11. Wilson #2
“Ah.” She nods slowly. “The woman in the Whitmore cottage.”
My head comes up so fast my neck complains. “You know her?”
“Small island.” She shrugs. “Dark hair. Sad eyes. Comes in every afternoon for a coffee and one of Maggie’s blueberry scones. Tips like a saint.” She pauses, watching me. “Cries sometimes, when she thinks nobody’s looking.”
I close around nothing.
Cries when she thinks nobody’s looking. She learned that being married to me.
“I’m her husband.” The word comes out too big and too small at once. “Or I’m trying to earn it back. I’m not doing a great job so far.”
Her expression sharpens into a guard dog’s. She crosses her arms. “She never mentioned a husband.”
“She wouldn’t.” I look down at the coffee. “I didn’t give her much worth mentioning.”
The espresso machine hisses. A gull screams somewhere over the harbor.
“Maggie’s blueberry scone could end wars.” Her voice comes down half a notch. “If a man was looking for a peace offering.”
“Is that advice or a threat?”
“Both.” She almost smiles. “Hurt her worse than she’s hurting, and I salt your coffee for life.”
“Fair.” I turn the cup in my hands. “I’ve earned worse than salt.”
She goes back to the machine. I sit at that window until the light starts to die, watching the street for dark hair and a walk I’d know anywhere.
She doesn’t come.
I leave a twenty on the table and walk back to the inn, and at the little desk under the slanted ceiling I start tomorrow’s letter.
I asked Linda a question today, it begins. I have to stop on the second line and breathe before I can make myself write down her answer.
***
Izzy
I find the envelope at dawn.
I’ve been sleeping terribly since I got here. Waking up before the sun, wandering through Gran’s cottage in wool socks and her old cardigan that still smells like her Jean Naté perfume.
The floorboards creak the same way they did when I was a kid.
The pipes knock like they’re complaining about the cold. Down the hill I can hear the waves doing their thing.
I came in through the kitchen door last night, the way you do when you love this house, and I didn’t even think to check the front step.
Now I’m opening the front door to watch the sunrise, the way I do every morning here, and there it is.
Cream envelope. My name on the front in his handwriting.
I’d know that handwriting anywhere.
He found me. He’s here. He’s on this island.
My knees go loose against the doorframe.
I look down the empty drive, at the scrub pines, at the road beyond them, and every shadow could be him and none of them are.
My first instinct is the trash can. Crumple it, burn it, protect what’s left of me from whatever’s inside.
My hands pick it up and carry it in anyway.
It sits on the butcher block while the coffee brews.
It rides in my cardigan pocket down the beach, my boots printing the wet sand, my fingers finding its edges every few steps.
It comes with me out to the rocks at the point, where I watch the ferry bring in people with ordinary lives and intact marriages.
I don’t open it.
If it’s another apology, another explanation, I’ll come apart, and I have worked so hard out here at staying in one piece.
I’ve painted.
I’ve walked. I’ve cooked meals I barely touch and called it healing.
At noon I give in.
I’m in the porch rocker under the blanket my grandmother crocheted before I existed, hands numb from the cold, when I tear the envelope open so fast the paper rips.
Izzy,
I know you don’t want to see me. I understand why. I’ll respect it for as long as you need.
But I’ll be at the coffee shop on Main Street every morning at eight, and every morning I’ll leave you another letter. You don’t have to read them. You don’t have to answer. You don’t have to do anything at all.
I just need you to know I’m not giving up.
I’m not going anywhere.
Wilson
I read it twice. My breath fogs over the paper.
He’s here. He followed me to the one place I thought was mine alone, and then he didn’t knock. He left paper instead of pounding, distance instead of demands.
That’s new. God help me, that’s new, and I hate that I can tell.
I carry the letter inside and stand it against my grandmother’s old vase on the kitchen table, and I spend the whole rest of the day not looking at it so hard that I memorize it.
The second envelope is waiting at dawn.
I’m barefoot on the freezing porch boards before the sun is fully up, and this time my hands don’t pretend. I tear it open standing right there in the cold.
Izzy,
I asked my assistant when your birthday is. I called Linda and asked her straight out, because I realized I wasn’t sure.
She knew without looking it up. March 15th, she said. You like peonies and dark chocolate and the place in the Village with the bad lighting and the good pasta.
I had to check my own calendar to know if she was right.
She’s been buying your gifts for three years, Izzy. The flowers, the jewelry, the robe you never wore. She chose them, wrapped them, signed my name to cards I never read.
I told myself the gesture mattered more than who handled it.
I was wrong about that the way I was wrong about everything.
I am so sorry.
Wilson
The porch goes out from under me. I sit down hard on the top step in my grandmother’s cardigan with the letter shaking in both hands.
He didn’t know my birthday.
Linda knew. Linda, who picked the peonies I put in water.
Linda, who wrapped the gifts I thanked him for with my mouth against his cheek.
All those cards in a florist’s tidy print, and I told myself he’d dictated every word, and the truth is worse.
He never even dictated. He never knew what the cards said at all.
The sounds coming out of my chest don’t belong to me.
They echo off the porch rails and scare a bird out of the beach roses, and I cry until the sun is all the way up and my face is stiff with salt.
Then I read it again.
He’s said sorry a hundred times. Maybe more. But this is the first time it ever showed up in his own handwriting.
Shaky. Cramped. Pressed so hard into the paper that I can feel the words from the back of the page.
He held this.
He sat somewhere and wrote every single letter himself and I can tell he hated himself the whole way through.
It’s all right there in the ink.
The way the pen dug in. The way some words are darker than others, like he had to stop and start again.
I can see all of it.
I fold the letter with hands that won’t stop shaking and carry it inside. I set it beside the first one, leaning against Gran’s old vase.
Tomorrow at dawn I already know I’m going to check the doorstep again.
I hate how much I already know I will.
I hate that the sun can’t come up fast enough.