about playing restaurant with twigs and pebbles. Theo swam out to the center of the lake, long powerful strokes until he was just a splash in the distance. Then he turned around and came home.
* * *
They drove through the sunny evening to the Point Reyes Lighthouse, an egg-blue hut perched on a spindly point. The stairs were closing soon, but they squeezed past the guards and dashed down the thousands of steps to find themselves on the balcony around the lighthouse, face-to-face with the rocks and the expanse of sea.
Every cell in her body had been polarized toward Theo, was aware of him even when he disappeared behind the other side of the lighthouse with Oscar.
“Kate!” Jemima tugged on the hem of Kate’s dress. She placed her hands around her mouth to call up to her, as if the sea were loud enough to drown her out, which it wasn’t. “Is this the end of the world?”
“The end?” Kate turned her to face the horizon. That stream of impossible blue. “Of course not. It’s the beginning.”
* * *
They were almost back to Callinas, the kids snoring contentedly in the backseat, when Theo spoke.
“You should come back for dinner.”
She glanced up. He turned away from the road to look at her with that vivid hunter’s gaze. His cheekbones were lightly sunburned. He had absorbed the outdoors—she could smell the salt on his skin and see a crest of sand beneath his jaw—and even inside the car, with its sleek upholstery strewn with toys, he seemed half wild.
This time there was no mistaking what he wanted.
She said yes.
* * *
They got back to the house at seven. After a feast of cheese sandwiches, Theo put the kids to bed and Kate set about unpacking the bags. When Theo came back downstairs, she was washing the Tupperware.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
She brandished the sponge. “Almost done.”
He went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of wine. She listened to the rustling as he found wineglasses, the quiet pop as he uncorked the bottle. He came over to her and leaned back against the counter, so that they were facing in opposite directions. She rinsed the last container. He waited until she had dried her hands, then handed her a glass.
It was good wine. She could taste the mineral edge. Peach and stone. And the color, as she tipped the glass, was like dissolved gold.
“We should talk,” he said.
Kate took another sip of wine and watched the soap bubbling down the drain, the light glinting off the wet knives in the rack. Talking meant lying or telling the truth, both of which seemed like bad ideas.
“Why?”
“Kate.”
“Theo.”
“We should talk because this is complicated,” he said.
She thought of that start in her gut when she had first seen him. His eyelashes sweeping down over his cheeks as he listened to her. His honesty, his severity. The way he left the door open every morning and let her into his life, a secret life, a walled-off life, a place people weren’t supposed to go.
She looked up at him. Her lungs felt tight, airless. “Is it?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Then somehow they were kissing again, the wineglasses shoved clumsily onto the counter. His hands ran over her, bold and tender. The rasp of his breathing, like being chased. No talking. No lying.
It was a bad idea.
Of course it was.
She knew this.
And yet.
And yet she followed him to his room, the same one she sat in every afternoon to read his mother’s diary, and pretended like it was the first time she had seen it. She watched from the shadows as he locked the door and put on music, a low blaze of jazz that would muffle any noise. She let the night swamp her, let her knees fall open. The music jowled through her veins, a throaty mix of longing. Loss being invented chord by chord, riffed on and remade. Light from the single lamp on the nightstand that held Miranda’s diary. The sex was hard, her hair falling in her face and his fingers denting her thighs. And when she came, it was dizzying in its brightness, in its self-destruction. It felt, unaccountably, like a species of love.
MIRANDA
SERIES 2, Personal papers
BOX 9, Diary (1982–1993)
* * *
MAY 4 1987
Jake came downstairs this morning with a bandage on his finger. I asked him what happened.