The Fourth of July

Pip Wolcott lived in a brick row house in Portland’s West End, on a street of old maples and brass door knockers, in a house she had bought at thirty-three with the first real money she had ever earned, and she had never let anyone forget it.

It was three stories high, narrow as a book, with a stoop of worn granite and a front door painted the green of a wet leaf. Behind it lay a long walled garden, sixty feet of tomatoes and delphinium and espaliered pear, and at the far end of the garden, glittering like a lantern among the green, a greenhouse. It was a Victorian conservatory in miniature: wrought-iron ribs, a curved glass roof, a door with a brass latch, and inside, in the damp, sweet half-light, a jungle of orchids, lemon trees, ferns, and basil gone wild. Her husband had built it for her, board by board, in the last summer of his life.

“Dad made all of it,” Emory said, as the pickup pulled up at the curb. He said it without looking at the house, staring straight ahead through the windshield with both hands on his knees. “Even the glass. He cut every pane by hand. It took him ten weeks.”

“I know. I came to the party, when it was finished.”

“I know you did.”

They sat in the truck for a moment longer. It was ten minutes to two on the Fourth of July, a day of blazing blue, with a smell of cut grass and charcoal in the air and the distant thump of a drum corps tuning up somewhere near the Eastern Promenade. Flags hung from the windows up and down the street. Already, over the garden wall, she could hear the clink of glasses and the rising tide of voices, and a woman’s high carrying laugh.

Corinne smoothed the skirt of her dress. It was green: an emerald linen sheath, sleeveless, with a square neck, that she’d found in a boutique in Camden on Monday, and tried on three times, and decided she was too old for, and bought. She had pinned her hair up with the tortoiseshell clip. She wore her mother’s small pearl earrings. She looked, she thought, like a woman with a secret; which was precisely the problem.

“Rules,” she said.

“Rule one.”

“Nobody knows.”

“Rule three.”

“Not a syllable of Mom, even in your head.”

“That one’s hard.” He turned, finally, and gave her a look of mock gravity. “I’m going to be in my mother’s house. I’m going to be eating my mother’s potato salad. It’s going to come up.”

“Then you’ll use her name. Pip. Or the hostess. Or Dr. Wolcott.”

“I’ll call her the Admiral.”

“I forbid it.”

“Aunt Cor,” said Emory, with a perfect wide-eyed blandness, and she hit him on the arm.

“Don’t.”

“It’s the cover. I’ve got to practice.” His grin was fast and wicked. “Aunt Cor, can I get you something? Aunt Cor, would you like a sparkler? Aunt Cor, have you tried the deviled eggs?”

“I will kill you in front of witnesses.”

“You wouldn’t. You’d have to give a statement.”

She laughed in spite of herself, and her nerves loosened, and for a moment it was the old joke again, easy and warm. Then she looked at the green door, and the stoop, and the brass knocker in the shape of a hand, and the laugh faded. She thought of Pip’s face at the oyster bar: you look better. You look rested. She thought of the text on her phone, the one she had written and deleted. She thought: twenty years.

“Corinne,” Emory said. He had not touched her. He laid his hand on the seat between them, palm up, an inch from her knee. “You can still change your mind. We can drive around the block. We can go to the harbor and eat fried clams on the pier. She’ll forgive us.”

“No.” She took a breath. “We’re here.”

“We’re here.”

“Then let’s go and lie to your mother.”

“It isn’t lying.”

“You keep saying that.” She picked up her purse. “One day I’ll believe you.”

* * *

“There she is!”

Pip came down the stoop with her arms outstretched and a glass of white wine in one hand, in a flowing blue linen shirt and white trousers, her silvery bob catching the sun, her face flushed and happy. She was barefoot. She had never, in twenty years, been known to wear shoes at her own party. She swept Corinne into an embrace that smelled of lemon verbena and Sancerre, and held her tight, and stepped back, and held her at arm’s length with a look of piercing, delighted scrutiny.

“Oh, Cor. Look at you. You’re glowing.”

“I’m sunburned.”

“You’re not sunburned. You’ve been loved.” Pip’s eyes narrowed. “What’s his name?”

Everything in Corinne’s body stopped.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The man, darling. The man who’s put that color in your face. I know a woman who’s been getting some sleep, and I know a woman who’s been getting some sleep.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially, with a wicked sidelong smile. “Is it the surgeon? Did Callum get your number? I specifically told him not to call before the party.”

“Oh,” said Corinne. She felt the blood leave her face and return in a rush. “No. No, there’s — there’s no one. It’s the sea air. The Atlantic. I’ve been walking.”

