Which she did, quite suddenly, ten days later, when she was hanging sheets on the line to dry. The bright, salt-tinged early autumn wind tugged at the sheets, surrounding Edith in the scent of lemon detergent and sending her back to her first time in their house, her bridal afternoon, the smell of lemon oil and Joseph waiting for her in the doorway, and she dropped to her knees, felled by loss, clutching the bundle of damp bed linens to her chest like a baby.
So Anne stayed for two weeks more, until Edith could function again, her brain sorting out the world hour to hour: wake, talk, shower, dress, shop for food, prepare food, eat food, sleep. Anne invited her to come live with her in Ohio, saying they could both use the company.
“Also, life isn’t easy for women on their own, and I can tell you from experience—long-ago experience but I don’t think times have changed much—that small communities like this one can be, well, a little uneasy with beautiful widows.”
Edith understood. She’d already felt the wariness and suspicion behind some of her visitors’ pointed questions about what her “next step” would be. But even so and as grateful as she was for Anne’s offer, she would not leave the house that Joseph had given her, every room of which was a part of him.
“I hate to say this,” said Anne, gently, just before she left, “but you will have to make money. I’ve checked, and you have enough for a few months, but no more. Can you go back to nursing?”
“No,” said Edith, pressing her lips together and shaking her head. “Not after my father and Joseph. I can’t.”
“I understand. So not right away, but soon, sooner than you’ll want to, you’ll have to find something to do.”
Edith put her arms around Anne and pressed her close. “I will,” she said. “I promise.”
Nearly a month later, at the market, a tourist from Pittsburgh visiting with her family in the off-season, a young mother buying milk for her baby, struck up a conversation with Edith.
“It’s only now that we can afford to come, the hotels have gotten so expensive,” said the woman, sighing. “And they aren’t homey, either, all those long hallways, and the lobby where I have to keep the kids in check. One day, we’d love to come in summer, for a whole week even, and stay in a real house, but I don’t suppose we ever will be able to.”
Edith took in the woman’s tired eyes, the resigned set of her shoulders inside her sweater, and an idea struck her with all the force of a revelation. She set down the apple she’d been examining and smiled at the woman.
“Why, I have a guesthouse,” she said. “Short-term boarders only, vacationers. I’m sure we could work out a rate for the summer. May I give you my address and phone number?”
The woman’s wan face lit up. “Well, of all the luck! My goodness. I’ll take all your information down right now!” she exclaimed, opening her handbag to rummage for paper, which she found, and something to write with, which she did not. “Does your establishment have a name?”
Edith imagined her precious house overrun by strangers and found it didn’t hurt. It seemed somehow right. Give yourself to something, Joseph had told her. Maybe this wasn’t it, not quite, but it would do for the moment. She reached into her own handbag, pulled out a pen, and handed it to the woman.
“It does,” she said. “I call it Blue Sky House.”
Chapter Twelve
Clare
“Ave Maria” was pouring out of the open front door of Edith’s house, lightening the heavy summer air and tingeing it silver, so I stopped in my tracks on the front walk, shut my eyes, and listened. Near the end of the song, as the voice began to trace an ascending arc so exultant and starlit that it made me want to cry, it cut off and said, “Damn it, Riley, I’m working here! You’ve called four times in forty minutes. If you miss me so much, why don’t you get off your scrawny butt and come see me?”
I laughed. Through the open door, I could see a long, jaunty silhouette, one hand on a cocked hip, the other pressing a cell phone to an ear. As I stood there, the silhouette moved toward me through the house, coming into focus. By the time it got to the door, I saw that it was a girl, probably younger than I was by a few years and worlds sassier, with cherry-red lips, platinum hair twisted into a bun on the very top of her head, and a bright blue bikini top.
“And, hey, if you bring me a pack of Butterscotch Krimpets, I’ll be your BFF. And not just for a day but forever and ever.” She paused, listening, then rolled her big Betty Boop eyes. “Yes, I know BFF forever is redundant? That’s why it’s funny? Just get up and get—”
Spotting me, she broke off.
