“This is my wife,” he had said to Jon. “Or—soon to be. She takes care of the marketing for us.” How Mae had loved those two words: my wife. In them, she had seen a future that did not involve her dying alone because she had no family—a viable concern when your only two living relatives (that you’ve ever met, at least) are in their eighties. “Do you want kids?” she had asked Peter when they had been dating long enough for her to bring it up. She had feared the answer: so many men didn’t, or said they didn’t until it was too late and then had babies with women who had not been left on the shelf so long that they were reproductively challenged. “Of course I want kids,” he had said. “That’s a silly question.”
She had envisioned inviting Jon and Mattie to dinner parties, had looked into Jorja’s eyes and prayed then that Mattie would be all right, that Jorja would not have to spend her life picking over her memories of her mother until they were almost gone. She had imagined Jorja playing with these future babies, the ones that would save her; she had imagined a perfect world.
Jon and Mattie had invested a huge amount of money in WindSpan Turbine. And now she can’t look Jon in the eye. “Mae? Are you all right?” She realizes the silence has stretched too thin, that she’s staring blankly over his left shoulder. She forces herself to meet his gaze head-on.
“How’s Mattie?”
“Strong. Hopeful. Better every day. She’s an amazing woman.”
Mae imagines hospital bills that can’t be paid. She calls for Bud. “I’m sorry,” she says to Jon. “I’m not feeling well. Really, really not feeling well.”
“Can I do anything?”
“No. But thanks. I need to get back to the office now. Or maybe head home and lie down.”
“That’s probably a good idea; you look pale. Hey, but sorry—can you have Peter call me when he gets a sec? I need to double-check something with him. I saw something on Twitter last night that was a bit concerning. About WindSpan. An article that seemed to suggest the site was abandoned. Or . . . not even abandoned, not even there. I’m sure that can’t be. Probably just trolls, or whatever, but I wanted to check in, so I’m glad I ran into you.”
Mae’s hand trembles as she attaches the leash to Bud’s collar. “Of course, will do, try not to worry, I’m sure it’s nothing.” As she walks away, she realizes she’s forgotten something. Let that be added to the catalog of her transgressions: “And she walked away without even picking up her dog’s shit.”
Back at the office, a knot of people have gathered. They are silent as she approaches. “I’m surprised you came back,” says Josh, who answers the phones. “I thought you’d taken off, too.” Josh is looking at her with revulsion and pity and something else. Because she was Peter’s fiancée, which means she either knew about this—in which case she’s a horrible person—or did not—in which case she’s a fool. I’m both, she wants to say. And I’m so sad, and I’m so sorry.
The elevator doors open behind her. A man and a woman emerge. They are plain clothed, but as their hands go into their jacket pockets, Mae knows they’re reaching for police badges. She reaches into her own pocket and feels for the note. She crumples it tighter, tries to make it small enough not to exist, but the ring gets in the way.
Eat! Go to Coffee Pot Cathy’s for the best fish sandwich you’ve ever had, Lil’ River Fudge Co. for . . . well, obviously fudge, and the Bay Area Bakery for amazing bagels. (And start planning your fishing camp shore lunch for when it stops raining. I can help!)
Gabe is at a restaurant he’s never been to and knows he’ll never go to again. He’ll probably avoid this block entirely. He’s with his wife, moments away from her being his ex-wife, and she’s telling him he never loved her.
“You were very fond of me, Gabe. You cared about me. But loved me? No. You never loved me. You were too damaged to love me. I think you did love someone once—that girl you told me about, back when you used to talk about your childhood, what was her name, Molly?”
“Mae.” Gabe mumbles it. It’s too pathetic, too sad, that Natasha is right even about this.
“Yeah. Her. The only person you ever loved is a ghost, someone you’ll probably never see again. And until you either make her real or exorcise her, you won’t be . . .” She pauses and looks past him, searching for the right word. The waiter misinterprets it, thinks she’s ready to order and approaches the table, but she dismisses him with a firm head shake. “Until then, you won’t be whole. But that’s only part of it.” Now the head shaking is sad, and she falls silent, as if she can’t bring herself to get into all the other ways in which he is broken. Instead, she reaches her hand across the table. “You need to know something. I’m pregnant. Twins. In vitro.”
He puts both his hands under the table. “Too much information. And, it’s pretty obvious. You’re huge.”
She sighs. “You’re a dick.”
“You fucked around with one of the doctors from the hospital where you work. Sorry if I’m bitter.” She’d been living with the doctor for some time, following an affair with him that she had once lain at Gabe’s feet like a challenge. Fight for me, her eyes had demanded. Gabe did not. Who could compete with a renowned pediatric cardiologist? She was an anesthesiologist; they were a good team. Except he could have competed. Natasha had loved him. It was a gift that he had senselessly squandered, and now there’s nothing left to say.
He stares down at the table until finally she says, “So, the papers.” She pushes the folder across the table at him along with a navy Montblanc pen and he imagines the renowned pediatric cardiologist giving it to her, the perfect gift. The last thing Gabe gave her was a can opener. He’d meant it as a joke, but it’s never funny to give your wife a can opener. What was the punch line, anyway, of the can opener joke? He can’t remember. Who cares? He gave her a fucking can opener.
