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“Yeah, okay. Thanks, Val.” Saying the words was like spitting glass, but Rudy knew that without her father’s help he’d get nowhere with Laurel.

Anyway, what did Val matter? Already, Rudy’s mind was racing ahead. He was thinking about Laurel, imagining what he would say to her … and praying that this time she would listen. She had to. He needed this so much.

“You had enough?” Rudy, through the mist that now seemed to have seeped into his skull, became aware that Val was getting up and heading for the door, a towel now tucked about his waist.

He forced a chuckle that seemed to rattle in his chest like loose gravel. But he couldn’t let his brother see how ill and desperate he felt. He’d rather kick the bucket right here on this floor than give Val the satisfaction.

“Yeah, let’s go. Any more of this,” he cracked, rising on legs as wobbly as a pair of rubber chickens, “and I’ll be donating my organs to a dim sum joint instead of to science.”

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Annie came to a halt in front of the building where she and Laurel had once lived. She’d been walking, lost in thought, and had no idea how she’d ended up here. The sidewalk was deserted; it had to be three or four in the morning. She stared up at the building’s grimy brick fa็ade, feeling like a sleepwalker or someone under deep hypnosis who’s just been finger-snapped awake.

She remembered going to Arturo’s, wolfing down two slices of pizza and half a spinach calzone, then Emmett forcing her into a cab, ordering her to go home and get some sleep. Exhausted, she’d let the cabbie take her to West Tenth, to her homey but messy apartment. She had a foggy memory of unlocking the wrought-iron gate facing the street, and making her way across the private drive shared by her carriage house and four others, nearly stumbling several times on old frost-heaved cobblestones. Then fiddling for what seemed like hours with the three keys to her door. Finally, inside, feeling her way through darkened rooms. Too tired even to switch on any lights, she must have fallen onto her bed, clothes and all. Vaguely, she recalled waking up hours later, her mouth dry, her heart pounding, feeling hot and closed in, trapped even. Dying to get out … get some fresh air.

Then, as if in a fog, not seeing really where she was going, walking … walking … walking.

It occurred to Annie, standing on the sidewalk in front of her old building, shivering in the too-thin suede jacket she’d absentmindedly thrown on, that in some deep part of her she must have known all along that this was where she’d been heading.

To Joe.

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f

She saw the lights blazing on the second floor, and somehow she wasn’t surprised.

She had to see him, had to find out if Laurel was right … if she had something to do with Joe and Laurel splitting apart. God, what if it was true? Did she want it to be true? She brought a hand to her mouth, and before she was aware of it she was nibbling off a carefully cultivated fingernail.

She thought of Emmett, picking her up and carrying her out of the factory. That was how she felt now, as if she were being swept along by something outside herself. Now she was mounting the building’s cracked stone outside step, pushing open the heavy glass door to the narrow lobby with its wainscoting of grimy tiles. Her hand went almost automatically to the button for Joe’s apartment, and she jammed her thumb against it.

The intercom crackled; a distorted voice echoed in the cold stillness. Joe, but not groggy or sleep-thick. He sounded almost as if he’d been expecting her … or somebody.

Annie, as she climbed the stairs lit only by dim naked bulbs, felt her head begin to clear. This is crazy, she thought, I shouldn’t be here. I’ll probably only make things worse for Laurel.

She thought of Emmett, of how she had felt last year when they’d been apart-not devastated to the point where she couldn’t get up out of bed, but… empty, like a house of bare rooms, its furniture gone, its busy, noisy family moved away. Until he’d gone off, she hadn’t quite known how intensely she cared for him, how entwined their lives had become. But that final step-a ring, a lifetime commitment-she just hadn’t been able to. She’d wanted to … she still did … but something was holding her back. Some maze inside herself she had to find her way through first. Was she here because it was Joe who could show her the way?

Hearing the top of the stairs, she saw him waiting on the landing, standing in front of his open door, the light at his back. A tall man with rumpled brown hair, his long shadow angling across the landing and halfway up the wall

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across from him. He was wearing a pair of faded chinos, and an old crewneck sweater, its sleeves pushed up over his elbows. His feet were bare, as if he hadn’t noticed how cold it was, or didn’t care.

