8. Margo #2
Then the professor says a word about tides and I think of his terrible knots and I am out of my seat, out the door and running, bag banging against my hip, down through the town I know better than my own hands.
Down the hill, the steps, and the harbor road, running as if the plan is chasing me instead of the other way around.
Because I’ve realized, an hour too late, that I don’t want to be smart.
I want to be his. I want to be with him.
When I hit the end of the pier, my lungs are on fire.
And the ship is already out.
Past the harbor mouth, sails full, that gleaming private thing his family sent for him. Small, already against the horizon and getting smaller as I stand there at the very end of the dock with the water slapping the pilings.
I don’t call out because what would be the point?
He can’t hear me, he’s gone.
I was too late, I was an hour and a lifetime too late.
So I watch until it’s a speck.
Then nothing.
But I keep the bracelet on for a year.
“Mommy… Mommy? Wakey, wake… Mommy!”
I surface out of the dream with my neck aching and my mouth dry. My daughter’s hand pats my cheek with the insistence of someone who has been trying for a while.
“Mommy, the wheels made a bump. Are we here? The man said we’re here.”
We’re here.
The little regional plane has bumped down onto a runway that’s barely more than a strip of tarmac between the hills and the water, and through the scratched window the whole of it opens up in the gray morning light, the harbor, the boats, the town climbing the hill in its crooked whitewashed rows.
My chest does a complicated thing.
Nine years I’ve been gone from this, more or less, back for a wedding here, a funeral there, always leaving again before it could reach me.
And now here I am with a child on my hip and a marriage in pieces, coming home the way you only come home when everything else has run out.
“That’s the sea,” Sandy breathes, nose to the glass. “That’s a lot of sea.”
“It is.”
“Bigger than the pool?”
“Bigger than everything, baby.”
The harbor hasn’t changed, and that’s the part that undoes me a little.
Same salt and diesel and fish-gut smell, same gulls screaming over the same nets. The same weathered pier stretching out into the same water, and I stand at the foot of it with our bags and I can see, if I let myself, a younger me at the far end of it watching a ship shrink to nothing.
There was a time I ran to this harbor because I couldn’t stand to let him leave without knowing.
Now, I came back to it because I finally couldn’t stand to stay.
Funny, how a place can hold both.
“Margo Delancy?” A voice behind me, warm and disbelieving. “I’m seeing things. Tell me I’m seeing things.”
I turn, and it’s Wallace. Broader than he was and browner, a coil of rope over one shoulder and a grin splitting his whole face, and before I can say a word he’s dropped the rope and pulled me and Sandy both half off the ground in a hug that smells of the boat he’s clearly just come off.
“Wallace…”
“Nobody said you were coming! Nobody said a word, and I’d have heard, so you didn’t tell anyone, which means…” He sets me down and reads my face the way people who’ve known you since you were six can read it, and the grin gentles. “Ah. Which means it’s like that.”
“It’s a little like that.”
“Right.” He doesn’t push. That was always the good thing about Wallace. He picks the bags up instead, both of them, easy, and holds his other hand out to Sandy with the total confidence of a man who’s got a pile of nieces. “And who’s this, then?”
Sandy considers him with her whole face. “I’m Sandy. Are you a fisherman?”
“Worst one in town. Don’t tell the others.”
“Do you have a pink boat?!”
“I have a very ugly green one. Would you like to insult it in person?”
Sandy decides on the spot that she loves him, and takes his hand, and we go up through the town like that, the three of us.
Wallace points out to Sandy which shop sells the good rock and which cat runs the post office, and me walking through my own childhood with my throat tight, and not one person we pass looks at me as if I’m a headline.
They look at me as Celia and Martin’s girl, home again.
I’d forgotten a person could be looked at that way.
“They’ll all know by lunch you’re back,” Wallace says, low, as we turn up the hill. “You know how it is. I won’t be the one telling the papers, if that’s your worry.”
“I know you won’t.”
“I might tell Julie, though.” He winces, apologetic. “She’ll murder me if I don’t and she finds out I saw you first.”
“Tell Julie.” I almost smile. “Julie’s allowed.”
***
My mother is in the garden when we come up the path, and she straightens with a hand at her back, and for one second she just looks, shading her eyes, not sure.
Then she sees me. The trowel hits the dirt and she’s coming down the path faster than a woman her age should move, apron flapping, saying my name like it’s a prayer she stopped expecting to be answered.
She doesn’t ask a single question.
She just opens her arms, and I walk into them. I break the way I’ve been refusing to break for two days and my five years of marriage, right there in the garden.
My mother holds the back of my head as if I’m small again and says there now, you’re home.
Behind us my father has come to the door, and I hear his voice.
“Celia? Is that…” and then nothing, because Martin Delancy is a man who runs out of words exactly when they’d matter most.
He just stands there in the doorway with his hand gripping the frame, looking at me and at the child on the path as if the sea’s given back a thing it had no business keeping.
“Are you Grandpa?” Sandy asks him, because Sandy asks everyone everything.
My father crouches, slow, knees cracking. “I am. And you must be Cassandra.”
“Sandy! I’m Sandy!”
“Sandy.”
He says it carefully, as if it’s a word in a language he’s afraid to get wrong, because the last time he held her she was barely more than a year old and couldn’t tell him her name.
I have to look away at the hills because the size of what I let get stolen from all of us is suddenly too big to hold.
“Well. You’re very welcome home, Sandy.”
Julie arrives before we’ve even finished the first pot of tea, in a cloud of noise and cheap perfume, phone already out.
“You absolute coward,” she announces, dropping into the chair beside me and hugging me sideways so hard the tea slops. “You come home and I have to hear it from Wallace? Wallace, Margo. I had to hear about my own cousin from a man who communicates in grunts.”
“I’ve been in the country for ninety minutes.”
“Ninety minutes is plenty of time to text your favorite cousin.” She holds me at arm’s length, checks me over, and whatever she finds there kills the theatrics for a second. “You look like death.”
“Thank you.”
“Loving death. Beautiful death.” She glances at Sandy, who’s been handed a biscuit the size of her head by my mother and is fully occupied. Then Julie lowers her voice. “Okay. How bad, on a scale of one to the-tabloids-are-calling-you-a-Russian-spy.”
I choke on my tea. “They’re not.”
“They genuinely are. Someone on the internet has a whole theory.” She flips her phone over so I can’t see it, a small mercy I notice and love her for.
“I’m not going to show you. It’s a nightmare down there and you don’t need it in your head.
I just need to know one thing, because I’ve had thirty-six hours of headlines and none of them are you. ”
She takes my hand. “Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Right. Good. Correct answer.” She squeezes. “We’ll work with no.”
***
The day goes the way homecomings go.
Sandy meets the chickens and names all four of them, badly. My father takes her down to see Wallace’s ugly green boat and comes back carrying her asleep on his shoulder, wearing an expression I haven’t seen on him in years.