her in anger had hurt him so deeply that finally he had been wordless, and all he could do was stare at her. Looking at her now, her face unguarded, her body next to his, he could not help loving her for the scar, the eyes, even if it meant he wished her to be this way.
II
The next morning, Hoegbo on woke to the fading image of the woman’s bloody bandages and the sounds of Rebecca making breakfast. She knew the apartment be er than he did — knew its surfaces, its edges, the exact number of steps from table to chair to doorway — and she liked to make meals in a kitchen that had become more familiar to her than it could ever be to him. Yet she also asked him to bring back more furniture for the living room and bedroom or rearrange existing furniture. She became bored otherwise. “I want an unexplored country. I want a hint of the unknown,” she said once and Hoegbo on agreed with her.
To an extent. There were things Hoegbo on wished would stay unknown. On the mantel opposite the bed, for example, lay those of his grandmother’s possessions that his relatives in Morrow had sent to him: a pin, a series of portraits of family members, a set of spoons, a poorly copied family history. A le er had accompanied the heirlooms, describing his grandmother’s last days. The package had been waiting for him on the doorstep of the apartment one evening a month ago. His grandmother had died six weeks before that. He had not gone to the funeral. He had not even brought himself to tell Rebecca about the death. All she knew of it was the crinkling of the envelope as he smoothed out the le er to read it. She might even have picked up the pin or the spoons and wondered why he had brought them home. Telling her would mean explaining why he hadn’t gone to the funeral and then he would have to talk about the bad blood between him and his brother Richard.
The smell of bacon and eggs spurred him to throw back the covers, get up, put on a bathrobe, and stumble bleary-eyed through the living room to the kitchen. A dead sort of almost-sunlight — pale and green and lukewarm — suffused the kitchen window through the purple mold and thin veins of green. A watermark of the city appeared through the glass: gray spires, forlorn flags, the indistinct shapes of other anonymous apartment buildings.
Rebecca stood in the kitchen, spatula in hand, framed by the dour light. Her black hair was brightly dark. Her dress, a green-and-blue sweep of fabric, fit her loosely. She was intent on the skillet in front of her, gaze unblinking, mouth pursed.
As he came up behind Rebecca and wrapped his arms around her, a sense of guilt made him frown. He had come so close last night, almost as close as the boy, the woman. Was that as close as he could get without…? The question had haunted him throughout his quest. A sudden deep swell of emotion overcame him and he found that his eyes were wet. What if, what if?
Rebecca snuggled into his embrace and turned toward him. Her eyes looked almost normal during the day. Flecks of phosphorescence shot lazily across the pupils.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked. “You came home so late.”
“I slept. I’m sorry I was late. It was a difficult job this time.”
“Profitable?” Her elbow nudged him as she turned the eggs over with the spatula.
“Not very.”
“Really? Why not?”
He stiffened. Would Rebecca have realized the mansion had become a deathtrap? Would she have smelled the blood, tasted the fear? He served as her eyes, her contact with the world of images, but would he truly deprive her by not describing its horrors to her in every detail?
“Well… ” he began. He shut his eyes. The sick gaze of the solicitor flickering over the scene of his own death washed over him. Even as he held Rebecca, he could feel a distance opening up between them.
“You don’t need to shut your eyes to see,” she said, pulling out of his embrace.
“How did you know?” he said, although he knew.
“I heard you close them.” She smiled with grim satisfaction.
“It was just sad,” he said, si ing down at the kitchen table. “Nothing horrible. Just sad. The wife had lost her husband and had to sell the estate. She had a boy with her who kept holding on to a li le suitcase.”
The remnants of the solicitor floating to the ground, curling up like confe i. The boy’s gaze flu ering between him and the cage.
“I felt sorry for them. They had some nice heirlooms, but most of it was already promised toSla ery. I didn’t get much. They had a nice rug from Morrow, from before the Silence. Nice detail of Morrow cavalry coming to our rescue. I would have liked to have bought it.”
She carefully slid the eggs and bacon onto a plate and brought it to the table.
“Thank you,” he said. She had burned the bacon. The eggs were too dry. He never complained. She needed these li le sleights of hand, these illusions of illumination. It was edible.
“Mrs. Bloodgood took me down to theMorhaimMuseum yesterday,” she said. “Many of their artifacts are on open display. The textures were amazing. And the flower vendor visited, as you may have guessed.”
Rebecca’s father, Paul, was the curator for a small museum inStockton. Paul liked to joke that Hoegbotton was just the temporary caretaker for items that would eventually find their way to him.
Hoegbo on had always thought museums just hoarded that which should be available on the open market. Rebecca had been her father’s assistant until the disease stole her sight. Now Hoegbo on sometimes took her down to the store to help him sort and catalog new acquisitions.
“I noticed the flowers,” he said. “I’m glad the museum was nice.”
For some reason, his hand shook as he ate his eggs. He put his fork down.
“Isn’t it good?” she asked.
“It’s very good,” he said. “I just need water.”
He got up and walked to the sink. The faucet had been put in five weeks ago, a er a two-year wait.
Before, they had go en jugs of water from a well down in the valley. He watched with satisfaction as the faucet splu ered and his glass gradually filled up.
“It’s a nice bird or whatever,” she said from behind him.
“Bird.” A vague fear shot through him. “Bird?” The glass clinked against the edge of the sink as he momentarily lost his grip on it.
“Or lizard. Or whatever it is. What is it?”
He turned, leaned against the sink. “What are you talking about?”
“That cage you brought home with you.”
The vague fear crept up his spine. “There’s nothing in the cage. It’s empty.” Was she joking?
Rebecca laughed: a pleasant, liquid sound. “That’s fu ny, because your empty cage was ra ling earlier.
At first, it scared me. Something was rustling around in there. I couldn’t tell if it was a bird or a lizard or I would have reached through the bars and touched it.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“There’s nothing in the cage.”
Her face underwent a subtle change and he knew she thought he doubted her on something at which she was expert: the interpretation of sound. On a calm day, she had told him, she could hear a boy skipping stones down by the docks.
For a moment, he said nothing. He couldn’t stay quiet for long. She couldn’t read his face without touching it, but he suspected she knew the difference between types of silence.
He laughed. “I’m joking. It’s a lizard — but it bites. So you were wise not to touch it.”
Suspicion tightened her features. Then she relaxed and smiled at him. She reached out, felt for his plate with her le hand, and stole a piece of his bacon. “I knew it was a lizard!”
He longed to go into the living room where the cage stood atop the table. But he couldn’t, not just yet.
“It’s quiet in here,” he said so ly, already expecting the reply.
“No it’s not. It’s not quiet at all. It’s loud.”
The le corner of his mouth curled up as he replied by rote: “What do you hear, my love?”
Her smile widened. “Well, first, there’s your voice, my love — a nice, deep baritone. Then there’s Hobson
