Alan had warned Greenie that, physically, Saga was a “lopsided” woman, that she’d had an accident years ago. She did not look so peculiar to Greenie. She had a crooked smile, and she walked with a subtle lope, but these quirks seemed nothing more than colorful to Greenie. Saga’s age was hard to guess; was she twenty-eight or forty? With her intense blue eyes, she was taking a cat’s measure of Greenie. (How much had Alan told her?)
Greenie laid aside the towel and shook Saga’s hand. In a cowardly way, she was glad to have someone else there, a chaperone to protect her, for at least a few hours, from facing Alan alone.
“I have a present for you,” Greenie told George. From her pocket, she pulled a small parcel of newspaper, now damp.
George did not seem to care about the wrapping or the ink that came off on his fingers. “Mommy, it’s a knife! Thank you!”
“Yes, I know it is, and you must be careful with it. There’s a note, George. It’s not from me.” She sat on the couch—the same old beat-up blue corduroy couch—to warm herself by the woodstove. She invited George into her lap.
After picking up the note, which he had dropped, George sat beside her instead. He allowed her to put an arm around his back. On a piece of hotel stationery from a Pittsburgh Days Inn, it read, From me to you, Small Man. Keep the faith. Come visit. 5 up, 5 down, 5 twist around! Tall.
It was a modest Swiss Army knife, with a single blade and a few extra gadgets, but to Small it was a magnificently grown-up object, one that promised transformation. This was obvious in the reverence with which George squeezed and stroked it. Before Greenie and Tall had parted, he had taken the knife off his key chain.
“I miss Tall,” said George as Greenie showed him how to pull out the nail scissors and the elfin tweezers.
“You’ll see him again. Don’t worry.” She removed her arm from around his shoulders. Her jeans were soaking the cushion. She excused herself to change.
She went into the downstairs room where her parents had slept. She stopped in the doorway. The double bed was gone; two bunk beds stood against opposite walls. The same painted bureau was there, but in its drawers she found not her parents’ extra sweaters, the tar-spattered khakis her father had worn when he worked on his boats. Instead, she found board games, a scruffy electric blanket, a set of souvenir lobster-claw pot holders still wrapped in plastic, two flashlights, and a faded Red Sox baseball cap. Next door, the smaller room where Greenie had slept was furnished with a crib, a changing table, and a rocking chair.
“You probably want to sleep upstairs.” Alan was standing behind her. “Unless you want to sleep in here with Saga and George.” A tangle of George’s clothing spilled from a bag in the corner. A small suitcase lay open beside it.
“My things are in the big room up there,” he said. “Borrow anything.” That’s how it was now: she needed permission to wear Alan’s sweaters. Was another woman wearing his sweaters and shirts? This hadn’t occurred to Greenie before. She looked down, so Alan wouldn’t see her face, and passed him to go upstairs.
The four-poster bed—the one her mother had found at a yard sale off Route 1 and painted white out on the rock above the dock—now occupied the big bedroom on the second floor. This arrangement did make more sense; grown-ups should take the best view. Here was the familiar loose-jointed bookcase, but its collection of paperbacks—the plump, ruffled copies of Hawaii, Future Shock, and Tora! Tora! Tora!—had vanished. A dozen newer books leaned along one shelf—novels by authors that her scholarly father would not have heard of: young, stylish New York City authors. The other shelves were empty.
The top dresser drawers were empty too, but when she opened the bottom drawer, here were her parents’ sweaters, her father’s work pants. She let out a sob. She lifted an Irish cable-knit sweater and held it open. It was pure white and smelled of rich dark cedar. Greenie cradled it to her face.
George called up to her. They were hungry; wasn’t she hungry too?
“Yes I am!” she called back. “I’ll be down to cook in a minute!”
She changed into a T-shirt of Alan’s, her mother’s sweater, and a pair of anonymous sweatpants drooping from a closet hook. Beneath her father’s trousers, she found a pair of blue fleece socks.
