Work Text:
“There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.”
i capture the castle, dodie smith
Mail, a disturbing amount, and nothing else awaited her when she finally made it home.
There were two bundles-worth, held together by three thin rubber bands, and on her front door, the mailman had stuck a note saying a good deal more was being held for her at the post office. At the note’s end, he had scrawled a brief, period-marked “Congratulations.”
Beth stuck the note on the fridge, as a reminder and because it felt like something a mother would do.
She had to take the phone off the hook.
It rang incessantly, working a nine to five, and sometimes rang later. The calls around midnight had her wondering, but by then, she had a headache and the headache made her want to self-medicate, so off the hook the phone went.
She did wonder.
He never called after she won. The front desk at her Russian hotel, and later her hotel in Washington, had taken a number of long-distance messages for her, but none from Benny Watts. The silence since made it clear—it was her move. What the timer had been set for was the mystery, how many minutes left before her chess clock ran out.
Her mother might have known the expiration date on something like this.
She missed Alma on mornings she woke up late and wandered the second floor in a dressing gown, and whenever she heated a pre-made dinner in the oven, and on nights she found her favorite comedies playing and watched them without laughing because Beth’s laugh never sounded as good as hers, but now she had discovered a new way to miss her.
They hadn't talked about boys, not seriously. Beth had focused on chess. Alma had focused on money and drinking and Beth. Boys—but more often, men—were simply competitors to be disposed of quickly and without remorse.
Beth never asked her about broken hearts. She just assumed her mother had one.
One night, she filled a martini glass with tap water, topped it with two olives from a jar at the back of the fridge, and slid the drink across the kitchen’s island, pretending she was there to accept it.
Is my heart even broken, she asked her imaginary mother.
The water martini looked terrible and delicious. Something underneath Beth’s fingernails tingled, like a need to scratch an itch until the skin broke and bled. The liquor store two miles uptown might not have closed yet.
She poured the water down the drain and left the two soggy olives in the sink. In her mother’s old bedroom, Beth wrapped herself in her robe and sank into her sheets that would never smell of her again. She heard the phantom ring of a telephone.
In her address book, she had written his number in red.
She couldn’t recall why. Perhaps a relic from days gone when she saw him as her greatest threat, the final untoppled king standing between her and Russia. Or, she always knew he was the most dangerous in every sense of the word.
She traced the numbers. She recited the string in the grocery store while she loaded her cart with cans of soup and frozen dinners that tasted like the cardboard they came in. She memorized the digits as she would positionings on a board.
Still, she didn’t call.
“You must have it bad, cracker,” Jolene declared over a late-afternoon lunch, water only and a split tab.
Beth folded her hands into her napkin and struggled not to purse her lips. “Why would you say that?”
“Because you’re talking to me about him,” Jolene answered. She polished off the remains of her salad and sat back in her chair, contemplative. “Benny Watts. He sounds like a bad magician.”
Beth laughed a little, thinking of his dark duster and his long fingers pocketing pieces in a lightning round of speed chess. “He looks a bit like a bad magician, too.”
“Oh, you’ve really got it bad,” Jolene said, eyes narrowed on Beth’s slip of a smile.
Without outright denying it, Beth asked, “And what am I supposed to do about it?”
Jolene rolled her eyes. “Girl, you were just on about every front page in North America. You can call a boy.”
Beth took a sip of water, wished for a moment it would burn like a shot, and thought of how life had been easier when she drank her feelings numb, except that was a lie.
In the end, she called him on a Tuesday morning.
The boy she paid to care for the lawn had come early and, while driving his mower, drove her out of sleep. He had gone, her grass pristine, but now she had time on her hands and an inclination to fill it in inadvisable ways.
Instead, she picked up the phone. As the operator patched her through, long-distance charges accepted, Beth willed him not to answer.
The call connected on the second ring. “Hello?” His voice reached her ear gravely. The last time she had heard it, he had been telling her to go beat Borgov with all the confidence she hadn’t felt in herself.
In lieu of a greeting—or an apology, if she needed to give one—Beth asked, “What magazine covers should I accept?”
