“Sure.” Louisa is nine—easygoing, except when her temper rears up.
You have a bright future ahead of you,people have been saying to Martin since his high school days, and earlier than that too, really since he got to this country, a boy of twelve, with his brogue and his foreign parents and his unfashionable clothes, determined not to let anyone pass him. Yale undergrad, Harvard for law, private practice, his eye one day on the state supreme court, and here he is, in a city, in a kitchen, at a table, holding a paper, wanting nothing more than for his beautiful wife and his sunny daughter to leave him alone so he can grasp at the brass ring as his horse moves around and around on the carousel.
“Of course it’s all right,” he says. “It’s more than all right, I’d feel terrible if the two of you were stuck back herewhen you could be up there, breathing in all that ocean air, being tended to by your mother.”
“All right,” says Annie. “If you’re really sure about it, I guess we’ll go. We’ll go! Should I leave Fenway with you, or bring him with us?” Annie considers the dog, who raises his ears affably and looks back and forth between the two of them with his black button eyes.
“I’m sure I don’t mind either way,” says Martin. He folds the paper, stands, kisses his wife on the cheek, his daughter on the forehead. Fenway presses against his leg and Martin pats him on the head. “He’d get more chances to run up there, and he’d be nice company for Louisa.”
Martin doesn’t know the rest of it that morning—how could he? Later that week he’ll meet Sheila Turner. In three years Annie’s parents will be dead, and the Owls Head house as well as a significant amount of money will go to Martin and Annie. In four years, he’ll be a district court judge, then superior court; in ten, a state supreme court justice, black-robed in front of the famous red curtain. Fenway will be only the first of the golden retrievers, followed by Gremlin, by Bentley, by Winslow, by Otis.
By seventy-three he’ll hardly know that any of this happened.
He says hello and goodbye to his daughter Kristie on the very same day. Kristie is two weeks old. She grasps Martin’s thumb in her little fist, and her eyes meet his. Louisa’s eyes had stayed in a milky state for some time before resolving into their startling sapphire blue, but this baby’s eyes are clear and bright already. It’s like looking into his own eyes, and he has the feeling that Kristie knows that, that she’s looking into his very core, that she knows what’s coming next.
Martin touches his lips to Kristie’s silky forehead. She smells like baby powder and Ivory soap and innocence; she smells just as Louisa did as a baby. Kristie closes her eyes and he stares at her gossamer eyelids, the tiny lavender veins snaking their way across.
Sheila is going to take the baby and go back to Philadelphia, where she has family. She’ll live with her sister. That makes him feel better. Where there’s a sister there’s help and hope. She’ll put off the rest of her education now, but not forever. Of course not forever.
He has to pull over on the drive home—he can’t see, for cryingso hard, and he can’t stop crying, thinking of the gossamer eyelids and the baby powder smell.
It’s a workday and Annie isn’t expecting him home at this hour. He catches her humming as she goes about her business in the kitchen, measuring, chopping, washing. The radio is on: Eric Clapton.
“I have to talk to you, Annie,” he says. He pours two glasses of whiskey and hands her one. Louisa is at school—the bus drops her off at three o’clock.
“Martin! It’s two in the afternoon. What on earth?”
“I’ve made a mistake,” he says. “And I need your help to put it right.”
A rustling under the table. He puts his hand down and feels the square head of the dog. “Fenway,” he says.
Louisa clears her throat. “Daddy, that’s Otis. Fenway is long gone, remember?”
“Ah,” he says. Well, no matter—one soul carries the soul of the dog before it, which carries the soul of the dog before it. In the end, maybe, it’s only the dogs that remain.
He looks around at all the faces, and beyond them, to the picture window, and beyond that there’s the water meeting the sky, the tangle of colors as the sun is setting. A sailboat gliding by, a glimpse of the far-off Samoset.
At the opposite end of the table is Annie, the love of his life, his North Star, silver hair catching the last of the sun, as beautiful now as she was the day she was his bride. And Louisa, and her children, and her husband. And the young man who mows the lawns and weeds the flower beds.
And Kristie.
They all think he doesn’t understand; they think he doesn’t know, and sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he’s lost, swimming through the murky past. Can’t tell the surface from the depths. Butin moments like this, when the thoughts unsnarl and the memories slot themselves into the right places, he knows. Oh, for certain, he knows.
Louisa raises a glass and every person at the table follows suit, even the children with their glasses of milk, Matty with his water. Martin catches Annie’s eye across the table and she gives him a tiny nod, because she knows too.
“To family,” says Martin. One by one they echo him. The word bounces off the walls, pings off the picture window. To family. To family. To family.
46.
Kristie
Danny takes Steven out to see the black knight flowers and the hydrangeas, his August bloomers, and Kristie begins to help Louisa clear the table; she heard Annie tell Pauline earlier to go ahead and go home. But Louisa shoos Kristie away and says the kids will help her. Otis exits after Danny, and then it’s only Kristie and Martin and Annie left in the dining room. Kristie lingers there for an awkward moment, unsure where to go or what to do. Annie, standing, leans over Martin, seated, and says something too quietly for Kristie to hear. The intimacy of the moment propels Kristie straight out of the dining room and into the adjacent living room.
The living room is longer than it is wide, with pink-and-green floral couches that look like they’ve seen better days but also look like, yes, they’ve seen somereally amazingdays. The windows on the back wall, which reach from behind the couch to nearly the ceiling, look directly onto the porch and by extension onto theyard and the water. The room has the haphazard, premium look that most of Ships View has: a table in the corner with a jigsaw puzzle 30 percent completed, an antique coffee table stacked with books, another faded Persian rug. Everything in the house seems to be saying,You could replace me if you want something newer. But you’ll sacrifice quality to do it,and whatever you choose instead won’t look nearly as nice.The walls are covered with family pictures in plain wooden frames.
Kristie turns and runs her hand along the back of one of the armchairs. Her mother had been in this house! Had her mother been inthisroom? Had she sat onthischair? Had she touchedthisflower on the fabric? What about this one? This couch, this table, this book about the building of the Rockland breakwater? Kristie remembers again the family tree project in seventh grade.Leave it blank. Put deceased.She sits on the couch; she closes her eyes and opens her heart and her soul. She tries to imagine her mother here, as a young woman, a hopeful woman. A woman with a married lover; a woman with a secret. A woman who still thought anything was possible. When she opens her eyes, she’s not alone any longer. Martin is standing in the doorway, watching her.
“Ohmygod,” she says. She puts a hand flat on her chest. “I’m sorry, I—you startled me. Sorry.”
