by Amanda Dykes
He’s come to Jenny’s house first. There is still protocol to follow. The widow gets the notification. He half expects his mother will be here anyhow, doting on her grandson.
The house pales in the waning twilight. There’s a peace here, with the red climbing roses on a white trellis. Shutters frame glowing windows, the sound of laughter and the radio coming from within. It’s such a picture—everything bright and good, like Jenny. He’s about to crash into this world, slice it clean through. This is a home awaiting a long-expected homecoming.
A lifetime ago, he’d dreamed of standing here at the gate with a bouquet at his back for her. He’d hoped back then to win her heart . . . and now he must break it. The only bouquet to fill his hands is the clutch of his brother’s belongings.
God, help me.
The gate creaks open to his touch, and the laughter inside falls silent. A porch light comes on, and Jenny rushes out. “Roy?”
Her voice is so full of hope she could buoy the whole world. She grabs his hand. Freezes. Takes in his civilian clothes. Peers closer against the fading light. “Robert?”
She looks around him, down the lane both directions. It is empty.
“Sorry,” she says, sheepish. “We heard you got a message and thought you went to get him, to surprise us.” She gives his hand a quick apologetic squeeze. “I . . .”
She looks down into the hand, where she’s felt Roy’s hat. She sees the picture, the Bible.
And she reads his face, reaching with her eyes for hope he cannot give.
She pulls back, wrapped in a thousand shades of knowing. But she shakes her head, not wanting to know.
Her aunt Millicent has followed her out and arrives at her elbow just in time to loop her wiry arm through Jenny’s, guide her toward the house. “Come,” she says over her shoulder to Robert.
The war has done a number on words, he thinks numbly as he follows them. Most of the time they all need words, words, words. Whatever news they can get, never enough words. And then—times like this—those words just fall to the ground, no chance of being big enough to say what needs to be said, what they all so desperately need to be unsaid.
Millicent guides Jenny to the blue curved sofa in the sitting room. Robert pulls off his hat, goes onto a knee before her. “Jenny, I . . .” He pauses, then begins telling her of the wound. The infection. As gently as he can, but she stops him.
She looks at him in that straight-on way of hers. Blue eyes of their youth, desperate. She takes his hand. “Just . . . tell me he wasn’t alone.”
His throat swells, aches. “He wasn’t.”
Her eyes fill, chin trembling. She lifts that chin and nods. Keeps nodding, as if that will keep her breathing.
Robert pulls in a shaky breath. “We were together. He was safe . . . comfortable. And . . .” He reaches into his pocket for the box. He’d bought it in Halifax, stopping there before coming home. Wandered in a haze through the city, disregarding the wary looks the ladies at the jewelry store gave him when he said he just wanted an empty ring box. If he had to deliver its contents to Jenny, it should have the wrappings of the treasure it was.
“He had you, Jenny.” He slips the deep red velvet box into her hand. She opens it, pursing her lips as she pulls out Roy’s worn wooden ring . . . and the slip of paper Roy gave him in the sick bay.
Jenny’s hand flies to her lips, where she presses them to gather herself long enough to whisper, “Thank you.”
She wraps her fingers tightly around the ring. Thinking, no doubt, of the hands of her love. Hands that carved it, sanded it, crafted hers to match. “Poor as church mice and rich as kings,” she murmurs. The paper flutters, unread, to the floor. And then she’s up, gripping the ring and running from the room, into the kitchen, out the back door, onto the porch—where silence falls, soon broken by a wail the likes of which he’s only heard in the winter wind, so haunting it rends the night.
He picks up the fallen paper and follows to the kitchen, but Millicent brushes past him, hand up to show him to stay put.
It is warm in the tidy room. A log snaps in the potbelly stove in the corner. His attention is drawn to a brass-framed picture sitting on the table next to a jar of lupine—a picture of Roy, proud in uniform.
Then a tiny hand springs up from a basket on the table, nudged up against the wall. Robert steps close, and William’s fair face peers back at him, eyes wide. A miniature Roy, hair dark and with Jenny’s sky-blue eyes.
