The Prize (38 page)

“What's this?”

He handed it to her. “I've been going over the numbers. Calculating what we've lost. April Stillman. She has something. I think she's worth our investment.”

“Really?” A smile spread across her closed lips. “She's quite a pistol, isn't she?” Her eyes lingered on the paperweight globe of Venice he had bought when he was there for the Biennale. She picked it up and shook it. The snow swirled among the buildings of the miniature city trapped under a dome of glass. They both admired it silently for a moment.

They heard a ruckus outside on the avenue, people shouting and chanting. They moved toward the window to look. Beneath them crowds had gathered.

“Look, it's a parade.” May squinted to look past the sun's glare. Together they watched the decorative floats move past.

“It's all a bit of performance, isn't it?” May said.

19 CONNECTICUT

H
E TOOK THE
earlier train home. He pulled up to the weathered house. Holly's SUV was already there. He sat in his car for a moment watching the clouds break apart and the purple sky slowly darken, and turned off the engine. When Annabel was little, she and Holly would wait for him to come home. The minute they heard the car engine shut off, Annabel would run down the driveway to greet him and Holly followed behind, grinning.

He went inside to find her. He wanted to explain himself but wasn't sure how or if words were what was required. Maybe divine truth was love in the most down-to-earth, mundane form, like moments in which he felt at peace with himself, grilling steaks for his family, or watching the light in Annabel's eyes when she rode.

The house was eerily quiet.

“Holly?”

He walked through the living room, then the kitchen and the den. He went upstairs and pushed open their bedroom door, then Annabel's. Upstairs was completely dark. The floors creaked under his feet.

“Holly,” he called again.

A vision of himself as a lonely man adrift and without purpose, busily trying to fill his days, flashed before him. Fear flooded him. He ran down the stairs.

“Holly. Where are you?”

He sat on the sofa to collect himself. He thought of Holly and Tom again and the look that passed between them. He told himself that what he saw was the familiar intimacy between two old friends. It had to be. A flapping sound coming from the screened porch drew him out. A bird was caught there. The glass door must have been left open and the wind slammed it shut, trapping the bird between the glass and the screen. It thrashed its body against the glass, then quieted for a moment and started again. It would kill itself. He fled through the back door and around the house and opened the screen and the bird flew out, its wings nicking the top of his head as it made its escape.

The sky darkened rapidly and the wind rustled the trees in the yard. The rain came down like sharp pins. It smelled of moss and dew and huge puddles quickly pooled in the yard. The white wings of moths seeking shelter zigzagged in the porch light. He felt something papery and thin fall on his arm and swatted it, a dead moth, withered and brown. Maybe Holly was in the garden or the basement and he had missed her.

“Holly,” he called, walking around the house, his soft leather loafers sinking into the muddy earth. He pushed back a lock of thinning hair from his head. He was into the heart of his life, past the point of reinvention, a man who would have to accept who he was and what he had accomplished. But without Holly to share his life with it would be unbearable.

“Holly.”

The rain subsided to a drizzle and then burst into a sudden, angry downpour all at once, all over again. In a matter of minutes he was completely soaked. He went back inside dripping wet.
The silence and stillness in the house made his blood run cold. The screen door blew open again; weightless and untethered, it banged back and forth.

“Holly,” he called again. “Holly, where are you?”

He went down to the basement. He couldn't find her and came back up through the kitchen.

“I'm here,” she said, wearing a dripping yellow slicker, one of the kittens in her hands. “I was in the garage. I wanted to make sure the kittens were okay once the storm began. What's wrong? You're soaked. You look like you saw a ghost.”

She took a hand towel draped over the oven handle and handed it to him. “Look, she's going to make it,” Holly said, holding up the black runt. She'd filled out and her coat had grown soft and full.

He looked into the smooth margin of Holly's forehead and into her open, youthful eyes and absorbed the steadiness of her being as if he were coming out of a long and fractured dream. He saw love in her eyes. It wasn't something that could be mistaken. He remembered when he was a boy and his father took him to a cornfield maze in autumn before Halloween. He had walked through the maze's twists and turns with his father and told him he'd race him to the end, and slowly released his hold on his father's coarse and gentle hand. His father went one way and he went the other, running as fast as he could. The cornstalks were above his head and when he looked up all he could see was the sky and around him the cornstalk walls. He took a turn and then another; everything looked the same. He didn't know which way to go. He ran breathlessly down the rows, making one turn after another, and found himself back where he started. He began to panic and breathed heavily, and then, just when he thought he would never find his
way, he saw a cone of light and followed it and there was his father, waiting for him at the end of the maze. He remembered thinking no one would ever love him as his father had.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

E
VERY WRITER NEEDS
a second (or third, or fourth) pair of eyes. Thank you generous readers, Rebecca Schultz, Deidre O'Dwyer, Helen Schulman, Lelia Ruckenstein, Diane Goodman and Bill Clegg. Thank you Howard Norman, especially. Thank you Sanda Bragman Lewis for your support. Thank you Sarah Chalfant and Jin Auh for your steadfast belief and good council. Thank you Dan Smetanka for your passion, dedication, and keen editorial eye. We should all be so lucky. Thank you to my copyeditor, Allegra Huston. Thank you team Counterpoint: Charlie Winton, Kelly Winton, Rolph Blythe, Claire Shalinsky, Megan Fishmann. Thank you, husband and son, always.