I opened the window. Why not? It was windy out. The birds would be swept away as if with a broom.

The still-caged birds on the right-hand wall chattered with increasing volume and their jumping rattled their cages, right next to my head. These weren’t the canaries. These were the fosters.

I felt myself trembling. My fingers wriggled easily between wire bars, grabbing two cages at once. I pulled them down, tumbling the ones above them as well. I was all limbs: kicking in the cages below, waving the two in my fists. The shrieking inside them increased in fear and then died away, one by one.

There’s a pattern in S. M. Madison’s books. She starts with contentment: a heroine in an exotic location, in communion with the place itself. Conflict follows, shoving the heroine up against other people. There’s friendship and sex, but always as action, never as the goal. The end brings equilibrium again; her triumph leads back to the pleasures of her original solitude, enhanced by comfort, or confidence, or money, or safety. But still, alone, and happy. Enchanted by place, not people.

The House of the Dead begins at the Mena House Hotel overlooking the Giza pyramids:

The walls huddled together. We were all tired, the walls and I. Only the shutters were awake, begging to be opened, energised by the hot daylight on the other side. I hadn’t slept on the plane. It had been impossible, with knees and elbows on both sides, and actors racing across the soundless screen at the front of the cabin. So I slept here: cool sheets, hard mattress, small room. The edges of the fluffed pillow made a high, soft wall around my heavy head. This sleep was delicious, and decadent like an evening feast after Ramadan’s daily fasting. I was fat with this sleep. Outside, camel hoof stomps pounded sand. Outside, the pyramids faded in the strong sun. Outside, flies landed on moist, open eyes. The shutters kept all of them out. The shutters kept me in. I’m grateful to shutters. The door should take lessons. It quivered from pounding fists. Someone was getting in. The shutters held out the whole waking world, but the door couldn’t keep out one man.

It ends in the southern city of Aswan, on the famous terrace of the Old Cataract Hotel:

Yellow and blue make green; it’s true everywhere. The blue Nile and yellow desert make green life between them, a fresh, narrow swath along each side of the river. Servants make coffee. Tourists make crowds. Rolling blinds, thick and patterned like carpets from the marketplace, make the terrace cool in the hot day. The natural shape of a huge stone elephant makes visitors photograph the island across from the hotel. Wind makes dozens of white sails pull feluccas across the water. All of these are true every day.

She follows this pattern over and over. In Out of the Sea, her heroine begins in an aisle seat on an airplane, desperate for the window view of the Aegean below. Her fellow passengers, like the one blocking her view, are impediments to her experience. Over and over, this S. M. Madison prizes place over people. Over and over, she finds peace in hotels, not a home.

Her fictional beginnings and endings became a comfort to me. Her abandonment of me hadn’t been personal. Her affair with solitude was the most consuming in her life; that was clear.

There are moments for me too, where the primacy of place, and relationship with the inanimate, is suddenly overwhelmingly satisfying.

I may be like her. I may be meant to be alone.

Harry sometimes asked me for help with crosswords. He’d read the clue and describe how many spaces and any letters he already had. I threw answers at him, but I hated it. I hate crosswords. They seem such a waste of time. I pelted him with words of the correct length, and suggested anagrams and interpretations of the clue fragments. I reasoned that if I could give him the answer it would end. Maybe he couldn’t tell I hated it; he kept asking. He kept talking to me, until I was sick from words, mentally batting them away from my head. The words were like birds flying at me, his birds, always birds. Their noise was constant.

The two in the cages in my hands were dead. I’d beaten the cages against the wall.

I put them down and descended the ladderlike steps. In the den I pulled up the website with taxi numbers and called one. I must always explain that I’m blind, or they won’t bother to push the horn on arrival, no matter that I’ve asked.

I printed directions to Rose Cottage to give the driver.

I brushed my hair in the bathroom. I changed my clothes.

The taxi’s horn was louder than I thought it would be. I jumped, I dropped my bag. It blasted again, twice, hard. My head throbbed. I opened the door.

I knew it was nothing personal. I could see that. She got rid of me because of who she is, because she doesn’t share life with anyone. It wasn’t me, it had nothing to do with me. I comforted myself with that truth, pulled it around me like a smooth sheet, a coarse blanket, and a soft cotton sleeve.

CHAPTER 9

The driver offered to walk me to the door of Rose Cottage, but I wanted the transition to myself. I’d brought my cane. Its tip swished through the longish grass until it scraped on hard path for me to follow. I rapped on the front door.

I tried to age the young woman that I carried in my mind: the woman from the Brussels photographs, the woman who wrote about children with fear and disgust. I tried to age her, but I didn’t know what had happened between now and then. So a young woman opened the door to me, wearing the green dress she’d worn to dinner in the Atomium restaurant in Brussels. She spoke with an old voice, but I saw the girl in the green dress. I suddenly remembered her perfume. I don’t know if she still wore it, or if it was another of those sudden memories that had been jumping out in front of me since Nick changed everything.

“What do you want?” said the old-woman voice.

My voice answered, also old. Amazingly old. In my mind I was young too: in my twenties, out of college, not yet married. We looked alike to me. We both looked like the young woman at the Brussels Expo. Then we spoke, and the vision splintered apart. “Why did you have me?” I asked.

This wasn’t the plan. The plan had been to persuade, to defend; to prove who I was and accuse who she was. Then to ask at last: Why did you leave me? But the question asked itself, and it was more important than the one I’d intended.

She didn’t answer, not quickly. She was examining me. Of course she would be; I’d skipped ahead. Then she retreated, leaving the door open. I followed her into a low-ceilinged room; I could feel the pressure of it, and the air smelled like the windows were closed. A fire made scratching noises in the corner. A jungle of furniture grew wild in the dry heat.

Her voice came from near the fire. She was faced away from me, poking it, I think. There were rustling sounds there, like a family of mice had settled into the flames. “Calling you Gretchen wasn’t my idea. A nurse named you. I didn’t have a name ready, so she called you after her dead sister. Her sister had died in a fire.” I’m sure the fire was consuming crumpled newspaper and hunks of wood. I’m sure of it, but I saw mice there. And a little girl. In a purple dress at Christmas.

“I despise waffling,” she said. “I’d come to hate Susan Maud. I hated what in me was like her. Equivocating. I wrote a scene; it was vicious. I had her raped in it. Never mind that there wasn’t even sex in any of the other books. I let it rip in this one. I held her down. I made her grow up. I was sick of her.

“It was unpublishable, of course. Unfinishable too. There wasn’t anything I wanted left to do with her after that.

“When I found out what was inside me,” and here I thought she figuratively meant her viciousness toward Susan Maud, but it became clear that she literally meant me, “I said, all right. I’m not going to pretend. I’m not going to apologise. So I stuck my belly out and everyone knew. I forced myself the way I’d forced Susan Maud: no more chance to go along and get along.”