by Condition
It is Gwen who mans the storefront, a trim stucco building on the Quai des Marins, Gwen in her Steelers T-shirts, her reassuring Americanness. She does not often, these days, pilot the boat. The new one is large and cumbersome, difficult to maneuver. The boys, Alistair and Gabriel, handle it expertly; so she is content to stay landlocked, to hand out tanks and equipment and take calls from the cruise lines.
The cruisers keep the dive shop in business. They show up without so much as a snorkel, and Gwen outfits them from top to bottom. Masks and fins; a hundred brand-new regulators; BCs hanging on wheeled racks, in bright shades of yellow and green. The equipment had cost a small fortune. Rico had been reluctant to make the investment, to take on any more debt.
We have to, Gwen told him. The cruise lines would deal only with full-service shops, able to equip boatloads of divers. And the cruise lines were their ticket to freedom, independence from the greedy resorts, which made huge profits on dive excursions and paid the outfitters a slim 20 percent.
At first Rico had balked. Gear for a hundred would cost more than the 2STE. But Gwen persisted, and finally he listened. Two years later, the loan was nearly paid.
In large matters she is adamant. In small ones—the daily schedule, the hirings and firings—she lets him have his way. The boy Gabriel is a friend of Alistair's, another delinquent Rico is determined to save. Gabriel is prompt and responsible, a better sailor than Alistair.
Gwen thinks of them sometimes, the three boys on the boat. Her husband, despite his posturing, is less man than boy. Gwen still notices the comely tourists, the flirty divers in their bikinis. Undoubtedly Rico notices them too. But there are no more dive excursions at night.
She has been married three years, and she chooses to trust him. The other road is her mother's, ending in heartbreak. A road she chooses not to travel.
Rico is her family now, Rico and Alistair and Gabriel. The two boys are her children, the only ones she will ever have, or need. Her other family she thinks of rarely. They have receded for her, like buildings on a distant shore. She phones Billy once a month, sends occasional e-mails to her father. In this way, she learns that Penny has decamped for Idaho, leaving the kids with Scott. That—is it possible?—Frank has sold his house in Cambridge and moved back to Concord.
The earth has tipped on its axis.
To these revelations Gwen does not respond. At first she pretended her silence was unintentional. The move to St. Raphael, the buying of the dive shop: she was preoccupied with other things. Then her life settled, and still she remained silent. It was better that way.
She could not forget what her family had done. The truth had come clear to her in a single moment, at the Mexican restaurant with Heidi Kozak. Scott had given the money to Rico. The money and the plan—the cruel, insulting, breathtakingly devious idea—had come from her mother.
That night she'd dialed Rico's number. My brother gave you the money. He paid you to leave me. Why didn't you tell me?
If my brother had done such a thing, he said, I wouldn't want to know.
Were you? She stopped, started again, knowing that the rest of her life hung on his answer. Were you going to leave me?
Never, he swore. You left me. I would never leave you.
But you took the money.
You don't know what it is to be poor, he said. How could you possibly know?
It was astounding what a person could forgive, if she wanted to.
This: Rico had taken money from her family.
And this: Scott had engineered this betrayal.
And this: Gwen herself had allowed it all to happen. She had run away in silence, ready to believe the worst.
She forgave Rico. There was no other choice. She refused to surrender the life that was possible. Anger and shame were no match for love.
Forgiving herself was more difficult. Compassion did not come easily to her. Kindness toward her former self, the Gwen who'd flown to St. Raphael, innocent as a sparrow. She had been ill equipped for love. Nothing in her life had prepared her for it. It pained her, now, to recall those first months on the 2STE: the frantic way she'd adored Rico, her creeping doubt and fear. She was a grown woman, yet she'd loved him desperately, as a young girl would. Her first love: two bodies conjoined, sharing a heart. Now Rico is her husband, and she loves him differently. She maintains a heart of her own.
She's so little. She needs time to catch up.
Finally, finally, Gwen had caught up.
Forgiving Scott took longer. Pride wouldn't let her hear his apologies. His letters she sent back unopened. She refused to answer the phone when he called. Finally, in desperation, he had sent a telegram:
I SUCK. I HOPE YOU FORGIVE ME.
