The Spare Key

August went by like a held note.

If someone had asked her, afterward, what she did in those four weeks, Corinne would have been hard-pressed to say. Nothing, and everything. She worked. She ate. She swam in the cold green water below the cliff. She slept. But it seemed to her, looking back, that the days had no edges: they ran together like colors in a wet painting, the morning bleeding into the afternoon and the afternoon into the long gold evening, and the only sharp thing in the whole blur was the sound of the truck in the drive, and three raps, a pause, and one tap.

They had stopped counting nights. He was simply there. He was there when she woke and when she slept. He was there at the stove at seven with his hair sticking up, humming, a skillet in his fist; he was there at one o’clock at the study door with a plate of sandwiches; he was there in the kitchen at six, cross-legged on the floor with a bag of flour and a recipe for Norwegian lefse that he had copied out in his small neat capitals. The gray sweatshirt had migrated permanently to the back of her chair. His boots lived by the door. His razor stood in the cup beside her toothbrush. One morning she opened the hall closet to find three of his shirts hanging beside her coats, and she stood and looked at them for a full minute, and did not take them out.

Rule four, said a small prim voice somewhere. You keep your own life.

Hush, said the rest of her.

And it was true, wasn’t it, that he had kept his. He went to the boatyard six days a week. He took his shifts with the rescue squad and came home smelling of antiseptic and lake water, and was twice called out in the middle of the night to a drowning, and returned at dawn gray-faced and silent, and lay beside her without speaking until the shaking stopped. He saw Ned Pratt on Sundays. He called his mother every evening at seven and said “Hi, Mom” in the lighthearted voice of a boy who had nothing to hide. He had a life, and she had hers, and the two ran together like twin streams in a single bed.

It was the happiest she had ever been.

She told herself so, often, in the mornings, standing at the window with her tea. She said it to the sea. And the sea, which was wiser than she was, said nothing, and went on turning from gray to blue to gold.

* * *

On the fifth of August she gave him a key.

She had meant to do it on a day that mattered. She had gone into Rockland on the Monday, on a pretext of a stationery errand, and ordered a copy of the front-door key at a hardware store that smelled of oil and rope. The man behind the counter had been about a hundred years old, and cut it slowly, with ceremony, and given it to her wrapped in a bit of newspaper. She had carried it home in her pocket like a coin. She had polished it on her sleeve. She had tied it, that evening, with a length of green ribbon she found in a sewing drawer, and she had hidden it under her pillow until the right moment.

The right moment came at dusk.

They were sitting on the porch steps, the third from the top, which he had mended in March; she with her feet on the second step, he with his on the first, the length of their bodies pressed together from shoulder to hip. The sun was going down behind the pines in a long gold ripple. A hermit thrush was singing. Below them, on the grass, a pair of rabbits cropped the clover with an air of monastic calm.

“Close your eyes,” said Corinne.

“Why?”

“Because I have a thing. Don’t peek.”

“I never peek.”

“You peek constantly. You peeked at the lemon cake.”

“That was a matter of quality control.”

“Close them.”

He closed them. A smile played at the corner of his mouth. She drew the key from under her cardigan and took his hand, turned it over, and laid the key in his palm, the green ribbon trailing between his fingers. His hand closed on it automatically. She watched his face. For a moment it was perfectly still.

“You can open,” she said.

He opened his eyes. He looked down. In the dusk, the key lay in the callused hollow of his palm like a small gold fish.

“It’s to the front door,” she said. A little breathlessly. “I know it’s silly, you come in anyway, you know the house better than I do. But I wanted you to have it. A real one. So that you never have to knock.” She hesitated. “Not that I mind the knock. I love the knock. I’d be heartbroken if you stopped. But I thought — it should be yours. It’s what people do. When they — when they’re —”

“When they’re what?” said Emory.

“When they’re not just visiting.”

He did not say anything.

He was staring at the key. The thrush went on singing in the dark pines. A last lick of sunlight caught the brass and set it blazing, and in its glow she saw the tendons stand out in his wrist. He was holding the key as one holds a bird that has landed in one’s hand, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

“Emory?”

“Give me a moment,” he said hoarsely.

“Oh — it’s too much. I’ve overstepped. We said rule four, and I —”

“It’s not too much.” His voice cracked. He closed his hand over the key and pressed it, in his fist, against his breastbone. “It’s — nobody’s ever given me a key. In my life. Not once. I’ve had keys. I’ve had my own. I’ve had keys to a hundred things. But nobody has ever handed me one. And said, come in.” He turned his face away. His shoulders shook. “I’m sorry. I’m such an idiot.”

