Two-Way Glass

Elspeth

In the morning the house is a different house.

I wake in the Lantern Wing at seven, under the blue quilt, in the gray dress I have slept in, and for a moment I don't know what is wrong. Then I understand. It is the silence. For six weeks the building has hummed, a low electrical drone of ventilation and ballasts and the faint clockwork of surveillance. Now there is nothing. The generator has died. The lights are out. The only sound is a soft continuous whisper at the window, which is snow, still falling, thick and straight as a curtain.

I get up and go to the glass. The slope has gone. The maples have gone. The lake, the road, the whole bowl of the valley is a single white page.

Nobody in. Nobody out until Sunday.

It is Saturday, the twentieth of December. I have fifteen days.

I stand there a long time with my forehead against the cold pane and take inventory, as I would of a company that has changed hands overnight.

Assets. A partner. Not a friend. A man with a safe, a Revox, thirty-one nights of a murderer's voice, and a private line to the woman who owns him.

Liabilities. The same man.

Opportunities. A key in a husband's head. A ballroom. Three hundred guests and a live stream.

Risks. Everything else.

I notice, with some surprise, that I am hungry.

…

We establish rules at ten.

It is his idea. He is at his desk when I come in, in the charcoal suit, with the seven clocks restarted on the wall behind him and a mug of black coffee at his elbow, and he rises as I enter, an old-fashioned courtesy, and does not offer his hand.

The study has been tidied. The linen is folded on the credenza in thirds. The Revox is under its cover. The steel safe sits behind the chessboard as if nothing had happened.

"Good morning, Dahlia," says Kestrel.

He says it pleasantly. He says it in a voice for the benefit of the intercom, which is on, and the camera in the corner, which is not. I look at the red light on the speaker and answer in kind.

"Good morning, Doctor."

He crosses to the speaker and turns a small brass knob. The red light goes out.

"The intercom is on a separate circuit," he says in a different voice. Lower. Drier. "It's the only listening device in the room that Cordelia can reach. I'll leave it on when we want her to hear and off when we don't. The hidden lens is mine. It records to a drive in the wall, and nobody else has the key."

"And the cameras?"

"Out of order." The ghost of a smile. "The storm has been very hard on the electrics. The technician cannot come until the road is clear. I don't think I can be blamed."

I sit down in the chair across the desk.

It is the first time I have sat in it as myself. The leather is the same. The angle of the light is the same. But the room has changed its grammar, as a sentence does when you find out who the subject is.

"Rules," I say.

"Three." He holds up a finger. "In public, in the corridors, on the ward, in the presence of any person who is not the two of us: you are Dahlia Reeve. I am Dr. Kestrel. We say what we have always said. We do not touch. We do not look at each other longer than a doctor looks at a patient."

"Agreed."

"In here"—he gestures at the room—"and below, you are Elspeth. That is all."

"And if one of us slips?"

"Then we have a word." He lowers the finger. "Something neither of us would say by accident. Something that means: stop, I can't tell what's real."

I think about it.

"Zurich," I say.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The third clock from the left. It has never lost a second. If either of us says Zurich, the other stops. Whatever we're doing. We stop, and we say what's true."

He looks at me for a long moment.

"You're very observant," says Kestrel.

"It's the only thing I'm good at."

"No." He picks up the coffee, and sets it down again, and I see that his hand is not quite steady. "No, it isn't."

…

I do not tell him about the hairpin.

It would be easy. I have Callie's letter in the pocket of my dress, soft as flannel, and I could put it on the blotter between us and watch his face. I would learn something. I would learn how much of the man in the Orchard last night was real.

But there is a principle in my profession that I have never broken. You do not show a counterparty your best document in the first meeting. You let him find out, in his own time, what you already know.

So I say nothing.

"There is something I want you to see," says Kestrel.

He rises and goes to the bookcase. Not the chestnut volume this time. He goes to the end of the wall, beside the window, where the shelves give way to a plain run of oak paneling, and he presses two fingers on a knot in the grain.

A section of the paneling, perhaps four feet wide, swings inward on a hinge.