I LOVE YOU. SCOTTY.
P.S. DON'T BLAME MOM.
In the end his Scottness had melted her. You do suck, she wrote in an e-mail. You also bite. I love you too.
She ignored the telegram's last line.
Gwen had learned that forgiveness was elastic. Forgiving Rico, and later Scott, had been a stretch. But never in this life could she forgive Paulette. The very thought of her mother nearly snapped the band.
For months, a year, she was sick with rage. Mysteriously, it was marriage that cured her: saying the vows had unblocked a drain, and in that moment her anger seeped away. Now her mother is with her always, a curious development. Years ago, after Mamie died, Gwen had thought of her grandmother constantly, as she hadn't when Mamie was alive. And now that Paulette is lost to her, Gwen remembers her mother with great tenderness. It is perhaps a feature of Gwen's condition, or perhaps her own personal strangeness, that she finds it much, much easier to love a person who is dead.
She no longer wonders what is normal, whether she feels correctly. It is impossible to say. Her whole life she's known that her condition is untreatable. Now she understands that it requires no treatment.
The difference is vast; you could fit a whole life in the gulf between.
And so she has.
For a long time, then, her life seemed finished—not ended but polished and sealed, like a piece of furniture, as though it had achieved its final form. The hot summer, slow and quiet. In September, on Gwen's birthday, she and Rico celebrated their second wedding anniversary.
That night Hurricane Cleo swept across the Caribbean, battering St.
Lucia. Gwen and Rico boarded the shop windows. This time at least, St. Raphael was spared.
A week later she was sitting behind the counter, poring over Smithsonian magazine, when Gabriel rushed into the shop.
"Turn on the radio!" he cried. "Some crazy shit happening in New York."
The radio was tuned to a local reggae station. Stir it up. Little darling, stir it up. Gwen turned the dial. Static. More reggae. More static.
"This fucking island, man," Gabriel fumed."It's like we living on the moon."
"What happened?" said Gwen.
"A plane flew into a building."
"That's all?" New York seemed as distant as China, or Pluto, or heaven. Still she locked the store and followed Gabriel across town. At the Ambrosia Café a crowd had gathered around the television. Gwen stared. The gaping hole in the tower, the rising cloud of smoke.
Billy, she thought.
The last time she'd visited, she took a cab directly to his office.
Together they'd strolled across the Brooklyn Bridge and back. A chilly spring evening, the sun setting early. In the towers every window was lit, a thousand panes of fluorescent light.
All day long she tried to phone him, cursing the recorded voice— All circuits are busy. Please try again later—that foiled her attempts. And that night, gripped with panic, she did what she'd sworn not to. She dialed her mother's house in Concord. The number floated like a buoy to the surface of her memory, the first telephone number she had ever learned.
A deep voice answered the phone.
Daddy?
A tide of feeling hit her, a tropical storm.
Billy's here, he sai
d. They got out of the city. It took them all day, but they got out.
And she was passed from brother to brother; to Ian and Sabrina and Srikanth; then to a refugee she didn't know, Scott's girlfriend Jane.
Was passed, finally, to her mother. And here Gwen lay flat on the deck, her home rocking beneath her, and stared up at the glittering sky.
They talked a long while. Gwen thought about the signal that made this possible, that bounced her voice into space and down to the house in Concord, mighty and infinitely small.
author 's note
For various kinds of help and support, I am grateful to: The MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Eastern Frontier Society, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers Dr. Elizabeth McCauley and Dr. John Brauman Karen Reed Dan Pope and Thomas O'Malley Claire Wachtel, Dorian Karchmar, Jonathan Burnham, and Michael Morrison Dr. Michael Cardone
About the Author
JENNIFER HAIGH is the author of the New York Times bestseller Baker Towers, winner of the 2006 PEN/L. L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author, and Mrs. Kimble, which won the PEN/
Hemingway Award for debut fiction and was a finalist for the Book Sense Book of the Year. Both novels were number one Book Sense picks. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere. She lives in the Boston area.
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