Love in Maine

by Connie Falconeri

  He held the watch in the palm of his right hand, letting the balance and weight become familiar to him. He touched the sharp ridges of the rotating bezel and moved the numbers around the dial. The band was made of some kind of rubber or composite. He turned over the watch to look at the back. Sure enough, the words Fifty Fathoms were engraved in an elegant script, with the word ANTIMAGNETIC in smaller caps just below. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the cool metal words until the metal warmed under his skin. He liked knowing that Maddie had touched the watch.

  He removed the cheap, reliable diving watch he’d used for years and set it on the counter, then put on the expensive Swiss replacement. After staring at the way the watch rested on his wrist, as if it had been made for the turn of bone and skin, he shook his head and walked over to his desk. He turned on his computer and logged into his e-mail. All of the decisions that had plagued Hank for the past few months seemed easily dispensed with all of a sudden. He replied to the head of the excavation team at the University of Cyprus. He replied to the administrator in charge of the NATO project in Athens. He replied to his contact in the R & D department at Ocean Works Laboratories.

  Life would go on. He refused to wallow. And if he got his shit together he might even be well enough to get in touch with Maddie when she graduated. Or sooner.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Head of the Charles was always a nightmare. Maddie had been in the lead boat for Brown all three years, but it was always a crapshoot until a few hours before the race. The coaches were prone to rearrange the lineups right until the last minute, working on the best possible odds, given the weather, the course, and the competition. Maddie had kept herself so busy for the past six weeks that she hadn’t had time to think about Hank, except when she was asleep and couldn’t force her subconscious brain into submission.

  All of her time was spent training, rowing, or studying. Sleeping and eating were part of training, nothing more. She fell into the robotic routine with a dismal sort of gratitude. At least she was going to have something to show for herself. She was in the best shape of her life, and her thesis advisor had pretty much told her she was going to graduate with honors if she wrote the paper he thought she was capable of.

  That small bit of research she had done at the Houghton Library that day with Hank—and Hank himself, if she was honest—had inspired her to fine-tune her research to a very particular aspect of naval antiquity. She was in the midst of applying for a grant to spend the year after she graduated in Cyprus, studying the historical significance of the great galley ships—the penteconter, the bireme, and the trireme, ancient vessels powered by oarsmen.

  Two hours before the first race, Maddie found out she was going to be in the lead boat. The coach gave her a quick pat on the back, and Maddie smiled up at her. Her parents were somewhere in the crowd, and Jimmy had said he was going to come, but it was too chaotic to see anyone until after her set of races was finished.

  She was in the Women’s Four. The boat was so familiar, the turn of the fiberglass, the way the seat molded to her bottom, the feel of the oars in her hands. The race itself always dissolved into mist in her mind. Maddie always remembered the final inhale before the gun went off, and then she was just . . . off. And then it was a steady, grinding series of pulls and breaths and muscle that hurled her body into a space of pure motion. And then it was over. And they’d won. Her teammates were hugging and crying, and Maddie looked up and thought she saw Hank in the crowd, but then the man turned and it wasn’t him, and then her friend Stephanie in the seat behind her grabbed her shoulders and shook her and was screaming her congratulations, and Maddie smiled and tried to look back where she thought she had seen Hank, but the crowd was moving and shifting like the water all around her, and Hank was gone.

  Or her dream vision of Hank was gone. She let herself cry, because everyone was crying for joy from having beaten the crap out of Princeton—finally—and she thought it was as good a time as any to completely let her guard down. When they got back to the boathouse, the coaches and the rest of her teammates were hooting and clapping, and everyone was thrilled. Maddie felt like she was in a tunnel, she was present, but everything was distorted, and the volume seemed to increase and decrease at odd times.

  “Hey, beautiful!” Strong arms grabbed her and pulled her into a hug, and Maddie’s stupid, gullible heart flew into a crazy, joyful dance. She whipped around, and her brother Jimmy was holding her and patting her back and congratulating her on her grand achievement.