“Hm. Walking.” Pip looked at her a beat longer, with an air of fond skepticism. “All right. Keep your secrets. I’ll find out. I always do.” She turned, and her face softened, and she held out both arms again. “And you. My baby. My lighthouse keeper. Come here.”

Emory went into her arms and she held him a long time, her cheek against his chest, and Corinne saw her eyes close. It was only a moment. When Pip opened them again and kissed his jaw and pushed him upright, her face was bright and brisk. But in that moment, with her eyes shut and her fingers clenched in the fabric of his shirt, she had looked like a woman holding a thing that she wanted very much not to drop.

“You’re thin,” said Pip. “Are you eating? I’ll make you a plate.”

“I’m eating, Mom.”

“What did you eat today?”

“Toast.”

“Toast.” She turned to Corinne with an air of vast injury. “He’s been at your house three months, Cor, and he’s living on toast.”

“I’m feeding him as hard as I can,” said Corinne, and heard it come out a half-tone too warm, and saw, from the very corner of her eye, Emory look at his shoes.

If Pip heard it, she did not show it. She only swept them both inside, along the cool dim hall and out through the kitchen, where three women in aprons were cutting watermelon, and into the garden, and the sun fell on them like a hand.

* * *

There were about forty people.

They stood in clusters under the pear trees and around the long wooden table, holding plastic cups: doctors and nurses from Pip’s clinic, in loud shirts; two retired judges from the neighborhood, arguing amiably about the parade route; a pair of lesbian poets with a baby in a sling; a flock of children, running in circles with sparklers in their fists that were not yet lit. A man in an apron was working a grill the size of a coffin, billowing smoke. There was a keg in a garbage can full of ice. There was a speaker on the wall playing something with a steel drum.

Corinne had been in crowds before. She had survived the Camden flea market and the Port Ellis general store. But she had never, in her life, been in a crowd with an enormous glowing secret, and she discovered that it changed everything: the look of the sunlight, the way people’s eyes moved over her face, the way she held her cup. She stood by the lemonade table in her green dress with her heart racing, convinced that every person at the party could see the night before written on her skin.

“Relax,” Emory murmured, appearing at her elbow with two paper plates. His expression was perfectly mild. “You’re holding that cup like a hand grenade.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re doing wonderfully. Eat a deviled egg.”

“I can’t eat. I’m going to be sick.”

“Then be sick elegantly. Eat an egg.” He put one in her hand. “Aunt Cor.”

She glared at him. He gazed back with limpid innocence. She ate the egg.

The afternoon spread out before her in a series of tableaux. She met a man who had been a judge for forty years and now bred spaniels. She was asked to settle an argument about the plural of octopus. She fed a child a strawberry. Whenever she looked up, Emory was across the garden, helping to carry a cooler, or laughing with a girl in scrubs, or kneeling to tie a toddler’s shoe, utterly and perfectly a nephew; and each time, as though a thread joined them, he looked up at the same instant, across thirty feet of noise and sunlight, and met her eyes, and looked away.

It was unbearable. It was thrilling. It was the most intense flirtation of her life, and it was conducted entirely in the span of a quarter second, across a croquet lawn, under the nose of his mother.

“Corinne Aldermere?”

She turned. A man stood at her shoulder, tall, with a tumbler of something amber in one hand and a paper plate in the other, grinning at her over the rim. He was perhaps forty-two, six foot one or two, with broad shoulders and a close salt-and-pepper beard and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose. He wore a faded blue Hawaiian shirt with parrots. He had the fine, quick, scarred hands of a man who did his living with a scalpel, and the genial rumpled warmth of someone who was usually the nicest person in any given room.

“Callum Reyes,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been loitering around you for ten minutes trying to work up the nerve. I’m told I’m supposed to be charming. I’ve never had the first idea how.”

“You seem to be managing.”

“It’s the shirt. Pip made me wear it. She said it was non-threatening.” He shifted the tumbler to his left hand and held out his right. It was warm and dry and gripped hers just the correct amount. “I’m a very big fan. Your Skau translation. The Cold Quarter. I read it twice, in English and then in Norwegian, to see if I could catch you out. I couldn’t.”

“You read Norwegian?”

“Badly. My grandmother was from Tromsø. I get through a menu.” His eyes crinkled. “But there’s a sentence on page two-eleven. The one with the harbor and the smell of herring. Lukten av sild og kaldt jern. You translated it the smell of herring and cold iron. And I thought, that’s the sentence. She’s got the sentence. It’s not what it says, it’s what it does. I read it out loud to my cat.”

