I got up as quietly as I could, making my way out the door and shutting it behind me. Just as it closed, Daisy burst out in a bright peal of laughter, delighted and breathy with an edge of tears. I went looking for Nick.
He wasn’t in the bedroom just off the main hallway. I looked around curiously because we hadn’t spent any time there. It was close and dim, just big enough for a wardrobe and a bed with an iron headboard. Everything was old rather than antique. The bed was unmade, and as I passed by, I touched the dent in the pillow, the sleeping pills that sat on the windowsill next to his head along with a bottle of brandy.
In his wardrobe, there was a packet of unopened letters stuck in a dusty pair of shoes. I pulled them out, noted that they were from Minnesota, and put them back with a slight smile. I half-hoped that Nick would come in, because there was some part of me that was strangely curious about his bed and what it would be like with him in it, but he didn’t.
Instead, I went out and down the hall. He wasn’t in the bathroom or the kitchen either. His maid told me he was on the back step, but it was empty when I went out there. The step itself was a solid block of some strange stone, something taken from somewhere else to guard this passage into the home. There were stories every few years where people discovered their step was taken from the grave of this king or that saint, but that didn’t interest me right now.
The rain had mostly stopped, but there was the faintest drizzle in the air. I could barely feel the drops, but cool water beaded up on my skin, weighing down the hems of my dress. From the magicked step, I could just barely make out the shape of Nick under the branches of the enormous black elm that took up most of his carefully groomed backyard.
I dashed across the yard just as the rain got worse, and when I arrived, my shoes were quite ruined. He looked at me with faint surprise. It wasn’t as if he were surprised to see me, more as if he were surprised that anyone remembered him at all. He was in his shirtsleeves leaned against the monstrously coarse bark of the tree. The tree’s leaves, broader than my outstretched hand, stitched a canopy over us, leaving us mostly dry.
A cigarette burned down unheeded between his fingers, so I pointed at it and he held it to my lips, letting me take a quick draw. It gave me an excuse, anyway, to cup my hands around his, steadying them, steadying him a little bit as well. When I let him go, he stubbed the cigarette out on the tree trunk and tucked it behind his ear.
“Come here,” Nick said, pulling me into his arms, dragging me against his body.
I allowed it for a few moments, fascinated by the depth of his emotions, and then I gave him a hard shove back because I knew that a light one wouldn’t do it.
“Don’t,” I said, deadly serious. “I’m not some little paper doll you can chew up.”
Nick glared at me, and then nodded, abashed, sticking his hands deep into his pockets. I wondered where his jacket had gotten to. The rain gave the air a kind of English countryside chill.
“I feel like the morning edition someone left on a park bench, and it’s begun to rain,” Nick muttered, looking towards Gatsby’s house. From this angle, it was the only thing to look at, a wonderland castle moored on the Sound for a season. When the weather turned, I thought, it would float away into the fall mists, the gray waves of the Atlantic slapping up against its pale stone walls.
“You’re not,” I said with confidence. “I like you too much for that.”
“And it’s only your opinion that matters?”
“It’s the only opinion that matters to me,” I said with half a smile.
I offered him my hand, and he took it, bringing it absently up to his lips for a kiss and then hanging on as if he had no other lifeline. He nodded at Gatsby’s house.
“You know he raised it up out of the ground,” he said. “There was a mansion there before, something small and sensible. One night this past spring, he drove here straight from the city. He had bought the land and the house from some bootlegger or other, pennies on the yard for the marshland, the terns, the foundation that would never dry out and the old ghosts of the sailors they marooned here. He looked around and said, No, that won’t do.”