“I’ll drive down on Sunday. So I’ll be there on Monday.”
She put an odd emphasis on Monday and looked at me as if I should understand. Had I missed something? “Monday?” Was there another interview she had scheduled? A symposium? A panel? I waited for a clue.
“I can’t stay here in town. I just can’t.” She stared at me. “You’ve forgotten.” Her voice was flat. Not a question. “Seven months,” she said, finally. “Monday it will be seven months to the day.” Her gaze was both accusation and indictment.
Somewhere deep in my chest I felt as if a rib had broken.
“I can’t believe you could forget,” she said.
“I didn’t forget.” But of course I had. And she knew I had, which made me defensive. “I just don’t keep track of the—the anniversaries. I don’t like to make a . . . a goddamn holiday of it.” God knows it was difficult enough to get through the formal calendar days—Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Lucy’s birthday—without marking each passing month too.
“You think that’s what I do? Make a holiday of it?”
“I don’t know what you do. I just think keeping exact track of the weeks and months seems—” Morbid, I thought but did not say. “I mean, what’s the point?”
“Well, what would you rather I do, Will? Shut down? Shut everyone out? Give up hope? Pretend nothing happened?”
“Jesus, Sophie. How can you think it is remotely possible for me to pretend, to forget—”
But Sophie was not listening. “Is that what you want me to do?” she continued. “Shut everyone out and retreat to the attic while the world falls apart around me?” Like you was unspoken, but the words hung in the air so present she might as well have screamed them.
“Soph—” I began, but saw it was too late.
She stood, her face set.
“Don’t go,” I said.
“I can’t stay.”
She left, not bothering to pick up whatever she had come for. I stood at the door and watched her walk to the car. Walk away from me.
CHAPTER FIVE
Evenings, I walked.
So the day Sophie left for DC, I headed out, as I often did, with no particular destination in mind, propelled only by the need to escape the vast and haunting stillness of the house. On some nights, I would walk to the harbor, a sight as familiar to me as breakfast toast, and I’d pause to sit on a bench and smell the sea, staring at the fishing fleet as the boats bobbed at their moorings like tethered boxcars or whales. I had read somewhere, probably a chamber of commerce brochure, that our harbor was the safest on the East Coast.
Sometimes, if there were no high school kids horsing around on the basketball court, I’d walk by the community playground. Several years back, a group of townspeople had spearheaded a drive to raise money to hire a big-name builder famous for his all-wood playgrounds, but when we learned our children had been playing on structures built of arsenic-laced timbers, it had had to be torn down. Now the swings and slides and jungle gym were all plastic and fiberglass, and parents hoped that they hadn’t been too late in discovering the danger of what they themselves had brought into town. After the playground, I’d walk over to the promenade that fronted the town beach, passing the house with a collection of owls set on glass shelves in the street-facing window, dozens of them in glass and brass, ceramic and wood, a collection that had fascinated Lucy when she was a child. I’d continue on, pass the statue honoring fishermen lost at sea and the memorial wall etched with their five thousand three hundred names—the harbor may be safe, the ocean not so much. I understood that some found comfort in these numbers, found consolation in knowing that they were not alone in grief, that they were but part of many who had walked the sorrowful path of fractured hearts and spirits, but screw that.
At other times I’d find myself cutting through an unfamiliar neighborhood, miles from our home, with no idea of how I got there. More than once I’d hiked all the way to the Eastern Point Lighthouse, and it would be after midnight before I returned home, feet sore, sometimes blistered, my legs worn as stumps, the exhaustion a relief. Again and again Sophie had told me it was foolhardy, dangerous to walk alone so late at night. She said it made her sick with worry to wait in the late dark for my return.
“What do you want me to do?” I’d asked her. “Get a gun?”
“A gun?” She had looked stunned.
“For protection. If you’re so worried.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Will. That’s the last thing I’m suggesting. I’d just feel better if you weren’t walking around out there half the night.”