The Cloisters(23)

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We decamped back to the patio for dinner, an unfussy mix of grilled vegetables, cod, and slices of campagne bread that Patrick brought out from the kitchen. Despite my initial impression that Patrick must have a full staff to run such a large house, it was clear that he happily made do on his own, and we ate tucked around a small table, not in a large dining room as I had initially anticipated. When we had eaten everything and were falling back in our chairs, the night still warm from the heat of the day, Rachel stood and cleared her plate and my own before Patrick joined her with the rest. I watched their bodies recede into the kitchen, the dim interior light revealing only the faintest shadows inside. We could hear the clatter of plates and pans making their way into the dishwasher and sink.

“They might be a little while,” said Aruna, who pulled out a cigarette and offered me one before hers sprung to life in the darkness, our table lit only by the flame of a single hurricane lamp.

“Should I go help?” I said, moving to stand.

“No,” she said, placing a hand on my arm. “They don’t want your help.” The way she said it, with the barest edge of warning, caught me off guard.

“Oh.”

“Do you know what you’re getting yourself into here, Ann?” Aruna blew out a cloud of smoke.

“I think so.” I had watched Aruna drink at least four glasses of wine, and I wondered if that was factoring into her willingness to share with me as we sat alone on the patio.

“I don’t think you do.” She tapped some ash off the tip of her cigarette and onto the flagstones. “You must stay out of this.” She gestured at the door to the kitchen. “The rest of us, we stay out of it. We know better. It’s not a place for you or me, Ann. Our place is out here, on the patio. Not in the house. We don’t need to know what happens in the house.”

Of course, I knew what Aruna meant. Had known it, I realized, since I saw the red piece of ribbon wound around Rachel’s wrist. Inside, the sound of dishes clanging and the sink running had stopped. They had been gone for at least ten minutes.

“Don’t let Rachel get you involved,” she said. “Make sure that you remain yourself. That you keep a piece for you, apart. Because this”—she gestured down toward the Hudson and back to the house—“can be too much for some people.”

We sat in silence while the chorus of crickets grew louder and louder, a humming I could feel at the back of my throat, until Rachel and Patrick finally returned to the table. I noticed, as they walked side by side, that Patrick reached out once to touch Rachel’s arm, their bodies silhouetted by the kitchen light.

When we finally drove home, it was late, and the thought of my studio apartment seemed foreign and cold. The lights on the parkway flicked by outside, an orangey, otherworldly glow.

“I’m glad you’re here,” said Rachel quietly from the other side of the car. She reached out and put a hand on my arm, and let it linger a beat too long.





CHAPTER SEVEN


After that night, we stopped taking days off, Rachel and I. When the weekend came, we found a reason to be at The Cloisters even when Patrick wasn’t. And while I thought the magic of walking beneath its coffered ceilings, endlessly decorated with rib vaults and the occasional gold leaf, would wear off, it never did. The beauty was intoxicating, and I wondered if I would have felt the same down at the Met on Fifth Avenue, where the summer associates worked at rows of adjacent computer monitors. The Cloisters had taken me instead to a world of damp stone and a surfeit of flowers, where the artwork itself, in glossy encaustic and enamel, burned hot.

And as my urgency around the work grew—every waking minute occupied with the occult, every waking minute devoted to proving I was worth the risk Patrick and Rachel had taken—I started missing calls from home. At first, my mother’s messages were just to check. Checking I was doing okay. Checking on my summer. Checking to see if I had received the papers she sent. Checking in on my plans for fall. And then they became just to see. Just seeing if I had time to call her back. Just seeing if I was around. Just seeing if I had received her messages. In one, I could tell she had been crying, and it was as if I could see her, standing in the kitchen, wearing his clothes, clutter and sadness everywhere. I texted her: alive and well, just busy at work.

And it was true, we were busy, but not so busy that I couldn’t have called her back, couldn’t have checked in on her. I think, perhaps, I leaned into the work at the museum, even into the city itself, to hide from guilt I felt about not being there to guide her back to the business of life. As if I might have been able to persuade her to leave the island of grief she had created for herself. But it was better here, in New York, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to move between my new reality and my old nightmare. I didn’t want my mother, Washington, the apple orchards that surrounded town, to pull me out of the reverie I had tumbled into.

I was drunk on the city itself, desperate, in some ways, to drown in it. To let the sounds and the people and the constant movement draw me into its tides and send me out to sea forever. I never felt as alive as I did when I was being tossed around by New York. Even the fact that the city, under the summer sun, smelled of hot garbage and metallic exhaust enticed me. Already the idea that I might not be here to see the light change as it filtered through the maples in Fort Tryon Park in September—a month without Rachel, less luminous, less strange—filled me with dread.