“I—I don’t think I need a specialist. These things just take time,” Claire says, pressing her thumb into the embossed letters. Her fingers want to dig into her palms.
“It’s time to be proactive, I say,” Pete says gruffly. “Get you all checked out. See what’s broken.”
Claire clenches her teeth. She isn’t sure even the best fertility specialist on the planet could identify all the broken parts of her.
She keeps her mouth shut for the rest of the night. She follows Pete up to bed, does her wifely duty, and waits for Pete to start snoring before she starts her routine.
She stares at her own reflection in the vanity mirror—at her freckles, her springy hair, the thin hollows of her collarbone. She removes her pearls, setting them in the bottommost drawer of her jewelry box. She sets her engagement and wedding bands into her ring dish. She unpins her hair, pulling the brush through it in a soothing pattern.
She’s just about ready to run a scalding bath when through the adjacent window, Claire sees the flicker of moving shadows in Jackie’s backyard.
An intruder?
Claire’s heart flutters. She goes to the window, peering down over the fence.
The shadow isn’t an intruder. It’s Jackie. The shape of her is unmistakable, but it’s strange to see her after such a long day of careful avoidance. Jackie is standing by the pool, lit by flickeringunderwater lights, and she appears to be removing her silky robe. Except that underneath it, she isn’t in a bathing suit. She’s just—she’s in her negligée, but now she’s slipping out of that too, and—
And then she’s in nothing. Absolutely nothing. Jackie isnaked, and Claire can’t look away. Her hairbrush is suspended in midair and her mouth is hanging open andsomethingis happening in the vicinity of her hips as she watches Jackie, bare as the day she was born, dive into the pool.
Jackie’s pale form cuts through smoothly from one end to the other. After surfacing she treads water for a second, her limbs looking wobbly and strange under the surface, and then she floats onto her back and kicks her legs lazily to keep afloat.
Claire is standing so close to the window that her breath is fogging the glass. She moves to a different pane, gobsmacked, trying to make out the details—she can just see the outlines of Jackie’s chest floating on the surface, the fan of her dark hair around her head, and then a darker patch lower, between—oh,gosh, between—
Jackie’s feet find the bottom of the shallow end. She stands, the water shifting out from her body in ripples, and then she tilts her head in Claire’s direction.
Pete snores loudly.
It’s in that moment that Claire realizes her bedroom lamp is on. She’s standing in the window, staring at her neighbor swimming naked like some kind of peeping Tom, probably perfectly silhouetted by the light for Jackie to see her shameful spying.
Claire squeaks, in a deeply unladylike way. She ducks below the windowsill, shaking, and presses a hand to her racing heart. She hardly even recognizes herself in the actions of the last few days. The drugs, the argument, thepeeping—Claire is clearly losing her mind.
She can never see Jackie again after all of this. Never.
All she can do is crawl until she’s out of the window’s line of sight and climb into bed next to a snoring Pete, her stomach in knots and her bath forgotten. She hardly sleeps that night, tossing and turning until Jackie’s pool lights finally turn off in the wee hours.
~ ~ ~
Claire maintains the distance from Jackie as late April shifts into May.
It’s for the best, really. Now that she’s not so consumed with spending as much time next door as possible, she gets caught back up with the housework easily. She goes to book club, though once again nobody else seems to want to discuss the book. She even passes a small stationary store on the way home from grocery shopping, and she waffles outside for close to five minutes before she decides to use her last few leftover cents to buy a notebook and a set of drawing pencils.
The first time she opens the book with a sharpened pencil in hand, it all comes back in a rush. The scrape of graphite against paper. The smell of a fresh sketch. The streak of grey lead it leaves along the edge of her hand. It all feels as familiar as her grocery list. Maybe even more so.
She fills the book with meaningless little sketches each day. She makes a rough approximation of the bird nesting in the rafters above Jackie’s front door. She jots down cloud shapes and squirrels and anything else she can see from her kitchen window. She draws the yellow acacia tree—she painted it once, just after she and Pete moved in here and before she left her job at Anita’s art shop, but all she has now is pencil. The dark grey lines and round flowers remind her of Jackie’s tattoo.
And once she’s gotten accustomed again to having a pencil in her hand, Claire slides easily back into what she used to do at the park for hours at a time—simple portraits, capturing features in a quick sketch. Since there are fewer passersby in the cul-de-sac than there used to be in the park, Claire is limited to the faces she already knows.
She draws Peter from memory, frowning with his fingers crinkled in his morning paper. She draws Martha dusting a shelf with a hand over her belly, and Walter at his grill. She draws her parents—her mother’s face comes easily, but Claire has to work to recall the details of her father’s features.
Maybe it’s because she hasn’t been allowing herself to see Jackie, but it’s her face that Claire struggles with the most. Claire starts sketch after sketch, tracing out the lines of Jackie’s features in increasing detail—she draws Jackie smiling, and she draws her thoughtful. She tries to commit to paper the magic of Jackie’s laugh.
None of the sketches feel good enough. No pencil can accurately capture her, let alone one held inexpertly by Claire, and the constant attempts do nothing but remind her how long it’s been since they saw each other.
It doesn’t help that every time Claire tries to draw anything below the column of Jackie’s neck, she’s reminded of what she did.
She gives up after her seventh attempt. She rips out the pages, folding and tucking them into the back of the sketchbook where nobody needs to see them again.
~ ~ ~
