The Wideness of the Sea

by Katie Curtis

  When they got to Andrew’s house, Stephen lunged out of the car and scooped up more snow, and chucked it at his friend as he tried to get out. Andrew shot back in rapid fire motion. “Anna, help me!” Stephen called to her. She laughed, and came out of the car, and with her bare hands, scooped up snow. But instead of throwing it at Andrew, she threw it at Stephen.

  “That’s for hitting me in the parking lot at school,” she yelled.

  “Let’s take him down!” Andrew shouted. Together they cornered him in front of Andrew’s garage, a snow-covered row boat parked on the side of the driveway closing him in with no escape. When they had shown no mercy, and Stephen held up his hands in surrender, he shouted out, “I give up. I need a towel.”

  “Go look in the bathroom right across from the door. There should be some under the sink,” Andrew said, laughing. He was breathing hard, and little puffs of steam floated out as he exhaled. Anna was in a similar state, and started to shake her hands which were red and wet, and almost numb. She put them together and breathed into them.

  “Here,” Andrew said as he came closer. He took off his flannel shirt, and wrapped it around her hands, holding it with his own hands to warm them up. Underneath it, he had on a white t-shirt, and she could see his biceps peeking out underneath them, and the solid mass of his forearms, the golden carpet of hair on them matching his eyebrows. He looked at her, and she smiled up at him. “Better?” he asked. She nodded, and then Stephen was back outside.

  “Ok, next time, I’m wearing gloves, and I am going to take no prisoners,” he said laughing. “But I gotta get out of these wet clothes before I get frostbite. C’mon, let’s go,” he said to Anna.

  They broke apart, and Anna handed him back his shirt. “Thanks,” she said. Andrew smiled from ear to ear. It was that grin. That smile that undid her.

  “Anytime,” he answered, practically in a whisper.

  The next day at school, in between math and chem, Anna closed her locker, and he was suddenly standing there, his blond hair messy, his blue eyes clear. “Hi there,” he said.

  “Hi,” was all Anna could manage to say. She was positive he could hear her heart racing, since the sound of it beating had suddenly flooded her ears.

  “I was wondering, do you have plans on Friday?”

  “No, I don’t…I don’t think so.” In truth, Anna had no idea, since she couldn’t think about anything other than the sound his voice.

  “Oh, good, because I was wondering if you want to see a movie,” he asked nervously, but with so much politeness it made Anna smile as a reflex.

  “Sure, you mean, with Stephen?”

  “Actually, I thought it could just be you and me,” he said softly, tilting his head to one side.

  “Oh, right. Sure, I’d love to,” she said, nodding slightly.

  “Ok, great. I’ll pick you up at 6, ok?”

  “Sure, 6 o’clock sounds good.” She was still nodding. She actually realized she hadn’t stopped nodding since he had asked her out. She willed her head to stop moving.

  “Ok, great. I’ll just…I have to run to history, but I’ll see you then.”

  As Andrew walked away, Anna realized with a twinge that Friday was still two days away, and she wondered how she was going to handle her heart until then, which seemed to have turned into a bass drum.

  The movie was funny. He held her hand, and she tried hard to make it stop trembling by holding her arm. When he dropped her off, he kissed her gently, on the lips, once. Her first kiss. It felt simultaneously like ice and liquid fire floated through her.

  “I had a really good time tonight, Anna. Can I see you again?” he asked sweetly, his thumb gently brushing her cheek. His gaze felt like a warm light glowing on her.

  She smiled up at him. “I’d like that.”

  He kissed her again, briefly, and then she turned around and walked into her house, and headed straight to her room. Her mom might have said something to her but she couldn’t hear anything, since she was floating in a bubble. She lay down on her bed, and replayed every second of the night in her head, over and over, until she fell asleep.

  They were inseparable after that. Until Andrew left for college. And the years he was in college, they were inseparable on the weekend. Her mom joked that she had gained another child, since Andrew was always on their couch watching movies, or eating dinner over, or celebrating holidays with them. When they weren’t at Anna’s house, they were at Andrew’s, watching TV with his parents or stacking traps, or they were out on the lobster boat, working his dad’s territory.