With how they left it the last time they saw each other in person, she had difficulty picturing what his face was doing right now, what he might be thinking. She waited to hear the dial tone.
Instead, “All of them.”
Her eyes rolled up to her bedroom ceiling, blank, white like a film screen without a projection. It was a dumb exercise, asking Benny a question. She always knew how he would answer.
“Shouldn’t I try to be discerning,” she said.
“What the hell for?” He yawned, loud and unsuppressed. “You’re queen of the world, Harmon. Make sure they all know it.”
Just as she hadn’t said hello, he didn’t say goodbye.
She accepted the cover of Time first. It ran a week later, capitalizing on her burst of popularity, and she received two copies in the mail—one compliments of the magazine and the other postmarked from New York. It had the article dog-eared and the paragraph noting she’d be defending her US Championship circled in blue.
“See you there,” read a badly-printed note in the margins.
The cover went on the fridge beside the postman’s congratulations, along with the clipping of Benny’s promise.
The next time around, he called her late. He might have been her midnight caller after all.
“I need to give up gambling.”
She twisted the phone cord around her wrist and said nothing. The ceiling, streaked in moonlight, bore the shadows of branches from the maple outside.
“I’m going to get flushed out of my apartment if I don’t.”
It hardly struck Beth as a loss—his basement apartment with someone else’s garbage stinking the stoop, where the lights on the ceiling came from passing cabs blaring their horns and he didn’t have a maple out in the yard—but she knew better than to offer her childhood bedroom or a blow-up mattress on the living room floor.
“It’ll be hard,” she told him honestly. Impossible, even. Sometimes Beth thought she was simply counting down the days until the next slip of the knife, that her recovery was but a waiting room between bouts of addiction.
With a shaky breath, Benny said, “I know.”
He stayed on the line longer than the last time, continuing to breathe. She didn’t ask what had scared him so badly he needed to call, if it was a monthly bank statement or something worse. What he needed wasn’t an interrogation but someone who understood how dark it got after hours in anonymous cities and how difficult it was to say no to yourself. Quitting went against every cell in their bodies. She breathed with him. She let herself crave something to swallow, a nullifier.
A branch tapping staccato against a windowpane woke her up. She had the phone cord wrapped around her wrist in a coiled, plastic chain, or an invisible string made momentarily visible.
The calls went from a two-off to sporadic and from sporadic to habitual.
Her phone bill at the end of the month would have sent Alma to bed early with a migraine and Allston Wheatley into cardiac arrest. Benny complained about his own charges, but kept multiplying them. He called when he thought about gambling. She called when she’d have rather been sedated.
They didn’t talk about anything important. He played her records by The Velvet Underground and Love and talked about a sister in Arizona with a little girl who called him Uncle Benny. She narrated episodes of Bewitched and relayed stories Jolene told her over different phone calls. Chess infringed on their conversations from time to time, but she felt the conscious effort they both were making to find different common ground their relationship could stand on.
They never mentioned New York.
“I’m thinking about signing up for some classes.”
Benny snorted. “Sure.”
At his tone—condescending, as she’d overheard a father use with a son who had declared his intention to walk the moon—Beth bristled. “I’ve taken Russian classes before.”
“Because you had to for an edge,” Benny dismissed. “What classes would you even take?”
Beth had not thought so far ahead. “I don’t know. Something useful.”
Down the line, Benny hummed, distracted.
Impatient, she pressed it. “I’m bored.”
“You’re bored every day of your life, Harmon,” he said without sympathy. “What’s so different about now?”
The lack of vodka bottles stocked in the freezer or pills crowding the medicine cabinet, for one. In the place where other people played chess casually or substituted reading, or knitting, or gardening, Beth had put drinking and medicating herself into a stupor. She needed a new hobby, a healthier one, to take up the time chess could not fill.
Benny might be right—she was bored every day of her life and that was the problem.
“Maybe I finally want to do something about it.”
She settled on an art class at the local college where she had taken Russian.
On the first day, she walked into the classroom with the supplies the course required, bought new. She had hoped to find a seat at the back of the class, only to find the chairs arranged in a large circle with a vase of tulips in the center.