As she left the room, something Greenie had not seen in ages caught her eye: on a bedside table, the small leather book in which Alan had once, every morning, written his dreams.
Downstairs, a meal was already on the table, bowls of fragrant brown soup and a loaf of bread. (Was it lunch or dinner? She’d lost track of time, not just hours but days, perhaps entire eras.) “Oh my,” she said. “Thank you.”
“We’re very good at shopping, aren’t we?” Saga said to George.
“I know how to use a can opener. Saga showed me,” he told his mother.
“In the right place at the right time, a can opener might just save your life,” said Greenie. It was something Charlie had said when she teased him for using canned foods in the meals that he had insisted on preparing for her. She could count those meals on one hand.
George was alarmed. “What do you mean, save my life?”
“That’s a joke,” said Alan. He did not look at Greenie.
After dessert—made by Sara Lee—Greenie put George to bed while Saga and Alan washed the dishes. When she pulled out Owl at Home—which she had found behind her sofa in Santa Fe and carried with her across twelve states—his eyes widened. “Mrs. Rodrigo’s book! Did you take that from her?”
“No, that’s our copy. Do you remember that I bought it for you?”
He shook his head.
What else had he forgotten? Greenie asked if he wanted to read it to her.
“You read it,” he said. “I missed you reading.”
He leaned against her for all five tales, which related the neurotically foolish mishaps of a character who was a literalist yet also a romantic. In Greenie’s favorite, Owl made himself a pot of tear-water tea by thinking up, laboriously, as many sad things as he could: chairs with broken legs, forgotten songs, clocks that had stopped, mornings that no one witnessed because everybody was sleeping. More than sad, they were invisible, neglected, or simply lost to memory.
When she finished reading, George asked, “Can I sleep with my knife?”
“I don’t think so, honey.”
“Please? Please?”
Greenie saw the knife on the dresser. She brought it back to the bed, along with a T-shirt of George’s. “Listen, George. I’ll wrap it in this shirt and tuck it under your pillow, but you must promise me not to take it out, all right? Just like when you leave your tooth for the Tooth Fairy.”
“I promise,” he said.
For the first time that day, she indulged in simply gazing at her son. Though she had braced herself, he hadn’t changed so much. The great difference was that he felt more separate from her than ever before. His promises would grow increasingly complex, along with what he understood about the world. His secrets would deepen too, and one day his mother would no longer be the one who knew him best.
On the third day of their marathon drive, Greenie and Tall George had talked about Small. Before then, she had worried that to ask anything about her son would be to violate a private friendship, but Tall didn’t see it that way. He told her several amusing stories about Small, and Greenie was pleased to hear in this man’s voice an echo of her own pride in her son’s curiosity and oddball logic. Tall became serious, however, when she asked what he knew about the incident involving Diego. Tall had never seen the boys together, he had to admit, but from what he had gathered, he believed that Small George had been desperate for something to change. When Greenie asked urgently, “For what to change? What?” Tall had given her a long, almost insolent look and then shrugged. “Your guess be as good a mine,” he’d said. “Come to think of it, better.” If he’d meant her to feel shame, he had succeeded.
“Can I give you a really big hug?” she asked her son now. He laughed and told her yes. She lay beside him
on the bed for several minutes until he said, “Mom, you can go now.”
Before she left the room, he said, “Mommy, I like this place. Have we ever beened here before?”
“Yes, we have,” she answered from the doorway, “but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t remember. It was such a long time ago.”
“We’ll come again, won’t we?”
“Yes,” she said.
When she returned to the main room, Saga and Alan were sitting at the table by the woodstove. On the table was a game of Scrabble. It was the original edition she remembered from her childhood, in the dour cardboard box that Greenie had always thought precisely the color of a scab. It came from an era when fun did not have to look garish or even shiny. Here were the baby pink and blue Chiclet squares, the dowdy beige letters like scraps from a carpentry project, the racks like dollhouse church pews.
