Sunday

Emory

The casseroles began arriving at seven-fifteen on Saturday morning.

He heard the first car come up the lane, a slow rattling crunch of gravel, and was at the kitchen window with a dish towel in his hand before it had stopped. A green Buick wagon. A tall woman in a quilted vest got out and went round to the back, opened the hatch, and bent, and straightened with a covered Pyrex dish held out in front of her in both mitts like a woman carrying a baby to a christening. She came up the path with it. She set it on the top step. She stood a moment looking at the door, with her chin up and her lips moving, perhaps in prayer; then she saw him at the window, and gave a little brave wave, and went away.

By ten there were four. A tuna noodle from Mrs. Dunphy, with a card in her fat looping hand: Thinking of you both. We’re all so proud of how you’re managing. A lasagna from the Garden Club. A pan of lemon bars from a Mrs. Teague whom he had never met. A pot of baked beans, still hot, wrapped in a bath towel, with no name on it at all, left by a man who had apparently driven in, set it down, and driven out again without being seen.

He carried them in one at a time and lined them up along the kitchen counter, and stood looking at them.

It was exactly what he’d said it would be. He had said it to her in this room on Friday evening, with the sun going down, in a gentle and terrible voice, and he had meant every word, and it was the best piece of reasoning he’d ever done: they’ll bring us casseroles. He had been right. He was always right. And he stood there in the pale morning light with a dish towel in his hand and the smell of tuna and cream of mushroom rising from the counter, and felt, for the first time since September, something that he could only describe as the beginning of nausea.

The town has closed over her, he thought. Like water.

He had not wanted that. That was what he kept coming back to. He had wanted it to be safe. He had wanted a house on a cliff at the end of a road where nothing could reach her, and now it turned out that the world he’d made safe had come by itself, in its quilted vest, to reinforce the walls.

He put the lasagna in the freezer. He put the beans on the stove. He did not touch the tuna.

* * *

He had watched her on the boat.

He had not meant to. He’d had the binoculars in his hand because he always had them on the porch; and he had stood at the head of the cliff stair with the glass up and his heart standing still, and seen the Marigold pull away from the pier with her wake spreading white behind her. He had seen the small figure in the cockpit. He’d seen the fist go up.

And he had seen her laugh.

It was the thing he kept replaying, in the oil room, in the dark. A sunny day on a bright sea, a woman in a gray cardigan standing straight at the helm with her hair streaming back, shaking her fist at the cliff, at him, and laughing: head thrown back, mouth wide, an open, wild, delighted whoop of a laugh that carried across the water as clear as a bell. He had not heard it since July. He had not heard it, he realized, since the morning at Hurricane Island, when she had come up out of the cold water with the salt running off her shoulders and said, Oh God, that’s glorious, do it again.

It was the happiest he’d seen her in a month.

He had written it in the log. He had been scrupulous about that. 1412. SUBJECT TOOK BOAT. SUBJECT LAUGHED. And then he had sat for a long time in the green light with the pencil over the page, because the next line was the one an honest record required, and he did not want to write it.

SUBJECT IS HAPPY WHEN SHE LEAVES.

He wrote it. He underlined it. He looked at it for exactly the count of ten. Then he turned the page, and began the plan.

* * *

On Saturday afternoon he set the room.

He did it as he did a boat: by working from the keel up. The study first. He rehung the sash window, new frame, new screws, and then, because a sash was a sash, he took a hacksaw and a length of galvanized pipe from the shop and fixed three bars across it on the inside, painted white, to look like a thing a house does when it’s old. He took the green lamp off the desk. He moved the desk a foot to the left. He set a stack of her own dictionaries on the blotter and the laptop on the dictionaries, so that the camera sat at the level of her eye, and he sat in her chair, and looked at himself in the screen.

A window behind him. A great pale rectangle of sky and sea, with a fringe of dried asters at the bottom edge. A bookcase at the left, the lawyer’s one, with its leaded glass. On the third shelf a barometer. Nothing else. No coil of rope, no cedar box; he had carried the box that morning to the oil room, where it belonged.

It was a good picture. He’d have believed it. A woman works in a study by the sea. His mother would see sun, and a window, and a sky. She would see a woman who was well.

He did a thing then that he did not do often. He took out his phone and opened the folder he kept hidden under a sequence of numbers, and scrolled to the last file but one, and sat looking at the thumbnail for a long time with his thumb above it.