Tulips were not in season. The flowers were plastic.
No one else said as much, but very few people were saying much of anything. It was a more varied collection of people than her Russian class had been, with an age range of late teens to early fifties and a gender makeup favoring women and men with hippie haircuts.
The professor was an older woman with her graying hair thrown up in a sloppy bun and her eyes shrewd behind a pair of wire-frame glasses. She’d be a formidable opponent across a chess board, if she played.
Without asking for introductions and not giving one herself, she asked them to begin sketching the vase. To gauge their skill level and their points of view, she said.
Beth cracked into her case of colored pencils and went to work. Only twenty minutes into her sketch did she become aware everyone else had opted for colorless graphite.
Too late to trade yellow for gray, Beth cringed as the professor came up behind her.
“Why so much focus here?” the woman asked, pointing to her tulips’ bulbs. Beth had not merely shaded the petals; she had pressed her pencil hard enough to dent the paper.
“Because they’re fake,” she answered. “So, the color had to look fake.”
The professor nearly smiled. “Interesting.”
Beth reached home late, the sun a sunken sliver on the horizon, and almost felt too tired to heat a frozen dinner. The oven preheating, she called Benny.
“How was it?” he asked with his pick-up.
She had the sketchpad open on the hall table. The sketch was colorful but shapeless. Hung in an elementary school classroom, it would not have been the best drawing of the bunch. Interesting, she decided, did not necessarily signal a resounding success. “I’m not very good.”
“I’ve heard people don’t tend to be really good at things the first time they try it.”
Benny was speaking outlier to fellow outlier, to the child within her who had been terrifyingly good when she first sat down at Mr. Shaibel’s chess table and who assumed she’d be equally as good at everything else she set within her sights.
She considered her tulips again. They did look fake, hardly tulips at all. It was frustrating to be so awful at something. Equally, it was freeing.
“Are you going to stick with it?”
Beth pressed her pinkie into one of the bulb’s, feeling the dent of her efforts. “I think so.”
Two weeks into the course, a classmate invited her along for a casual group drink.
Beth went to the bar and ordered a club soda, nothing else. It tasted flat and everyone was laughing at jokes Beth didn’t find funny. One of the few men in the class asked her about Russia in the winter and if she thought the countries were careening back toward nuclear war. She said she didn’t know. She had only gone to play chess.
The group ordered a second round. Beth opted for water, but wanted whiskey neat. The laughter dialed up and the faces began looking sweaty and green under the cheap bar lights. If she were to paint the scene, she would make everyone’s features large and grotesque and herself small but the most twisted of all.
She left early and didn’t remember the drive home.
Just that suddenly she was slumped against the wall in the foyer with the phone gripped in both hands and he answered on the first ring.
“I almost drank tonight.”
He inhaled and asked, “Do you have a board near you?”
He held the line while she carried over the board she kept on the coffee table. On the floor, holding the phone with her shoulder, she reset.
“What if I can never make friends because of this?” she whispered, rolling a pawn between her index finger and thumb. It would take a great deal of force to splinter a wooden piece like it, but once broken, it couldn’t be repaired. “What if I’m—”
“You have friends, Beth,” Benny interrupted over the clack of heavier stone pieces being placed down, him setting up his side. “Harry is your friend. Matt and Mike are your friends. Townes. Me, I’m your friend.”
“It’s different.”
They had known her before, had seen her through the devastating lows Beth hoped to never let anyone new to her life see. But what her new friends would see was a woman who goes rigid any time they ordered a glass of wine with dinner. They’d see a woman whose hands shook passing a pharmacy. She left on a sour note. She declined social invitations. She had an iron curtain inside herself, splitting her into a before Beth and an after Beth, and no idea which was the real one.
“How?” he asked, but she couldn’t say it, not over the phone.
“I don’t know.”
She dragged her knees to her chest and closed her eyes, wishing for Alma and her hand to hold.
“Pawn to E4.”
Her eyes blinked open at his intruding voice. “What?”
