by Sarah Blake
Evie couldn’t move.
“And Len and I got in a boat and rowed away.”
Evie drew out her breath.
“And later, that’s where they found Moss,” he finished.
“At the end of the Island?”
He nodded.
Evie turned away.
Reg stared straight ahead, his arms clasped around his chest, his feet up on the bench, seeing nothing in that moment. Nothing but Moss.
“Why would it be there, then, that my mother wants her ashes buried?”
Slowly, Reg looked at her.
“What do you mean?”
“She wants her ashes put under a stone out there. A stone that says ‘Here.’”
Dear God. Reg stared at Joan and Len’s child. My heart. There is no end, is there? Below the one story, there was this other. A plank dropped down another floor, and there he was. This was why he had come. And something Jimmy had said to him long, long ago, something he’d thought he’d understood, he understood again. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
“Just say it,” Evie said softly, looking at him. Directly at him. Ready. “I’m so tired of the quiet.”
* * *
“DO YOU KNOW, it’s yours,” she said, after he told her that second story. “Uncle Moss’s share of this place—my grandmother has asked us to give to you.”
He straightened. “Moss’s share?”
“She left it up to us,” Evie went on, wanting to be truthful, not wanting to let themselves off the hook, “to decide.”
“Ha,” he said softly. “What would I do with a share in this much sorrow? I have enough of my own.”
“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you.”
“But you have.”
“Not right away.” She shook her head and gave him a slight, sad smile. “It was the one thing we all could agree on.”
“Not telling me?”
“Not even wanting to find you. As if somehow maybe you’d just go away if we didn’t do anything.”
“Ha,” Reg said again. “The old story.”
“It wasn’t meant to be hurtful. We just didn’t want to have to decide.”
He raised his eyebrow.
She held his gaze.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said after a moment. “I don’t want any part of it. Not the Island, nor the gesture. Your grandmother’s guilty conscience has tangled me up with all the dead.”
“But must it only be guilt?” Evie crossed her arms, looking at him. “Couldn’t she also mean it clean? Couldn’t she have wanted to recognize your friendship? Couldn’t she have wanted to do something good?”
“Good,” he repeated flatly.
She nodded, frowning. “Isn’t it possible? Now, and here?”
He looked at her. “Even if it were possible, why would I want it? Any part of it? You heard what it all is—why would anyone want to hold on to it? Why would you?”
She looked down the lawn. There were no boats on the water. The weather vane on the boathouse roof swung lazily round.
“Because it’s mine,” she said. “They are mine.”
He studied her. “All of it? All of them?”
She faced him.
“Yes,” she said, understanding. “All of it.”
Reg looked at her a moment, and then an enormous open smile broke upon his face. “Well, you can keep your share and have mine, too. I give it right back to you.”
She stared back at him and then, caught up in the breeze of his smile, started shaking her head, and finally laughing out loud.
“Who’s talking about shares?” Charlie came around the corner of the house, the tea tray in his hands.
Forty-five
THEY WALKED CHARLIE and Reg and Posy down to the boat, and after they’d waved goodbye, as the boat turned from the dock in a wide circle and sped away toward the mainland, Evie pulled on her mother’s thick black boots and picked her way down to the cove for mussels. She hoisted the bucket onto the granite rock covered in barnacles and waded in. The water poured through the hole in the front toe of her boot, making her gasp as she walked deeper, toward the spot where the clumps of mussels lay just below the clear surface.
The water was icy cold around her wrist as she grabbed for the nearest bunch, pulling it straight up, tearing each mussel off the clump, testing it, and turning to toss it into the bucket, where it fell with a clatter. The tide sucked slowly backward as she worked. The lobstermen slowed through the Narrows, the day done, heading with their hauls into town. When she looked up, one of them waved. She lifted her arm in greeting, pushed her hat back off her forehead, and bent again into the water.
“What will you do now?” Reg Pauling had asked her as they shook hands goodbye. “With all of this.”
“I don’t know,” she answered truthfully, looking at him.
He studied her a minute.
“That’s a start,” he answered. And smiled, releasing her hand.
“I hope you’ll consider my offer,” Charlie had said. “Pass it along to your cousins.”
Min nodded. “It’s very generous.”
“It would be a way for you to keep all of this.” He nodded. “Think about it.”
All of this. Evie thought, hearing the echo. Her mother. Her father. Her grandfather. All of them. And a brother. She shook her head. All of them here in this place now. What they had done. And not done. All of it.
We repeat what we don’t know, Paul had said that night with Daryl. The night he had shown her the photograph.
