The first thing to fall out of the coat was a pear. The second was a small brass door knocker.
Vela caught the pear. “Should I take it off?”
“Not yet.”
Vela’s train left in the morning. Irin had the two hours before Vela’s meeting, and she meant them to include a whole supper, sitting down.
Irin knelt behind her, her cheek almost against the green wool. A square of lining had folded inward between the shoulder blades. Beyond it she could see polished floorboards and the foot of a chair.
“It ought to be larger,” she said.
“The pear?”
“The door.”
Vela held the fruit to her nose. Then she bit it. Juice ran down her thumb, and Irin remembered the peculiar inconvenience of loving someone: the person could be standing perfectly still, eating a pear, and make it impossible to work.
“I had that dream,” Vela said.
“I know. You gave me the silk.”
“Yes, but the pears tasted of onions.”
Irin looked up.
Vela swallowed. “I was hoping you’d improved them.”
She took off the coat. A little enamel moth glittered at her blouse collar. They spread the coat over the cutting table, sleeves dangling. Irin lifted the square lining, and a smell of sun-warmed curtains came through. Behind it lay the room she had dreamed into a piece of yellow lawn the previous Sunday: a wide window, a table for two, the lamp with the crooked shade that Vela had liked enough to buy and disliked enough to leave at Irin’s house.
Beyond the table stood Vela’s pear tree. It grew directly out of the floorboards.
“Ah,” Irin said.
“Is that a good ah?”
“I’ve never joined two before.”
Each piece had its own closed border. She had fitted Vela’s smaller silk inside the yellow lawn, joining the two with a separate row of stitches, as she would set a pocket into a skirt.
Vela looked at the pale marks in the silk. They resembled water stains until one followed them long enough to recognize a banister, a lamp, a pair of shoes. She had slept with the swatch under her pillow three nights ago, at Irin’s request. It had come out full of stairs.
Irin had discovered the marks by accident, sewing a pillowcase while her latest dream still clung to it. When she closed a line of stitches around a pictured door, it opened. Behind the first had been a pantry of iced buns. Behind the second, a room full of her mother’s broken crockery, all of it mended. The rooms lasted until their borders were unpicked; anything carried out faded within minutes. She had lost a whole plate of buns that way.
Dreamed people never appeared. Irin had tried, once, after a particularly good dream about Vela. The result had been an empty bath and three wet towels, which she had used before leaving.
“Will it hold us?” Vela asked.
“It held me.”
“How long?”
“Long enough to wash the cups.”
Vela smiled. “Of course you did.”
Irin hooked the coat onto the tall fitting stand. She let out the pleats at the corners, leaving the stitched border intact. The cloth stretched until it reached the floor, the wool hanging like a dark frame around the yellow room.
Vela put her hand through. Irin watched the fingers turn in the warm light.
“I meant us to have supper,” Irin said.
“We can still have supper.”
“Somewhere we don’t have to clear a space for our elbows.”
Vela glanced at the cutting table, occupied by three sleeves, a box of hooks, and the cello case she had carried up four flights. She left again in the morning for fourteen weeks of concerts. Tonight’s visit was wedged between a rehearsal and the meeting with the other players. Irin had asked for more time. Vela had said she would try.
She had left the silk before rehearsal that morning. Tonight she had brought wine.
Now she stepped through the lining.
The room had the sloping ceiling from Irin’s childhood bedroom and none of its shortage of space. Low sunlight caught two glasses on the table. The pear tree brushed the ceiling with waxy leaves. A door beside it opened onto a staircase going down.
“That wasn’t mine,” Irin said.
“It was mine.”
“Where does it go?”
“In the dream? I never get to the bottom.”
Vela leaned over the banister. Her hair fell forward, showing the little pale seam behind her ear where a dog had bitten her when she was nine. In twenty months Irin had learned that mark, the pattern of freckles across her shoulders, and the patience with which she would untie every knot in a tangled chain. She did not know what Vela did on the first morning in a new city. She had asked, but “find breakfast” had not satisfied her.
She set down the wine she had brought from the workroom. “We need an opener.”
“There’ll be one.”
“Only if I dreamed it.”
Vela inspected the drawers. In the first she found buttons. In the second, more buttons. In the third lay an orange.
“You’re very thorough about some things.”
Irin went back through the coat for her corkscrew.
When she returned, the window had moved. It was lower now, and the sunlight came at an angle she did not like. Vela stood at the bottom of the first flight of stairs, peering around the turn.
“The room tilted,” Irin said.
“I only went down.”
“Come back up.”
Vela did. With each step, the floor eased toward level. The glasses stopped trembling against each other.
They stood still.
“Perhaps don’t use the stairs.”
Vela glanced at the doorway, then at the table set for two. “All right.”
They opened the wine. Irin found bread in a covered basket; Vela tried a corner and reported that it was, so far, bread. They ate slowly, telling each other things they had forgotten to put in letters. Most of an hour passed before either looked toward the workroom. They sat beside the window. Beyond it a hillside of tall grass bent in the wind. Irin had forgotten dreaming that part. She had remembered only the table.
Vela unfastened the top button of her blouse.
“Better?” Irin asked.
“Much.”
Under the table, their bare feet touched. They had both left their shoes outside without discussing it. The relief of this, of something familiar needing no arrangement, made Irin set her glass down too firmly.
“What?” Vela said.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t do that.”
Irin watched the grass. “I wanted to give you a reason to stay tonight.”
