What Pip Assumed

The knock at 7:52 on Saturday morning was not his.

Corinne knew it before her eyes were open. She lay in the warm gray light of the bedroom with the quilt up to her ear and her cheek against his shoulder, drifting on the edge of a dream about a boat, and the sound came up the stairs from the front door: two quick, firm, impatient raps, a pause, and then two more, followed by a voice calling through the wood in the high, penetrating, thoroughly unselfconscious tones of a woman who has never in her life waited on a porch.

“Cor-inne! It’s me! I know it’s early! I’ve brought pie!”

She sat bolt upright.

Emory, beside her, did not stir for a full second. Then his eyes opened. They were clear, and gray-green, and wholly awake; he had the knack, which she found unnerving, of going from sleep to alertness without any intervening fuzz. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at her. He tilted his head, listening, and something very like delight crept across his face.

“That,” he said, “is my mother.”

“Oh, my God.”

“She’s early.”

“Oh my God.” She flung back the quilt. “She’s at the door. She’s at the front door. She can see the lights are on, she can probably hear us — you have to go. Where’s your — your truck! Is your truck in the drive?”

“Behind the lighthouse. I’ve parked there since the casserole.”

“Thank God. All right. That’s good.” She was hunting wildly for her robe. “Boots. Your boots are in the hall. Your jacket is on the hook. Your toothbrush — Emory, your toothbrush is in the glass! There are two toothbrushes in the glass! She’s a doctor. She notices dental hygiene!”

“Corinne.” He caught her wrist as she flew past, and pulled her gently down onto the edge of the bed, and kissed her. It was a quick, hard, laughing kiss, and he held her face between both palms and looked at her with his eyes dancing. “Breathe. I’ll go out the back. I’ll be at the lighthouse by the time you reach the door. At eight-thirty precisely, I’ll drive up in my truck like an innocent man, with bagels. You’ll be calm. You’ll be welcoming. You’ll hide the mugs.”

“There are two mugs.”

“Hide one.”

“How are you so calm?”

“I’ve had a lot of practice.” He released her, and rolled out of bed, and pulled on his jeans in a single movement. “Go and let her in. Go!”

“Cor-inne!”

“Coming!” she shouted, in a voice she hoped was the voice of a woman who had just woken up alone.

* * *

The next ninety seconds were the most athletic of her adult life.

She dashed along the hall in her robe, scooped up two enormous brown boots, and flung them into the closet under the stairs. She snatched his jacket off the hook. She swept the second coffee cup off the kitchen table and into the sink, seized the dish towel, dropped it, picked it up again, and plunged his gray sweatshirt, which lay draped across the back of a chair like a fallen soldier, into the first place she could think of, which was the breadbox. She heard the back door close with the faintest of clicks. She saw, through the kitchen window, a long shape move across the wet grass toward the lighthouse. And then she was at the front door, with her hair in a rat’s nest and her robe done up wrong, hauling it open.

Pip stood on the step in a straw hat, holding a pie.

“My God,” she said, “you look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge.”

“It’s seven fifty-two.”

“I know! I left Portland at five. I couldn’t sleep, and I thought, why not?” Pip bustled past her into the hall in a cloud of lemon verbena, and shoved the pie into Corinne’s arms. It was warm and smelled of blueberries. “I couldn’t stop thinking about this house. I haven’t been up here in twenty-four years. You’d never believe it — Cor, look at it — look at that staircase. I swear, it’s just the same.”

Corinne, in the middle of closing the door, went still.

“You’ve been here before?”

“Of course I have, darling. Well — I think I have. Twenty-four years ago.” Pip turned in a slow circle, with one hand pressed flat to her chest and an expression of dazed, delighted disbelief. “When you told me you’d rented a house near a lighthouse in Gull Harbor, I thought, there must be a dozen of those. A stone house on a cliff. And then I came up the drive this morning and saw the tower, and I almost drove into a ditch. It’s Fennimore’s. It’s old Captain Hal Fennimore’s place. Cor, look at that staircase. I swear it’s exactly the same.”

“You know it?”

“Know it! Dez worked on the lamp. Out in the tower. Did I never tell you? It was the last big job he did before Em was born. The Captain had a Fresnel lens that hadn’t turned in twenty-five years, and he got Dez to come out every weekend for four months and rebuild the clockwork. That was the summer I found out I was pregnant. He used to leave me in the kitchen with a thermos of ginger tea and a crossword, and I’d sit and listen to him banging away in that tower, and the Captain’s wife — Alice — would bring me cookies and say the child will be a sailor.” She laughed, and wiped her eye with the back of her wrist. “And then she was right. The child is a sailor. Isn’t that something?”