  He so wasn’t Hank. She hugged him back and cried.

  “Wow. Since when did you turn into such a bawl-baby?”

  Maddie laughed and wiped her face. “Since we just kicked ass, that’s when.”

  Jimmy smiled and gave her one last squeeze. “You know, I’m not really supposed to be here, but Mom and Dad are so happy for you, and I wangled my way in. Great job!”

  “Thanks, Jimmy. I’ll see you at dinner tonight.”

  The imaginary sightings went on like that for the rest of Maddie’s fall semester. She knew it was part of her emotional crack-up or whatever it was that she was going through. It just seemed so impossible that she had been with the right guy and it hadn’t worked out. In that, at least, Hank was right: Maddie was spoiled. She had been raised to believe that with hard work and integrity, things would work out for Ms. Madison Post. She no longer believed that.

  She knew it was spoiled to think that way, with all of her privileges and a future that was basically laid out before her, but inside it felt shadowy and thin compared to how she’d felt in Hank’s arms last summer. By Christmas, Maddie was entirely capable of masking her disappointment. She suspected that many people lived their entire lives masking their disappointment. Perhaps that’s all that was meant by grand philosophical euphemisms like “The Human Condition.”

  Or “Adulthood.”

  Maddie’s nieces and nephews were at just the right age for the perfect holiday celebration, jubilant and enthusiastic about the cookies and milk for Santa and the carrots and celery for the reindeer, and not overly concerned about the quantity of presents under the tree. Everyone descended upon Maddie’s parents’ place for the holiday weekend.

  On Christmas morning, they were all sitting around opening presents, the fire crackling, the paper ripping, when Maddie’s mother looked up. “Oh, dear, I forgot that something came for you in the mail last week, Maddie.”

  Laura got up and left the living room, where all the grandchildren were tearing through their gifts and sitting cross-legged on the floor in their pajamas while their parents sat in their bathrobes drinking coffee and watching the clock for when they could have the first eggnog or Bloody Mary.

  Returning to the living room a few minutes later, Laura handed Maddie a small box wrapped in brown paper. It was covered in foreign stamps, and her name and address were spelled out in a beautiful masculine script. It felt like him already.

  Maddie looked up. Her mother was smiling, and her father looked away as if it were none of his business. Feeling a little idiotic, all she wanted to do was hold the unopened package. She loved the way it was so meticulously wrapped and the way each of the stamps had been placed with exquisite care at the upper edge. It was so Hank.

  Her two oldest brothers were busy talking to each other about which college football game they were going to watch first, but their wives, Isabel and Georgia, were staring at Maddie expectantly from across the room.

  “A secret admirer?” Georgia said with a raised eyebrow.

  Maddie took a deep breath and opened the package. She did it carefully. She wanted to preserve the brown paper and all those stamps and his handsome handwriting, and frame it or do something special with it eventually. After she’d removed the paper, she opened a small cardboard box, which had tiny wood shavings that were keeping an even smaller box delicately afloat in the packing material. She took out the small jewelry box and opened it.

  An ancient silver coin winked out at her. Maddie touched
it cautiously with tingling fingertips, feeling the ridges of the ancient profile, then gently took it out of the box and held it up to the light.

  Her mother gasped. “Oh, darling! What is it?”

  Maddie folded her fingers around it in a possessive move that surprised her mother and herself. Her unspoken answer: It is mine. She held it like that for a few seconds, then opened her palm and held it out to her mother.

  “Here,” Maddie offered. “It looks like there’s a description in the box. I think it’s second- or third-century BC. You hold it while I read about it.”

  Laura Post took the artifact out of her daughter’s hand and examined it closely, pushing her reading glasses up her nose to have a closer look. “How gorgeous.”

  There was a small folded piece of pale blue paper tucked along the inside edge of the cardboard box. Maddie unfolded it and began to read. An academic description of the gift, in Hank’s strong confident hand, told of the face of the goddess Athena on one side and the full form of Herakles on the reverse. It was from 280 BC and . . .

