She could talk to the grocer about vegetables, to the butcher about meat. She had talked to her father about birds, fungi, tides, bees, ants, the phases of the moon, predator and prey, the cycle of life.
When she fell in love with Joseph, she discovered, for the first time, her gift for telling a story, for finagling beauty and humor and weirdness out of the everyday with the right detail, the proper metaphor.
But coffees, cocktail parties, neighborhood barbecues, all these seemed to her like games the rules of which she’d never learned. Conversations reminded her of the time when, as a little girl, she tried to catch tadpoles with her fingers, the subject matter darting and slippery, wriggling away at the last second. Her confusion turned her, not fluttery, but blunt, keeping quiet, then tossing a comment like a stone, sending the tadpoles skittering off. In the ungainly silence that followed, the other women would sip their drinks, bite into a canapé or deviled egg, telegraphing Poor Joseph, what an odd bird his wife is to each other with their eyes.
But for Joseph’s sake, she kept trying. In truth, Edith would’ve spent her days with only her husband. To her, his body alone was a world—rippling, bristling, full of weather, flavors, seasons, never the same two days in a row—and their private sphere of house, yard, marshes, bay, ocean, beach was an entire universe. Both were enough to command her rapt attention, to fire her imagination, to bring her joy for a thousand lifetimes. Honestly, the idea of wanting to spend time with people one did not love absolutely mystified her. But Joseph liked company, small talk, sharing food. Magnetic, gregarious, he drew people to him and was drawn in return. And he wanted her with him, so she went.
But she never fit. Even looking like everyone else eluded her. All her life, she had never managed polish or tidiness, never, even as a child, been perky or pretty or cute. She’d understood—because she had been told—that she was a certain kind of beautiful, with her long, angular face, her strong brows, curving mouth, dark, feathery lashed eyes, but, distracted by books and animal tracks, mud, water, insects, and bones, and half in love with loneliness, she had never cared. A gangly girl, now she stood tall, narrow hipped, broad shouldered, leggy as a heron. In an era of things staying in place, of starch and hairspray, she was loosely gathered, pieces of her forever apt to ravel, crease, fly away. In the salt air, her long bob uncurled, tangled in wind. Her lipstick smudged.
At home, she went without makeup, lived in blue jeans and Joseph’s shirts, her hair held off her face with a scarf. In the beginning, when they first fell in love, for the first month perhaps, her beauty mattered to her as it never had before. She loved her face because Joseph did, because it was something she could give him, but it was as if once she had handed it over to him, had given it into his keeping for good, she forgot about it. When he photographed her, he laughed because she never posed, never offered the planes of her cheeks to the light, never even remembered to look into the camera. Instead, she watched him, cherishing each piece of him with her attention, his hands holding the camera, his brown hair falling on his forehead, the shell-curve of his ear, the way the collar of his shirt opened to reveal, like a secret, the triangle of skin at the base of his throat.
Chapter Ten
Clare
The morning after Zach’s nighttime visit, he texted me a long, sad apology that made me ache for him and that ended: I messed up like I messed up at the lake house. It’s like I have this well of anger inside me and I don’t know how exactly it got there and I don’t know how to cap it so that nothing gets out. But I think I can learn, especially when it comes to getting angry at you. Because god Clare I know you deserve better and I understand why you’d run away from a person like me. But I still wished you’d stayed. I know you could fix me if you were here.
I texted back: I messed up, too, Zach, so badly. But I really believe you don’t need me to change the things you want to change about yourself. You’re smart and strong and good enough to do it on your own. I hope I am, too.
Even as I tapped out the message, I was dogged by the thought that it might not be true. What if Zach did need me? What if I were his only hope? I understood how arrogant that sounded, but the fact was people did need people. People saved each other all the time, every day. What if, in the grand scheme of things, I was supposed to stick around and save Zach?
It would have been so easy to text again, to tell him that he was right, that I would get on the first plane back to him. I could envision myself typing the words. It would make him so happy. Imagining his happiness was almost more than I could bear.
