No one should live with someone who scares her.
My heart began to pound, but I sat up as straight as I could. “Could you hold my hand again, just for a minute, before I go?”
“Courage, dear heart,” said Edith, and she held.
I deserved to remember his face until the day I died. I don’t mean his face after, but the way it looked before, when I knocked on his hotel room door, and he said, “Come in,” and I did. His face in the tiny, shiny, hope-lit spot of time before I started talking: the trust, the instant openness, like something blooming, and the joy.
I shut the door and leaned against it.
“Hey,” he said, grinning, turning off the TV, and standing up. He still wore his golf clothes, a pink-and-white-striped polo shirt and frog-green shorts. “You’re totally breaking the rules, you know.”
I held up my hand to stop him from walking toward me and forced myself to keep looking at him.
“Zach, I need to say something.”
“Anything.”
“I am sorrier than I have ever been in my life and than I ever expect to be again, even if I live to be a hundred, but I can’t marry you.”
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Like I’d thrown something heavy at him, he rocked back on his heels and fell into his chair.
“Give me a sec.”
He placed his hands on top of his head, fingers drumming, and shut his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “I get it.”
“You do?” Heaven help me, I felt relief at the possibility that I’d be let off the hook so easily, even though no one had ever deserved it less.
“You need more time. And, come on, of course you can have it.”
The relief flipped over and died.
“Honestly, I’ve been worried that I rushed you. I almost said something the other day, but I chickened out, which was wrong of me,” said Zach. “And screw all this, the big wedding, our families. Bad idea. My family alone is too much. What was I thinking?”
“Don’t,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. “Don’t take the blame.”
“We should’ve run away. But now here’s the thing: to hell with them all. We’ll wait and do it alone, just the two of us, whenever you’re ready. On a moment’s notice even.” He ran a hand through his hair, excitedly. “How could I not have seen that just the two of us would’ve been so much better? The whole point of getting married is to be just the two of us, making a new family on our own terms. Forget the rest of them.”
“No, it’s not them. It’s us. It’s me. I love so many things about you.”
“Well, I like the sound of that,” he said, with a shaky smile.
I shook my head. “But I can’t spend my life with you. I can’t envision it all, and I promise you I’ve tried.”
“But I can fix that! I can change, and you’ll change, too. That’s what happens in a marriage, you adapt to each other!”
“Zach, please listen to me,” I said. “I never feel completely like myself when we’re together. I can never quite relax. I’ve always known this deep down, but I wouldn’t admit it. You’re a good guy, and I wanted to make you happy. But we aren’t home to each other.”
“I’m a good guy?” Zach winced and slapped a hand to his stomach, as if he’d been punched.
“That came out wrong. You’re decent and kind; you try so hard to always do the right thing. That’s what I meant.”
“You’re home to me. You are. I swear.”
“But,” I said, “you aren’t to me. You’re a lot of wonderful things, but you’re not home.”
He opened his hands and with a sweet, almost childlike certainty, said, “I can be.”
Very, very gently, I said, “No, you can’t.”
“What? You mean ever?”
“Ever. I’m sure of it. I’m so sorry.”
He seemed to consider this, then shook his head. “You don’t mean it. You’ll change your mind.”
“No.”
“It might take time, but once the dust has settled from all this big wedding bullshit, you’ll change your mind.”
“Please don’t—”
Zach cut me off. “Clare, just go now. No wedding right now. I get it. It’s fine. But we’ll talk soon. I’ll be patient; I’ll do anything to fix this, which is how I know it’s going to be okay. Plus, I love you.”
Without a word, feeling every inch a monster, I left.
Chapter Seven
Edith
June 1951
Joseph became a photographer for the local paper, one that served not only the string of beach towns, but the entire southern portion of the state. Before he offered him the job, the editor, Beau Fleeger (cigar chomping, fast talking, bighearted, all of five foot four), warned Joseph that it’d be pretty damned tame stuff after what he’d been doing in Europe, but Edith knew that her husband would delight in it. Holiday parades, high school football games, fireworks, society weddings (as much as there was a society), political rallies, ribbon cuttings, even the occasional funeral or petty crime (trespassing, break-ins, public drunkenness, a gas station attendant robbed at gunpoint): it was what Joseph had missed most during the war, all the small, scattered pieces of the precious and luminous ordinary, evidence that life insists on continuing.
Then, on a summer afternoon, one week shy of Edith and Joseph’s first anniversary, the Driver twins, Robbie and Susie, twelve years old, were out in their dinghy checking their crab pots when a storm hit. Except for its sudden and unexpected arrival—bruise-colored clouds materializing along the tree line to the east, then a rush of wind spilling them like ink across the sky—the storm was unremarkable, no hail, no flash floods, no miles of downed power lines. Wild, tree-snapping winds, some stomps of thunder, spatters of lightning. A typical summer squall, short-lived as a tantrum, certainly not the kind of weather event that kills people. Except that the Driver twins never came home, a fact their parents discovered only when they returned from work, hours after the storm had fled the scene, blowing out as spasmodically as it had blown in.
