“Thanks, Mom,” was all she said now. She trudged down the front steps into a mist that made her grateful for Kathleen’s fussiness.
Merritt made her way to her Nissan, turned it on, and immediately swatted the radio off. She would not have her walk sullied by another NPR sneak attack from Graydon Lyons.
On her mother’s advice, she had chosen a nearby trail, one that started and ended on the opposite edge of town and was therefore hard to get lost on. After leaving her car in a small dirt parking lot, she began to walk. Merritt enjoyed walking, which had never felt quite as true to her in Texas. Here, it took only a few steps to leave Whelk Harbor behind and feel like she was out in the world, in capital-NNature. Even as her feet padded along packed-dirt paths, and even in the presence of multiple elderly couples wearing unstylish sunglasses and walking with those ski pole–looking things, she was a woman of the woods out here, a natural woman, whatever. 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 makingher 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 watchedMary 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 hadintroduced 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 socialsavoir faire.
“So this is your house,” she said, standing in the foyer in ablack 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 Brontë 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 getscold, so please let me know if you need the heat turned up while you’re here.”