If you went back, you could never leave again, I told myself. It would be too cruel. If you went back, it would be for forever.
That forever is what sent me backward, reeling away from the edge I’d been standing on. I realized I would probably go back to that edge more than once, but on that day, I turned off my phone, set it down, and ran up the stairs the way I used to when I was a kid, taking them two at a time, clomping like an elephant. I remembered how back then, I hadn’t been running away from anything; I had run out of a pure, free-floating urgency, just because if you were going someplace, you might as well get there fast.
For the next week, I threw myself into business matters. Zach and I had been all set to move from his spiffy apartment to an even spiffier one, Zach having insisted that no marriage could thrive outside the presence of granite countertops and a very sparkly, nearly noiseless dishwasher, so my belongings were already boxed up and ready to go. The image of those stacked and neatly labeled boxes patiently waiting to be carried into a future that no longer existed was one of many that haunted me in the days following our breakup, but the boxes made Hildy’s shipping my stuff to my parents’ house easy enough (easier for me than for Hildy, obviously, who, in typical Hildy fashion, told me to shut the hell up every time I tried to thank her).
I borrowed money from my parents to cover the cost of my half of the apartment security deposit, the moving company’s security deposit, and all the other deposits toward a future that had turned out to be the opposite of secure. I wrote a half-charming, half-frantically-desperate letter to the graduate speech pathology program in Boston that I’d bailed out of when I’d agreed to marry Zach, asking them to please consider reinstating me, if not this year, then—pretty please with sugar on top—the next. I returned wedding gifts and penned endless notes of apology to the givers and to all our would-be-turned-would-not-be wedding guests, and if I say that I felt every word of those notes carve themselves into my skin like in that scary Dolores Umbridge detention scene in the fifth Harry Potter, I’m exaggerating, but only a little.
And, through it all, each night, I spent hours texting and talking with Zach, whose moods encompassed every permutation of heartbroken, from grieving to enraged, from bitter to sweet to bittersweet, from pleading to threatening, from repentant to accusatory, from hopeful to hopeless, sometimes all in a single conversation. It was brutal, and maybe the hardest part was realizing—like a plunge into ice water—that I loved him, a fact that had gotten lost in all the prewedding hubbub of his loving me and in the post-nonwedding hubbub of shattering his heart. True fact: Zach was lovable and I loved him. I could not marry him, but I loved the complicated, contradictory, sweet, knotty humanity of him, and it is one thing to crush the heart of a man who loves you unrequitedly and quite another to do it to a man you love back. I cried a lot. I scrolled through old photos on my phone late into the night. At least a dozen times, I came one breath away from asking him to take me back.
For three weeks, I regrouped, introspected, considered my options, although from the outside (and sometimes from the inside, too) this process looked a lot like taking long walks, staying up late watching old movies with my mom, and lying on various items of indoor and outdoor furniture binge-reading the books from my childhood.
And then, one day, Edith gave me a house.
It started with a letter from a Philadelphia law firm, and the letter led to a phone call, to a few more phone calls,
to a car trip, to a meeting at a glossy conference table with a robot-like, staccato-voiced, auburn-haired lawyer named Eloisa Dunne, who explained that Edith Herron had died of cancer just two weeks after I’d met her at the hotel in Virginia and had left me a house in a pretty—or so Eloisa Dunne had heard, not being a beach person herself (a fact that did not surprise me)—coastal town called Antioch Beach, Delaware. Eloisa Dunne was not authorized to give any other information regarding the deceased and in fact knew no other information but explained that the house had been uninhabited for nearly sixty years. However, it was in remarkably good shape, since a property maintenance company had cared for it since Edith Herron had moved away in the 1950s. The company was paid through an anonymous trust that had been put in place not long after her exiting the property, and as there was still at least five years’ worth of money left in the trust, I was obligated neither to live in the house nor to care for it. I need not even go there, although the house was mine to keep or to sell.
“I imagine it would be worth a very tidy sum these days,” said Eloisa Dunne. “Anyway, the residence seems to have been a boardinghouse for a few years, and consequently, it has a name: Blue Sky House.”