She put her arms around him. He put his face in her neck and wept without a sound, for a full minute, with the key clutched in his fist, and she rocked him, murmuring, it’s all right, it’s all right, I’ve got you, while the rabbits looked up from the clover and the light drained out of the sky.

“Thank you,” he said at last, in a muffled voice. “I’ll keep it forever.”

“You’d better. It cost me two dollars.”

He laughed, wetly. Then he sat up, wiped his face on his sleeve, and dug in the pocket of his jeans. “I have one for you, too. I was going to wait. But I think this is the time.”

He brought out a keyring.

She knew it at once. It was the one she’d glimpsed in April, when it fell out of his vest onto her desk: a plain steel ring the size of a bracelet, heavy with keys of every size. Truck keys. The boatyard. The padlock on the shed. And, nestled together in the middle like twins, two identical brass keys, old and flat, with worn bows and the same set of notches along their shafts.

“My dad had a saying,” said Emory. “A man with one key has none. He said you should always have a spare. For every door you’ve got. And you should give the second one to someone you’d trust with your life.” He worked the ring open with his thumbnail, and slid one of the twin keys off, and held it out to her on his palm. “I’ve been carrying these two for eight years. Since I was fifteen. I used to take them out at night and look at them. I used to think, who am I going to give the other one to?”

“What do they open?” said Corinne.

“The tower.”

She looked at him.

“The lighthouse door. The big one at the base. It’s always locked.” He smiled, a little crookedly. “I know I said it was rusted shut. It was, in March. I oiled it. Dad rebuilt that lock himself, when he did the clockwork, twenty-four years ago. This is the key.” He pressed it into her hand. “Now it’s yours. So you can go up whenever you like. Sit under the lamp. Look at the sea. You don’t have to ask me.”

“Emory, I can’t — it’s your project. It’s your father’s —”

“It’s the thing I love most in the world,” he said, “after one other thing.” His voice was very quiet. “I want you to have the door.”

She closed her fingers on the key.

It was warm from his pocket, a little oily, heavier than it looked. It had a dull gold shine, worn smooth by years of handling, and along one edge, scratched with a pin, were three tiny letters: D.W. She turned it over in the light. She thought of a man she’d met a dozen times and hardly known, with big hands and a rumbling laugh, a man who had built a greenhouse out of cut glass, who had once said, at a small boy’s birthday party, this one will be trouble.

“It was your father’s.”

“It was ours. He cut two. He gave them both to me on my fifteenth birthday, on a ring. He said, for when you get a lighthouse of your own. And give the spare to somebody you’d trust with your life.” Emory’s eyes were bright. “Eight months later he was dead. I never thought I’d have a lighthouse.”

“And now you have.”

“And now we have.”

She threaded the key onto the fine silver chain she wore at her throat, her mother’s, which had held nothing for years, and worked the clasp closed behind her neck, and let the key fall inside her cardigan, against her heart. The metal was warm. It lay there like a second pulse.

“Thank you,” said Corinne.

“Thank you.”

“I’ll never lose it.”

“I know,” Emory said. He took her hand and kissed the knuckles, the one-two-three of them, with a look so grave and so tender that she nearly told him, then and there, everything that she had thought and not said. “I know you won’t.”

* * *

The first time she was sick, she blamed the clams.

It was the ninth of August, a Saturday, and they’d eaten at a shack on the Rockland waterfront, a place with plastic chairs and a paper menu and a view of the ferry terminal. She had ordered the fried clams. She’d eaten the whole basket. It was only on the drive home, in the truck, with the windows down and the road unspooling in the headlights, that she began to feel peculiar: a low, greasy swell in her stomach, a prickle at her hairline, a sudden terrible sensitivity to the smell of the upholstery.

“Pull over,” she said.

“What?”

“Pull over.”

He pulled over. She fell out of the truck, ran six steps into the weeds, and was violently ill into a patch of goldenrod. Emory was there before she’d finished, a hand on her back, another holding her hair. She retched and retched, and when it was over she stayed bent over the ditch with her hands on her knees, shaking, tasting copper.

“Clams,” she gasped.

“Maybe.”

“It’s the clams. They sat in the sun.”

“You want some water?”

“God, yes.”

