Seven Letters

by J. P. Monninger

  “I’ve been a couple times, actually.”

  “It’s the smallest state,” Lucy said. “Small things welcome you in ways large places don’t.”

  “Mom, that’s ridiculous,” Helen said.

  “Maybe ridiculous, but that’s my experience in the world.”

  Donald appeared. He had taken off his jacket and changed his trousers. He grabbed Helen and kissed her. Helen pretended to fight him off a little, but it was easy to see she enjoyed it. I tried to remember my seventeenth birthday, but that felt like ancient, ancient history.

  “They’re making a round of Ireland,” Lucy said to Helen, by way of explaining my presence. “Circumnavigating, I guess you could say.”

  “It’s a mad, mad plan,” I said and felt a pang about abandoning Ozzie at the dock.

  “It sounds great to me,” Helen said, her eyes bright with youthful enthusiasm. “We should do that, Dad.”

  “I can’t get you on the boat as it is,” he said, going to the fridge for a beer. “You’d think I was asking her to pitch coal all day.”

  “It’s a long way,” I said. “Maybe I’m just realizing that.”

  “I wonder if anyone else has done it?” Donald asked to no one, pulling out a beer.

  Then Helen spoke to Siri.

  “Has anyone circumnavigated Ireland?” she asked.

  She studied the screen when Siri gave her the results.

  “Looks like more people than you might think,” she said. “There are two Australians who did it by kayak just last year.”

  “I knew something about that,” I said. “But we aren’t doing it to break new ground.”

  “Well, it sounds like a grand adventure in any case,” Lucy said. “Now, Helen, help me serve. Donald, you keep an eye on her wineglass.”

  It was a friendly, warm meal. The shepherd’s pie tasted better and fresher than any I had eaten since arriving. When I asked about the recipe, Lucy said she made it from mutton raised by a friend of theirs; she did not trust the supermarkets except for basic staples. A thick layer of mashed potato and creamed corn coated the top of the stew below. It was delicious and nourishing and I didn’t object when Donald poured me another glass of wine. I was charmed by the entire family. They teased each other in gentle ways, but their love for one another was evident in every tick of the clock. The food was plentiful and they seemed happy to have someone else to include in their circle. Helen asked me a dozen questions about the States that I could barely answer. Lucy laid out for me her entire connection to Rhode Island. Donald, for the most part, remained silent, but always attentive.

  They served cake for dessert and Helen blew out seventeen candles. She looked lovely sitting behind the candlelight. I don’t know why, but I felt teary watching her. She was loved and effortlessly embraced by the two people closest to her. She had her fondest birthday wish whether she knew it or not.

  Presents. A pale gray sweater that matched her eyes. Ear buds. A homemade coupon for a “movie night” with her dad. A first edition copy of The Wind in the Willows, her favorite childhood book, that her mother had come across in a thrift store. When it was finished, she went around the table and hugged them both. For good measure, she hugged me. Their inherent kindness had been planted and harvested in their daughter.

  “You’re welcome to stay,” Lucy said when Donald said he could run me back whenever I liked. He looked tired and I was certain he was not far from falling into bed. “We could fix you up and have Helen sleep out here.”

  “Thank you, but I should be getting back. We usually leave early in the morning.”

  “This storm isn’t leaving,” Donald said, standing to get his keys. “It’s going to get bigger before it gets smaller.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll sit it out then.”

  Lucy leaned close to me as we neared the door to leave.

  “Are you safe?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” I answered, shocked that she could think me in the position of an abused wife. But why not? I had all the symptoms.

  “Be back in a shake,” Donald told his women. “Keep the lights on.”

  We left after some more goodbye-ing. The car felt cold and damp after the warmth of the house. Donald drove me back without much comment. I thanked him and told him he had a lovely family. He smiled and nodded.

  “If it comes to it,” he said when he dropped me back at the dock, “you always have a place here.”

