Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
We did not leave the cemetery immediately.
There was no particular discussion about this either — the same unspoken agreement that had kept us in Tammy’s restaurant four days ago, the recognition that some things required a moment of simply standing in them before you moved on.
The moon held its position above the headstones.
The night was cold and entirely still. Eileen stood at her grandmother’s grave with her hand not quite touching the stone, and Olive’s shape held in the moonlight, tentative and present, and none of us felt any urgency to be anywhere else.
After a while Tammy produced, from somewhere in the interior of her coat, a small flask.
She looked at it and then at the assembled company and passed it to Eileen first, which was the right instinct.
Eileen took it with the automatic courtesy of a woman who had been raised to accept things graciously, took a small sip, and passed it on.
It went around the circle — something warm, something with honey in it, Tammy’s own — and when it came back to Tammy she took the last of it and put the flask away without comment.
Jill stood beside Eileen. She didn’t say much. She didn’t need to. She had the quality she had when she was simply being present for someone, the empath’s gift used in its quietest register — not reading, not reaching, just there. A warmth beside a woman who had been cold for a long time.
“She’ll be stronger,” Lori said to Eileen, quietly. “It takes time. The mooring holds but the solidity comes gradually. Give her Thursdays.” She paused. “Give her more than Thursdays, now. You don’t have to ration it anymore.”
Eileen looked at her grandmother’s shape against the headstone — already slightly less distinct than it had been at the height of the working, the moon doing less now, the ordinary night reasserting itself — and nodded.
“I know,” she said. “I can feel that.” She was quiet for a moment.
“I’ve been coming every Thursday for seven weeks.
Since I got back. Before that I came whenever I could — holidays, her birthday.
” She touched the headstone finally, just the tips of her fingers against the stone.
“I always felt her. Just barely. Just enough to keep coming back.”
“She felt you too,” I said. I was certain of this without knowing exactly how I was certain of it. “That’s why she’s still here. Thirty-eight years of you coming back.”
Eileen looked at me. Her eyes were dry now, the composure returned, but softer than it had been.
“Thank you,” she said. She said it to me and then to the group of us, taking us all in.
“I don’t — I’ve been doing this alone for so long that I don’t quite know what to do with —“ She stopped. “Thank you.”
“You’re one of us,” Lori said. Simply, the way she said things she had decided. “Whatever that means going forward. You’re one of us.”
Eileen looked at her for a moment. Then she looked at the five of us — Lori and Ruth and Jill and Tammy and me, standing under the Hunter’s Moon in a cemetery in the town her grandmother’s family had helped build — and something settled in her face that had not been settled before.
“All right,” she said. “Yes. All right.”
We walked out of the cemetery together, six of us, the iron gate swinging behind us, the moon enormous above the harbor, the town doing its quiet nighttime things all around us.
Ruth offered Eileen a ride. Tammy said she’d open the restaurant in the morning and there would be breakfast for anyone who wanted it.
Jill squeezed Eileen’s arm once before she got in the car. Lori said she would call tomorrow.
I walked home along the harbor path. The water was black and silver in the moonlight and the lighthouse was turning and the boats were settled and the town was exactly what it had always been — old and particular and built on things most of its inhabitants would never know about and held together by people who did.
Rosaria walked beside me.
Not visibly — she was not visible on the harbor path, she never was in public, she had opinions about what was appropriate — but present, in the way she was present, the specific quality of her attention beside me in the cold night air.
I could feel that she was steadier. Not fully restored, not all at once, but the provisional quality of the last weeks was gone.
The candle burning at its proper height.
We didn’t talk. We walked, and the harbor moved beside us, and it was enough.
Tony came home an hour later.
I was at the kitchen table with Rosaria in her chair — solidly in her chair, the candle burning at its proper height — when I heard his key in the door.
He came in, took in the room, took in me and the harbor and Rosaria’s chair, and hung his jacket on the hook without saying anything.
Then he sat down across from me and said, “Voss confessed.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“She said it wasn’t premeditated. It was an argument that went wrong.
She went early that morning and they fought about his getting back with his wife.
Things escalated.” He paused. “She’d had a relationship with Halverson on and off for four years.
She found out about the reconciliation with Diane.
She was angry about several things at once — the desk, the relationship, the undervaluation. It all came to a head.”
Voss in her Camden shop. The composure, the professional grief, he didn’t deserve what happened to him. She had meant it. That was the complicated thing about people.
“The desk,” I said. “She took it as cover.”
“Not exactly. She knew it has a lot of value. She took it and two random lots and left.” He paused. “She said it was to make it look like a robbery, but I suspect she had an idea to stow that desk away as a retirement plan. By then no one would remember or be looking for it.”
Rosaria, from her chair, had the air of a woman with views about crimes of passion over antique furniture who was choosing to keep them to herself. Restraint of a high order.
“Thank you,” I said to Tony. “For all of it. The desk, the promise.”
“Did you get what you needed?”
“We did,” I said. “We got exactly what we needed.”
He reached across the table and put his hand over mine.
We sat like that for a moment — the harbor outside, the lighthouse turning, the town quiet and intact — and I thought about Ada Waverly and her pens and the cold moon still hanging above the cemetery where Olive Marchetti’s shape was finding itself in the dark.
“Good,” Tony said. Just that.
The morning came in gray and steady, the harbor doing its ordinary things outside the window, Rosaria sat solidly in her chair.
“Well,” I said.
“Well,” she said.
She looked out at the harbor. I looked at the harbor.
We sat in the kitchen in the particular comfortable silence of two people who had been through something together and had come out the other side of it and were now simply drinking coffee — one of us actually drinking it, the other just watching.
“Rosaria,” I said, after a while.
“Mm.”
“I’m glad you’re still here.”
She looked at me with the expression she used when I said things that were obvious and she found the obviousness of them mildly exhausting but was going to let it go just this once.
“Of course you are,” she said. “Don’t be maudlin about it.”
I looked at my coffee cup so she wouldn’t see me smile.
“Stella wants to know,” Rosaria said, after another moment, in the tone of a woman relaying a message she has been asked to relay and has views about, “whether your young man is serious.”
I looked up.
“I told her,” Rosaria said, “that he moved a second razor into your medicine cabinet and that should be sufficient evidence for anyone.” She smoothed her housecoat with the air of a woman who had managed the situation competently. “Stella is not always reasonable. We manage.”
I looked at her — the housecoat, the pinned hair, the expression of a woman who had been dead for two years and was busier than most people who were alive, who had spent six days going thin and had come back and was sitting in her chair by the window with the harbor behind her, entirely herself, entirely present, entirely Rosaria.
“Thank you,” I said. “For staying.”
She looked at the harbor.
“Where else would I go?” she said.