Block Island

She was twenty years old, and she had no shoes.

That was the detail she always came back to, afterward, when she told the story, which was almost never. Not the bruise on her arm, or the broken plate, or the man in the next room with the shower running. The shoes. He had put them in the trunk of his car on the Friday, with the rest of her clothes, and the keys, and the passport she had not known he’d taken, with a cheerful little shrug, as one puts away the summer things. You won’t need them. We’re not going anywhere. And she had stood in a Providence apartment at midnight in a borrowed T-shirt with the sound of the water running in the bathroom, and the telephone in her hand, and had understood that she could not say the thing she needed to say, because he was twelve feet away and a wall was a thin thing.

She had dialed from memory. A Boston number, belonging to a woman seven years older than she was, a medical student in a rented attic with a five-year-old. It rang four times. It was a quarter past one.

Hello? said Pip, thickly. Cor? What’s wrong?

And she had said, as brightly as she could, with her heart going like a drum against her ribs: Hi! No, nothing, sorry it’s so late. I just wanted to ask you something. We’re planning a weekend, Dylan and me, and I was wondering — do you know if the Block Island ferry is still running?

There had been a pause. Not a long one. Perhaps three seconds on a line in the dark, in which a girl in a bare attic apartment had sat up in bed with her hair on end, and listened to a voice she had known for two years say Block Island, and ferry, and Dylan, in a pitch an octave too high.

It runs till October, said Pip. Her voice had changed. It had gone flat and low and clear, a voice you could have set a level on. Where are you?

Providence. Brook Street. Number twenty-two. Second floor.

Is he there?

Yes. Yes, it’s fine. I’ll let you go.

Don’t hang up, said Pip. Stay on the phone. Say something about the weather.

She had said something about the weather for eleven minutes. She remembered it still. She had stood in the dark kitchen with her bare feet on the cold lino and said the sky had been so clear, and the moon so bright, that she thought it might freeze; and on the other end of the line, steadily, from a car on a highway, a voice that did not stop said good, that’s good, keep going, I’m on 95, you’re doing great, until the water stopped in the next room and the bathroom door began to open. I’ll let you go. Bye! And she had hung up the phone, and turned around, and smiled.

Pip came up the stairs at ten to three. She had not knocked. She had come in through a door he’d had the sense to leave unlocked, and had looked at the man in the doorway of the bedroom in his undershirt, a big man, thick-necked, six-two, and at the girl on the couch with her knees drawn up, and had said, in a conversational tone, Hi. I’m Philippa. I’m a doctor. Cor tells me you’re thinking of sending her home.

He had been drunk. He’d said something. Pip had walked up to him until she was an arm’s length away and had not raised her voice. I am a very patient woman, she’d said, and I have never been in a fight in my life. But I am also an anesthesiologist in training, and I can put a man to sleep in nine seconds, and I would so love to try it on someone who deserves it. She had held out her hand. Her shoes.

He had given her the shoes.

They had stood on the pavement on Brook Street at three in the morning, in the orange light, with the shoes in Corinne’s hand, and she had begun to shake; and Pip had put her arms round her, in the cold, in the dark, and held on, and said into her hair: Well. I suppose we’d better have a drink. And they’d driven to a diner in Pawtucket and eaten eggs and drunk bad coffee, and Corinne had laughed until she cried, and at some time toward dawn, over a plate of home fries, Pip had raised her mug and said, in her dry ironical way:

To the Block Island ferry. May it always run.

May it always run, said Corinne.

That was all it had ever been. A toast, a joke, a thing two women said to each other at weddings. But under the joke, like a stone under a stream, there was a promise, and neither of them had ever needed to say it: If you call and say those words, I will come.

She lay on the bed in the dark and held the thought of it in both hands.

She heard me, she thought. She heard.

* * *

She did not remember much of the next two days.

