“A friend?”
“Yes. Joan Laurant. She’s rented a place in Rockport for the summer, and she asked me if I wanted to come along. Apparently it’s one of those old farmhouses with dozens of rooms and property that goes down to the water.”
Joan. I recalled the way she’d barged in last winter and pulled Sophie from her bed and taken her to the gym to box.
“I need this, Will. I need to get away to think.”
“You could have gone to Amy’s.” You could have gone with me. We could have rented a place together.
“I wasn’t planning to go at all. This just came up. And when Joan asked me, I thought, Why not? And then I knew it was exactly what I needed. Time away from here.” She looked at me a little shyly. “I might even try to write.”
Write what? I wanted to ask. “And you can’t do that here?”
She replaced the brush on the table, her confidence returned. “I’m not here to ask permission, Will. I just wanted to see you before I went. To let you know where I’ll be.”
“It’s settled then? That’s it? No discussion?”
She opened her bag and pulled out a notebook page. “I’ve written down the address. The phone number at the rental. I’ll have my cell, but service is spotty there.”
I stared at the paper.
“Do you want me to leave it here, or shall I put it on the kitchen table?”
“Doesn’t matter.” So this was a done deal.
“And Amy will always be able to reach me. Their house is only seven miles from where I’ll be.”
“When are you leaving?” I asked.
But Sophie didn’t hear me. “Oh,” she said, her voice soft. “This is lovely.” She was looking at the sketch I had set on the table. “I didn’t know you knew her, Will.”
“Who? Knew who?”
“Mary.” She picked up the pad and carried it to the window for better light. The skirt of her dress whispered around her legs. “Mary Silveria.”
I realized then why the woman in the market had seemed familiar. In midwinter, Sophie and I, along with most of Port Fortune, had stood in line outside the funeral home, all waiting to go in to the wake for her husband. I hadn’t wanted to go. I really didn’t know the family, but Sophie had insisted. The woman was a parishioner at Holy Apostles. Her husband’s boat had gone down off Georges Bank. The line of mourners had inched along until finally we were inside, standing before the woman who gazed at us with grief-stunned eyes, hands cupped in front of her swollen belly. Sophie hadn’t told me she was pregnant. “I don’t. Not really. I saw her yesterday and was just fooling around with it.”
“It’s good.”
“Just a sketch,” I said, my voice dismissive.
Sophie put the pad back on the table and came to me, slipped her arms around me. I felt, beneath my fingers, the sheerness of the dress, the strength of her body. I didn’t want to let her go.
“Take care, Will,” she said. “Be well.”
My throat thickened. “You too, Sophie. I love you.”
“I love you too, Will.”
And then she was gone, leaving me alone to wonder how much love could withstand.
A great restlessness took hold for which I had no outlet. I replayed the scene, trying to make sense of it. I picked up the paper on which she had jotted down the address and fought the urge to tear it to shreds. I looked at the address: 13 End of the Road. An odd name. And not a good omen. Then my gaze fell, as Sophie’s had, to the drawing on my sketch pad. Now I had a name for the woman. I again recalled her standing in the funeral home, pregnant and bereft. And then pictured her as she had been in the market, a widow with two toddlers and an infant in her arms. Then I heard the echo of her laughter, light and joy-filled. How was it possible? How had this woman, widowed too young and left with three children, been able to not only go on but to come alive to joy? And for a moment, one single moment, the darkness that had filled me, the despair and grief that were as much a part of me as bone and marrow, lifted, warming me with a lightness of being as surely as earlier that morning a ray of light had streamed through the studio window, heating my leg.
I stared at the drawing as if the answer was held there, but the image stared silently back at me. Even as I put it away, her gaze stayed with me, haunting, beseeching. What did she want of me? What did any of them want of me? This woman? Father Gervase? Sophie? Couldn’t they understand I had nothing left to give?
Then, as if the priest were standing there in the attic room with me, Father Gervase’s words echoed in the silent studio.
The saints were ordinary people.
The saints were us.
You do paint saints.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
But I did not paint saints. Or anything else.