John Blanchard, the town’s chief of police, hastily put out a call for a search party, and half the town showed up, men, women, teenagers. Known for his cool head, blond hair, and perpetual air of calm, John was Joseph’s friend. The two men ran into each other at crime scenes and town events, and occasionally, John called when he needed photos for a police file. In the case of the search party, he left the role Joseph would play ambiguous, saying only, “Better bring your camera.”
“To photograph the happy Driver family reunion,” said Joseph.
“Hell, I hope so,” replied John.
Because she couldn’t bear to be home by the phone, at loose ends, swinging between hope and dread, Edith tugged on a pair of blue jeans and the knee-high rubber boots Joseph had given her for Christmas and went along.
Some of the searchers set out in boats, others combed the woods edging the salt marshes, hoping the kids had put ashore and taken shelter amid the trees. Just before dark, the Drivers’ neighbor, eighty-year-old Roger Payne, found the boat, overturned, empty as a husk, and floating farther out in the deep waters of the bay than anyone had dared imagine. Most people went home after that, disheartened, promising to come back at daybreak, hungry less for their dinners than for the lamp-lit rooms and solid floors of their houses, the living faces of their own children. They wanted to watch fireflies hover and flicker above the cut grass of their lawns, to pull tricycles into the safety of backyard sheds.
A few kept searching, including Edith, Joseph, and John in John’s skiff. They navigated the maze of channels and inlets and ponds, kept close to the water’s edge, raking flashlight beams through the marsh grass and brush, disturbing sleepy birds: black ducks, clapper rails, and willets, and once a blue heron, breath-stoppingly huge, that broke from a clutch of shrubs and, after one prehistoric cackle, winged silken and liquid-necked, noiseless as a paper airplane, low across the water and into the night.
They found them just as the
sun slipped above the horizon to simmer in the tall grass and beam pink against the white sides of the houses far to the west. Robbie at the mouth of an inlet, snagged in the talon-like roots of the pine trees that gripped the shore’s edge and hung out raggedly over the water. And Susie, not twenty-five yards away, lying facedown in a plot of thickset, feathery plumed phragmite weeds. They were both fully dressed, except for their shoes. Even Susie’s hair had stayed braided.
Once the three of them were ashore, John Blanchard took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “We’ll need to photograph them, Joseph. Just for our records, not the newspaper. God knows, no one wants or needs to see this.”
Joseph just nodded, but in the morning light, he looked not merely sad but haunted, his eyes hollow, his mouth trembling. When he raised the camera, his hands were shaking, so without a word, Edith took the camera from him, wiped the tears from her face, and stepped into the tea-colored water, stirring up tempests of silt with her boots. As she photographed first Robbie, then Susie, she tried to put her emotions away, to focus only on the act of taking accurate pictures, but in the end, whatever it took to turn a dead child into any other two-dimensional scrap of light and shadow, she didn’t have it. The details pierced her: the exposed strip of pale skin on Robbie’s leg where his shorts rode up, the straight line of Susie’s carefully parted hair. Edith moved around the children, catching them from a variety of angles. By the end, she heaved with dry-eyed, audible, chest-burning sobs that didn’t stop, not when John and Joseph lifted the twins into the boat, not when she covered each with the blankets they’d brought to warm them, if only they had found them alive.
But later, at home, she did stop, and it was Joseph who cracked, shivering and weeping and saying, “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.” Edith understood that it wasn’t just the deaths of these children that were shaking him to the core, but also all the deaths from before, during the war. She built a fire, even though it was summer, wrapped her husband in quilts, rocked him in her arms, and wove a cocoon of words, descriptions of every loveliness that crossed her mind, birds and mosses and flowering plants, the sound of a creek rattling through woods, a cluster of cabbage butterflies fluttering, dance-like, on a patch of ground. She gave him morning coming through their bedroom windows and the shapes of leaves. She gave him the names of things.
Because the pain of losing the children hung on hard, Edith would do it for weeks, this whispered comforting, and each time she would lie awake long after he’d fallen asleep, enfolded in two sorrows, Joseph’s and her own, but also in a radiant, awestruck gratitude at what she understood was the great honor of her life, not being loved but loving, soothing this good man, making him feel safe.
Chapter Eight
Clare
Even though I didn’t have much time to develop expectations in the numb three hours between those two conversations, the first with Edith and the subsequent one with Zach, I had expected relief. Maybe not over and above other emotions, but I had expected to walk out of Zach’s room and be aware of it, running silvery through my psyche beneath the guilt like an artesian spring. Honestly, I’d expected to have to hide it, to keep every trace of it off my face for Zach’s and decorum’s sake. And I’d expected hiding it to be hard.
But the relief didn’t come. Not as I was walking away from Zach’s room. Not when I walked into my own to find my wedding dress, camellia cool and eyeing me from its padded satin hanger. Not when I went into the bathroom and splashed my hot cheeks and then downed the complimentary bottle of fancy water—culled straight from an actual artesian spring in actual Fiji—gulping frantically and loudly, like a person who’d been lost in the desert for a week.
Not even when I witnessed the same sort of relief I’d expected for myself illuminate—sunburst style—the faces of my mother and Cornelia.
