by Laura Dave
Gwyn clears her throat, turns to look at Eve’s retreating back. “But thank you,” she says.
“For what?” she asks.
“For tonight,” she says. “For doing such a nice job. The food was great. Everyone thought so.”
Eve smiles. “Thank you for saying so, Gwyn.”
“Well, someone needed to,” Gwyn says. “And all that the rest of them will remember now is the tree.”
“And maybe the cake.”
She smiles. “And maybe the cake.”
Then she turns the doorknob, leaving Eve behind, and goes inside to her family, for tonight, while it is still hers.
Maggie
Maggie is sitting on the swing, by the edge of the cliff, smoking. She is smoking too many of Eve’s cigarettes. The last time she had a cigarette was during the U-Haul drive from California to New York. Before that, it had been a long time. But during that trip east, when they’d stop at roadside diners, they’d share triple-decker BLTs and sweet iced coffee and one cigarette each before getting back in the truck, trying to drive through the night. We’re done with these things when we get to New York, she remembers telling him. Now she is having several and not thinking about it, except to decide whether she is having another. She is deciding to make the next one her last, and is looking out at the ocean, and trying not to think about anything else too much, except for how long she has been out here, which seems long. Too long, already. She should be inside, helping to do something.
She reaches into her pocket to light the final cigarette, and drops her lighter beneath the swing’s seat. She leans down to pick it up, and something underneath the swing catches her eye—writing engraved on the swing’s underside. On a metal plate screwed into the swing’s underside. It is hard to make the words out in the darkness, but she flicks the lighter open and tries.
She thinks it is a poem, at first, but then she realizes it is a song. The lyrics to a beautiful song, a song she recognizes. She runs her fingers along one of the stanzas:
And you shall take me strongly
In your arms again
And I will not remember
That I ever felt the pain.
She holds her fingers there, over the words. There is something in them that hits her. It hits her now, when she needs it to most, something about belief. She doesn’t know how she and Nate will get through this, but she also knows that she believes in him. How can that be? Maybe because, in the end, belief isn’t supposed to make sense, at least not all of the time. In that, it finds its power. It gets to creep up on you and carry you forward. Until you can carry yourself again.
She pulls her hand away. She has heard the song before. She can’t remember who sang it (it’s on the tip of her tongue . . . why can’t she remember?) but she starts humming the melody. It is coming back to her a little at a time—the melody—which isn’t the worst way to begin to remember the rest.
And she hears footsteps. She looks up, from beneath the swing, thinking it is going to be Nate, coming back for something, but it is Gwyn, walking quickly toward her—out of her dress, and in a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved button-down top.
“You’re back?”
She smiles. “I just came back to the house to change, and I got some overnight clothes for Georgia, pack her up a suitcase.”
“She’s staying at the hospital?”
She nods. “She’s okay, though. Just a little wound up. Denis just got there, right as I was leaving, and he is going to stay with her. Thank goodness for that at least. And Nate went to get us all rooms at the inn on Second House Road. But he should be back soon. He wanted me to tell you that he’d be back soon.”
She is quiet, not eager to think about Nate coming back, about going to the inn with him or staying here. About anything they have to talk about. Sleep, all of a sudden, seems so far away.
Gwyn sits down on the swing, beside her.
“Are those yours?” she says, and points at the pack of cigarettes in Maggie’s hand. “Please tell me you don’t smoke.”
Maggie didn’t remember she was holding them, and immediately gets embarrassed and starts to explain—not usually, just tonight—but then she looks back at Gwyn, who is holding her hand out for one.
“Of course not,” Maggie says, and hands one over.
Gwyn lights it up, taking a long drag, closing her eyes against it. Maggie watches her, considers telling her that they are Eve’s cigarettes she is smoking. Would it matter to her? It seems beside the point. If Maggie is right about Eve and Thomas, or, if she is wrong, it will come out soon enough, and either way these cigarettes are not part of the story.
Maggie points back in the direction of the house. “I’m planning to head back inside and to pack some things up for you guys. Like the photographs along the staircase? Things that seem like they might get waterlogged. If it starts to rain again.”
Gwyn nods. “Thank you for that.”
“Well, maybe you should see what I’ve managed to do before you actually thank me. I am terrible at cleaning.”
“It gets easier.”
“Maybe. But I was standing in the library for less than ten minutes when I saw the swing through the window and decided I had to come out here instead. I had to take a break.”
Gwyn picks her feet up, so the swing swings. “You just described every morning for me.”
Maggie laughs and runs her hand along the swing’s seat, along the wooden boards. “So did Thomas build this?”
“No. Thomas’s parents. A long time ago. It was their wedding present for us, actually.”
“Champ and Anna?”
“Champ and Anna.” She smiles.
“What were they like?”
Gwyn smiles. “Wonderful, really. Very lovely people who liked each other a lot. Anna didn’t particularly like me, though. But Champ did. I made him laugh.”
“Why didn’t she like you?”
