SALTWICK

Callum

They went on the ninth of April, in a small white plane, with a nurse and a hospital bed and a basket of Josie's sandwiches.

Nobody had thought it could be done. Dr. Okafor had said so in plain terms, with his arms folded, in the doorway of room 312: that she was too weak for a flight, that the bleed might return, that a place without a hospital within forty minutes was no place for a woman in her condition. Win had said, "Is it a medical objection or an aesthetic one?" and Okafor had said, a little stiffly, "Medical," and Win had said, "Then write it down, and I'll sign it, and we'll go." He'd looked at her for a long moment. He had looked at the man in the green chair. Then he had taken out his pen and, with the air of a surgeon making an incision he does not approve, begun to write a set of instructions that ran to four pages.

Margaux had done the rest. She had not been asked. She'd been forbidden, in fact, by the fifth clause of a hospital menu, and she'd taken her day off with admirable obedience, on the eighth, in a gray coat, with a small suitcase and a book. On the ninth she was on the tarmac at Portland at six in the morning with a clipboard.

"I understood I was to rest," said Callum.

"I have rested." Her face was perfectly smooth. "I rested yesterday, from nine to five. I slept on a bench in Washington Park. It was dreadful. I do not intend to repeat it."

"Margaux."

"The aircraft is a Pilatus. It has a pressurized cabin and a stretcher fitting. There is a flight nurse, an ex-Navy woman named Delaney, who has done this four hundred times. The medical team at Friday Harbor has been briefed. There is a boat." She looked at the clipboard. "I did not call a specialist. I did not buy a building. I merely made some arrangements, as a friend."

He had looked at her for a moment.

"Thank you."

"It is a day off," said Margaux. "I am taking it in the air."

…

The island came up out of the sea at a quarter past eight, a long low dark shape, wooded, with snow still lying in the high places and a skirt of white surf. The pilot circled it once, low. He had been told to. In the window the water spread away on every side, hammered silver under a high pale sky, scattered with other islands, green and blue and violet, like spilled beads, and beyond them to the east a vast white mountain, standing alone, so high and so entire that it seemed to hang in the air.

"Baker," said Callum.

Win was awake.

She lay strapped on the stretcher with a blanket to her chin and an oxygen tube at her nose, and her face was turned to the window. He had not told her what she would see. She was looking out with an expression he had seen once before, in a cellar, when a door had opened; the look of someone who has been underground a very long time and is seeing the sun.

"Oh," said Win.

"Yes."

"It's so big."

"It's thirty miles off."

"It's the biggest thing I've ever seen." Her eyes were bright. "Is that where we're going?"

"The island. Not the mountain."

"I'd like to go to the mountain."

"Next week," said Callum.

She laughed. It was a small, dry, rasping laugh, and it made her cough, and Delaney was at her side with a hand on her shoulder and a murmur. But he saw her smile as she lay back. He saw it, in the light that slanted through the window, as plainly as if it had been printed.

She has not smiled like that since Montauk, he thought. And I did it with a mountain I did not make.

…

The house stood on a rise above East Sound, as in the photograph.

It was longer than the picture had suggested, and grayer, and older. Four chimneys. A wraparound porch with a rail of whitewashed spindles, gone silver with weather. A pair of rocking chairs, placed, by some instinct of the caretaker, side by side. The cedar shingles had weathered to the exact color of the sea in winter, and the roof was green with moss, and from the porch, as from the bridge of a ship, one saw the whole of the sound unfurl: the long gray water, the dark headland like a sleeping animal, the far ghost of the mountain.

There were madrona trees. He had not known what to expect. They grew down the slope in a loose, crooked, leaning crowd, with trunks the color of terra-cotta, and bark that peeled in curls, as a sunburned shoulder peels; and in the first week of April they had begun, in secret, to open. Their buds were small and white and tight. They stood against the green of the firs like a scatter of pearls.

"They're not out yet," said the caretaker, an old man in a plaid shirt named Hollis, who had met the boat with a truck. "Another ten days. They're late this year."

"She'll see them," said Callum.

"She will if she wants to," said Hollis, and spat tactfully into the grass.

They put the bed in the sunroom, at the south end of the house, where there were windows on three sides. Nell was installed in the room across the hall. Delaney took the one beyond. Margaux stayed three days, and walked the grounds with her hands behind her back, and inspected the locks, the generator, and the dock; and on the fourth morning she knocked at the study door, where Callum was sitting with an untouched cup of coffee, and said, "I have found nothing that requires my attention."

"That is a remarkable thing to say."

"It is a remarkable house." Her mouth twisted. "I am going to the mainland. I have a sister in Tacoma. I haven't seen her in nine years." A pause. "You will telephone me."

"I won't."

"You will, if you require me."

"I will, if I require you."

She nodded. At the door, with her hand on the frame, she said, with great stiffness, "She's lucky to have you, Mr. Draycott."

"I'm not sure that's true."

"It is the only thing I have ever been certain of," said Margaux, and went out, and her small neat car went down the drive.

