Chapter 4
SIENNA
I don’t know where I’m going until the highway splits and I take the north fork.
The coast road is empty. No trucks, no headlights, just the white line unspooling in front of me and the water somewhere out there in the dark on my right. I haven’t driven this road since I got married. I don’t have to think about a single curve of it.
The lane is worse than I remember, grass up the middle, gravel popping under the tires. I pull up to the end of it and cut the engine and the headlights die and the sea is just there, wide open behind the cottage, silver under the moon, moving the way it moves whether anyone is watching or not.
I sit in the car with my hands still on the wheel and look at it.
I forgot how much of the sky you get out here.
The cottage belongs to me. Not to us, not to the marriage, and not to the arrangement my grandfather explained over a desk. I bought the cottage with my own money while I was working at Granddad’s company, before Cade, before any of it, and my name is the only one that has ever been on the deed.
Cade doesn’t know it exists.
That thought opens in my chest like the first full breath I’ve taken all night.
The key sticks the way it always did. Quarter turn, then lift. The door gives and the cottage smells the way a place smells when it’s been shut up too long, dust and old paint and under that, salt. Something in me unclenches so hard my eyes sting.
I put my hand on the switch and the kitchen light comes on.
I have paid the electric bill on this house every month of my marriage. A small payment from an account he never looked at. I never mentioned it. Some part of me always knew I’d need the lights to come on when I got back here.
The couch is the first thing I reach. I mean to make the bed. The sheets are in the cedar chest where I folded them the morning of the wedding, like a woman closing up a season. I remember thinking I’d come back for a weekend in August.
I sit on the couch to take off my shoes, then tuck my feet beneath me. I still mean to make the bed. The next time I open my eyes, the window over the sink has gone gray and I can hear the waves outside.
I’m still in the soft pants and the old sweatshirt. One sock has come off in the night and is balled up between the cushions.
Cade offered to take the couch on our wedding night. He said it kindly, the way a man offers a favor he expects to be thanked for, and I lay there in the dark and turned it into a promise: he’s going slowly, he’s being decent, he’ll come the rest of the way.
It was five weeks before he touched me, and only then because I asked, in the dark, with my voice pitched so it could be a joke if it needed to be. He said yes. He was careful with me. I told myself careful meant something was growing.
He never came the rest of the way. He was standing exactly where he meant to stand the whole time. And I had signed that contract pretending I was as practical as he was, while every word I didn’t say was just please fall for me.
I get up and open every window in the place.
Three of them are swollen shut and take the heel of my hand.
The air that comes in is cold and wet and smells like the flats at low tide, and it moves through the rooms and finds the stale air and starts pushing it out.
I haul the couch cushions onto the deck rail and beat them until the dust comes off in clouds, and I stand there swinging in my sweatshirt with my hair full of grit and something unfamiliar moves through me.
I haven’t felt this in so long it takes me a second to recognize it.
Relief. Just relief. Nobody needs me out here.
Nobody is going to walk through a door and hand me a problem wrapped in politeness.
I’m standing on my own deck hitting my own cushions and the only person I’m doing it for is me.
I hit the last cushion harder than it needs.
When I stop, I realize I’m smiling, stupid and wide, at absolutely nothing.
Inside, I catch myself running his schedule in my head before I’ve poured a glass of water.
A flight Thursday. A dinner Friday with a name I could still recite.
A shirt at the cleaners that has to be back by Wednesday or the Friday won’t work.
All of it sitting where it sits every morning, ahead of anything of mine.
None of it is mine anymore.
I stand in my own front room and there is nobody coming home to this house at an hour I need to work backward from. Nothing here waiting on me to smooth it over first.
“Well,” I say out loud, to nobody.
The room just absorbs it. No rebuttal, no negotiation. I listen to the silence settle back down around the word, and I don’t apologize for taking up the space.
The drive into town is short, windows all the way down, letting sixty-mile-an-hour wind scour out whatever stale breath of his house is still clinging to the leather.
The market in town hasn’t moved a shelf. Same green baskets, same handwritten signs, same bell over the door that’s needed oiling since I was in high school.
I buy eggs and butter and bread and coffee and four tomatoes I have no business buying this time of year.
I buy the blue cheese Cade won’t have in a house because he claims he can smell it through the refrigerator door.
I buy salt because I can’t picture the box in my own cabinet and would rather have two.
The woman at the register has reading glasses on a chain and rings me up without hurrying.