Instead, I felt purely horrible, and I don’t mean I felt miserable, although I did. I mean I felt that I was horrible: transfigured into something heavy and misshapen, mean and core-rotten and cruel, coated so thickly in horribleness it was like I’d been rolling in it. I had been mad at myself before. I had been disappointed in myself. But I had never, until the moment I called off my wedding to Zach, been repulsed by myself. In one ten-minute conversation, I had wiped my name off the list of kind and decent people. By the time I got to the door of Cornelia’s room, I had begun to believe—to know—that I’d never been on that list in the first place. All those years I’d spent thinking I was a good person—once, a long time ago, Teo had told me I was a good person, made of good materials; “Just being you is being good,” he’d said, and I’d believed him—when I had really been hopelessly bad all along.
If I had expected to fling open the door and announce my news—and I think I had expected that, the flinging part definitely—by the time I actually stood outside it, I could barely bring myself to knock. I listened to my mom’s and Cornelia’s voices, and I knew that they were getting the kids ready for the wedding. I knew that my mother said, “Just a few more, Rose. Gosh, you’re being so patient and staying so still!” because she was curling Rose’s hair. I knew from Cornelia’s singing “High Hopes”—cheerfully but with a note of exasperation and interspersed with commentary like, “Would you look at that perfect loop? I’ve never seen a more perfect loop in all my life”—that she was trying to inspire Simon to tie his own shoes, a task he loathed. Typical, goofy family stuff, but as I stood outside that door, steeped in my own horribleness, it all struck me as astoundingly beautiful.
You don’t even deserve to overhear this, I told myself, much less to go in and be part of it. But I had to go in. There was music to be faced, a wedding to be dismantled (oh, God, the wasted money alone made me feel like a criminal), and anyway, deserving or not, even in the smack-dab, ugly middle of my self-loathing, I wanted them, my mother and almost-mother. I wanted just to be near them. No flinging open the door for me, though, just barely more than a brush of knuckles against the frame.
Cornelia called out, “Dev, if that’s you, get in here and take this shoeless wolf-boy of a child off my hands!”
I opened the door. “It’s not Dev.”
Everyone, even Simon the wolf-boy, went still, staring at me.
“I’m not marrying Zach,” I said, bleakly. “It’s over.”
That’s when the relief broke like morning across their faces. After one quick glance at each other, they shook it off, composed their features into looks of concern, but I’d seen it. And still I felt only wretched.
“Oh, honey,” said my mother. “What happened? Can you tell us?”
“It’s just that no one should live with someone who scares her.” I blurted it out, but as soon as I had, I hated myself. If I’d sat for hours calculating what explanation would garner me the most sympathy and support from these two particular women, I would have made a beeline for that one. The words sounded overblown, underhanded, manipulative, painting me as the victim when I was the monster; the fact that the words were also true just didn’t matter.
“Oh, God,” said Cornelia, standing up from her chair.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t like that. He never hurt me. I just mean—”
I tipped sideways and leaned against the wall.
“Kids!” said Cornelia, clapping her hands. “Run down to your brother’s room. Tell him to take you out on the lawn for—oh, anything. What’s your favorite game?”
“Croquet,” said Rose. “But in my dress?”
She fanned open her rose-sprigged skirt with her two hands, and love for her squeezed my heart like rubber bands. I would’ve given anything to go with her, to be a nine-year-old girl in a dress, heading out into the sunshine to play croquet.
“No worries, darling,” said Cornelia, smiling. “Tell Dev I said you need to play outside. No shoes necessary.”
And in a rush of pastels, clean hair, and gorgeousness, they were gone. My mother and Cornelia turned to me, waiting.
“Okay,” I said, holding up my hand like a traffic co
p, “but you are not allowed to comfort me. I am a terrible, careless, destructive person for letting things get this far.”
“But—” said my mother.
“Promise. No reassuring words. Not even a hug.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” said Cornelia, narrowing her eyes.
“Promise.”
They sighed and nodded.
With as little editorializing and emotional display as possible, I recounted my conversation with Edith.
“She helped you. Maybe she saved you,” said my mother, quietly. “A total stranger.”
“Don’t,” I snapped. “I see where you’re going, and no one, no one is allowed to feel guilty or take responsibility for my mistakes. They’re horrendous and all mine.”
“We had misgivings,” said Cornelia, sadly. “All along.”
“But you trusted me,” I said. “Because I’ve always been pretty trustworthy. Just not this time.”
“You know,” said Cornelia, pointing Simon’s shoe at me. “And I’m really not comforting you here or letting you off the hook or whatever it is you don’t want me to do, but you know that however terrible you think what you did was, doing the thing you didn’t do would have been much, much worse. Unforgivably worse.”
“Yes,” I said, grimly. “I do know that.”
“Go home, sweetheart,” said my mother. “Leave everything to us.”
I shook my head. “‘I won’t be gotten out of anything anymore, thanks.’”
It was a quote from Cornelia’s favorite movie. She smiled but shook her head.
“The power of The Philadelphia Story is nearly limitless, but nope, not this time,” she said. “You must let us do this. We command you. You’re not the only one who feels guilty here.”
I started to protest, but she cut me off with a hand slash to her throat.
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