“Barb called you?”
“She said you were interested in selling. It’s a buyer’s market, but you know we can always make things happen.”
“I’m sure.” He did not know what else to say and as he stood there a dull sense of irritation flooded through him and then disappeared. Did Barb think he was somehow unable to call a realtor on his own? What kind of incompetent person did she think he was? “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “A cup of coffee?”
“No, I’m fine,” she said. “Can I take a look around?”
“Sure. Is that what you need to do?”
“I have to know what I’m selling, Mr. Corcoran,” she said. She showed her teeth again.
He stepped out of her way. “OK,” he said.
She opened the black binder in her hands and took notes. Keith wandered behind her into the living room. “You weren’t kidding when you said you were painting,” she said.
“Yeah, I just started.”
“When do you think you’ll be done?”
“I’m not sure yet. Four or five days?”
“OK,” she said. She wrote something in her notebook. “New appliances.”
“I guess so.”
She nodded. Then she motioned toward the massive sofa next to them in the living room. “Not quite done moving?” she said.
“That’s right.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “It might be easier to sell if all your personal belongings were removed from the home. Maybe you could move the remaining items to the garage for now?”
He looked at her. “OK,” he said.
Again, the smile. “Mind if I go upstairs?”
“No, but I haven’t painted up there yet.”
She wandered away and he did not follow. Instead, he set the paintbrush in the tray in the kitchen and retrieved his phone from atop the plastic-covered island and dialed and when Barb answered he said, “You called a realtor?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. Is that OK?”
“Is that OK?” he repeated. “I’m a little confused here.”
“Confused how?”
“I thought I was doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Calling a realtor.”
“I was just trying to help,” she said. “Is that OK?”
“No, not really.”
“I’m sorry.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “It’s fine. I just … I’m painting in here so it’s not really ready for a realtor yet.”
“You’re painting?”
“I’m repainting it. It needs paint.”
“You should just hire someone and leave.”
“Leave for where?”
“I don’t want you to be there.”
“What? Why not?”
There was silence on the phone for a long moment and then she said, “Never mind.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s OK,” she said. “I was just trying to help. Is that a crime?”
He was still confused by the conversation but he did not return to that confusion now. “I don’t need your help with this,” he said.
“OK,” she said again. Then: “It doesn’t need to be painted to be listed.”
“I know that.”
There was a silence on the line. Then she said, “How are you doing?”
“How am I doing?”
“Yeah.”
“Fine,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, Barb. Everything’s fine.”
“OK,” she said.
“I’ve got to go deal with the real estate lady.”
“OK,” she said again.
He said good-bye and clicked the phone closed. There was no emotion, not even irritation, just a flat white emptiness.
The realtor’s voice was coming from somewhere in the house: “Mr. Corcoran?”
He had been standing at the sliding glass door in his socks, looking out at the backyard, a stripe of green lawn that baked slowly in the increasing morning heat, and he turned from that now and stepped toward the sound of her voice as she appeared in the doorway. “In here,” he said.
“I have a few things to go over with you,” she said. “It won’t take very long.”
“OK,” he said. He stood there, blinking, waiting for the few things to materialize.
“Or we can do it another time,” she said.
“Let’s go ahead and do it now,” he said.
They moved to the kitchen island and she spread some paperwork before him on the plastic sheeting that encased it and he read, initialed, and signed in the requisite boxes. “And here too,” the realtor said. Then: “Is that your daughter?”
“What?” he said. He followed her eyes to the sliding glass door to the backyard. A little girl stood there who looked so much like Quinn at that age that he was actually startled by the sight and he made the same vowel-heavy sound he had made when seeing the bird. She might have been nine or ten years old, her face enshadowed by the cupped shape of her hands as she leaned forward against the glass, apparently peering in at them although the shade rendered her eyes invisible. She was in that pose for only a moment and then, at the sound of Keith’s surprise, she bolted, a brief skinny ghost comprised of sharp knees and elbows, disappearing from view.
He turned back to the realtor, his heart thumping in his chest. She stared at him. “I don’t know who that is,” he said. “Not mine.”
She smiled. “Neighborhood kids,” she said. “That can be a good selling point to a family looking to buy a home.” She packed the papers back into her binder. “Probably kicked a ball over the fence,” she added.
He may have answered but there was a sense that something was moving in his chest again, a thin sharp fluttering, and he was relieved when the realtor told him she was done and they both returned to the front door. There was some discussion of price and various details and he stood in the doorway as she finished talking and flashing her toothy smile. Then they shook hands and a moment later she was gone.
There was no sign of the little girl through the sliding glass door, no ball or toy or footprint left behind to signal her presence in the yard, but when he stepped back he could see the marks of her hands where they had cupped her face against the glass and Quinn’s face ghosting up between those smudged prints, her age dialed back to the age of the girl he had seen, the age she had been when they still were, for those faint short years, a father and a mother and a daughter in a golden idyll, before the whole thing had, without sound and without violence, spun slowly and imperceptibly into a distance that now gaped open before him. There was so little tangible about the experience, the calculus of loss no equation at all but rather some impossible blur, a field of turbulence so complex as to be blank, like an infinite and ever-moving cloud that could be defined only by a set of equations capable of mapping each individual droplet of suspended fluid, each molecule of vapor.
He stood at the glass door and stared at the smudge of the girl’s handprints. Beyond those: a strip of green grass, a small cinderblock wall with some weakly yellowing shrubs, the concrete pad where he rinsed the dropcloths each evening and laid them out to dry, the wooden fence dividing this tableau from nearly indistinguishable ones on all four sides. Past the fence, he could see the edge of the sky over the roofs of adjacent houses. The bird he had seen on the morning after his return had already begun to feel like the memory of a dream, the eagle or hawk or whatever it had been, bleaching into the impossibly new subdivision that surrounded him, the patterned rooflines of nearly identical houses one after another. He could muster no clear sense of grief from such a sight. Perhaps there was a universe not so far from this one where distant birds of prey circled darkly in endless thermal updrafts above perfectly designed and orderly suburban landscapes. It was a pleasant thought but as he turned toward the kitchen island and the paintbrush that lay on its plastic-wrapped surface he knew that the most pressing universe he could think of was the one in which the file box arrived at his doorstep. All others endless and bleak and futile.