"Not today," she says. "Soon."
"It's lonely waking up in this room alone."
"I know."
"How much longer do I—"
"Not today." She steps away so suddenly her glasses slide back down to the tip of her nose.
Henry was a fool when it came to marriage, and he worked to understand it with the flailing desperation of a drowning man fumbling with a lifejacket. But he knew enough to know when to let a point go unpursued. Sometimes you had to wait for whatever bruise that ached between the two of you to darken first before fading, even if, looking back on it, you could never recall the blow that caused it in the first place.
Lily goes to the window at the far end of the room. "Curtain open," she says.
The heavy blackout curtains part on their own. The morning light first slashes, then expands through the space between the halves. It leaves Henry blinking where he still lies in the bed, in part from the brightness, in part to shield himself from the stark vacancy of the room. A single chair with wooden spindles along its back (their knobs poking and painful to sit against). A rug too small for the space, leaving the corners cold and exposed. The double bed of a size that can comfortably accommodate only one. The tidy vacancy of a spare bedroom.
"Window open," Lily says.
The heavy glass pane rises automatically. This time instead of light it's air that licks and curls against her skin. She breathes it in: the cool mineral scent of autumn that she thinks of as a cave turned inside out.
The sun pours down the street and splashes against the elms and cedar shake walls of her neighbors' houses, staining everything with orange and rust. It's the part of town where the rich once lived, the factory owners and physicians and distillers. After a few decades of neglect, a new set of professionals—start-up financiers and tech work-from-homers and consultants of niche expertise—had come to apply tasteful renovations and hang swinging loveseats on the wraparound porches.
You could make fun of it as a nostalgic amusement park. Lily sometimes did, and in those precise terms. But it was also unquestionably lovely, the properties wide and deep, each façade an architectural defense of America, or the idea of it. It wasn't a gated community, but made its values and exclusions clear nonetheless. The fantasy of the Upstate College Town, long thought to be extinct, but here returned to life on the handful of blocks on either side of them.
Even the morning's sounds were delightful. Birdsong and the babble of kids making their way to school on the sidewalk, the delivery drones dodging through the branches over their heads, buzzing like honeybees. Lily looks down at the parents herding their children or carrying them on their shoulders and guesses which of them she will seek out as friends once she joins their ranks.
It takes her a second to understand why the children themselves are dressed the way they are. Dwarfish superheroes and goalie-masked killers and green-faced, daycare-bound witches. The decorations on her neighbors' houses had been there the past couple weeks, but she'd grown used to them and forgotten why they were brought out in the first place. On almost every lawn there's a papier-mâché graveyard, every other tree home to a web of rope and a spider made of stuffed garbage bags. There are no such things on Lily and Henry's property. They have never decorated their house for this or any holiday.
"Halloween," she says.
"What?"
She speaks louder without turning around. "It's Halloween morning."
"Should we get candy?"
"Have we ever handed out candy?"
He thinks on this as if there's riddle buried in it. "No," he says. "But we could start."
"We don't have a jack-o-lantern by the door, no lights or decorations. Nobody is coming up our walk anyway."
"A trip to the store. That's all it would take."
Now she looks at him. A moment that stretches into a meaningful appreciation, her shoulders inching lower, yielding. "It's a nice idea. And it's sweet of you to suggest it. But I think we both know you're not going to the store, Henry. And even if you did—if you could—do you really see yourself opening the door to strangers?"
"You're right," he says, shaking his head. "I don't think I could manage it."
"Not without me having to call 9-1-1."
He snorts. It's his signal to her that concedes how their lives are shaped the way they are because of his deficiencies and his alone.