Greenie’s parents had been clever at Scrabble. On the island, they had played every night after Greenie went to bed. She had heard their murmurs of surprise, frustration, triumph, disgruntlement; they concentrated so hard on the game that they rarely exchanged words other than those on the board. For long stretches of time, if the ocean was still, Greenie could hear the tiny clatterings of the wooden letters in their racks. Once in a while there would be a challenge—generally from her mother—and out would come the dictionary. (She’d never known of a word from her father that did not pass the test.) Olivia and George had kept score year by year for their entire married life. Every New Year’s Day began with a tallying of the score; the winning spouse would choose where they’d go on their next big vacation. Greenie’s father (who generally won, though never by a landslide) was the one who had chosen Scotland.
As Alan turned the letters facedown in the lid of the box, he told Greenie and Saga about the work he would be doing with Jerry, at the clinic for people traumatized by Tuesday’s attacks. Though he might have seemed relaxed to anyone else, Greenie knew he was nervous, because against his very nature, he was working to fill every silence. From across the table, she looked at him now the way she had just looked at George. He was thin and uncharacteristically tanned, as if he had spent the summer sailing or hiking. Alongside his ears, his hair was almost entirely gray. He looked more beautiful to Greenie than he had in years—unattainably beautiful, as if she had found his picture in a magazine.
Saga went first, laying down the word S O F A, descending from the star at the center of the board. Alan, almost immediately, put down S E L K I E.
“Well,” said Greenie. “Well, I forgot how good you are at this.” Now she remembered that they had played two or three times with her parents. Her mother had been tense—amusingly, at the time—when Alan beat everyone the first time they played.
“What’s that?” asked Saga, her question one of genuine curiosity.
“A selkie is a creature from Irish folklore, part seal, part woman.”
“How could you think that up so fast?” asked Greenie.
“George had a book from the library. The Selkie Girl. A fisherman falls in love with a selkie and forces her to marry him by hiding her pelt.”
“Something terrible must become of him,” said Greenie.
“No, not really, but he does have to let her go in the end. It’s your turn.”
Greenie had a decent assortment of letters—enough vowels, no wallflower consonants—but she could not concentrate. She laid down three letters. “Onto.”
“That’s all you want to do? That’s five points.”
“Yes, Alan,” she said. “I need to warm up.”
He wrote down her score. She recognized his neat handwriting, his straight columns. In his precise way of doing things, he wasn’t unlike Charlie; yet they were so different, Charlie so much more expansive, someone who looked ever outward. She wished that she and Charlie had been together long enough that some of the things she admired and loved about him had become cause for irritation—that his ardent resourcefulness had come to seem like rigidity, his sense of adventure like restlessness; that his playfulness could look immature, his lack of sentimentality cold instead of wise. But they had not been together that long. To recall even one of those qualities made her feel as if her heart would crack in two.
Saga placed A R M Y at the tail end of S O F A. “Double word score,” she said, as openly pleased as a child might have been. (This was a woman in crisis? Greenie inspected her critically for a moment, but what could you really know from the surface? Alan had taught her how well people hide things, often for the sake of their own survival.)
“Eighteen,” said Alan. “Excellent.” He began to fiddle with his letters.
“Can I ask you a nosy question?” Greenie said to Saga. “Can I ask you about your name?”
Saga laughed, self-consciously. “It’s really Emily.”
“Mine’s really Charlotte,” said Greenie. Alan looked up at her, briefly, then back at his letters.
Saga told Greenie that when she was five years old, she’d run away from home. “I sat with my stuffed dog behind a bush at a bank down the block. I wanted them to be good and sorry. You know, like kids always do when they feel wronged. So nobody came, and nobody came. It felt like I was there for hours. A lady I thought I knew from my school saw me there and asked me what I was doing. But she was nice. So I told her. She said she’d take me for a treat. We walked down the street, and we stopped to look in a toy store window, and she bought me an ice cream cone and we sat at a table while I ate it. I thought for sure my mom would show up then, or maybe pass me in her car and be shocked to see me with somebody else. Then she’d be sorry. But no. So then I went with this lady while she bought herself a pair of sunglasses in another store—I tried a bunch on myself—and then she walked me home. She didn’t take me in, she just waved to me while I walked to the door.”