“Gotta go,” she said.
She shoved the cell phone into her pocket and grinned.
“Hi, there. You must be the new owner,” she said, walking toward me with her hand out. “My mom said you’d be coming, got word from a lawyer about it, but I thought it was tomorrow. She’ll be upset that the house wasn’t quite ready for you.”
“No, no, I’m early. I guess I got a little impatient,” I said. I shook her ring-bedecked hand. “Hi, I’m Clare Hobbes.”
“I’m Joliet,” she said. “Not like the Shakespeare character, like the town in Illinois where my grandma’s from.”
“I like it,” I said.
“Thanks.” She gestured toward the door of the house. “I just changed the sheets. Wasn’t sure what bed you’d be sleeping in, so I took them all home yesterday and washed them. Even though no one ever sleeps here, we do that from time to time, because my mom is super-anal about Edith’s house.”
“You and your mom own the cleaning service I guess? The one that gets paid out of the trust?”
“Ha! Own! Baby, we are the cleaning service. My grandma started it up when she moved here from Joliet. Granny started cleaning this house in the 1960s, before my mom was born. When her arthritis got bad, my mom took over. Her boyfriend, Axel, does all the handyman stuff, repairs, yard work. He even takes care of the canoes; honestly, I think he’s obsessed with the canoes. Anyway, I started college last fall. Pre-vet. But I’m helping out this summer.”
“Well, thank you for changing the sheets.”
Joliet shooed away my thanks with her hand. “I love being here. When I was a baby, Mom would plop me down in whatever room she was cleaning. I guess I kind of grew up in this house.”
“That’s nice. It’s a nice house.”
It was. White clapboards, tall windows, a porch that looked like it was once screened in but was now screenless and doorless, a garden lavish with flowers.
Joliet nodded, thoughtfully. “Yeah. I suppose I grew up in a lot of houses because of the cleaning service and all, but this one’s special.”
“How so?”
She smiled with her whole face. “Because it’s Edith’s.”
Joliet said this as if no further explanation were necessary, and as a person who had spent all of an hour and a half in Edith’s company, I understood completely. “Was she a friend of your grandmother’s?”
“No, another company cleaned this house for ten years before my grandmother took over, and of course, by then Edith was long gone. None of us ever met her. In fact, we didn’t even know she was alive until we found out that, um, she wasn’t anymore, which made us all sad. No, it’s just the house itself. You feel Edith all over it. You feel both of them.”
“Both?”
Joliet looked surprised at my question. “Well, Edith and Joseph, of course.” She said it the way people say Romeo and Juliet or Bogie and Bacall. “How do you not know about Joseph?”
“A few weeks ago,” I said, “I had three conversations with Edith, two short, one longer, all during what was supposed to be my wedding weekend.”
Joliet narrowed her eyes. “Supposed to be?”
“That’s right. I broke it off because marrying the man I was supposed to have married would’ve been a colossal mistake. It was Edith who helped me see that.”
It was easy enough for me to say this with assurance today, since that morning, I’d woken up to a v
oice mail from Zach. He was obviously drunk, but even with the slurring, I had no trouble making out his words: “You bitch. You goddamned, heartless bitch. Who the hell do you think you are to play me this way? Someone must’ve done something seriously shitty to you for you to end up like you are. What do you think of that? Maybe your perfect little childhood wasn’t so perfect after all? Hey, you know what? Go to hell.” It was the verbal equivalent of being punched in the stomach, and for at least fifteen minutes, I lay balled up on the bed of the hotel room, my eyes squeezed shut, fighting off nausea and fear. It was as if Zach kept taking the five stages of grief and shuffling them, and somehow he kept coming back to anger.
Joliet nodded and scratched her chin, thoughtfully. “That makes sense. You can tell from her house that Edith knew true love, so I guess it would stand to reason that she’d also know untrue love. Or true unlove. Or whatever.”
“I loved him. I might still, in a way. But he wasn’t the one. He wasn’t home to me. Edith could tell.”