It opens on a closet.

I look at it for some time without speaking. It is perhaps three feet deep and six feet long, lined with the same horsehair quilting as the green room, covered in gray felt. There is a single stool. A narrow shelf. A small brass switch. And at the far end, set into the wall at the level of a seated man's eyes, a pane of glass about the size of a hardcover book.

"What is this?"

"An observation room." He doesn't look at me. "It runs along the north side of the Orchard. The panel on the other side is frosted from the inside. In a dim light, you can see through it. I had it built nine years ago, when I came."

"For what?"

"For a witness." A pause. "It is considered good practice. For a doctor who is working with deeply suggestible patients to have a colleague present, silent, behind a screen, who can attest to the propriety of the treatment. There was a board review. I built the room. No one has ever sat in it."

"Not once?"

"Not once."

I step inside. The air has the dead stillness of a place that has been kept sealed. I put my hand on the stool and find that it has not a speck of dust.

I look through the glass.

It is the Orchard. From above and a little to one side I see the whole round chamber: the glass floor, the pebbles and shells beneath it, the white-branched walls, the chaise on its pedestal of shadow. I see the brass clock. I see the diffuser. I see the place where, last night, a man in shirtsleeves sat on the floor beside a lantern.

It is the Orchard as God would see it.

I think: he built this for me.

I know at once that it isn't true. He could not have known, nine years ago, that I would ever need to sit here. But I think it nonetheless, and I find that I cannot shake it, and I turn round to face him in the narrow doorway with a feeling like cold water in the chest.

"Tonight," says Kestrel, "is a Saturday."

…

He pulls me a chair.

I find this very odd. It is the sort of thing that, in an ordinary week in an ordinary life, I would have taken for granted. A man sees a woman about to sit on a stool and brings her a better seat. But he does it so carefully, with such an air of rehearsed attention, that I look away.

It is a leather armchair from the library, small, with a high back. He has carried it down himself. It stands in the observation room at an angle to the glass, with a cushion on it, and a tartan rug folded on the arm. He has put a glass of water on the shelf. He has put a small lamp, covered with a handkerchief, beside it.

"Thank you," I say.

"It is a long session."

"How long?"

"Usually three hours. Tonight I think four."

"And he doesn't know."

"He will know nothing. He will arrive at ten, and I will give him a drink, and we will go down. He'll lie on the chaise, and I will speak to him, and he will speak to me. At the end I'll bring him up, and he'll go to bed." Kestrel stands in the door, one hand on the paneling. "I would like you to watch."

"Why?"

"Because you ought to see what you're proposing to do."

It is not what I expect.

I look at him.

He is not smiling. He looks tired, and a little pale, with the careful stillness that I have learned to recognize as the surface of a very deep feeling. I see that he is quite serious. That this is not a test and not a courtesy, but something much stranger: a physician showing a colleague the operating table.

"You have heard the tape," he says. "You know what he says. But you have not seen what it costs him. And I will not let you use it without knowing."

"Use it."

"The key." He says it quite gently. "It isn't a weapon, Elspeth. I should be failing you if I let you believe it was. It's a door. And you are going to walk a man through it in front of three hundred people, and I think you ought to see his face."

I put my hand on the arm of the chair.

He's right, I think. And I hate that he is right.

"All right," I say.

…

Conrad arrives at ten.

I have been in the closet since nine, in the dark, with the rug over my knees and my eyes on the glass. I have heard nothing for an hour but the tick of the brass clock below and the occasional groan of snow settling on the roof. Then, very faintly, through the layers of stone and plaster, a creak. A door. Footsteps on the ten steps.

Two men enter the Orchard.

The first is Kestrel, in his shirtsleeves, with a decanter in one hand. The second is a tall man in a gray silk scarf, who comes down the stairs sideways, favoring his left foot, with one hand on the wall.

I have not seen him since the doorway of my room.

In the amber light of the lantern he looks older. The Seoul face has not aged, but the rest of him has; there is a gray look to the skin about the jaw, a kind of loosening in the shoulders, as if he were wearing a suit that has been taken in. He sits down heavily on the end of the chaise and holds out a hand for the glass.

