Chapter 3 #2
The grief-bond between them grew slowly.
Dinners I wasn’t invited to, then dinners I was invited to but couldn’t attend because I was handling foundation logistics.
A shared language about Cole that excluded me because I’d known him as a dinner guest and they’d known him as family.
Elise’s name appearing in Beckett’s calendar more and more frequently — coffee, gallery visits, a trip to Cole’s old studio to catalog his work.
I’d been the one to schedule that trip. I’d been the one to call the studio manager and arrange access and book the car service, and then I’d stayed home and managed a donors’ event while my husband drove to a dead man’s studio with the dead man’s sister and whatever happened between them in that space happened without me knowing, and I’d come home to a quiet house and a husband who said, “Elise is struggling. I should be there for her. It’s what Cole would have wanted. ”
And I’d said, “Of course.” Because I always said of course. Because saying anything else would have meant admitting that the marriage was a room with a crack in the door and someone was standing on the other side of it, and I was the one who’d been too busy hanging the paintings to notice.
The bus slowed for the Rockport turn. The highway narrowed to a two-lane road and the sea got closer and the houses changed — smaller, wooden, the colors of weather.
Salt-faded shingles and lobster buoys on porches and trucks parked in gravel drives.
Nothing curated. Nothing hung at forty-two inches to center.
Nothing that required a consultant or a caterer or a woman with a clipboard and a talent for invisibility.
I thought about the pregnancy. How I’d taken the test alone in the guest bathroom because Beckett was in meetings.
How I’d made the appointment with Dr. Adler alone because his calendar didn’t have a gap until the following month.
How I’d gone to the ultrasound alone and heard the heartbeat alone and bought the frame alone and practiced saying “I’m pregnant” alone in a parking lot, and the entire arc of discovering I was going to be a mother had happened in the spaces he wasn’t paying attention to, which by that point was most of them.
I’d planned to tell him at dinner. The good wine, the dining room, the announcement: “We’re having a baby.
” I’d rehearsed the smile. I’d imagined his face — the surprise, the softening, the hand on my stomach, the version of Beckett Aldridge who would hear this news and become the man I’d thought I married.
That version existed somewhere. I’d seen him once, at the Gardner, standing in front of a Sargent and talking about light.
Instead I’d stood in a hallway and heard him say he had infinite options.
Instead I was on a bus.
The Greyhound pulled into Rockport at 7:42.
Two minutes late. The station was a parking lot next to a gas station, and Andie’s truck was already there — a faded blue pickup with a dent in the passenger door and a bumper sticker that said SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL ARTIST (BUY NOTHING).
She was leaning against the hood with a thermos and a face that was trying very hard not to look like she’d been waiting for this call for six years.
I stepped off the bus. The cold hit me. Salt air, February wind off the Atlantic, the kind of cold that cleans you — nothing like the sealed, expensive warmth of the Back Bay.
Andie looked at me. Looked at the suitcase. Looked at my stomach, which at nine weeks showed nothing but which she looked at anyway with the X-ray vision of a woman who’d heard me say “pregnant” on the phone and was now confirming it with her own eyes.
She handed me the thermos. Tea, not coffee. She’d remembered.
“The spare room’s got clean sheets,” she said. “The studio opens at seven. There’s bread in the kitchen and I’m not going to ask you anything until you’ve slept.”
I took the thermos. My hands were shaking again — the same fine tremor from Tuesday night, from the hallway, from the glass of water I’d held with both hands — and Andie reached over and steadied the thermos without commenting on it, because that was Andie: she saw everything and named only what needed naming.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You can thank me when you’re painting.”
She drove me to her house. The truck smelled like clay dust and turpentine and the specific funk of a vehicle that had been used to haul sculpture materials in all weather for eight years.
The radio was off. Andie didn’t do background noise — she said it cluttered the part of the brain that was supposed to be making things, and I’d laughed at that once, at RISD, and now I understood it completely.
We drove through Rockport in the early morning light and I saw the harbor for the first time from ground level — the boats, the lobster traps stacked on the dock, the clapboard buildings along the waterfront painted in colors that had faded and peeled and been repainted and faded again.
It looked like a place where things were allowed to weather.
Her house was a converted fisherman’s cottage on a hill above the harbor — small, drafty, warm in the way that wood stoves make a place warm.
The spare room was at the back, a narrow bed under a window that looked out at the water.
She’d put a vase of dried flowers on the nightstand, which was the closest thing to sentiment Andie was capable of, and I sat on the bed with my suitcase at my feet and my coat still on and the thermos in my hands and looked at the harbor through the glass and cried for the first time since the hallway.
Not sobbing. Not a scene. Just tears, quiet and steady, running down my face while I sat very still and let them come, and Andie stood in the doorway and said nothing and then closed the door and I heard her footsteps in the kitchen and the sound of bread being sliced, and I thought: this is where it starts.
This narrow bed. This cold room. This view of water I used to paint before a man walked into my life and taught me that love was a reason to stop.
I drank the tea. I lay down. The bed was hard and the pillow smelled like lavender and the wind off the harbor rattled the window in its frame, and I put my hand on my stomach and said it one more time, to the ceiling, to the grape, to whatever version of myself was going to wake up tomorrow and start building something from nothing:
“We’re going to be fine.”
I closed my eyes and slept for fourteen hours.