It was dark, mostly. A round room, seen from above, from the corner of a steel ceiling, in a grain of soft green. A tall bright glass thing in the middle of it, turning, a hive of prisms, throwing little rainbows on the walls. A woman lay on a blanket on the floor beneath it with her hair spread out. A young man kneeled over her. He could not hear the sound without turning it up, and he did not turn it up.

He had put the camera in the lamp room in March. He remembered doing it. A small black thing the size of a matchbox, up in the corner behind the rafter, on a clip, to watch the lamp. For the lamp, he had told himself then, because there had been a bad short in the wiring, and a man had to be careful with a lens that old. He’d told himself so for months.

He had not turned it off on the thirty-first of July. He told himself that too.

He closed the file. He put the phone face down on the blotter, very gently, as one lays a child to sleep.

* * *

At nine that night he went up with a tray.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed in the lamplight in her gray cardigan with her hands in her lap. The shutters were boards again. He had done it on Friday, in the dusk, with a drill and a flashlight, not speaking, and she’d stood in the middle of the room with her hands over her ears. Now the cracks between the planks showed black. The room smelled of cedar and sawdust and something under it, sour and animal and sad, the smell of a creature that has been kept in the dark.

She looked at him when he came in. Her eyes were swollen. She had cried, he thought, for two days. He had listened to it from the landing with his back against the wall, hour after hour, a hoarse dry heave of crying, until at last it stopped and there was only the sound of her breath.

“I’ve brought you supper,” he said. “There’s a lasagna. It’s from the Garden Club. It’s meant to be good.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I know. Will you eat a little? For her?”

She was silent. Then, with the dull docility of a child, she took the plate.

He sat in the chair. He watched her take three mouthfuls, chew, swallow, and put down the fork. He had a speech ready. He had written it in the log, in the afternoon, and rehearsed it in the oil room, and the first sentence went out of his head like a bird out of a hand.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “Mom’s calling at three.”

“I know.”

“I’d like us to go over it. What she’s likely to ask. What you’ll say. It doesn’t have to be a lie, Cor. Nearly all of it can be true. You’ve been sick. You’ve been resting. The baby’s twelve weeks and six days, and she’s healthy, and everything is —” He heard his voice go and brought it back. “Everything is going well.”

“And the part that isn’t true?”

“Is that you’re here because you’re happy to be.” He said it so low that he hardly heard it. “That’s the only part.”

She did not answer. She sat with her hands in her lap, looking at the plank over the window, and a muscle moved in her cheek.

“I’m going to play you something,” said Emory.

He had thought it through. He had told himself it was not a threat. A threat was a thing you did to someone you did not love; this was a reminder. He took the laptop from under the tray and opened it on the quilt between them, and clicked, and the speakers gave a small dry crackle, and then, out of the dark, out of the green grain of the picture, a sound.

It was rain. The rain on the glass. A great slow turning whisper, whispering, over and over. And a woman’s voice, ragged and tender and very close, saying: I love you.

He watched her face.

It went white. Not slowly; all at once, as if a hand had wiped it. She looked at the screen, at the grainy round room and the little rainbows on the wall, and he saw her recognize the corner of the ceiling, the angle, the rafter, the long dark glass. She put her hand to her throat.

I know, said his own voice from the speaker, broken and happy. I’ve been waiting a long time to hear it.

He pressed a key. The room was silent.

“There’s a camera in the lamp room,” he said. “I put it in in March, for the lamp. There was a short. I forgot it was on that night. I’m so sorry. I would never have —” The half-beat came, the small cool gap, like a stair that isn’t there. He stepped over it. “It was a mistake. But it was a mistake that kept something. I’ve watched it a good many times. I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You were so happy.”

“You filmed us.”

“There are a few others. A handful.” He kept his eyes on the quilt. “I’ve never shown them to anyone. I’d never. You know that. I only want to say — I want to say it once, so we don’t ever have to say it again — that if Mom were to believe, tomorrow, something that wasn’t true. If she thought, God forbid, that I’d hurt you. That you were here against your will. I’d have no choice, Cor. I’d have to show her what was true. I’d have to show her how you were, and what you said. I’d have to let her see how much you wanted this.”

“You would show your mother that.”

“I would show her you were happy.”

The silence was long. She sat so straight and so still that he thought she’d stopped breathing. He heard the sea beyond the planks, and the lamp across the lawn beginning its slow turn, and the small high singing in his own ears.