Outside, Jenny’s voice slips into a battle of ragged breath and restrained sobs. It is the sound of loss and life colliding, the one pulling the other right out into the night. Unearthly, growing. It is not any lullaby this child has ever heard.
William begins to whimper, and for a second, Robert steps back. These arms that battle the sea do not know how to cradle a baby. He feels in every stiffened muscle, the burn of not knowing what to do. And yet his legs bend him near, carry him where his arms won’t go. Stiffly . . . and then not-so-stiffly, he reaches in, cups the tiny face as gently as he can in his callused hand.
Fingers so young wrap around Robert’s hand, the hand that swaddled this child’s father unto his grave. Robert’s hand begins to shake. He wants to stay here, cocooned in this grip of innocence that doesn’t know, doesn’t see how these hands are stained with death. He pulls away ever so gently from the grip, from the lie. Shaking still, he turns his life-roughened hands backward, fingers curled around his calluses, and lets his knuckles brush that soft cheek.
William smiles and a dimple appears, just on the left. It is good and pure. Light flickers in those tiny, trusting eyes. Something deep in Robert begins to crack. Like granite from the shifting of earth miles below the surface.
Out in the night, Jenny’s wail morphs into muted words, and the back door creaks open. Clipped steps come in an efficiency only Millicent could bring, but Robert cannot look at her. Setting down the scrap of paper, he slides his arms beneath the child and pulls him close.
This should have been Roy standing here, pulling his son against his chest, feeling the flutter of this tiny heartbeat strong through the blankets. So much life. He presses William close, mustering all the strength he’s ever known and letting it gentle around this child. This. Should. Have. Been. Roy.
Millicent, for once, does not intrude. She goes to the stove, turns off its flame, and the bubble of the savory meal begins to quiet. She waits. In the corner, the cuckoo clock ticks on as if to remind him time is short.
The cracking inside is spreading. Tendrils webbing, chasm widening. He has to say these promised words somehow. He presses his lips to William’s head. And yet in this gesture given to show comfort, it’s he who feels the comfort in the downy softness of that dark hair, the smell of soap washing his soul clean enough to say, “He loves you.” He can’t bring himself to say loved. “And . . . it’s going to be okay.” There is more to Roy’s message, and though Robert doesn’t feel the truth of it just now, he says it. “Life is big. And God is bigger.” He’ll tell the boy these words all his life. He vows it.
The child has stilled, relaxed into his arms with more warmth and trust than the whole world outside knows.
Millicent shuffles her feet. “His mother . . .” She lifts a hand to rub a slow circle on the child’s back.
Of course. Jenny needs William. William needs Jenny. This is right and good. And yet as Robert lowers him away from his chest and into Millicent’s arms, the cracking down below rends deep. He trembles with the way it grows as Millicent disappears through the door.
A breeze tumbles the paper across the kitchen table, and Robert catches it. He means only to anchor it there for Jenny, for later. But as he turns it in his fingers, he sees the message his brother wrote with his last bit of strength, for his beloved:
77 fathoms. And more. Always.
Jenny’s shuddering sniffles calm into the rhythmic creak of the rocking chair out back. A fragile calm descends, walling him away. He can’t stay. The cracking grows, he can nearly
hear it. It’ll shatter everything he touches if he stays.
He secures the paper in a fold of the baby’s basket, where Jenny will see it in good time. He slips out the front door, locks the knob behind him, and silently pulls it shut. The night swallows him up. He should go on to tell his mother. But her windows are dark through the pines, and he cannot wake her to this living nightmare. Not yet.
Breath comes thick in this sea of clean air. He walks, then runs, then pounds to the dock. Into the rowboat. Out into the waves that are wretchedly gentle. He spears them with his oars, willing them to fight. All the way to the island, a one-sided battle, the cracking driving him harder with each movement.
