“You didn’t tell me about him.”
“No, you were too busy telling me about him.” Amy laughed and walked away, not even looking back as she said, “Have a great time tonight.”
And the metal door slammed.
This memory was a brick on his neck—aching. He must be seeing things outside on the dock. Amy didn’t even wear that cross anymore. He didn’t often visit these memories where each detail, if probed, was still as sharp as the needle that had sewed their relationship together. She had a quote, an old quote she used to say about their relationship . . . something about being sewn together. He would ask her. He would ask her a lot of things. Nothing else mattered except this second chance he was now being offered—even if it was through his daughter’s boyfriend.
Eliza had talked him into coming to the lake house this weekend, her tears and pleading accomplishing the intended job. Or maybe he hadn’t really needed to be talked into it. Either way, now he just wanted to know Amy again, the spaces of her: the dents between each vertebra, the soft spot below her anklebone, the curve of her earlobe. And now another desire rose—to find out why she had never come, to find out what had caused her to abandon their promised life together.
By the time he’d been released from the hellhole they called a jail, he had sufficiently buried all the good of Amy and had only found, when probed, fury at her broken promises.
He glanced out to the lake—there it was again, a flash. Amy. Now she was here—all her goodness lucent and evident again. He couldn’t fool himself into bitterness and hatred when she was present.
Amy awoke to the pinprick pain of numb legs. She opened her eyes to a pure black void; she was afraid to move. She curled her legs up to her body until she could remember where she was and why. It came back to her in short bursts: Nick’s lake house, red wine, dinner, a dizzy sleeplessness that had sent her out to the lake and the large deck chairs, away from her snoring husband. She leaned back on the teak steamer chair—no plastic lounge chairs at the Lowry house.
The night was an erased chalkboard: starless, moonless. She strained backward, gazed to the right and left in the dark, looking for the moon. Her heart rolled as she realized she’d lost all sense of direction, lost the moon.
Where was it? There was always a moon.
Was she facing east, west? She didn’t move, fearful she would fall in the lake. Then she placed one foot on the dock, pushed on the wood, placed her other foot down and stood.
Footsteps echoed through the night, vibrated across the dock. She grasped the arm of the chair, not caring who walked toward her as a need to find the scarred face of the moon consumed her. If she didn’t find the moon in that pitch dark, she would be lost forever, bobbing in this new great divide between the present and the past, between the seen and unseen. She would disappear into the white noise of water, a world without directional markers—vaporous, weightless as she now was.
She scanned the sky.
“Ame, you okay, darlin’?”
Nick.
She rotated her head, careful not to shift her body.
He moved down the dock toward her in the dark, a shape more than an outline. He appeared at her side, apparitional; she reached for him.
“Where’s the moon?” Her fingers curved and grabbed a handful of his shirt as she pitched forward. He caught her and she leaned against his shirt, inhaled his smell of fresh-cut wood and soil—a part of all the land he tried to preserve. She laid her head on his chest, a resting place.
Words came through the vibration in his upper body. “The moon?” His fingers wrapped in her hair and she heard a slight moan. Was it his or hers?
“I can’t find the moon,” she said.
“Well, Ame, the house is facing east. It’s two in the morning, so . . .” He turned her body and lifted her chin, pointed to a faint glow. “There’s a massive cloud cover, but the moon is under there. Right there.” He took her hand and lifted her arm and index finger, wrapped his hand around hers and pointed.
She stared at the diffuse and rounded filtering of a moon with no light of its own.
“Thanks.” She felt her feet on the wood, her hand curled in his denim shirt. “Is it really two in the morning?”
“Yes, darlin’. You must’ve fallen asleep out here. The rest of the house is asleep.”
“Not you.” She backed away from him.
“No, not me. I don’t sleep well. You know that.”
Yes, she knew that. Even in sleep he had always seemed to wrestle some imaginary force of life.
She released an involuntary whisper. “Hmm.” It was a sound easily heard in bed, asleep, half-asleep.
He pulled her back toward him. “God, Amy, I’ve missed you. I never thought I would see you again, but I’ve never stopped missing you—not once. Shit, you still make me lose my breath.”
“Nick, don’t.”
“I wanted to hate you when you didn’t come.”
His voice came low, raspy, and the whirling darkness that she was afraid would encompass her now rolled over her.
Her voice came from the other side of the lake. “Didn’t come where?”
“For me.”
A star fell—a flash between the clouds.
“What?”
“When you didn’t answer the telegram, I understood. I did. I was not the man you thought . . .”
Her body fell into him. She’d placed her desire for him in a honeycombed labyrinth, so deep below her life that she shook with its rising force. Below her breast, inside the V-shaped convex of her ribs grew a widening shakiness, a quiver that expanded, without possible escape. With the growing feeling also came a serrated pain that had grown and changed while hidden in the dark; it now appeared as anger.
The anger and desire braided together, fighting each other, leaving her without strength to push him away. Nick slid his hand where the cotton of her T-shirt billowed away, forming an air pocket between the vertebrae of her spine—warmth spread as evenly and firmly through her body as her mind. The small groan came from the bodily memory of him.