“As discussed, we’ll both walk away with what we walked in with. A clean break.”
He picks up the pen. He signs. It does not feel like a clean break at all. But it does feel like an ending, and there is some relief in that. Endings always relieve Gabe.
“You’re okay, right? Still freelancing? I saw one of your drawings in the Times.”
“There. Done.” He signals for the bill, then remembers they haven’t ordered anything yet. He picks up his water glass, swigs. It’s not what he needs. He stands.
“Gabe, please, don’t go yet. You can’t run away from everything for the rest of your life. We should—”
“Good-bye, Natasha.”
He doesn’t run, he walks, so she’s wrong about that at least. He buys Wild Turkey on the way to his new apartment and drinks some in the elevator, then collapses with the bottle onto the mattress on the floor, the mattress he dragged up three flights of stairs by himself even though friends offered to help him move. He can afford better than this shithole. When she asked he could have told her that, yes, his freelance career is doing just fine, that a publisher might even be interested in his kids’ graphic novel idea, but he didn’t bother. He stares at the ceiling. It’s heavily water stained. It looks like it might collapse on him. What would that be like, he wonders, to have a ceiling collapse on you? Would it be a quick death, or slow and suffocating?
Quite the life you’ve carved out for yourself, Gabriel Broadbent.
Alex Bay isn’t your typical tourist town. There are mysteries, secrets, a shadowy past involving pirates. And you can find out about all of it at the Cornwall Brothers Store & Museum, where, conveniently, you can also shop for souvenirs.
Lilly waits, listens, counts George’s breaths, counts the spaces between them. He’s asleep. She sits up, waits again, searches with her feet in the darkness for her slippers, slides them on, stands and finds her dressing gown where she left it, draped over the chair in front of the dressing table. She pauses with her hand on the chair. She used to sit here and apply her makeup before leaving this room every morning. When you were running an inn you always had to look presentable. You couldn’t just wander around in sl
ippers and a dressing gown, hair sticking out at all angles.
She backs away from the chair. A floorboard protests beneath her feet. She turns and steps on another one, and this one groans even louder. George stirs. She used to know where every creaking floorboard was in this house. Now she doesn’t.
She didn’t notice the forgetting at first. Names, mostly, and George had carried a piece of notepaper in his front shirt pocket for decades because he could never keep names straight in the high season, when the inn was full of strangers and old friends. She’d tried making her own cheat sheet, but it was only a month before the forgetting of names gave way to something more: an abyss of things forgotten, but not enough that you didn’t feel them hovering just outside your grasp. She’d wake in the night and shout the name of a person or a town. George thought she was having nightmares. He’d rub her back to get her to sleep again, the way he used to after Virginia died.
When she shouted “Everett!” that meant trouble. No back rub that night: George got up and wandered the house himself, though he didn’t mention her outburst to her the next day at breakfast. “I keep forgetting his name, until I’m asleep,” she wanted to say to him. But she knew where that would lead. George wanted to sell the inn and move to a condominium. A box beside the river, but not one that contained any of her memories. And she couldn’t leave the inn, ever. She had promised Virginia. And before that, Everett.
Hadn’t she promised them? Whom had she promised?
She feels her way along the wall. Don’t trip and fall and break your hip or you’ll get moved into that damn condo anyway, or worse, an assisted-living home, where people will assist you right off the mortal coil. The darkness is danger, but she can’t risk turning on a light and waking George. He’ll want to know why she’s up. She’ll have to say she can’t sleep and needs a glass of warm milk, and then she’ll have to make it and drink it and be up for the rest of the night peeing.
The stairs. The moonlight in the window at the bottom helps. She sits on the top step, then bumps down on her bottom, like a child—like Mae used to, and Virginia before her. Bump. Bump. Bump. She grips the banister and pulls herself back to standing. There.
She shuffles along the threadbare carpet, and now at least she remembers where the pitfalls are: here the floor has buckled slightly; there a floorboard is loose and popped up, a booby trap for old toes. Then she forgets where she’s going and almost veers into the kitchen because the last words she can remember are warm milk. No: her desk, her box. Condominium? Not that kind of box. The one Tommy made before he went to war. Tommy, your big brother. Tommy, who was a flyboy, and wrote to you about how much he missed the bay and about the importance of home, stability, staying in one place while you still had the chance. And so you did it for all of them: Tommy, Everett, Virginia, and now Mae. Your grandchild, the only one you haven’t lost, yet.
“Mae,” she says, because this is a name she cannot forget, because once she forgets Mae, she’s finished.
Lamplight; she opens her rolltop desk. And there is the box, right where she left it. There’s such relief lately in finding things just where she left them—and such frustration when they aren’t there, or worse, when she forgets what she’s looking for entirely.
