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They moved from room to room, dusting, vacuuming, washing tiles, hauling trash, making beds, putting laundry into hampers. Elliot worked at these tasks like a man she noticed, sloppy with the beds, good in the kitchen, washing the floor as though he were punishing it. With Elliot in her bedroom and in Julia's, potentially dangerous objects were defused, a shirt flung over a chair was just a shirt that Elliot tossed onto the floor with a bundle of laundry. Bed linens were bed linens, in need of washing like everything else. He picked up the discarded papers in James' office and, without examining them, as Olivia would have had to do, put them all into a drawer and closed it. In Julia's room, Olivia felt Elliot's scrutiny, sensing that he was afraid it would be in that room she would falter, but she surprised him and herself by being particularly speedy and efficient. By the time they were finished with cleaning, the milky swirls in the sky had given way to low, lead stained, clots.
"It's supposed to be pretty hot tonight, near ninety." Elliot said, spraying out the inside of the kitchen sink with the faucet hose
She opened the cupboard beneath the sink and put away the bathroom cleaner, the pin sol, the comet. She rinsed her hands in the spray from the hose and dried them on a dish towel.
"I'm hungry" she said, feeling the mild satisfaction that always came from having cleaning a house. Like having a bath.
"Good" he said "I've got lobster in the car."
She raised an eyebrow.
"From the store, I picked them up on the way here, I couldn't resist."
"I might not have liked lobster." she said
"I saw the picks and crackers in the silverware drawer"
"Observant" she said
"Occasionally"
But standing there, she suddenly had the sense that Elliot Stabler was observant. Always watching.
Elliot cooked the lobsters while Olivia set the table in the front room. Olivia opened the fridge and took out two bottles of beer. At five minutes before noon, Elliot had turned off all the ringers on the telephones. There was nothing urgent that it couldn't wait an hour or two, he had said, and she agreed.
In that spirit, she had covered the table near the windows in the front room with a red flowered cloth. Olivia had wished she had flowers. But what exactly was she celebrating? she wondered, feeling vaguely guilty. Having survived that last few week? She set utensils, bowls for shells, bread, melted butter, and a thick roll of paper towel on the table. Elliot walked into the front room from the kitchen bearing wet, slippery plates of lobsters. There were water spots in front of his shirt.
"I'm starving" he said, setting the plates down and sitting across from her
She examined the lobsters in front of her, and it was then that the swift, sharp shock of a memory once again assailed her. She looked up quickly and then out the window. She brought a hand to her mouth.
"What is it?" Elliot asked
She shook her head quickly, side to side. She held herself still, locked in an image, not daring to move either forward or backward for fear of the crevices. She breathed in deeply, let it breath out, and laid her arms on the table.
"I've just had a memory" she said
"What is it?"
"James and me"
"Here?"
She added.
"Doing this?"
It was like this, she wanted to say, but not like this. It was early summer, and the screens were on. Julia was with Margaret, and it was later in the day, around four o clock or five. The light was unique, she remembered, shimmery and green like sea glass. They had had champagne. What were they celebrating? She couldn't remember. Possibly nothing, possibly themselves. She had wanted to make love, she remembered, and so had he, but neither of them would sacrifice a hot boiled lobster, and so they had waited with a kind of delicious tension between them. She had sucked the legs of her lobster with exaggerated kisses, and James had laughed and said she was a tease, which she enjoyed. Being a tease. She seldom did that.
"I'm sorry" Elliot said "I should have known. I'll take these into the kitchen."
"No," she said quickly, stopping his hand as he reached for her plate "No, you couldn't have known, and anyway, my life is filled with these. Hundreds of little memories that catch me off guard. They're like mines in a field, waiting to detonate."
He moved his hand from under hers and laid it over her fingers. He held her hand the way a man might hold the hand of a woman friend, waiting for a small crisis to be over. His hand felt warm, because Olivia had suddenly gone cold. All her memories did this to her, they made the blood leave her hands and feet. Like fear did.
"You've been good to me" she said
Time passed. How much? She could no longer gauge seconds, minutes. She closed her eyes. The beer had made her slightly sleepy. She wanted to turn her hand over, to have him touch her palm, to slide his hand along her palm and up her wrist. She imagined she could feel the warmth of his hand feeling along the underside of her arm, past the elbow.
Her fingers under Elliot went slack, and she felt the tension drain from her body. It was erotic, but not, that loosening, that giving up. Her eyes seemed to have unfocused themselves, and she couldn't see Elliot or anything else properly, only a sense of light from the window. The light, diffuse and dimmed, created an aura of languid ease. And she thought that she ought to feel disturbed for thinking of Elliot and herself in that way, but a kind of leniency seemed to have descended upon them with the haze, and she felt merely vague and drifting. So much so that when Elliot, perhaps in an effort to bring her back, tightened the pressure on her hand, she felt jolted into the present moment.
"You're like a kind of priest" she said
He laughed "No. I'm not."
"I think that's how I've come to see you."
"Father Elliot" he said, smiling
And then she thought: Who was to know if this man's hand traveled up the inside of her arm? Who was to care? Weren't all of the rules now broken?
She could see that he was struggling to understand precisely where she was and why, but she couldn't help him, because she herself didn't know. He withdrew his hand, leaving hers uncovered. She felt exposed. She drank another bottle of beer. Between them, they ate all of the bread and lobsters.
Olivia looked down and took a sip from her beer.
"James told me to call Alfred and to have him come on Friday to fix the leaky shower. If James wasn't planning on coming back, he wouldn't have done that. Not in the way he did it, almost as an afterthought as he walked to the car. And he'd have been different with me. He'd have said goodbye differently. I know he would. There'd be one small thing that maybe wouldn't register at the time, but would after the fact. Something."
