Where or When by Anita Shreve

doing in his study in the evenings (what can she possibly have thought of the music emanating from the room night after night?), though she has mentioned once or twice that she is concerned about his “stress level.”
    Then he actually sent the tape, the small player, and the headphones. It was the most reckless gesture of all, one he regretted the minute he watched Harry Noonan behind the counter at the post office toss it into the Priority Mail bucket. He expected the box back unopened almost immediately, dreaded going to the post office each day and finding the little pink slip announcing that there was a package waiting for him. He was positive, too, that the picture he sent along with the package, the picture of him holding the fish, was going to backfire. It was a terrible picture, but it was the only one he could find that showed him alone—without one of his children or Harriet.
    He listens to the first song on the tape, Dion’s “A Teenager in Love.” He has tried, in the correspondence, for a tone of lightheartedness, and he sent the tape in the same vein, though he is certain—and he suspects this has been all too obvious to her as well—that his entire life hangs in the balance of her response. He
has
felt like a schoolboy, a teenager, with a teenager’s innocence and longing.
    He is confident, too, though he understands this less well, that she has been there all along, all through the years, a kind of subterranean rhythm or current. He knows this because he has always favored women who looked like Siân—tall, small-breasted, blondish (and it has often puzzled him that he married a woman so unlike this image)—and he knows Siân was the first, the antecedent. And her name, her strange Welsh name, has bubbled up into his consciousness over the years, often when he has least expected it. In college, he roomed for a year with a boy named Shane, and he frequently slipped and called him Sean, the spelling different but the pronunciation the same as hers. He remembers, also, a client he had seven or eight years ago, a Susan Wain, and how he twice addressed correspondence to her, Dear Siân, without the accent, somehow transposing letters subconsciously from the last name to the first, but again echoing the antecedent. He hadn’t realized his mistake until the client pointed it out to him.
    He knows as well that through the years he has been drawn to things Welsh, a subconscious draw, as if one were trying to find something lost in childhood—a piece of music, the shape of a room, the way the light once filtered through a certain window. He remembers reading Dylan Thomas and Chatwin’s
On the Black Hill
not too long ago, and another book, Jan Morris’s
The Matter of Wales,
and deciding that if he ever got to Europe he might begin with Wales and then make his way south to Portugal. (Though when he drives to the beach and looks out, he never imagines looking at Wales—it’s too far
north,
he thinks.) He will have to ask her, but he thinks he has remembered this correctly, that she has a Welsh father and had an Irish mother, both first-generation immigrants after World War II, and though there was no lilt in her own voice as there was in her father’s (he remembers the father’s accent vividly from that phone call he made when he had returned home from college: the strange vowels, the crescendo and sudden swift fall in the rhythm of the sentences), it was evident, looking at her (particularly on that first day at camp and, more recently, even in the photograph in the newspaper), that she had Celtic origins. It is in the shape of the mouth possibly, or in the high forehead, or perhaps it is the eyes with their pale eyebrows.
    The second song is on now: “Angel Baby,” Rosie & The Originals. He loves Rosie’s nasal twang, is not sure they ever had another hit. Great slow beat on this one, though. For months after they left each