They came afterward as a kind of fever, a dim hot gray. She had held herself upright through the call, and through the long strange interval in the study when he stood by the dead screen and said I’m not going to punish you, and I want you to be happy; she had held on, with her teeth, through the walk upstairs on his arm and the click of the bolt. And when it was done she lay down on the bed with her face to the wall, and something in her, which had been clenched for six weeks like a fist, let go.

She wept for hours. It was not grief. It was too large, too unshaped. It came up out of her in long retching gasps, in waves, like the sickness, and she could not stop it, and when it stopped she slept, and when she woke it began again. She lay under the quilt and heard him come and go. The tray. The tap of the bar. The soft clink as he laid down a cup. Once, at some hour of the night, a hand on her hair, so light that she might have dreamed it.

She’s coming, she told herself, in the gaps. The twentieth. Eight days. She heard. It was the only thing that held. She repeated it to herself, in the dark, with a feverish exactness, as she might have repeated a sentence from a text she was afraid of losing, until it was no longer words at all but a kind of breathing.

On the third day he opened the shutters.

He did it at seven in the morning. She heard the drill, and the soft thud of the planks being laid one by one on the grass below, and then the light came in, not as it had come in September, in a single shout, but slowly, in a long pale yellow tide that rose across the floor and up the foot of the bed. She lay and watched it come. Her eyes were swollen. She didn’t have the strength to turn.

He stood in the middle of the room with the drill in his hand.

He had shaved. He had put on the blue shirt, the one whose button she had sewn back on in May, on the porch, while he sat on the step with his arms round his knees. His face was white and drawn. He looked like a man who had been awake for a week. When he spoke it was in a voice she hadn’t heard since the cabin on the Marigold, low and rough and unguarded.

“I wanted to tell you that I was wrong.”

She looked at him.

“About the video. About the whole thing. I thought about it for two days.” He put the drill down on the dresser. “I said it was a reminder. It wasn’t. I know what it was. I stood there and told you I’d show my mother —” He stopped, and shook his head. “I said I wouldn’t hurt you, and that was exactly what I did. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Cor. I can’t tell you how sorry.”

He took out his phone.

He did it in front of her. He sat down on the edge of the bed with the thing in his hand, and she watched his thumb move on the glass, and a folder open, and a file. A small dark thumbnail. He turned the screen so that she could see it. A round room in a grain of green.

He pressed his thumb to it. A small gray box appeared. Delete this file?

“I’m not going to watch it again,” he said. “I’m not going to keep it. It’s yours. It was never mine to keep.”

Delete.

The thumbnail vanished. She saw it go.

She also saw, because she was a woman who had spent twenty years reading the fine print, that the folder it had come from still held, in the long list beneath, eleven other files. Each had a date. The thumbnails were small and dark. He had not deleted those. His thumb had gone past them, quickly, in the way of a man who is not thinking about something, and she saw the tiny flicker of his eyes as he did it, away and back again.

A handful, he had said, in the dark, with the half-beat.

“Thank you,” said Corinne.

It came out of her without a gap. She heard it, and she knew what he would hear: gratitude. And she looked at him, at the beautiful ruined face, the hair in his eyes, the long, sad, hopeful curve of his mouth, and understood that she was going to have to be very, very good.

* * *

Like July.

It was what he called it, in his head, she could tell; though he never said so. He only brought her down the stairs that same morning with his hand under her elbow, and sat her at the kitchen table, in the pale oblong of sun that fell across the boards, and put a mug of ginger tea in front of her, and stood back.

The kitchen was warm. It smelled of coffee and bay leaves and woodsmoke. The red-eyed detector in the ceiling watched her from its corner. The four casserole dishes stood washed in a row on the counter like a chorus line, waiting to be returned, and there was a vase of dried asters on the table, and the radio on the windowsill was playing something with a clarinet in it, very low.

“I thought,” said Emory. “I thought we could start with eggs.”

