The Tell by Hester Kaplan Read Free Book Online Page A

already sensed he was going to have a hard time sharing her with her history. It was everywhere in the house, and in the accommodating, careful way she moved through and around it. He could not separate her from it.
    He’d been the one to suggest she give him a tour that first evening. She’d had on a red sweater that zipped up the front but not to her throat, and her hair was collected with a piece of kitchen string, an attractive, careless touch. She was always barefoot. That she’d lived contentedly alone in the house for more than a decade after her parents had been killed made him question if there was room for someone else in all of it. If silence and echoes and still air didn’t make Mira hungry for company, then what would? Why would she ever need him? When they came to the third-floor stairs, she’d tucked her thumbs into the belt loops of her pants and announced there was nothing to see up there. Empty rooms, she said. Peeling wallpaper, an old bathroom with a claw-foot tub. Her tone had intrigued him for what she wasn’t saying. He’d backed her up a few steps, and she resisted only a little when he guided her the rest of the way with his hands on her hips. He’d wanted to stand very close to her and still feel the distance above and below and around them, while she was suddenly interested in pushing out the smallest space left between their bodies. Come closer, she’d said. Hold me tighter, take your clothes off. Press your chest to mine. He had put his shirt on the floor to protect her from splinters and she teased him about his manners and his armor of goose bumps. He was shivering for a few reasons, and he asked why they weren’t making love on one of the beds, or couches, or even rugs instead, somewhere warm, at least. She laughed and tightened her legs around him; she liked the chill contrast to his hot skin. He dwarfed her in a way they both were awed by. His hands were huge on her. They were cold in the ecstatic drafts blowing up between the floorboards. There was nothing casual about what they were doing; he didn’t want to mess this up, to be half-hearted, half-asleep, or afraid. She knew who he was and what he’d suffered, and how he suffered still. She wasn’t scared of his past—just the opposite. She wanted to understand it, but she admitted she’d always be, at best, looking in from the outside.
    She told him that night how she’d seen him on Wickenden Street one evening when she was coming back from Brindle, his shoulders hunched as though he’d been trying to disappear. It sounded like too many evenings to him when disaster tailed him like something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. She said that she’d like to make him less forlorn, if she could, and pull happiness out of his gloom. That he would be the best work she might ever do.
    Later that night, she’d looked ghostly, moving pale and naked to the far end of the hall, where she stopped in front of a closed door. This seemed to be a sort of ritual of hers that suggested something terrifying behind the door. A month after he’d moved in, she’d shown him the angled space where the ceiling zoomed low to meet the pitch of the roof and went on forever, but she wouldn’t go in. He smelled the closet’s morbid breath while she’d giggled uneasily, dismissive of herself and her babyish fears, and explained that the dread was just something left over from her childhood. But she did not want that erased or revealed; she was content to leave it alive and intact, and she’d pulled him back when he’d tried to take a step in.
    Tonight Mira was staying late at Brindle again, getting the place ready for the fundraiser. Owen sniffed at the loamy stink of the four artichokes he was steaming on the stove and imagined the smell zigzagging across town to reach her, stirring up her appetite, which always waned in these anxious pre-party days. Down in the kitchen,