MARRIN’S LANDING

The cabin had been advertised as rustic, which she now understood to be a word that meant the roof leaked in two places and the stove had opinions.

It stood at the end of a gravel road, two miles south of a town that was itself hardly a town: a gas station, a post office, a diner called the Tidewater, and a hardware store with a stuffed salmon over the door. The place was named Marrin's Landing, after a man who had drowned there in 1911. The sign at the turnoff gave the population as 212. Someone had crossed it out in marker and written 211.

She had paid for three months in advance, in cash, to a woman with a ponytail and an enormous ring of keys, who had counted the bills with her thumb and said, "Honeymoon?"

"Writing retreat," said Win.

"Oh, how nice. What do you write?"

"Claims."

The woman had looked at her blankly, and then laughed, as if it were a joke, and handed over the keys. It was the first lie Win had told in Oregon, and she was pleased with how well it had gone. It was nearly true.

…

There were two rooms and a porch.

The main room held a woodstove, a table with three chairs that did not match, a sagging green couch, and a kitchen the size of a closet. Through a door was the bedroom, with a narrow iron bed under a quilt that smelled of cedar and other people's summers. There was a bathroom, which she did not look at too closely. And outside, on the porch, a pair of salt-bleached chairs faced a long gray beach, across which the Pacific came in all day, in rows, with a sound like someone endlessly turning the pages of an enormous book.

She sat in one of the chairs on the first evening with the quilt round her shoulders and a cup of tea going cold on the rail, and watched the light go out of the water.

It went slowly. First the sky went the color of a peach; then of a bruise; then of ash. The sea held the last of it like a coin held in a fist. A line of pelicans went by, low, in single file, skimming the swell. The wind brought her a smell that she had not smelled since a terrace on Long Island, on the night a man in a black suit had said that he wished to be frightened: iodine and kelp, cold iron, wet stone.

Of course, thought Win. Of course it smells like that.

She had chosen the sea for the oldest reason in the world. She had wanted to look at something larger than herself. It had not occurred to her, until the wind turned, that she'd chosen the one smell on earth that would make her unable to look at anything else.

She pulled the quilt up round her chin.

Ten, she thought. Nine.

It wasn't pain. It was only habit. But she counted anyway, all the way down, and the sea went on turning its pages, and at the bottom she found she was still there.

…

By the second week she knew the rules.

The rules were the ones the body makes. It does not announce them; it only enforces them, one at a time, like a landlord. She could not eat before noon. She could not eat much after four. The pale-blue pill at seven and the white pill at seven-thirty and the small brown one, with its terrible little sleeve of foil, at any hour it chose. She could walk to the end of the beach and back, if she went slowly, and if she stopped twice. She could not carry anything heavier than a bag of groceries. She could not sleep lying down flat.

She could not look in the mirror in the morning, because her eyes were turning.

It was not dramatic. It was a faint, uniform, parchment tinge, like old piano keys, in the whites; and the skin of her face had taken it up, so that in a certain light she looked like a person in a very good sepia photograph. The itching had begun on her shins and the soles of her feet. She scratched herself raw at night, in the iron bed, in the dark, and woke in the morning with her nightgown spotted with blood.

She had known it was coming. She had read about it. She had sat in her cubicle at Hartwell Mutual and adjudicated forty such cases, in the ordinary course of business, in a vague gray prose: progressive hepatic failure; terminal cholestasis. She'd had a form for it. She had thought of it as a stage in a process, like a signature or a stamp.

She had not known that it would smell.

It was faint, sweetish. It was in the bathroom, in the sheets, in her own hair when she lay with her face in the pillow. A thin sour note, like fruit left too long in a bowl. She washed her hair every day, in the cabin's trickling shower, until her scalp ached, and it was always there at the end.

That's the thing nobody tells you, she thought, one gray noon, standing in the steam with her forehead against the tile. They say "dignity." They say "peace." They put it on the brochure with a picture of an old lady's hand in a young one.

Nobody puts the smell on the brochure.