“You’re back,” she says. Not a question.
“I’m back.”
“Those tomatoes are a crime this time of year.” She rings up all four. “I’d have told you if you’d asked.”
“I’d have bought them anyway.”
“I know it.” She puts the eggs in their own bag, the way she always has, the way nobody in the city has ever done for me once. “You bought them out of season the first time you came in here. Stood right there and told me you knew exactly what you were doing.”
“I did know.”
“You did not.” She counts my change into my palm. “Staying at the little place?”
“I am.”
“Good to have you,” she says.
She doesn’t ask about my life in the city.
She doesn’t know there’s a husband in it.
Down there, every conversation I had was managed first, the ground cleared before I opened my mouth.
I get all the way to the car before it hits me, and then I am crying so hard I can’t get the door shut, and I sit there with my hands on the wheel until my eyes clear.
Because nobody has been that easy with me in a very long time. Nobody has just let me stand there and be a person without needing something smoothed or managed or made beautiful first.
At home I cook with the window light and a lamp dragged in on its cord, because the bulb over the sink went sometime while I was gone and there is nothing in the house to replace it with.
Two eggs in butter until the edges go lacy.
A tomato cut thick with salt. The bread in the pan after, in what the eggs left.
I burn my thumb on the handle and swear at the stove, and there is nobody in the next room who is going to appear in the doorway staring at the phone in his hand to ask, kindly, whether everything is all right in here.
Two years of toast standing at a counter, eaten fast so my hands would be free by the time he came downstairs. I never once made a whole breakfast for myself in that kitchen. It never occurred to me to try.
After the dishes, I start opening the cottage back up properly.
The book boxes are in the closet, four of them, tape gone brittle. My handwriting in fat marker on the side: BOOKS. DO NOT LOSE. I was packing up my first apartment and apparently shouting at the future.
It takes an hour to get them shelved with my others. Dust in my hair, dust on my arms. Half of them have my name inside the front cover in handwriting I barely recognize.
These are the books from before. I kept buying them after the wedding, one here and there, but I stopped finishing them.
I’d get a chapter in and set it down and forget about it, and then a week would pass, and then a month.
I stopped the way you stop doing anything that never makes it onto someone else’s calendar, quietly, without noticing, until you can’t remember what you used to think about before bed.
The woman who packed these boxes read every chance she got and had opinions about all of them. She swam in cold water in May because waiting for June struck her as cowardly. She was happy and certain of herself and she had never in her life warmed up her voice before she used it.
I miss her. I miss her more than I miss anything I left in his house.
I take a book out to the deck and try. The first page won’t hold. I read it twice and arrive at the bottom with nothing. I set it face down on the arm of the chair and sit there looking at the water.
I don’t feel like a woman whose marriage just ended.
I feel like a woman who just got out.
The relief is enormous, and I don’t give a damn that it’s the wrong thing to feel. The grief will catch up with me eventually; I’m not stupid. But right now, out here on this weathered deck, the wind belongs entirely to me. I lean back, taste the salt dried on my mouth, and let the quiet take over.
The bed gets made at dusk. Cedar chest, good sheets, the quilt with the old burn in the corner. I sleep nine hours and wake before the sun without an alarm.
Coffee. Out to the step.
The cold comes up through the concrete into the backs of my legs while the morning burns gray off the water. I’ve loved this stretch of coast since I first came out here alone. I forgot I didn’t need anyone’s permission to just exist in it.
I have decided nothing except to sit here. The rest will sort itself when it’s ready.
The phone has been off since I got here. I bring it out with my second cup and set it on the deck railing, because I’m a grown woman and not a person hiding from a telephone.
It finds the tower and starts lighting up.
Fourteen missed calls. All him. No voicemails, because I never set one up, and he’s never needed to leave one.
My chest tightens looking at the number. Fourteen calls is a man alone in a house, trying again and again. For a second I almost feel sorry for him.
Then I remember standing in the cold in a thin dress with a heavy brass plaque in both hands and no ride home. Whatever was softening in me goes stone cold.
The screen brightens. His name again. Fifteen.
I watch it ring. Every instinct I have tells me to swipe and smooth it out. My thumb doesn’t budge.
It stops.
I pick up my coffee and drink it lukewarm. No guilt, no urge to soften the blow, and certainly no debt to a man who only just remembered I exist.
Behind me, the railing starts to buzz again.
I let it.