I stare at his back, thinking of that awful moment in the bedroom with him. How I made him white with fear. Kissed him until he left me, mumbling about how he had to go buy some fruit.
“You bought the fruit.”
He’s still turned away from me, staring at the cupboards. “Yup.”
“Tad, I’m really sorry I was behaving so strangely before. I wasn’t… myself.”
“It’s all good,” he mutters.
But I know he’s red in the face. I am too. I look at the kitchen floor, which Tad has swept and cleaned in my absence, like he’s swept and cleaned everything else.
“It isn’t good. I’m sorry if I did anything to make you—”
“Hey,” Tad says, turning around at last to face me. His eyes are rimmed red, shining with tears. He walks over and hugs me then. In the warmth of his arms, I feel his love for her. I smell her happiness in his scent of beach and bright days.
“Grief is a journey,” he says. “And everyone has their own way, you know?”
“Still,” I say, shaking my head. “That wasn’t the way I ever meant to go.”
He pulls away a little so we’re face-to-face. He brushes my hair away from my eyes. “There’s no one right way to ride a wave, Belle.”
“Thank you for being good to my mother. Thank you for loving her. I’m glad you were in her life.”
“I’m glad she was in mine. I’m only sorry I wasn’t there that night she…”
He looks away.
“Me too,” I say, tears in my own eyes now.
“The truth?” he whispers. “Is that I really didn’t know what was going on with her. She wouldn’t see me much toward the end. At all. She’d taken up with this… crowd. Fucking weird rich people. Really into skincare, I guess it was?” He laughs darkly, but his eyes look pained, helpless. “I wasn’t sure. She didn’t really let me in. Your mother was pretty secretive about that stuff. About a lot of stuff, honestly.”
I stare into his kind eyes, where once I thought I saw darkness. What was it I really saw there? Sorrow. Loss. Denial. A sunny attempt to sweep it all away.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell Tad everything. Whisper it all into the shell of his ear.
Instead I say, “I hope you’ll come back. For the windows.”
He smiles. “Of course. I’ll come back anytime. I’ll be around. For the windows or not the windows.”
He leans in, and for a moment I feel a thrum of panic. Then he kisses my cheek. Ruffles my hair. No cold. Not a trace of cold do I feel from his touch. It feels like being warmed through. And then we’re parted.
“Oh hey, I didn’t know what to do with those.” He points to the two mannequins sitting at the table. “I guess they’re new?”
I stare at their white smiling faces. Red lips and hair. Golden eyes. One in a dress of starry midnight. One in a dress of gold.
“Oh no, not new. Old friends. Sisters, you might say.”
Tad looks at me. Sisters?
“You didn’t see a third one, did you?”
“A third one? No. There was a broken window though. I think someone might have tried to break in while you were gone. I fixed it for you. Reinforced them all too so you won’t have trouble like that again.”
He smiles at me. Taking me back to the child I once was, standing in Mother’s hallway. I picture him waving at me in the dark. A waver, he would have been for sure.
“Thank you.”
Through the window, I watch him leave the apartment. Get on his bike and drive away in a cloud of smoke and “God Only Knows.”
Hard not to tell him to come back. But I just stand there watching him disappear into the sun from the glass. So clear, you can’t even tell there’s a glass there. So clear, you would never believe there was anything at all between you and the sea.
* * *
At the windows, I sit looking out at the crashing water for a long time. I’m not afraid to look out at the water anymore. Above the waves, the sun is setting. The sunset is really a story all its own. A movie, Mother used to say when I’d first arrived here. The best one ever made, she said, taking my hand. It goes on and on, see? Many twists and turns of color. Magic, really. Like a fairy tale. It begins with a pinkening of the clouds. Then a reddening, so that they look like the underbellies of some great fish. Then a bluing, which can go on awhile, giving way at last to starry black. Then you can hear the water but can’t see it. You can only see yourself in the glass, looking out.