The Undoing. Averil Dean

the floors. Huge, impossible jobs, but they tackled them together, cheerful and undaunted. Celia would hear Eric’s tuneless voice ringing through the old hotel, the beat of his music thundering from the stereo: Do ya, do ya want my love, baby, do ya do ya want my love... A crazy falsetto, cracking over the high notes, punctuated by Rory’s rumbling baritone urging him to keep his day job. Eric would laugh, cranking up the volume just to piss him off. They filled the empty rooms with the sound of power tools, hammers, the clatter of boards and nails, heavy thumps of their boots on the floor. The most beautiful sounds in the world.

      Rory and Eric. Their names formed an impression in her mind that was less about the way they looked than about the way they felt, their dual presence like a pair of moons swirling elliptically around her: one near, the other far, then switching, accelerating, swinging away and moving heavily back. She felt the weight of them physically, a cosmic tug that kept her always wobbling slightly off balance.

      No one who knew them casually could believe they’d be such good friends. Eric seemed like the antithesis to Rory’s golden-brown solidity. His pale skin was the canvas for a collection of tattoos, an ongoing attempt to illustrate his identity in a way that Rory had never needed to do. Eric was dark, pierced, mercurial, with an IQ approaching genius and a blatant reluctance to use it, as if he were too smart even to think up the things that would challenge him, too smart to keep his own brain ticking. He could easily have become frustrated with Rory, who had struggled for years with undiagnosed dyslexia and hadn’t read a book cover to cover in his life. But Rory was not unintelligent, and he had a commonsense canniness Eric lacked. When Eric wandered off course, Rory provided ballast.

      Celia set down the spackling paste tray and made a wide stretch. A hot ache pressed at the back of her eyes. She had lain awake the night before, her thoughts all scraps and snippets: a flash of someone’s face, a fragment of conversation, memories like the pieces of several different puzzles all laid out on a table, impossible to assemble. At dawn she rose and went up the narrow back stairs, through the dollhouse door to the attic—a long, slanted room with one dingy window at either end and a century’s worth of accumulated junk, once so thick you had to turn sideways even to get through the door. Over the months they had sifted through it, had carried down pieces of furniture, paintings with cracked frames or rips in the canvas, boxes of books and musty old clothes, an enormous elk’s head mounted on a wooden plaque. Eric had hung this in the kitchen, as a joke, because Celia didn’t eat meat—which had upset her at first because she didn’t realize it was a joke and thought he meant for it to stay. But he took one look at her face and laughed, kissed her head and hauled the poor thing down to the truck with the other flea market items.

      From the mudroom, she heard the door open and close, a thud of boots on the floor and the nylon whisk of someone’s coat. A moment later, Rory came through the kitchen door, pulling off his cap as he ducked beneath the lintel. The ends of his hair were dusted with snow, his eyebrows threaded with ice. His bootless feet in purple socks made no sound, but the floorboards creaked a little under his weight.

      He looked around the room, hands slung low on his narrow hips.

      “Looks like a bomb went off in here,” he said.

      Celia held up the tray. “I’m spackling. It’s a dirty job, et cetera...”

      Rory hunted briefly for a glass, settled for a coffee cup and went to fill it at the kitchen sink. He drank off the water in five or six long swallows, his head tipping slowly back, then refilled the cup and stood with his hip leaning against the counter.

      “Finally got the shed organized,” he said. “And I hung the new door. You would not have appreciated the spider situation out there.”

      “Body count?”

      “Twenty-six.”

      “Yikes.”

      Rory grinned. Nothing fazed him. Spiders, leaks in the roof, faulty plumbing, snarls of electrical wire. He tackled every job with the same easygoing confidence; it was all in a day’s work, whatever the day might bring. He had a way of jollying Celia and Eric along, his blue eyes crinkling around the corners, mouth curving open around the white gleam of his teeth.

      Captain America, Eric called him. Here to save the day.

      And Rory did seem unambiguously heroic at times. He radiated good intention and that comforting solidity a strong person brings into the room. It was almost impossible to imagine a situation Rory would not be able to handle, or that anything awful could happen while he was around. He made everything seem simple.

      Celia waited while he drained his cup for a second time and set it in the sink. Now would be the time to bring up the topic of Julian. Knowing Rory—and her own inability to articulate the problem—this conversation could take a while. “I’m glad you’re here, because I want to talk to you.”

      He came through the pantry doorway. She felt him approach and knew without turning her head that his mood had shifted. His cool cheek pressed against her temple.

      “You can talk, but I’ll hear you much better in twenty minutes.”

      He took the tray from her hands and set it aside, slid his hand around her head to turn her face to his. His mouth opened over hers, cold inside as if he’d been eating snow. His teeth felt sleek and hard under her tongue.

      She shivered. “You’re freezing.”

      “Warm me up, then.”

      “Here? Don’t we know better than that?”

      “Yeah, we definitely do,” he said.

      She expected him to lead her out of the pantry and up the winding stairs. But he slipped his hand around her wrist, thumb to forefinger like a bracelet.

      “They won’t be back for a while,” he said. “We have time.”

      He pulled her against him so she could feel his erection at the small of her back. He traced the line of her neck with his lips and teeth, buried his nose in the hair behind her ear. His hands began a slow descent down the front of her body, then up again, under her sweater, a ticklish chill across her ribs. His palms were rough and calloused, so big that with both his hands over her breasts it felt as if she’d added a layer of chilled fresh clothing.

      She sighed and turned her cheek to his lips. Easier—much easier—to set aside the conversation about Julian and just go along. Later she would tell him everything and they would figure out together what to do. It could wait a few minutes longer.

      He reached down and unbuttoned her jeans. Hand-me-downs from Kate, painting clothes, so baggy that they dropped to her hips before Rory had even touched the zipper.

      “Don’t turn around,” he said.

      * * *

      The lifts had been running sporadically all afternoon, stopping and restarting as inexperienced skiers skidded over the ice trying to round the tight corner at the end of the ramp. A wall of clouds poured like wet concrete across the sky and hardened around the mountaintop, leaking tiny pellets of hail that stung Eric’s cheeks and clattered over the vinyl seat of the chairlift.

      He shouldn’t have come out today. It was Julian really who wanted to ski. He said that Kate was getting clingy and he needed a third wheel.

      “I keep thinking I’ve got to cut her loose, but I’m not ready to have that conversation. I need a reason to procrastinate. You know how it is.”

      Eric wasn’t eager for the day. There were a hundred projects waiting for attention at the Blackbird, and he’d barely gotten home after almost a month away. He’d felt guilty about it this morning, but Celia had only kissed his cheek and told him to go, have fun, nothing was so urgent that it couldn’t wait another day.

      He had explained his reluctance to Julian as they sat in the mudroom pulling on their boots.

      “Stay if you want, man,” Julian said. “But if she’s telling you to go...”

      Outside they could hear the thud of Rory’s ax chopping wood. From the kitchen, the