“I don’t want to,” he said. “Please believe me. It would break my heart. I want us to tell her ourselves. At Christmas. When the baby’s strong, and the worst is over, and she’s had time. We’ll sit down together in her kitchen, with a pot of tea. We’ll tell her the whole thing. I just don’t want her to find out in a hallway. You understand? I’m only trying to — to protect what we’ve got.”

“What we’ve got.”

“Yes.”

“Emory.” She raised her eyes. They were red, and dry, and utterly steady. “What is the Block Island ferry?”

He had not expected it. It went through him like a stone through a window.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’ve read my phone since June. You’ve seen it. On the second of September, I started a text to your mother and deleted it. You must have it logged. And you’ve been asking yourself for six weeks what it means. I’ve watched you do it.” Her voice was quite level. “So I’m telling you. It’s a toast. Pip and I have been saying it for eighteen years, since I was twenty. Here’s to the Block Island ferry. It means good luck. It means may you always get home. We say it at weddings, and funerals, and when one of us gets a job. I was going to text it to her because I was lonely.”

It was possible. Every word of it. It was perfectly possible. He sat looking at her and tried to find the place where the lie lay, and it was not there; there was no pause, no hitch, no glinting seam; she had said it in one long smooth breath, as a woman says her prayers.

He realized, with a lurch like missing a step, that he could not tell.

She has learned it, he thought. She’s learned to close the gap.

“I’d rather you didn’t say it tomorrow,” he said, hearing his own voice come thick. “On the call.”

“Why?”

He opened his mouth. He found there was no reason that he could give her that was not a confession.

“No reason.”

“Then I will if I like,” said Corinne. “It’s a toast, Emory. It’s our toast. I’m not going to be forbidden my own friend’s toast. If you want to take that away from me as well, you’ll have to do it in front of her.”

He stared at her.

She picked up the fork. She took a mouthful of the Garden Club lasagna and chewed it, thoughtfully, and swallowed, and he watched the long line of her throat move, and had the dizzy conviction, so strong that he almost spoke, that he was looking at a stranger.

* * *

The call came at three, as promised, on the dot.

He had arranged everything. The laptop on its stack of dictionaries; the pale window; the lawyer’s bookcase. Her hair brushed back. A little color, from a pinch of her own blusher, on her cheekbones, laid on with his thumb while she held perfectly still and looked at the wall. The gray cardigan, the pearl earrings, the tortoiseshell clip. He had pulled a second chair up on the left, just out of the frame, and sat in it with a legal pad on his knee, on which he had written in capitals: SMILE. SLOW. DON’T RUSH. And under it, in smaller letters: IF SHE ASKS FOR THE FATHER: “IN PERSON.”

On the screen a little spinning circle. A chime.

And there was his mother.

She was in her kitchen. He knew it by the yellow wall and the copper pot and the corner of the green door at the back of the frame, the door he had opened for the first time at the age of eleven. She sat very close to the camera, so that her face filled the screen, and the sight of it went into him like a hook: the silvery-copper hair, cut sharp; the hazel eyes; the fine lines at the corners of the mouth that she had always said came from laughing and that he knew came from not. She wore the blue sweater. She looked as though she hadn’t slept.

“There she is,” said Pip.

Her voice cracked on the is. She put a hand over her mouth. For a moment nobody said anything; and the girl in the window across the room, in the frame, did something he’d never have predicted. She smiled. It was a real smile. It broke out of her slowly, like light coming into a cold room, and her eyes filled up, and she said, in a voice so warm and rueful and ordinary that it nearly took his breath away, “Hi, Pip.”

“Come closer. I can’t see you. Lean in.”

She leaned. His mother’s eyes went over her face, quickly, with the flat professional sweep he knew from a thousand times in the clinic, hairline to chin, color, pupils, the line of the neck. A doctor’s look. He watched it come to rest.

“You’re thin.”

“I’m green is what I am. I’ve been sick every morning since the end of August. I can’t keep down anything but rye toast.”

“Mm. How far are you?”

“Thirteen weeks today.”

“Due the nineteenth of April.” Pip made a note on something off screen. “Who’s looking after you? Not a country OB. I know it’s high-risk, you’ll have a specialist.”

“Dr. Baptiste. At Maine Medical. Maternal–Fetal.”

“Janelle Baptiste?”

