Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lori tried to call Eileen on the way over but she didn’t answer her phone.
Her address was a rental on Calder Street, four blocks from the harbor — a small Cape with a light on in the front window and a car in the driveway that suggested someone was home.
Tammy knocked. We waited. She knocked again, harder, the knock of a woman who did not have time for subtlety.
Nothing.
Jill tried the bell. Ruth stepped back and looked at the lit window. The light was on but there was no movement.
“She’s not here,” I said.
We stood on the front step in the early dark and looked at each other. The sky to the east had a quality to it now — not quite light, not quite dark, the particular luminous gray that preceded a rising moon. The Hunter’s Moon. Three hours had become two.
“Where would she go?” Tammy said.
“With the pens,” Lori said. Something clicked. “The graves. She told me at lunch. She goes there. She said nobody else looks after them. She must go there to be near Olive and now that she has the pens, she might be trying to moor her.”
Nobody needed to say anything else.
Ruth was already moving toward Tammy’s car.
The Starfall Bay cemetery sat on the eastern edge of town on a low rise above the harbor, the kind of location that had been chosen a hundred and fifty years ago by people who understood that the dead deserved a view.
The iron gate at the entrance stood open, the way it always stood open after dark — there was no lock, had never been a lock, on the theory that a town like this one did not need to keep its living out of its cemetery at night.
Tammy parked on the road outside. We went in on foot, through the gate, along the gravel path that ran between the older stones.
The moon was not yet fully risen but its light was everywhere — that particular cold luminosity that came before the disk itself appeared, filling the sky from the east with a pale silver that made the headstones glow and the shadows go long and sharp.
The Marchetti plot was in the older section, toward the back.
Lori knew where it was. She led us without hesitation along the path, past the newer stones and the older ones, past the Waverly plot with its well-kept borders and the small American flags the historical society placed every year, past the bench where someone had left a bunch of late-season wildflowers going brown at the edges.
We heard her before we saw her.
Not words — a sound, low and steady, the particular quality of someone speaking with great concentration and no expectation of being heard.
The cadence of it was old. Not the cadence of prayer, exactly, though it had some of that quality — more purposeful, more directed, the sound of someone trying to reach a specific destination by force of will.
We came around the last turn in the path and there she was.
Eileen Walsh was kneeling at a headstone near the center of the Marchetti plot, her good coat spread around her on the November grass, her white hair bright in the rising moonlight.
In her hands she held the leather roll, open across her knees, the six dip pens arranged in their loops.
One of the pens was in her right hand and she was holding it the way you hold something you have held ten thousand times before — not tightly, not carefully, just with the ease of long familiarity.
She was talking to the headstone.
She had not heard us. She was entirely somewhere else — in the place you go when you have been doing something alone for a very long time and have learned to close the door behind you when you enter it.
We stopped at the edge of the Marchetti plot. None of us spoke. The moon was coming up fast now above the tree line, full and cold and enormous, the Hunter’s Moon doing exactly what it had been doing on this night every November for as long as there had been a November to do it in.
Eileen’s voice faltered. She stopped. She looked at the pen in her hand and then at the headstone — Olive Marchetti, Beloved Mother and Grandmother — and something in her posture said what decades of Thursday visits had not managed to say aloud: that she was exhausted, and she had been exhausted for a long time, and she did not know how to stop.
“Eileen,” Lori said.
She turned.
She looked at the five of us standing at the edge of the plot in the moonlight and her face did several things in quick succession — surprise, then something that might have been shame, then a kind of desperate hope that she visibly tried to suppress because she had been disappointed too many times to let hope arrive without supervision.
“Lori,” she said. Her voice was steady. She was a composed woman and she was going to be composed about this even now, even here, even kneeling in the grass in the Hunter’s Moon with a dead woman’s pen in her hand.
“We know what you have,” Lori said. She said it gently, the way she said difficult things. “And we know what you’ve been trying to do. And we think —“ She looked at me, and at Ruth, and at Jill and Tammy, and back at Eileen. “We think we can help each other.”
Eileen looked at the pen in her hand. Then at the headstone. Then at us.
“There’s a document,” she said. “Inside the pen. I found it last night. I’ve read it.” She paused. “I’ve been trying to do it alone. I don’t —” She stopped. “I don’t think it can be done alone.”
“No,” Lori said. “I don’t think it can either.”
The moon cleared the tree line and came fully into the sky and the cemetery went silver and sharp and entirely still.
Eileen Walsh looked up at it, and then at the five women standing at the edge of her grandmother’s grave, and something in her face finally let go of the thing it had been holding for thirty-eight years.
“Tell me what you need,” she said.
Ruth held out her hand. “Let me see.”
Eileen handed her the small paper. Cream colored, dense with handwriting, the ink brown with age but entirely legible.
“Ada,” Ruth said. Just the name. Confirmation.
She read it aloud, slowly, in the still cemetery air.
Ada’s handwriting was the handwriting of a woman who had expected to be read and had written accordingly — precise, complete, no flourish wasted.
The counter-working. The mooring. Every requirement set down in order, every step as clear as a recipe from someone who had cooked the dish before and knew where the difficulties were.
The Hunter’s Moon. A full five. The pen as instrument — the same pen that wrote the binding, held by the one who loves most. An anchor on each side — one living, one not.
The words, which Ada had written out in full, with a note in the margin that said simply: say them as if you mean them. You will mean them.
