Chapter 5 A Nephew I Never Met

The knock came on a Tuesday, at the hour Coralie had come to think of as the building's hollow time, the empty middle of the afternoon when the radiators cooled and the television below went quiet and Thornlea Court seemed to hold its breath. It was not the knock of the postman, who knocked twice and fast, or the knock of Bette Wenderly, who knocked with her knuckles on the wood and her voice already talking through it. It was three knocks, even and unhurried, the knock of a man who had practiced it. She looked through the peephole, which told her nothing, because it never told her anything. A man, medium height, dark coat, hands in pockets. A shape. She opened the door because she always opened the door, because a woman who cannot recognize faces cannot afford to live behind one, and because she had told herself a thousand times that the register, and not the door, was what kept her safe. "Mrs. Tunstall?" he said. "You're not the postman." "I'm not." He laughed, and the laugh was warm, and she did not trust it. "My name is Emrys Rellick. I'm Sylvie's nephew. Her sister's son. I'm sorry to come without warning. I only heard on Sunday." His voice was soft and careful, a voice that had been made soft on purpose, and it had a faint regional rise at the end of its sentences, a rise she could not place. It was a pleasant voice. It was, in fact, exactly the voice a man would choose if he wanted a stranger to open a door. "I'm sorry for your loss," Coralie said, and meant it, and watched for the thing that would tell her whether she meant it to the right man. "May I come in for a moment?" he said. "It's about her things. The piano. Her papers. I don't want to bother the police with it, and I thought her friend in the building might know where she kept things." She should have said no. Later, over and over, she asked herself why she had not said no, and the answer, every time, was the same and small and human: because she wanted to hear his voice a little longer, to decide whether she had heard it before, and because a woman who cannot see a face will let a voice come inside where she would never let a body. She let him in. She was aware, even as she stepped back to let him pass, that she was doing the one thing she had warned herself never to do, which was to admit a voice into her home before she had any idea whose it was. But a voice is not a face, and a voice cannot be held at the door like a coat, and hers was a life built out of other people's sounds, so she did what her whole life had trained her to do and listened, and while she listened she looked past him without meaning to, at the empty landing, at the sealed door one floor up, at the ordinary gray afternoon, and told herself that a man who says he is a nephew is, more often than not, a nephew. The building, which told her everything, told her nothing about him at all, which should have been enough. He sat when she told him to sit, in the chair by the window, the one that told on every guest. He drank the tea she made because she made it without asking and he did not refuse it. And she stood across the room and listened to him the way another person might stare. He had no drag in his left foot. She noticed it when he crossed to the chair, all his weight even, both steps clean and matched, and something in her shoulders came down a fraction of an inch. He wore no ring, or if he wore one he kept it still; there was no click of metal anywhere, no tap against the cup, no chime against the arm of the chair. He did not swallow the ends of his words. He finished every one of them, deliberately, almost too deliberately, a man laying each word down in full like a man laying down a card face up so you would not suspect the one in his sleeve. "That's kind of you," he said, when she asked how he had found her. "Sylvie mentioned you. In letters. The neighbor who tunes pianos. She said you had the best ear she ever taught." "She never taught me. Not formally." "She said you had it anyway." He set down his cup, and Coralie heard the small honest sound of porcelain on wood, and nothing else. "You're the one who found her." "Yes." He was quiet a moment, and the quiet was well-timed, and the timing was the only tell she found all afternoon, and it was so small she could not have defended it to anyone, even to herself. A man grieving, after all, is allowed to be quiet. "I keep thinking about the man who did it," he said. "They say he might have known her. That she was teaching him. Do you think he was a student?" "I think she'd had a visitor she didn't like." "That's what the police asked me about too." He stood. "I won't take more of your time. I'll come back with the papers and the keys, and I'll leave you in peace. Thank you for the tea, and for knowing her. She was better than this family deserved." At the door he paused, and turned, and did the thing she thought about for a week afterward, trying to decide whether it had been a courtesy or a performance. "You know," he said, "Sylvie wrote once that you can't see faces. She said you knew people by their voices instead, and that she thought that was the more honest way to know anyone. I hope you don't mind me saying so. I found it beautiful. Most of us only ever know the mask." And then he was gone down the stairs, both feet even, no ring anywhere, every word finished, and Coralie stood in her own doorway and felt, for the first time in the whole terrible week, the warmth of being understood. Later she took out the register and made a new card, and she did not know where to put it, because the card was almost empty. Emrys Rellick. Nephew. No drag. No ring. Ends words clean. Soft regional rise. Says beautiful things. Underneath she wrote the only thing she did not yet understand, the only thing that had a shape she could not shake. Knows about the register. She had never told a soul outside the building and the police, and she had not told the police about the cards until Niall Harewood, in the lobby, two days after Sylvie died. Emrys Rellick had stood in her kitchen and said the word beautiful and told her she knew people by their voices, and Coralie, who noticed everything, had not once asked him where he had learned it. For the rest of the afternoon she kept hearing him, the way you keep hearing a bell after it stops, and the more she heard him the less she could say about why. His voice had no drag, no ring, no swallowed endings. He had finished every word as neatly as a man laying down cards face up. And yet there had been one moment, reaching for his coat, when he had said a sentence with the two halves a beat apart, the way people do when they are reading, and the reading had not been for her. She wrote that on the card too, and looked at the two lines under his name, and could not decide whether she had noticed a thing or invented one. A woman who cannot see faces learns to doubt her ears, because everyone else in the world trusts their eyes, and there is no one to tell her when she is right. She told herself it was the letters. She told herself Sylvie wrote about her to her family, and the family talked, and the nephew listened. It was an ordinary explanation, and she held onto it the way a person holds a rope in the dark, and she held on with both hands, and the rope, as it turned out, was the thing that pulled her in. ---