Starting at the left edge of the board, Alan spelled B A I R N, the final N forming N O where it linked up with Greenie’s O N T O. The B occupied a red square. “Seven times three, plus three,” he said quietly.
“Bairn?” Greenie laughed. “What is this, Celtic Scrabble?”
“I don’t know what’s come over me,” he said. He looked at Saga.
“What happened then?”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “My mom was inside the house. She never noticed I was gone. She thought I was in the yard. When I told her where I’d been, she told me I had a big imagination. When my dad came home, she told him I had quite the saga to tell him. ‘You are a saga!’ he said, something like that. I thought I’d get in trouble. I wanted to be in trouble—but no one believed me.”
“You never told me that story,” said Alan.
“It’s true,” she said, “something I remember clear as anything.”
They traded smiles, the expression of people who understand each other in the midst of much confusion.
Greenie felt Alan nudge her foot with his. “You again,” he said. “Don’t rush.” He got up and went to the stove, took the kettle to fill it.
Greenie hadn’t looked at her rack since picking up three new letters. She saw R H M I E L A. The E was a substitute. Many years before, when a real E had gone missing, Greenie’s father had penned the letter on one of the two blank tiles. “Ha! Just like life,” he had joked. “Occasions for free choice diminish as you age. Though your mother will probably tell me I’m wrong about that.”
Jostling the letters, she found H A R E, H A I R, H A I L: was H A I L E R a word? She could make A L I E N with an open N. “Alieno?” she said. Saga laughed. Greenie happened upon M A R I E L, but that was a name. M A R E. M A L E. She focused on the L in S E L K I E. M A L L. My mind is refusing to do this, she thought, moving the letters arbitrarily: M A R H L E I, M H A R L I E. She stared.
M HARLIE
Mournfully, pointlessly, she searched the board. No C. Of course not. No place for such things. No proper names allowed. What about improper names?
Alan returned from the kitchen with three mugs and a mason jar filled with a vari
ety of tea bags.
“Can you remill something?” Greenie placed R E M I L above the open L.
“I think so. Flour, if it’s not fine enough the first time around,” said Alan. “You of all people would know about that.”
Saga nodded. Over B A I R N, she made O A R. “Believe it or not, I need consonants.”
They chose tea bags. Alan put the bags in the mugs and lined them up on the table. He leaned down to pet Treehorn, who slept close to the stove. He returned to the table. “You’re both going to hate me.” With an R, he turned O A R into R O A R and then, using both hands, built a bridge all the way to R E M I L L, crossing a double word score, to make the word R E Q U I E M. He wrote, but did not say aloud, 40.
“Is this what they call a rout?” said Greenie.
“It’s early yet,” said Alan, pointing to the unchosen letters.
Greenie smirked at him. “I don’t think we have to be telepathic to predict this outcome.”
Saga continued to stare at Alan’s latest word, as if she might challenge its legitimacy. “Copper,” she said. “Greenish.”
“Requiem?” said Alan, who seemed to understand.
She nodded.
“I’m not sure I’d have come up with that word at any other time,” he said.
They grew quiet, reflecting. Each of them took another turn, no one scoring remarkably, and then they agreed that it was very late. They poured the letters straight from the board back into the box and put the game away. Though the wind complained incessantly through the trees, the rain had stopped. The next day was to be a nice one, according to their crank-up radio—which they consulted only for weather and, now and then, a hasty sampling of news. Next day, they decided, they would explore the other side of the island.
Saga whistled gently to Treehorn, who jumped up to follow her into the nearby bedroom, which George had requested the three of them share. Awkwardly, Alan and Greenie said good night to her as she closed the door.