  I leaned across and hugged him. In that moment, his door jerked open and Ozzie reached in and yanked him out by his collar. It happened so suddenly that my arms remained outstretched from my body. Then I saw Donald snap against the hood of his car, and I heard Ozzie’s hand slap against flesh. I screamed for him to stop it, stop it, stop it, and he did. He walked away, weaving with drink, and I hurried around to help Donald back to his feet.

  23

  Donald was not hurt badly. He had been humiliated, and shocked by the sudden violence, but he stood beside the hood of his car and smiled at me. It was a smile to tell me he was all right, it was not my fault, he could take it.

  I didn’t want him to take it.

  “I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry. I am sorry I got you involved in this.”

  “I’m fine, Kate. I’ve had worse. He didn’t have a heart for it.”

  “But you were so kind … and I repay you with this.”

  “You didn’t repay me. He did.”

  He nodded in the direction of the Ferriter.

  “If you’ll wait one minute, I’m going to get my things,” I said. “Then if you’ll let me, I’m coming to spend the night at your house.”

  “I’ll wait,” he said. “I should go on board with you.”

  “No, let me take care of this. It will be all right, I promise.”

  But I didn’t know if it would be. Ozzie had never been anything but kind to me. I had never seen him act violently toward anyone until this night, although I occasionally heard stories of past altercations. They were muted stories, little worrisome legends that followed him. He had always been exceedingly tender with me. If anything, he had been careful of his strength around me, protective in a good, honest way.

  I hurried. I stepped onto the Ferriter and immediately went belowdecks. I didn’t see Ozzie. I didn’t sense him on board, either. That was curious, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. As quickly as possible, I filled a bag with as many things as I could remember to take. I grabbed my computer. I grabbed my notes. My hands trembled as I stuffed things inside the bag in no order whatsoever. My mind asked over and over how it had come to this. How had I ended up on a boat in Dublin with a man who could not feel life unless he risked it recklessly? Who drank beyond what was good for him? Who jerked a man out of a car and slapped him so quickly, and so horridly, that I saw in my husband the soldier, the trained killer who carried a memory of actions in war that plagued him? How had I been so blind to miss all the tell-tale signs?

  As soon as my bag was filled, I hoisted it onto my shoulder and climbed off the boat. Still no sign of Ozzie. The bag made me unbalanced and I nearly fell on the uneven dock boards as I returned to the car. Maybe that was an omen, I wondered.

  “Was he there?” Donald asked.

  “No. I don’t know where he is.”

  “I saw someone walking out that way,” Donald said, pointing toward an area where lobster pots had been stacked. “It might have been him.”

  “Please, let’s go. I’m sure he’s ashamed of himself. We’ll have no more trouble with him.”

  We went. As we pulled slowly away, I put my hands over my face. I didn’t cry, although I wanted to weep. My stomach filled with butterflies, poisonous ones that landed on each thought and fluttered there. My hands continued to tremble. I felt apart from myself, if that made any sense: I was watching a girl from a low-budget television movie, a girl whose husband raged and fumed until she had no choice but to leave. It was bad television, bad drama, bad life.

  “Would you please drop me at a hotel
?” I asked, my voice tight with emotion. “I can’t face your family. Any kind of hotel whatsoever. I don’t want Helen to see me like this.”

  “She would understand. Sincerely, Kate.”

  “Please,” I said. “I’m embarrassed and shaken. I have my wallet. I can manage, honestly. I’d prefer it. I don’t want to explain anything to anyone right now. Everyone will be kind to me and that will only make it worse. Honestly.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I promise. I’m humiliated. I just want to be alone. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. He stopped at the first stop sign we came to and told me he was thinking of hotels nearby, what might make sense.

  “Maybe I should drive you a little distance from here,” he said, “in case he comes looking for you.”

  “I think he’s done for the night. I really do. He was drunk. He was angry at me and angry at himself, probably. He’s not like this.”

  Donald looked at me. I sensed the evaluation. He didn’t buy my assessment.