“Pawn to E4. C’mon Harmon, keep up.”
On her board, the white pieces glowing in the moonlit dark, Beth moved his pawn as instructed. In return, “Pawn to E5.”
“Queen to H5.”
Danvers Opening, unorthodox and a favorite of novices, and also called the Kentucky Opening. Beth smiled, biting the inside of her cheek.
“This isn’t going to be a long game.”
“We’ll see,” and in his challenge, she heard Benny’s smile, a match to hers.
Without them meaning for it, the calls developed a schedule.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he called after her class, often catching her just as she came through the door. He asked her what technique she was learning or what fruit she had drawn and she teased him that he should pay for half the class given she was relaying it to him for free.
She called him late Monday nights and they watched The Carol Burnett Show together because she liked hearing someone else’s laughter. Sunday mornings, she acted as his ten o’clock alarm.
Sometimes, he called her on Fridays because an old friend swung into town and wanted to clean him out of cash over a few dozen hands of poker. She got the sense he had collected a great many friends across the United States who were only friendly when cash was on the table. Other times, she called him on Saturdays because the neighbors were throwing a party and she heard the corks popping.
Usually, they played chess without stakes. They flirted with openings and middle games they’d never risk in competition. The matches rarely finished, abandoned before the endgame. In most, the would-be outcome favored her but not always.
The potential draws and losses kept her up late into the night, worrying over whether she was getting sloppy or if he was stumbling upon previously unknown holes in her game. In the mornings, she replayed. Pawn took pawn. She castled. Benny told her a corny joke about yellow cabs as he ruthlessly hunted her knight. She remembered the jokes and the stories as clearly as she remembered the moves.
She had begun slipping in tidbits about Alma and Mr. Shaibel.
They continued to leave off talking about New York.
She bought a cookbook and Benny missed a call.
Eating wilted lettuce salad with overcooked chicken cut in chunks served atop it, Beth watched The Carol Burnett Show alone. She tried to recall the sound of Alma’s laugh and couldn’t.
The phone rang as she finished unwinding her scarf, back on schedule.
“Where were you last night?” she asked as her opening. Not aggressive, only curious.
“Ah, I—” He paused, considering. Almost hesitant, running through his potential responses. If he had been with a woman, she would rather he not be evasive. “I’m taking a class, actually. You inspired me, Harmon.”
“Oh.”
She flashed back to their last US championship, a college campus in Ohio and Benny playing speed chess in the student commons. His cowboy hat hadn’t fit amongst the stone and ivy and Beth had trouble imagining Benny returning willingly without the promise of adoration and a check.
Of course, he hadn’t dragged himself back to middle America. His class would be at a city college and he was doing it because Beth inspired him in something wholly unrelated to chess.
She ducked her head, though Benny was not here to see her flush.
“Oh.” he repeated with an upward inflection. She pictured his baiting smile. “What did you think I was doing?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly. “Taking a class.”
“Uh-huh.”
Something had shifted, the crackling static in her ear mimicking electricity. She couldn’t tell yet if the shift was minor, one square to the right, or the last turn before going over the bridge.
Twice a month, she visited Alma’s grave.
She oscillated between a selfish satisfaction she had the grave to herself, that she loved her mother best and she loved her most in return, and an unspeakable anger no one else mourned her. With each visit, she cleared leaves and budding weeds from around the gravestone and brought a fresh bouquet of flowers to replace the old. Alma might have mentioned a preference for daisies in passing, but Beth believed she’d prefer whatever was in season.
Her visits were never brief. She set aside a three-hour block of time, adjusted her routine accordingly.
“I have a routine now,” she told her mother, sitting on a flannel blanket she had found at the back of the upstairs linen closet. She had asked Alma if she once used it for picnics and, of course, the gravestone couldn’t answer one way or another. “And I cook, if you can believe it.”
Her attempt at scallops last night had been a disaster. Over the phone, chuckling at her misfortune, Benny had claimed the fumes traveled the seven hundred miles from Lexington to New York.
