The Clairvoyants(36)

“Really?” I said. “Do we have to go?”

I’d thought we might have our own small feast at home. I’d even looked up recipes, thinking I might duplicate Thanksgivings from my childhood before my parents’ divorce, when even the preparations were extravagant, and the little ranch house was filled with cooking smells, and my father would wrap his arm around my mother in a boozy sort of embrace.

William looked annoyed. “I don’t want to go alone.”

As with the All Hallows’ Eve event that Geoff had taken us to at Anne’s, I felt in some way manipulated to attend.

“Who will be there?” I asked William. “Can I invite Del?”

William said he had no idea who’d be there—that he hadn’t asked. “She is your sister,” he said. “I suppose it’s all right.”

That evening, I tried to find Del to tell her about the plans, but she wasn’t home, and on Thanksgiving morning there was still no answer at her door. By afternoon it had grown so cold, everything frozen over. I was worried about Del, but William brushed over my fears.

“She’s probably visiting Sybil Townsend, learning card tricks,” he said.

“What if she’s missing?” I said.

I wished I had gotten Del a phone, although I knew she wouldn’t have kept it charged and wouldn’t have carried it with her at all times. It began to grow dark. William asked me if I was ready.

“I have to take a shower.” I stepped into the bathroom and turned the taps to the shower. The pipes groaned, and I left the water running to heat up.

William sat in the duck-carved chair. He often did, to read, and he was looking over student essays. “What have you been doing all day?” he said. He kept his eyes on the pages in his lap.

“I was in the lab.” William was always curious about my work—always asking me if I would like him to take me to sites he’d found. I suspected his interest was more competitive than he would admit, and I mostly refused.

I stood in the light from the little bathroom. I’d taken off my clothes, and the water was running in the shower. He looked up at me, and his expression changed—his eyes softening.

“You want to kiss me,” I said.

He shuffled the pages, slowly, his eyes still appraising. “That and more,” he said. “We have to leave in fifteen minutes, though. We’re riding with Geoff.”

I went to him and moved the essays from his lap, slid my legs alongside him, and took his face in my hands. He groaned, a sound I loved to urge from him. Meanwhile the shower ran and the apartment steamed up—the cold windows by the chair, the chrome fixtures on the stove, the mirror hung beside the door. We’d often made love in the chair—William’s head leaning against the upholstered chair back, and me moving over him, clutching the carved ducks’ heads. I would close my eyes and then open them to find him watching me, intently, and sometimes I found it disconcerting that he would see me in the moments I was least in control. That night he kept his eyes open in the darkening room, the steam swirling around us, and I didn’t protest or ask him not to look at me, as I often did. It was funny how you expected the moment of orgasm to be joyful, but really, his eyes revealed so much more—a strange mixture of joy and pain and sorrow. Once I mentioned putting the mirror behind the chair, so I could see what I looked like, what my own eyes revealed. William never moved the mirror, but I knew he didn’t judge me for my request or think me strange; rather my desire to see my own expression was just another thing he found interesting about me.

That night I kissed him in the fog of steam, and he lifted me off of him, almost abruptly.

“I don’t want to make Geoff wait,” he said.

I felt out of sorts, reminded of the first night he refused me. “Come in the shower with me,” I said, tugging on his arm, but he pulled away and gave me a look I suspected he gave his most ignorant students.

I took only a few minutes to shower, then I dressed, shivering with cold. Neither of us spoke. We went downstairs and I knocked on Del’s apartment door, but there was no answer, no lights, and no smell of incense. Geoff was waiting for us in his car at the curb, exhaust spilling out and blackening the snow.

“You’ll have to help me watch for black ice,” he said as we climbed in.

I made a sound of concern, and he chuckled.

William pulled the passenger door closed. “Black ice is transparent,” he said to me. “We’ll know we’ve hit it if the car is spinning.”

“Where’s your sister?” Geoff asked.

“I don’t really know,” I said. “Maybe she’s with Alice’s family.”

The thought of Del seated at a dining-room table covered in a lace cloth with Alice and her grandmother and Erika—tan and striking against the gray scene through the picture window—didn’t make me feel any better. Next, Del would be planning her own trip to Florida, she and Alice with Erika in her convertible speeding along some palm-lined boulevard.

As we drove it grew dark, making the ride to Anne’s feel longer than it had before. Although I’d driven the route myself, I wasn’t ever sure where I was. I shouldn’t have gone without Del. On Main Street I barely recognized the landmarks I’d driven past in my search for Del on All Hallows’ Eve—the bandstand, the Agway, the funeral home, the diner—all of it transformed by the snow, by the deserted quality of the town’s roads. Anne’s house, too, seemed changed, the snow’s sheen lit by the lamppost, the lights beaming yellow from the house windows. The same cars from last time were there—the Chevy Nova, the Camaro, Randy’s Firebird, a pickup truck—now splattered with salt and sand thrown by snowplows. I had thought the Milton girls would be with their families—but it seemed that they were as displaced as Del and I, and Anne was their family. I had a vague hope that Del would be there, but then I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. We walked up the ice-coated walkway to the front of the house. Geoff opened the storm door and we stepped inside.