“Mother-in-laws are the worst. You know, they don’t like you, they make you feel bad about yourself, they have a divorce party the day you meet them and you have to face the fact that they are crazy. Plus, if you aren’t very sure of yourself, you may start feeling like you are going that way too.”
Maggie smiles.
“I wished you could have met them. You would have liked them. They moved here, for good, after the hurricane of 1938. Anna said Champ was like a man obsessed with Montauk for a while after that. He built the town a library, and helped remake a new town center.”
"And then what?”
“And then it calmed down. But he was peaceful here. He was really peaceful.” She shakes her head. “I think I thought that Thomas was like him. It was important to me. But being absent and being peaceful are two different things. They can look alike, but they are really the opposite.”
Maggie is quiet, thinking about that, hoping that Nate is closer to the second, believing he is. “When did they die? Champ and Anna? I mean I know it was before Nate was born, but—”
“Anna got sick not long after we got married. And the doctors couldn’t really do anything to stop it. I don’t think Champ could take it without her. He died six months after she did.” She takes a final drag of her cigarette. “But they lived a happy life together. Not long enough, but very happy. I think that is better than the other way around.”
“How do you get there?” Maggie asks, turning and meeting Gwyn’s eyes. “The happy part?”
Gwyn smiles. “You get lucky.”
“That’s what you’ve got for me?”
“I’ll work on it, and get you something else when I’m a little less tired.” She pauses. “Avoiding smoking is probably a good starting point.”
Maggie puts her cigarette out on the bottom of her flip-flop, and looks over at Gwyn. “Sounds good.”
Gwyn stands up and Maggie can feel her look down at her— carefully—as though she were trying to figure out whether she should say it, whatever it is that she has already decided she needs to say.
“I know you’re upset wit
h Nate, Maggie, and who am I to tell you that you shouldn’t be? Maybe you should get out now. Maybe when things start to show that they aren’t what we think, we are better off hitching ourselves to a different star.”
“Really?”
Gwyn puts her hands on her hips, shrugs. “Who am I to know? But I have been thinking a lot today, and for whatever it is worth, there are different ways to have trouble. There are different ways to be confused about how someone’s disappointed you. My husband lied about the future because he wanted to forget the past. But Nate lied about the past because he thought it would give you two a future. Don’t confuse the two things.”
“I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”
Gwyn reaches over and, without asking, gently takes the pack of cigarettes from Maggie’s hands. “What I’m trying to say is that it will be okay between you and Nate. Because you both want that. Because you both want that more than anything. It sounds simple, but I’m learning that the problems start when you want different things.”
“Like Mr. Huntington wanting to become a Buddhist?”
“Like Mr. Huntington not wanting to be with me.”
Maggie looks down, gets quiet. Her eyes focusing on Eve’s cigarette, on what she thinks she knows about Eve, on wondering what the truth of it may be doing to Gwyn, may do to her from now on.
Which is when she remembers—an answer popping into her mind. “It’s ‘Sweet Thing,’ right? It’s ‘Sweet Thing’ from Astral Weeks. That would have made me crazy, if I didn’t remember,” she says, the whole song from under the swing coming back to her. “And there’s a great story behind it, why he decided to write it. I’ll have to check. I’ll have to look that up again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The song,” she says. “The song under the swing.”
Gwyn shakes her head as though she had no idea what Maggie is talking about, and whether she does or not, Maggie can see it: how tired she is. Like Maggie. Maybe more than Maggie. She is too tired to discuss this.
“You know, I’ll show you tomorrow,” she says.
Gwyn smiles. Then, as if thinking better of it, and doing it anyway, she bends down and kisses Maggie on the cheek.
“It is nice meeting you, Maggie Mackenzie.”
“It is nice meeting you too, Gwyn.”
Maggie watches Gwyn walk away, waits for the car ignition to start, and then taking a deep breath, she gets up herself, gets off the swing, planning to head back to the house.
But instead of going back to the house, she takes the steep fifty steps down to the beach, the rocks meeting her at the bottom, giving way to smooth sand, giving way to the ocean—right there, suddenly right there—for her to step into.
She slides off her flip-flops and walks into the midnight water, flinching as it freezes around her feet, her thighs. She is hoping it will make her feel clearer, but it is only making her colder. Still, she turns and looks back in the direction of the house. She can see it fairly clearly—all the lights on. She can even make out the tree, the injury, still firmly rooted in the strangest place. She keeps looking anyway.
It may not be what she thought she was searching for, but maybe it will turn out to be what she needs. Because safe or unsafe—safe and unsafe—it is starting to feel like it is her home that she is looking at.
Gwyn
There is a moment in every relationship when you see the whole thing. The question is when does the moment come? Is it the first time you see the person and instinctively know that things between you are going to work out, or fail? Is it a moment in the middle when you’ve experienced a loss—a parent’s death, a sickness—and this person gets into bed with you and holds you all night, until you feel guilt, incredible guilt, at any time you ever questioned him? Or is it a moment toward the end, however you get there, when you realize that there is something behind this person’s eyes that you were never able to touch, no matter how hard you tried?
