by Meg Donohue
No one had ever told me that they were proud of me. I looked around the table at the faces of my friends and felt their kindness envelop me. I longed to stay in that moment.
Still, my eyes brimmed with tears that refused to fall.
LATER, WHILE EMMA was giving Ronnie a tour of the house, I stepped onto the balcony. The night was cool but there was no wind. The sun had almost set. The Langfords’ view was of the Bay and the bridge, but a sliver of ocean was visible, too. Its presence in the distance always reminded me that my father had once thought of the ocean as an enormous, sleeping animal. I leaned against the railing and looked out toward it.
Within moments I was overcome by the sense that I was being watched. It was not a bad feeling, but on the contrary left me comforted. I thought of how after I learned that my mother had died falling from the cliff, I always felt her watching me when I stood on the beach. The feeling that I experienced in that moment on the Langfords’ balcony was similar: I was watched by someone who cared deeply for me.
I turned when I heard the door to the balcony open. It was Will, and he had a white blanket in his hand.
“I thought you might be cold.”
“Thank you.” He placed the blanket on my shoulders and then began to walk back inside. “Stay,” I said. “I’ve had enough of my own thoughts.”
He nodded and stood beside me. For a few moments we both looked out at the view.
“Did you ever finish A Moveable Feast?”
I turned to him in surprise. “Yes.” He had given me the book when he’d driven me back to Horseshoe Cliff, and I had it still. “I can’t believe you remember.”
“We had a conversation about Paris. I told you how I traveled with my friends around Europe.” He looked down at his hands, his expression suddenly pained. “I can’t tell you how many times I went over that conversation in my head afterward.”
“Really? Why?” I’d gone over it in my own mind countless times, but it had never once occurred to me that he might have done the same.
“Later, after I drove you home, I thought of how I must have sounded, talking to you about traveling through Europe when . . . when . . .”
I remembered studying his expression when he drove up to our cottage. I remembered how Bear had sat on the porch with his beer and barely moved, a dark mountain of resentment, of silent fury. Now that I had been away from Horseshoe Cliff for four years, I had a sense of how it must have appeared to Will. Run-down. Bleak. Battered by coastal winds and rain and the unrealized dreams of our sad, hopeful parents.
Fancy car, Bear had said as Will drove away.
“It’s been years,” I said. “All this time you’ve been upset with yourself for telling me that you traveled in college?”
“I wish I were as proud of my finest moments as I am ashamed of my mistakes.”
He gazed out into night, the lights of the houses below us, the Bay beyond. I liked how serious he appeared. Even when he wasn’t speaking, I sensed his mind at work.
“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I wouldn’t call that conversation a mistake. I enjoyed it. I’ve thought about it since then, too. And never in the way that you’re thinking. You made me wonder what my life could be like if I went to college. You inspired me. I wasn’t listening with closed ears. I knew you were speaking from a place of kindness. Right from the beginning, you were only kind to me.”
He turned toward me. “‘Closed ears,’” he echoed. “My mother is right about you. You speak like someone who loves words.”
Four years earlier, he had been nice to me, but distant. Now, he seemed more open. I thought that perhaps it was because I was older. I was a college graduate, and I had a job and an apartment. I was an adult.
“You know,” he said, taking a step closer to me, “that weekend was surprising in a lot of ways. I’ve never forgotten it. I hope you won’t mind me saying this, but meeting you made me realize how little I really knew of life. I’d been so immersed in my studies, and you . . . you were like a breath of fresh air.” My expression must have revealed my surprise because he looked momentarily stricken, then laughed. “Oh no. Did I just create a new moment to feel mortified about for the next four years?”
“No, no. It’s just I don’t think ‘breath of fresh air’ is how most people would have described me then. There wasn’t a big emphasis on oral hygiene in my childhood.”
His smile flashed and then was gone. “Oh, Merrow,” he said quietly, “you have no idea how lovely you were, do you?”
I looked out at the water. You’re disgusting, Bear whispered in my ear. I shivered. What would my brother say to me now, I wondered, in my green silk dress and golden heels, my hair as tame as it had ever been, the Langfords’ soft blanket draped over my shoulders?
Will cleared his throat. “It’s a beautiful night.” He rested his hands on the railing. “I’ve always loved the hills across the Bay at sunset. The way they seem to turn purple.”
I smiled. “‘The golden day is dying beyond the purple hill.’”
“Yeats?”
“No, it’s an old folk song. My father taught it to me when I was a child. This time of day reminds me of it.”
“Will you sing it?”
I had never been shy about singing. My voice was not beautiful, but it was mine, and my father had always told me that he loved to hear me sing.
“The golden day is dying beyond the purple hill,” I sang. “The lark that sang at dawning, in dusky wood is still.”
I closed my eyes and felt the salt wind of Horseshoe Cliff against my face as I sang. My father had taught me the song as a round. Years later, Amir and I had sung it together, echoing each other in a solemn, contented loop as we lay on the bluff at night with a canopy of stars overhead.
A tremble entered my voice on the last stanza.
