“And what an adorable little boy you are,” she said to me. Her long nose was slightly pink at the end. “I’m awfully glad to meet you. James and Pippa have been telling me all about your visit—the most extraordinary thing. We’ve all been abuzz about it. Also—” she clasped my hand—“I have to thank you from the bottom of my heart for returning my grandfather’s ring to me. It means an awful lot to me.”
Her ring? Again, in confusion, I looked at Hobie.
“It would have meant a lot to my father, as well.” There was a deliberate, practiced quality to her friendliness (“buckets of charm,” as Mr. Barbour would have said); and yet her coppery tang of resemblance to Mr. Blackwell, and Pippa, drew me in despite myself. “You know how it was lost before, don’t you?”
The kettle whistled. “Would you like some tea, Margaret?” said Hobie.
“Yes please,” she replied briskly. “Lemon and honey. A tiny bit of scotch in it.” To me, in a more friendly voice, she said: “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid we have some grown-up business to attend to. We’re to meet with the lawyer shortly. As soon as Pippa’s nurse arrives.”
Hobie cleared his throat. “I don’t see any harm if—”
“May I go in and see her?” I said, too impatient for him to finish the sentence.
“Of course,” said Hobie quickly, before Aunt Margaret could intervene—turning expertly away to evade her annoyed expression. “You remember the way, don’t you? Just through there.”
viii.
THE FIRST THING SHE said to me was: “Will you please turn off the light?” She was propped in bed with the earbuds to her iPod in, looking blinded and disoriented in the light from the overhead bulb.
I switched it off. The room was emptier, cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. A thin spring rain was hitting at the windowpanes; outside, in the dark courtyard, the foamy white blossoms of a flowering pear were pale against wet brick.
“Hello,” she said, folding her hands a little tighter on the coverlet.
“Hi,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound quite so awkward.
“I knew it was you! I heard you talking in the kitchen.”
“Oh, yeah? How’d you know it was me?”
“I’m a musician! I have very sharp ears.”
Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dim, I saw that she seemed less frail than she had on my previous visit. Her hair had grown back in a bit and the staples were out, though the puckered line of the wound was still visible.
“How do you feel?” I said.
She smiled. “Sleepy.” The sleep was in her voice, rough and sweet at the edges. “Do you mind sharing?”
“Sharing what?”
She turned her head to the side and removed one of the earbuds, and handed it to me. “Listen.”
I sat down by her on the bed, and put it in my ear: aethereal harmonies, impersonal, piercing, like a radio signal from Paradise.
We looked at each other. “What is it?” I said.
“Umm—” she looked at the iPod—“Palestrina.”
“Oh.” But I didn’t care what it was. The only reason I was even hearing it was because of the rainy light, the white tree at the window, the thunder, her.
The silence between us was happy and strange, connected by the cord and the icy voices thinly echoing. “You don’t have to talk,” she said. “If you don’t feel like it.” Her eyelids were heavy and her voice was drowsy and like a secret. “People always want to talk but I like being quiet.”
“Have you been crying?” I said, looking at her a bit more closely.
“No. Well—a little.”
We sat there, not saying anything, and it didn’t feel clumsy or weird.
“I have to leave,” she said presently. “Did you know?”
“I know. He told me.”
“It’s awful. I don’t want to go.” She smelled like salt, and medicine, and something else, like the chamomile tea my mother bought at Grace’s, grassy and sweet.
“She seems nice,” I said, cautiously. “I guess.”
“I guess,” she echoed gloomily, trailing a fingertip along the border of the coverlet. “She said something about a swimming pool. And horses.”
“That should be fun.”
She blinked, in confusion. “Maybe.”
“Do you ride?”
“No.”
“Me neither. My mother did though. She loved horses. She always stopped to talk to the carriage horses on Central Park South. Like—” I didn’t know how to say it—“it was almost like they’d talk to her. Like, they’d try to turn their heads, even with their blinkers on, to where she was walking.”