He gave it to her. He wiped her face with his handkerchief, gently, and tucked her back into the cab and drove the rest of the way at twenty miles an hour, glancing at her every few seconds with a look she could not read. He carried her up the stairs, though she protested. He put her to bed. He brought her ginger ale and plain toast and a damp cloth for her forehead, and sat beside her in the dark, and did not speak. At one in the morning she woke to find his hand lying flat on her stomach, warm, still, on top of the quilt.

“What are you doing?” she murmured.

“Checking.”

“Checking what?”

“If you’re all right.” The hand did not move. “Is that okay?”

“It’s fine.” She was too sleepy to care. “It’s — warm.”

“Go back to sleep.”

She did.

* * *

It did not stop with the clams.

That was the thing. A week went by, and then another, and the feeling of being slightly, obscurely wrong never quite went away. In the morning she woke queasy. At noon she was ravenous and could eat only crackers. At four she needed to lie down. The smell of coffee, which she had loved for twenty years, went suddenly sour in her nose. A pot of Wild Rose honey, left open on the counter, brought her to the sink retching. She stopped being able to read the Skau pages for more than forty minutes at a stretch; the words swam and slid. She fell asleep over her laptop at three in the afternoon with her cheek on the keys and woke an hour later with dddddddd stamped across a whole page.

“I’m getting old,” she said, with some dismay.

“You’re not old.”

“I’m thirty-eight. It’s the beginning of the end. The body gives out. First the knees, then the metabolism, then the will to live.”

“Maybe it’s the heat.”

“Maybe it’s the summer flu.” She pressed her palms to her cheeks. “Or perimenopause. That’s the thing, you know, it can start early, after — after the surgery, with everything the way it was — the doctor said my hormones might go off. I don’t even know if I get a regular — I haven’t tracked in years. There wasn’t any point.”

He was sitting at the kitchen table that morning, peeling an apple in one long unbroken spiral. He looked up.

“There wasn’t any point,” he repeated.

“There’s nothing to track. It’s all just — a malfunctioning plumbing system.” She tried to make it a joke. “I’m fine. I’m a woman of a certain age with a fondness for fried food. This is what happens.”

“You should see a doctor.”

“For what? A stomachache?”

“For you.” The apple peel dropped in a perfect coil onto the table. “I’d feel better. That’s all. I don’t like seeing you ill.”

“I’m not ill. I’m fine.”

“You threw up in a ditch.”

“A clam did.”

He held her eyes for a second. He had gone quite still, and his face was perfectly open, and there was a patient, careful, expectant quality in it that she took for love. “Humor me,” he said quietly. “When you’re ready. There’s no hurry. I only want you to be well.”

She said she would. She did not.

* * *

Ingrid called on the nineteenth.

“I am looking at a calendar,” said the voice from Oslo, dry and unhurried, “and it says that on the thirtieth of September I am expecting a manuscript. It also says that we are on the nineteenth of August. You have sent me four chapters since the middle of July.”

“I’m sorry, Ingrid. I’ve been unwell.”

“You have been happy. It’s not the same.”

“I’m doing my best. I’ve got Chapters Fifteen to Eighteen outlined, and I’ll give you a full draft on the first of September, I swear —” She sat up at the desk, pressing the heel of her hand to her stomach, where a vague nausea had been rolling since morning. “I’ll work nights. I’ll lock myself in.”

“I do not want you to lock yourself in.” There was a silence on the line. The tram clanged in the background. “Corinne. I will tell you something I have not told you in six years. You are the best I have. I mean this professionally, not as a compliment. The others translate. You carry. The Skau book is the first of ours that is going to be read in America by people who have never heard of Norway, and it is because of you. So I say, take the time you need. Fall in love. Have a summer. But do not forget that you are a person who finishes.”

“I won’t.”

“You sound pale.”

“It’s the connection.”

“It is not the connection.” Ingrid’s voice softened a fraction. “Eat something. Sleep. And whoever the boot belongs to —” a faint dry smile “— tell him that the Bergen invitation extends to him. Anders will want to inspect.”

She hung up before Corinne could think what to say.

Corinne sat in the humming quiet of the study with her hand on her stomach, and the pencil box at her elbow, and the walnut glowing in the slanting afternoon. Outside the window the sea lay blue and still. She looked at the calendar tacked to the wall above the desk, a plain paper one from the Port Ellis hardware store, with a picture of a lighthouse for August. The days were crossed off in neat pencil strokes. Her handwriting. Hers. She counted them slowly with the tip of the Blackwing.

Thursday. Friday. Saturday.

