The following week, she had gone on virtual tours of four different apartments, all of them convenient to the music school. The timing had worked in her favor: during the pandemic, people had fled the city in droves. Rents were low, inventory was high, landlords were waiving security deposits. It felt, to Sarah, like the world wanted this to happen. Within a week, she had signed a lease for a beautiful, high-ceilinged studio with a small kitchen and a black-and-white tiled bathroom, and arranged for a contact-free key transfer.
Starting in February, every day or two, instead of taking lunch at her desk, Sarah would go to her new apartment. On the weekends, she’d tell Eli she was meeting Marni for a walk, or going to the music school for a few hours, to work in her office while the building was empty. “Can you handle the boys?” she’d ask, and he’d say, “Of course,” in a distracted tone suggesting there’d be a surfeit of screen time in Dexter’s and Miles’s immediate future. She couldn’t bring herself to care. Once she’d reached Manhattan, and turned down the street that led to her new place, she’d feel her pace quickening, her chest loosening until she could take deep, cleansing breaths. She’d unlock the building’s heavy front door, climb the three flights of stairs, and stand on the threshold, unmoving, appreciating the emptiness. She would sit on the hardwood floors, in the center of her own four hundred square feet, sometimes with her eyes closed; sometimes looking out the window, or at the blank walls. For an hour or two, she would inhale that stillness, the air that had been breathed by no one but her. She’d buy fresh flowers every few days, extravagant bouquets of hydrangeas or lilies, and set them on the counter of the tiny kitchen. She’d listen to music, recordings of the pieces she’d pushed herself to master as a teenager: Bach’s harpsichord concerti, Chopin’s nocturnes, Debussy’s arabesques. With the music in her ears, she would let herself imagine living here. A single bed, against the wall. A couch, just big enough for her. A television, a table; two barstools at the counter. A different life.
She told no one, not even Marni. A home for one, for her alone. A room of one’s own. The thought thrilled her and scared her, but as the weeks went on, she found herself more thrilled than scared.
Slowly she began to furnish the place: a single bed, and linens, and pillows. A couch, a table, a television set. She had rented a piano and had it delivered during her lunch hour, telling herself that she wasn’t moving her keyboard from home because she didn’t want to have to move it back again, not because she didn’t want Eli to know what she was doing, and she’d play for hours, filling the empty room with music. She would keep the keys in her pocket, on a heavy fob of scrolled silver in the shape of the letter S. During the day, she’d find her fingers seeking the cool silvery surface; tracing the shape of the letter, transmitting the sensation of respite and relief from her skin to her brain. Her heartbeat would slow; the tension in her chest would loosen, and she’d feel a measure of peace, the calmness she needed to go on.
“Call me if you want to talk later.” Marni reached down to squeeze Sarah’s hand. The sun was fully risen, and the park was emptying out, the bikers and the joggers doing their cooldowns, the sidewalks full of people on their way to work or bringing kids to school. Sarah sighed. It was time to go home.
By the time she’d made it through the front door of the brownstone, whatever peace she’d felt from the exercise and her friend’s company had burned away, replaced by the resentment that was constantly present, seething right beneath her skin. Sarah took off her sneakers by the door. She was walking by the living-room couch when something stirred.
“Shit!” she yelped, as the blanket-covered lump rolled over and her brother-in-law’s sleep-rumpled head emerged.
“Oh, hey,” Ari said, yawning. “Sorry. I had, um, an appointment in Williamsburg last night, and it ran late. Hope it’s okay that I crashed here.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. She knew exactly what Ari meant by “appointment.” She’d already had to tell Eli to speak to him after Dexter had asked her if Ari was a doctor, and when Sarah had said, “No, what made you think that?” Dexter had reported that Ari had told him he’d had a late-night appointment with a lady who’d needed her vitamin D.
“I just hope you’re being safe,” she said, hating the scolding school-marm’s way she sounded.
He gave her a lazy grin and ran one hand through his disheveled hair. “We kept our masks on.”