He cooked. She sat and watched him. He did it as he had done it in June, with his sleeves rolled and a dish towel over his shoulder, humming, cracking the eggs one-handed against the rim of the bowl, grating a little cheese, turning the pan with a flick of the wrist; and she thought, in her cold clear way: He’s so happy. He moved around the kitchen as though he were walking on water. Twice she caught him looking at her over his shoulder, and each time he looked away at once, ducking his head, flushing a little, like a boy caught staring at a girl in church.

“Do you remember,” he said, setting the plate down, “the morning at the Camden flea market? The vendor with the bad toupee?”

“Of course.”

“I was so frightened he’d say something. About how I’d been in the week before. That I’d asked about the record.”

“You told me you’d just been looking.”

“I did.” He sat opposite, his plate untouched. “God, I was a mess. I came out of that market and I thought, she’ll know. She’ll turn round in the car and say, You’re a fraud. And you said —”

“I said you had excellent taste in lawyers’ bookcases,” said Corinne.

He laughed. It was a real one, short and astonished, and the sound went through the kitchen like a bell. “You did. You said, Whoever you are, you have a gift for rescuing furniture.”

“It was a very nice bookcase.”

“It is a very nice bookcase.”

They sat and smiled at each other across the table in the winter sun, and she thought: This is how it works. This was the whole machine, in one small room. It was not the bolt. It was not even the fear. It was the fact that he told the story right, that he had every word of it, the toupee and the bookcase and the quartersawn white oak, and that for the length of one breath, as the laugh went out of him and the light fell across his hands, she wanted with all her heart to be the woman in the story.

She ate the eggs. They were very good.

“I’ve been thinking about names,” said Emory.

“Have you.”

“I haven’t decided. I only wanted to say a few. If you’d like to hear.” He bent his head. “There’s Marigold, obviously. But I thought that might be — I thought you might think it was a boat. There’s Alice, for Mrs. Fennimore. There’s my grandmother Josephine, though it’s a bit much. And I’ve got one more.” He raised his eyes. “I wrote it down. In the car, in August. I don’t know why. It just came.”

“What is it?”

“Alma.”

She sat quite still, with her fork in her hand.

“It’s Swedish, isn’t it? And Spanish. It means soul. I looked it up.” His voice shook, a little. “I thought, if she has your eyes, she’ll need a name that goes with them. Something that sounds like it’s got a lot of weather in it.”

Alma.

It was her mother’s mother’s name. He couldn’t have known. She had never said it aloud, in her whole life, to any living soul. It had been written on the flyleaf of a prayer book that lived in a drawer in Worcester; and then, after the funeral, in a box in a storage unit in Falmouth, under a tag in a stranger’s hand that said, YOUR MOTHER’S THINGS. I DIDN’T OPEN ANYTHING.

She looked at him. He was looking at his plate, turning a piece of toast over and over. Either it is a coincidence, she thought, or it is the first lie on that ring.

She put down the fork.

“It’s a lovely name,” she said.

And it was true, God help her. It was so true that it cut.

* * *

On Sunday evening he told her about the stage.

He said it plainly, standing in the bedroom doorway in the evening, with the sun going out behind the shutters and the last of the light on the floor. He had a clipboard in his hand. She almost laughed.

“She’ll arrive at ten. She’ll want to see the house. She’ll want to see your room, because she’s a doctor, and a mother, and she’ll want to be sure you’ve been sleeping properly. So I’ve taken the bar off.” He looked at the clipboard. “And the bolt. I’ve put a sleeve over the hole so you can’t see where it was. The window’s got a curtain. The one in the bathroom’s got a plant. You’ll see.” He looked up. “It’s a good room, Cor. It’s a lovely room. I’ve never seen it look so nice.”

“And where does she sleep?”

“The spare room. Across the hall.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll be on the landing. In the chair. I thought — I thought she’d like to know someone’s watching. In case you need anything in the night.”

Of course you will, thought Corinne.