…

Win

She did not know how to be still.

It was the first thing she learned at Saltwick. At the hospital there had been nothing to do but lie there, strapped by wires to a pole; there had been no question of action. But here, in the sunroom, with the windows open and the sea three hundred yards away, something in her would not lie down. She wanted to do. She wanted to rise and walk to the water, to climb the trees, to haul the skiff out of the shingle and row. The body would not have it. The body had its own opinion, and it expressed it each afternoon around three, in a long gray wave of exhaustion that took her from the knees upward, like a tide.

So she learned.

She learned the order of the day. Six, the light: first on the headland, then on the water, then in a slow warm tide through the windows. Seven, the nurse. Eight, tea, and whatever Nell had cooked; she was making, with the stubborn zeal of an old woman denied employment, a series of increasingly outlandish soups. Nine, the porch. Callum would carry her out. He did it every morning, in the same way, one arm beneath her knees and one behind her back, as a man carries something precious across a stream. She weighed a hundred and one pounds. She had checked. She would lie in his arms with her head against his shoulder and her eyes on the horizon, and think, Nobody has carried me since I was five.

Then the chair. The blanket. The long, slow, glittering forenoon.

They read. He read to her from Persuasion, in his low rough voice, with a faint scholarly dryness that made Anne Elliot sound like a junior partner. He read Treasure Island, because she asked, and halfway through the second chapter stopped, and she said, "It's all right," and he said, "I know. I'd like to," and went on. They listened to the radio, a tinny old Zenith that Hollis had left in the kitchen, which got a station out of Victoria that played nothing but Elgar and the shipping forecast. She learned the names of the sea areas. She learned that a man in British Columbia spoke the weather in the voice of a prophet.

They talked. It was extraordinary how much they talked. She had thought, in the cabin, in the dark, that when it came to the end there would be nothing but silence, and a few great words. But it was not so. It was small things, mostly, and they were infinite. What was the first thing you ever bought with your own money? A Slinky. And yours? A cufflink, from a flea market in Lisbon, at fifteen. Do you like olives? Never. Do you believe in ghosts? She did; he didn't. What was the worst haircut of your life? She told him about a perm. He laughed until the rocker creaked.

I did not know, she thought. I did not know that this is what people did with the rest of their lives. That they talked about perms.

It's the best thing in the world.

…

Callum

He dissolved the Gilded Hour on a Thursday, from the porch, in forty minutes, on a telephone.

It was not as hard as he'd thought. That was the strange part. He had imagined it for twenty years: a scene of loss, a pillar coming down. But it was only a list. He sat in the rocker with the receiver against his ear and the sea going gray-green beyond the rail, and spoke to a lawyer in New York, and a notary, and the head of security at Halcyon House, who listened in silence and said, at the end, "Sir. May I ask what's to be done with the house?"

"It is to be sold."

"All of it?"

"The land to the Trust. The building to be taken down, or given to someone who wishes to use it." He considered. "A school, if one will have it. A hospital. I leave that to the board."

"The board, sir?"

"I have resigned the chair."

There was a pause on the line. He could hear, at the other end, the sound of a person sitting down.

"The Meridian board has been informed," said Callum. "The vice-chair assumes the chair on the first of May. I am to be non-executive. I shall retain a share, which will be held in trust, for purposes the trustees will decide. I have no objection to their being sensible." He looked at the sea. "I do not intend to return to the Tower."

"Understood, sir."

"Please inform the members. Each is to be paid the sum stated in the contract. A letter will be sent to every one of them, in my own hand."

"What will it say?"

He thought about it.

"That I was wrong," said Callum.

He wrote the letters that afternoon. There were eleven of them, in the end: eleven men and women, over twenty years, who had come to the house and paid fifty thousand dollars to be afraid of him. He wrote them with a fountain pen on thick cream paper. He wrote the same sentence in each, and then something different. I am sorry that I made you a part of my grief. You deserved better than to be my instrument. To Vivienne he wrote a longer one. To Sloane Whitmore he sent a check, and a note that said, You were the bravest of them. You saw before I did.

He sealed them one by one. He carried them down to the dock.

The tide was out. The sea lay flat and shining at the foot of the steps, and the skiff rocked at its mooring, with a quiet knocking of wood on wood. A pair of ducks went by. He stood at the end of the planks, in his gray sweater, with the stack of envelopes in his hand, and for a time he did not move.

It was a dock.

He had known it would be. He'd known when he bought it, and he'd bought it nonetheless, in the way that one touches a bruise. The boards were gray and warm and slightly cupped by the sun. There was a ring of iron set in a post, and a coil of salt-stiff rope. Beneath, the water was green and clear and shifting, with a skin of light on it, and under the skin, in the green, one saw the stones.

Here, thought Callum. Here is where you go in.

He sat down on the edge, and let his feet hang over the water.

He did not feel the cold tide of the old fear. He felt only the sun on his neck, the small grind of the boards, the slow slap of the water against the piles. A seabird called from the headland. In the house behind him, very faintly, Nell's radio was playing a piece of Elgar, and he listened to it, and the thing in his chest, the cold coin, turned over once and lay quiet.

