Betty would never let her daughter see her concern. Miranda needed her to be strong. But her heart went out to Miranda, and she lay awake at night wondering what would become of her pretty, vivacious, irresponsible daughter, so alone in the world, no husband, no children. And now, no authors either.
She knew Miranda was broke or, as Miranda preferred to put it, "temporarily unable to access funds," which must be terribly frustrating considering all her success. There was an awful, endless, complicated lawsuit that had frozen all of Miranda's assets. As if they were so many lamb chops, Betty thought, imagining the assets wrapped in aluminum foil and coated with a white film of ice.
Poor Miranda had never been very good with money. Joseph had always been telling her to save more. But Miranda would just laugh and say that money was not the goal, it was the means, then set off on another eco trip, spending tens of thousands of dollars to go someplace whose claim to fame was that it had gray shower water and you had to put your toilet paper in the wastebasket . . . Oh, it was all incomprehensible. If Joseph had been alive, he would have explained it to her, but since Joseph had died so tragically, Betty was left in ignorance to watch with a broken heart as her daughter worried about money. Miranda had never worried about it before, and now that it was all gone, it seemed doubly unfair to have to worry about something she no longer had.
A kayak might be just the thing to cheer her up. At the very least, it would get her out of the house, leaving Betty a moment to search her own soul without having to jump up to make her forty-nine-year-old daughter tuna fish sandwiches "just the way I like them, Mom!"
Miranda had gotten a call from her former assistant. Out of the goodness of her heart and a residual, reflexive terror at the sound of Miranda's voice, this young woman was still handling Miranda's health insurance from her busy desk at a rival agency, filing Miranda's claims, and she had called to report on a wayward dental bill. Miranda had taken the opportunity to ask her if she could help arrange parking for the new kayak.
"They must have parking lots for these things."
The girl--so well trained in her two years with me, Miranda thought with satisfaction--had found a place right at the beach's marina. There was a fee, but what in life did not have a fee of one kind or another?
The new kayak itself was a bright, shiny red. Miranda's life vest was orange, and the black of the clingy kayaking clothes she'd gotten contrasted nicely, giving the whole, according to an admiring Betty, the appearance of a tropical fish.
That semiretired lawyer, the friend of Cousin Lou's, was at the water's edge fishing "with zero environmental impact," he assured her, showing his fishless basket. She had initially tried to ignore him, but as soon as he saw her struggling with the kayak, he lowered his fishing pole and helped her get the boat into the water.
She shot away from the shore, a streak of color against the slate gray water of Long Island Sound in the early dawn. The wind was cold. Bracing, she thought as she paddled into it, passing Compo Beach. How insignificant the beach looked from the water, even smaller and slighter than from the curve of sand itself. She had Googled some maps of the coast. Coming up was Sherwood Island, which was not an island at all but a state park. She had never been there. But she had driven to Burying Hill beach, the minuscule bit of sand up ahead on her left. There were wetlands there, enfolding several large architecturally uncertain houses that had somehow been allowed to spring up in the last twenty years. She headed her little craft toward the inlet that led to the pretty marsh.
This seems as good a place and time as any, she thought, better than most, to search my soul. But what will I find there? A lint-covered Altoid? Suddenly, alone, slapping among the whitecaps, she recoiled at the thought of introspection. As a girl, she had affected despair and emotional pain in an attempt at depth. Now she had no need of affectations. The despair was real, the pain was real. And depth? It no longer beckoned, that rich, worldly dimension of sophistication, of adulthood. Depth spread itself out before her instead, a hole, a pit, a place of infinite loss.