“But I’m really lonely, mom,” she admitted to the grave, and the bouquet of daisies, and herself. She had scraped the scallops out of the pan and wanted to turn to find Benny leaning against the counter, teasing up until she forced him to swallow a bite.
There were men at the college who asked her out for drinks. A few who she brushed off with the truth—“I don’t drink”—had come back with the offer of dinner. She never accepted because she had someone waiting at home, if only over the phone.
They were fast approaching the point it would no longer be enough. She anticipated the next time he missed a call and not because he had taken up another class.
“I don’t know how to ask for what I want,” she said, smoothing an nonexistent crease from her skirt. In a tournament, she could take what she wanted. Here, this, Beth was at a loss.
She arrived home from the cemetery to an empty house, same as the day before, and the day before, and the day before. It was routine.
“I’m getting a pet,” Beth announced as the call connected.
Benny laughed—not a chuckle or a huff masquerading as amusement but a genuine laugh. Stripped of his usual edge of arrogance, he sounded young, as boyish as he looked most days and on the night she had him without his cowboy boots and the knife strapped to his hip.
“That’s a terrible idea.”
“Why?”
One day, she really would stop asking him questions. He gave answers and she did their opposites, moves and countermoves.
“When’s the last time you took care of anything that wasn’t yourself?”
Beth worked her jaw, grateful Benny was not there to delight smugly in the blatant frustration showing on her face. “And when was the last time you took care of anything other than yourself?” she returned coolly.
“Never, and that’s why I don’t have a pet.”
In the background of his line came the clang of metal, a pot hitting a pan. The clock in her living room read a quarter to seven, dinner time for them both. Benny hardly struck her as the home-cooked meal type. She wondered, briefly and with an uncomfortable swallow, if someone else was cooking for him.
“I won’t get a dog,” Beth said, cleanly keeping them on subject. “I can get a…”
“Cat?” Benny suggested. Then, a thump followed by a short hiss. He muttered something about a damn onion. Cooking alone then, she thought, and relaxed against the wall. “Or a bunny rabbit.”
“A bunny,” she echoed, ruminating. She liked glancing out the window and happening upon a rabbit grazing in the yard, so she transposed the image to inside her house, the rabbit hopping along the carpet, hiding beneath Alma’s piano bench.
The hair would have bothered Alma and it would bother Beth, too. She wanted something, a living something, but without the mess and constant cries for attention. She needed something that wouldn’t need her too much.
The rough chop of an onion being diced on a cutting board preceded Benny saying, “What about a fish?”
The woman at the pet shop drilled her with questions more personal and thought-provoking than any Beth had answered for the likes of Life Magazine and upon the questionnaire's completion advised she get a Betta fish.
Betta fish were known for being highly territorial. She should only purchase one lest she witness a bloodbath by the night’s end.
Beth left the store with a medium-sized tank, a bag of rocks, a host of plants to decorate the tank—to stimulate the fish’s environment, the woman clarified—and the fish. The fish, a red-finned he, bore the car ride with a stoic dignity and the process of Beth setting up the tank with quiet curiosity. Once in the tank, he swam a cautious lap as she watched, face close to the glass.
“Do you like your new home?” she asked him. Another adopted child in the Wheatley house, Beth realized.
She named him Fisher. It suited him.
A turn in the weather, heralding spring, and Beth checked out two books on gardening with a newly-acquired Lexington library card. She had become the kind of person to have a library card, and a pet, and a cookbook with favorite recipes tabbed and marked-up with adjustments to better suit her tastes.
Chess still came above all else, but she played most of her games on the living room floor, sitting cross-legged on one side of the coffee table while Fisher swam at the end of the other. He played the part of great masters with diligence, his Borgov particularly stern. He never gave her the cold shoulder when she beat him.
Beth loved Fisher in a strange, imprinted way she used to begrudge the girls at Methuen who got attached to a certain squirrel or bird that made a home in the yard. She liked having something to whisper secrets to. She liked having something to take care of, even if, true to her desire, Fisher didn’t need her very much.
It was a step, in the way the art class had been, and the library card, and every time she picked up the phone.