The box is cedar, still fragrant; there are clumsy flowers carved along the bottom. She opens it. Photos, letters, dried flowers that crumble at her touch. A birth certificate, a death notice. She slides these beneath a newspaper article featuring a photograph of her and George smiling through specks of confetti. There she is in her blue jacquard traveling suit. She had a white carrying case, and inside it . . . inside it—but what is that other word? What did they call them, all those things gathered up before a wedding day, items she had to scrimp and save for or make herself, because nothing was easy to come by when there was a war on?
The clock ticks. The word matters only because she can no longer recall it.
She had to get extra fabric to make those clothes, she had to allow for the slight widening of girth that no one was supposed to know about, not even her new husband, not yet.
Outside the window the river is frozen, silent, but it’s silence she can hear.
What is the word?
Trousseau. It was called a bridal trousseau.
Buoyed by relief, she plunges her hand back into the box and comes up with a bundle of letters, held together by a decaying rubber band. She knows his handwriting: these were Everett’s letters from the ship. She can see that he wrote “beautiful” and “love you madly, deeply” and “dream of your kisses, every night.” Her cheeks grow warm. Her old cheeks, now the texture of crepe paper, can still blush like a girl’s cheeks. It makes her smile. This is why she likes to go through this box: because everything in it makes her remember. “Hello, Everett,” she says, into the silent dark. And then, “Hello, darling,” because she’s grateful to him in that moment for helping her recall who she is, who she was.
A rustling sound. Someone is standing in the door frame.
“Darling,” she says to her husband, to George this time, but it has the wrong effect. She has hurt him, she can see it in his eyes, and the panic of what she has inflicted is causing her to forget what and where and why and . . . “Oh.” She lifts up a photograph and holds it in front of her face. Who are those girls, so young, with foolish hair? Who is that handsome man that the most foolish-looking girl is hanging on to?
It’s you. You and Vivian and Everett, and George took the photograph. Lilly drops the photo and claps her hands. How wonderful, to be able to remember that!
But someone is standing in the room. Someone who is angry with her. She stares at him, blinks uncomprehendingly. There’s an angry old man in the room—George.
“I’m sorry.” These words are automatic.
“What are you sorry for?” he asks in a hoarse, broken voice. “Are you sorry that you had to marry me and live with me all these years, instead of marrying the man you really wanted to marry?”
“I wanted to marry you!”
Trousseau. Bridal. Niagara Falls. The feeling of being saved, guilty gratitude and also so much love and hope and George. Clinging to him like he was a lifeboat. A bolt of silk my mother gave me. She’d been saving it for years, she said. In her eyes, knowledge and accusation. It was white silk, as pure as snow, and I should have handed it back to her, her eyes were daring me to say I couldn’t wear white because I was already . . .
“Are you listening to me?”
“I can’t forget him! I can’t forget his name, don’t you see? He was the father of my child!”
Wait. No.
Not the right words. That was a secret, or not exactly a secret, but something they didn’t . . . that was a promise, or that was—
George is gone. She hears his heavy footfalls on the stairs and remembers again. She said the wrong thing. She said a secret.
She puts her head in her hands and stares down at the desk, at a photo of a young woman she no longer knows and a man she doesn’t want to forget—not because she still loves him now but because she still needs him in order to remember herself. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. But it’s too late for sorry now.
We just got the game Clue! It’s so fun. Gather up some fellow guests and play a few rounds. (I bet it was Colonel Mustard in the parlor with the lead pipe.)
How long have you known Peter Greaves?”
“About a year.” A year next week.
Both detectives are taking notes.
“And you worked together, but you were romantically involved also?”
“We were engaged.” She can picture the moment, six months ago, when Peter held out the ring. She had felt like every piece of her life had fit into place—or that her life was expanding to fit more pieces into it. They were in Paris, at the top of the Ferris wheel at the Tuileries. On the way down he had said, “Doesn’t it feel like we’re flying, baby?”
Everything with Peter felt spontaneous, even the proposal. Let’s take the ferry to Staten Isl
and for lunch. Let’s take a helicopter tour. Let’s fly to Chicago just to have dinner. Let’s make love, right here, right now. No one can see. Baby, let’s get married. She reaches into her pocket and touches the diamond ring. No one had ever called her “baby” before. At first, she didn’t like it.
“Are you ready to continue?” the male detective asks. She’s crying; she hadn’t realized.
“Yes. I’m ready.”
“Did you have any reason to believe that something wasn’t right about WindSpan Turbine?”
“Yes. No. Not exactly. I mean . . .” She takes her hand out of her pocket and wipes both her sweaty palms on her jeans. I really should get a lawyer. Why did I say no to that? She breathes in deeply and continues. “I had a feeling, I think. But I—I was too afraid to say anything to Peter.”
“Afraid why? Afraid that he might harm you in some way?”
She shakes her head. “Afraid, I guess, that he would leave.” She says this in a voice that sounds too childlike in her own ears. “Afraid to make him angry or unhappy. Because it was very important to me to make . . . to make him happy. To try to make him better, a better person.”
The two officers exchange a look.
“Did he leave anything behind, any sort of message for you?”
She can no longer feel her legs. Maybe she’s having a panic attack. Please destroy this. “No. Nothing.”
“And he didn’t ask you to meet him anywhere?”
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