Corinne laughed, in spite of herself, and the knot in her stomach came partly undone. She had been prepared to dislike him on principle. It was proving difficult.

“You’re very kind.”

“I’m very honest. It’s a surgical habit. We’re not allowed to flatter. It causes errors.” He tipped his head. “May I ask you something improper?”

“That depends on how improper.”

“Dinner.” He said it in a rush, and went slightly pink above the beard. “Fore Street. This Thursday, or any Thursday, or any day that suits. I’m not trying to sweep you off your feet, I know you’ve just been through a wretched year. It’d just be a plain dinner with a plain man, who’d like very much to listen to you talk about commas. No pressure. You can say no. Pip said you’d say no, in fact, and I told her that I’d say it was worth the risk.”

It was a gracious, decent, rueful invitation. It was the sort of thing she would have wished, a year ago, on her worst enemy, and prayed for, secretly, on her best. She stood on the grass with a plate of deviled eggs in one hand, in the sun, and for the first time since March felt a blank and curious panic: what do I say?

She could not say I’m seeing someone. Rule one. She could not say I’m in love with a man who is twenty-three. Rule one. She could say no thank you, and watch his kind face fall, and be asked why, and have no reason to give that would not set off every alarm in Pip’s house. Or she could say yes, the way a woman does when she has nothing to hide, and dine in a candlelit room with a decent man, and lie.

She could feel Emory, somewhere behind her. She did not turn.

“I’d have to look at my calendar,” she heard herself say. “I’m in the middle of a deadline. It’s awfully kind of you.”

“Of course. Of course.” He beamed with relief. “Take all the time you need. I’ll be here. I’m always here. Pip will give you my number, I’m in the book. I’m very easy to find.”

“Thank you, Callum.”

“Not at all. Enjoy the party.” He raised the tumbler. “And Corinne — you really did make that sentence.”

He drifted off into the crowd, rumpled and beaming, and Corinne stood quite still with the plate in her hand and a feeling of enormous, shameful relief, and beneath it, a sinking sense that she had just made a terrible mistake.

She was right.

She heard it before she saw it: a small sharp crack, like a branch breaking, from the direction of the table. She turned. Across the lawn, Emory stood alone by the drinks, with his back to the party and his right hand held low against his thigh. He was looking at nothing. He was looking at the wall. His face wore an expression of such blank, polite serenity that for a moment she did not understand what was wrong.

Then she saw the fragments of glass on the grass at his feet, and the thin dark thread of blood running down between his fingers and dripping from his knuckle.

* * *

She found him in the greenhouse.

She would never be quite sure how she’d gotten there. She seemed to have said something to someone, and picked up a napkin, and crossed the garden at a measured walk, smiling, with her heart going like a hammer; she had slipped through the curved glass door and drawn it shut behind her, and the roar of the party had dropped to a distant murmur. Inside, the air was thick and green and warm as a mouth. Water dripped. Sunlight came down through the glass in hazy golden shafts, and between the orchids and the lemon trees and the dark fans of the ferns, on an overturned flowerpot at the back, with his hand held out in front of him, sat Emory.

He had wrapped a handkerchief around his palm. It was already soaked red.

“Let me see.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Emory.”

He let her take his hand. She unwound the cloth, her fingers quick and cold, and drew in a breath. The cut ran across the heel of his palm, three inches long, and deeper than she liked. A sliver of glass still glittered at its edge. Blood welled and ran, and when she pressed the clean napkin to it, he did not so much as flinch.

“How did this happen?”

“The glass broke.”

“Glasses don’t break by themselves. Not those. Pip buys them at Goodwill. They’re an inch thick.” She pressed harder. “You squeezed it.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“You squeezed a glass hard enough to break it. In a garden. Full of people.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not asking for sorry. I’m asking what happened.”

He said nothing. Green light moved over his face. He was staring at her bent head, at the napkin, at her hands, with a look she couldn’t read; and she realized with a stab of fear that he was breathing very fast, a quick, shallow, silent pant, like a runner at the end of a race.

“Emory.”

“He asked you to dinner.”

“Yes. And I said I’d think about it. Which is a polite way of saying no. You heard me say it.”

“I heard you say you’d look at your calendar.”

“That’s what a person says.”