“And soon above the meadow, the silver moon will swing. And where the wood is darkest, the whip-poor-will will sing.”
When I opened my eyes, Will was watching me, rapt.
“That was beautiful,” he said.
“Thanks.” I laughed. “I guess? I didn’t write it.”
He put his hand on mine and gave me a gentle smile. “You won’t let my compliments stick, will you?”
I was startled by his words but even more so by the electric sensation caused by his hand on mine. His eyes were a blue that made me think of a cloudless sky.
“I’ve never met anyone like you, Merrow,” he said then. “I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind.”
There was an urgency in his voice that drew me toward him. The wind rose off the Bay, swirling around us. I lifted my chin and pressed my lips to his. The blanket slipped from my bare shoulders, but it didn’t matter; Will’s arms were warm around mine.
Chapter Sixteen
That summer, Will took me on a two-week vacation to Italy. We had been dating for a little over two months, seeing each other mostly on weekends. Ronnie was surprised when I told her of our travel plans. She thought we were moving quickly. But I felt that I had known him for years. No matter how my time in the city had smoothed my rough edges, it could never cut away the gnarled parts of me that were rooted at Horseshoe Cliff. It comforted me that Will knew where I had come from, and that we had met in Osha.
It also comforted me that Will and Amir were nothing alike. Amir loved what was most familiar; Will was curious about the world and craved new experiences. Amir made art from instinct; Will admired art through the lens of a scholar. I had learned that I could not trust Amir, who had hidden within him a capacity for violence that I could hardly bear to think about. Will was upstanding and dependable.
But of course Amir had known so much trouble, while Will had known only peace.
“Who is paying for this trip?” Ronnie had asked, watching me pack.
She already knew the answer, so I didn’t respond.
“Merrow.”
I zipped my swimsuits into an inner pocket of my bag.
“Merrow!”
/> I looked up at her. “Listen,” I said. “I know you don’t like Will. But I do. What does it matter if he pays for our trip? He knows I’ve always wanted to travel. We talked about it when we first met, years ago. It makes him happy to be able to do something nice for me.”
“I bet it does. I’m sure it’s a heady feeling to have so much money that you can make someone’s dreams come true.”
“Ronnie, I’m excited to go away with him.” This was an understatement. I had been looking forward to the trip so much that I had hardly been able to sleep. It hurt me that Ronnie was not happy for me. “Please don’t ruin it.”
Her face softened. “I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t like Will. He’s nice. The whole family is nice. And the way he looks at you . . .”
“Yes?”
She hesitated. “It’s clear he really cares for you.”
I laughed. “So why do you sound so skeptical?”
“I don’t know. I’m not.” She ran her hand over a sundress that I had laid out on the bed and then stood. “Hang on.” She left the room, returning with one of her own dresses, a white one I had always loved. “Take this. It looks great on you.”
I thanked her, promising to take good care of it. Ronnie claimed that she didn’t know why she was skeptical of Will, but I thought I knew the answer. Since Will and I had started seeing each other, I was spending less and less time with her, and she did not like the growing distance between us.
Will had many friends, and my weekends had become filled with events at museums and restaurants and carefully decorated homes. When, at a dinner party several weeks earlier, Will had introduced me as a writer, I had felt a wave of pleasure move through me. I found myself telling the table memories from my earliest years at Horseshoe Cliff, when I’d had little for company but the sea, the land, and my father’s stories. Will’s friends’ attention dazzled me; I went on too long. Will watched me, his expression amused and—I thought—proud. But when at last I fell quiet, I was filled with regret. What would they think of me? At best, they would decide I was eccentric—at worst, downright odd. Within moments, though, Will put my fears to rest.
No one in this room has ever met anyone like you, he said, his hand low on my back as he whispered in my ear. And you’ve just made each one of them fall in love with you.
IN ITALY, OUR favorite thing to do was to get lost. In Rome, we wandered through the shadows cast by the ancient arches of the Colosseum. We walked the old streets and admired the stone buildings, the way the sun hit the red roofs at dusk. In Florence, we returned each afternoon to drink red wine in the most perfect little café that we would have missed if we had not happened to have wandered down one narrow, winding street and then, instead of turning back, wandered farther along another. In Venice, whenever we crossed a bridge, the light on the water compelled us to stop and take in the view. I felt in awe of the beauty that we saw everywhere we went.
The world was so large, and I had only seen such a small part of it. I had understood this the moment our plane had lifted into the air and the coast of California, which had always felt so powerfully large, fell quickly away from view. I had never felt so distant from Horseshoe Cliff, but for the first time in years, I did not feel homesick. In fact, I felt almost as though I were someone else entirely. In a foreign country, I stood apart from the young Merrow who had lived that peculiar, wild childhood with Amir and her vicious brother and the lonesome beauty of Horseshoe Cliff. It felt natural to evolve, to take on a new shape and outlook while traveling. It was not a shameful or even a particularly intentional shift. It felt like growing up.