“Pip.” Corinne put the pie down on the hall table. Her hands were not quite steady. “I had no idea.”

“Well, how could you? It’s absurd. It’s a coincidence of the first order.” Pip drifted down the hall toward the study. “I’d like to see the lamp. Is Em working on it? He told me he was fussing with a lighthouse lens, on weekends, in his spare time. He never said whose. He’s cagey about his hobbies.” She sighed. “I think it’s why he took the job at Tilden’s. A boy follows his father’s footprints, even when he can’t see them.”

Behind the lighthouse, thought Corinne, stricken. Right now, at this moment, he is behind the lighthouse.

“I think he’s — he’d be happy to show you,” she said weakly. “He generally comes at half past eight.”

“Does he?” Pip had turned in the study doorway. Her hazel eyes were suddenly keen. “Every morning?”

“Most mornings. He’s been terribly helpful. The porch, and the window shutters, and the —”

“I know. He tells me.” The straw hat was pushed back. Her face in the soft light of the hall was lined, tired, lovely. “Do you know that in eight years, Cor, that child has never once offered to fix a thing for anyone? Not a leaky tap. Not a lawn mower. He’d rather be alone. And he talks about you as if you hung the moon.”

The words went through Corinne like a cold wire.

“He’s a sweet boy,” she said carefully.

“He’s more than that.” Pip stood a moment, looking at her. “I’m glad he’s got you. I mean it. I’ve been so afraid, these last few years, that he was shutting himself away. That I’d done it to him somehow. That I’d —” She cut herself off with a sharp little laugh, and turned back to the room. “Listen to me. It’s seven in the morning. Where’s the kettle? I’m going to make you tea and sit you down and interrogate you.”

* * *

The interrogation lasted forty minutes.

It was conducted in the kitchen, over tea and blueberry pie, with the sea glittering through the window and the light climbing the wall. Pip took a chair at the oak table, and Corinne took another, and between them lay a small battlefield of cups and forks. Corinne had hidden everything she could think of. The record player stood closed on the sideboard. The gas bill was in her cardigan pocket. The walnut pencil box was in the study, in plain sight, but Pip had picked it up, turned it over, and said, “Pretty,” and put it down.

They talked about the book. They talked about Graham’s lawyer, and the final hearing, and Dana Okafor, who had sent Pip a Christmas card. They talked about the clinic, where a new grant had been approved and a doctor had quit in a rage and a drug-addicted boy had come in last month with an abscess the size of a plum. And all the while Pip’s eyes moved: restless, unsparing, brilliantly attentive, touching the faucet, the latch of the window, the crook of Corinne’s elbow, the second place setting, which she had somehow failed to clear.

“Two plates,” said Pip.

“I had a visitor.”

“Oh?”

“Emory. He brought bagels. Yesterday.”

“Hm.” The fork lifted. “Em doesn’t like bagels.”

Corinne felt her pulse trip. She took a sip of tea. She told herself that she was a grown woman, and a professional, and the survivor of a contested divorce. “He eats them if there’s honey.”

“There’s always honey.” Pip smiled, rather oddly. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? You have a lot of honey. Em’s been to see you so often that I’d begun to think —” She stopped. She turned her cup in its saucer. “Cor. I’m going to be honest. I came here this morning because I wasn’t sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“Of him.” The word fell heavily. “I know how it looks. A boy of twenty-three, who’s never had a serious girlfriend, who’s alone in the world, practically, and a woman who’s recently single, and lonely, and who he’s adored since he was in diapers. I lay in bed after the party and told myself I was imagining things. He’d cut his hand. You were in a greenhouse. You both looked guilty as thieves, and I thought — well.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I thought, oh, God, no. I thought, it’s happened. That he’d got an idea in his head and was following you around Maine like a —”

“Pip.”

“Like a puppy. Like a man on a mission.” She dropped her hand. “I’m sorry. That’s an awful thing to say. And I’m sorry, I know it’s the sort of thing a mother says about a child she can’t understand. But I’ve seen him do it. I’ve seen him fix on a thing, and not let go, and I’ve been so afraid —” She drew a breath. “I thought I’d come up here and see for myself.”

Say something, thought Corinne. Say anything.

“Emory,” she said, “is a baby.”

The words came out of her mouth quite smoothly, like a stone dropped into a well.

