The winter blew through Westport, hard and fast, as if it were a season in a hurry, ready to get the whole messy business over with and move on. There was just one big snowstorm, which dissolved in the bright yellow sun of the following morning, and one ice storm that brought with it a townwide loss of power as branches fell to the ground, hundreds of them, sheathed in frozen rain, heavy and ornate as French mirrors. Some gray skies hovered, some wind blew through, a fair amount of rain fell. And then, suddenly, in February, deep blue heavens and gentle breezes and mud.
When the Weissmanns returned from Palm Springs at the beginning of January, the snow had just come and gone and the ground was oozing. Betty decided to take up online poker in an attempt to supplement the family income. Annie and Miranda had forgiven if not forgotten what each had said to the other and were on precariously good terms, but Annie tried to spend as much time as possible at the library. Even there, however, she felt the need to escape. When she could no longer stand the part of her job that required her to speak to board members and ask bibliophilic rich people for money, she would retreat to the library's attic and putter. She told the staff she was looking for artifacts, and she did discover a discolored letter from George Washington in a frame with cracked glass, as well as the first volume of the two-volume first American edition of Sense and Sensibility. But the main reason she dug through piles of broken chairs and abandoned space heaters was to be alone. It had become an aching, physical need. The beach in Westport, where once she had felt so free, now seemed to her to be teeming with the presence of other human beings: they were behind her in their houses, they were across Long Island Sound in other houses, they were a mile away on I-95, whizzing past her in cars. They flew above her, back and forth, in planes in the sky. They were even buried beneath her, or close enough, deep and silent, in the earth. Wherever she went, they followed. They spoke to her on telephones and wrote to her on computers. They sang from radios and hailed cabs and demanded she hold the elevator. It was not their fault, of course, they were only doing what people were meant to do, yet she found herself despising them.
But in the attic, there were just the things people had discarded, not the people themselves. A bulky electric typewriter. A framed diploma from Barnard College for Mildred Peacock Winship, 1927. Engravings, photographs--it was like picking up seashells. She was alone, blissfully alone. Who was Mildred Peacock Winship? Perhaps she had been a devoted member of the library's staff, a middle-aged unmarried person who typed and filed, collected her meager paycheck, and went home to a big frame house in the Bronx to make supper for her aging parents. Perhaps she was a trustee who had bequeathed to the library thousands of dollars as well as her treasured editions of Emerson and Hawthorne. Annie thought vaguely that she should find out. At the same time, she blessed Mildred Peacock Winship, for, whoever she had been and whatever she had done, she was now, blissfully, absent.
The attic was safe. It was quiet and remote. Like me, Annie thought. She was walking to the subway after a particularly tiring board meeting.
"Aren't you just so bwack and bwown?" a woman cooed to a dog tied to a parking meter.
When Annie emerged in Grand Central, a homeless man holding a battered coffee cup said, "Hello there, beautiful lady," and she was wondering whether to smile politely without making eye contact or just hurry past, when she realized he was talking to the woman behind her. On the train, she walked through the first couple of cars looking for a seat facing forward. She spotted a likely prospect--the back of a single well-groomed female head sticking up from the three-person bench--but when she got up to the female head and was about to heave her bag onto the middle seat, she saw it was occupied by a small child.
There was an awkward moment when, even as she drew back her bag, determined to avoid what could only be a very loud and very dull young companion on an evening when she wanted peace and solitude, she caught the mother's eye and wondered if she had already somehow committed herself to join the duo and if it would now be insulting to this doubtless doting parent to continue on her way. But even as she quickly and decisively decided in favor of insult over boredom and annoyance, the child in question spoke.
"Annie!"
And she looked down at the boy, focused, and recognized Henry.
Annie put out her arms, and Henry jumped to his feet and, standing unsteadily on his seat, gave her a hug. She saw the mother's face over his head. Henry's mother. It was instantly and unquestionably apparent. Not just the full cheeks or the set of the eyes. But that look, that proprietary mother look. "Oh, you must be Henry's mother," Annie said quickly, holding a hand out. "I'm Annie Weissmann. A friend from Westport."
Henry was looking around. "Randa?" he asked.
"Are you Randa?" the mother asked. "He talks about you quite a bit. I'm Leanne."
Annie sat down and explained that Randa was her sister, Miranda.
"Miranda's at home," she said to Henry.