by Anita Shreve
He’d driven to the beach then. Straight across the bridge to the dunes. He’d walked the spit in its entirety, the air clean and chill, the sea gradually becoming rougher than it had been during the hours before dawn. He liked the sun on his face, even though it gave off little warmth. On his way back along the beach, in his crumpled suit and overcoat and soiled shirt, he walked at the edge of the hard sand left by the tide and thought of Winston. And when he thought of Winston, he was immediately mired in the imponderables left in the wake of his pronouncement to his wife: Who would keep Winston now? Himself? His children? And with those questions, immediately there were others: Where would he live in the interim until Siân could get free? Would she want to get free? Where would his wife and children live when the house was foreclosed? How could he keep his business going if the business was located in a house he could no longer enter? Did he have a business left at all? And how was he going to pay for everything?
The questions made him dizzy. Or perhaps it was his hunger. He hadn’t eaten anything since the eclectic dinner of Christmas Eve. (Was that really only the night before? he wondered in amazement; it seemed as though days had intervened.) And like Harriet, he had not touched the pancakes at breakfast. It was—he looked around him for the sun—what time now? He minded that he hadn’t thought to collect his watch when he was in the house earlier. He thought it must be midafternoon, three o’clock, perhaps later. He’d driven then to a bar outside town where he knew he would not be recognized, had a sandwich there and a couple of beers in the company of the saddest men he thought he had ever seen, and when he’d emerged it was dark. Dark enough so that he could return to the motel and imagine that the day was over, dark enough to wish the day behind him.
He’d slept briefly, woken with a start. He called the motel owner to find out the time, was disheartened to learn that it was only seven-thirty in the evening. He’d driven back then to the Qwik Stop, bought another six-pack along with a toothbrush and a razor and, for good measure, a package of over-the-counter sleeping pills. If he didn’t sleep tonight, he thought, he would go mad.
He had slept, fitfully, twenty minutes at a time, once waking up in the midst of a nightmare in which his house was floating in the bay and he could see Winston in a lower window, drowning. He’d had another dream, a sort of erotic nightmare, in which he and Siân were making love in his marital bed when Hadley entered the room. He’d woken from this dream with his shirt soaked. He’d sat up quickly, stripped the shirt from his skin, had a shower. In the shower, he determined that it was perhaps better after all not to sleep, spent the rest of the night until dawn sitting in the dark in the only chair in the room, finishing the rest of the beers.
It is ten minutes to ten now; he knows from the clock in the Cadillac, the clock still keeping accurate time after 140,000 miles. He is parked beside the best-situated phone booth in town, a booth at the back of a small fish market at the end of a pier in the harbor. It is a phone people seldom use, chiefly fishermen calling home to their wives. In the half-dozen times he has called her from here, the only sounds he has had to compete with are the slapping of the waves along the dock, the frenzied cries of gulls looking for chum.
His heart racing, his fingers shaking more from nerves than from lack of sleep, he punches in the digits of her phone number, then his credit card. The phone rings once, twice, three times. He prays fervently and rapidly that her husband is out of the house. He brushes the hair from his forehead, looks around him from habit. The dock is deserted, this day after Christmas.
She answers tentatively, as she almost always does.
“Siân,” he says with enormous relief. He is afraid for a moment that he might actually begin to weep with relief.
“Charles.”
“I thought I’d go out of my mind if you didn’t answer,” he says in a rush.
“Oh . . .” Her voice sounds guarded, careful.
“What is it?” he asks. “Is your husband there in the room?”
“No,” she says, in a voice she might use to give information to a woman friend, an acquaintance. “My husband’s brother is here with his family.” She pauses. “Visiting . . .,” she says carefully.
“Siân, listen to me. You don’t have to say anything. I’ll do the talking. But there’s something very important I have to tell you.”
“What?”
“I’ve told my wife.”
“What?”
“I’ve told my wife.”
There is a long pause at her end.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve told my wife that I’m in love with you. That I’m leaving her.”
The pause this time is so long he thinks she may have hung up the phone. Finally he hears her say, quietly, under her breath, as if she had turned her head away from the people in the room, “Oh, no.” She repeats this—two low, sonorous syllables. “Oh, no.”
“It’s done.”
“No,” she says, again quietly. “No.”
“Siân, it’s done. It’s over.”
“What happened? Why?” she asks, her voice rising.
“It was awful. Just awful.”
“You can’t . . .,” she says.
He waits. “What?”
“Listen,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “You have to get it back. You have to talk to her, get her to take you back. You can’t have done this. We can’t have done this.”
“Siân, it’s done. I couldn’t live that way. I couldn’t keep lying, whatever happened. I’m not telling you you have to leave your husband. I’m just telling you what I had to do.”
“I know. I know.”
“Well, then.”
“I can’t talk now. Something’s happened,” she whispers. She says, in a louder voice, “So how was your Christmas?”
“When can I talk to you? When can I call?”
“You can’t. Not today. I’ll write.”
“Write! I’ll go out of my mind waiting for a letter. Let me call you later.”
“No, you can’t. You don’t understand.” And again, in a louder voice, “Lily is fine.”