  And then Maddie couldn’t read it very clearly anymore because it was all stupid beautiful things that he could never say in real life about how she was his goddess and he was trying to complete his labors and how he hoped that she would wait for him for just a little while longer because they were two sides of that coin and—

  “Is that a description of the coin, Maddie?” Her father reached for the thin airmail paper, and she folded it up quickly and tucked it back into the box. “No, it’s nothing.” She wiped her cheeks with the sleeve of her robe, and everyone was kind enough not to ask her why she was a weepy mess. “Apparently the coin is Lucanian,” Maddie explained. “Third century BC.” She asked her mother if she could have it back for a moment, and then Maddie passed it to her father.

  While her enthusiasm and bravado had come from her mother, Maddie’s love of old, beautiful, solid objects had come straight from her father and his parents’ side of the family. This house. Everything in it. Old. Beautiful. Solid. It was a strange kind of wealth, really, because it felt like everything had always been there. There had never been any evidence of acquisition. Everything was just there.

  Maddie’s paternal great-grandparents had been antiquities scholars at Harvard. Everyone always joked that her great-grandmother had been the smart one because the woman’s husband had only spoken four languages and she had spoken six. They went on long, dangerous trips. They were nineteenth-century adventurers.

  William Post took the coin from his daughter and held it in the palm of his hand for a few seconds. “May I?” He held it up to indicate that he wanted a closer look.

  “Yes. Let’s.” Maddie stood up too, and she followed her father out across the front hall and back toward his office, which overlooked the snowy expanse of the backyard and the adjacent conservation land. It was a glorious winter scene, all crackling black branches against virgin snow.

  “Have a seat, sweet pea, and let’s see what we’ve got.”

  This was always the way. Objects bound Maddie to her father. She would find something in the woods or down near the stream that ran between their property and the Wallaces’ next door, and she would run home and wait until her father got back, and then she would present it to him for inspection. He always encouraged her and brought her into his mysterious and secret world. His study.

  At the moment, he was looking through a large, handheld magnifying glass. He had set the coin—about the size of a quarter—onto the green, papery felt of his desk blotter and had turned on a desk lamp that shone down upon it. “It’s quite something, isn’t it? Look at the detail on Athena’s helmet. Mmm-hmmm.”

  Maddie sat in the chair next to his desk, her hands held palms together between her thighs, in her old pajamas and her flannel bathrobe and ragg wool socks. She was waiting for her turn.

  “Come see,” her father finally said.

  She jumped up and took the hand lens that he held out for her. He had a metal pointer, like a surgical instrument in the shape of half a tweezer and twice as long. “See here,” he began. “Do you notice the Scylla here?” He was pointing at the figure atop Athena’s helmet.

  “Yes. She’s beautiful.”

  “She looks terrifying, if you ask me!” Her father laughed. He loved to make these long-dead characters come to life. “But I suspect Herakles,” William paused to turn over the coin to show the over side where the hero stood, “thinks she’s worth fighting for, don’t you?”

  Maddie stared at the small piece of history, thousands of years old. Thousands! She sighed. “It’s a spectacular gift. I don’t really know how to . . . think of it.”

  Her father sat back in his old, creaking leather chair on the casters. “I think the person who gave it to you is very clever . . . and knows you very well.”

  She could tell that her dad was skimming around the pronoun. “He. It’s a he. He knows me very well.” She smiled up at her father, then continued speaking while her attention returned to the coin. “I think you’d like him . . .”

  “I would like him hypothetically? Or I will like him when I meet him?”

  Maddie smiled but didn’t look up. “I hope the latter.”

  “So do I! So do I!” William Post pushed away from the desk on the wheels of his chair and stood up. He clapped his hands together, then opened his arms wide. “Merry Christmas, Madison!” She hugged him back. He patted her twice quickly, and then it was over. She set the magnifying glass back onto his desk, picked up the coin, and turned off the table lamp.