“He’s twenty-three, Pip. I changed his diapers. I used to read him Goodnight Moon. It’s like — it would be like —” She searched for the most revolting comparison in the world. “It would be like falling for the nephew of a dentist. You’ve misread it entirely. He’s a lovely, lonely kid who needed someone to bring soup to, and I happened to be there with a kettle. He’s like a brother. Or a — a very big, handy cousin.”

“A cousin.”

“I mean it.”

“I believe you.” And the strange thing was that Pip did. Corinne could see it happen, a slow, visible relaxation, as of a cord being let out. The tension went out of the shoulders under the blue shirt. She put the fork down and leaned back in the chair and let out a long, shaking breath, and laughed, and wiped her eyes. “Oh, thank God. Oh, I’m such a fool. You can’t imagine. I was lying awake. I had a whole speech.”

“You didn’t say a word of it.”

“I was going to, as soon as the pie was gone.” Pip pressed both palms to her cheeks. “Honestly. Look at me. A woman of forty-five who runs a free clinic and has put four thousand people under anesthesia, trembling in a kitchen over a boy who brought you a bagel.”

Corinne laughed with her. It was the most hollow sound she had ever made. She sat in the sunlit kitchen across the table from her oldest friend and felt a thing she could not name pour through her like cold water into a glass: not guilt, exactly, but a high, thin, glittering clarity, as though she had stepped to the edge of a roof and found, with surprise, that the edge was not frightening at all.

It’s easy, she thought. It’s so easy. She wants to believe me. All I have to do is let her.

And then Pip said, with a sudden narrow sparkle, “Which doesn’t explain the sweatshirt.”

“The —”

“The sweatshirt, Cor.” She was pointing, with the prongs of her fork, at the breadbox. A single gray sleeve, rather conspicuously, trailed out from beneath the lid. “I may be a doctor, but I’m not blind.”

* * *

There are moments in a life that arrive all at once, like a window going up.

Corinne looked at the sleeve. She looked at Pip. In the long silence the refrigerator hummed, and a gull screamed somewhere on the cliff. She had perhaps three seconds. She could feel, with the awful speed of a mind in free fall, the shape of every answer: the truth, the half-truth, the plausible lie. It’s mine, she could say; but it was enormous. It’s a gift; from whom? It’s Graham’s; Pip knew Graham’s sizes.

“It’s a man’s sweatshirt,” Pip said, with delighted slowness. “A large one. In your breadbox.”

“I can explain —”

“You do not need to explain.” She was sitting up now, bright-eyed, rosy, flushed with a happiness that was almost indecent. “Oh, my God. Cor. Cor. You’ve been holding out on me. That’s why the glow, the lipstick, the dress. That’s why you couldn’t look me in the eye at the party. You’ve got a man.”

Say no.

She opened her mouth to say no.

“It’s Callum,” said Pip. “Isn’t it?”

Say no, say no, say no, say —

“He’s been so odd all week,” Pip rushed on, laughing. “Cheerful. Humming in the OR. He told the whole scrub team he had a prospect. I thought it was the quarterly numbers. I thought he’d had a good case.” She clapped her hands. “And you gave him your number, didn’t you, after the party? I knew it. I knew you’d say yes. I said to Margaret at the clinic, he’s got a crush, she’s too good for him, and it’s the best thing that could possibly have happened.”

Corinne sat very still.

She could have said no. She could have said it so simply. She could see the word, small and round and clear, lying on the table between them like a coin. She had only to pick it up.

“It’s very early,” she heard herself say.

“Of course it’s early! You’ve only had a week!”

“I don’t — I’d rather you didn’t say anything to him. He’d be mortified.” She heard the words come out one by one, in a voice that sounded just like her own, sensible and a little embarrassed. “It’s just dinner. A few dinners. I don’t know what it is yet. And I’d feel — it’s silly — but I’d feel better if it were just ours.”

“Not a word.” Pip crossed her heart. “I won’t breathe it. I won’t even give him a look at the next staff meeting. Oh, Cor.” She seized her hands across the table and squeezed. “I’m so happy. You have no idea. I was so afraid you’d shut the door. After Graham. After everything. And instead you’ve gone and found yourself a handsome vascular surgeon in a Hawaiian shirt.” She wiped her eyes again. “He’s got such good hands.”

“You said that already.”

“It bears repeating.” Her face crumpled with joy. “Is it serious?”

“It’s —” Lie. “Yes. A bit.”

“A bit.” Pip laughed through tears. “Well. A bit is a start.”

She hugged her across the table, a hard, fierce, warm embrace that smelled of verbena and flour, and over her shoulder, Corinne could see, through the kitchen window, the green nose of a pickup truck turning in at the end of the drive.

