One Cold Night

their letters silently before moving on to shadow the next player. He didn’t like Scrabble and never joined in. Marie was a good player, but with her there Susan and Carole minded their manners more than they normally would have. It didn’t matter; the game helped pass the torturous minutes of waiting. It helped Susan to not continually check herwatch and her BlackBerry, though even as she composed words from her random letter bricks, her mind turned the words into obscure love poems she memorized for the next moment she could be alone and start e-mailing Lisa again. I ponder you with exquisite ardor. Ripe avenues dig maps in my heart. Overflow ing mutinous memory. Boys build toy s while girls swallow pearl s. A woman who had always hated writing and reading, she now wanted nothing but to compose verses to her daughter.
    They had played one full game and started another when the intercom buzzed. Susan abandoned a fresh reverie spawned by the word cache and got up to answer it.
    “Mrs. Strauss? Mr. and Mrs. McInnis and their daughter are here to see you,” announced Alan, the late-afternoon doorman.
    Susan didn’t hesitate before telling him to let them up. She returned to the table to complete her word, cachet, then joined Bill at the open door until Audrey, Neil and Glory McInnis got off the elevator and came inside.
    “Any news?” Glory immediately asked. She looked so wan and frightened.
    “Not yet, honey,” Susan told her.
    Glory fought back tears. “Is it okay if I go into her room for a while?”
    Audrey’s expression turned pleading on behalf of her daughter, but Susan would not have denied Glory anything.
    “Of course,” Susan said.
    Carole and Marie welcomed them to the table, saying they had been about to take a break from the game anyway. Neil and Audrey sat down and Susan broughtthem all mugs of coffee. She picked up the small milk pitcher from where it had been sitting all morning, to take it back to the kitchen for a refill.
    “Let me do that.” Audrey pushed her chair back and began to stand, but Susan stopped her.
    “It helps me to keep busy.”
    “This must be awful for you,” Audrey said. “We won’t stay long. Glory insisted we come over.”
    “No, I’m glad you’re here. The more the —” She stopped herself; not merrier, certainly. There were really no words for this situation.
    Susan returned to the kitchen with the pitcher, opened the refrigerator and took out the milk. Back in a pocket of solitary quiet, a fresh blossom of pain overtook her. I love you she wanted to write to Lisa. I LOVE YOU. But she had left her BlackBerry on the coffee table and didn’t want to get it in front of everyone; suddenly she was crying again, and she didn’t want them to see her now when she had been holding herself together so well. Then, from nowhere, she heard a loud, angry shout.
    From her meager privacy in the open kitchen, she looked out at the others at the table — her mother was sitting next to Neil, her father between Marie and Audrey — and the hushed tableau told her that no one else had heard the shout. Her gaze landed on a teaspoon someone had left on the counter, a brown coffee spot dried in the curve.
    It was Lisa’s voice she had heard; she was sure of it. Lisa was trying to reach her, probably telling her to stop expecting the worst.
    She filled the pitcher, then opened the refrigerator to replace the milk, keeping the door open too long as an excuse to turn her back on the others and think fora moment. On the bright, cold shelves she observed the bottles of yogurt Lisa liked for breakfast, the raisin-nut bread Dave sliced thin and toasted to a crisp, the chicken she had taken out of the freezer last night to defrost for tonight’s dinner. It was all a museum piece now; hunger had left her. She was free of any desire for physical satisfactions, aware that only a restoration of love could begin to fill the canyons of loss that had become her soul. The love of Lisa and of Dave, one intertwined with the other. She had the stark awareness, looking into the refrigerator, that the life its contents represented was already over.
    The haunting voice returned and was singing now as wisps of spicy incense curled through the open windows. It looked like cartoon smoke. No one else seemed to notice it. And no one heard the voice singing “The Circle Game” — that mythic child moving around and around the wheel of seasons. Lisa’s high, bright voice sailed through Susan’s