The gallery on the right ran shorter than the one on the left and gave, after some twenty paces, onto a low arch I had not noticed last night. The arch went down. There were stairs. The stairs were not the wide shallow stairs of the great gallery—they were narrow, the treads steep, the risers deep, and they went down in a long unbroken flight into a corridor that was not mirrored at all. The walls there were bare black stone. The same polished obsidian of the floors above, but cut rougher, left more honest, the marks of the tool that had made it still visible along the seams.
The corridor was cooler. The light was lower.
There were small mirrors set into the stone at intervals—narrow ovals the height of my torso, framed in the same dark wood as the study walls—and between every two mirrors an alcove. Each alcove held one object. Each object stood on aplinth of dark wood. Each plinth was the height of a man’s hand resting on it.
I walked.
The first alcove held a pair of reading glasses with one arm bent slightly out of true. The lenses were small and round. I did not, for a half-second, recognize them. Then I did. They were the glasses my Aunt Liesl had worn on the day she had taught me to read, sitting on the screened porch of the rented house in Sag Harbor with her finger under the words of a Beatrix Potter book, and they had been buried with her in 2007.
The second alcove held a cassette tape with a hand-lettered label. The label said, in my mother’s handwriting, Rachel — driving songs, July ’01. I had not seen the cassette in twenty years. I had not, until this second, been able to remember the precise loop of my mother’s capital R.
The third held a stub of pencil with teeth marks along the unsharpened end.
The fourth held a paperback copy of Wuthering Heights with my mother’s margin notes still in it.
The fifth held a single small white scallop shell, the kind I had picked up off the beach at Ditch Plains the summer I was eleven and kept in a drawer and lost.
He had collected my life.
I want to be careful with the word collected, because the word collected is the word of his brother and not his. He had not collected these things. He had—I felt it as I walked, in the slow private way the corridor was offering its alcoves—coveted them. He had coveted them and not, until last night, been allowed to have them in his halls. They were here now because I was here. They had arrived sometime in the small unaccounted hours.
I came around a long bend.
The next alcove held a hardback book.
I knew the book before my eyes had finished arriving on it. The binding was a deep blue, the color of a sky going through one of its later colors, a color I had imagined many times. The title was in a thin cream serif along the spine.Salt and Stay. The author’s name underneath. Rachel Booker.
The book was finished.
The book had a flap. The book had a back cover. The book had the small heavy weight in the air around it of a thing that had been bound and trimmed and slipcased and held by other hands than mine.
I did not pick it up.
I could not.
If I picked it up I would have to open it. If I opened it I would have to read the first line. If I read the first line and the first line was the line I had written on the L train going the other direction in October of last year, then the book was mine and I was, for the first time in nine years, on the front of one of my own pages.
I was not, this morning, ready to be on the front of one of my own pages.
Instead, I walked on. I understood, though, that I was not choosing the corridor.
The corridor was choosing me. Or rather—the wire at the inside of my wrist was choosing, with the soft unhurried hand of a thing pulling slack out of a line, and the corridor was the path the slack was running along. I had felt it, at the door of the chamber, as a length of give. I felt it now as a direction. When I took a step that the wire had not asked for, the air went a fraction less bright. When I took a step the wire approved of, the gold along my forearm warmed by the smallest possible degree.
It had been pulling at me, I realized, since I had opened my eyes.
I had not, until this minute, given it a name. I had given it the name of restlessness, the name of being unable to face him, thename of needing to walk somewhere that was not a study with a fire in it. The bond had let me give it those names. The bond had been patient about them. The bond was, just at this moment, done being patient.
The corridor turned.
It went around a long mirrored bend—the small narrow oval mirrors set into the bare stone at intervals, the wood-framed ovals, six of them along the curve, each giving me back a slice of a woman in dark trousers and a charcoal shirt walking with her left wrist held a fraction higher than her right—and gave, on the far side of the curve, onto a gallery I had not seen.
Mirrored on both walls.
It was the narrowest gallery I had been in. The two walls of it stood not eight feet apart, panel after panel of pearled silver in narrow black frames running the length of it on either side, and the floor between them was the same black mirrored stone as the great hall above. The corridor I was walking in had no door at the end. It simply opened, after one more step, into the gallery, the way one room opens into another in a dream.
He was standing in the middle of it.
He had his back three-quarters turned, his shoulders square to the panel on the right-hand wall, and he was looking at his own reflection in the mirror.