It was eight twenty-nine.

* * *

“There he is!”

Emory came up the porch steps like a man out of a stage comedy: boots stamping, bakery bag swinging, a look of wild, innocent, rehearsed surprise on his face. He pushed through the front door with his shoulder, called “Corinne? It’s me, I’m a minute early, I got the sesame ones —” and stopped in the kitchen doorway as if struck by lightning.

“Mom?”

“Surprise!”

“What are you — how did you — it’s Saturday.”

“I know what day it is, I’m the one who put you on it.” Pip rose, arms wide, and he walked into them, and she held him, and Corinne watched her close her eyes. It was all in the details, she thought, with the odd cool part of her mind that had awakened that morning: the way he let his arms go around his mother, the little dip of his head, the exact distance of the hug. He had never looked more like a nephew. He had never, in his life, looked more like a son.

“You look tired,” Pip said, into his shoulder.

“I worked late.”

“Doing what?”

“The lamp. I’ve nearly got the clockwork turning.”

“Well, I want to see it.” She pulled back and held him by the elbows and looked up into his face. “Do you know, I didn’t realize. I only worked it out this morning. Your father did this lamp.”

“I know.”

“You know.”

“He told me about it once. When I was little.” Emory shrugged, with a small embarrassed smile. “I looked it up. It’s partly why I applied at Tilden’s. I thought — I don’t know. I thought if I could fix it again, it’d be a way of —” He floundered. “It sounds stupid.”

“It doesn’t,” said Pip, in a thick voice. “It doesn’t sound stupid at all.”

She laid a hand on his cheek, and he turned his face into her palm, the way he did to Corinne’s, and looked at his mother with an expression of such unforced, grave tenderness that Corinne, standing by the counter with the pie knife in her fist, had to look at the floor. It was true. It was perfectly, entirely true; she could see it. It was a story as pure as glass.

It was only that it was not the whole thing.

“Em,” said Pip, wiping her face. “Sit down. Corinne has news.”

“Does she?”

“I’m not allowed to say. But she’s allowed.”

Corinne looked up. Across the kitchen, over his mother’s shoulder, Emory’s eyes met hers. They were clear and bright and utterly empty of alarm. They were telling her, with a patience so exact that it was almost tender: you know what to do. Go on.

She put down the knife.

“Pip thinks,” she said, “that I’m seeing Callum Reyes.”

“Thinks?”

“I mean —” She flushed. “I am. It’s early. It’s very early.”

There was a beat.

It was a half-beat, no more, and she would not have noticed it if she had not known the pattern: a tiny, delicate hitch, like a stitch skipped on a loom. Then Emory’s face broke wide open into a grin of such warm, unclouded, entirely believable pleasure that she almost believed it herself.

“Callum?” He laughed. “Callum Reyes? The one with the shirt?”

“The shirt was Pip’s idea,” said Corinne.

“I liked him. I thought he was great.” He stepped forward and took both her shoulders in his hands, and kissed her, chastely, on the cheek: the dutiful peck of a nephew. His mouth was warm. His fingers pressed her shoulders, once, hard. “Good for you, Aunt Cor. Honestly. You deserve it. He’s a decent man.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“He’d better treat you right,” said Emory, “or I’ll have words with him.”

“Em,” said Pip, laughing.

“I mean it, Mom. Somebody’s got to look out for her.”

And he looked at Corinne, across the sunlit kitchen, with an expression of limpid fraternal concern, and she felt something cold and lovely and appalling slide down the length of her spine, like a bead of water on a window. It was not guilt. It was admiration. She was standing in a kitchen with the man she was sleeping with, and the best friend she had in the world, and two people were telling a lie to a third, in unison, in perfect pitch, and it was the most artful performance she had ever seen.

* * *

Pip stayed for two hours.

She inspected the lamp. She stood at the base of the tower with a hand on the whitewashed stone, her hat in her fist, and looked up the dim spiral to the glimmer of glass at the top, and said very softly, “I can still hear him,” and no one answered. She ate two croissants. She walked the cliff path with Emory, arm in arm, her silver head bent toward his, and Corinne watched them from the porch, two small figures against a vast blue morning, until they dwindled to the size of a thumbprint.

At eleven she left.

She kissed Corinne at the door and held her face between her hands. “I’m so glad you’re happy,” she said. “Even a bit. Especially a bit.” And she kissed her son, and got into her Audi, and drove away down the gravel lane in a swirl of dust. The sound of the engine faded. A gull circled once over the roof, and the morning went quiet.

