“I’ve already told you more than I’ve ever told anybody.”
“Really? My God, what a dry, lonely existence you’re leading, my dear.” His thumb was now stroking mine, the way you might stroke a nervous animal. And it struck me in that moment—an instinct, maybe—that he knew exactly what he was doing. That he was an expert in this kind of thing, making people feel at ease, and somehow the knowledge that I was being soothed—consciously, purposefully—was itself soothing. No need to worry, Virginia. He’s a doctor. He knows what he’s doing. He’s dealt with your kind before.
You can trust him.
“Look,” he said, “I know what you’re afraid of. Do you think you’re the only one? I know. The horrors I’ve seen. The damned sights that have kept me awake, the men I couldn’t save. Hemorrhages that wouldn’t stop. The infections that spread and spread. Going to bed streaked with blood, soaked with it, and you’re too tired to give a damn. Then the voices. I still hear them, whenever I’m alone, like a Greek chorus. And every day, every morning you wake up thinking, My God, what horrible thing awaits me today? What fresh grief.”
I bent my head over our clasped palms and gasped for breath. His other hand found the back of my head, my hair. His thumb comforted my ear.
“Shh. You see? I know, Virginia. But I think—for the past few months, I’ve had a bit of hope now, because of you. A little pinprick of light, and it’s just out of reach, and do you perhaps understand, now, why I’ve written all those letters? Why I’ve kept writing, even when you didn’t reply? Because I can’t give it up. I can’t give you up, the possibility of you. Not this single darling person whose vital spark I’ve craved, the way one craves water in a desert. Not unless I was wrong, and there isn’t even that. Not even a spark left.”
It was as if he knew exactly the words to win me over. Exactly what to say to overcome me. I knew I was sobbing, but I couldn’t hear my own sobs, or feel my own wet tears. I only felt his hand in my hair, supporting my head.
“I know, Virginia. I know how you feel. I know your loneliness and your misery. I feel the same. We’re all alone, the two of us. All alone in this frightful black world. Can we not at least try to give each other comfort? Light some small lamp together, against the darkness?”
And then, a quiet moment later: Please, Virginia.
And I believe, looking back, that this was the moment of my capitulation. Please, Virginia. This was the moment I chose my course, the moment I threw my heart over the cliff and leapt after it. I felt the tumbling of my resistance like a physical event, starting in my head and clattering down my spine and the bones of my skeleton, until I had nothing left to support myself. Only him.
And instead of feeling dread at this act of defeat, I felt freedom. I felt, in the instant of my leaping, as if I would never touch the ground again.
I lifted my head, or maybe he moved it for me, with that hand that now caressed the side of my face, the curve of my jaw. I met his eyes without fear. My fingers wrapped around his and squeezed for all life.
“Thank God,” he said, closing his eyes, but the bang of the door smothered the words.
“Well!” said Hazel. “And to think we were worried to death.”
Chapter 11
Cocoa Beach, Florida, June 1922
I spot Mr. Marshall right away, the first thing I notice when I follow Clara inside the wood-framed house at the southern end of Cocoa Beach. He’s sitting by himself, wearing a hat, hunched over a drink of some kind, but I’d know that prehistoric profile anywhere.
The building, as you might guess, is the kind of place I believe they call a speakeasy. It’s just a shack, really—a plain wooden shack, big enough for tables and chairs and something that serves as a bar, not more than a couple of hundred yards down the beach from the old House of Refuge built by the Coast Guard in the previous century—so Clara tells me, anyway—in order to mop up survivors from all the shipwrecks. (The Florida coast, it seems, is a dangerous place to ply your sail, or whatever craft you happen to captain.) Whether the Coast Guard knows or cares what’s going on under its lee, I can’t say, but I certainly don’t see any signs of knowing or caring here tonight. Just Mr. Marshall of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, all by himself, miraculously arrived on Cocoa Beach on this moonless evening, taking note of our entrance with a small salute of his glass.
In case you’re wondering, I’m much recovered from the ordeal of two weeks ago. I woke up the day after that meeting in the Japanese garden filled with all kinds of resolve, and the first thing I did—well, the first thing once Clara was awake, which came long after the breakfast I shared downstairs with Evelyn—was to tell my sister-in-law to pack her bags, because we were heading straight back up to Cocoa. Back to the town of Cocoa, Florida, where Simon Fitzwilliam, English doctor, captain in the British Army Medical Corps, citrus grower and bootlegger, met his fate.
Cocoa, Florida. It sounds so lovely, doesn’t it? Just saying the name gives you a marvelous, exotic charge, however great your troubles. We’ve passed our time at the beach, played all day in the heat and the blue ocean, and the surf and sun have so exhausted my daughter that she falls asleep almost before I tuck the blankets tenderly around her. Safe and sound. And I’ve settled in for the evening like any old grieving widow, in the lively company of my sister-in-law and the generally silent company of my brother-in-law, and I’ve waited.
Waited for the turn of the moon.