  And then she followed him to University of Maine at Orono. They studied together in library, ate dinner together every night. They grew even closer, if that was possible. Her dad was mad that she hadn’t gone to a more prestigious school, but those years with Andrew were the happiest ones of her life. She just remembered laughing whenever they were together.

  Anna opened her eyes, and looked at the glow the front door lights cast on the wall, the shadow of branches waving in the window dancing across the space. Remembering how much she had loved him felt odd, like remembering a dream. A really wonderful dream, she thought as she drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter 4

  “So there is going to be a reading of the will,” her father said briskly into Anna’s phone as she was filling her sister’s car with gas. It was Wednesday, the day after Uncle Charlie’s funeral, and they were headed back from the grocery store. She had been contemplating when to return to New York but wanted to hang around for a few days, to help their dad and aunt handle cleaning up Uncle Charlie’s house, but she also just wanted to spend more time with her family, and soak up being together after losing Uncle Charlie. She felt comforted being in Maine, where she had loved him, where her family had spent so much time together when he was alive. This trip made her realize just how long she had been gone. She stood up and adjusted her Ray-Bans on top of her head before she balanced the phone and the pump at the same time.

  “A will?” Anna asked. The thought hadn’t occurred to her. Her main experience in the funeral-and-death department had been her mother’s. There wasn’t a reading of the will since everything just went to her dad, save a few smaller accounts for each of the kids. But Uncle Charlie had no wife or children—his brief marriage right after college ended sadly when his wife declared she couldn’t live in Maine and went back to her parents’ farm in Georgia. He just had his brother and sister.

  “Don’t you and Aunt Catherine just split everything?” Anna asked, the logic from her last experience carrying over.

  “I don’t know what it says,” her dad said. His voice sounded pained to have to explain this much to her. “I don’t know what Charlie arranged, and I never thought to ask him.” His father and his brother were close, playing rounds of golf throughout the summer and meeting up to watch big sports games. But by nature, John and Charles Goodrich were loners. While Anna’s father had chosen academia, becoming a tenured professor of art history at Bowdoin College, his brother had been a banker, quietly running a regional bank and keeping it from takeovers until he retired, when it was subsequently taken over. Neither of them spoke about deeply personal matters very much, and Anna couldn’t imagine them having a conversation about wills.

  “Well, when do we need to be there?” she asked, climbing into the passenger seat. Her sister looked up, curious, having only heard a part of the call.

  “The lawyer was asking if everyone could meet on Friday morning,” he said. “I don’t know if Stephen can arrange it, but I’ll call him next and let you know.”

  “Hang on and I’ll ask Marie.” Anna put the phone across her chest. “Can you meet with Uncle Charlie’s lawyer on Friday morning? Dad says there is a will.”

  “Sure, I can bring Henry with stuff to keep him busy, I guess. Mike doesn’t need to be there, right? He’s on this whole weekend.”

  “Hey, Dad, Marie and I can make it. Mike doesn’t need to come, right?”

  “No, just Marie,” he sa
id. “Let’s make it ten o’clock, so Stephen can make it.”

  “We’ll be there,” Anna said. “Oh, and Marie said you have to come over for dinner tonight. We just got the makings for beef stew. Six o’clock.”

  Anna heard a silence and then, “Ok, I’ll be there,” and then the click of the phone, since he had hung up.

  That afternoon, Anna left Henry napping and her sister contentedly making beef stew, her white apron tied neatly around her waist. Though Stephen was the professional, her sister shared his culinary prowess. Anna loved to eat good food but seemed to lack the good-cooking gene, which she ardently wished for every time she had a kitchen disaster. She started to feel hungry already as she drove Marie and Mike’s red pickup truck into Damariscotta to get some art supplies. She wore her coziest pair of jeans, filled with holes and faded to a light blue, and a white long-sleeved T-shirt beneath her gray cardigan. Other than her uncle’s wake and funeral, she hadn’t put on any makeup or blow-dried her hair since she had arrived. Though she felt a sadness ready to pounce on her consciousness every time she thought of Uncle Charlie, she also felt clean and light, buoyed in the freedom or being in nature, away from the city, and being around family.