“How’s the fish?” Benny asked, a Sunday morning. His paper rustled as he hunted for the crossword. “Does it miss me?”
Beth looked to Fisher, floating in stasis within his tank, a slice of sunlight shining through the glass. “How could he miss you?” she countered. “He’s never met you.”
Yet, she understood the possibility of missing something or someone you had no concrete memory of. She thought of a car crash, the sound of crunching metal and white light like the flash of a camera bulb. What you missed wasn’t the person exactly, but the piece of your heart they took with them and you’d never get back.
“Beth?” Benny softened his tone. “Did I lose you?”
“No,” she answered. Never, added silently. The hollow space where the piece of her now in New York once occupied echoed with longing. “You should come meet him sometime.”
The crinkling of paper stopped. He exhaled through his nose, likely running his fingers through his hair. She’d still like his hair, whether he had let it grow longer or cropped it short. The more time that passed without seeing him, the harder time she had picturing his face and how he might have changed. She could flip through a recent issue of Chess Magazine, but she didn’t want another still image. Her memory already trapped him enough in time.
“The US Championship is coming up. You can come to Lexington first and we can drive to the tournament together,” Beth said, in an effort to have something concrete.
Benny sighed. Such a quiet sound, but it hurt her eardrum.
“Is that really such a good idea?”
Beth hung up and belatedly realized that the gesture was as good as a no.
“I don’t understand your relationship.”
The light reflecting off the reservoir caught the frustrated set of Jolene’s mouth.
“You want him,” she continued, walking with a lawyer’s courthouse stride even as they had decided on a slow afternoon stroll in the park. “He wants you. But…”
Jolene trailed off with a pointed glance to Beth. For her part, Beth didn’t know if Jolene was questioning her as a witness or the defendant.
“He doesn’t think it’s a good idea,” Beth said in evidence.
“Did you ask him why?” Jolene hadn’t stopped eyeing her and found her answer in Beth’s twitch of a frown. “You didn’t ask him.”
Beth tugged the collar of her jacket up, the cool spring breeze nipping at her neck, and avoided Jolene’s flat stare. “I’m not going to like the answer.”
“How do you know that?” Jolene asked, unimpressed. “I know this is your first serious, adult relationship, so I’ll give you a break, but you need to talk to him. Communicate.”
Beth wished, not for the first time, they had these serious, adult lessons taught to them at Methuen instead of being slipped serious, adult drugs. Written on a blackboard, committed to chalky memory, here was everything your parents—dead or adopted—wouldn’t teach about love and a happy marriage.
Except no one at Methuen would have been qualified to teach the course. She hadn’t considered it at the time, how sad every adult and child had been at a place with the word “home” in the name.
She looked to Jolene, who had shown up on her doorstep at her darkest hour and kept showing up since. Beth slipped her arm through Jolene’s and squeezed her wrist lightly. “Thank you,” she said, because Jolene deserved it in words. “For everything.”
“Don’t cry,” Jolene warned. “But you’re always welcome.”
For her final art project, she had to draw two things she loved.
“What do you think?” She angled the sketchpad toward Fisher for an assessment.
He blinked, unenthused.
Beth tucked her red pencil behind her ear and considered the sketch again. Perhaps she had portrayed Fisher with more fire and defiance than he thought himself capable, but as her professor said, it was about perspective. Perspective and contrast.
“I’m getting better,” she mused aloud, and Fisher did not disagree.
At the presentation, her professor gave a brief, satisfied nod at her portrait of Fisher, but lingered on her second piece. It had no touches of red, done all in hazy yellows and dark shades of brown. She had been trying to improve her shading work, to capture how the kings and queens cast sharp shadows across the board and the pieces they lorded over, but her professor was not interested in the chess.
“It’s about him,” she said, remarking on the faceless opponent, only shown from the neck down. He had one hand resting on his thigh, leaning with a crook in his elbow where his black sweater was bunched, and the other hand around a rook, a risky move with the state of the board as it was. He knew it. “You can tell the amount of attention paid to drawing him, to getting him right.”
Beth wanted to ask, had she? Had she gotten him right?
