The Woman in the Window(33)

“You take the one by the window.” I sat on the edge of the other bed, unzipped my suitcase. “Better make sure it’s locked.”

Ed swung his bag onto the mattress. We began to unpack in silence. Beyond the window, curtains of snow shifted, gray and white in the creeping dusk.

After a moment, he rolled up one sleeve and scratched at his forearm. “You know . . .” he said. I turned to him.

The toilet flushed and Olivia burst into the room, hopping from one foot to the other. “When can we get up to ski?”



Dinner was to be prepacked PB&Js and assorted juice boxes, although I’d stowed a bottle of sauvignon blanc amid my sweaters. By now the wine was room temperature, and Ed liked his whites “really dry and really cold,” as he always notified waiters. I rang the front desk, asked for ice. “There’s a machine in the hallway just past your room,” Marie told me. “Make sure to give the lid a real hard push.”

I took the ice bucket from the minibar beneath the television, walked into the corridor, spotted an old Luma Comfort model humming in an alcove a few steps away. “You sound like a mattress,” I informed it. I gave the lid a real hard push and back it slid, the machine exhaling into my face, frosty cold, the way people’s breath looks in spearmint-gum commercials.

There was no trowel. I rummaged within, the cold scorching my hands, and shook the cubes into the bucket. They clung to my skin. So much for Luma Comfort.

That’s where Ed found me, wrist-deep in ice.

He appeared suddenly at my side, leaning against the wall. For a moment I pretended not to see him; I stared into the basin of the machine, as though its contents fascinated me, and continued to scoop ice, wishing he’d leave, wishing he’d hold me.

“Interesting?”

I turned to him, didn’t bother feigning surprise.

“Look,” he said, and in my head I completed the sentence for him. Let’s rethink this, maybe. I’ve overreacted, even.

Instead, he coughed—he’d been battling a cold in recent days, ever since the night of the party. I waited.

Then he spoke. “I don’t want to do it this way.”

I squeezed a fistful of ice cubes. “Do what?” My heart felt faint. “Do what?” I repeated.

“This,” he answered, almost hissing, sweeping one arm through the air. “A whole happy-family holiday, and then the day after Christmas we . . .”

My heart slowed; my fingers burned. “What do you want to do? Tell her now?”

He didn’t say anything.

I withdrew my hand from the machine, slid the lid shut. Not “real hard” enough: It jammed halfway down. I propped the bucket of ice on my hip, tugged at the lid. Ed gripped it and yanked it.

The bucket rolled away from me, clattering to the carpet, spattering cubes across the floor.

“Shit.”

“Forget it,” he said. “I don’t want anything to drink.”

“I do.” I knelt to rake the cubes back into the bucket. Ed watched me.

“What are you going to do with those?” he asked.

“Should I just let them melt?”

“Yes.”

I stood and set the bucket atop the machine. “You seriously want to do this now?”

He sighed. “I don’t see why we—”

“Because we’re already here. We’re already . . .” I pointed to the door of our suite.

He nodded. “I thought about that.”

“You’ve been thinking a lot lately.”

“I thought,” he continued, “that . . .”

He went quiet, and I heard the click of a door behind me. I twisted my head to see a middle-aged woman moving down the corridor toward us. She smiled shyly, eyes averted; picked her way through the ice cubes on the floor, walked on to the lobby.

“I thought that you’d want to start healing right away. That’s what you’d say to one of your patients.”

“Don’t—please don’t tell me what I would or wouldn’t say.”

He said nothing.

“And I wouldn’t talk that way to a child.”

“You’d talk that way to their parents.”

“Don’t tell me how I’d talk.”

More nothing.

“And as far as she knows, there’s nothing to heal.”

He sighed again, rubbed at a spot on the bucket. “The fact is, Anna,” he told me, and I could see the weight in his eyes, that broad cliff of his brow near collapse, “I just can’t take this any longer.”

I looked down, stared at the ice cubes already softening on the ground.

Neither of us spoke. Neither of us moved. I didn’t know what to say.

Then I heard my voice, soft and low. “Don’t blame me when she’s upset.”

A pause. And then his voice, softer still. “I do blame you.” He breathed in. Breathed out. “I thought of you as the girl next door,” he said.

I braced myself for more.

“But right now I can barely look at you.”

I screwed my eyes shut, inhaled the cold tang of ice. And I thought not of our wedding day, nor of the night Olivia was born, but of the morning we harvested cranberries in New Jersey—Olivia shrieking and laughing in her waders, buttery with sunblock; slow skies above, the September sun drenching us; a vast sea of rose-red fruit all around. Ed with his hands full, his eyes bright; me clutching our daughter’s sticky fingers. I remembered the bog waters risen to our hips, felt them flood my heart, surge into my veins, rise within my eyes.