She kissed his cheek, which felt like ice. She felt as if she were under water moving very slowly, yet her heart was beating fast. Now she was swimming past him, through his open door and down his narrow, dimly lit vestibule, into the bright living room.

Turning, she saw Joe standing in front of her, looking mildly baffled, as if he hadn’t quite decided whether she was real, or if he was dreaming that she had just floated in.

“Annie. Jesus. What the hell are you doing here?” He rubbed his face with his hand. The skin along his jaw looked raw and blotchy.

“Would you believe I just happened to be in the neighborhood? I saw your lights, and thought you could use some company.”

“At four in the morning?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Yeah … me too.”

“Can I sit down?”

“Oh … sure.” He blinked, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Coffee? I made enough to keep the whole city wired.”

“No thanks.” She looked around. Years since she’d been here, but it was exactly the way she remembered it -the polyurethaned wood floor with its lone Navajo rug, whitewashed brick walls, the monkish Stickley couch and chairs. On the coffee table, she spotted an old Newsweek with Elvis on its cover-three or four years since Elvis’s death, and Joe hadn’t thrown it out. God, this place was a museum … like going back into history, her history; everything she looked at held a memory, a dozen memories.

“It’s strange,” she said, “being here again. Seeing you in this place. It’s like you never moved out.”

“It doesn’t feel that way.” He looked about him, as if he half expected to discover he’d wandered into the

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wrong place by mistake. “Somehow, living here again, it just doesn’t fit. It feels like I’m trying to cram myself into something I’ve outgrown.”

Annie touched his forearm. “Joe … what’s going on with you and Laurey? The other day when I was out there, she seemed pretty upset. But I never thought …”

“What did she say?”

“She seemed to think … well, that maybe you were having an affair. She’d seen you with that woman at the restaurant-that counselor. But when I told her she had it all wrong, she … she got really angry. Said a lot of crazy things I’m sure she couldn’t have meant. About me … and you.”

“Maybe they’re not so crazy. Maybe we’re the ones who are.”

He was looking at their reflections in the darkened window, wearing an odd, distant expression. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, she saw. Without them, he looked somehow naked, vulnerable as a little boy. The skin around his eyes was pink as if he’d been rubbing there. Heartbreaker eyes. “Ever listened to silence?” he went on in a soft voice, almost as if he were talking to himself. “I mean really listened? No music, no TV, no white noise even. You can hear your heart beating. It’s scary. You start thinking it could just… stop. Like a watch winding down to nothing.” He stopped, half turning, for the first time seeming really to see her. And she, too, was seeing him more clearly than she had in years and years. He looked haggard, yes, but his face, those features that when he was younger hadn’t appear to mesh, now had grown into one another, seams connecting, angles not so sharp.

Laurel had done that for him, Annie thought. Maybe those first few years Joe hadn’t been wildly in love with her … but Laurel had given him something that maybe she couldn’t have. A home, a family, a place safe from the pressures and turmoil of running a business. So why, now, was it all falling apart?

“Jesus, listen to me,” Joe said, shaking his head as if to clear it. “I must be getting morbid in my old age. Either that, or I’ve had one too many coffees.”

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“Have you talked to Laurel? I’ve been trying to reach her, but I keep getting a busy signal. I think she’s leaving the phone off the hook.”

He sighed. “She won’t talk to me, either. Just gets Adam to call.” He pushed his palms over his forehead, flattening his hair against his skull then releasing it. “Christ. You don’t know what that’s like, telling your kid you don’t know when you’re coming home.”

Suddenly, Annie felt weak, as if she couldn’t trust her legs to support her. She sank onto the hard leather sofa, her heart leaping with shallow bounds inside her.

“Joe, are you saying that… You and Laurey aren’t thinking of …”

“Divorce?” He stared at her, his eyes bleak and rawlooking, his jaw clenching. “Jesus, no, not that. Laurey just wants some time. Alone. To think. See where we’re headed.” His mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “Euphemisms. What she’s really saying is, ‘You let me down, you son of a bitch.’ “

Maybe you did. But I’m partly to blame, too.

