“I’m not sure.”
“You’ve drawn the saints, Will. You’ve conveyed them in all their humanness and their transcendent holiness.”
“I just did what you said, Soph.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I did it for Lucy.” Lucy. The name that was a constant pain in my heart slipped from my lips with an ease I wouldn’t have believed possible. “For Lucy.”
“Oh, Will. She would have loved them, you know. She would have been so proud.”
But she will never know, I thought. Unwilling to pursue this—to destroy the moment—I steered the conversation toward the safer topic of my technical decisions: having all the saints in robes of their individual periods, the variety of ways they clasped hands in prayer. I sensed the shadow that flickered momentarily over her at the shift in subject, but she followed my lead. No more talk of Lucy.
We cleaned up from the lunch, and Sophie suggested a walk. We began by strolling the cottage property and then continued past the overgrown bushes where Sophie had picked blueberries for our pie and ended up by following a narrow path to the point where the cove spilled out into the Atlantic.
Earlier, she had asked me if I wanted a copy of her finished chapters to take back to Port Fortune, but I’d said I would prefer to wait until she had completed the entire first draft, but the truth was I was not able to bear reading of murdered and disappeared children, bereft parents, and so, as if by mutual agreement, we had spoken no more of it. If she was disappointed, she concealed it.
We ended our walk by the dock, drinking Chardonnay and dangling our legs over the edge of the dock. Sophie had hitched her skirt up to her toned and tanned thighs. My chino cuffs were rolled to my knees. Water lapped our ankles. A lock of hair had fallen over her cheek, and I reached over and pushed it back. “Shall we go change and take a swim to cool down?” she asked.
The effort of going up to the house to put on a suit was beyond me, and I said, “Right now I’m enjoying this.” And so we sat, sipping wine and staring across the cove, listening as the sounds slowly shifted from those of day to evening. The echoes of mothers calling their children in from play reverberated across the water. We were quiet, falling again into a companionable silence.
Sophie spoke first. “Lucy would love this.”
My mind was far away as I’d been thinking about whether I should drive into the nearest town and pick up another bottle of wine or suggest that we go out somewhere for dinner. A shore dinner. Lobster and clams. The whole thing. And her words jolted me back to the present. Lucy would love this. Lucy. Our ever-present ghost-child.
“She would, you know,” Sophie continued.
I closed my eyes at the truth of it, the sure and hard knowledge that Lucy would have embraced every moment of this day. Swimming in the cove. Long walks. The ease of cottage life and indolent August days. Picking berries. Eating outside on the painted table. Reading condensed stories from must-scented pages. And most of all of the three of us on holiday. Together. My heart was so heavy with sorrow it felt as if it were filled with knives.
“It never goes away, does it?” she said. “The loss. The pain.”
I shook my head, not trusting my voice.
“I don’t know how we could ever think it would. I think that’s what’s so hard for people who haven’t lost a child to understand. As if it is even possible to forget. To go on like before.”
From somewhere in the distance to our right came two voices, clearly drunken and raised in argument. A silvery shimmer of minnows curved through the water, circled our feet. At least I thought they were minnows, but my piscine knowledge was limited. My father wasn’t a hunter or fisherman. His only hobby had been puttering around our home, fixing sills, teaching me the value of caring for belongings. For family. And at this I had failed.
“Do you know what someone once told me?” Sophie said. “‘Life goes on.’”
“You’re kidding me. Someone actually said that to you? Who? That bitch Alicia?”
“It doesn’t matter. But it doesn’t, you know?”
“Doesn’t what?”
“Necessarily go on.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I interviewed one man whose wife had committed suicide after their child was murdered.”
“But you—you never thought of that.”
“Actually, it did occur to me. I wanted to die. I wanted the pain to end. A broken heart still beats. Unless you stop it.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.” She took a deep swallow of wine. “I never really could have, you know. Not only because it would be a sin. Perhaps the raw truth is I’m too much of a coward.”
I thought of her facing interviewers, talking about the numbers of children lost every year, wanting to effect change, to weave even one positive thing out of Lucy’s death. I thought of her out in the world doing her work in our daughter’s name while I had retreated to my studio, to the false solace of alcohol. “That’s one thing you are not. You’re not a coward, Soph.” I took her hand. “I didn’t know. I should have known.”
She leaned her shoulder against mine. “Did you ever think about it, Will? Suicide, I mean.”
I thought of that day in July when I’d met Sophie at the beach and how I had stared out at the horizon and felt the seductive pull of knowing how easy it would be to walk into the water and keep walking. But even then I’d known I would never take that road. As I sat next to Sophie on the dock I thought that the surprise wasn’t that people commit suicide but that more didn’t.
“No.”
“Never?” Sophie persisted. “You didn’t ever think of it?”
“Not really.” Murder. I’d thought of murder, of finding and killing the person who took Lucy. Slaying that person. Such a biblical word, slaying. Shakespearean.
As if I had spoken, she said, “I read somewhere that suicide is rage and despair turned inward and that murder is the same turned outward.” She swirled her toes through the water, scattering the minnows. “Do you think that’s true?”