I am sorry, Theo, he thought. I am sitting on a dock. I am not looking at a book.

I am looking at the water. I'm looking at it as hard as I can.

…

Win

"There's something I'd like you to do," she said.

It was the last Sunday of the month. The madronas had come out, all at once, in the course of a single warm night, so that she had woken to find the hillside white. They stood below the house in drifts of bloom, a hundred thousand tiny bells on every bough, and the air was full of their scent: green, and sweet, with a faint honeyed bitterness, like the memory of a smell. The bees had come. The whole slope hummed.

She lay in the chair on the porch with a quilt over her knees. He sat beside her in the other. He had a mug of tea on the rail and his long legs stretched out, and the afternoon light fell across his face and showed her what she had been trying not to look at: how thin he had grown, how the skin had drawn in below the cheekbones, the first gray in the black of his hair above the ears.

He is aging, she thought. In front of me. By the week. It isn't me he's watching die. It's himself, coming apart.

"Anything," said Callum.

"Don't say that."

"It's the habit."

"I know." She smiled. "It's a nice habit."

She nodded at the little table between them. On it, where he'd left it every night since Portland, face up, beside a jar of wild violets that Nell had picked, lay the watch. He didn't carry it now. He laid it down in the morning and picked it up at night; and in between, he glanced at it, sometimes, from the corner of his eye, with the look of a man who is checking that a sleeping dog is still asleep.

"Wind it," said Win.

The sea sounded below them, slow and soft. A bee blundered past the rail.

He did not answer. He looked at the watch.

"Win."

"It's been stopped twenty-two years."

"I know."

"It's a good watch. Anyone can see that. The case alone is a hundred and fifty years old, you told me. It was made to run." She turned her head. "I think it's tired of being a monument."

"It isn't a monument. It is—" He stopped.

"It's Theo's."

"Yes."

"And you've kept it stopped at the moment he died. To keep him there. To keep it from going on." Her voice was very gentle. "I think I understand. I think I'd have done the same. But Callum, he wasn't in the watch. He was in the lake, and the towel, and in you. He was in the way you said his name. You've been holding on to him with a little silver thing that can't hold him."

"If I wind it—"

"You won't lose him."

"How do you know?"

"Because I'm going to be where he is, soon," said Win. "I'll ask."

He made a sound. It was not a laugh. He put his face in his hand.

She waited.

She waited for a long time. The sun went lower. The shadows of the madronas lengthened on the grass, and the bees lessened, and a wind came up the sound and shook the boughs, so that a thousand white petals loosened and drifted down the slope in a slow fall, like snow. She watched them. She did not hurry him. She knew it was the hardest thing she'd ever asked, and she asked it without any trace of doubt.

At last he reached out.

His hand closed on the watch. He lifted it from the table, and it hung from his fingers on its chain, the silver gleaming, turning slowly, as a pendulum turns. He opened the lid with his thumb. He looked at the face. The white enamel, the delicate black numerals. The two thin hands, standing at the quarter after four.

He found the crown. He took it between his finger and thumb.

It resisted. It had been so long. She saw the tendons stand out on the back of his hand; and she heard, small and dry in the great hush of the afternoon, the first reluctant click of the spring. Tk. Tk. Tk. He turned it. He turned it slowly, ten times, twelve, fifteen, with his eyes shut, and his mouth moving a little, as if counting.

Then he stopped.

He held it against his ear.

For a moment there was nothing. The madronas rustled. The sea sighed. And then, very faint, very clear, as small and as insistent as the pulse in a wrist, she heard it: a quick bright mechanical heartbeat, going on, and on, and on.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

She saw his face change.

It did not break all at once. It went in stages, as ice goes out of a river. The brows lifted. The mouth opened. The eyes, which had been closed, opened wide, and fixed on nothing, on the far gray line of the sea; and the tears came, and ran, and he did not try to stop them. He sat in the rocker with the watch against his ear and wept like a child, with his whole body, in great slow shuddering sobs, while the little thing in his hand went on counting, tirelessly, in the long gold light.

"It's running," he said.

"Yes."

"I can hear it."

"I know," said Win.

"I haven't heard that— I haven't heard that in—" He could not finish.

"Twenty-two years."

"It's loud." He laughed, wetly. "I had forgotten it was so loud. In the dark. Under the pillow. He used to put it under the pillow and I'd hear it through the wall, and I'd say, Go to sleep, Theo, and he'd say I can't, it's ticking—"

His voice broke.

She put out her hand. It took all the strength she had. She laid it over his fist, with the watch inside it, and felt the small steady vibration, the live tick against her palm, passing up through the bones of her fingers into her own heart, where it fell into step.

They sat like that while the sun went down: the thin woman and the weeping man, their hands wrapped round a silver watch, and the white petals coming down in the dusk, and the sea gold, and then rose, and then gray; and in the stillness between them, quietly, the oldest sound in the world.