“She’ll talk to you,” he said. “She’s going to talk to you. She’s going to ask you a lot of things, and I’d like you to answer the way you did on the call. Warmly. Truthfully. The truth is nearly all fine, you know. The baby, the sickness, the lighthouse. You love the lighthouse.” The half-beat came and went. “There’s only one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t upset her.”

She waited.

“You know what she’s like. She’s had a hard year. She’s been tired since the summer, and she doesn’t sleep, and she’s lost weight, and — I don’t think it’s serious.” He studied the clipboard very closely. Corinne had seen it herself on the screen: the blue sweater hanging loose from the collarbones, a new shadow under the cheekbone. She had put it down to worry. “I’m sure it isn’t. But her heart’s not what it was. And I was thinking, if there were a scene. If she thought something was wrong. If she thought, I don’t know, that I’d been unkind. That I’d done something. It would be — you’ve seen what it does to her. After Tessa. She didn’t get out of bed for a week.”

It struck her, as he said it, that he had not spoken that name to her since the rainy afternoon at Ledge Point, when he had told her the story in a flat low voice, looking at his hands.

“She’s been through so much for me,” said Emory softly. “I don’t want her to do it again. That’s all. I’d do anything to spare her. Wouldn’t you?”

That, thought Corinne, as the last light left the floor, is the most skilled thing he has ever said.

She understood it perfectly. It was not a threat. It was a hand laid on a scale. It put in the one pan her love for Pip and in the other the thing she wanted most to say, and asked, in the gentlest voice in the world, which was heavier. He was not lying about the sick woman at the end of the line. That was the genius of it. He was quite sincere. And the beam trembled, and she felt it, and hated him for the way it trembled.

“I’ll be careful,” said Corinne.

“Thank you.” His shoulders dropped. He smiled at her, shy and relieved, with all his crooked teeth. “I knew you would. I knew you’d see.”

He went away. She heard him go down the stairs, humming.

* * *

She did the last thing at midnight.

She had not been able to sleep. She lay with her hands on her stomach, listening to the lamp turn, far off in the dark, and the quiet clink of the carabiner as he crossed the yard, and then, because she could not bear another minute of lying still, she got up, and took off the left slipper, and sat on the edge of the bed in the faint gray light from the crack of the shutter.

It was an old pair, lambswool, with a stiff leather sole, a gift from her mother, the one thing she’d worn every winter for fourteen years. She found the seam at the heel with her thumbnail. It had begun to part. She worked the stitches loose, very slowly, in the dark, with her thumbnail and the edge of the little hex wrench she had taken from his ring; and slid the wrench, no longer than a paper clip, between the lining and the leather. She pinched the seam shut. She laid the slipper on the floor beside the bed with the heel turned in.

Two places, she thought. The picks in the hem; this in the heel. One hiding place was a hope. Two were a policy.

It was a small thing. It was nothing. A woman with a paper clip in her shoe. And she lay down again with her eyes open and looked at the cracks in the ceiling until her heart slowed, and thought of a girl on a pavement in Providence in a borrowed T-shirt, with the orange light on her face, and a voice saying, Her shoes.

She slept at last, toward dawn.

She woke to a sound.

She lay quite still, with her cheek on the pillow. The room was bright. She could not have said what had waked her. A gull, perhaps, or the old house settling. The shutter threw its long gold ladder across the quilt. Beyond the glass, far down the lawn, a curl of dust was rising from the end of the lane.

A car.

Not the truck, with its heavy diesel mutter. Something smaller, lighter, a kind of dry confident purr, coming up the gravel at a measured pace, at the speed of a woman who knows exactly where she is going and has decided not to hurry.

She heard it stop.

She heard the door open, and, after a moment, quite distinctly, in the stillness of the cold October morning, from the bottom of the lawn, a woman’s voice, crisp and level, call out across the grass:

“Em? I’ve brought soup.”