The Hand

She had told him to bring nothing, and it felt wrong to knock on a door with empty hands.

Gideon stood on the cottage step at eight o’clock on Tuesday evening in a clean blue shirt. He had spent a night on this step under a grey blanket, and he had never been past it. The sun was low over the Adirondacks and the lawn behind him was gold and bare. The forty-one stakes were in the boathouse, in a bundle his daughter had tied.

The invitation had come on Saturday night, in the office, after Winnie had gone up. Camille had closed the binder and said it to the binder. “Tuesday. Eight o’clock, at the cottage. I’ll feed you.” He had asked what he should bring. “Nothing,” she had said. “That’s on the paper.”

She opened the door before he knocked a second time. She was in jeans and a white T-shirt, barefoot, and her hair was loose. He had not seen it without the bandana in daylight since he was twenty-seven. It came to her shoulders in dark curls, and it changed her whole face.

“You’re on time,” she said.

“I’ve been told it matters in this family.”

“Take your boots off. There’s a mat.”

The kitchen was small and yellow and very clean. There was a pine table with four chairs that did not match, and one of them had a cushion tied to the seat. A refrigerator hummed in the corner with a fire extinguisher on top of it and some old tin pushed to the back. A child’s drawing of a boat was taped to its door. The boat had a hawk above it, carefully labelled.

A door stood open off the kitchen. He could see the end of a small bed and a windowsill with jars on it. One jar had a blue lid and two pieces of green in the bottom. Four more greens lay in a line on the painted wood beside it.

He looked from where he stood. He did not go to the doorway.

“You can,” Camille said. She was watching him. “She’d show you herself if she were here. She shows everybody.”

“Then I’ll wait until she’s here.”

Something in her face eased. She pointed at the chair across from the cushion. “Sit down. I’m making you an omelette.”

“I’ve eaten at your dining room. I’ve had the lamb.”

“The lamb is the inn’s. Forty people ate that lamb.” She took a bowl down. “I make one omelette a week. It’s on Tuesdays, when she’s at Mill Lane, and I eat it at that table by myself with yesterday’s bread. Nobody has ever had the other half.”

He sat. He understood that he had been told something, and he kept quiet so as not to spoil it.

She cracked three eggs one-handed and beat them with a fork for no more than ten seconds. She cut two thick slices from the end of a loaf and laid them in a dry pan on the back burner. Butter went into a second pan, a small black one with a long handle, and she watched it until the foam died down.

“Arlo makes forty of these in a morning,” she said. “His are good. They’re brown, because Americans like to see that something’s been cooked. This one won’t have any colour on it at all.”

“Is that harder?”

“It’s faster. You have about forty seconds and you can’t look away.” She poured the eggs. Her right hand shook the pan in short pulls while her left stirred with the back of the fork. He had watched her make change and bone a shoulder and wrap coolers in the dark, and he could have watched this for an hour. It took less than a minute. She tipped the pan, rapped the handle twice with her fist, and the omelette rolled over itself onto a plate, pale yellow and smooth as a stone from the beach. She scattered chives on it and cut it in half.

“Emmett’s chives,” she said. “The bread’s Monday’s. Eat it while it’s hot. I don’t serve them twice.”

He ate. The inside was barely set, and it tasted of butter and eggs and nothing else. The toast was hard at the edges and soaked with butter in the middle.

“Well?”

“I’ve had dinner in the best rooms in fourteen cities,” he said. “I’d have driven five hours for that.”

“You’d say so either way.”

“That’s your daughter’s line.”

“She got it from me.” Camille sat down with her own half. She ate the way she worked, neatly and with attention. “Did the thermometer read sixty on Saturday? She wouldn’t tell me. She said it was between her and the rope.”

“Fifty-nine. She read it herself and informed me that fifty-nine isn’t sixty. I’d have let her off. She wouldn’t let me.”

“No. She wouldn’t.” Camille wiped her plate with a crust. “I hired the baker. Nadia Brisson, from Middlebury. She laminated a block in front of me yesterday and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it, and I looked. She starts on Monday.”

“Three days after the oven.”

“So I’ll have had three days alone with it, and I’ll know all its faults before she does.” She looked up. “And your Mr. Pike? You were going to speak to him about the notice.”

“I spoke to him on Thursday night. He said it was an oversight in his office and he apologised for a full paragraph. Every word of it was correct.”

“Did you believe it?”