His body pressed against hers. She closed her eyes to overlapping images behind her lids: his wide hand splayed across a white pillow, his sandals on a hardwood floor, granules of sand encrusted in the sole of a shoe lying on its side, the smooth white porcelain of a tub, his hand reaching above it, pulling her down.
His lips found hers in the dark; she responded with visceral memory as a shock of anger broke from the woven pattern. She pushed him away.
“No.” She made an unconvincing strangled sound. A telegram, he’d said something about a telegram. “What telegram?”
“The one I sent.”
“I never . . . got a telegram.”
He released her, sank to a lounge chair and groaned. “Oh, God, no.”
In the silence between them, something undefined began to move toward her, growing exponentially. She shivered, backed away from him. His bent body punched the dark like an old bruise. Panic rose from a well within her pelvis. Whatever he had to say—she couldn’t hear it. Now sure of the dock and where to step, she ran.
She slammed the door as she entered the house and a phrase from a poem she’d written in her journal the day she had fully given herself to him, a phrase she’d long ago repeated to him, rose from the released memories: We are bound at the edges, sewn firm down the center: one.
She fled now, step by step, to her husband and children, to those she was now bound to and would never, ever betray.
Chapter Ten
Eliza ran a baby blue dishrag under the faucet, squirted pine-scented soap on it, then ran it up and down the kitchen’s speckled black-and-taupe granite counters. She was precise, never wasting a movement. Nick wanted to grab the dishrag from her, tell her to pull her hair out of her damn ponytail and go outside: swim, splash in the lake, run naked down the dock—anything but
clean and pack and act as if this were a normal day, as if they were just leaving the lake after another weekend of entertaining.
But how could he despise the same qualities in her that had saved his life, that had made it possible for him to be standing here with children, with a lake house, with a life? Her methodical way of living, along with her family status and influence, were to be praised, not ridiculed.
He wanted something other than his own altered heartbeat to prove that none of this weekend qualified as normal. He reached across the counter and grabbed the dishrag from Eliza’s hand, flung it across the room. It landed with a squashed-slug sound against the far wall.
The kitchen clock ticked one second, then another.
She clenched her teeth; he saw it in her jawline as she spoke. “What are you doing?”
“I am going outside to say goodbye to our guests. What are you doing?”
“Cleaning the kitchen. Not anything you would know about.” She turned and glared at him. “You were right. You shouldn’t have come.”
He lifted his hands in the air. “A no-win situation there, Eliza. It was wrong for me to stay home and wrong for me to come.”
“No, I was wrong. You shouldn’t have come.” She turned away.
He’d hurt her; he hadn’t meant to, as his pain now entered the space they occupied together.
“Go say goodbye to our guests,” she said.
He walked out the door, timing each step to the clock he’d never noticed before. She mumbled, but he couldn’t hear what she said. He shut the screen door on her words, on the clock, but he couldn’t shut out the hunger that rose inside him.
He’d waited, watched all day yesterday for a chance to talk to Amy, his need consuming all else, but never fulfilled. Family, skiing, boats, meals and late-night Scrabble never allowed contact with her. She was a master at making sure someone was by her side all day. The need to talk to her had sat like an unwanted and wakeful companion through the night.
He stood on the back porch and leaned over the railing. There she was: alone. She stood behind the car, bent over, pushing a suitcase into the back. Her jeans hugged the parts of her he had once touched as easily as his own skin. Now he couldn’t even look directly at her; she was as untouchable as if a solid but transparent wall lay between them.
She stood, then turned to him, smiled. A wind visited from the back of the house and lifted her hair, raised it to the sky. A bird flew from the branch above her. Her white blouse billowed from her chest as she waved. “Are you gonna stand there and watch, or help me?”
He walked down the steps, sensing the wind and the way it must feel as it whispered through her blouse. “Need a big strong man to do your work?”
“Oh, forget it. I got it.”
He stood next to her, touched her arm and bent to look in the back of her SUV for a sign—anything to show him who she was now. Sunglasses lay lopsided on the dashboard, an Anita Shreve novel was open facedown on the console, a hair clip was attached, clawlike, to the visor. He made quick mental calculations: she was not a neat freak; she still loved reading; she still tried, in vain, to contain her hair.
He knew he must say what he had to say—fast.
“Will you please meet me, not anything really, just a cup of coffee, something? You can tell me about the island project. We can talk.”
She looked around. Up, down, to the left and right. He had forgotten to do that, to check that no one else could hear, as if the two of them still existed alone.
She spoke low; his skin remembered her other whispers.
“Well, um, I’d love to tell you about Oystertip and—”
“I want to talk . . . tell you . . . ask you what happened.”
“What good would that do?” She brushed a leaf off the bumper, looked away from him.
He lifted her chin so she would have to face him.
“Stop doing that. I can’t . . .” She backed away from him.
“Have you slept at all?”
“Stop. Please,” she said.
