Chapter 14 #2
If it’s only a few minutes, then it’s better if you go without me, he said. I’ll only bring you down if I go. I’ll be distracted. I won’t want to talk about anything except turning around and getting back to this book. Don’t let me ruin this for you. I know you need time in the air.
“I’m not going without you,” I said.
Then let’s at least be expedient. I’ll type another page or so and then join you down there. You can show me what you find at the end.
“That’s not what I want.”
I’ll bring you a present. His eyes sparkled. For the first time in days, I saw a trace of his old self, the impish figure who had waltzed into my life on a whim back in June.
“If you insist,” I said. “But seriously, you’re spending too much time on my computer. We’re not missing anything if you go out. It’s not a race.”
Aster smiled, but his eyes looked sad and far away. I’ll join you as soon as I can, he promised. I did promise never to leave you.
I started down the trail alone. The day was not an especially hot one, but the sunlight hit me clear and direct, and by the time I reached the trail in the brush by the beach, a sweat had broken across my back.
Before I left, I turned and looked at the lighthouse a final time.
The sight of the bright tower gazing over the horizon had a way of transporting me back in time.
Instantly I could imagine a long skirt swishing around my knees in an Edwardian fantasy, my vision partially obscured by a bonnet meant to protect me from the sunlight.
In my hands would have been a basket, and I would have gathered a bouquet of forget-me-nots and Queen Anne’s lace and tied them with string to later place in front of the window.
I had the habit of overrating the past when I compared it to the present.
If fate had given me the opportunity to choose to live a century or two earlier, I might have taken it—but then there would have been no writing, no easy path forward like the one I had followed. And then I would die in obscurity.
No, this time and everything in it belonged to me.
And already I could not have imagined my life if Aster had never appeared.
I feared losing him. I dreaded the end of the summer and the terrible feeling I had that despite our promises, I would never see him again after the end of the residency.
I feared also his new attitudes and obsessions and the fact that sometimes even when we were in the same room, he felt too far away to reach.
I turned and started down the sand path near the far side of the beach.
It was thin, mostly overgrown with ever-encroaching grass and a scattering of violets.
After a quick hike, I reached a patch of woods that marked the end of the beach.
Cedars, pines, and white birches leading away from the ocean.
In the front of this curtain of trees I saw a dramatic shadow—a tall figure holding what looked like a giant sword—but when I glanced at it again, the shadow had disappeared, leaving only a narrow footpath forward.
The shade from the trees came as a welcome relief from the growing intensity of the sunlight.
Now I could open my eyes wider and glance around, relishing the sound of the leaves in the wind and the dull chirping of crickets in the distance.
I saw a few bushes of ripened blackberries and ate a generous handful on the way.
I’d need to get more when I brought Aster next time, whenever he joined me.
Then I reached the end of the trail, and my breath stilled in my lungs. There were no signs, no labels. Nothing to mark this place or maintain it from the nature that crept in around it from all sides. The memorials sat, some tall and proud and some no more than tiny lumps of granite. A graveyard.
I stepped forward. I made sure I didn’t disturb the site in any way. In fact, I removed my sandals before I entered the clearing. This place had the feeling of sacred ground around it, and I felt that I was free to enter only as long as I left no sign of my presence behind.
Then I read the names, one by one, of the Childress family, starting with Robert and Ethel.
Five generations who had built this place and stayed behind, a line of sons and the women who married them.
Children who had died young. Odd siblings and cousins and one or two other names who could have been servants.
I wondered who tended this place and kept the grass short.
It occurred to me that time did not pass here in the same way as it passed everywhere else.
This place was a bubble enclosed from the rest of the world—a magic circle, so to speak.
Perhaps someone else had been here last week.
Or maybe there was a sort of magic, like the sort that allowed me to hear the ocean over the trees even though it was far away.
The fairy-tale beauty of this place so much resembled the charm of Aster’s presence that I turned around past a point and honestly expected to see him at the edge of the forest, watching me and waiting to join me with his promised present.
But when I watched back, he was gone, and I found myself alone.
So I walked up and down the rows of stones, waiting for his voice, listening for my name called over the gentle breezes teasing the birches nearby.
Eventually my legs grew tired. There was no place to sit over here—an intentional design, it seemed.
If I wanted to sit, I needed to go back to the lighthouse and to Aster.
I retreated from the cemetery and waited for a time following on the edge of the woods. When Aster did not join me, I slowly walked back to the lighthouse. I found Aster seated behind my desk, typing his fingers away on his project.
Aster hardly noticed when I came in. He recited my name in response to my calling out, but never apologized for not meeting with me when I was out or asked what I found at the end of the trail.
Instead he repeated a line to himself while typing, adjusted it.
There, much better. I considered greeting him, but thought better of it.