Four Pages

The divorce took four pages, which Corinne Aldermere considered insufficient.

She had written longer grocery lists. She had written longer apologies, in the early years, in the stiff blue notebooks she’d kept by the bed. She had once translated a seven-hundred-page Swedish crime novel in which a man was dismembered over three hundred pages of carefully paced dread, and it had taken her less time to read than the previous twelve years had taken to live. But here it was: four pages of heavy cream stock, a gold-embossed seal in the corner of the last one, and a pen that the clerk of Cumberland County Family Court had slid across the table with the weary courtesy of a woman who’d handed out a great many pens.

“Sign where the flags are,” said Dana Okafor, at her elbow, in a voice pitched for the room. Then, lower, without moving her lips: “You can still throw the pen at him. I’ll represent you.”

“You already represent me.”

“Then I’ll do it for free.”

Corinne almost laughed. It surprised her; she hadn’t expected to be able to. She signed her name — Corinne M. Aldermere, the maiden name, the one that had been on the covers of her translations the whole time, tucked in small type under the author’s — on the first flag, and the second, and the third. The pen was a heavy fountain pen with a nib that scratched, and she was aware of the sound in the way you are aware of a loud clock at a bad moment. Across the polished table, Graham’s attorney, a man named Preston Hale whose gold tie clip was doing most of his talking, watched her sign with the pleasant smile of someone watching a stranger’s dog finally be put down.

Graham himself did not look at her. He was brushing a nonexistent speck from the sleeve of a suit she had picked out for him in October, because he’d said he couldn’t be trusted to know what color he was. Twelve years. He had put on a little weight in the face and lost it in the hands. He looked, she thought, like a man waiting for a delayed flight.

It was over at 10:42 a.m. on the fourteenth of March. A judge in half-moon reading glasses, who had already glanced at her watch twice, signed the last flag, said, “We’re done here, counselors,” and rose. There was no gavel. Corinne had been secretly looking forward to the gavel. She had imagined it in the dark for months, the crack of it, the finality. Instead, everyone just stood up and started finding their coats, and that was how a marriage ended: with the scrape of chairs.

On the courthouse steps the wind came straight up off Casco Bay and went through her trench coat as though it were a rumor. Dana lit the first cigarette of what was clearly going to be a long afternoon. “You did well,” she said. “You know that? The retirement split, the house proceeds, the lump sum. I’ve seen men with better lawyers do worse. I want you to remember that on the nights you feel like you lost.”

“I’ll feel like I lost on a regular schedule, probably. Tuesdays.”

“Tuesdays are good for it.” Dana exhaled toward the harbor. “Where are you headed?”

“North. Some rental. A stone house on a cliff.” Corinne buttoned the top button of her coat and felt, absurdly, like a woman in the first chapter of a novel she wouldn’t have been allowed to translate: too on the nose. “I need to finish the Skau book. The publisher’s been very polite about the deadline, which means they’re furious.”

“A stone house on a cliff.” Dana’s eyebrows rose. “Is there a lighthouse?”

“There’s a lighthouse.”

“I want to hate you.”

“Get in line.”

The doors behind them swung open. Graham came out alone, holding the leather briefcase she had bought him for their sixth anniversary — she’d translated a Danish cookbook on a three-week deadline to afford it, and she knew exactly what each of its brass corners had cost her — and he stopped, not beside her, but close enough that the smell of him reached her before the voice did. Sandalwood and cedar and a little mint. The cologne she had given him every Christmas for a decade. She noticed she had a feeling about it, and noticed the feeling was mostly curiosity.

“Corinne,” he said, quietly, like a man commenting on the weather. He tipped his head down, so the words would go into her ear and nowhere else. “Clean up the wreckage on your own. Good luck. But I do have to ask — when you really think about it.” The smallest pause. “Who’s going to want you at thirty-eight?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He seemed to consider the question asked and answered, and the matter closed. He walked down the granite steps with his briefcase, toward the parking lot, where a late-model Audi sat idling with a young woman in the passenger seat. Her face was turned toward her phone. She had a ponytail. She looked, from this distance, about twenty-five years old, and she was probably wearing the scarf Corinne had thought about buying in November, before she’d found out what November meant.

Corinne stood very still on the steps.

She waited for the thing she had been promised, by friends, by magazines, by a therapist who’d taken her insurance: the flood of grief, or the clean burst of rage. She stood there a full minute, in the wind, with her hands in her pockets, waiting for it.

What came was smaller and stranger. It was something like the feeling of setting down a heavy bag, and realizing that your arm had been shaking for years.

“Say the word,” Dana said beside her, “and I’ll key his Audi.”

“It’s a lease.”

“I’ll key the lease.”

This time she did laugh, a short, startled bark that turned a few heads on the courthouse steps. She wiped her eyes with the back of her glove. Her hands were cold; she had lost the other glove a long time ago, and had been wearing the odd one out for years, the way she kept a lot of things.