Will had been to Italy many times before that trip, but he looked around with the same wide-eyed excitement that I felt. When we grew hungry, he never steered us in the direction of a particular restaurant unless I asked him to. He made me feel as though he were seeing Italy through fresh eyes, each turn a new discovery.
We were discovering each other as well, of course. Traveling was an aphrodisiac. We made love in the morning and again at night, falling asleep naked with the bedsheets twisted at our feet.
One morning, my happiness vanished when I awoke to find Will’s side of the bed empty. I listened for sounds from the bathroom but heard only the noises of Venice beyond the open window: a man calling to someone in Italian, water lapping against stone, the flap of wings. I sat upright.
“Will?”
There was no answer.
Panic swelled within me. For the first time in days, I thought of Bear and remembered how fragile happiness was, how easily stolen. I remembered then that the man who had checked us into the hotel had warned us of a rash of burglaries, advising us to store our passports and valuables in the safe. We were not to leave the window open.
We had left the window open all night! And now Will was gone. In my panic, these two events seemed connected. I ran to the window, but before I managed to shut it, I caught sight of Will strolling toward the hotel. He held a bouquet of flowers in his hands, a burst of pinks and oranges so bright that I was sure that even someone flying in an airplane far overhead would have spotted it and thought, What beautiful flowers!
“Will!” I was so relieved that I could not stop myself from yelling to him though I was naked and he was not alone on the walkway below.
He looked up, surprised, and when he saw me, he grinned and began to jog. I shut the window and locked it. When Will reached our room, he wrapped me in his arms and we toppled back onto the bed. I buried my face in his neck. Seeing my expression, he grew still, his brow furrowing.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I thought you’d left. Or . . . that something had happened to you.” I heard how odd this sounded and flushed. “The hotel clerk mentioned those robberies, and I just thought . . .” I trailed off. Really, what had I thought? Why had I panicked at the sight of the empty bed?
Will smiled. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I traced his jaw with my finger. I began to tell him how I had collected things when I was a child. My treasures, I had called them. They were only scraps of driftwood, stones with odd shapes or striations, sometimes an old button or a bit of string I’d found long buried in the dirt. Though I’d hidden my collections, storing them like an animal mindful of future hunger, they were always gone when I returned. For years, I thought I’d simply forgotten my hiding spots. I blamed myself for my losses. They were such little things, but I loved them so. And then, as I grew older, it was my books that went missing. I could not seem to keep track of them. And then my father died, and Bear sold the horses that had brought me such happiness. And then Bear kicked Pal, my dog, and I was convinced that the injury had led him to die in a fight with a coyote years later.
Will lay very still beside me, listening. “Your brother took those things that you loved.”
“He could not stand to see me happy. If something brought me happiness, he destroyed it.”
I did not mention Amir, and how Bear had treated him. It didn’t feel right to bring up Amir as I lay in bed beside Will, but this story was about him, too: because I had treasured him, Bear had hated him. Amir was always in my thoughts. I was sure that Will sensed this.
Will’s eyes moved back and forth between mine. How could someone who had grown up the way he had, loved by a family like his, understand? His arms enveloped me, but I felt alone. My heart sunk.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said again.
It wasn’t enough. He didn’t understand. And how could he when I barely understood myself? I felt myself pulling away from him.
“Merrow,” he said quietly. “Bear isn’t here. He can’t take me from you . . . unless you let him.”
This was true. I felt Bear’s presence so deeply that it was nearly impossible to convince myself he wasn’t in the room with us, that he had not followed me across the globe to steal my good fortune. I could not let my memory of things he had done to me as a child pull me away from Will.
This was my hap
piness, and I had a right to it.
Will brushed my hair off my forehead. I kissed him. I slipped my hand under his shirt and felt the warmth of his skin. He moved his hands down my body, pulling me closer to him. I felt a new sense of desperation as I kissed him, a need to feel more than think. His shirt was off and then his pants and I rocked against him, losing myself to those moments with him when our bodies were connected, my cries ones of pleasure.
Later, when we stumbled blearily from the hotel room and found a café that offered a late breakfast, I told Will that the strange thing was that Bear hated to see me happy, but he also hated to see me sad.
“Or at least, he hated to see me cry,” I said. “It made him angry.”
Will put down his fork. He reached across the table and took my hand. “What do you mean, ‘angry’?”
I blinked. I had never told anyone, but why? For the first time, I felt I understood what a disservice Amir and I had done to ourselves to keep Bear’s treatment a secret for all those years. What good had it done us? In the end, we had still wound up separated, and far from home. It had been four years since Amir had disappeared.
“He hit me, sometimes. Or pushed me. But mostly he found other ways to punish me.” I thought for a moment. “The really terrible thing, more than how he hurt me, was the fear I lived with even when he wasn’t hurting me. I rarely felt safe. It was always more psychological than it seemed at the time. Nothing felt stable. I loved my home and I hated it. I even loved Bear at the same moment that I hated him. It was confusing.” I cleared my throat. “And it was always worse for Amir. Always.”
“Oh, Merrow. I’m so sorry. Didn’t anyone see what was happening? I wish I could go back in time. I wish I’d known.”
