Chapter Seven #2
She liked it.
For a while as she walked she thought about Whit and their plan, willing the excitement she had felt last night to return in full force, but then her mind wandered.
She wondered what Graydon would think (if he ever heard about what she was doing), and she began mounting a defense against him, preparing talking points about the value of children’s literature and the particular skills it required of its authors .
. . This walk, she realized, was doing the exact opposite of what she’d wanted from it.
In fact, it was making her more anxious, less settled, less connected to Mother Earth, and then—
And then she found herself staring at a small pond, slate gray against the morning sunrise. Mist was tucked into its edges
like dust along baseboards, and the low winter light was bisected and trisected by the orange- and red-leafed trees. Something
about the sight made her think, I am going to be a writer. Moments like this one were what she wanted to put on paper. Not what it looked like specifically—she hardly got jazzed about
setting—but the thing she felt in her ribs as she looked out on the milky pink and stark gray scene. She wanted to put it
down in words—this yearning, this hope, this connection to the world. A sense of both aloneness and togetherness as she walked
in the crisp air, her hair damp in places, her cheeks cool and rosy. I am going to be a writer.
Whit had tried every strategy in his repertoire for getting Annie to open up. First, on Saturday, he’d gone with Helen’s tried-and-true
method of quality time plus patience. Whit had told himself, in Helen’s voice, that Annie would talk when she was ready. She
was apparently not ready: not at the library, or when they went out for ice cream, not while they watched Mary Poppins, not for the whole of Sunday. And so, this morning on the drive to school, he’d tried the direct route of asking, “Is everything
okay, Annie?” and been told “Yes?” the question mark making his daughter sound more like a teen than a third-grader. “What
about Friday night?” he’d hazarded, but Annie seemed to have developed short-term memory loss. “I don’t know what you’re talking
about.” Whit had given up and then spent the morning speculating about the right thing to do, wishing Helen were here to help,
missing her all over again, and then realizing, with a start, that he was hungry.
He threw together a Croque Monsieur, something Helen had introduced him to on their honeymoon, when they had stayed in her great-aunt’s home in the south of France.
It had taken some convincing, since, as a rule, Whit was opposed to ham sandwiches, but Helen had spoken with such confidence, quoting chefs who’d said things about its merits as the perfect lunch and so on, and he’d been persuaded by her warm, commanding assurance.
He’d ordered one alongside her, and they ate them at a table looking out over the beach, where women in broad hats and men in speedos sunbathed, swam, and laughed.
Helen had been right, of course, and since then they had kept a ready supply of Gruyère and Parmesan, thickly sliced white bread, grainy Dijon mustard, and French ham.
Whit had kept up the habit after Helen died, and the sandwich always made him think of the Riviera in the summer.
He was allowing himself to rest in this memory—blue-striped umbrellas and shores covered in pebbles and people with fewer
qualms about beachside nudity—because it was easier than thinking about Annie or the fact that (1) he had written nothing
all morning, and (2) in a matter of minutes Merritt would arrive for their first day of work. He had spent Sunday sublimating
his nerves by giving most of the house its first good cleaning in days, and then today, after dropping Annie off at school,
he’d passed the morning in his study, swiveling around in his chair and listening to a BBC history podcast about the Tang
Dynasty.
He felt the oven-baked cheese crack under his teeth. Maybe this was a mistake. Or worse, a betrayal. What would Helen think
of Whit bringing in someone else to help him finish her masterpiece? Another woman, an attractive woman, and one whom he hardly
knew, who had been only too eager to jump in and help?
Whit felt a burst of guilt but was spared from having to come up with an answer when he heard someone rapping at the front
door, and of course it was Merritt.
“Hello.”
“Hello.” Merritt’s smile was broad. She wore a purplish coat, the cut of which reminded Whit ever so slightly of something owned by a suitor in a Jane Austen novel.
“I like your coat,” he said, which was not exactly true, but it was what came out.
“Oh, thank you,” she said, still standing on the small, covered porch. She had a brown leather backpack over one shoulder
and a tote bag in her opposite hand. Her green-framed glasses had little flecks of water on the lenses.
