Page 23 of Nine Lives

The square kitchen of his newly reacquired home was toward the back, and from its side window he could see into the backyard of his neighbor’s property. That house had belonged to a family named Lambert when Jack was a boy. This was back in the early 1950s. There were three children in the Lambert family, all slightly older than Jack and his sister. There was a teenage girl, who still retained her English accent from the time before the Lamberts had emigrated to America. Two more girls, fraternal twins, liked to embroil Jack and his sister in strange games of imagination, usually involving the fairies that lived in their conjoined backyards. Jack remembered those games better than he remembered any of the Lamberts’ faces. He wondered what had happened to them. The parents would be dead now, of course, and those young girls would all be older than him. They’d most likely have children and grandchildren and successes and heartbreak. And the chances were that at least one of them was already dead.

Looking out at the Lamberts’ old house now, he watched as a very thin woman with long brown hair stepped into the back sunroom, holding her own mug of coffee and staring into her backyard. The sunroom had not been part of his neighbor’s house when he’d been a child. It was an addition, probably added in the 1970s or 1980s, a room almost entirely made of glass. He was calling it a sunroom even though he was pretty sure it went by another name that he couldn’t quite remember. Words had been escaping him lately. They were like cigarette smoke. He’d open his mouth and the word would billow away on the wind. He could see its shape as it dissipated but the word was gone.

Jack, coming out of this reverie, refocused on his neighbor’s house. The woman with the mug was now turned and looking directly at him, not with any animosity, but with curiosity, if anything. He raised a hand and she waved back, and then Jack stepped away from his kitchen window. There was a mirror in the front hall and Jack took a look at himself, making sure he had no food in his teeth, nothing crusty around his eyes, then he swept his fingers through his thick, mane of gray hair, and made his way to his back porch. If the woman was still in her solarium—that was it, a goddamn solarium!—then he’d say hello.

It was colder outside than he thought it would be, and Jack buttoned up his cardigan as he wandered across toward his neighbor. The woman was still there, and she stepped outside as well, just as he reached the threshold of her property.

“Thought I’d introduce myself,” Jack said.

“I’m Margaret,” she said, putting out her hand, and taking three quick, awkward steps to shake his.

“I’m Jack. I’m—”

“I’ve been meaning to come over and introduce myself, and I even put together half of a welcome basket, but then ended up eating the muffins, and I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. I’m sorry I haven’t come over sooner.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. I’ve only been here less than a month.”

“I know. I just don’t want you to think I’m not neighborly. I’ve got a pot of coffee on, if you want a cup.”

“Sure,” Jack said.

Once they were settled in the solarium/sunroom, Jack with another cup of coffee he didn’t want, Margaret said, “I heard a rumor you used to live here.”

“Oh, yeah? Who did you hear that from?”

“A fellow librarian, actually. At the branch just down the street where I work. She told me you used to live here, but before her time. She also said that you wrote a famous book.”

“She’s one for two. I did used to live here, but I hardly think my book was famous. Maybe it was for about a year and a half, right after it came out.”

“What kind of book was it?”

“It was called Say It Out Loud, Then Do It Out Loud. It was—it is—a business book about always announcing your plans before you do them. I know what you’re thinking—How do you write a whole book about that?—and I can barely remember how I did it. Wide margins, I guess. But it made me a lot of money once upon a time. And it turned me into a full-time consultant. I still occasionally do seminars all over the world.”

“It rings a bell. My father probably bought it.”

“Was your father a business man?”

“Yes. In the insurance business.”

“Then he may well have bought my book.”

Margaret had put out a platter with a few slices of coffee cake on it, and Jack took one and had a bite. It was very good. She looked expectantly at him, and he told her how much he liked it, and she confirmed his guess that it was homemade. While she talked with him about baking, and how it was her true love, he studied her. She had small features, a slightly pointed chin, and the skin on her cheeks was darker than the rest of her face, as though she’d had bad acne as a teenager. She was skinny, and sat slightly hunched forward, the same bad posture that Jack saw on so many young people. Her best feature was her long brown hair. It had that lustrous look that comes from a healthy diet, or maybe just plain genetics.

“So is it true you used to live here, in this neighborhood, I mean, when you were a kid?” she said, pushing her hair back off her forehead, and sitting up a little straighter.

“I grew up here. Right next door, same house I just bought. My father, like yours, worked in insurance.”

“Wow. How long did you live here?”

“Until I went to college. Then my parents got divorced, and the house was sold. But except for vacation homes this was where I spent my childhood.”

“You must have happy memories,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you’ve bought the house and moved back into it. Unless you plan on burning it down or something, I just figured . . .”

“No, you’re right. It was mostly a happy childhood. And I love this neighborhood with all the brick houses.”

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