“I’ve decided not to decide until I’ve looked at him.” It was the truth, and it sat badly in his stomach. He pushed his plate an inch away. “Camille. Why here? You’ve never asked me past that step.”

She was quiet for a moment. The light through the window over the sink had gone from gold to pink.

“This cottage belongs to Hallett Hotels,” she said. “So does the stove. I found the table at a barn sale in Bristol for forty dollars and carried it home on the roof of my car, so the table’s mine. Everything you and I have done has been in your boathouse or the inn’s kitchen or a public park. I wanted to see what you looked like in a chair I paid for.”

“What do I look like?”

“Too big for it.” Her mouth moved. “And as though you’re waiting to be told where to stand. You’ve done that for eight weeks, Gideon. You were right to. I’ve liked it more than I should.” She stood and took both plates to the sink. With her back to him she said, “I’m not going to wash these now.”

He got up. He came round the table and stopped a foot behind her, close enough to see the fine hair at the nape of her neck.

“Here?” he asked.

It was her house. It was the bed she got out of at half past four every morning, sixty yards from the kitchen, with their daughter’s room on the other side of a wall. He had never assumed it, and he would not start tonight.

She turned round. Her eyes were very dark.

“Yes,” she said. “And tell me what you want, for once.”

He opened his mouth and nothing came. He had spent two months asking what she would allow, and he had got good at it. He had not once said the other thing aloud.

“That’s what I thought,” Camille said gently. “Try.”

“I want the lamp on.” His voice had gone rough. “I had a storm lantern last time and it went out, and I’ve regretted it ever since. I want to take as long as I like. I want you to keep your hair down.” He stopped, and then made himself finish. “And I don’t want to go down that lawn in the dark afterward. I want to wake up where you are. I know when you get up. I’d settle for half past four.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she took his hand and led him through the other door.

Her room was plain. There was a white iron bed, wider than the one over the boathouse, with a blue cover. There was a chest of drawers with a photograph of a new baby on it, red-faced and furious, and a chair with a white jacket over the back. She switched on the lamp by the bed and left it on.

He undid her first, because he had said he wanted time. He drew the T-shirt up over her head and let her hair fall back onto her bare shoulders, and stood looking at her in the light until her colour rose.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I asked for the lamp. I’m using it.”

He kissed her mouth and her throat and the top of each breast, slowly. Her skin smelled of butter and soap. When he knelt to work her jeans down over her hips she steadied herself with a hand in his hair, and he kissed the silver lines low on her belly on his way, because he knew them now. She pulled him up by the collar.

“Your turn,” she said, and unbuttoned the blue shirt with dry hands and no trouble at all.

There was no storm tonight and no hurry. They lay down on top of the blue cover with the window open an inch and the peepers going outside. He did what he had said he wanted. He learned her again from the instep to the back of the knee and up along her thigh, and each time her breath changed he stayed where he was. She was not quiet. She had the whole cottage to herself and she used it.

“Tell me,” she said, when she had her breath back. She was leaning over him on one elbow with her hair hanging round both their faces. “You’ve had one want. I’m sure there are more.”

“Your hands,” he said. “I’ve watched them for two months. I’d like them on me. Anywhere you like.”

She laughed low in her throat. She put her hands on him. They were strong and warm and a little rough at the fingertips, and they knew what they were doing. She went over his chest and down the muscles of his stomach and lower, watching his face as she would have watched butter in a pan. He said her name, the soft way, and then he said it again with less control.

“The jacket pocket,” he managed. “On the chair. I’m still hopeful.”

“Presumptuous,” Camille said, and reached for it.

She came down onto him slowly, with her knees at his hips and her palms flat on his chest. He held her waist and let her set the pace. She moved without haste, with her eyes open, and he kept his open too. The lamp showed him everything, the flush across her breasts and the pink bar of the scar and her lower lip caught in her teeth. When she began to lose her rhythm he sat up and put his arms round her, and she wrapped hers round his neck, and they finished like that, face to face and holding hard.

Afterward she lay against his side with her leg over his. He pulled the blue cover across them both. Her hair was in his mouth and he left it there.

“That’s what I wanted,” he said.

“I gathered.” She was smiling against his shoulder. He could feel it. “You can have the half past four.”

They lay for a long time without talking. The window went dark. He counted her breaths and was happy, and he knew the feeling this time because he had felt it once before.

A little after ten she sat up. She found his shirt on the floor and put it on, and did up two of the buttons. It hung to the middle of her thighs.