His pencil stopped on the pad.

“Is that her first name?” said Corinne lightly. “I only ever see the initial.”

“It’s Janelle. We trained together.” His mother’s face did not change. “I’ll give her a ring tomorrow. Tell her to be good to you. She’s a bit of a dragon but she’s the best in the state.”

“That’s — that’s very kind.”

He sat with the legal pad on his knee and felt the blood leave his hands. He had known it was possible. He had considered it on Thursday night, in the green lamplight, and decided that the odds were too small, that Maine was a big state, that his mother’s world was not the world of the high-risk clinics in the city. Of course she knows her, said a small cold voice. You took the name off the reminder yourself. You built the lie out of the one true thing you had.

“Callum sends his love, by the way,” his mother was saying. “He’s been on at me for a month. He wants to know whether you’re alive. He says you owe him a Thursday dinner and a very good explanation.”

She said it quite simply, looking straight into the lens. And for one moment, in the small bright rectangle, he saw his mother’s gaze go very slightly past Corinne’s shoulder, to the edge of the frame, to the chair where he sat; and come back.

She called Callum.

She called him, and she asked, and he said no.

It dropped through him slowly, a gray cold drop. His mother had known since September. She’d waited until now to say it. She had let him think it was a joke about a dinner.

“Is Em there?” said Pip.

He rose. He did it without thinking, as one does when the teacher says one’s name. He crossed to the desk, and bent, and put his hand on the back of Corinne’s chair, and smiled into the lens his best smile, the one with the snaggle tooth, the one that had got him out of every trouble of his life.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hello, darling.” His mother’s eyes went to his face, and then to his hand, white-knuckled on the chair-back, and then to Corinne’s, folded in her lap; and he saw her take it all in, and file it, with a slow impenetrable steadiness. “You look tired.”

“I am tired.”

“She’s lucky to have you.”

“I’m the lucky one,” said Emory.

It was the right line. It was what he’d planned to say. And it came out of him in exactly the right voice, a soft, wondering, sincere, boy’s voice, with a catch in it; and he saw his mother’s mouth tighten at the corner in a way he had seen only once before in his life, in a kitchen in Portland, over a manila folder from the Brandt family’s lawyer.

“And the father,” said Pip pleasantly. “Cor, you haven’t said. Who is he? I’d like to know whom to hate.”

Silence.

He looked down at the legal pad. He did not need to. IN PERSON. It was written there, in capitals, in his own hand. But the screen had gone small and far away, and in the whole bright window of the room there was nothing but the sound of his own blood, and the back of Corinne’s head, and the line of her neck.

“I’ll tell you when I see you,” said Corinne. “Please, Pip. I can’t do it through a screen.”

“All right.”

“I’m so sorry I’ve been —”

“I know.”

“I’ve been the world’s worst friend. I’ve been so —” She stopped. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, laughing a little. He felt her shoulders shake under his fingers, a fine ripple like wind on a pond, and could not tell if it was grief or something else. “I’ve thought of you every day. I was thinking about the island this morning. Remember the toast? That first summer? We got so drunk on the ferry that we missed our stop, and you stood on the rail, and —”

No.

” — and you said, Cor, Cor, if we ever get properly lost, it won’t matter, because there’ll always be a boat.” She laughed. She was crying openly now. “Is the Block Island ferry still running, do you know? I’ve got such a hankering for it. I’d love to take it before they stop for the season.”

He saw it land.

He was watching his mother’s face, as he had watched it all his life, as a deckhand watches a barometer. And what he saw was nothing, and that was the worst of it. Nothing at all. The face did not change. It did not go white, or flinch, or soften. It went smooth. It went blank and still and flat, like a plate, like the surface of a bay in the instant before the stone strikes. It was the face she wore on the table, over a patient whose heart has stopped and who has not yet been told.

He knew that face. He had seen it twice.

“It runs through the twenty-sixth,” said Pip.

“Does it?”

“The last boat leaves Point Judith at four. I looked it up last week, as it happens. I had a funny feeling you might ask.” She took off her glasses, and rubbed her nose, and put them on. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll come up and we’ll go over together. I’ve got Monday the twentieth free. I’ll drive up in the morning.”

“Mom,” said Emory.

“I’ll bring soup. I’ll bring a bag. I’d like to stay a few days.”

