Read Online Where or When by Anita Shreve - Free Book Online

in, put them on. I had never listened to music with headphones before, had never experienced the way the music seems to be inside the brain.
    I played the first song, and I smiled. It reminded me of CYO dances as a girl; of dark gymnasiums with loud, slow, dreamy music; of awkward embraces with boys who were often shorter than myself then. Of my face sometimes muffled into a taller boy’s shoulder.
    I played the second song and sat up in bed. I laughed. I thought: This is a kind of excavation.
    I played the third song, and the memories flooded in upon me. A kiss at the nape of the neck. A butterfly.
    I played the fourth song, and I began to cry.

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    H E WAKES for the fifth time and can see, to his relief, by the faint suggestion of light at the edges of the shade at the window, that it is finally early morning. He stirs slightly, not wanting to disturb Harriet, but something in his movements, the slight tug of the sheet perhaps, makes her turn toward him, murmuring in her half sleep. He feels then her fingers, her hand reaching for him, the practiced, sleepy gesture meant to massage, to bring him along. He sucks his stomach in, shifts slightly so that he is just beyond her reach, hoping that she is not yet quite conscious enough to notice this gentle rebuff. Not this morning.
    He studies his wife in the gray light of predawn. She seems to be burrowing, lying on her stomach with the pink strap of her nightgown meandering down her shoulder. Her mouth is pressed open against the sheet; her eyes are still closed. Her hair is matted against her ear, half hidden by a pillow that has fallen partly over her head. He watches his wife sleep, this woman he has lived with for fifteen years, watches her breathe, and as he does so, he feels again, as he has felt at odd moments over the past several weeks, the tremulous drag of guilt, a line snagged with seaweed. In a file cabinet in the room below the bedroom, there are in a manila folder six letters and a postcard that could not be easily explained, that are, in their seeming innocence, as treacherous as motel receipts. Yet he resists this drag of guilt, knows he cannot afford to let it take hold of him. Not today, not this morning.
    He rolls over, squints at the clock. Nearly six forty-five. Christ, it has to have been the longest night of his life, and there are still five hours and fifteen minutes to go. He knows already that the morning is lost to him, held suspended in anticipation: Will she be there? Will she come at all? He has no reason to expect her. She has written that she wants it—the nebulous “it” they have created only with words—to stop, and he has ignored her. He’s done worse than ignore her: He’s sent her the goddamn tape!
    He slips out from between the sheets, walks naked into the bathroom. The tile floor is ice against the soles of his feet, the air so frigid he begins almost immediately to shiver. He minds that he pays six hundred dollars a month for heat and can still see his breath in the morning. He turns on the shower, watches as clouds of steam boil over and around the plastic curtain. His face in the mirror disappears; the bathroom fills with mist. He steps into the shower, adjusts the water temperature so that it is just below scalding. He turns, bends his head, lets the water pummel the back of his neck.
    It has not, he knows, been an innocent correspondence. In the beginning he tried to tell himself that it was harmless, simply intriguing, but he knew, even then, that from the very first sentence of the very first note, there was nothing innocent about it. If he wrote her, as he had, that he had the same feeling looking at her picture as he had when he first saw her in the courtyard of The Ridge thirty-one years ago, what did that imply? And although he has not permitted himself to think of Siân Richards sexually—he cannot, despite his childhood memories, despite the temptation, for to do so might