She thought of her mother, who had refused until the last week to let anyone change the sheets; who had said, over and over, in that small apologetic voice, I'm so sorry, Winnie. I'm so sorry to be a bother. She had been twenty-two. She had washed her mother's hair in a plastic basin with a cup, and said, You're no bother, Mom, and meant it.

You were right, she told her now, silently, to the tile. I'm sorry. I didn't know. I thought you were being polite.

It wasn't politeness. It was shame.

It was shame, and I'm so sorry, and I understand.

…

The knock came on the eleventh day.

She was lying on the green couch with a book open on her chest, not reading it, listening to the rain; and it was the sort of knock that did not ask. Three raps, flat, unhurried, with the bottom of a fist. A pause. Then a voice through the wood, low and dry and perfectly unembarrassed.

"I've got soup. If you'd rather I went away, say so, and I'll leave it on the step."

Win lay quite still.

A neighbor, she thought. I have no neighbors. The nearest house was a quarter-mile up the road, behind a stand of Sitka spruce; she had seen a light in it twice. She considered the possibility of lying very quiet, and the woman going away.

"I can hear you breathing," said the voice. "It's a thin wall."

Win laughed. She didn't mean to. It came out as a cough, and the cough turned into the other thing, and she had to sit up and press the heel of her hand to her side and wait for it to pass. The knock came again, gentler.

"Door's not locked," she managed. "Come in."

…

The woman who came in was sixty, or near it. She was short and square and weathered, with a cap of cropped white hair and a face like a good piece of driftwood: lined, brown, strong-boned, with a pair of very pale blue eyes. She wore a man's yellow rain slicker and rubber boots, and she carried a cast-iron pot with both hands, wrapped in a dish-towel. She came in, shook out the slicker on the mat, set the pot on the stove, and then turned and looked at Win.

It was a long look. It took in the quilt, the pillow, the book, the hand pressed to the flank; it took in the color of the skin, and the color of the eyes. It took in, Win thought, the way the room was arranged: the pill bottles in a line on the table, the stool by the couch, the bucket under it. It took in all of it in perhaps four seconds, with the unhurried thoroughness of a customs officer, and when it was done there was no pity in it at all.

There was only recognition.

"Nell Ostrander," said the woman. "I'm in the yellow house. You're the one who rented the Halloran place."

"Win."

"Win." She nodded. "Chicken and rice. It's not fancy. I put in a lot of ginger, because I thought you might be off your food."

"That's kind."

"It's not kind. I've got a freezer full and nobody to give it to." She took a bowl from the shelf, as if she had known where it was, and ladled. "Eat what you can. Leave the rest. I'll ask you something, and you can tell me to mind my own business."

"All right."

"How long were you told?"

It was said so evenly, so entirely without drama, that the question had gone into the room before Win had time to flinch. She sat with the bowl warm in her hands and the steam rising against her face.

Clause eleven, she thought, almost hysterically. Neither party shall ask.

"Three months," she said. "A little less now."

"Who told you?"

"A doctor in Cleveland. Voigt."

"Helena Voigt." Nell's eyebrows went up. "I know her. Good woman. Terrible handwriting." She sat down in the nearest of the mismatched chairs, put her hands on her knees, and regarded Win with those pale clear eyes. "I did hospice for thirty-one years. Portland, mostly. Ashbourne, the last ten. I retired in May and I bought the yellow house to look at the sea, and I've been bored out of my mind for six months."

Win didn't know what to say.

"I'm telling you so you know what you're dealing with," said Nell. "I won't push. I won't drag you off to a hospital or a priest. If you want me to go, I'll go, and I'll still leave the soup. But I've been looking at this cabin's chimney for two weeks and I haven't seen smoke before noon. I know what that means."

"What does it mean?"

"It means you're alone."

The rain ticked on the roof. Somewhere out on the beach the surf boomed and sighed.

"I'm alone on purpose," said Win.

"Everybody is. At the start." Nell's voice was quite gentle. "It lasts until the first bad night."

"I've had bad nights."

"Not the real ones."

Win looked down at the bowl. The broth was clear and golden, with a few green flecks of scallion on the surface, and the smell of ginger came up out of it warm and sharp. She lifted the spoon and, to her own surprise, put it in her mouth.