“So what was she like? Beautiful? Wise? Funny?”
“Yes, yes, and yes,” I said. “And calm. I was coming apart at the seams, but she acted like it was all perfectly normal and understandable. ‘Understanding’ is actually a good adjective for her. And I don’t just mean nice. She understood things, saw right to the bottom of them without even seeming to try.”
Joliet nodded.
“Strange as it sounds, I think she might have understood everything in the world.” I smiled. “Well, that was a weird thing to say.”
“Makes sense to me,” said Joliet.
“She was frail. She walked with a cane. I didn’t know she was sick when we met; I just thought she was old. Only her body was frail, though. Her mind moved fast as anyone’s, faster, and her voice sounded like a girl’s.”
“Go on,” said Joliet, then she jumped. Both feet actually came off the ground. “No! Wait! Why don’t I show you around the house? You’ll see what I mean about Edith; it’s like the whole place is a little monument to true love.”
“It sounds like a good place,” I said.
Joliet smiled. “It is.”
It was there, unmistakable. Two chairs in front of the fireplace, tilted toward each other like friends; the matching vintage canoes; the entire third-floor bedroom with its matching bedside flower vases—newly filled, by Joliet, with pink coneflowers—its bed situated so as to offer those sitting up in it curtain-framed views of the back garden and shimmering canal; and oh, that blue sky ceiling, still radiant despite the years. When I told Joliet what Edith had said—You’re his blue sky. When everything else is darkness—she sat down on the bed and looked up at me as if I’d solved the riddle of the universe.
“I just thought it was to remind them that summer would come. Believe me, it gets pretty gray and drab here in the winter. But this, this is even better. They were each other’s blue sky. Oh, be still my heart.”
And above all else, there were the photographs, magnificent black-and-whites framed on every wall of the house. All of them were of Edith. Downstairs were seascapes and waterscapes and landscapes, with Edith so organically a part of them you almost didn’t register her presence. She might have been a gull, a dune, a pine tree. Upstairs, in the third-floor bedroom, close-ups of her face, high-cheekboned, tan, her dark eyes alive beneath peaked brows, her expression ranging from tender to amused to starkly adoring; in one photo, she had the exact look of someone reading a book she loves. Joseph, I thought. Joseph was the book.
“You see what I mean?” said Joliet. “Edith and Joseph, Joseph and Edith. Him loving her through the lens, her loving him right back. This house is a frigging love museum.”
“It is,” I said. “It really, truly is.”
“How long are you staying?”
“I don’t know. I’m really just here to check the place out. Maybe a few days, maybe a week.”
Joliet gave me a skeptical look. “I saw your car. It was packed to the gills, as my mom would say. I bet you’ll stay longer than a week.”
I felt my phone vibrate and got it out of my pocket. A text from Zach: I’m so sorry about that call last night. Forgive me, Clare. Forgive me forgive me forgive me.
I looked around at the walls of Edith’s house and said, “Who knows? You just might be right.”
That night, feeling a lot like a girl in a fairy tale, I opened the first locked box I came across—a kind of wooden, oversized jewelry box—trying each key until one fit, and found Joseph Herron’s obituary, which I read with sorrow. War photographer . . . worked with Society of Friends to rebuild Europe . . . photographer for the Lower Delaware Daily Bee . . . beloved friend . . . beloved son . . . cared for through his illness and survived by his beloved wife, former nurse Edith Herron.
Beneath the obituary was a stack of photographs, each a piece of Joseph—a hand, a temple, a hillock of shoulder, the curled corner of his mouth—never a full shot of him, but somehow each photo felt complete and so reverent, as if someone believed that the tiniest part of the man was worthy of the most exquisite attention. Not someone. Edith. On the back of each, just “My J” in small precise lettering and a date.
Beneath the photographs was their marriage certificate, faded and so old the paper was soft as suede. They’d been married here in Antioch Beach. I held the certificate under the lamplight to make out the date, then quickly double-checked Joseph’s death certificate, hoping I’d gotten something wrong. I hadn’t.