“Stay there a minute,” she said. Then she changed her mind. “No. Come to the kitchen.”

He put his jeans on and followed her. She did not switch on the big light. She turned on the small one over the stove and went to the refrigerator. She stood on her toes and reached past the fire extinguisher to the back. His shirt rode up. She brought down the tin.

It was red and gold, with a Breton woman in a lace cap on the lid. She carried it across the kitchen and put it into his hands.

It weighed almost nothing.

“You asked me on the first night whether you could see them,” she said. “I said no, and I said you’d have to manage with my word. I didn’t believe you then. I thought you’d held every one of them.”

“And now?”

“I decided to believe you. I didn’t feel it all at once. I think it started when you got out of your car after ten hours and asked what she said, before anything else. I watched you kneel down to a stake that was stuck by a root. I’ve been adding it up for a fortnight, and tonight it came out.” She folded her arms over his shirt. “If you never saw them, then you ought to see them. The lid sticks.”

He set the tin on the table she had paid for. He worked the lid with his thumbs until it gave.

There were three envelopes. They were ordinary white ones, gone soft at the corners, and each was addressed in blue ballpoint, in the hand that was on the yellow paper in his wallet. Jamie Rourke, 14 East 74th Street, New York, N.Y. In the top corner of each she had written C. Bouchard, Larkspur Inn, Saxby Point, Vt. He turned the first one over. The flap was sealed. Across it, small, she had written a second address. 9 Mill Lane, Vergennes.

“That’s my mother’s house,” Camille said. “I lived there then. I put the inn on the front, because I was at the inn all day and I wanted to be the one who got your answer. I put Mill Lane on the back in case you’d sooner come to a house than a hotel.”

He could not speak. He turned the envelope face up again and looked at the rest of it.

He knew the hand before he had read the words.

It ran slantwise across her writing in four words of square capitals. Every stroke was the same weight, and the pen had been pressed hard enough to dent the paper. The ink was a dark, clear green.

He had seen it on the first set of accounts he was ever given, at fourteen, beside a column he had added wrong. It was in the margin of every memo that had crossed his desk in five and a half years. It had written SELL on page seven of a folder that was lying in the boathouse now. Eighteen days ago he had watched it print an appointment on the back of a card.

REFUSED — RETURN TO SENDER.

The postmark was the thirtieth of August, 2021. He lifted it. The second was the thirteenth of September, and the green was the same, and so was the third. The first of November had been pressed hardest of all.

His mother had said it herself, on the telephone in April. People for the estate had been in and out of the house all that autumn with boxes. The executor of his father’s will had sat at the desk in the front hall and gone through every piece of post that came. Gideon had been ten blocks away with the lenders, with the same man standing behind his chair.

He thought of a hand stopped in the air in the pastry kitchen, and a mild voice saying, I’ve seen the name written down.

“Gideon.” Camille had come close. She was looking at his face and not at the tin. “Do you recognise it?”

He had perhaps a second.

If he said the name, she would learn tonight, barefoot in her own kitchen, that the man who had put a stake at the corner of her daughter’s bedroom was the man who had sent back her letters. She would learn that Gideon had worked beside him every day since. She would ask what he meant to do about it, and he did not know. He had not heard one word from Desmond yet. He wanted to look at him first.

Those were the reasons. Under them was a plainer one. She had decided to believe him an hour ago, and he could not bear to hand her this in the same hour.

“No,” he said. “But I’ll find out.”

It was the first lie he had told her since he gave her the wrong name. He knew it as he said it.

She nodded slowly. She believed that too, and it was terrible to watch.

“They stay shut,” she said. “I’m not ready to have them read. I wrote them to somebody who wasn’t there, and I’m not who wrote them. I’ll tell you when.”

“I wouldn’t open them without you.” That was true, at least. “May I take a picture of the fronts? Somebody at that house wrote this. I’d like to be able to show it.”

“Go on.”

He laid them side by side on the pine and photographed them with his telephone. His hands were steady. He put them back in the order he had found them and pressed the lid down until it clicked, and she stood on her toes again and slid the tin to the back.

“I’ll go down on Thursday,” he said. “I’ll be back before Saturday.”

“Saturday is three.”

“I know what Saturday is.”

She took his hand and switched off the light over the stove, and they went back to the white bed. She fell asleep quickly, with her head in the hollow of his shoulder and her fist closed in the cover.

He lay on his back with his eyes open, in her house, where he had asked to be. He stayed awake until her alarm rang at half past four.
***