Eleanor thinks the Keeper understands the past better than he understands the future.
She never felt she belonged here and now she feels it doubly so.
She looks for Simon in the baby’s face but finds only hints of him. The baby has her dark hair though it is pale when not screaming. She wanted so badly for the baby to have Simon’s blondish hair but none of the books suggest that a baby’s hair color changes from black to something else after a certain time. Eye color might, but right now they stay squeezed shut so much Eleanor isn’t certain what color they are.
She should give it a name.
It feels like too much responsibility, to give someone else a name.
“What should I name it?” she writes to the Kitchen.
When the light comes on and Eleanor opens the door there is not a tray or a card but a scrap of paper that looks as though it was torn from a book with a single word written on it.
Mirabel
Vermont, two weeks ago
The bar is dimly lit with vintage bulbs that cast a candle-like glow over its glassware and its occupants. Additional light filters in from the windows despite the late hour, the streetlamps illuminating the snow to day-like brightness.
A man whose name is not Dorian sits alone at a table in a corner, his back to the wall. The wall sports a pair of deer antlers, a taxidermied pheasant, and a portrait of a young man hung as a traitor in a war no one living now remembers. The still-living man in front of the painting faces out toward the rest of the bar in a way that suggests he is watching the entire space and not one other table in particular.
One person in particular.
The drink he is nursing was suggested by the waitress when he requested something scotch-forward and he forgets its clever name but there is maple involved.
He has an open book but he is not reading (he has already read it). It merely allows him to keep his gaze focused in the direction of a table of three across the way, the view only partially obscured by the occasional patron lingering near the bar, which is topped by a massive piece of marble that looks as though it was rescued from a much older building.
Two young women (one he has seen already, in the morning in the snow) and a marginally older man. He had questioned the nature of the relationship earlier but the more he follows and the more he watches, the more he sees and the more he wants to know.
The two women are the couple, if he is reading body language and eye contact correctly. He catches a hand placed on a thigh that confirms his suspicions and he is pleased with himself despite the fact that he has done this before, many times, in many bars, and he is long past the point of being proud of a well-developed skill. He is good at this. Has always been good at this, reading people like books from across dimly lit rooms.
The women he can read. The one with the very short hair talks quickly, emphasizes her points with her hands, looks around at the rest of the bar frequently. The other woman is more subdued, comfortable and relaxed, she’s slipped her feet from her boots under the table and Dorian is momentarily envious. She’s at home in this space, with these people, though she listens in a particularly attentive way. She knows the other two but not as well as she would like to.
Then there’s the man.
He’s facing almost away, the light catching his profile when he lifts his cocktail glass, his expression lost entirely when he turns, a shadow of snow-damp curls.
Dorian had expected a boy. A student. A handful of collegiate clichés. This is a man. A young man, but a man. An intriguing man. A man who studies video games of all things.
Looking at him now Dorian can’t see it. He cannot read the handful of facts on the man in front of him. He had thought social anxiety and hermit earlier but that’s not what he’s looking at. The shyness is a minor discomfort that vanished halfway through the first round of drinks. He listens more than he talks but when he does talk there is nothing awkward about his manner. He occasionally pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and appears to be drinking a sidecar though he must have asked for it to be served without a sugared rim.
A man he can’t read. It is as vexing as having a book he cannot touch. An all too familiar frustration.
“How’s the book?”
Dorian looks up to find the waitress at his shoulder, refilling his water. She probably swooped by to check the level of his drink: half full or half empty, depending on optimism. He glances at the book in his hands. The Secret History. He has quietly longed for relationships with the type of intensity of those within its pages, regardless of the bacchanalian murderousness, but never found it and has now reached an age where he expects he never will. He has read the book seven times already but he does not tell the waitress that.
“It’s very good,” he says.
“I started that bird one but I couldn’t get into it.”
“This one’s better,” Dorian assures her, coolly enough to shut down the flirtation. Some but not all of the warmth fades from her smile.
“Good to know,” she says. “Let me know if I can get you anything.”
Dorian nods and returns his attention to just above the top of his book. He thinks the group he is looking at does not have the same level of camaraderie as the characters in his hand but there’s something there. Like each of them individually is capable of the intensity if not the murder but this is not the right grouping. Not quite. He watches their table, watches the hand gestures and the arriving food, and watches something make all three of them laugh and he smiles despite himself and then hides his smile in his drink.
Every few minutes he performs a cursory perusal of the room. Pretty good crowd, probably because there are only a handful of bars in this town. He glances at the Tenniel illustration of a gryphon over the bar and wonders if anyone ever names bars after the Mock Turtle.