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“Shit!”
    What was happening to him?

3

    He was in a black mood by the time he left the uptown IRT and walked to the apartment he had taken on Madison Avenue after Monica died and the five rooms on Riverside Drive had seemed so vast and empty. This place satisfied him. It was a good-sized studio—with a tiny kitchen and bath off to one side, a sleeping loft built over a small study area. The ceilings were twelve feet high. He had a working fireplace, long walls for built-in closets and bookshelves. There was traffic, loading and unloading outside from seven in the morning until noon, but by afternoon the neighborhood was quiet and most nights it was country silent.
    He had let himself into the apartment and dumped his books when the phone rang.
    “Noel? Is that you? This connection is bad. Should I call back?”
    “Mrs. Sherman? My side is fine.”
    “Well, I guess this will do then,” she said, her nasal voice unmistakable. “I just wanted to check if you were coming up this weekend.”
    The minute she said it—half pleading, half reminding—Noel remembered: today was March third. In two days, Monica would have been twenty-eight. They had always visited her parents for her birthday, and after she died, the Shermans had insisted Noel continue the tradition. How they had loved her! How good they had been to him after it happened, never leveling a hint of reproach for letting their only, their wonderful daughter drown. Of course they had known Noel most of his life, were almost family to him. And usually Noel looked forward to seeing them.
    “I know it’s a long trip, now that we’re so much farther away,” Mrs. Sherman apologized.
    “No problem.” Brewster was only an hour and a half by train, a pretty ride along the Hudson River. Noel enjoyed being out in open country in cold weather. He hated the city in winter.
    She was armed with train schedules, and they agreed to meet by eleven on Saturday morning.
    “Peter is so much looking forward to seeing you,” she said. “He made sure to ask if you were coming. We hardly see you.”
    “I’ll be there,” Noel said. But the minute he put down the receiver he knew he would do it this year only out of duty. Something was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was there, gnawing away at him, not the usual flood of memories, but something else, something different.
    He put on a record, one of Monica’s favorites—the last Beatles album—and tried to remember her. Nothing happened.
    He went to the closet, pulled out a box of photo albums they had collected for years and opened it randomly. The snapshots he peered at had been taken some eight years ago. They were still in college then, living together in a small basement off campus. She’d tried to be a lighter blond that year and had dyed her hair platinum, and cut it quite short. As usual, she had pulled it off. She had looked like a golden retriever, glossy, smooth, tanned, long-legged.
    From that album it was easy to get into the others. Noel sat in the curved-back rocking chair he and Monica had bought on the spot one morning after an all-night party, and went through album after album of photographs: a dozen of them, beginning when they were children living next door to each other in Mamaroneck. Many photos through junior high, she always a few inches taller, always a bit more mature—as in that snapshot of them at the Shermans’ lakeside house in Connecticut, Monica staring right out at you, Noel squinting—a slim, curly-haired boy of thirteen. The next album covered high school, when he finally passed her in height and weight, and Monica had grown radiant in her fair beauty, indomitably high-spirited, so securely the most popular girl in school that one could almost overlook the serious, gawky young man who inevitably appeared next to her—Noel, the obligatory chaperon. Monica was always the main attraction, looking seductive at seventeen in her first bikini (Noel to one side, holding a