The professor wouldn’t have an answer for her. Just a passing grade and the suggestion she consider taking Drawing II during the summer session.
She didn’t have the potential to be a great artist, but she had the talent of a good hobbyist. Beth liked the sound of that better.
After three weeks, he called again. Another Sunday morning, her mushroom omelet finished and plate soaking in the sink, a second cup of coffee set by the board where she had set up a classic Luchenko game for her and Fisher to play through.
“I’m sorry,” he said off the top, tone frustrated and with himself. “I shouldn’t have said it like that. I didn’t—”
“Why did you sleep with me in New York?” she asked, finally.
“You said you liked my hair,” he answered with a nervous, joking edge. Then, with a sigh, he relented. “Before New York, you usually looked at me like I was an obstacle in your way and I got it because I would look at everyone I competed with that way, too. But that night, it was all over for me. I was never going to be better than you again.”
Beth frowned, throat gone dry. “So, you slept with me because I was finally good enough?”
“No, no,” Benny protested. “I slept with you because I wasn’t your competition anymore, or someone who had something to teach you, and because it was probably the last chance I had before you got bored of me. And because…”
He let his final reason linger, an incomplete move.
“Because?”
“I liked you, Harmon,” he confessed. His lips sounded close to the receiver. If he had been next to her, whispering, he’d be kissing the words to her ear.
“Liked,” she repeated, in the past tense.
“It’s something else now,” he said. The words, as vague as they were, had a weight behind them.
“It is,” she agreed. “Are you going to come?”
In the pause, they exchanged breaths. She had only been so nervous across the table from Borgov, waiting to begin, waiting to adjourn, and waiting for a concession, or else an evasion she hadn’t foreseen.
“I don’t know.”
This time, he hung up.
Every meal she made was meant to feed two.
She wrapped the second servings in plastic and stuck the plates in the fridge, leftovers for lunch that never tasted as good lukewarm. At the table, she ate with one place setting, across from Fisher, and he glared whenever she ate salmon or baked cod. No one was there to contradict her—fish can’t glare, Harmon.
They hadn’t eaten much at the table, she and Alma. Beth couldn’t say the last time the table had seen two place settings, never mind three or four. She tried to imagine Alma and Allston, sitting where she sat, eating salmon fillets together and talking about their days. The silence surrounding her now felt icy but more accurate.
“I don’t want to be like my mother,” Beth said, another secret for Fisher to keep. “Either of them.”
As much as she loved them. As much as she wished her love could have saved them from themselves.
Half past midnight, but the ringing didn’t wake her. She hadn’t been asleep. Outside her window, a storm carried on, knocking the arms of the maple tree against the glass panes. Inside, under her mother’s best comforter, Beth was cold.
She answered the phone without a greeting—they never said hello or goodbye, like they had spent five months in one continuous conversation—and listened for his breathing on the other end of the line. It was shallow, the kind common after a bad dream.
At last, an admission. “I’m scared.”
Laying in the dark at the eye of a storm, curled in the shape of the phone cradled to her ear, Beth was scared, too. She lived in a big, lonely house unpopulated by ghosts. Everyone she loved died far away.
“What are you scared of?” she whispered into the silence his confession had left behind.
“I come, and we play house for a little while, and…” He breathed heavier down the line and Beth almost felt it, a trembling breeze ruffling her hair. “And you really will get bored of me.”
Benny said it not as a question or an accusation but as an inevitability. And it stung that the conclusion seemed to have been reached through second-hand knowledge. He and Harry had talked. After playing every angle of her game against Borgov, they had drank and commiserated, the Beth Harmon Broken Hearts Club.
She had broken Harry’s heart, but in much the same way Townes had broken hers, not on purpose or out of spite but because in the end they’d never be what the other needed them to be.
“Do you want to play house?” Beth asked, because she might have had Benny wrong from the start.
“God, no,” Benny groaned. “But that’s not—”
“Then we won’t.”
Benny let out a strangled, near desperate laugh. “You make it sound so simple, Harmon.”
She pressed the phone harder to her ear, holding it tight like she could anchor him in place across the distance. “Why can’t it be?”