  The day was gorgeous. Singing birds mingled with the sun-drenched sights of spring green buds and grass, the splashes of yellow from the daffodils and forsythia, and the red and white and pink tulips from eager gardeners. Anna noticed that even a concrete barrier in a parking lot had a creeping flower vine climbing over it, as if the ground itself was reaching up to cover banal with beauty. As she drove down the winding roads, her phone rang. It was Georgia.

  “Hey Peaches,” Anna answered. She pulled over into an empty lot on the side of the road, where farmers set up stands in the summertime.

  “Hey Anna, God, how are you doing? I can’t stop thinking about you guys losing your uncle. It’s so sad, and so sudden. He was the one with the house on the water, right?” Georgia had joined Anna for a weekend home, and she was able to nod in wholehearted agreement that Anna’s father was the difficult kind in all subsequent conversations they had. After a dinner on Uncle Charlie’s deck of lobster rolls and cold beers one evening, they sat looking up at the stars, and heard Uncle Charlie tell the funniest stories, and played poker while smoking cigars until they were completely broke, her Aunt Catherine claiming he cheated and her brother Stephen demanding a rematch next time. Next time. She was glad her friend had been there, that she had met her family.

  “Yes, that was Uncle Charlie,” Anna said. “It’s been hard, but being around everyone is helping. Seeing my sister and my aunt have been great.”

  “How’s your dad?” Georgia asked tentatively.

  “I haven’t talked to him much. It’s been the same.” Anna was hoping time at her sister’s over dinner would help her discover the good vibes that she told Raphael she would try to find. “I also bumped into Andrew.” Anna heard a pause on the phone.

  “THE Andrew?” Georgia said in shock. Their friendship began right as they were breaking up, and just as Anna knew every detail of Georgia’s relationship with her boyfriend Jake, from their first meeting to their repeat fights, to their bright future ahead, so Georgia knew all about Anna’s history with Andrew and then Raphael. “What happened, how’d you meet up with him?”

  “It was a coincidence; we bumped into each other when we went to a bar after the funeral. It’s not that shocking, given how tiny my hometown is, but it still felt so weird.”

  “That’s a lot to take in all at once. Well, I’m headed out now to meet a client who is buying some photos for his office, but we’ll talk soon. You’ll have to fill me in on all the details and you have to call me if you bump into Andrew again. Promise?”

  “I promise,” said Anna. She hung up the phone. As she stared out the window, a memory floated up.

  Andrew, laying on the grass on campus, in the warm sunshine. They were supposed to be studying, but he was throwing grass at her instead.

  “Stop, or I’ll make you write this Plato paper for me,” she said.

  “What’s it about? Maybe I will.” Anna didn’t doubt it – Andrew aced all of his classes with what appeared to her like no effort.

  “Well, it’s on one of his dialogues. The Symposium. They’re all at a drinking party, and they start trying to figure out the nature of love. First all the men speak and say love is power, and romance. And then Socrates tells everyone that all of their ideas about what love is are wrong. He tells them that love was born of resource and need.”

  Andrew squinted his eye in the spring sunlight, his long muscular frame relaxed, his head resting in his palm. “I think that’s a good explanation of love,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Yah. I need you.”

  Anna smiled. “Andrew, you’re a portrait of resource. You tame the ocean and hunt for food. You cut down the egomaniacs who try to fish in your territory, and then go home and feed soup to your father, all with a 4.0 GPA. There is literally nothing you can’t do.” Anna stared at his soft almost blond eyebrows that were pushed together as he was thinking, and longed to reach out and touch them.

  “Yea, but I still need you. I needed you since the first moment I laid eyes on you, when we were looking at the blue lobster.” Andrew looked at her, his eyes serious. “Maybe that’s why we love each other. We are each other’s resource and need.”

  “Maybe,” said Anna smiling, watching his eyes on her. Her heart felt like it was a tectonic plate shifting. “I didn’t think I could be any more in love with you, Mr. Toomey. But I was wrong. So now I have a need,” she said. “I need a kiss.”

  “Thought you needed to write your paper,” he teased, squinting one eye.

  “I think I have to do some research first,” she said, closing her book, and pulling him close.