“I know.” His voice was low and strange. “I know it’s what a person says. I know why you had to. I understand, it’s the rule, it’s what we agreed. I’m not angry. I’m not.” He drew a ragged breath. “I just stood there. I watched him put his hand on your arm. And I thought, he’s tall. He’s a surgeon. He reads Norwegian. He doesn’t have to hide. He could take you to dinner on a Thursday in a restaurant with candles, and put his arm around you in front of the whole city, and no one would say a word. He could have you, Corinne. In the open. He wouldn’t have to be a secret.”

“He doesn’t want me. He wants a woman from a book club.”

“He wants you. I saw his face.” Emory’s jaw tightened. “And he’s right for you. He’s right for you in every way that I’m wrong. He’s forty-two. He’s got a house. He’s —”

“He’s a stranger I met ten minutes ago.”

“He’s what Pip wants for you.”

“I don’t care what Pip wants for me!” It came out sharper than she’d intended. She closed her eyes, and opened them. The dripping of the greenhouse filled the silence. She pressed the napkin to his palm and said in a quieter voice: “I don’t care what Pip wants. I care what I want, and I’m sitting on an upside-down flowerpot in a greenhouse with my hands covered in your blood. It isn’t a close contest.”

“You’re sure?”

“Look at me.”

He looked.

“I’ve been to dinner with the Callums of the world,” said Corinne. “For twelve years. They’re very nice. They are kind, and decent, and good at parties, and they ask how my day was, and it takes about three months to discover that they are not curious about the answer. I don’t want a man who’s easy to find. I want one who finds me.” She tightened the napkin, and tied it off. “I want a man who dances on a rock in the rain. Who can plane a board so thin it glows. Who checks my pupils after a near drowning.” Her voice shook, slightly, and steadied. “Who breaks glasses because he can’t bear to see me touched by someone else, and then apologizes for the mess.”

“That’s a very unflattering description of me.”

“It’s the truest one I’ve got.”

He laughed. It came out unsteady, too bright. Then he reached out with his good hand and drew her down, onto his knee, among the ferns and the orchids and the dripping green light, and buried his face against her neck.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not good at it. The — waiting. Watching. Hiding. I thought I was. I thought I’d practiced. I’d been practicing my whole life.”

“I know.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“It might. It’s all right.” She stroked his hair. “If it does, you tell me. You say, Corinne, I’m drowning. Rule five.”

“Rule five.”

“And I’ll do something about it. I’ll invent an urgent phone call, and we’ll leave. I won’t make you stand there and watch.”

“You’d do that?”

“I’d do that,” she said, “for the man who made me a pencil box.”

He lifted his head. His eyes were bright, and wet, and astonishingly young, and she kissed him. She had not meant to. It was meant to be a consolation, a quick pressing of the lips; but it caught, the way a match catches, and in the hot green hush of the conservatory, with the glass over their heads and a mob of forty people thirty yards away, it deepened. His good hand slid into her hair. The clip came out. He tasted of salt and lemon and metal, of blood, and her own hands went around his neck, and the orchids nodded above them in the hazy gold.

“Cor?”

They sprang apart.

It was a miracle of reflex. Corinne was on her feet, three paces away, bent over a lemon tree with her fingers in the leaves, before she knew she’d moved. Emory was on one knee on the tiles, in the act of inspecting a clay pot, with his injured hand held neatly out of sight behind his hip. The greenhouse door swung inward on its brass hinge, and a long shaft of sunlight struck across the floor, and Pip stood on the threshold with a tray of tomatoes.

For one long moment, nobody spoke.

Pip looked at Corinne, at the lemon tree. She looked at Emory, at the flowerpot. She looked at the spot on the tiles where the flagstone was spattered with a few bright drops of red.

“Em,” she said. “Are you bleeding?”

“It’s a scratch.”

“Let me see.”

“It’s nothing, Mom —”

“Em.” The voice was entirely level. It was the voice, Corinne realized, that Pip must use at four in the morning with a patient on the table: quiet, absolute, with no room in it for an argument. “Give me your hand.”

He gave it.

She set down the tray. She took the cloth from his palm and turned it to the light, and her face did not change. Her fingers moved over the edges of the wound, light, deft, knowing. “Clean. A bit deep, but it missed the tendons. You’ll want two or three stitches. I’ll do them in the kitchen.” She looked up. “Glass?”

“A glass.”

“You broke a glass.”

“I dropped it.”

“You dropped it so hard it cut the inside of your hand.” She said it without heat, and without taking her eyes off his face. And Corinne, standing frozen in the ferns, saw the exact moment when Pip stopped being a hostess and became something else, something very still and very frightened, a woman looking at the shape under the water.