“Is it raining?”
“It’s just misty.”
“Did you walk here?”
“No,” she said, leaning to one side so he could see a silver Nissan Versa on the country road past the gate.
“Oh. You could have parked on the drive. I’ll write down the gate code.”
He sort of hated the gate code. A relic of Helen’s fame.
“Oh, okay,” Merritt said. “Next time.”
Her smile was beginning to look strained. This was awkward—why was this awkward? Could she sense his hesitance? Maybe his
worries about Helen were seeping out of him, sabotaging this partnership before they could even give it a shot. Or did she
sense Helen’s absence like a distant ghost?
“Well, can I come in?”
Oh God, what was happening to him? Was the part of his brain that navigated human interactions taking a nap? Was he unwittingly
slipping into sociopathy?
“Gosh, yes, please.”
Merritt laughed, not unkindly, and followed him in, taking the liberty of hanging her coat on the coatrack, presumably because
she doubted Whit’s ability to accomplish something requiring such elevated social savoir faire.
“So this is your house,” she said, standing in the foyer in a black sweater, black pants, and black lace-up boots, the one pop of color a short, silky gold scarf knotted at her neck. “It’s very . . . cozy.”
The pause, he knew, had been necessary while Merritt searched for a word other than “big.” Oddly enough, “cozy” worked. Under
the watchful eyes of Helen and a legion of contractors and interior designers, the big stone, English-style house had been
transformed from a picturesque but musty money pit into something airy and spacious, lit by dozens of warm and fuzzy lamps
and beeswax candles. There were flagstones in the entryway and kitchen and charmingly uneven, pristinely restored wood floors
everywhere else. Thick Persian rugs filled every space where they made sense; ancient, exposed oak beams arched over whitewashed
walls and walls papered in soothing deep blue and green patterns. The huge space had once crackled with the energies of a
famously social Victorian judge’s family. He’d brought his wife and their army of children across the sea from Scotland and
built a house that could stave off their homesickness. But over the centuries it had grown derelict and damp. Until Helen.
Whit sometimes bristled at the bigness of it all. He had not been used to obvious displays of wealth, and he’d been surprised
by how easily his wife slipped into a new kind of elegance when the book money started pouring in. But the piles of throw
pillows and endless baskets of blankets, the art and the antique furniture, the multiple fireplaces and the sheer oldness
of the place, made him feel like he was safe and warm in the Cotswolds or on a Bronte sister’s favorite misty moor. It was
Helen’s gift to herself and to him and Annie, and Whit was deeply grateful for the home she had left behind.
“It’s a two-hundred-year-old historical stone house,” he said to Merritt now, “remodeled within an inch of its life, but it
still gets cold, so please let me know if you need the heat turned up while you’re here.”
He was borrowing these lines, verbatim, from Helen. It was what she had said to guests, and now he was repeating the words like flight attendants on a weekly flight from Tampa to Raleigh.
Get it together, Whit.
“Can I get you something to drink? Water? Tea?”
“I’d accept tea.”
Merritt followed him to the kitchen. Everyone who’d been in his house for the last year had been there before: his sister,
his mother, Willa, some of his and Helen’s couple friends who’d checked in on him early on, then came around less and less
frequently. Merritt was the first guest in who knew how long to see the place with fresh eyes. He didn’t look back as they
walked, but he wondered what she saw: The sad remnants of a concluded marriage? A bachelor’s hovel? Or something else?
“I love this house,” she said once they were in the wide-open kitchen. When he turned to look at her, he decided she meant
it. Thank God he had cleaned up.
“Thank you. It feels like home.”
She nodded, then leaned against the counter that ran beneath a long window, her backpack still on.
“Sorry,” he said, filling the kettle at the farm sink. He popped it onto the stove, lit one of the eight burners, and turned
to her. “Let me take your bags to my study.”
She was distracted. “You have one of those things.”
Whit followed her gaze to the pot filler faucet over the stove.
“Oh, right,” he laughed. “I always forget.”
Merritt looked at him as if she were trying to crack an interesting, somewhat amusing code. It made Whit’s face burn slightly.