“Go,” Dana said, and her hand, brief and hard, landed on Corinne’s shoulder. “Go see your lighthouse. Call me when you’ve stopped being polite.”

* * *

She hadn’t cried since January.

She’d used up her tears in one night, a cold Thursday in the second week of the new year, when she had come home from the farmer’s market in Portland with a bag of winter squash and found a brown envelope on the front doormat. No stamp. No return address. Her name written on the front in black capitals so neat they might have been printed by a machine.

Inside were twelve photographs, glossy, eight by ten.

She still had them, in a folder at the bottom of her suitcase. She didn’t need to look at them. She could have drawn each one from memory: a luxury high-rise on Boylston Street in Boston; a corner window, floor to ceiling, curtains not drawn; a man she’d shared a bed with for twelve years standing in a pair of boxer shorts she had bought him at Filene’s Basement, holding out a glass of wine to a girl on a white couch. A girl in a Boston College sweatshirt, with a ponytail. The time stamp in the bottom corner of each frame said Friday, and she would later learn, from Graham’s own credit card statements, that Friday was the day of the “weekend business trips” that had taken him away from their home in Portland for eleven months.

No note. No demand. No clever little line about thought you should know. Just a dossier, neat and complete and clinical, shot from a long lens by someone with a very steady hand and a great deal of patience. Dana had spread the twelve photos across her desk and said, in the hushed voice of a woman beholding a miracle, “Whoever sent you this is either a saint or a lunatic. Either way, I’m sending them a fruit basket.”

They had never found out who it was. Corinne had spent a few weeks building theories: a private investigator hired by some earlier woman with a grudge; Brielle’s jilted boyfriend; a disgruntled doorman in Boston with a good camera. She’d even, briefly, tried to trace the postage. In the end, she had made peace with it the way she made peace with most things, by deciding to be grateful to the universe in general and leaving the paperwork there. Someone had opened a door for her. She had walked through it. The why could wait, and in the meantime it had spared her another ten years.

Who’s going to want you at thirty-eight?

She started the Volvo. It coughed twice, considered the matter, and turned over.

* * *

It took her two and a half hours, going north on Route 1 with the windows cracked an inch, to see the sea again.

She hadn’t realized how badly she’d wanted it. She had spent twelve years in a gray, tasteful, carpeted house in a suburb of Portland that smelled of other people’s expectations, and the sight of the Atlantic at the bottom of a long hill, slate-gray, chopped white, enormous and indifferent, did something to her chest that she didn’t try to name. She drove with one hand on the wheel and the other pressed flat against her breastbone, like a woman checking that something was still there.

The house had come to her in February, on a night she’d been looking at rental listings for the sixth hour in a row, with a glass of wine she wasn’t enjoying. She’d typed quiet coastal rental six months Maine into a search bar with the kind of hopelessness that makes you expect to be sent to a motel in Bangor. And then an email had come, from a small agency called Harbor & Pine Realty, which seemed to run, as far as she could tell, on three adjectives and a very slow typist. Furnished stone house, Gull Harbor. Private. Sea views. Available immediately. The rent was fourteen hundred a month. She had read the number three times. Stone houses on cliffs, with their own lighthouse, did not rent for fourteen hundred a month. They rented for four thousand, five, and in July they rented to people named Thatcher.

“It’s a scam,” Dana had said, flatly, when Corinne forwarded it. “Or he’s a ghost. Or it’s a murder house. Ask for a video walk-through.”

The agency had declined the video. We’re a two-person shop and both of us are on the water most days, the email said, with what she thought was real warmth. Happy to wire a deposit refund if the house isn’t what you hoped for. The lease was clean, standard, the landlord an LLC called Pine & Pennant Holdings, as landlords in Maine frequently were. Dana had read it aloud over wine at the kitchen table, with a red pen, and had finally declared it boring in every respect, which she said was the highest compliment a lease could receive.

“The price is the only weird thing,” Dana had said. “Maybe the owner just wants a tenant who’ll heat it.”

“Maybe the owner is a dead sea captain.”

“In which case, he’s very generous with the heat.”

Pip had been more direct. Pip, on the phone from her kitchen in Portland with the faint ping of a microwave behind her, had said, “Go. Do not think. You’ve been thinking for twelve years, Cor. Go sit by the ocean and stare at it until you remember who you are.”

“I know who I am.”

“You know who you were married to, which is different.” A pause, the clink of a spoon. “Is it Maine? Tell me it’s Maine.”

“It’s Maine.”

“Good. It’s far enough that I can’t drop by constantly, and close enough that I can.”