“Mom, she’s on bed rest. The specialist said —”

“I’ll be quiet as a mouse.” The smile she gave him was gentle, and loving, and without the smallest gleam of humor. “I’ll sit by the bed and read her the paper. I’ll cook. I’ll be no trouble at all. You won’t even know I’m there.”

He opened his mouth. He could not for his life have said what would come out. And he heard, from a long way off, from some vast quiet chamber at the back of himself, a voice that sounded almost exactly like his own.

“That would be wonderful, Mom.”

“Good.” She looked at them both. “I love you. Both of you. You know that. Whatever it is.”

The screen blinked. The circle spun. And the little window went dark, and in the sudden hush there was the sea, and the tick of the radiator, and the sound of a woman beginning, quite softly, to sob.

* * *

He did not touch her at first.

He stood by the chair with his hands at his sides, looking at the black screen, at his own face in it, and the small bright slice of sky behind. He heard the sob catch and break and gather. He heard her try to stop it. He heard the pencil roll off the desk and tick away across the floor.

“What does it mean?” he said.

“It’s a toast.”

“Cor.”

“It’s a toast, Emory.” She wiped her face with both hands. “It’s only a toast. I told you.”

He looked at her. He looked for a long time, at the shaking shoulders and the tangle of hair, at the cardigan he’d chosen, at the earrings that had been her mother’s. And he knew. He knew it as he knew the depth of the cove and the weight of a plank. She was lying, and she was telling the truth, and both of them at once, in a grammar he had never learned: a toast and a signal, a joke and a flare. He had heard his mother’s face say so.

He was not angry. That surprised him. He stood in the cold bright study with the whole structure of his plan falling down about him like a wet tent, and what he felt was a kind of vast, heavy, wondering tenderness. She did it in front of me. She looked me in the eye and told me and did it anyway.

She’s so brave.

“I’m not going to punish you,” he said.

She stared up at him.

“I mean it. I’m not going to take anything away. I thought about it, all night. I thought, what if I took the lamp, the bed, the — and I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.” He sat on the edge of the desk. His knees felt weak. “I think I was wrong, about the call. I think I frightened you and I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to do. I won’t show anyone anything. Not unless —” He stopped. “I won’t.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want Mom to come on the twentieth.” He heard himself say it and was astonished. He had not known it until the words were in the air. “I want her to see the house. I want her to sit at the table. I want her to see you, here, with me. Safe. Eating. Happy.” He put out a hand, and let it fall. “I want you to be happy, Cor. Really and truly, not as a performance, for her. Eight days. Can you do that?”

She looked at him as one looks at a man who is speaking in a foreign language.

“You’re asking me to be happy.”

“Yes.”

“On order.”

“I’m asking you to try.” He leaned down. His eyes were wet. “I’ll do anything. Everything I can. I’ll bring back the shutter. I’ll bring the record player. I’ll bring you out of this room, and we’ll cook, and sit in the kitchen, and you can read to me, and I’ll listen, and it’ll be like July. It’ll be like it was. We can have it again. I know we can. We only have to — to be it, for eight days. And she’ll see. She’ll see there was nothing wrong.”

“And on the twenty-first?”

“And on the twenty-first, she’ll go home,” said Emory.

It was out of his mouth before he knew. And he heard, at once, the half-beat. It had come between twenty-first and home, a small clear silence like a breath held under water, and it sat in the room between them, as plain as a third person.

She heard it too. He saw her hear it.

They looked at each other across the dictionaries and the dead screen, a man and a woman in a pale cold study, and neither said a word.

* * *

At half past five in the morning, in the oil room, he wrote the log.

MON. OCT. 13. 0530. WIND SW 14 KTS, GUSTING. BAROMETER 29.71, FALLING. SEA MODERATE. SQUALLS EXPECTED BY NIGHT.

SUBJECT SLEPT 2 HRS. CRIED UNTIL 0400. ATE NOTHING.

CALL 1500: COMPLETED. PIP SUSPECTS. SHE KNOWS BAPTISTE. SHE CALLED CALLUM. SHE UNDERSTOOD THE FERRY.

He sat looking at it.

Then he turned the page, to a clean one, and wrote at the top, in capitals, underlined twice:

CONTINGENCIES.

He wrote the number one. He sat with the pencil above the line for a long time, listening to the lens turning, whisper, whisper, whisper, high overhead in the dark.

Under it, at last, in a small steady hand, he wrote:

1. NOVA SCOTIA.