You can only guess at it, where things really end, where they really begin, and so Gwyn knows it is possible that she is wrong that it begins and ends and begins again here. That this quiet moment is her moment. Years from now, it just may define tonight for her, or the end of tonight for her, the end of one part of her life, the beginning of another.
It’s also possible she’ll forget it. It doesn’t feel possible now, but that is the thing when you are still in the middle of something. You can’t believe the gods or the universe or all the incontrovertible proof to the contrary. This too shall pass. This, too, doesn’t get to count for everything.
Gwyn takes a deep breath, standing in the middle of the driveway, looking around herself, listening to all the noise. This is one of the other things she loves about Montauk—one of her small, forgotten things—how loud it gets here after a storm. She can hear the ocean from where she is standing, she can hear people on the street, and she can hear cars all the way down on Old Montauk Highway.
It is enough, in its way, to make her question her instinct. Her gut instinct to go back into her house and take just a few of her things with her. Right now. To pick up a few of her own things that may be getting damaged, things that she needs and loves, and that one day will remind her what she had in this house. To get them now, before it is too late.
But she makes a decision. It isn’t the most important decision she’ll ever make, maybe even that night, but she decides to ignore what her heart is telling her to do, and not to go back into her house. Not now. Not when she’ll find other proof for herself, as if she needs other proof, that there was a family here. That, soon, they will be gone.
Instead, she reaches into her bag, and finds her keys, and takes them out, and goes to get into her car. She gets into the car and turns on the ignition and quickly turns out of her driveway.
She is going to drop off these clothes for her daughter, and she is going to stay with Thomas, for tonight, at the inn on Second House Road, and she is going back to the hospital tomorrow and she is going to do what is needed. For her daughter. But she isn’t going into her house tonight. She isn’t even going to look at it in her rearview mirror, or consider it at all.
Call it what you want. But soon enough, less than a year from now, or a little more than a year from now—in the brief space of time where it looks like Thomas may actually marry Eve; in the brief space of time right before they sell their house to a young couple from western Massachusetts, the ones who were willing to go into debt to buy it, the ones who want to turn it back into a full-time home—Gwyn takes this car on a road trip out to Oregon, to stay for a while with her sister and the journalist. At least that is her plan, originally. But she stops along the way in a northern Arizona city, where she walks into a hotel barroom and finds a man sitting there, yellow socks peeking out from beneath his dress shoes. She recognizes him in the way we get to recognize the people we are supposed to meet, the ones we have been waiting our whole lives to meet. Does that mean that Gwyn turns out okay, just because she’s found someone else, someone who wants to see her? No, not as far as she is concerned. As far as she is concerned, it means she turns out okay because she believes—in that hotel barroom, for the first time in such a long time—that she should be seen. It is a bonus, of course—an immeasurable bonus, the immeasurable bonus of her life—that the man with the yellow socks has been the one to do it.
And for tonight, at least, she is done. With this house, this piece of her life, the whole damn thing.
She isn’t angry. She isn’t hopeful. She is simply done. For tonight, Gwyn is done trying to pick up what cannot be saved.
Maggie
Maggie is trying to pick up what can be saved. She is sitting on the living room floor, the half-filled wine box by her side, books and picture frames and candlesticks and vases surrounding her. She has grabbed newspapers from the kitchen, from the recycling bin there, and is beginning to spread them around her—beginning to get ready to wrap everything around her up—when she looks up and sees him standing there in the
doorway, leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed across his chest.
Nate. He looks like he has been standing there for a while, watching her. He is still holding his car keys in his hands, between his fingers.
“You’re back?” she says.
“I’m back.”
“And what are you doing standing there?”
“I’m pretending.”
“Pretending what?”
“That when you’d look up, you’d still be as happy as you usually are to see me. That your face would light up how it does, you know . . .” He uncrosses his arms, motions with the keys in his hands to his own face. “That I’d get to watch you get a little happy.”
She takes a closer look at him. “Did I?”
“Half,” he says.
She smiles, looking down at her piles, reaching for more newspaper, trying to decide what to use it for. “That’s not so good.”
“It’s not so bad,” he says. “I thought I’d be starting at less than that. So maybe we’re doing okay.”
The newspaper is turning her hands black and yellow, and she turns it over, away from herself, which is when she catches the headline on the top of the page, the headline announcing that today is the anniversary of the hurricane. Sixty-nine years ago today. Sixty-nine years ago. What was happening in this room then, she wonders? How did they come out the other side of it?
Nate walks deeper into the room, toward her, so that he is just a few feet away from her. He doesn’t sit down, though. He waits. He waits for her to give him a sign that she wants that.
“Murph told me what she said to you on the bus. It’s not true. We never slept together. We never even kissed. Except during some stupid spin-the-bottle round in the fourth grade.”
She looks up at him. “Then why did she say it?”
“Because she could.”
“She picked a bad day.”
“Yes, she picked a bad day,” he says. “Maybe that’s not the real problem, though.”
“What is?”