  “Well, still, I know of a place,” he said finally.

  He drove for twenty minutes or so until we seemed to enter the outskirts of Dublin. We parked beside a small B&B called the Coat of Arms. It was a dull, brown building with a poorly kept façade, but I didn’t care at that point. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to be away from everyone. Donald waited while I ran inside to see about vacancies. A sleepy-eyed boy named Martin told me I could have a choice between two rooms. I told him to give me the one he would pick. He did. I signed the register, gave him my credit card, then went out to say goodbye to Donald.

  “I wish I could apologize even more,” I said. “I wish I could make it go away.”

  “Well, it was a bad act, but he didn’t seem like he wanted to hurt me. He’s a strong man. Don’t torture yourself about it.”

  “Would you do me a favor and not mention it to your girls?”

  He smiled.

  “Well, I can’t promise I can keep it from my wife. She can wring anything out of me. But Helen doesn’t need to know. If anything comes up, and you need a place to stay, you come and find us, all right?”

  I hugged him. But it wasn’t a warm hug anymore. He was tired of me, tired of the problems that trailed after me. His left eye had swollen a little along the edge where Ozzie had struck him. I hurried into the Coat of Arms. Martin led me upstairs and opened the door to my room. It was a basic guest room with a white comforter on a full-sized bed, a chest of drawers, and a small writing table. A tight bathroom extended off the window side of the room. I accepted the key, told Martin it was fine, then closed the door after him. I flipped the bolt on the door and then stood for a long minute in the silence, the whir of my blood filling my ears with the sound of the sea.

  * * *

  I fashioned a desert in my head. A desert was the proper antidote for the sea.

  It sounded ridiculous, I granted, but it was the metaphor that sustained me. I grew a wide open, dry land, with pale cacti and shimmering waves of light and heat. I wedged that image into my head and left it there, a harbor of safety and quiet that allowed me to retreat to it whenever I needed. Everything—meals, travel, other voices—everything had to accommodate itself to my dry, white land.

  Ozzie did not get to come to the desert. He did not get to be there. He was too loud and too liquid to live there.

  What I did was this: I took the train from Dublin to Limerick. I got a cab from the station to my apartment. I turned off my phone. I went into the apartment and I slowly, methodically unpacked. It did not take long. I pulled the kitchen table into a better position against a southern-facing window, so that I could get the sun all morning. I showered. I took a long, long shower. Then I did some yoga stretches and fixed tea. I did not feel sleepy. I felt that I had a desert to live in, and I made myself dry inside, quiet and light-filled.

  When any thought of Ozzie, of what would become of us, of what needed to happen started to intrude, I shut it away. I sent it to the desert. I wanted to be a mystic, a holy woman wandering the desert, fixed and focused on my work.

  For a day, I did nothing but reread everything I had gathered or written about the women’s narratives on the Blaskets. I reordered things, put things in new packets and manila envelopes. I charted every correspondence, every set of notes into an Excel spreadsheet.

  If I had been too sloppy, if I had gotten off the track, then the simple solution was to restore the track, to get back on it, to regain order where chaos had threatened.

  I took a cab to the grocery store on the second day of my return. I stockpiled food and bought myself two dozen yellow tulips. I stored the groceries carefully, as one would in a desert, then put the yellow tulips in jelly jars near my desk-table. Later that day, I burned sage again. It was ridiculous, more ridiculous than ever, but it brought me serenity.

  On the fourth day of my return, someone knocked on my door. I sat for a long time and waited for whoever it was to go away. I made no sound. Eventually the person left. I looked out the window to see who it had been, but the person had gone off in a different direction, one that prevented me from seeing who it was.

  I kept my phone off. I detached from everything electronic.

  I did more stretching and yoga. I edited my Blasket piece. I watered the tulips. They did not belong in the desert, but they comforted me anyway. I had just returned to my desk for an afternoon session of writing and research, when someone knocked again. This time the person didn’t wait. I heard a jingle of keys, then suddenly the door opened.