A light dawned.
“Say that again,” I said.
“Blue Sky House. Not your typical house name. But quaint, I suppose.”
You’re his blue sky. When everything else is darkness. But is he yours? Edith’s voice, bell-clear and ageless in the morning air.
“I won’t sell it,” I said, so quickly that my mother gave me a surprised glance, and even Eloisa Dunne’s eyes widened briefly and blinked once in her otherwise motionless cameo face.
“‘Sometimes, in order to hold your own, you need a place of your own,’” I said. “Oh, Edith.”
“Clare?” said my mother, frown lines between her eyes.
“It’s what she said to me. Light and space all my own. A place to breathe easy. I told her I used to carry my safe place around with me like a turtle, but then, when I got involved with Zach, I somehow stopped.”
I stared at my mother in wonder.
“So she gave you one,” my mother said, softly. “An almost total stranger talked you out of your engagement to the wrong man and then gave you a safe place to go. Unbelievable.”
“Yes. It is unbelievable.” I thought for a moment. “Or it should be. Somehow, though I didn’t expect this at all and I know it’s rare and even sort of crazy, it’s somehow believable anyway. Because of Edith. Because of how she was.”
“How was she?” asked my mother.
“I don’t know. Bigger than the rest of us. Overarching. More part of things than regular people. And more knowing.”
“Maybe because she was dying,” said Eloisa Dunne.
I stared at her. With her foggy, faraway eyes and turned-inward expression, she suddenly didn’t look like a robot at all.
“My mother did that, in her last days,” she went on. “Became intuitive, as if she’d tapped into some cache of understanding the rest of us couldn’t get anywhere near. And she was so peaceful. I’m sure she didn’t actually glow. But in my memories of her, she’s glowing.”
The three of us sat there, considering whether death’s nearness could transform a person, whether it could maybe turn their personal borders watery and permeable so that more of the world got in. Eloisa was the first to snap back to herself. She slid a manila envelope out from under her stack of legal papers, unfastened it with one quick motion, and handed it to me.
I looked inside. Keys, a lot of them, each one tagged. I turned the envelope over and spilled the keys onto the conference table, then fanned them out with my hands. Front door. Back door. Cabinet One. Cabinet Two. Fireproof box. And so forth.
“I wonder,” I said, slowly.
“What do you wonder?” asked my mother.
I smiled. “I’m going to sound crazy again, and maybe it’s just me projecting all of this stuff onto Edith. Probably. That would make sense. But anyway, I feel as if, in addition to giving me the house, she’s giving me herself. I think she wants me to discover who she was.”
“And you wonder if one of these keys—?” said my mother.
“Exactly. I wonder if one of them will unlock Edith. I hope so. I had exactly three encounters with her, none of them long, but I hope so. I hope so so much.”
Chapter Eleven
Edith
August 1952
It was during what they both knew would be their last canoe trip together that Joseph made her promise to live.
“And by live I mean all the way, with all your heart and soul.”
“If there is any of either left,” she said, but she canceled out the rueful words with a broad smile because she would not, could not, had sworn not to since he’d first fallen so ill, give him cause to fear for her.
“My precious Edie,” he said, “you must promise to give yourself entirely to someone or something because that’s who you are. You are a genius at devoting yourself; it’s what makes you happiest.”
“Not to someone,” she said, firmly. “And you may as well not even try to talk me out of that, mister, because you won’t, not if you throw every ounce of your charm at me. You are my only someone. I will stay devoted to you and to no one else, ever. That’s that.”
He eyed her skeptically. “I’m not so sure, but never mind. Something then. Find something. Of course, the world should cherish you in return, but that will take care of itself. Nothing in the wide world is easier than loving you.”
“Says you,” she teased.
