Her hand rested on his.
She was most likely thinking of her own husband, who’d walked into the flames. No one knew why some went in and didn’t come out. Did they want to come out that little bit less than the others? If nothing else, Michael Dunbar was never of two minds about Abbey.
* * *
—
Next, the paintings, which he couldn’t look at anymore.
Her image would start him wondering.
Where she was.
Who she was with.
The temptation was to imagine her in motion, with another man. A better man. No niceties.
He wanted to be less superficial than that, to say that such things didn’t matter, but they did. They reached below, at something deeper, and they were places he didn’t want to be.
One night, about three years in, he pulled the paintings to one side of the garage, and covered them end to end, with bedsheets: a life behind a curtain. Even when the job was done, he still couldn’t quite resist; he took one last look inside, he ran a palm across the biggest, where she stood, shoes in hand, on the shoreline.
“Go on then,” she said, “take them.”
But there was nothing left to have.
He pulled the sheets back down.
* * *
—
As the remaining time climbed by, he was swallowed by the city.
He worked, he drove.
He mowed the lawn; a nice boy, a good tenant.
And how could he ever know?
How could he know that two years later again, an immigrant girl’s father would be dead on a European park bench? How could he know that she’d go out in a fit of love and despair, and buy a piano, and have it delivered not to her, but to him—and that she’d be standing in the middle of Pepper Street, with a trio of useless piano men?
In many ways he’d never left that garage floor, and so often I can’t help seeing it:
He crouches and gets to his feet.
The sound of faraway traffic—so much like the ocean—a long five years behind him, and I think it, again and again:
Do it, do it now.
Go to that woman and piano.
If you don’t go now there’ll be none of us—no brothers, no Penny, no father or sons—and all that there is is to have it, to make it, and to run with it as long as you can.
On that Monday, after Michael had left in the dark, and Clay saw the sketch in the kitchen, he’d made breakfast and walked to the lounge room. The Murderer’s notes, sheets, and workings were in seven separate stacks on the coffee table. Some were taller than others, but all had a title on top. On each stack was a rock, or stapler, or scissors, to kee
p them from flying off. Slowly, he read each title:
MATERIALS