It was the best thing she'd tasted in a month.

"There," said Nell. "That's the first thing."

…

She came every day after that.

She never asked again. That was what Win could not get over: the wonderful, scrupulous restraint of it. She would arrive at ten with a basket and a flask and a bag of oranges, and go through the cabin like a quiet tide, doing small things. She cleaned the stove. She got the roof to stop leaking, with a tarp and a ladder and a vocabulary of astonishing richness. She brought a hot-water bottle, a thick wool blanket, a wedge of foam for the pillow so that Win could sleep half upright. She showed her, with a washcloth and a bowl and the placid dexterity of three decades, how to wash without moving her ribs.

She never said the word dying.

She talked about the weather. She talked about a husband called Gus who'd been a fisherman and had gone down off Tillamook in '98; about a daughter in Phoenix who called on Sundays; about the mink that lived under the Tidewater's deck. She talked about sixty years of the Oregon coast, its fogs and storms and the particular, persistent, uncomplaining melancholy of its people. She was funny. She was dry as a bone. She made Win laugh more in a fortnight than she had laughed in the months before it, and then, at the end of an afternoon, she would pick up her basket and say in the doorway, "I'll be back at ten," as a person says it who has no doubt that the door will open.

On the twentieth night, at half past two in the morning, the door did.

…

It was the pain.

She had thought she knew pain. She had counted through it for months. But this was not that pain, the dull, bargaining, manageable pain of the early weeks. This was another animal altogether. It came up out of the right side of her belly like a hand reaching in and closing, and it turned, slowly, with the whole weight of an arm behind it; and her breath went out of her, and she lay curled on the iron bed with the quilt in her teeth and ten, nine, eight going round in her head like a prayer in a language she had forgotten.

She could not reach the pills. They were on the table, six feet away. She could not reach the telephone.

Seven, she thought. Six.

She did not know how long it lasted. Somewhere in it she heard the door, and a flashlight beam crossed the ceiling. She heard a calm, low voice saying, I've got you, I've got you, I'm here, little one, and a bottle rattled, and a small cold weight was pressed under her tongue. Hands turned her. A wet cloth moved on her forehead. The voice went on, steady, patient, unhurried, like a person walking beside a runaway horse.

"Breathe with me. In. Good. And out. Good girl. Count if you like."

"I am," said Win through her teeth. "Four. Three."

"Who taught you to count?"

"No one. I— I just—"

"It's a good trick." A hand on her hair. "Somebody gave it to you."

Somebody did, thought Win. A man in a cellar. A man with a watch. "Count with me," she'd said. "I'm— I can't—" And he had; and his voice had been low and warm and entirely without fear, going down the numbers beside hers like a hand on a rail.

Two. One.

Nell wiped her face. "There. It's turning. Wait for it."

It turned. It loosened, slowly, like a fist unclenching, and she lay in the dark with her heart going like a bird's and tears running sideways into her ears, and a stranger's hand in hers.

"I don't want to die like this," she whispered.

"I know."

"It's not— it isn't what I thought. I thought it would be like— like a candle. Going out."

"It isn't. Not for most." Nell's voice was neither kind nor unkind; it was only true. "It's work, mostly. For you and for the people with you. It's the hardest work there is." A pause. "But it can be done well. I've seen it done well. I'll help you do it well, if you let me."

"I can't pay you."

"I didn't ask."

"I don't have anyone."

"You've got me," said Nell. "That's one."

She stayed until dawn. She sat in the hard chair by the bed with her slicker folded on her knees, saying nothing, and at some point Win slept; and when she woke the room was gray and the rain had stopped and the old woman was still there, with her chin on her chest, snoring faintly. There was a bottle of morphine on the nightstand with a label in a firm, small hand: Take as directed. Beneath it, tucked under the glass, was a piece of paper.

Hospice isn't a place. It's a promise. Say the word and I'll make some calls. —N.

…

She wrote the first letter that afternoon.