“You already had one.”
“But not one that changes your plans.”
Vela pulled her foot away. “I changed two rehearsals to get here.”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant.”
The pear tree rustled. There was no wind inside the room.
Irin took the bread apart along its split crust. Vela would leave in the morning. They would exchange letters that grew longer as they became less frequent. Irin would describe a customer, Vela a hotel with an alarming lift. Irin would feel she did nothing but wait for a person to return. Vela had written that she was tired of arriving to find a list of all the days she had been away.
They had nearly ended it by post in August. Then Vela had sent a drawing of the landlady’s dog, asleep on her cello case, and Irin had laughed in an empty kitchen until she began to cry.
Vela pushed back her chair.
“I want to see the stairs.”
“I just told you what happens.”
“Irin. They’re mine.”
Irin looked toward the coat. It hung open beyond the table, showing her workroom and the small, ordinary night at its window.
“Then I’ll come with you.”
They took the stairs one at a time. Above them the room creaked. The banister was warm, and its polished wood bore the dents of furniture carried around awkward corners.
At the first landing stood a pair of men’s slippers. At the next, a basket of clean washing. Then came a door with a brass knocker, an empty hook beneath it, and a mat worn pale in the middle.
Vela stopped so abruptly that Irin nearly stepped on her heel.
“Here,” she said.
“What is it?”
Vela ran a finger over the empty hook. “My key hangs there.”
“Your flat?”
“The one I had before the orchestra. The room was awful. You could hear the man next door clean his teeth.”
She tried the door. It opened onto a narrow hallway with a chipped red bicycle leaning against the wall. Irin had seen the bicycle in a photograph. Vela had sold it three years ago.
“I keep dreaming I’m coming home,” Vela said. “But I can never get up the stairs.”
“These go down.”
“They’re stairs. They change their minds.”
A groan ran through the wood above them. Irin looked up. The upper flights were drawing together, their banisters almost touching. She could hear the glasses sliding across the table.
“We should go.”
Vela stepped over the threshold.
“Vela.”
“Just a moment.”
She put her palm against the hallway wall. Irin could not tell what the small room had that hers did not. It was shabby, and the bicycle blocked the passage, and somewhere beyond the door a tap dripped. Then Vela put her other hand flat beside the first and bent her head between them.
Irin waited.
“I want a key again,” Vela said.
“You have mine.”
“Yes.”
Irin looked away from her hands.
Above them something struck the floor. A glass had fallen. The stair narrowed enough to press Irin’s shoulder against the wall. Above her, the two flights had folded together, closing the way back.
She put her fingers on the seam running along the doorframe. She had placed Vela’s silk inside her own dream’s border, a little passage off the room she wanted. As Vela occupied it, the lower room was taking the space the upper room had used. The silk was pulling its enclosing lawn inward; the stair twisted tighter with every movement.
“We have to unpick it,” Irin said.
Vela looked back. “Which part?”
“The join.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. I can undo one room. I’ve never had two.”
Vela let go of the wall.
“Show me.”
The seam was drawn tight. Irin could not get a fingernail under the first stitch. Her scissors were in the workroom, beyond the stairs. She tugged at the silk and felt the whole doorframe tremble.
Vela unfastened the moth from her collar and gave it to Irin, pin open.
“It’ll bend.”
“Then bend it.”
Irin worked the point beneath a stitch. A thread snapped; the narrow hall flickered. Through it she saw her cutting table, then the bicycle again. She broke another stitch. The ceiling lifted half an inch.
Vela held the cloth taut where the wall had begun to thin.
They followed the join toward the blocked stairs. Under their feet the wood sagged into cloth, then stiffened again. Once Irin put her foot through something that had been a step, and Vela caught her under the arms. They stayed like that for a moment, Irin’s back pressed to her, listening to the great impossible rooms settle around them.
“Keep going,” Vela said against her ear.
Irin did.
The last stitches gave, and the thin wall opened onto the workroom. They stumbled out with the coat around their knees. The wine bottle had rolled through ahead of them and lay leaking beside the fitting stand.
Half the wine remained in the bottle. The glasses were still in the dream, broken or not, and neither woman proposed fetching them. Vela found two jam jars and rinsed them at the sink.
Irin laid the coat on the table and the moth beside it, its pin bent. The joining thread hung loose. Beyond one torn edge she could see grass; beyond the other, the chipped bicycle. Both rooms were still there. She would need more cloth between them, or two separate entrances. She could find out later.
“I can leave you my key,” Vela said.
Irin looked up.
“The flat I’ll rent when I get back. I want to stop taking the last train out of every city. I’ll keep the touring work, but I want my own bed between times.”
“Here?”
“I was thinking across the river. Near the practice rooms.”
Irin took up a needle. She missed the eye with her thread and tried again.
“Can I come and see places with you?”
“Some. Not all of them.”
“All right.”
Vela set a jar beside her. “You can tell me which windows face west. I’m useless at that.”
They drank standing up. A button pressed into the sole of Irin’s foot. She picked it up and dropped it into the box.
“What time is your meeting?”
Vela looked at the clock. “I’ve missed it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not yet.”
She took the needle out of Irin’s hand and laid it on the table. Then she kissed her, and Irin caught the lapels of the open coat because she had to hold something. They laughed into each other’s mouths.
The coat slipped to the floor. Somewhere inside it, a pear fell down the stairs.
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