“OK, OK. But promise me this. You’ll write today.”
“Yes.”
“And send it Express. I’ll get it tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“And listen, take down this number. It’s the motel where I’m staying. Just in case. Call me anytime you can. From a phone booth. Any hour.”
“OK.”
“Siân, I love you.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to hang up.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to let you go.”
He hangs up the phone, unable to say goodbye. He picks it up immediately, hears the buzz of the dial tone. He stands with the phone in his hand, unable to move, reluctant to replace the receiver.
He looks out toward the end of the dock, takes a great gulp of air. What could possibly have happened that she needs to tell him about?
He replaces the receiver, walks to his car. He hits the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. There is nothing he can do but wait, a task at which he is remarkably poor. He has all but promised her he will not call her again. He could hear the fear in her voice. Something is very wrong, and she can’t tell him what it is.
He puts the car in gear, heads down High Street, thinks of driving west to Pennsylvania. Instead he passes the street on which he used to live, makes the turn. He sees his house; Harriet’s station wagon is not there. He takes a chance, pulls the Cadillac into the driveway. He hears no sounds, sees no faces in the windows. When he opens the kitchen door, the silence is complete: Not even Winston is here, bounding out to greet him as he normally would. Charles looks at the disarray in the family room—children’s toys strewn about, abandoned. On the counter in the kitchen is a note in Harriet’s hand: “We’re at my sister’s. I don’t know when we’ll be back.”
Charles picks up the note, walks to his study, at the front of the
house. Of course he understands why she has left with the children: she cannot bear the house now, a house so full of memories, a house she cannot have. He wonders if he should call, decides he should not, not today anyway. He hasn’t planned on coming here, hasn’t planned on working, but as long as he is here, he wonders if he oughtn’t to try to get something done—something to while away the hours until Harry Noonan opens the post office tomorrow. He could fill some cartons with his papers so that he could sort through them back at the motel Or perhaps, with Harriet and the children gone, he could work here for a couple of hours, listen to his messages, return the most important calls, get out some mail.
He enters his study, sees immediately another note on his desk. In his coat, he sits in his office chair, picks it up. It is written in purple crayon, on the back of a piece of his business stationery. The handwriting is Jack’s.
He crumples the note in his fist, looks out his study window to the yard, where he can see the long rope swing he threw over the walnut for Hadley and the others. In the silence of his study, he opens the note, reads again the childlike scrawl.
The note contains only one word, a question.
Why?
The house was full of people, Stephen’s brother and his wife, their children. They were solicitous and guarded. They wanted to ask, but did not, what exactly it was that had caused Stephen to be in the barn with a gun on Christmas Day. Stephen, in the hospital, would not say. Lily was told only that there’d been an accident.
I wrote the letter to you, as you had asked, and put it in the mail. I knew when I wrote it that it was irrevocable, and, when I mailed it, that it was irretrievable. I knew, too, that if a heart can be said to be broken, this letter would break your heart, because it had broken mine. And yet love—the love that we shared so briefly—lodges not in the heart but in the brain, and with the brain there are always thoughts, always memories.
The afternoon I handed the Express Mail package to the woman behind the counter at the post office, it seemed to me that I was giving over to her a great secret, forfeiting a mystery.
The next morning, the house still full of people, I dressed my daughter and put her in the car. We needed milk, cereal, eggs, bread for toast, and coffee. I did not want to think about when your post office would open, about how you would find the red-white-and-blue package, about how you would rip it apart, take it to your car. I did not want to think about your face when you had read the letter.
The A&P was not crowded; some early morning shoppers like myself, looking for their breakfast or thinking to get this chore done early. I put Lily in the basket in the cart, started down the aisles. Overhead was the piped-in music, a lazy drone I barely heard. I put bananas and oranges into the cart, potatoes for dinner. In another aisle, the next, I found cereal and coffee, put them idly in. I opened Lily’s coat, I remember, shook open my own. It was hot inside the store; we were overdressed.
In the third aisle, the refrigerator aisle, I saw at its end a worker, a tall boy with pimples, in a white coat, whose task it was that morning to put prices on the orange juice, restack the eggs. I headed down the aisle, picked up a hefty gallon of milk, some yogurt, a container of cottage cheese. I was thinking about whether it would be more economical in the long run, since there were so many people in the house, to purchase cans of frozen orange juice rather than the brand in the carton that I preferred, when I heard the song.
Perhaps a bar or two had passed before it registered, before it stopped me, there in the middle of the aisle. I listened to its melody, its words, a simple pop song of no consequence to anyone else in the store, yet to me, at that moment, it was a call across the years, a cry across three states.
I began soundlessly to mouth the words. Lily looked up at me and smiled, then stopped smiling when she saw that I was crying. I put sound to the words, a hesitant, cracked sound that was something like singing. The boy, the teenage boy with pimples at the end of the aisle, heard my unfelicitous voice, saw me standing paralyzed with my shopping cart in the aisle. Another woman, an older woman with tight gray curls and wearing what we used to call a loden coat, turned the corner into the aisle, looked first at the boy, then at me, to see what was the matter. My voice is terrible; I am not a singer. But I didn’t care. What was there to be ashamed of, what was there to lose? I opened my mouth wider. I sang as if were not normally chagrined by my voice, I sang as if I had wanted to belong to a band all my life, I sang as though the song were a prayer and I a priest, begging for its meaning.
