’d spent a good deal of the rest of that afternoon doing: admiring my crimson manicure. Stella was honest, and she’d said it was my color, so it was.
“How was your day?” I asked him.
Work was a series of disappointing client meetings, he told me, and I tried to be interested and consoling, because he’d found a job when we couldn’t make a go of the resort, because he worked hard, because I loved him, because he was starting to resent me, because I was pleased with my nails.
When we finished our dinner of pasta and tomato sauce from a jar, I washed the dishes with a sense of purpose. I’d started living according to a certain arithmetic: If I did enough dishes, David couldn’t resent me as much. I took a glass vase out of a cupboard, rinsed it, too, and placed it on the counter, thinking that the next day, I would fill it with flowers. I would set a table. I would open a cookbook and make us a proper meal.
David sat on the living room couch in semidarkness, looking at his phone.
“David, David, David,” I said.
He held on to his phone longer than he should have, out of habit, but before this could depress me, I took it from him, standing over him. He looked up, called back to a place that, out of habit, we hadn’t been for far too long. Then he took my hand, pulling me toward him.
“I like your nails.”
“Thank you.”
“You found it,” he said, reaching up to touch the gold disc resting below my collar bone.
I climbed on top of him. There was nothing covering the bay window in that room. It faced a backyard that turned into brush. I kept looking at the glass as if I might see someone outside, but all I got was my own reflection.
Stella was golden in the sun. We lay on towels in the sand and she glittered, smooth and tan, after we’d been swimming in the lake. I had on a form-fitting, long-sleeve shirt, made of bathing-suit material, and though it protected me from getting burned, from ultraviolet damage, I wondered what the point was. My skin didn’t look like Stella’s did, like it sought