A Room at the Breakwater

There is a dead woman in my van, and the man at the inn would like to know whether I have a reservation.

“For her,” I say.

Rain travels down the back of my collar. I have been holding my folder beneath my jacket for the last twelve yards, sacrificing the rest of myself to a document that ought to make this conversation unnecessary. The man looks from the folder to the van. He has a roasting pan in one hand.

“A room?”

“A place in the sunroom. We arranged it with Jean.”

He sets the pan inside the door. Carefully enough that I stop trying to get the folder out.

“Jean was my aunt.”

Behind him, water drops from the hall ceiling into an enamel bowl. He has brought the larger pan to replace it. The bowl makes an absurdly cheerful note each time a drop lands.

“Was?” I ask.

“She died in August.”

For a second I look at the blue door, at the polished brass bell I rang, at the name on the sign beside the steps. THE BREAKWATER. I checked the address when I booked the ferry. I checked it again at the harbor, balancing my phone against the steering wheel while Sylvie explained why the road I meant to take would have been better in 1978.

The address is correct. I would prefer a wrong address. A wrong address is something I can type into a phone.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

He steps back to let me under the porch roof. He is tall, with brown hair flattened on one side and a gray shirt rolled to the elbows. A pale scar interrupts one eyebrow. His attention flicks toward the ceiling, then returns to me, and he manages to look as though the person on his doorstep has not become one more thing he will have to put a container beneath.

“I’m Gavin. What did you arrange?”

“My name is Audrey Keating. I relocate ghosts.”

He waits. It is a reasonable response, although I had prepared for a woman who knew exactly who I was, had the kettle on, and was pleased to receive a ghost. I have not prepared a version for her bereaved nephew.

“Sylvie Bellamy,” I add. “She knew your aunt. Jean offered her a place here in June. The window looking into the garden.”

“Right.”

It does not sound like recognition.

“I emailed to confirm this week.”

“Which address?”

I show him. He reads the screen without taking my phone, one hand against the doorframe. There is a narrow smear of white paint on his thumb.

“That’s the booking address,” he says. “Did someone reply?”

“Yes.”

The answer has already left my mouth before I open the message. At the top is the name of my business, which looked gratifyingly official on Monday. Beneath it is a photograph of the inn in sunshine. I remember showing Ruth the screen while we were securing the chair, and the relief on her face when I said it was all arranged.

We look forward to welcoming you to the Breakwater.

Below the photograph, in smaller type, it asks me to allow two working days for a personal response.

I read the smaller type again, in case there is some interpretation of two working days that makes this less my fault. There is not.

“It was an automatic reply.”

Gavin doesn’t offer to pretend otherwise. I appreciate this so much less than I might under different circumstances.

“I should have called,” I say. “I’m sorry. That’s my mistake.”

From the van comes a distinct tapping sound. Not a knock. Sylvie cannot knock. It is the loose buckle of the restraint strap moving against the ramp in the wind. Nevertheless, we both turn toward her.

She sits in the blue armchair facing the open rear doors. Her felt hat is tilted at the angle she prefers, her hands neatly arranged in her lap. The chair is secured to the floor; its occupant is not. I explained this difference to the deckhand at Rockland, who then asked whether she needed a passenger ticket. Sylvie asked whether a ticket would entitle her to a seat with a better view.

Now she is looking at the inn as if the building itself might clear up the delay.

“Does she know?” Gavin asks.

“Not yet.”

He looks toward the bowl in the hall. A drop lands. Neither of us moves.

“I can’t agree to someone living here,” he says.

I have seven years of experience at this. I have placed ghosts in rooms where the wallpaper frightened them, in rooms their families had chosen without consulting them, and once in a room whose advertised sea view became available only if a living person lifted the anchor above the dresser. I know how to stop a bad move.

Last Monday, I opened my own office. This is the first move with my name alone on the paperwork, and I skipped the simplest question of all: had the person in charge said yes?

“The house she came from is being emptied tomorrow,” I tell him. “Her daughters have arranged their travel. I can make other arrangements, but not safely from your front step with her waiting in the van.”

He looks at me more closely. I hear how that sounded.

“I’m not making it your obligation. I’m asking for somewhere dry while I find out what’s possible.”

“How long?”

“Tonight.”

Beyond him, a phone starts ringing. He lets it ring twice before reaching inside the door to silence it. He doesn’t look at the screen.