  As they walked back toward the living room, her father said, “I’m afraid the sweater your mother and I got you is going to be rather anticlimactic.”

  She smiled up at her father and held the coin in the palm of her hand for the rest of the day.

  That night, Maddie re-read Hank’s letter over and over. If anything ever happened to it, she had it committed to memory for all of eternity. He had been in Greece. Obviously. But other than that, he said he wasn’t able to tell her details. He didn’t use the word deployed, but it sounded like that was the case. He said it was going to be better for both of them if they met up again in August when he got back. And then his tender request that he wanted her to wait for him. It was so glorious. Maddie’s face hurt from smiling when she read the words, and said them over and over in her mind. Two sides of the same coin.

  CHAPTER 19

  Everything made sense again. Maddie spent the rest of her Christmas vacation baking with her mother and babysitting for her nieces and nephews and working on her senior thesis and generally being in a stellar mood. She got back to school in January and felt like she was in the final segment of the longest race she’d ever rowed. The combination of the ramped-up academics to finish her senior year, waiting to see if she got the grant, counting down the months and weeks until Hank resurfaced from wherever he was—it all began to wear on her.

  She watched the news with an intensity that set her roommates on edge.

  “What is your problem, Post?”

  Maddie was sitting in front of the banged-up television in the living room that she shared with three of her friends in the off-campus house they rented together. She was biting her nails. The habit had started sometime after the Head of the Charles. It helped, somehow.

  “No problem,” she mumbled. “Just watching the news.”

  “You are not a poli-sci major. Since when did you get so interested in the Gulf War?” Her roommate Deeanna was a bit of a pain lately.

  “It’s not the Gulf War, you idiot.”

  Deeanna stared at her. “What did you just call me?”

  Maddie looked up from the television. “I called you an idiot. The Gulf War ended before we were born. The only active combat zone right now is Afghanistan. I am watching the news about Afghanistan.” Maddie rolled her eyes and went back to nibbling her fingernails and trying to see what she could see when the news camera swept over the landscape between Kandahar and Kabul.

  The ne
ws clip finished, and Maddie turned off the television.

  Deeanna was still standing there with her hands on her hips. “What the hell has gotten into you?”

  Maddie stood up and raked her hair back into a ponytail, pulling a rubber band from her wrist, where she always had an extra. “I’m sorry. You’re not a total idiot.” Deeanna was one of the top premed students at Brown. It wasn’t a lie. “But you seriously know so little about American history that I sometimes worry for you.”

  Deeanna smiled. “Isn’t that what Wikipedia is for . . . all those silly dates?”

  Maddie shook her head. “Let’s agree to disagree. I think all those silly dates pretty much define our humanity. You go cure cancer. Together, maybe we’ll make the world a better place.”

  They walked into the kitchen and had a couple of glasses of wine that Maddie poured from the box of cheap dreck they kept in the fridge.

  Deeanna stared at Maddie’s pale, exhausted features. “Are you ever going to tell any of us what this is all about?”

  Maddie stared into her wineglass. “Probably not. It’s bad enough thinking about him all the time, I don’t think I could bear—”

  Her roommate made a fist pump. “I knew it! I told Leah that you met someone and you were heartbroken—”

  Opening her mouth to defend herself, Maddie was immediately cut off.

  “—or temporarily heartbroken or whatever.”

  “Yeah,” Maddie said. “That’s about right. Temporarily heartbroken. But I think I’m on the mend.”

  Sort of.

  After Maddie had begun to do a little research on the role of military divers and the jobs they tended to have after they retired from the military, Maddie became mildly obsessed with where Hank actually was. If he thought it was safer not to be in contact, it had to be pretty hairy. By the beginning of April, Maddie was reaching the point of desperation from not having had any word from Hank. And then Janet’s wedding invitation arrived.