Elliot reached for his beer and pushed himself slightly from the table.
"Do you remember?" she asked "When the Safety Board questioned me, asking me if James had any close friends in England?"
"Yes"
She stared at the bowl of discarded shells.
"I've just had a thought." she said "I'll be right back."
As she climbed the stairs, she tried to recall if she had done that particular wash. She'd worn the jeans for two days and then thrown them into the hamper. But not her own hamper, she remembered, Julia's. And Olivia didn't wash Julia's things as she had not been there. Any laundry Julia had needed would be done by her.
She found the jeans at the bottom of the pile of soiled laundry, buried beneath clothes Elliot had tossed into the hamper just hours ago. She removed the handful of papers and recipes, which were slightly damp from a long buried towel. When she returned to the front room, Elliot was looking out the window. He watched her as she pushed her plate away and unfolded the papers.
"Look at this"she said, handing the lottery ticket to Elliot
"I found these papers wadded up in the pocket of James' jeans on the back of the bathroom door on the day he died. I didn't think much of them at the time and just stuck them in the pocket of my own jeans. But do you see that notation? M at A's and the numbers following it? What does it look like to you?
Elliot studied the number, and she could see from the flicker of his eyes that he understood what she was thinking.
"A U.K. phone number, you think." he said
"It's a London exchange, isn't it? The one eight one?"
"I think so."
"Isn't that the right number of digits?"
"I'm not sure."
"Let me see." she said
She put out her hand, and Elliot gave her back the ticket, though not without a certain reluctance.
"I'm curious" she said, defending herself "If it's a phone number, why is it written on this ticket? And this is recent, he must have bought the ticket the day before he left." She looked at the ticket's date. "Yes, he did." she said "July 3rd"
This was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, she thought as she walked up to the telephone in the kitchen. She picked up the receiver and tapped in the numbers. Almost immediately, she could hear a distinctly foreign ring, a sound that always put her in mind of old-fashioned Parisian telephones with spindly black cradles.
A voice answered at the other end, and Olivia, startled by the voice, unprepared for it, glanced quickly up at Elliot. She'd given no thought at all to what she wanted to say. A woman said hello again, this time in a slightly irritated voice. Not an old woman, not a girl.
Olivia searched for a name. She wanted to ask: Did you ever know a man named James Dean O'Connell? but the question suddenly seemed absurd.
"I must have the wrong number." Olivia said quickly "I'm sorry to have bothered you."
"Who is this?" the woman asked, wary now.
Olivia couldn't bring herself to say her name.
There was the click of the phone being hung up in annoyance. Followed by silence.
Her hands shaking badly, Olivia replaced the receiver and sat down. She felt rattled much in the same way she once had as a girl, in junior high school, when she had called a boy she liked but hadn't been able to say her name.
"Let this go" Elliot said quietly from the table
Olivia rubbed her hands along the thighs of her jeans to stop their trembling
"Listen" she said "Can you find something out for me?"
"What?"
"Could you find the names of all the crew that James has ever flown with?"
"Why?" he asked
"I might be able to recognize a name if I saw it. Or put a name to a face I've once seen."
"If that's what you want" he said slowly
"It's hard to know what I want."
While Elliot went up to James' office to get the crew list, Olivia spread out all of the other papers from the crumpled wad and scanned them. She noticed particularly the receipt from the post office for a twenty two dollar purchase. Perhaps it was not for the stamps, she thought, peering at the receipt more closely. She opened up the piece of white lined paper and looked at the lines of poetry James had copied.
Who have sought more than is in rain or dew
Or in the sun and moon, or on the earth,
Or sighs amid the wandering, starry mirth,
Or comes in laughter from the sea's sad lips;
And wage God's battles in the long gray ships.
The sad, the lonely, the insatiable,
To these Old Night shall all her mystery tell;
God's bell has claimed them by the little cry
What did the poem mean? She glanced up at the sun beyond the windows. She unfolded the second piece of lined paper, the remember list. Bergdorf Fedex Robe to arrive the 20th.
Odd, she thought, but a fedex package had not come on the twentieth. She was certain of that.
Rising from the table, she once again pondered the significance of the lines of poetry. They meant little to her now, but perhaps she could find the whole prom and that would suggest an idea to her. She walked over to the bookshelf, it was little more than a tall tier of planks stretching nearly to the ceiling. James had read books about airplanes and biography about men, sometimes a novel with a clever plot. She searched for an old anthology of poetry and found it on the bottom shelf.
She sat on the edge of the sofa. She propped the book on her lap and began to turn the pages. When nothing immediately revealed itself, she decided to start at the beginning intention of turning each page until she had found the lines she was looking for. But it quickly became clear to her that she wouldn't have to do that. The early poems were ancient. Using the language in the lines of the poem as a guide, she opened up the book about halfway through. There, the verse was by poets who wrote in a syntax similar to the lines she had in her hand. She began methodically to make her way through the pages when Elliot called her from James' office.
She put the book down and went up to James' office, where Elliot was seated at his desk. In his hands, he held the shiny paper of a fax, and she realized suddenly, as she saw him sitting in James' chair, that Elliot knew what was on the tape, of course he did, Robert had told him, and not her, to protect her.
"Tell me about the tape." she said
"This is a list of people James ever flew with at American Airlines."
"Thank you" she said, taking the list from him but not looking at it. She could see that he hadn't thought she would ask.
"Please." she said "Tell me what you know."
I hope you enjoyed, leave me some reviews, I fly home tomorrow, and I don't get back home until midnight, so I don't think you can expect a chapter until Tuesday, but I hope you enjoyed this! Don't forget to review!