"Sorry I'm late," he says. "The drive was a nightmare. Three cars in a ditch on the county road."

"The road is closed."

"Mother had a plow sent. She had one sent for me." He laughs. It is an unlovely sound. "She'd have one sent for a stray dog if it had a Marrow collar."

"Drink that."

He drinks it, in two swallows. Kestrel takes the glass and sets it down.

"Lie back, Mr. Pryce."

I watch him lie back.

It takes me a moment to understand what I am seeing. He lies as he used to lie on our bed at night in the apartment on Seventy-First, flat, rigid, with his hands clenched on his chest, as a man might lie in a coffin. His eyes stare at the ceiling. His lips are moving. He is counting.

One. Two. Three.

I can see it from here.

He is counting sheep.

I put my knuckles against my mouth.

"Look at the watch," says Kestrel.

The silver arc swings. The voice drops. One. Two. Three. Your eyelids are growing heavy.

I have heard that cadence eleven times, on a leather chaise, in this room, with my own eyes closed. I know its tempo and its tricks. I know the fall of the fourth beat, and the little space before the tap. I watch them done to someone else, from outside, and I discover that it is nothing like being inside.

From outside it is a kind of tenderness.

I had not expected that. I'd thought it would look like violence.

It looks like a man talking a frightened child down from a tree.

Tap. Tap. On the back of his hand.

You are in the Glass Orchard. Nothing can hurt you here.

And Conrad Marrow lets go.

I see it happen. It is like watching a rope parted by a blade. All at once the tension runs out of his body, from the crown to the heels, and he sinks into the leather as if it had been waiting for him. His jaw slackens. His eyes close. His hands uncurl.

His face smooths out.

For a moment, in the lantern light, with the lines of care wiped away, he is thirty again. He is a boy at a diner at two in the morning, eating blueberry pie.

I find that I have stopped breathing.

…

"Tell me what you see," says Kestrel.

"The kitchen."

"Which kitchen?"

"Always the same one." A sigh. "It's got a lamp. I keep going back. I turn out the lamp, and I think, this time I won't. This time I'll leave it on. But my hand goes out and it's out."

I listen.

I have heard it already, on the tape. I listen anyway, with the cold, dispassionate attention of a woman who has put on a mask for the day. I don't hear the words. I hear the shape: the way each phrase begins in confidence and ends in a question, the way the sentences loop back on themselves like a dog circling before it lies down.

He is not lying. That is the thing. He cannot lie in this state. It is not a drug and not a spell; it is only that, in the warm dark, with a kind voice, a part of him that has been clenched for two years opens its hand.

I think of Dennis, sitting down in the chair.

I do not weep. I have a tidy kind of rage at the bottom of me, and it takes up the whole of my chest, and I sit very still in the dark and let it burn.

"Mr. Pryce," says Kestrel, after an hour. His voice is very soft. "I want to ask you about something else."

"Hm."

"The binder. The black one. You said there was another copy."

"Yes."

"Do you know where?"

A long pause. The clock ticks.

"No."

"Think."

"I looked." The voice is dreamy, aggrieved. "Warren had the whole house torn up. The flat on Seventy-First. The office. The cabin. He had men in the walls. Nothing. She'd hidden it. She always knew where to put things."

"Where would she put it?"

"Somewhere I wouldn't look."

"Where wouldn't you look?"

A long, slow, unhappy breath.

"Anything she loved," says Conrad, "that I didn't."

Behind the glass, I close my eyes.

…

At one in the morning, Kestrel does something I did not ask him to do.

He gets up from the stool. He crosses the glass floor, past the lantern, and stops at the wall just to the left of my panel. For an instant I think that he is going to look straight at the glass, and my heart gives a terrified bound.

But he only reaches up and, with great delicacy, opens a small brass grille in the frosted wall. A vent, no bigger than my hand, set at the level of my chest.

It's the speaking tube.