Lori read the document once more to herself. Then she looked up.
“Eileen,” she said. “You anchor Olive. You’re the one she loves most on this side.” She looked at me. “Gina anchors Rosaria.”
I nodded.
“The pen,” Jill said. “Ada’s pen. The one the document was in.”
Eileen was already holding it. She looked at it in her hand — the dark barrel, the fine nib, the pen of a woman who had been dead for a hundred years and had apparently planned for exactly this moment with considerable thoroughness. “I anchor Olive,” she said. “I can do that.”
The air shifted.
Not a dramatic change. Not the cold drop or the candle-gutter. Just the particular alteration I had learned to recognize over two months of paying attention to things that didn’t announce themselves. I turned.
Rosaria was at the edge of the Marchetti plot, just beyond the iron border, standing the way she stood when she had arrived somewhere and was taking stock of it.
She was the most translucent I had ever seen her — not alarmingly thin, not frighteningly thin, but diminished in the way a candle is diminished in the last hour of its burning, still entirely itself, still giving light, but with a quality of fragility that had not been there two months ago.
She looked at the headstone. She looked at Eileen. She looked at me.
“Well,” she said. “It’s about time.”
Eileen heard nothing. She couldn’t. But she looked at the spot where Rosaria stood with the particular attention of a woman who had spent decades being aware of presences she couldn’t fully perceive.
“She’s here,” I said. “Rosaria.”
Eileen nodded once, carefully, the nod of a woman who had learned not to require proof.
We arranged ourselves the way Ada’s document described — Lori at the center with the paper, the five of us in a loose circle around the two headstones, Eileen at Olive’s grave and me slightly apart, oriented toward where Rosaria stood.
The moon was fully up now, enormous and cold and white, flooding the cemetery with a light that was not quite like any other light.
It made the headstones silver. It made the shadows absolute.
It made the grass look like something from a different world entirely, which perhaps tonight it was.
Lori began.
She read Ada’s words in her steady unhurried voice, the voice she used when she was doing something that required precision and care and the particular kind of authority that didn’t need to raise itself to be heard.
The words were old — older than Ada, Gina suspected, older than the founding of Starfall Bay, words that had been borrowed from something older still and put to this specific use by a woman who had understood what she was working with.
Jill and Ruth and Tammy joined at the places Ada had marked for the full five. Their voices low and certain in the cold air.
Eileen held the pen.
I held nothing — I was the anchor, Ada had been clear about that, the anchor needed only to be present and to hold.
I looked at Rosaria and thought about two months of coffee and the harbor view and don’t be nosy and the toaster and he’s a good one, Gina and the chair by the window and we are not pretending anymore and every morning I had come downstairs and found her there and every morning I had been quietly, specifically glad.
I held all of it. I held it the way you hold something you are not willing to let go of.
Rosaria looked back at me with the expression she reserved for moments when she was going to say something she meant completely and wanted no misunderstanding about.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. I had known her for two years and I knew every register of that face, and what this one said was: I see you. I am here. This is real.
The moon did something.
It was difficult to describe afterward — not a change in the light exactly, more a change in the quality of what the light was doing, as if it had been simply illuminating and had shifted to something more active, more purposeful, the Hunter’s Moon performing the function Ada had known it would perform when she wrote the moon is required, without it the mooring will not hold.
Something moved through the circle that was not wind. Something settled.
Lori spoke the last words.
The silence after them was different from the silence before.
I looked at Rosaria.
She was still there. She was — more there.
Not dramatically, not all at once, but the fragility of the last days had receded by a degree that I could feel before I could see it.
The candle still burning, but the burning steadier, the light less provisional.
She looked at her own hands in the way people look at things they were afraid of losing and find they still have.
“Oh,” she said. Quietly. Just that.
Beside Olive’s headstone, Eileen made a sound.
It was a small sound, involuntary, the kind that escapes when you been waiting for something so long you had stopped entirely believing it would happen. She was looking at the headstone — at the space just in front of it, just above the grass — and her hand had come up to her mouth.
We looked.
At first it was nothing — a thickening of the air, a slightly wrong quality of the moonlight in that particular spot, the kind of thing you would dismiss if you were not looking for it.
Then it was more than nothing. A shape — indistinct, tentative, the outline of a woman in the way that a reflection in moving water is the outline of a face.
There and then less there and then more there again, finding itself, assembling from whatever it was assembling from, with the slow deliberate quality of something returning from a very long distance.
Olive Marchetti. Faint as breath on cold air. But there.
Eileen was weeping without making any noise about it, the tears simply present on her face in the moonlight, her hand still at her mouth.
She took one step toward the headstone and stopped, afraid perhaps that another step would disturb something fragile, break something that had only just begun to hold.
The shape steadied. It did not speak. It did not move. But something in its quality changed — a kind of orientation, a turning toward, the way a face turns toward a voice it has been straining to hear across a great distance and has finally, finally caught.
Toward Eileen.
The Hunter’s Moon held its position above the cemetery, enormous and indifferent and entirely necessary, and the six of us stood in its light and did not speak, because there was nothing to say that the moment wasn’t already saying better.
After a long time Rosaria said, from beside me, “Ada knew what she was doing.”
“Yes,” I said. “She did.”
Rosaria considered the shape of Olive at her headstone, and Eileen standing before her grandmother with thirty-eight years of waiting finally answered, and the expression on Rosaria’s face indicated she was very glad.
“Well,” she said. “Good.”