The song—a simple song with enigmatic words and lovely flourishes—finished abruptly, leaving me stranded in the aisle to no applause.
I picked up Lily, abandoned the cart with all that I had put into it. I carried Lily to the front of the store, looked frantically for a phone booth. It was twenty past eight. I had to reach you before you went to the post office. I was crazed, intent. I was crying too—I didn’t care. I yelled up to the manager, in his booth above the shoppers, to let me use the phone. He said there was a pay phone just outside the store, around the corner. I ran with Lily past the startled woman at the register, ran past the long line of carts, found the phone booth against the wall. I put Lily down, reached for quarters in the bottom of my pocketbook. Lily started to wander away; I put my leg around her, held her to me I found the piece of paper in my wallet, punched in numbers, fed the box with quarters as if it were a child you wanted to keep quiet with cookies.
The phone rang. A man answered. I asked for you. He said that there were no phones in the rooms, but he would be glad to give you the message. I told him very carefully what the message was: Don’t open the letter. Go directly to The Ridge. I would meet you there.
I made the motel manager repeat the message. I told him it was essential that he give it to you. Essential. He said that he would walk straight over to your room, give it to you now, and that if you weren’t there, he would watch for you, give it to you himself, in person, when you returned.
I thanked him, hung up the phone. I put Lily in the car, drove back to the house.
They were all in the kitchen, waiting for their breakfast, astonished I had returned without the milk and coffee. I said Hello and then Excuse me, and I ran upstairs to the attic.
In the attic, in addition to the trunk that had traveled from Springfield to Dakar and back to the farm, there were cardboard cartons of belongings from my father’s attic that he had given to me several years before. The cartons had been placed along a far wall, behind other trunks, other boxes, in a position that had all but guaranteed their never being opened again. But I was on a mission, determined. No trunk was too large, no object insurmountable. I shifted heavy boxes, wedged myself in. I thought for a moment I might not get out. I made my way to the far wall where the cartons were.
When I reached them, I tore open their tops, upended the boxes onto the attic floor. There were showers of school papers and mementos. In one carton, I heard a promising clink. At the carton’s bottom was a box of childhood jewelry—ropes of beads, a pin from the National Honor Society, a handful of gaudy rings. And there, tangled with a necklace, green and sticky with a substance that might thirty years ago have been Kool-Aid, I found the bracelet.
I held it in my hand, as if it were an ancient amulet I had excavated, its worth beyond understanding.
I put it on my wrist.
I went quickly downstairs to where the others were gathered. I hugged Lily, told her to stay with Stephen’s brother’s family. I told Stephen’s brother I might be gone most of the day; it was important. Before he could think to protest, I ran out the door to the car.
I drove seventy, eighty miles an hour, hoping you wouldn’t get there before me.
The lawns around The Ridge that day were covered in snow, a pristine snow with a crust that had not yet been trampled upon. I was sure that you would come. I remember feeling exhilarated with the knowledge that you would come, that within an hour or two you would be there with me. I did not precisely know how it would w
ork, but I felt somehow that it would. We would talk, we would hold each other, and we would invent a life.
I thought that I would go for a walk around the inn, perhaps down to the lake. Then I went inside, asked the man at the desk, who knew me, if there was still the badminton court I remembered from childhood. He looked surprised, said yes, the court was still there, though not set up now, of course. But I could walk there if I wanted to. I told him I would like that. He gave me directions. It was across the lawn, down to the left. Behind a hedge. A flat grassy field in the summer, with a bench. I’d know it by the stone bench with the carvings, he said.
I walked across the lawn, making virgin footprints in the snow.
I found the hedge, covered with a thick frosting. I found the bench by the field, brushed off the snow with my gloved hands. I sat on the bench.
I looked across the grassy court, now covered with snow. The sun made a billion brilliant specks on the crust.
I looked across the grassy court. It was summer, and we were children.
And it was then, finally, that I could see it all.
A GUST CATCHES the metal motel door, slams it hard on his fingers. Charles winces, retrieves the door, pushes it against the wind, closes it. His topcoat billows out behind him. He bends into the gale, walking quickly to his car. In the parking lot, bits of debris and dust swirl and eddy, sending grit into the air, into his eyes. The ferocity of the wind surprises him, considering the clarity of the day. Overhead, evergreens sway and bend. A freak storm—a blow without the clouds.
He shuts the door, feels the sanctuary of the car, the quiet as well as the calm. He looks at his fingers, the bruised knuckles, the middle finger swelling already. Checking in the rearview mirror, he sees that his hair is wild about his head. He tries to comb it with his fingers. He notices, too, that his eyes are bloodshot—from too much beer, no doubt, but also from an almost superhuman lack of sleep. He cannot remember the last time he slept a whole night through, cannot really remember the last time he slept more than two hours straight. His face feels grainy, stretched, even though he has just shaved.