It lasted perhaps two seconds.

“Cor,” said Pip, without turning her head, “would you be a dear and help Em wash up? I’ll get the kit. Thank you for finding him.” And then, with a sudden gaiety so exactly pitched that it was nearly convincing, she clapped her hands once. “Honestly. Boys. I leave them alone for ten minutes. I don’t know why I bother with the good glasses.”

She went out. The door swung shut.

Corinne let out her breath. She turned, and Emory was looking at her with a face as white as paper, and for the first time she saw that his eyes were not frightened, but calculating, calm, quick, like a man in a chess game who has just heard the clock.

“She saw,” Corinne whispered.

“She saw a man with a cut hand.”

“She saw something.”

“She saw what she wanted to.” He wound the handkerchief around his palm with practiced fingers. “She’s seen me bleed before. It’s a very long story. She’ll think I got in a fight. She’ll think I was showing off. She’ll never in a thousand years think it’s you.” He got to his feet, and caught her wrist, and smiled. “It’s all right. Trust me.”

“I’m trying,” she said.

She was.

* * *

The stitches took six minutes.

They sat at the old oak kitchen table, in the empty house, with the party roaring away outside and a pale gold light slanting through the window onto a tray of instruments. Pip worked with a pair of needle drivers and a curved needle, humming softly under her breath. Emory sat with his hand on a towel, staring at the ceiling. Corinne stood by the sink with her arms folded, a person with no business there. Nobody spoke. The kitchen clock ticked.

“There,” said Pip, snipping the thread. “Three. Don’t use it for a week. Keep it dry. And for the love of God, don’t crush any more of my glassware.” She patted his wrist. “Go and find Callum. He’s about to light the sparklers for the children, and he’ll want somebody to hold the matches.”

“Mom —”

“Go.”

He went. The back door banged. The kitchen was suddenly very quiet.

Pip washed her hands at the sink. She dried them on the dish towel, finger by finger, with great attention. Then she turned, and leaned on the counter, and looked at Corinne, and for the first time all day she didn’t smile.

“Cor,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Come here a minute.”

Corinne came. Pip took both of her hands. The fine bones of her fingers were cold. She stood close, her silver head tilted back, her hazel eyes searching Corinne’s face with an urgency so naked that it made her stomach turn over.

“I want to ask you something,” said Pip. “And I want you to promise me you’ll say yes. It’s not a hard one.”

“Of course.”

“Promise me —” She stopped. Her lips pressed together. She seemed to be choosing, one by one, from a dozen things, each one more terrible than the last. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. “Promise me that if you are ever, ever in any trouble, you’ll call me. Whatever it is. Whoever it’s about. If something ever feels wrong, and you don’t know how to say it, or you’re afraid, or you think nobody will believe you. You say the thing. The ferry. And I’ll come. I’ll come no matter what.”

Corinne stared at her.

“Pip, what’s —”

“Just say yes.”

“Of course I’ll call. Of course. You know I will. You came to Providence at two in the morning. I’d never —” Her throat tightened. “Why are you asking me this? Did something happen?”

“No.” The word was too fast. Pip let go of her hands, and straightened, and a brittle bright smile crossed her face like a curtain drawn over a window. “No, nothing happened. I’m just a worrier. I’ve been a worrier since the day I had him.” She laughed, lightly. “Occupational hazard. When you spend your life putting people to sleep for a living, you start to see how easily they don’t wake up.”

“Pip.”

“I’m fine. I’m fine. Ignore me. Wine and heat and a hand full of stitches.” She took Corinne by the shoulders and kissed her on the forehead, hard. “Go out to the garden and be social. Go and let Callum take you to dinner. Let somebody be nice to you for an evening. You’ve earned it.”

“I’m not —”

“You are. You are, darling. Go on.”

She went.

She stepped out the back door into the golden afternoon, into the smell of charcoal smoke and the hum of conversation, and the first sparkler hissed and caught at the far end of the garden, and a ring of children shrieked with joy. Light streamed across the grass. She stood at the foot of the steps with her hand pressed flat to her chest and felt her heart beating against her palm.

She glanced back once, over her shoulder. In the kitchen window, behind the glare of the glass, Pip stood very still at the sink, looking out across the lawn: not at Corinne, but at the far side of the garden, where her son stood among the children in the dusk, laughing, a sparkler in his bandaged hand, his head thrown back in the fizzing white light. Pip had one hand pressed over her mouth. She was watching him the way you watch a candle in a drafty room.