Infinite Home by Kathleen Alcott

smells and sounds of it, the squeal of rubber soles on the court and the rough talk between teammates in the locker room afterward, felt like a long life in prison. He would go home and put on Billie Holiday and press his improbably clear teenage skin to his pillow and weep. But soon he would rise and go to his desk, where the sharpened pencils lay arranged by length, and put one to paper. The thought of his tears muddling a line he’d pulled at so carefully disturbed him, and that formed the pattern of his next seventeen years, work chasing away any excess of feeling like a car that sends deer leaping back into the green.

T HE BOILER IN THE BASEMEN T , ancient and tall and dust-covered, gave its last hiss early one mid-January morning. Sometimes Adeleine grew so absorbed by the story of Miriam’s life, her perfect cursive and the talk of dinner parties and operas, that she forgot to eat. Slim and forever sensitive to the cold, she became more so on these forgotten afternoons, so the first day without heat she could only understand the chill as a failure of her own body. The thermostat, mounted on the yellowed wall of Edith’s living room and typically kept at a sturdy sixty-five degrees, crept backward into the evening. The snow outside piled on and obscured bushes, trash cans, bicycles, until they looked only like suggestions, nebulous shapes drawn by small children.
    Distracted by a young Miriam’s description of her son’s first Christmas, the escalators in the department stores and how she accidentally forgot him under a rack of red felt coats, Adeleine put on another pair of wool socks and finally crawled into bed after fetching an extra quilt and afghan from the overflowing linen cabinet. She never had guests but always vaguely expected them, kept piles of folded warmth clean and ready, and when she slept that night, she dreamt of arrivals, doors opened and ready, mouths kissed and embraces shared.
    At 2:15 she woke from shivering and saw her breath in clouds around her, the multiplied snow out the window through the thin ancient glass. She crossed into the living room and stood below the heating vents, spread her hands and finally realized. Her teeth clattered as she moved across the hall, and she knocked more loudly than she’d expected. As the creak of his mattress and lean rhythm of his gait sounded, she was surprised to find that the tremor the cold made in her body was nearly equaled by the thrill of his approach. When he answered, his face admitted a struggle: in opening the door with his good hand the blanket he’d wrapped around himself had slipped.
    “Come here,” he said, wit and effort gone from his speech. She understood he was as glad to offer his body heat as she was to take it, and pressed into his shoulder a while before they spoke.
    “I called her at six and knocked at nine—no answer. I think she was exhausted after that visit from her son—she’s finally catching up on sleep. Probably she accidentally nudged the tab on the thermostat in a hurry to lock the door.” His speculative optimism was like that of a mother attempting to diminish her own worry.
    “Either that or she was scheming up a way to finally get us in bed together.”
    His startled laughter at her bold joke lasted a while, and then she followed him through his apartment—bereft of life’s clutter, gleaming, dusted—into his bed. The whole night, they practiced various combinations, linking their bodies at an endless series of points. They were too cold and tired for anything but this, though still she felt briefly the stutter from between his legs. When the sun rose glacial and early, they absorbed the suggestion of it as filtered through four layers of blankets, but didn’t move to watch it. She never released his limp left hand.
    Midmorning he grunted, spoke directly into Adeleine’s skin: “All right, enough. I’m going to find her.”
    —
    T HOMAS KNOCKED with the volume of a man with a full body: nothing. He