There was a theoretical answer—they weren’t wired for simple. Their brains saw branching paths where others saw singular, lateral moves. Ten steps ahead of their opponent, already thinking of the next game, and the next tournament, and—in the fashion of true masochists—the next stage of their careers. They sought after endgames.
But they’d doom themselves if they went any further playing their relationship like it was something to be won or lost. How many moves until Beth retreated? How many counterattacks until Benny forfeited to prevent her from capturing anything he couldn’t afford to lose?
“I’m not supposed to be gambling anymore,” Benny said, voice thick, not sold on simplicity.
“It isn’t gambling,” she said, but with the knowledge it was far from a sure thing.
The storm continued on with a clap of thunder and a fresh wave of rain drumming against the roof. Beth shivered, burrowing deeper beneath the comforter. Over the phone, Benny laughed for a second time.
“Well, looks like I can’t fly out tonight.”
A crack of lightning lit up her room. Beth, though her teeth were chattering, smiled with the light.
Benny didn’t come the next day, or the day after.
She cleaned the house, stocked the fridge with chicken cutlets and pork chops, stacked extra sheets and a pillow on the couch just in case. Fisher gaped at her through every chore, wary.
Another day passed, and then another. Beth wondered if she mistook a joke for a promise.
In her arms, she had a carton of daisies to be planted in the front garden. In the back of the car, she had several more cartons of flowers in shades of fuchsia, yellow, and magenta she wouldn’t be able to replicate with colored pencils. Balanced on her hip, a brown paper bag with seeds for tomatoes, cucumbers, and bell peppers.
Her sunglasses had half-slipped off her nose, so Beth couldn’t be sure what she was seeing.
On the stoop, Benny sat on the second step, head bowed. There was a suitcase at his side, a coat draped over it. He might have been waiting a while.
“I could use some help,” she said, no hello.
His head shot up, his bloodshot eyes squinting into the midday sun. Benny swallowed upon seeing her and Beth watched his throat bob, nervous. He rubbed his palms on his jeans, like a little kid would, and stood, meeting her halfway down the front walk.
Benny took the daisies from her, flecks of dirt bouncing off his sleeve. “Are you gardening now?”
“Is that so surprising?”
He regarded the flowers in his arms and then her with a warmth in his tired, unguarded eyes both brand new and familiar. “I guess not.”
Together, they unloaded the rest of the flowers and left them by the untended beds in the front yard. Beth brought in the seeds, to be planted in the back, and Benny hauled in his suitcase, leaving it at the foot of the staircase.
Beth turned her back on him as he began touring the living room. She thought she’d be knocked off balance when he finally arrived, if ever, but she moved through her own house as she always did, not minding his curious eye.
“The famous Fisher,” Benny said, approaching his tank, bending at the waist for a closer look.
Fisher, swimming amongst the kelp, ignored him.
Beth bit back a smile. “You’re the first person I’ve introduced him to.”
“Really?” Benny asked with a suggestive note.
She nodded—it was a bit ridiculous he had to ask.
Benny joined her in the kitchen, his hands running over the counter. Beth stood planted firmly in the center of the floor, aware of the disappearing distance between them. This was the closest they had been since their goodbyes in New York.
Not quite falling into each other’s gravity yet, Benny paused at the fridge. On it still, the postman’s note and Benny’s article clipping. Taking up the most space, though, her portrait of Fisher and her portrait of a game of chess, of him.
He stared at it, expression in profile unreadable.
“I didn’t quit,” Beth said quietly.
“You didn’t quit,” he whispered back, directed to the picture.
Beth moved to the fridge, leaning with her back against it, her shoulder blocking half the portrait. Slowly, with six months of intention, she took his hand—the one she had drawn holding the rook, preparing to make a gambit.
With equal care, Benny tangled their fingers together.
Later, in the dark, he’d say it first.
In the morning, with her heartbeat under her tongue, she’d say it back.
Pressed against the fridge now, against congratulations and challenges and a capturing of love, Beth sighed into Benny’s kiss, a homecoming.