He shook his head as if to clear it. “Anyway, what about you? Where’d you grow up? Do you have siblings?”
“Connecticut. No siblings.”
“I knew you were an only. Or the oldest.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re bossy.”
“Excuse me. You mean I have a leadership mentality.”
“Yes,” Theo agreed. “That’s it. A leadership mentality.”
She refilled her glass. She must have drunk a whole bottle tonight. Her tongue dry from the tannins. The grapes stormy and ripe.
How odd to be listened to so closely. Teased. It had been too long since she had gone out on a date; she had forgotten the hot rush of being heard. Not that this was a date. Still, she was acutely conscious of her thin sweater, the flush that had spread across her chest and wouldn’t leave, like an allergic reaction. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness; now she could see his face, grainy and blurred, and the way the light from the window slid along the planes of his shoulders. One leg crossed over the other, ankle to knee, a triangle. One foot on the ground, rocking them.
“You know,” she said slowly, “I spend all this time in your childhood home, looking at things from when you were young, but I don’t know what any of it was like for you.”
The slightest hitch in the movement of the swing. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” She gestured to the house, the yard. “Tell me something. A memory from when you were a kid. Anything.”
It took him a while. Kate watched his long fingers move across the grain of the wood as he thought.
“All right,” Theo said. “It’s from the beach.”
“Your dad’s birthday. You mentioned it the other night.”
“No. A different time. Same place, though. I was seven, maybe eight. You know that spot, over by the cliffs, with the rocks? We were having a picnic there, and I went over to look at the tide pools. I loved those tide pools. I could stay there for hours, watching everything inside. Barnacles, crabs. I was kneeling, just staring, when all of a sudden I see this sparkle. It was just this normal little fish, only it had swum through a patch of sun, and the sun made its scales look like a rainbow … I thought it was so magical. This beautiful secret. All you had to do was see it from the right angle. Then I realized why it was swimming back and forth like that: it was stuck in the tide pool. It couldn’t get out.
“I was watching it when a wave hit me. It was like a truck—it lifted me up and pulled me back into the ocean. I hit a rock, I didn’t know which way was up. Then my shirt caught, and I was out of the water. My dad had seen me fall in and pulled me out. His face was so pale. He took me back to the towels and my mom was crying. But that was the happy part. Seeing how relieved they were that I was alive.”
But first he had to almost drown.
Kate knew something about the kind of happiness that came only after terror, the kind of breath that came only after suffocation. She felt the opposite now: yanked from the pleasant hum of alcohol into clarity. Not by the story, but by the wonder in how he had said the last part. How relieved they were that I was alive. As if he hadn’t always known that. As if he had once feared that his parents might want him to die.
She didn’t know how to respond. She couldn’t pretend she thought it was a happy story, and yet she knew Theo well enough to know that any sign of pity would shut him down. They were alike in that way.
“It’s good they were there,” she mumbled at last.
Cicadas singing. The night around them bending back and forth.
Theo said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Okay.”
“The other day,” Theo said, and his voice sounded a bit faded, too, as if he also might have drunk too much, “you said something happened at work.”
Kate had forgotten she had said that. Actually, she had temporarily forgotten the thing itself, which surprised her: it had occupied so much of her mind and her time, these last few months.
“Yeah,” she said.
“So what was it?”
It wasn’t as fun, being on the other side of the questions. She stared at her wine. Through the curve of the glass, the surface was