By the time he reaches the shore, he’s in a thousand pieces, held together by he knows not what. He’s at the top of the trail and can’t even remember taking the steps to get there. Yet here he is, this place untouched in the months since he and Roy were here. Cold in the white moonlight. Black coals where their bonfire last lit the night. Their chest of boyhood loot tucked into its rock shelter. The Victrola perched crookedly, its coned speaker tilted like a curious dog, watching him.
“What are you looking at?”
It just stares, stupid and silent.
A few strides and he’s cranking the thing. Picking up the needle. Placing it on the record, desperate for it to work. But the wood is warped from too many fog-drenched mornings, rain-soaked afternoons, freezing nights. Its song, gone.
The cracking inside him has webbed so far that it’s stopped, and all that’s left for him is to either crumble or explode. He presses his eyes shut and strains to hear reason. But all that comes is Roy’s voice: “You’re a good man. Let me try to be one, too.”
The words kick him in the gut. He shoves the needle blindly across the record’s ridges, feels it scratch and destroy. He steps away, and its silence mocks him.
Blind heat floods him. Shards of consciousness register him snapping a branch from an overhanging tree, wielding it like a bat. The splinter of the Victrola five times, ten. The wires inside the demolished box stringing its mangled parts together. Him gripping it, flinging it into the waves, the boil in Cauldron Cove matching his own. Him falling to his knees in the graveyard of stones he and Roy left behind the night they’d left their dares untossed. He grips one hard, sobs retching from him in silence.
A hand falls on his shoulder.
It is his mother, lantern in hand. She’s dwarfed in his father’s plaid flannel shirt over her nightgown. She looks at the scene before her, shrapnel. Kneels. Gathers up her one remaining son.
And together they weep.
nineteen
The days that follow are a haze. At any given time of any given day, there’s a boat crossing the harbor from the village to Sailor’s Rest or Jenny’s cottage—bringing food, lugging tools, telling tales to bring a smile, offering handkerchiefs to dry tears. Some bring news from a newspaper in Bangor reporting of U-boats brought ashore just down the coast to Kittery. How this will change things, give the U.S. more victory, both now and in wars to come. Not that anyone can think of wars to come, when the one just ended is still so ravenous.
Robert stays close at hand, torn. He needs to get back to the sea if they’re to have a harvest of lobster this year. But he’s anchored here, for Jenny, for his ma, sensing hearts need more tending than lobster traps.
And one lobsterman or another begins to show up every few days with a stack of money. “From your traps,” they say. Which makes no sense. His traps need mending, some unable to hold a catch. And these men have their own traps to mend and set and tend, need the money as much as anyone.
So he thanks them and tells them to keep it, but without fail, he later finds the dollars tucked under a rock, the welcome mat, hanging from a bait bag on a nail on the porch post.
Millicent, Jenny, Ma, Robert—not a one of them has lifted a finger to cook a meal in days. Not for want of trying, but because every time any of them goes to open a cupboard, a knock sounds at the front door and they open it to find a basket-o’-this or a bushel-o’-that. Ma was going fair crazy with it, loving the hearts and gifts but itching to do something, too. She’s taken to canning up blueberries, since everyone brought a pail of them “for a sweet treat.”
They gather for meals each night at one house or the other, trying to swallow around the ache of the empty seat, finding strength in one another and the normalcy of the supper prayers.
They all struggle with how returning to anything resembling a normal duty seems like a betrayal. A taking part of life, moving on without Roy, of leaving him behind. And yet it has to be done.
I dare you to. Robert could picture Roy saying it. And so he takes to the sea one September morning. Stops off for bait at Melvin’s boat, grateful Mel doesn’t refuse payment. A man of few words, he must sense that this corner of normal—of paying for bait—is needed.
“Looks to be a good’n.” Mel raises a nod to the horizon, where the sun is igniting a ceiling of clouds with fresh color.
Melvin’s right. The sun is bright, the air is fresh. Bob knows his work will be cut out for him, his traps sitting untended for so long.
There’s something blessedly hard about the work, pulling him out of his fog as he pulls the traps in. He passes islands where the summer people have departed when he wasn’t looking, windows boarded and flags pulled in. Signs of life moving into a new season.