And standing in the frigid water, Evie was suddenly and completely filled with a great unreasoning joy that shot through her like a shaft of light. She was here. She knew it now. A Milton. And not. Solid and alive. No more than that.
The empty water before her stretched wide and silent to the sea. She bent again, searching for the mussels with her hands, pulling them from the rocks below the surface and walking them to the big black bucket to drop them in.
When she looked up, a lobster boat coming from the mainland had started to slow as it entered the Narrows. She bent down again.
When she looked up the next time, there he was.
“Paul?” she cried. Seth!” She caught sight of his head moving along the railing. “You’re here early!”
“Hi, Mom.” He leaned over.
“It’s you.” Evie put her hand up to shield her eyes, loving the sight of the two of them.
“Hey,” Paul said, grinning. “Get out of the water.”
Dazed, Evie pulled herself out of the muck and carted the bucket of mussels up the beach to the boathouse. Seth had already started up the lawn to the Big House. Paul was waiting in the grass.
“Hey.” Paul pulled her into his arms.
He felt so good against her. She had forgotten how good it felt to be held. She closed her eyes and drank in his smell.
“Hey,” he said quietly.
She caught hold of his belt loops but didn’t answer.
She had walked all the way to the end, past the end. And she wanted to turn around and come home. She wanted to feel the tug again homeward, the invisible ties. She wanted this man. She wanted Paul. Her mother was dead. Her father was dead. And Len Levy. Dead too. There was no more to know. She was free. She looked up into Paul’s face.
There was so much to say to him.
Seth came out of the front door and stood under the lilac, waiting for them to walk up the hill.
“Glad to be here?” she called.
He nodded happily. “My rock collection is still here.”
“Of course it’s here,” Min remarked, coming around the side of the house. “Nothing changes.”
She hugged Seth and kissed Paul on the cheek.
“Not exactly,” teased Paul, pulling back and looking up at the house. “The place looks terrible.”
“Thank you very much,” said Evie dryly. “We’ve been working all week.”
�
�I can see that.” He arched his eyebrow.
“Okay, it’s a little tired,” Evie agreed. “But freshened.”
He pulled open the screen door.
“And there still isn’t one comfortable place to sit,” he observed, carrying the bucket of mussels into the kitchen, where he dumped them into the pantry sink.
* * *
AFTER DINNER, SHE and Paul walked down to the dock and stood at the end, holding hands.
“You were right, you know,” she said quietly, “about the photograph.”
“Evie.” He was wary.
She nodded. “And about Pops’s business. All of it.”
He didn’t say anything for a long while.
“I met Reg Pauling today,” she began. With him listening beside her, all that she had heard that afternoon, all that had happened, circled round and landed fully. Telling Paul made the full history real. There could be no more quiet.
When she had finished, Paul took her by her shoulders and turned her toward him, pulling her against him.
“What do you want to do?” he asked into her hair.
She shook her head and let herself be held.
“It’s not just them here, Paul,” she said after a little. “We’re all here, you realize. It’s my past.” She looked up at him. “And yours. Ours. Seth’s. This is his, too. This place holds all the pieces.”
“Ours?”
“Yes,” she said. “Whether we have it or not.”
* * *
THEY TOOK JOAN’S ashes down to the picnic grounds to bury her the following evening. Seth carried the wicker basket with the Scotch and the Dubonnet and the stackable plastic cups from the eighties that had cracked but still held the cold. Anne and Eddie Fenwick had come across, and Paul dug a hole deep enough and wide enough to set Joan’s ashes in. Carefully, Evie leaned over and placed the box in the spot, sat back on her heels, and threw a handful of dirt on top. No one spoke. Not even Aunt Anne. Then Seth squatted down beside his mother and slid some dirt on top. Then Paul. And Min. And slowly, very slowly, Anne.
When the hole was halfway filled, Evie set the stone on top. And then she filled in around it with more dirt.
Here.
She stood up.
“I feel like we ought to water it.” She smiled at Min, standing across from her.
Paul found Evie’s hand and took it in his and slid it into his pocket as they all turned around to lay out cocktails. They had decided to steam the mussels down there, and Evie realized they’d forgotten matches and ran back up to the house to get them, and saw on the windowsill beside them Charlie’s spoon where she’d tossed it yesterday. She slid it into her pocket.
When she arrived back down at the picnic grounds, she caught sight of Seth standing apart from the others, facing the water, his hands in his back pockets. Alone.