“I can’t sleep. I can’t breathe. Please say you’ll see me.”
“No.”
He pulled a scrap of paper from his back pocket. “This is my cell phone number. I’ll wait. Just to talk. Talk.”
She took it, stuffed it in the back pocket of her jeans. She looked up toward the porch, and waved at Molly. “All packed, except your bag,” she called in a voice he didn’t know, in a voice of family. He felt a stab below his ribs—her family.
“Look at me,” he tried again.
“No.”
“Look at me.”
She slammed down the hatch and looked at him. Her brown eyes were hard, boulder and dirt, for a moment before they turned fluid and full.
“Nick. Stop.”
“Please.”
She turned from him and waved to her daughter coming down the steps.
“Please.” He mouthed to himself, to the universe that had returned her to him.
Chapter Eleven
The dusty scent of familiarity surrounded Amy as she pushed open the door from the garage to her home. Phil unloaded the trunk while she walked to the answering machine to check messages. She was anxious to know if there was any news about the island project from the OWP. Among the multiple reminders of Molly’s tennis match (change of location), meeting for the art fund-raiser, and a cocktail party at the neighbors’ house that night, there was a message from Carol Anne about her husband, Joe.
“Amy, I talked to Joe about the island project. He believes he can find out who the buyer is. He’s gonna ask the private eye his old law firm uses.”
Amy let out a whoop and crossed the kitchen, walked down the hall to bounce into their bedroom, where Phil was unpacking the suitcases. He looked up at her.
“Any messages for me?” he asked.
“Just a reminder about the party at the McCanns’ tonight. But guess what.”
He glanced down at the pile he’d sorted into clean and dirty. “I’m not in the mood for a party tonight. Can you call and bow out?”
“Didn’t you hear me? I said, ‘Guess what.’ ”
“What?” He stopped and looked up from his task.
“Carol Anne called.”
“And?”
“She said she thinks Joe can do some digging and find out who the anonymous buyer is.”
“Honey.” He stopped unpacking and touched her arm. “You don’t need to get everyone we know involved.”
“Everyone we know? It’s just Carol Anne and she offered.”
“And your college buddy Nick.”
“What?” She shook her head, took two steps back. “He offered, too. I’m not trying to—”
“How can they help but offer? It’s all you talk about.”
“It is not.”
“Forget it. . . . Do you think we can get out of this party tonight? I have a ton of work to do before my seven a.m. meeting tomorrow.”
Amy sat down on her vanity chair and stared up at him. Being ignored came in various forms with Phil—this time it came in a bailout for a party obligation. She inhaled deeply and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“No, we backed out last time.”
He grabbed a pile of dirty laundry and threw it into the closet hamper. “I can’t go tonight, Amy. You’ll have to find an excuse or go without me. I have a ton of work to do and I probably shouldn’t have gone to the lake.”
She agreed internally—she, too, probably shouldn’t have gone to the lake.
Her brief bubble of elation over Carol Anne’s news deflated. She stood, fingered the back pocket of her jeans, slid her finger inside and rubbed the scrap of paper. She yanked her hand away.
“We’ll skip tonight,” she told her husband. “I have papers to grade, anyway.”
There was no use getting into an argument; he was preoccupied, and it would
be a fruitless discussion leading to her inevitable frustration. She turned and headed for her office, her papers and the distraction of her work.
Molly flipped her tennis racquet back and forth between her legs in the passenger seat. The radio spurted forth a thumping beat from a song Amy had never heard before and didn’t care to hear now. Her head was dense, full with dreams, thoughts and frustrations—with an overwhelming need to know, just know, what telegram Nick was talking about.
She reached over and switched off the radio, rolled down her window. Molly glanced at her but didn’t speak, rolled down her own window and stuck her head out. Molly laid her head on the windowsill and looked behind the car, her hair wafting up, the end of her ponytail slashing in the wind. She pulled her head back in and looked at her mother.
“Are you staying for my match, Mom?”
“Of course I am. Why do you ask?”
Molly shrugged.
“I know I’ve seemed busy. The school semester is winding down and the art fund-raiser is in a couple weeks. But I’d never miss a final match . . . not yours.”
“Okay.” Molly looked out the windshield, stood her racquet straight up and leaned against the dashboard on top of it. “Mom? Is Dad coming?”
“No, babe. He’s got some big meeting with Mr. Stevenson. I think this promotion might finally come through.”
“Okay. You know, he’s never missed a final match.”
“And I’m sure he won’t miss many more. This was really important.”
“I know, I know. Hey, Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Where do you think time goes?”
Amy took in a slow breath. Molly had been asking questions like this since she could speak: “Who sees the sun first when it leaves our side of the earth?” “Why do dolphins live in the water when they can’t breathe in the water?” “Why don’t dogs have tears?” These were questions that required much more of Amy than the usual distracted answers. Molly’s intense curiosity had never bothered her before, but now, here, she felt like slamming on the brakes of the SUV and dropping her head on the steering wheel in defeat.
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