The chatter on the VHF radio does him good, too. He hasn’t chimed in yet, to the talk of tides, and winds, and fog. He hears Arthur’s voice crackle through with a warning about southward gusts.
It’s good to hear his friend’s voice. Arthur has stayed away, and Robert can only speculate as to why. Maybe he’s giving them space, doesn’t want to intrude. Or maybe it’s something more. Something akin to the way Jenny won’t look Robert in the eye anymore. He can’t blame them, really. He’s a walking reminder of the one who’s not coming home, ever. He can barely look at his own reflection most days, for all it looks like Roy’s.
He wonders, then, why it feels as if someone’s punched the air straight out of him when he trolls his boat past Jenny’s place on his way home that afternoon. There’s a sharp pounding, hammer on nail, reverberating like gunfire. She’s kneeling before a hand-painted sign. It’s lovely, like everything Jenny touches—fresh white paint, clean black letters scrolling across it. Has she given the cottage a new name? He squints, finally close enough to read:
For Sale
He cuts his engine.
She pounds a final nail into the post at the end of her dock and stands. Turns to face him. Hair falling around her face from behind the white handkerchief holding it back, overalls spotted with paint. Eyes stained red when she looks at him, and for the first time in weeks, she doesn’t look away.
They stand this way, eyes locked, waves lapping the boat closer to her. And before he knows it he’s on the dock, boat tied up, eyes still locked with hers.
She swallows.
He looks at the sign again, and up close he sees how the letters’ soft lines tremble. They are not from a steady hand. Lovely at a distance, but they have cost her dearly.
She hangs her head, clasps Roy’s ring, which she wears on a simple string around her neck, next to her heart.
“I’m sorry, Robert,” she says at last. It’s the most she’s said directly to him, just him, since the night he broke her world.
“You’re . . . leaving.”
She nods, looking over her shoulder. Her parents’ old black Buick is up by the cottage, shining like the day her father brought it home ten years before. No one had ever had an automobile out that way before. Robert and Roy had spent that summer helping him chisel the harbor road wider up to their gate, cutting away bracken.
“My parents are taking us in,” Jenny says. “Selling the place here. Things are good for them in Minnesota.” She tries to muster a smile, pushes a note of optimism into her voice. “They’ve got a room for us.”
Us.
Of c
ourse. William, too.
“Jenny . . .” His voice rasps. Don’t go. His chest pounds with the two words. They’re strings pulling from all directions. The quickening of his heart at the sight of her years ago, the letting go of her, the sight of Roy’s child in her arms.
They pull and threaten to snap, and all he can say is . . . “Don’t go.” He feels the desperation in his eyes, sees her see it too, and miles of words are spoken between them in this silence.
She exhales slow through her lips. “Part of me will never leave here, Robert. Most of my heart, truth be told.” She looks east to their island, shields her eyes with her hand. “But if we stay here to live,” she says, “we won’t live. We’ll just . . . exist.” She looks to the cottage, to her mother who’s stepped outside with William on her hip, toting a suitcase to the car. “I owe Roy more than that. William, too.”
Robert can feel a divide, some wall between them, as if she’s drawing a line in the sand with her words—past and future—and they’re standing right in between. He reaches for her through that wall, grasping for more time here on the line. And he does what he long dreamed of. Lifting a finger, he traces her jawline, cups her face. But it’s different, so different than he ever imagined. In that touch, he knows right through him that his love for her is the love of a brother—the love he’s strived for, schooled his heart for—and it is strong.
He ducks his head, uncertain what to do with that. “You’ve a place here always, Jenny.”
She smiles, lines gentle around her mouth. It is foreign on her face, but it becomes her. “Maybe when we visit Aunt Millicent in Boston, you’ll come see us.” Something of the old Jenny flashes across her face. The mischief of days gone by. “You know how warm she is.”
He laughs.
She stuffs her hands in her overall pocket and retrieves something, picks up his hand and places it in his palm, wraps his fingers around it.