“Oh, no. Let it not be true,” I pleaded to the empty room.
Distilled and rare and rampant love everywhere, in every corner of this house and spilling over into the front garden, the backyard, eddying into the canal that led to the bay, all that, and Edith and Joseph had had just two years together.
With tears in my eyes, I picked up a photograph Edith had taken of her husband: his inner wrist, twin tendons running down its center, the narrow valley between them as private, as holy a place as any I’d ever seen.
“This,” I said, cradling the photo in my palms. “This is it. The thing you hold out for. You wait a lifetime if you have to.”
It felt like a vow, and, for a second, I wished I had a witness, but then I realized that I did. The house was my witness.
Chapter Thirteen
Edith
September 1953
Later, once she had dragged herself far enough out of her swamp of grief to look back, Edith understood that it was the guests who had kept her going. This despite the fact that she resented them, sometimes fiercely, on and off, for at least the first year, resented their presence, outsiders tromping all over her and Joseph’s sanctuary, their voices crowding out the memory of Joseph’s voice, their carefree, cut-loose vacation happiness reminding her piercingly, hourly of every joy she had lost.
The guests forced her out of bed. They forced her to wash her face, brush her teeth, apply a touch of makeup, and get dressed, not in the blue jeans she’d favored when her house was empty, but in a neat dress or pair of pedal pushers. They forced her to pay attention, to button each button in the right order, to bathe regularly, to not lie facedown on Joseph’s side of the bed for hours or days wishing she were dead.
Each morning, she would tiptoe from her attic bedroom and down the stairs, avoiding the creaky spots as she passed the second-floor bedrooms where the guests stayed, and would start the percolator, set the table with her wedding plates and flatware and with little cut-glass bowls of jam and butter, slice peaches or melon or bananas, mix up a batch of drop biscuits, put them in the oven, and then would go out in the backyard with her coffee and sit in a chair, drinking and watching the sun toss coins across the canal and tiny jellyfish beat like gauze hearts just below the surface of the water. For those few stolen minutes, she found she could let go, second by second, of everything that haunted her until her mind was empty as a scoured bowl and all she knew was flavor on her tongue, air against her face, the small, dazzling details of her scrap of world. Then, she would go inside, ready to smi
le and chat, to fry and pour, to lean over the open oven to check for just the right amount of goldenness.
She was busy, busy, busy, but also—for the first time she could remember—bored. She learned what she would never have imagined: that heartbreak and boredom could be paired. Apart from the guests, most people stayed away. No more cocktail party or dinner invitations, no more of the interminable coffees that she, rocked with loneliness, might even at long last have welcomed.
Out of sheer desperation, despite her terror at how painful it might be, Edith began to venture out alone in her canoe. The first time was a horrible, racked, air-gulping, hair-tearing ordeal, and she swore she’d never go again. But one afternoon, when the guests were at the beach, she found that she missed, down to her bone marrow, the very specific sight of sun glazing the mussel-studded bank of the salt marsh at low tide, that lacquered, rainbow-suffused black. By the third time, she didn’t cry. By the fifth, the sensation that Joseph’s canoe was gliding along parallel to her own comforted her instead of torturing her. On the sixth trip, she took her camera, and—in narrowing the sprawling, intractable everything into one small, contained rectangle after the next—felt tiny stirrings of hope.
John Blanchard dropped by now and again to check on her with a genial, matter-of-fact concern for a woman living alone that never tipped over into condescension or judgment. In the months following Joseph’s death, Edith had a handful of male callers—Donald Smith dropping off a casserole his wife had made; Richie Fulton, barely out of his teens, who cut her grass and trimmed her bushes; old Len Pilgrim, an avid bird-watcher, who came around occasionally to brag about his sightings to the only other person he knew who cared; and a few bachelors and widowers, slick-haired and sheepish, who brought flowers and never got farther than the front lawn—all of whom were subjected to searing, raised-eyebrow scrutiny by Edith’s neighbors.