“One night,” he says. “And we talk in the morning.”

Relief makes me dangerously eager to agree to things. I keep my mouth closed long enough to be certain of this one.

“One night. Thank you.”

“What do you need to get her inside?”

“A level entrance, ideally. The chair is seventy-five pounds, and the left arm is loose. We can’t lift by it.”

For the first time, his expression changes into something I can read.

“Show me.”

* * *

Sylvie has listened to our approach with an air of patient disapproval. It is mostly directed at me, which is fair. The family had given me lunch before we left, and she had advised against the soup. We have been together long enough for her to establish a record of being right.

“This is Gavin,” I tell her. “Jean’s nephew. He’s helping us bring the chair in.”

“Is Jean busy?”

“Let’s get you out of the rain first.”

Her eyes come to mine. I have answered the wrong question, and she knows it.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” I say. “I’d rather do it inside.”

She holds my gaze for another moment, then looks at Gavin. “You’re the one who used to come in the summer.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve grown.”

“I’ve had a while.”

She considers him. “Apparently.”

He almost smiles, but Sylvie has already turned toward the chair. Whatever she remembers of him, she has decided he is capable of carrying it.

We go around the side of the inn to the kitchen entrance, where a level path runs past a closed workshop and the garden. Gavin shifts two flowerpots before I have to ask. Then he waits while I check the width and show him how the ramp locks. He doesn’t take over the job because it involves weight. He also doesn’t stand about assuring me that seventy-five pounds is nothing. By the time we return to the van, I am alarmingly grateful to him for possessing ordinary judgment.

The chair is wide and faded along the arms, with a darker patch where Sylvie’s husband burned the fabric with his pipe. A green thread has come loose beneath the seat. I tuck it away from the wheel and check the two red straps before releasing them. Those are the things I can control. Ramp secure. Dolly under the frame. Nobody pulling the loose arm.

“You can stay beside it,” I tell Sylvie. “We’re going slowly.”

She rises. Her skirt passes through the front edge of the seat. Gavin watches the movement, then looks down at the place I’ve indicated for his hand.

“Here?”

“Yes. Keep your fingers under the frame.”

We start down the ramp. The wheels jolt at the join with the gravel, and Sylvie stops.

It takes me half a second to notice that the gravel is visible through her sleeve.

“Hold there,” I tell Gavin.

He holds.

Sylvie looks toward the lane. Her face has the blank concentration of someone trying to remember why she has entered a room. The van is behind her. The chair is beside her. Neither is where it was ten seconds ago.

“Is Ruth coming back?” she asks.

I set the brake and crouch where she can see me without turning away from the chair.

“Ruth is at the house. We spoke to her before we got on the ferry.”

She looks past me. I cannot tell whether she heard.

Gavin has not asked what is happening. He stands on the other side of the dolly, his hands exactly where I put them. Rain catches in his hair. I am aware of all this in the brisk, unpleasant way I notice useful things when frightened.

“Sylvie. Tell me about the mark on the arm.”

Her gaze drops. The pipe burn is dark against the blue cloth.

“Peter said that was already there.”

“Was it?”

“Of course it wasn’t. I bought the chair.”

“Did he keep saying it?”

“Only until he realized I’d seen him do it.”

The edge of her hat grows clearer. She looks at me properly now, annoyed that Peter has escaped contradiction by being dead somewhere other than here.

“He did the same with the picture in the hall,” she says. “Said it had always hung crooked. He’d taken it down to mend the wall.”

“What was wrong with the wall?”

“He put a hole in it.”

Behind the chair, Gavin lowers his head. I suspect he is trying not to smile. Sylvie sees him anyway.

“It wasn’t funny at the time.”

“No,” he says.

“It became funny later.”

He nods solemnly. “That happens.”

She glances toward the kitchen door. “Are we going in?”

“We are.”

I don’t tell her she is all right. She is clearer than she was a moment ago; that is what I know. Familiarity sometimes helps with the disorientation of a move. Sometimes it doesn’t, and I have never liked the cheerful certainty with which people who don’t do this work pronounce a ghost settled because she has become easier to see.

We move again, slowly. At the kitchen threshold, Gavin takes more of the weight while I guide the wheels. My knuckles brush his. His hands are warm despite the rain, and I have the wholly unnecessary thought that I would like to know what they feel like when neither of us is holding furniture.

Then the dolly clears the threshold. I attend to my actual profession.