I understand at once. In the dark of the closet, against the cold felt, I had not noticed it. A short brass tube, perhaps a foot long, pointing into the Orchard. A way for a hidden witness to whisper to the doctor.

Or to sing.

He doesn't look at me. He turns his back to the glass and returns to his stool, in a perfectly unhurried manner, and sits. In the silence, I hear him say, very clearly, in the tone of a man making an observation about the weather:

"I think that's enough for tonight, Mr. Pryce. Unless there's anything else you'd like to say."

"No."

"Nothing at all?"

"No. I'm so tired."

"Then rest."

I understand.

This is the test.

He has set it up. He has put the question in front of me, and left the door open, and walked away. It is up to me. I can sit in the dark and let the session end, and we shall have learned a certain amount. Or I can put my mouth to a brass tube in the wall and do the one thing that no one but me can do.

My throat is dry.

I look at the man on the chaise. At the long white hands slack on the leather. At the face, boyish and unguarded and utterly defenseless.

I lean forward. I put my lips close to the brass.

And I hum.

…

I do not sing the words. I haven't the courage. I hum the tune, very low, almost without breath, in the back of my throat, as I did on the tile floor of a kitchen on Seventy-First Street, with my arms round a barefoot man who could not sleep.

Little lantern. Three notes, rising. Little light. Two falling, and the long fall of the third bar, the place where my mother always put her hand.

It is a trick of the brass. The sound goes out into the Orchard thin and strange, not as my voice but as a ghost of it, a sound from nowhere, from the walls, from the glass. It hangs in the air above him. It touches the white branches.

On the chaise, Conrad Marrow draws a long, shuddering breath.

His hands are moving on the leather. The fingers curl, and unfurl. His head turns slowly on the cushion, toward the wall, toward the sound. A line of tears runs down his temple into his hair.

"Els," he says.

It is the voice of a child.

I go on. My throat aches. I take the tune up the long slow stair of its second verse, the part where it asks its question, and I feel him go with it, deeper, down through layers I cannot see, until his whole body has gone loose with trust.

"Els, are you there?"

"Hush," says Kestrel, quietly.

"I can hear you. I can hear you. I'm so sorry. I'm so... I didn't mean... Els..."

I stop.

I cannot do any more. I take my mouth from the tube and sit back in the dark with my hand over my face, and I hear Conrad Marrow, on the other side of the glass, begin to cry.

It is not the crying of a man who has been caught. It is the crying of a man who has been forgiven.

That is the worst of it. That is what I'll carry out of this room. He thinks it is absolution. He thinks that in the dark of the Orchard, at the end of two years of not sleeping, his wife has come back to sing to him, and has said: it's all right.

I have said nothing of the kind.

…

At two, Kestrel brings him up. At twenty past, Conrad climbs the stairs, rubbing his face, sheepish and puffy-eyed and oddly peaceful. He mumbles something about the draft. He asks whether the doctor has a spare sweater. He goes out into the cold, to the car that waits at the east door, and does not look back.

I sit in the closet until the sound of the engine has faded.

Then I open the panel and step out into the Orchard.

Kestrel is on the stool. He has taken off his watch. He holds it in his left hand, turning it over and over, and he does not look at me.

"It works," I say.

"Yes."

"He's ready."

"Yes."

"Why do I feel as though I've done something unforgivable?"

He lifts his head.

His eyes are red-rimmed and gray and dreadfully clear. For a long moment, he regards me in silence, with an expression I can't read.

"Because you have," says Kestrel.

He says it without cruelty. He says it as a physician might say: the fever has broken.

"And you're going to do it again," he says. "On the fifth. In front of three hundred people. And I think, when you've finished, you will find that it was not what you thought."

"What did I think?"

"That it would feel like justice."

I look at him.

Then, because I cannot think of anything to say, and because my hands are still shaking, I sit down on the glass floor beside the lantern, with my back against the chaise, and I draw my knees up.

After a moment, he comes and sits beside me.

Neither of us says anything at all. We look at the dried branches in the walls, gleaming white in the small flame, and we listen to the brass clock ticking, and above us, through two floors of stone, the storm draws breath and goes on.