She did not decide to. She was sitting on the porch in the quilt with the ledger on her knee, in the thin watery sun, and the pen was in her hand, and the page was blank. She had been trying to write a balance. She'd tried five times since the airplane. Each time the line came out wrong, a debit that wanted to be a credit, a sum that would not close, and each time she crossed it out.

So she turned to a fresh page at the back, and she wrote:

Dear Callum,

It is Tuesday. The rain has stopped. I am sitting on a porch at the end of the world, and there is a heron in the shallows, and I thought you would like to know that it stood on one leg for twenty minutes, perfectly still, and then it stabbed something and swallowed it, and all the stillness was suddenly over.

I thought of you. I think of you every time something is very patient and then very fast.

I am not afraid. I keep telling people that. I was telling Nell, my new—

She stopped. She looked at the word she had been about to write. Friend, she thought. Keeper.

—my neighbor, who is a nurse. I told her last night, between one thing and another, that I wasn't afraid, and she said, "I know. That's what worries me."

I don't know what she meant. I think I do.

She wrote for an hour. She wrote about the heron, and the Tidewater diner, and the postmistress, who had told her that morning that there was a letter held for you at the general delivery and had handed over, with a wide meaningless smile, a postcard from Josie of a cartoon pelican. She wrote about the smell of the sea. She wrote, because she could not help it, I count the waves. They come in sevens, sometimes tens. You would find it irrational. You would find it beautiful.

She did not write I love you. She did not write come. She read it through twice, and signed it, in the small upright hand, W.

Then she folded it and put it in the back of the ledger, where the gold-edged card of Dr. Voigt had been taped. She did not seal it. She did not look for a stamp.

That's one, she thought.

By the end of the fifth week there were nineteen.

…

The ring came back to her in the middle of February.

She had forgotten it. That was the shame of it. It had come in a plain white box in the second week of December, delivered to the Fifth Avenue apartment by a jeweler on Madison, who had asked for her by name and handed it into her palm with a courteous bow. She'd ordered it on a Tuesday afternoon, without telling anyone, under the pretense of a fitting for a gown. She'd stood in the shop for forty minutes with a loupe, selecting the metal; she had written the inscription herself, on a slip of paper, with the Montblanc; and she had paid in cash from the envelope in the lining of her bag, because it was not a thing she'd wanted on his account.

It had sat in the bottom of her suitcase ever since. She'd taken it out of the apartment on the morning she left, along with the ledger and the pen, as one takes a letter one has not yet decided to send.

She found it now by accident, going through the case for a sweater.

It was small. It was only a plain band of white gold, a man's size, nothing in it, nothing on it but the one word cut inside. She turned it to the window. She read the word as the light caught the curve, in letters so fine they were barely there.

HARBOR.

She had meant to give it to him on the last night of the contract. In February. At the Tower, on the observatory floor, over the glass, with the whole city lit under their feet. She had planned it with an almost childish exactness. She would say: There. It isn't a clause. It isn't a condition. It's only the thing I couldn't say in a room with a lawyer. She'd imagined him taking it, turning it in his scarred hand, with that look. She'd imagined that he would put it on.

She sat on the edge of the iron bed with the ring in her fist.

The wind had risen. It was blowing hard off the sea, shaking the little window in its frame, and the surf was loud, and the whole cabin trembled slightly like a ship. She listened to it. She listened for a long time. And somewhere in the rhythm of the waves she heard, quite distinctly, as clearly as if he stood in the room, the low steady voice she had been trying not to hear for six weeks.

Ten.

Nine.

Count with me.

She did not weep. She had no tears left, it seemed; they had been used up on the airplane. She only sat, with the ring in her hand and her thumb moving slowly over the fine small word, and thought of a man in a dark room, saying, in the dark, with his hand over hers: It's where you go when the water's too much.

I couldn't give you that, she told him. I tried. I'm so sorry. I had one ship to give and it was already sinking.

She opened the drawer of the nightstand. She took out the little white box. She laid the ring in it, on its bed of cotton, and closed the lid; and she put the box in the drawer, under the bottle of morphine and the note that said a promise, and shut it with a small, final, decided click.

Outside, in the gray, the tide was coming in.