She went back past the launch of the Marigold, back past the Saturday Pip had come with the pie. That was the last time. She was almost sure. She had woken that week with a faint cramp and a pinkish smudge, a day and a half of nothing, so brief and light that she had put it down to the heat, and she had not thought of it since. Five weeks. Five weeks and a few days. And the box of tampons she had bought from Mrs. Dunphy in April still sat under the bathroom sink with its cellophane on.

She felt it rising in her then, a long, slow, dreadful, ridiculous, astonishing surge of something she dared not name.

She put down the pencil. She said aloud, quite calmly, to the empty room: “No.”

The room did not answer.

“It’s not possible,” said Corinne. “It isn’t. It is medically impossible. A doctor told me. Four doctors told me. It’s — I have a scar. A very large one.” She laughed, once, an odd flat sound. “It’s the clams.”

She turned over the calendar page to September, and stared at it, and did not turn it back.

* * *

On the twenty-seventh of August, a Wednesday, he made lamb.

He cooked it the way he did everything, slowly, with the radio low and the oven door open to the warm sweet smell of rosemary and garlic. It was one of his surprises. He had come in at five with a shoulder wrapped in paper from the butcher in Port Ellis, and a bag of new potatoes, and a bunch of mint from his mother’s garden, and had banished her from the kitchen in a voice of such operatic firmness that she retreated to the porch with a book. She sat there for an hour, and the book fell, unread, onto her lap.

At seven he called her to dinner.

The kitchen smelled like a feast. The table was laid for two, with the good blue plates and the white candles in their saucers. A bottle of wine stood open at her place. Emory held out her chair with a flourish. He had tucked a napkin into his collar, in a mock-French way, and his hair stood up at the back, and he looked about nineteen.

“Madame,” he said.

“Monsieur.” She smiled, and sat.

The plate came down in front of her. It was lamb in a dark glossy sauce, with potatoes and a heap of green beans, and the smell rose from it in a warm, rich, heavy cloud: meat, and fat, and rosemary, and wine, and the faint sharp sweetness of garlic.

Her stomach turned over.

It did not roll. It heaved, a single violent contraction that came up from her toes. Her mouth filled with water. A cold sweat broke out on her forehead. She pushed back her chair so hard that it crashed against the dresser, and she was out of the kitchen and halfway down the hall before she knew she’d moved, and fell to her knees in the little downstairs bathroom in front of the toilet.

She was sick for a long time.

When it was over she stayed where she was, on the cold tiles, with her forehead on her forearm and her eyes shut. The house was very quiet. She could hear, from the kitchen, nothing at all: no clatter, no footsteps. He had not come after her. She heard the faint ticking of the oven. She heard, down the hall, in the silence, the soft scrape of a chair.

And then his step in the passage.

He didn’t hurry. He came unhurriedly down the hall and stopped in the bathroom doorway, and she lifted her head and looked at him, from her knees, with her hair stuck to her face.

He had a glass of water in his hand. He had a cool damp cloth over his arm. He did not look alarmed. He did not look worried, or puzzled, or sick with concern, as he had in the truck. He looked, standing there in the yellow hall light with the napkin still tucked into his collar, like a man who has been waiting at a station for a very long time, and has just heard, in the distance, the sound of the train.

“It’s not the lamb,” said Corinne weakly.

“No.”

“I don’t think it’s the clams, either.”

“No.” He crossed the tiles and knelt in front of her. He wiped her face with the cloth, slowly, from the forehead to the chin, and held out the glass, and she drank. His fingers were steady. His eyes were soft and warm and wide. “I think,” said Emory gently, “that you should see a doctor.”

“Emory —”

“Tomorrow. Or whenever. I’ll drive you.” He set the glass on the floor, and took both her hands in his, and chafed them gently between his palms. “You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to know. I just want you to go and find out.”

“Find out what?”

He smiled.

It was a small, private, wondering smile, and it was so tender that for a moment she forgot to be afraid. In the dim yellow light, kneeling on the cold bathroom floor with her hands in his, she watched it spread slowly across his face. It came up from somewhere very deep. It lit his eyes from within.

He wasn’t surprised.

That was the thing she would turn over later, again and again, in the long white nights, like a stone in a pocket. She would remember the napkin, and the water glass, and the candlelight in the kitchen down the hall. She would remember that he had not asked her what’s wrong. He had not said oh, God, are you all right? He had walked in and wiped her face and said, you should see a doctor, and smiled; and she had looked at him, kneeling on the tiles, and thought, with a dizzying, delighted, terrible certainty:

He knows.

He’s known for weeks.