Corinne stood on the porch for a long moment with her hand raised in a farewell no one could see.

Then she felt his arms come around her from behind.

“You were magnificent,” Emory breathed against her ear.

“Don’t.”

“You were. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s early. It’s very early.” He mimicked her perfectly, with a delighted husky laugh. “And Pip thinks. That was genius. You took the lie and you turned it into a window.”

“Emory —”

“I could have fallen over. I swear. I had to look at the floor.” He spun her around, lifted her off her feet, and whirled her in a circle on the porch, laughing, kissing her neck, her cheek, her hair. “You’re seeing the surgeon. You’re seeing Callum Reyes, on the quiet, and you’ve told my mother. I’m so jealous I can’t think. I’ll have to challenge him to a duel.”

“Put me down!”

“I’m jealous of myself.” He set her on her feet, flushed and laughing, and cupped her face. “Don’t you see? It’s perfect. It’s so perfect. She’s no longer looking at me. She thinks it’s him. If anyone ever asks why you’re glowing, if Mrs. Dunphy sees us together, if we’re ever caught — it’s Callum. It’s a decoy. It’s the safest thing in the world.”

“It’s a lie.”

“It’s a shield.”

“It’s a lie, Emory. I just lied to your mother, in her face, for two hours. About a man who doesn’t know I exist.” Her voice rose. “He asked me to dinner, and I put him off, and now Pip thinks I’ve said yes. She’ll treat him differently. She’ll tell the nurses. He’ll find out. And then he’ll be hurt. He’s done nothing to deserve it.”

“He won’t find out. She promised.”

“Pip has never kept a promise about gossip in her life.”

“Then I’ll deal with it.” His thumbs moved along her cheekbones, gently, and his eyes were warm. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t reach him. I’ll talk to him myself, if I have to. I’ll — I’ll find a way. Corinne. Listen. I know it’s hard. I know it feels low. But think what it buys us. Summer. A summer, with no one watching. And when it’s time, when we’re ready to tell her, we’ll tell her everything, and she’ll understand, because she’ll see that we were careful.”

“And Callum?”

“Callum will be fine. Callum is a surgeon. He’s used to having things cut off.”

She stared at him.

He blinked, and then laughed, and shook his head, and it was just the old, sheepish, lopsided Emory again. “That was a terrible joke. I’m sorry. I’m punchy. I’m so relieved I could weep.” He rested his forehead against hers. “Do you know how long I’ve been afraid of that conversation? How long I’ve lain awake imagining it? And now it’s gone. She doesn’t suspect. She relaxed. Did you see her face? I haven’t seen her face like that in years.”

“I saw it.”

“You did that.”

“I know,” said Corinne.

She said it very quietly. For he had said it in the tone of a man giving her a gift, a medal, a bouquet; and she was holding it in her hands, and finding it was warm, and heavy, and beating faintly like a heart.

* * *

When he had gone down to the beach to check the mooring, she took the dish towel and went into the kitchen and stood at the sink, alone.

The sun was high now. The window was full of sea. Out on the water, small and white, a sailboat tacked and turned, and she watched it for a long time, with the faucet running and her hands lying in the warm suds like two things she had found.

It’s early. It’s very early.

Yes. A bit.

She had said the words in a calm voice. She had said them without a tremor. She had looked into the eyes of the woman who had driven ninety minutes at two in the morning to rescue her from a fire escape, who had held her through four miscarriages, who had stood beside her at her mother’s grave. She had looked into those eyes and watched them fill with joy. And she had felt nothing.

That was what frightened her. Not the lie. She had lied before. She had told Graham that she was fine, on a hundred nights; she had told her mother-in-law the soufflé was delicious; she had told a nurse in a recovery room that she wasn’t in pain. She had always known the taste of lying, thin and sour, like copper on the tongue.

But today there had been no taste at all.

It had come out of her like silk, and it had worked, and in the instant of its working there had flowed through her a bright, clean, intoxicating rush, a pure animal triumph. It was the exhilaration of a mountain climber who has made the leap. She had felt alive.

She turned off the tap.

“Rule six,” she said aloud, to the empty kitchen, to the pie, to the sea. She said it quite softly, as a person says a prayer she does not entirely believe. “If I ever want to stop, I’ll say so.”

The sailboat came about, and the sail went white in the sun, and vanished behind the headland.

She dried her hands. She lifted the gray sweatshirt out of the breadbox, shook the crumbs from its sleeves, and hung it back on the chair where it belonged.