Outwardly, she had let go of Joe, but not in her heart. There, she had held fast to her love, secretly tending it, shielding it like a flickering candle that might otherwise blow out. Using it to keep Emmett at arm’s length … and maybe using it, too, to punish Laurel for taking Joe away from her.

But if that were true, she hadn’t meant to.

“Laurel’s just hurt. She’ll get over it.” Annie spoke rapidly, wanting to get the words out so she could hear them and maybe even believe them.

“No … it’s more than that.” Joe sank onto the sofa beside her, his forearms resting on his knees, his head drooping forward. She could see the soft hairs on the nape of his neck, like Adam’s baby hair. She fought the impulse to reach out and stroke him there. “She’s … different. I married a kid. Now that kid is “grown up. She loves me, but she doesn’t really need me anymore, not the way she used to. And that’s okay … but, you see, the thing is … / need her.” His voice choked on the last words.

“What are you going to do?”

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“Thought I’d write her a letter.” He gestured toward a legal pad with some words scribbled on it and a few wads of balled-up paper littering the coffee table.

“What are you going to write?”

“That I love her.”

“She must know that.”

“She does. At least, I hope she does.”

“Then why? Why all this?”

“Because she knows she’s not the only one. She knows how I feel about you.”

Annie heard the creak of footsteps from the floor above. Outside, on the windowsill, a pigeon cooed, making her wonder if morning was near. She felt cold deep in her bones. And her own heart-what if, like a watch, it slowly ran down?

“We haven’t done anything wrong,” she said, feeling like a stupid child in school, not knowing what to say, how to answer.

Joe let his breath out between his teeth with a whistling noise. “Christ, sometimes I think everything we’ve done was wrong. All our pretending.”

She wanted to cover her ears, shut out his voice. At the same time, she felt a quickening inside her, a spreading warmth.

“No!” she cried. “It wasn’t like that. I wanted … honestly wanted you and Laurey to be happy.”

In her mind now she was stepping back, examining her words like a careful shopper inspecting an item of clothing for stains and snags, a loose button, a Tom seam. She relaxed a little. Yes, she’d told the truth. Of course, she’d wanted her sister to be happy, for her marriage to be good. Of course.

“So did I.” Joe pressed his thumbs against his closed eyelids. “So did I.”

“Tell her that. Tell her …”

Joe looked up at her, the pain in his eyes unbearable. God, how could he stand it? And she, could she!

“Sometimes I think,” he began slowly, his eyes fixed on her face, “that if we’d only made love, you and I. Just once. Then I wouldn’t have felt so … cheated.”

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Silence seemed to be swallowing them. There was only the throaty murmuring of a pigeon outside the window. The steady ticking of the radiator as it cooled.

“Do you want to make love with me now?” The question slipped out of her before she realized she was saying it. She sat back, shocked, breathless, her heart galloping.

Yet she also felt strangely calm, as if she were dipping into a wooded pond, deep and cool, shimmering darkly with her reflection. She’d travelled forever to get here, and maybe now the journey would be over. Wasn’t this what she’d come here for? To quench a desire so old it had become part of her, her bones, her flesh? When she was with Joe, her desire for him was at the edge of every sentence, at the heart of every thought. And yet always she was holding herself back, taking care to fashion each word, each touch, each public kiss, in exquisite miniature. Always circumspect, within the bounds of sisterliness.

Joe stared at her, his eyes holding her with the tenderness of an embrace. His eyes in this light more brown than green. What a lovely color. How could anyone think brown was dull? Joe’s eyes were the color of the earth, of the ages. Even the tiny fretwork of lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes-they moved her, made her want to hold him.

With a jerking motion that startled her, he stood up, not touching her, not even looking back at her as he walked out of the room.

Annie, as if in a trance, followed him.

Joe’s bedroom was smaller than she remembered it, with one tall window looking out over a tiny yard, lit by a yellow bulb that spilled a waxy light over low evergreens and a patch of half-dead impatiens left from summer. The room was dark except for the glow from the yard, giving everything an oddly stark look, as if this were a black-andwhite movie. One that had no beginning or ending … only what was here, now.