Joseph laughed and she could see his features tighten with pain, watched his right hand grope vaguely at his back, felt the canoe move side to side as he shifted his big, newly angular body in search of the comfortable position she knew he wouldn’t find, and there it was: the sensation of spinning on a cliff’s edge, the tearing, metallic screech of losing him forever gripping the back of her throat. She looked away from her husband, squinted at a bird flying low above the water until she felt the canoe’s wobbling cease.
She pointed. “A shearwater. Not a very elegant bird, really, all that stiff-winged teetering, like a seesaw.”
“Unlike you, my elegant bird,” said Joseph, reaching for her hand. She set down her oar and clasped his hand, which had grown thinner but was somehow still square and strong and familiar.
It was she—and not the nurse but the lover—who had noticed the first symptoms: the faint yellowing of his eye whites and skin (she saw it earliest on the pale places untouched by sun, like a pollen stain on the smooth skin across his hip bones and the tops of his thighs), and a new articulation of his ribs and cheekbones and spine and wrists. Such slight changes, but she had taken his body apart—focusing on one tiny piece of him at a time—and put it back together so often, with her camera and her eyes, and had mapped the intricate, stretched-out landscape of him with her own bones and muscles and nerve endings so many times and with such absorption that she detected what most people would have missed.
Still, it wasn’t early enough, not even close—a fact he’d so vehemently forbidden her to torture herself with that she’d complied. Once he began to go down, he went so fast that she began to have dreams of wildfire racing through dense forests, leaving black and skeletal trees, or of a skyscraper being violently dismantled by wind or once, horribly, of a gray whale being torn apart by sharks. Joseph had been so large; the sheer scope of him had dazzled her from the start. To watch that broad, strong body come to ruin, pare down and weaken, was shockingly cruel, but she swore to give him, no matter what, the gift of herself, her usual self, unbroken, composed and joking and observing the world with sharp-eyed curiosity. He should have his wife, she thought, until the very end, and come hell or high water or sorrow like a screaming bird of prey, she would make certain he did.
John Blanchard had helped lower him into the canoe. It was early morning, just after sunrise, the jeweled hour, the sun a liquid-edged apricot, its light pattering like fingertip
s over the water, the sky a breath of blue. Joseph’s favorite time of day. Edith paddled slowly, then let them just float, suspended between sky and water. She alternated: paddle and float; glide and drift; intention and chance.
Apart from the shearwater, they’d seen few birds, the serenity of the morning punctuated only by two silent flotillas of ducks and one burst of tiny fish skittering like rain across the water. But then, as they rounded a point, they saw them, dozens of them, roosting in the trees, white as laundry: herons, what appeared to be an entire flock.
“I’ve never seen so many together,” whispered Edith. “Never, ever.”
“No, never,” said Joseph.
Absently, enthralled by the birds, she reached up and slid the kerchief off her head, and in an instant, a light wind kicked off the water and caught in her hair, sliding coolness along the back of her neck. Then, like a massive exhale, the flock of herons lifted itself off the branches and threw itself at the sky, the individual birds, their impossible necks, the white drapery of wings becoming a single event, one noisy, snowy, chaotic glory.
When the birds had blown away like a blizzard, at the moment when the air still held their electric memory, Edith and Joseph turned rapt faces to each other, and Joseph said, reverently, “That was you. You, you. That’s what you have been to me. Exactly.”
* * *
After Joseph died, Edith entered a period of freeze. Numb, wooden, blank-eyed, she moved through first his funeral, then the burial in the bean field cemetery in front of the chapel where they’d been married. His mother, Anne, had been there for his last days, stoic and tender, and after his death she had crumbled and clung—childlike, grief-blind—to Edith until the morning after the burial, when Edith woke to the smell of eggs and bacon. Still frozen, Edith applied fork and knife to the meal, directed the food to her mouth, chewed. Afterward, when she tried to thank Anne, she found she couldn’t speak, a condition that lasted for days. So Anne stayed, sat up night after night with her mute, disoriented daughter-in-law, telling her stories about Joseph’s childhood. Edith listened without reacting, but some still-working part of her mind gathered the stories up, put them away for safekeeping, all those small pieces of Joseph ready when she needed them, when she thawed.