Within seconds, Ted has finished speaking. He begins to again descend the stairs, the receiver still in his hand, the base of the phone at his side, his fingers curled under the cradle. As he takes a step, another down the stairs, Sylvia turns and swings her hands down and out to her sides, regnant. Everything, suddenly, goes dry. The sea light slides back, evaporated. In the potent, magnetic air everything looks bleached and static—the walls, their faces, everything but the pitch-black, glossy phone. Sylvia’s upper arms glow white with the imprints of her own hands. She rushes forward, the blood blooming under her skin, her face febrile, lit by a ghastly inner radiance, to meet Ted at the phone table.

The receiver is still in his hand. As he sets the phone down on the table and readies to fit the receiver onto the cradle, Sylvia snatches the telephone’s cord out of the air and pulls, grimacing, yanking the telephone itself off of the table, yanking again, the table falling, the drawer crashing out and the pens and pencils and scraps of paper tumbling and sliding to the floor, the cord ripping out of the wall socket and snapping into the air, its wires bursting like a coppery flower out of the end of the striped fabric cording. Sylvia pulls the phone out of the wall and feels a surge of electric current, a charge, the million filaments of the wires exploding, burning all along the line from London, all along her nerves, electrocuting her, burning the shadow of the moment into place, shocking her again with their lightning stroke, straight to her electrified heart. He had betrayed her.

As Sylvia pulls the telephone out of the wall, the cells in her brain are charging, the synapses going off like cannons, like fireworks, setting off little tails of smoke, the scent of scorch electric in the air, and silence behind, everything over. Sylvia pulls the telephone out of the wall: dead air. The voice on the other end cut off, severed, extinct. Dead air. And that’s not all that’s dead. In the moment the cord sails up and snaps and shoots its sparks in the potent hall, Sylvia knows how futile all of her protections have been, all she did to sandbag her slipping hold. What’s dead is the life she saved from herself. The moment has cut her loose, stripped her of everything that tied her to her perfect, ordered, resurrected life. In the eye blink of a god, in a heartbeat, all that she clung to rises up with her like smoke, like ash, into the charged, dead air: The cakes of soap. Her wedding ring. His gold filling.

8. “Tulips”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Tulips”

EARLY AUGUST 1962

COURT GREEN