Past the town of Port Ellis — a general store, a white church, a gas pump with a hand-lettered CASH ONLY, DON’T ASK — the road turned to gravel and the world began to close in. Pines on both sides, black in the dusk, and then, abruptly, between the trunks, the shine of water: a cliff edge, a long drop, a gray sea going dark. Three miles of it, with the fog thickening by the minute, until the Volvo’s headlights swept over a stone gatepost and the road ended.

Fennimore House stood at the very tip of the peninsula, on a knuckle of black rock the sea had been working at for a few thousand years.

It was bigger than the photographs. Two stories of weathered gray granite under a slate roof, with a bay window on the ground floor and a deep porch that seemed to lean slightly toward the water, like a person listening. The paint on the shutters was shell-colored and peeling in places, but the walls under it looked unbothered by weather, solid in a way that made her think of old teeth. And behind it, taller than she’d expected, a stone tower rose out of the rock into the fog, narrow and round and tipped with a glass lantern room that held what remained of the daylight like a held breath.

Fennimore Light. The listing had said decommissioned, 1974. It said nothing about how it would feel to stand in a gravel driveway at dusk with the whole sky closing over you, and look up at a lighthouse that had stopped being needed.

She turned off the engine. The wipers squeaked once and died.

“Well,” she said to the empty car. “You wanted to run away.”

* * *

The lockbox on the back porch took a four-digit code from the last email. The key inside was brass, heavy, old, with a bow shaped like a clover. It turned in the lock without a sound, as though someone had oiled it that morning.

Inside, it was warm.

That was the first thing. Not just not-cold: warm, the dry, settled warmth of a house where the heat had been running for hours, which was strange, in a house nobody had lived in since the previous fall. The second thing was the smell: pine, floor wax, a little woodsmoke, and under it something faintly sweet she couldn’t place, like the memory of bread.

She put her suitcase and her bag down on the hallway floor. The boards were wide and dark, and her footsteps sounded loud on them. “Hello?” she said, to nobody, feeling foolish, and the house returned the word with the courteous, empty echo of a place very much not haunted.

It was furnished in the way of a house that had been loved by a person with no talent for decorating and excellent taste in wood. A stone fireplace in the front room, laid with kindling. A deep green sofa. A kitchen with gray ceramic tile and an old Aga-style stove someone had converted to induction. And, at the end of the front hall, a room with a bay window that looked directly out at the sea.

She stopped in the doorway.

It was a study. A thick oak desk stood in the curve of the bay window, angled so that anyone sitting at it would have the whole gray width of the water in front of them. A leather chair, not too low. A shelf of dictionaries within arm’s reach. A brass lamp. On the wide desktop, enough room for two heavy reference books and a cup of tea and her elbows.

I want a window on the water. A desk wide enough for two dictionaries and a mug. A chair that doesn’t make me feel eleven.

She’d written exactly that, three years ago, in a blog post called A Translator’s Wish List, read by perhaps forty people, thirty-eight of them other translators and one of whom was, she was fairly sure, her mother-in-law.

She laughed out loud. It was a real laugh, a little breathless, the kind you get when the universe turns out to have a sense of humor after all. Of course. There were only so many ways to arrange a desk and a window. Every translator on earth wanted the same thing; it was practically the job description. And the owner of this house, whoever he’d been, had obviously been one of them, or had rented to one, and had thought: where would a person who works with words want to sit? This was the answer. It was simply the correct answer.

She ran her fingers along the edge of the oak. Beautiful grain, hand-planed, sanded smooth. She sat down in the leather chair, and it fit, and she sat there for a minute in the last gray light with her hands flat on the wood, not working, not thinking, only existing in a room that had been built for her kind of silence.

When her stomach growled, loudly enough to embarrass her, she stood up and went looking for something to drink.

The kitchen was spotless. The refrigerator was an old ivory-colored thing that hummed to itself. She pulled the door open for bottled water, and stopped.

It wasn’t empty.

On the contrary: it was full, carefully, like someone’s idea of a hospitality shelf. Almond milk, two cartons. Spinach. A dozen brown eggs in a paper carton stamped with the name of a farm. A wedge of sharp cheddar wrapped in wax paper. A loaf of dark bread. A bottle of good white wine. And on the middle shelf, in a neat little row, three glass jars of golden honey with a hand-lettered label, Wild Rose Farm — Chamomile Blossom.

She stared at the honey.

It was not a brand you could buy in a store. It came from a family apiary somewhere in the hills outside Portland, and she’d discovered it by accident at a farmers’ market two summers ago, from a woman with a folding table and a shy, stubborn smile who’d said it was her late husband’s recipe. Corinne had gone back every Saturday for a year. She’d been so sure she was the only person in the world who bought it that she had once sent a gushing, ridiculous email to the apiary’s tiny website, which had not been answered.

Warmth spread through her chest, sudden and unexpected, and she felt her eyes sting.

Pip.

