Esme was sixty-three, and she had never felt more like a woman in all her life.
It was a Sunday, with rain on the skylight. The whole afternoon stretched out in front of her like an unbroken road. She lit the candle and put on the cello. Then she lay in the middle of the big bed in nothing but a long pearl-gray silk slip, a joke gift from her daughter.
She did not touch herself. She did not need to.
She closed her eyes and let the breath do the work, in for four, out for six. She watched the golden tide rise from her feet. It climbed her calves and gathered in the warm bowl of her pelvis.
She felt the old familiar heaviness and the sweet slow tug. She felt the quiet bloom of wet between her thighs. Her lips swelled. Her button began, faintly, to pulse in answer to the rhythm of the cello.
She lifted her floor, a feather’s lift, and let it go. And again.
The tide swelled, and she rode it. Her breath deepened and a flush spread up her chest. The silk whispered against her skin. Her body began to sway, quite on its own.
She thought of nothing. She thought of everything. She thought of a summer in Seville when she was twenty.
She thought of a night in her thirties that she had never told anyone about, and the particular smell of her husband’s neck. She let each memory pass through her like light through water.
Then the wave rose, and rose. Esme lay in her silk, in her empty house, with no hands at all. She came apart in a long, glowing, shimmering rush, laughing out loud into the rain.
She lay there for a long time afterward.
“Well,” she said finally, to the skylight. “Sixty-three. Who knew?”