TINA WAS STANDING AT OUR KITCHEN WINDOW, looking out at the garden. Beyond the fence and above the boardwalk, the horizon was lit with the white silken promise of a moon preparing to rise over the lake. “I can see the attraction of living here on the lake,” Tina said. “Except for everything else.”

I was sitting at the kitchen table. I had poured a finger or two of brandy into an old glass but had not touched it yet. I was waiting for my sister to leave. Some sins need solitude. “What’s ‘everything else’ mean?”

Tina waved her hand. “The traffic on the bridge, the stuff from the steel companies, some of your neighbours … and, you know, it’s not the cleanest beach in the world.”

“That’s why Martha Stewart keeps turning down my invitations.”

She turned from the window, her arms folded across her chest. “Did Gabe appreciate your sense of humour?”

“As a matter of fact—” I began.

“Does Mel?”

Someday, Tina will have a verbal ambush named after her. In high school, Tina claimed she joined the debating club because a couple of cute boys were members, which was a lie. The only man in my lifetime who was both cute and a good debater was Bill Clinton, and the combination was so rare that it got him elected president. Tina joined the debating club so she could learn to cut people up with her comments. If she had joined the choir and learned to sing as well as she learned to win arguments, she’d be Céline bloody Dion.

Hearing her mention Mel was enough to overcome my reluctance about the brandy. I took a long swallow and closed my eyes while it burned its way toward my stomach. When I opened them, Tina was still staring at me. “What do you want to know about Mel?” I asked.

“What makes him a nice guy?” She began walking and talking, moving around the kitchen, closing cupboard doors and picking crumbs off the counter. “When women like us, you and me, when we say a man is a nice guy, it means more than he opens a door for you or buys his wife expensive trinkets, stuff like that. That’s what I think.”

“He’s not married.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“He’s also younger than me.”

“How many years?”

“Four or five.”

“Tall?”

“Kind of.”

“Lots of hair?”

“A bunch.”

“Wavy?”

“Sure.”

“Blue eyes, right? You always fell for guys with blue eyes.”

I refused to give her the satisfaction.

“Am I going to meet this Mel?” She sat across from me.

“Probably.” I looked up at the clock. It was past ten. “I’m going to bed. Hang your breakfast order on your doorknob.”

“Josephine.”

My sister had become my mother. I hadn’t changed. I refused to answer and climbed the stairs to my bedroom, finishing the brandy on the way.

I HAVE A THEORY that time moves at different speeds in darkness. I don’t know if it moves faster or slower when the light is out. Only that its pace changes. The first night with a new lover always passes at a speed you never expect, sometimes long and leisurely, sometimes swift and fleeting. Never normal.

Lying in the darkness, I heard the television set in the living room below me and the traffic passing on the highway bridges above the roof. From out on the lake, I heard a freighter’s horn announce that it was approaching the canal, and a moment later the air horn on the bridge warned everyone it was about to rise. From another place, I heard Gabe in the bathroom, brushing his teeth and then whistling under his breath in that tuneless way he did. Lying on my side, my back to the bathroom, I heard him pad across the floor and felt the bed sink behind me with the weight of his body, and I awoke.

I rolled over. No one was next to me. The house was silent, the traffic from the highway bridges distant and intermittent. I rested my arm across my eyes until the tears stopped. Then I rose from the bed, wrapped myself in my bathrobe, and crossed the hall to the guest room, where I stood at the open door and called Tina’s name until she stirred and said, “What?”

“I want you to know …” I began. There was an old steamer trunk near the door. I’d bought it from the junk shop down the beach strip last year. There was nothing inside. I sat on it now. “I want you to know that whatever happened, or whatever you think happened, I never stopped loving my husband. Okay?”

“Why are you saying this?” Tina’s voice floated at me from the darkness.

“I just want you to know.” I was clenching my fists so tightly in my lap that they hurt. “I never stopped loving Gabe. Not for one minute, okay?”

“Okay.” Tina’s voice was sleepy and frightened. I had intimidated my older sister. It did not make me feel good about myself.

I think I mumbled something about seeing her in the morning. Then I returned to bed.

8.

The first hour after sunrise was the time my father believed he was most likely to see angels. My father was not a religious man, so he didn’t mean it literally. He simply loved mornings because mornings held promises, and evenings held something else. I agree with him. If angels exist, I expect to meet one at sunrise.

I was up with the sun. Tina would remain sleeping for hours, still on west coast time. I made coffee, poured myself a cup, and carried it to the back door, where I stood looking out at the lake. Joggers were already passing on the boardwalk, some alone and wearing headphones, others in groups of two or three, chatting as they bounced past, a couple with dogs trotting alongside. I watched them all, silhouetted against the sun, and I looked up to see cormorants flying east across the lake. I looked at the tool shed last, wrapped in yellow plastic tape printed with crime scene. I imagined a man inside, watching while I moved about the kitchen or dressed or undressed in the upstairs bedroom with its window overlooking the lake, where Gabe and I slept and talked and made love.

Some people saw angels in the dawn. I saw perverts.

I finished the coffee and morning paper and almost walked to the telephone to call Gabe at Central Station. That’s what I did after I finished my coffee and the newspaper. I would call Gabe to talk to him, if he was available. When I reached him, Gabe and I would discuss everything except the case he was working on at the time. When the case was closed and Gabe had moved on to the next one, he might reveal some of it to me, leaving out the gory details. But when he was in the middle of an investigation, especially a violent homicide or child abuse case, he left his feelings on the beach. If he were involved in something horrific, he would park the car at the side of the house when he arrived home, walk to the boardwalk, and stand looking at the lake. Then he would come through the garden to the back door and into the house, leaving life’s crap outside.

He learned how to do this while getting over the death of his children. A therapist taught him about places where he could leave things he didn’t need or want. He had a place like that in his mind while he lived alone. He called it his white room. Wherever he was, he would close his mind and erase images of all the furniture, the pictures, the books, the carpets, the lamps, everything. In his mind, the room around him would be totally plain and white. Nothing could intrude. He would be Gabe Marshall for a while, without connections or pain.

After we married and moved to the beach strip, he found another place, which was the lake. He did not need to be Gabe Marshall, free of everything including pain this time. Just free of things he didn’t need, and he would stand staring at the water long enough to leave the things he didn’t want to burden me with out on the water until they sank from sight. I’m a little sceptical of that stuff, but then I’ve never been in therapy or worked at a job that involved stepping over somebody’s intestines. All I know is that Gabe never failed to walk through our back door with a smile for me, no matter how upset he might have looked when he got home and parked the car at the side of the house, before he walked to the beach and stood looking at the lake until all the bad stuff was sent out there to sink to the bottom with the other pollution.