  “Hello?” someone called up the stairs. “Miss, are you here? Is anyone here?”

  Tentatively, I walked to the top of the stairs and looked down. It was a campus security officer. He was a young man who held his hat under his arm while he put away his pass key. His zippers and pockets and lanyards made noises whenever he moved.

  “Hello? Yes, what is it?” I asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “We were asked to check on you. A woman stateside, your friend Milly, she called campus security. She said she hadn’t heard from you in a number of days. She said it was unlike you. We didn’t know if you were here.”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “She was persistent…” he said, leaning a little to use the light to inspect me. “Everything all right, then? You’re not sick, are you?”

  “Just working. I’ll call her. Thank you, though.”

  He paused, sizing me up. Then he nodded.

  “If you require anything, please let us know.”

  “Thank you. Everything is fine. I appreciate you looking in on me.”

  But it wasn’t fine, of course. Healthy young people don’t have security officers checking on their status. I lifted my hand to say goodbye to him. He backed out of the doorway. I returned to my desk and put my nose against the tulips. They smelled of gardens.

  * * *

  “Now what?” Milly asked.

  I had told her the entire story on Skype. I had tried to tell it calmly, flatly, without tipping the scales one way or the other. I drank tea and laid out the whole ordeal. She listened, drinking tea on her end, her hair pulled back, her hands coated with flecks of paint. She had been up late, working. She had apologized for getting a security guard to check on me, but she had been frantic that I had been lost at sea. It was our habit to text nearly every day, even when I was out on the Ferriter. My absence had caused her concern and she had tracked me down like a mama bear.

  “I don’t know, Milly. I haven’t thought that far ahead. For now, I work. I get back to the reason I came here. I research.”

  “You’re married, though, Kate. It’s not like breaking up after a fling.”

  “I know.”

  “And Ozzie hasn’t been in touch? Is he still circumnavigating the island?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t talked to him?”

  I shook my head. She puckered her lips and blew air through he
r mouth.

  “Kate, you have to talk to him. Is this a pride thing?”

  “Whose pride? His or mine?”

  “His, yours. What does it matter? Are you finished with him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you love him. You had a wonderful time on the boat, didn’t you?”

  “We had a wonderful time, yes. We did. For a while. And I love him deeply. But I’m afraid he’s broken, Milly. I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love with a piece of pottery that’s beautiful, but you know it has a hairline fracture at its base and that it won’t hold up. It won’t be able to fulfill its function. It’s no longer a bowl. It’s simply pretty clay. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes, except that Ozzie is not a bowl. Or a piece of pottery. He’s a man. He’s flawed, I guess, but we all are.”

  “I know that. I know I’m flawed. Seriously flawed. But that look on his face when we were in the storm … I can’t forget that. That’s a serious thing, Milly. And the drinking. He’s carrying a wound from the war that he won’t get fixed. Or he can’t get it fixed. He won’t talk about it or address it. And it haunts him.”

  She sipped her tea.

  “Better to cut it off now then to keep thinking the bowl will mend itself?” she asked. “To use your metaphor.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. He’s so charming and he’s so beautiful that he still takes my breath away. He can quote Yeats. He’s the dream guy in so many ways, but he is hurt and wounded. I’ll never forget him pulling Donald from the car and slapping him. I can’t forgive that.”

  “He was jealous and drunk. He’d just come through a violent storm and his wife left the boat.”

  “I know. I know that. I’ve been over that a thousand times in my head.”

  Then I told her about the desert I had fashioned in my head. She smiled. It was an indulgent smile.

  “That’s a very Kate thing to do,” she said. “Living in a dream desert.”

  “All I can do is wait for a while. I think we both are using this time to assess our relationship. That’s my guess. He’s not the sort to run after me. If I need time to sort things out, then he will leave me alone. From his way of thinking, I’m the one who left the boat. I canceled the trip.”