  She snapped out of her memory when a huge semi-truck drove past her, and pulled back out onto the road. A few minutes later, she pulled into the parking lot of Albright’s Art Shop, the art store she and her mom had always shopped. It was still in business. Coastal Maine had always been a draw for artists. Streets were dotted with signs hanging out front that said Gallery or Art Studio. The northern light, the rocky coast, the drama of the seasons mixed with the power of the ocean, all made for constant inspiration. Add to that the charm of New England – lobster boats and tidy colonial homes with flower boxes and bakeries and restaurants with inviting facades. Plus, Mainers valued hard work, and they valued making things with their hands. Anywhere she went in Maine she found many hard-working crafters – in some parts they made bread or beer, in other parts they farmed. Here on the coast, they fished and painted. And kept Albright’s Art Shop in business.

  She looked up at the familiar shop, and took a deep breath. It was the strangest experience, being home. Everything was stored somewhere in a memory that hadn’t been used in so long, like she had lived another life in another dimension.

  She heard a bell chime when she opened the door. The inside smelled faintly of turpentine and freshly cut wood. She saw an older woman with a thick middle, a colorful wool sweater, and a large white bun on top of her head. Though her hair was much grayer, Anna immediately recognized her. She had come into this shop almost every week during high school, especially in the summer. And every trip home during college required a stockpile shopping trip. Her school had supplies, of course, but she preferred her favorite brushes and colors from Albright’s, plus they always sold their canvases unwrapped so they were used to the air. Anna loved being able to use them right away.

  The woman was Frances Albright, and she had known her mother well. Anna suddenly remembered how she always had a poster of her mother’s gallery behind the counter, with the name McAllister Gallery in large letters at the top. She had used her maiden name in the art world. Anna could still see the photo of her mother, smiling, head crooked, next to one of her paintings, with the text Therese McAllister, Artist, underneath. The space where it used to be was empty now, but she reme
mbered how proud it used to make her feel.

  The woman greeted her politely and then studied a pad of paper on the back counter. Anna hesitated to break her concentration. “Hi, Frances,” she finally said. The woman looked at her for a long time. “Anna Goodrich?” She put her hand to her heart. “My word, Anna, it’s so good to see you!” She dropped the glasses she had been holding up to her eyes, and they swayed gently on their chain. Her eyes lit up and crinkled, and she reached out to grab Anna’s hand.

  “Thanks, Frances, it’s good to see you too,” Anna said warmly. “Just here for some paints. I need burnt sienna, burnt umber, titanium white, indigo, cadmium red, cadmium yellow, and . . . mars black. Here’s the list. Oh, and I need an angled and flared brush, and a few canvases as well.”

  Frances stared at her wall of paints and pulled out tubes efficiently as Anna spoke. Her arthritic fingers touched each tube tenderly. She looked at her nervously after she had found them all. “You remember that your mother loved Payne’s gray, for doing the sky over the ocean, don’t you? She used to always mix it with some blues and greens to get the ocean just right on a stormy day.”

  Anna smiled. Her heart ached so much at the memory, she had to remind herself to breathe. “That’s right. I’m so glad you remembered that. I’ll take Payne’s gray as well.”

  “Have you been painting a lot yourself these days?” Frances asked while she handed her a receipt.

  “A bit,” Anna nodded. “I live in New York, so most of my paintings are scenes of the city now, but Maine comes out in them every now and then.”

  “Of course it does, dear,” said Frances. “Maine will always be in you.” She winked at Anna.

  “Thanks for the supplies, Frances. It was so good to see you.” Anna smiled.

  “You too dear. Come back and see us anytime.”

  She walked out of the store with a large bag of canvases and a smaller bag of paints and brushes that made her enormously happy, and headed to St. Patrick’s. As she drove down familiar roads, past their old high school, Lincoln Academy, and the parking lot where she had that October snowball fight with Stephen and Andrew, long forgotten memories started to crowd her head as she turned into the empty parking lot at St. Pat’s. She set up a portable easel at the edge of the yard around the church. Her view was of the old nave and stained-glass window of St. Patrick, along with an old tree and garden that made the church look like it was from England. She sat with the church to her right, the late afternoon light streaming through the trees over the cemetery. She glanced at the far corner.