"You have a remarkably high tolerance for fifteen-year-old boys, then," Bridget said. "They can be . . . well . . . you know. Pretty awful sometimes."
"No," Melissa said. "He was nice. We talked a bit."
Bridget forced herself not to ask, What about? Though she'd have given a lot just then to know. "You should come to the house one day," Bridget said, knowing the suggestion was risky.
Melissa looked away. There would always be, Bridget knew, a fierce loyalty to the mother that Bridget would not interfere with. A quality one could only admire.
"Maybe," Melissa said, leaving the door open but not committing herself.
It was enough, Bridget thought. It was quite a lot, actually.
Bridget asked questions then and Melissa politely answered them, once offering a question of her own, which astonished Bridget. "How are you feeling?" the girl asked.
Bridget thought a minute. She took a sip of coffee. She decided to tell Melissa the truth, unedited.
She worried about the tentacles of the star shape, she told the girl. She had a 50 percent chance of a recurrence, the correct term for the cancer's return. If it did return, it would show up in the bones or the brain or the liver. She hoped to make it until Matt was Melissa's age. This was the bargain she had more or less made with God: Let Matt get to twenty, and then you can do whatever you want with me. One could never really use the word "cure." One had to think of oneself as "a work in progress."
All this she told Melissa, who seemed startled at times by some of the revelations, but who appeared to take it in with concern. She was, Bridget thought, the perfect person in whom to confide. A woman who might want the information but who would remain essentially detached. The stranger on the plane to whom one confessed everything.
"That answer you gave last night at dinner," Bridget said, "about the Arab men on the plane. I thought it was the best at the table."
Melissa tilted her head. She would know, Bridget thought, that Bridget meant what she said, that she was not pandering, that a woman who had confessed being afraid of a recurrence in the bones might be expected to tell the truth.
The sun was hot on Bridget's back as she packed the car, Matt and Brian ferrying suitcases and suit bags and presents to the back of the van. (Presents! Bridget hadn't anticipated those.) Bridget had said to Bill when he'd found Bridget and Melissa in the dining room (quickly forestalling what she feared might be another collapse on Bill's part, her new husband decidedly unhinged this weekend) that he should drive back with Melissa so that the girl wouldn't have to make the journey alone. Bridget would take Matt and Brian. She had then gone in search of Nora to thank her but had no luck. She'd been reluctant to disturb the woman in her suite. Nora had to sleep sometime.
Bridget would write her a long letter when she got home.
"And then they lived happily ever after."
Bridget turned to find Rob and Josh, identical suit bags hooked over their shoulders.
"Where's the groom?" Rob asked.
""We're separated," Bridget said.
"So soon," Rob lamented, smiling at the joke.
Bridget embraced him. "Thank you for coming," she said.
"Wouldn't have missed it for the world."
"A long and happy life," Josh said, giving Bridget the quick hug of an acquaintance who might soon become a good friend.
"I'm calling you next week," Rob said. "After a suitable period of marital bliss."
"You're in Boston for a while?"
"For twenty days. Count 'em."
"And you're going to London," Bridget said, addressing Josh.
"In four days."
"Good luck with that."
"Thank you."
"So, we're off," Rob said. He turned to Matt. "You take care of your mom," he said and shook the boy's hand. "I'll send you that CD we talked about," he added, "and you keep working on your chords."
Matt nodded, and Bridget knew her son would be immensely pleased to have had his own music acknowledged by such a gifted musician.
Rob turned, a wave beginning. But then he stopped. He walked to where Bridget stood by the van and embraced her again, this one lasting seconds. This one saying what he had not said all weekend, what he would not say in front of Bridget's son.
I know you'll beat it.
Rob stood back and hitched the strap of his suit bag a little higher on his shoulder.
"Me, too," Josh said.
Bridget slammed the rear door of the van. "All right, that's it," she said to Matt and Brian. "Climb in."
Though either of the boys could have had the front seat, they'd chosen to sit together in the back. Bridget put the car in reverse. She had not said good-bye to Agnes or Harrison. Had they left already? Bridget made the turn, and as she did she caught sight of a branch of a tree glistening. It might be a trick of light, she thought, for it was just the one branch. Bridget stopped the car. It was a sight too beautiful to pass by. The branch pointed toward the mountains and glittered as if encased in jewels.
The limb must have been in shade, but now that the sun had hit it, the gemlike casing would last only seconds in the warmth.
Bridget had a thought. An extraordinary thought.
There was every possibility that she might live.
She might see more of Matt's baseball games. Melissa might come for Christmas. Bridget might one day be sweltering in the bleachers watching her son graduate from college.
Bridget and Bill might grow old together. Really, really old together.
The thought was so astonishing that Bridget glanced back at Matt to see if he, too, had seen the glittering branch, if he, too, had had a similar realization. But her son already had on his earphones and was fiddling with his Walkman. He smiled at her and gave a little wave.
The wonder of it, Bridget thought as she put the van in gear and pulled out of the parking lot.
Harrison returned to his room and began packing. On the desk was his letter to Evelyn, written two days earlier. He read it and tore it up, dropping the bits into the wastebasket. With her lawyer's eye, she would note the repetition of Nora's name, and she might wonder.
His suitcase packed, Harrison glanced around the room to make sure he hadn't left anything behind. He stepped into the corridor. He let the heavy door close and click behind him.