The sunroom opens off the dining room, with eastern windows overlooking a walled garden. There are three other chairs, a low table, and a lamp whose shade leans slightly toward the window. I ask Sylvie where she would like to face. She chooses the garden, then changes her mind by about six inches once the chair is down. Gavin and I move it again.

“Better,” she says.

I check the repaired-looking but loose arm, remove the straps, and put the dolly out of the route. Then I sit in the visitor chair.

“Sylvie, Jean died in August.”

She looks at Gavin.

He comes as far as the doorway. “My sister and I were with her.”

The room is quiet. In the kitchen, something clicks as it cools.

“I didn’t know she was that ill,” Sylvie says.

“Neither did she, when she wrote to you.”

Sylvie looks toward the window, where the garden is disappearing into the wet October evening. I had been prepared to explain the practical arrangements again. She doesn’t ask about them.

“She was going to tell me what she’d done with the roses.”

Gavin’s mouth moves before any words come. He looks out too.

“I don’t know what she did with them,” he says.

Sylvie nods. She keeps looking at the garden.

I stay where I am. For once, there is nothing I can usefully arrange.

* * *

At six twenty, my phone tells me the seven o’clock ferry has been canceled.

I have spent the last half hour making sure Sylvie knows where she is, speaking to Ruth, and giving Pamela the same truthful account without improving it for the second telling. Neither daughter has shouted at me. Pamela thanked me for letting them know, which was worse. They will talk tomorrow after I have spoken to Gavin.

Now I am standing in the kitchen with my damp folder, looking at a notice about winds that have presumably been doing this all afternoon while I concentrated on a much smaller disaster.

Gavin turns from the stove. “The ferry?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll need a room.”

“I can pay.”

“I assumed you could.”

I feel my face warm. He opens a cupboard and takes out a mug. “Room Three is eighty dollars. Breakfast included.”

“That’s fine.”

He takes out a second mug. I follow the movement with more interest than a cup warrants. I have been bracing for him to be kind in a way that will make refusing him impossible, or impatient in a way I will deserve. An ordinary room rate leaves me somewhere to put my feet.

“I’m not usually this badly organized,” I say.

He pours hot water over the tea bags. “You looked organized bringing the chair in.”

“That was the part I knew how to do.”

He lets the answer stand. I could kiss him for that, if the circumstances were entirely different and he had not just offered to sell me accommodation.

Instead I take my card out.

He gives me the room key and tells me where to find extra towels. His own name is written on a pad by the telephone. Beside it lies a pair of glasses, folded with their arms slightly out of line. I look away before he has any reason to notice where I am looking.

In the sunroom, Sylvie asks for the lamp moved because its reflection covers part of the garden. Gavin tries two positions and waits for her to choose. He doesn’t explain that there will be nothing to see once it gets dark. She knows how evenings work.

“Do you want the radio?” he asks.

“For a little while.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Something where they finish talking before another person starts.”

“I’ll see what I can find.”

He settles on a local station. A man is discussing a village event scheduled for the fourth weekend of October. Sylvie listens for a moment, then asks us both to leave her alone.

Back in the kitchen, Gavin checks the oven. I stand beside the table, unable to decide whether I have been invited to sit. I have spent the day issuing instructions to other people. It would be useful to have one now.

“Cake?” he asks.

“I haven’t eaten since lunch.”

“That wasn’t exactly what I asked.”

“Yes, please.”

He cuts two pieces of apple cake. His piece breaks at the corner; he puts the loose part on his plate with his fingers and pushes the unbroken one toward me. I sit down before I can offer to wash anything.

For the first few minutes, we eat. The cake is still a little warm. Outside, rain brushes against the kitchen window, and from the hall comes the duller sound of water landing in the roasting pan.

“Better than the bowl,” I say.

Gavin looks toward the hall. “It lasted longer.”

“I meant the noise.”

“So did I.”

I laugh before I can check whether it is appropriate. He smiles, tired and unexpectedly young around the eyes. Then he takes another bite of cake.

Tomorrow I have to explain how one night becomes something else, or how I am going to get a woman out of a room she has already chosen. My business card is upstairs in a wet folder. Jean is dead. Sylvie knows. Nothing about this evening amounts to a successful placement, and the daughters will need an answer that does not depend on whether Gavin likes me.

Gavin moves the cake tin within my reach.

I take another small piece, and stay at the table.