There had been a day in the winter, an ordinary school day when she was walking with him after school. She had asked about his day and he had answered. She had tucked her hand in his elbow and they walked loosely in their coats. It hadn’t been too cold. They fell into the sturdy silence that always lay between them. And why just then, why that moment was the moment in which she understood quite suddenly her own death, she couldn’t say. Simply, she saw how he would miss her. She saw the middle-aged man he would become, struck dumb by the memory of this moment, of her beside him, his mother, asking him about his day. She could see it almost as clearly as if the future were her memory. And her heart pealed for her son, for what was coming that she could not put out her hand and protect him from. She would have done anything to keep him from the hole where there used to be her face turned to his, listening.
And she saw now, though he would miss her, that he could not know her completely, standing behind him on the picnic grounds watching. If he turned to look at her, he wouldn’t see her. This unknowing would go on and on.
Beyond him stretched the waters of the Narrows, blackening as the sun settled down. Blackening and moving always toward the sea. It was the cocktail hour and the grown-ups were drinking. The tall boy stood with his back to the grown-ups, looking out.
Evie had stood this way countless times. Waiting for the grown-ups to finish their drinks, their talk. Waiting for this part to be over so the next could start. She had a sharp, sudden memory of her mother standing behind her when she was a child, just there, and watching her, leaning against one of the old picnic tables, still well, still young, her low contralto laugh escaping. Mum.
And Evie was the grown-up now. She was in the line of grown-ups behind the child. Her eye rested on Joan’s stone there at the edge of the clearing. She walked to it and then walked out past it and onto the rocks that stretched beyond.
And there, almost at the end, she leaned and carefully set down Len Levy’s spoon.
Slowly, she rose, still facing the water. The evening sun was warm on her skin, and a tern raced the thread of gold stretching across the reach of the sky. The grasses whispered in the small breeze. As they would in fifty years. And she would not be there to hear them. She turned around. Aunt Anne and Uncle Eddie sat on the bench, deep in conversation with Paul. Min had her hands on both hips, her head bent listening. And past them, down the way, Seth crouched and picked up a stone, then stood and hurled it in one long, fluid arc to the sea.
“We vanish,” Evie whispered.
Acknowledgments
I spent most of the years of writing this book writing in the dark, writing my way toward something I wasn’t quite sure was possible to see, let alone say. Throughout those years, the guidewire, the voice in that dark—challenging, loving, sustaining—was that of the poet Claudia Rankine. This book would simply not have come to be without our conversations. For her nearly thirty years of friendship, I remain in gratitude, alongside.
Readers give a writer eyes to see. And I am lucky enough to have had great readers through the many stages of this book’s becoming: my sister Elinor Blake, Venetia Butterfield, Maud Casey, Katherine Dunbar, Ivan Held, Howard Norman, Linda Parshall, Diana Phillips, Claudia Rankine, Deb Schecter, Shields Sundberg—and Joshua Weiner, my more than reader.
I was inspired by the work of several writers and artists as I wrote this book. Professor Sarah McNamer opened the window on the world of medieval anchoresses for me. Her theory of ancrene marriage underlies Hazel Graves’s. The stumble stones that Paul photographs refer to the Stolpersteine project, conceived and carried out by the German artist Gunter Demnig, beginning in 1992 and continuing to this day. A. O. Scott’s pitch-perfect phrase “everyday wickedness,” describing nineteenth-century slavery, is from his October 6, 2016, review of Nate Parker’s movie The Birth of a Nation in The New York Times. On their first date, Joan quotes two lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Recuerdo.”
I am so grateful to have been given both time and place by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Corporation of Yaddo while I was at work on this book, and I will be forever grateful to my cousins Harold Janeway and George Montgomery for their tenacity in finding a way to hold on to the island, and for their continued stewardship, carrying it forward.
Anna Worrall and Ellen Coughtrey at the Gernert Company have been always at the ready with answers and perspective, for which I am so appreciative. Caroline Bleeke, Bethany Reis, and Conor Mintzer at Flatiron Books prove that one can mix editorial rigor with great good humor, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart for all their attention.
And finally, for the two without whom my books would never be made—Stephanie Cabot, agent, warrior, friend, who listens deeply, and exhorts fiercely, and Amy Einhorn, who never once shies from asking every possible question of a scene or a sentence, but whose patient faith in the work girds me and spurs me on—there are not thanks enough.
Recommend The Guest Book for your next book club!
Reading Group Guide available at
www.readinggroupgold.com
ALSO BY SARAH BLAKE
Grange House
The Pos
tmistress
About the Author
Sarah Blake is the author of the novels Grange House and the New York Times bestseller The Postmistress. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two sons. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
The Anchoress
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
A Cappella
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
The Island
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
