At the house they stopped by the side piazza steps. There were no lights in any windows, but something luminous from the harbor, or the stars behind the clouded sky made for enough light to see. He asked her about the house, admiring the gutters, and she told him they’d bought it after Sally was born when they’d become too many to stay at the house on the cove with her parents. They sat down on the steps, facing out. She found herself telling him about Irene Putnam and her disappearance. Walter Vail’s face, atilt, took on a sympathetic expression, wincing like someone braced to be hit.

It’s hard to lose … , he began, but trailed off.

Very starkly there appeared to Lilian like dark birds on the lawn all the losses she had known since she’d last seen Walter Vail — Irene Putnam, then Hildy, who’d died in June after months of wheezing in a metal bed, and further back all those years, thinking of the boys who hadn’t come back. Lilian told him about Forrey Cooper and the memorial fountain in town. He said he’d had a friend who’d never come out of the Black Forest. Staring out at the lumpy bank of raspberry bushes at the lawn’s edge, Walter Vail reached over and placed his hand on top of Lilian’s which looked like a beige glove forgotten on the step. As he talked he kept his hand there, enveloping her fingers, tightening his clasp, talking on with no reference whatsoever to what his hand was doing. The pressure increased, and Lilian felt she was coming to know him again. His self was returning. And then it wasn’t just he who returned, but herself as well. She felt the air on her face.

The usual stuff of her life fell away, tumbling down past the lawn’s edge, dropping off the cliff, leaving her and Walter Vail alone in the world. The space around them seemed complete. Their talk grew warmer, easier, and they stayed on the steps for a long time. When they stood up and went into the house, they were one pale shape with two heads, and it had gotten quite late.

In the morning Walter Vail was gone.

50 • The wing

50 • The wing

SO THIS, she thought, is how my life turns out: that there are slivers into which I pack my greatest feeling, that the moments with this skittish man who appears now and then in my life are to have more power than all the days with my husband. Of course, the precariousness made her feeling more intense, she knew, but knowing did not lessen it. She scorned herself. I’ve never been one of those foolish people taken up with romantic notions. I have my feet on the ground, anyone would say so; I have always been a reasonable woman. But then she would drift back into reverie.