Alejandro shoved his lank hair from his eyes, grabbed the edge of the door. "I been through this mierda Third World-style. So don't you question how / stand by a friend just because you don't know how to act like one."
His footsteps padded out, and then the front door opened and closed quietly.
I stared at myself in the mirror, didn't much like what I saw.
I made sure Alejandro had locked the front door behind him, then returned to the couch. Resting my feet on the coffee table, I watched the windows. They had lever locks, simple throw-and-clicks with a catch that made them immune to jimmying. Good locks.
Seized by an impulse, I sprang up and threw those levers, one after the other, elbowing each window open on a slight tilt. Back on the couch, I listened to my heart thudding its disapproval. But I didn't get up.
I stared at those locks, breathing the fresh breeze, for what must have been hours. It's amazing what you can hear through a screen at night. I could sense the canal. Dragonflies buzzing, cicadas singing, the mossy reek of standing water. I could see the fluttering shadows of the Tibetan prayer flags nailed to the eaves.
With great effort I averted my gaze from the windows, slid down on the couch, closed my eyes. The locks called to me, jealous for my attention, but I ignored them. The pleas rose to demands, a great, angry clamoring in my head, but still I didn't answer.
Security matters. But maybe comfort matters, too.
A thousand small decisions.
Sometime around morning I fell asleep.
When she opened the door, I was struck by the lack of resemblance. Maybe it was the years that had passed, or maybe it had always been that way, but Lydia Flores looked nothing like her sister. At least nothing like how Jane Everett had looked at thirty-two. I stuffed the Polaroid of Jane and Bilton back in my pocket and smiled in greeting.
Lydia studied me through the screen, mottled by the morning light. "Can I help you?"
"I hope so. I'm Nick Horrigan. I'm sorry to intrude on your morning, but I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about your sister."
She unlatched the screen and pushed it open.
She'd be sixty now, but she looked older, with that timeless grandmotherly bearing. She wore a housedress, and her hair was neatly done up in a bun. Her face was soft and round, made rounder by oversize glasses. Makeup-nothing excessive, but she was of the generation that really used it. Stockings and sling-back shoes, sensible but certainly not comfortable for hanging around at home alone. Somehow I knew that she'd been widowed-a sixth sense had emerged from an unknown part of my brain to make the diagnosis.
She said, "Are you with the press? Every few years someone comes knocking. A retrospective or whatever they call it. Last year I got contacted by someone doing a psychology study about grief."
"No," I said, "I'm not a reporter."
But that didn't seem to deter her. She didn't even bother to ask who I was with. She led me back in through a narrow hall to a living room. The house was clean, but every surface was cluttered. A side table crowded with antique Limoges boxes. Porcelain cats on a doily. Plants everywhere, sprouting from decorative watering cans and hanging from crocheted slings, lending the air a musty quality. Framed pictures rising like feathers from the lid and key cover of a small upright piano. Lydia at the altar, Jane in the maid-of-honor spot, though she couldn't have been more than thirteen. It was impossible not to recognize Jane Everett's lips. Lydia's husband, a kindly-looking
Hispanic man, appeared to be at least a decade older than his bride. He aged with dignity across the piano. The last shot, a close-up of him in a yellow sweater holding a tennis racket, was years old, bleached like the others from the facing window. He reclined at a club table, sipping iced tea, and his hair was silver, his teeth pronounced against a nice retirement tan.
I sat on a plastic-slipcovered couch. The seat was slightly warm, and beside me was a crossword-puzzle book, folded back to a pencil-indented page. I'd taken Lydia's spot, though she'd been too polite to say anything. Across, on a flat-screen that looked anachronistic contrasted with the other furnishings, two soap stars were mashing their faces against each other in a way that looked distinctly uncomfortable.
When I realized that Lydia was watching me, some prudish impulse made me turn my gaze away. The unplayed piano was too depressing, so I looked out the window beside it. A short, square garden met its end five feet out at the neighbor's aggressively tall slat fence.
Lydia followed my stare and said, "The young couple added that fence when they moved in. It's at the property line, so there was nothing we could do."
"Bad zoning laws."