Of course it was Pip. Pip, who had listened to her moon over honey on the phone for a year, who had once driven forty miles to buy her a jar when Corinne had the flu. Pip, who was a doctor and therefore believed all human misery could be solved with a casserole and a good night’s sleep. She’d probably hired a service, or asked a friend near Port Ellis to let themselves in with the lockbox code. She’d done all this while Corinne was sitting in court, so that when she walked into the house she wouldn’t find it empty.

“You terrible, wonderful woman,” Corinne said to the honey.

She filled the kettle. She found a white porcelain mug, a box of chamomile in the cupboard — also, she noticed, her usual brand — and she made the tea the way she always made it, with two spoonfuls, one big and one smaller, the second one added when she thought no one was looking. Then she carried the mug out onto the porch in her coat, and sat on the top step in the dark.

The fog had come all the way in. The sea was gone, the sky was gone, even the black shape of the lighthouse was only a gentle thickening of the dark. There was just the sound of the waves working at the rocks below, steady as a pulse. She drank her tea and let it spread down through her ribs, and for the first time in months, she stopped listening for footsteps.

Who’s going to want you at thirty-eight?

“Not you, apparently,” she told the dark, quite pleasantly. “And thank God.”

Her eyelids were heavy. She finished the tea and went inside to rinse the mug, and that was when she saw the note.

It was a yellow sticky pad square, pressed dead center on the refrigerator door, just under a little magnet shaped like a lighthouse. She hadn’t seen it before; the door had been open, the note on the outside. She went closer.

WELCOME. E. WILL BRING SOUP TOMORROW. — P.

Black marker. All capitals. The letters were upright, spare, sharp, and the crossbars of the Ts and Es were drawn long and firm, with a deliberate flick at the end, like someone signing a document.

She read it twice. Then she tilted her head.

Pip’s handwriting resembled the printout of a seismograph in distress. For twenty years, it had been the despair of pharmacists and greeting-card recipients across the Eastern seaboard; Corinne had once held a Christmas card up to the light to confirm that it said Merry. This was nothing like it. This was tidy, steady, nearly architectural.

Dictated, Corinne thought. She had someone write it. Or she wrote it in capitals on purpose, so I wouldn’t need a decoder ring. It was probably a joke. Pip was full of jokes.

A yawn cracked her jaw. The day had drained her down to the dregs. “E.” was, of course, Emory, Pip’s son, whom Corinne had last seen four years ago, at Pip’s forty-first birthday dinner: nineteen, gangly, polite to the point of silence, with a snaggletoothed smile and a habit of refilling everyone’s water glass before they’d noticed it was empty. A sweet boy. A little odd, in the way of boys who grow up too fast after their fathers die. She remembered thinking he’d make some lucky girl very happy and some unlucky one very nervous. She hadn’t seen him since.

Pip, of course, would send her son with soup. Pip sent soup like other people sent sympathy.

She switched off the kitchen light. The house settled around her, the old beams ticking, and in the dark she could just make out the sheen of the honey jars on the shelf. She smiled at them again, foolishly. Then she picked up her suitcase and climbed the stairs.

The bedroom at the top was large and plain, with a high white ceiling and a wide bed already made up with white linen. Someone had pressed the sheets. The window looked straight across the dark yard to the tower. She left the curtains open, brushed her teeth in a bathroom that smelled of cedar, and fell into the bed fully clothed except for her shoes, too tired even to think about unpacking.

She slept, and woke, in the way of a person in a strange house, at some deep black hour with no number.

It was very quiet. The fog had thinned; a pale smudge of moon came and went in the window. She lay on her back with her eyes open, listening to the sea, and watched the ceiling.

A band of light slid across it.

Slow, and pale, from left to right, like a hand passing over a table in the dark. It crossed the white plaster, touched the wall above the dresser, and was gone.

Corinne lay perfectly still.

She counted to thirty. Nothing came. She counted to sixty. The room was dark and ordinary; the sea hushed and slapped; a floorboard ticked somewhere below. She sat up, slowly, and looked out the window at the tower, standing blind and black in the thinning mist, its lantern room dark.

Decommissioned, 1974.

A car on the gravel, then. Headlights through the fog, swinging across the house. Except the road ended at her door. There was nothing for three miles in either direction, and she’d have heard an engine.

A reflection off the water. A cloud shifting. The kind of thing the half-asleep mind makes of a moonbeam.

She watched the window for a long time. The light did not come again.

You’re tired, she told herself. You’ve been in a courtroom, in a car, in a stranger’s house. You dreamed it.

She was very good at deciding things. It was a skill she’d had twelve years to practice. She lay back down, pulled the white sheet up to her chin, and by the time the sea had rocked her halfway back to sleep, she had already filed the light where she filed everything that didn’t fit: under later, in a drawer she never opened.

Downstairs, the refrigerator hummed to itself, and three jars of honey sat in the dark, waiting for morning.