He started for the lobby and the registration desk, but when he had descended the stairway, he took a quick detour into the library. He gazed out at the view (now familiar, now losing some of its charm), at the high-tech coffee machine, at the framed photograph of the house as it had been years ago. He studied again the racetrack, the train a blur in the distance. The place had been here long before there was a Nora or a Carl Laski or a Harrison Branch or the ghost of a Stephen Otis. How many other stories might there be, Harrison wondered, in a house so old?
He walked out into the lobby, but there was no one at the desk. He waited a suitable interval and then placed the heavy gold key on the blotter. He'd already given his credit card. They would send him the bill. How odd it would be to receive that piece of paper in Toronto. To have an envelope from Nora's inn sitting on his kitchen table. One world intruding painfully into the other. Would Harrison be able to open it, or would he simply drop it into a file of bills, to be glanced at later — months later, perhaps?
It would sting, that bill, just the way a quick memory of Stephen could reach out and sting at any moment.
Harrison hoisted his bag over his shoulder and stepped into the sunshine.
The pavement was wet. The maze was revealing itself. Even the wrought iron fence shone in the sunlight.
Harrison walked quickly toward his car. It would take him just under two hours to get to Hartford. Another hour until his plane left. Two hours to Toronto. He'd be home in time for Sunday dinner, an old-fashioned ritual Evelyn and Harrison had decided to maintain, thinking that the boys needed one immovable feast in the week. Evelyn would do up a rack of lamb (his favorite) or a pork loin (the boys'
favorite), and they would take their time over the meal, allowing nothing to interfere. Today that dinner would be a kind of torture for Harrison, though next week's would be slightly easier, and easier still the week after that. And finally his memories of this wedding weekend would not be with him all the time, but would come only intermittently — at lunch, say, while waiting for a colleague and trying to draw from memory on a paper napkin the jumbled roofline of the inn.
Tell me a story, she had said.
Harrison opened his trunk and tossed in his bag. He heard a commotion behind him and turned to look. A couple, surrounded by friends and family, was on its way from the inn to a waiting car, the car done up in tin cans attached to the rear bumper, colored streamers wet and clinging to the hood. Harrison had only a glimpse of the couple, who must, he thought, be the bride and groom of the Karola-Jungbacker party, the parallel wedding to that of Bill and Bridget. Casually dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, her body small and lithe, the young bride skipped down the steps, flashing a lovely smile and stopping to hug a friend. The groom had his hand on her back, as if guiding her to their new life. Solidly built and wearing a sweatshirt that read Dartmouth across the front, he turned to shake a hand. His back was thumped, and he laughed. A man in the crowd with a movie camera called out, Over here, Ian. Look over here. Harrison heard other cries rising aloft from the send-off.
Be good, someone said.
Don't be good, said another.
From the doorway, Nora waved. Harrison didn't know if the wave was for himself or for the couple, and not knowing, Harrison waved back. A small movement of his hand that might have gone unnoticed.
The groom helped the bride into the car and started the engine. Harrison watched as the vehicle, tin cans tumbling noisily, made its way around the circular drive and passed by him. The young woman, still smiling, glanced at Harrison, and he smiled back.
They had it all before them, he thought. Uncommon beauty. Thrilling risk. The love of children. A sense of rupture. A diagnosis. Relief from pain. Great love. Betrayal. Grand catastrophe.
When he turned to open the door to the Taurus, he suddenly felt quite hollowed out. For a minute, he couldn't breathe. He hadn't anticipated how much it hurt physically to be separated from Nora.
Leaving might be all wrong, he thought — all wrong for all the right reasons. He glanced up at the entrance to the inn, but Nora had gone inside.
Would it be possible to start again? he wondered. Could he and Nora rewrite their own history? Bill and Bridget had done so. Might he and Nora make a life together after all these years?
He felt a wild recklessness within him.
Charlie, he thought. Tom.
Harrison leaned against the door and waited just a moment longer.
Acknowledgments
I have many people to thank. Katherine Clemans, natural-born editor. Chris Clemans, who introduced me to the joys of baseball. Molly Osborn, who talked to me about field hockey. Celeste Cooper, with' whom I love to brainstorm. Elinor Lipman, dear friend, literary and otherwise. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, to whom I owe so much. Michael Pietsch, beloved captain of the ship. Asya Muchnick, whose sharp eye and gentle nature I much appreciated. Heather Fain, who makes the public side of the writing life so much easier to bear. Karen Landry, who appears to love baseball even more than I do. And John Osborn, who always sees the bigger picture.
Most of all, however, I would like to thank my father, Richard Shreve, to whom this book is dedicated, for persuading me and my sisters, Janet Martland and Betsy Shreve-Gibb, that we could be or do anything if only we tried hard enough. Sometimes life taught us otherwise, but we never wanted to let him down.
About the Author
Anita Shreve is the author of the acclaimed novels Eden Close, Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, Resistance, The Weight of Water, The Pilots Wife, Fortunes Rocks, The Last Time They Met, Sea Glass, All He Ever Wanted, and Light on Snow. She lives in Massachusetts.
Also by Anita Shreve
Light on Snow
All He Ever Wanted
Sea Glass
The Last Time They Met
Fortunes Rocks
The Pilot's Wife
The Weight of Water
Resistance
Where or When
Strange Fits of Passion
Eden Close
A Wedding in December
Anita Shreve, A Wedding in December
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