“BARBARA, YOUR FILLING’S going to have to wait, but you’re going to be a big help. Can you assist us in pulling a wild colt into the world?”
At first I didn’t recognize you. Then I saw Olivia, with her freckles and rosy cheeks, straggling in with Chief Margaret. I had seen dozens of photos of you. Chris had shown them to me. Now you were on the island, giving birth to your second child in the dentist’s office. I was so shocked, I got dizzy. Not at first, because I thought I was the one with the most experience bringing babies into the world and that they needed me. You needed me. Chris needed me. I held out until your baby peeked her head out. And I thought, She’s not a breech birth, and she doesn’t have the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck; everything’s OK. Then I let myself go and it hit me.
What did you expect, that a colt would come out of my womb? I heard you in an echo, already off in the distance.
More than a month had passed since Chris had left the island. I had taken his silence as him undergoing the necessary process of reconnecting with reality. I knew I wouldn’t get any letters or visits, and that was fine. I wasn’t yearning for them. I had entered into an auto-programmed state of hibernation, like the crew of a spaceship crossing the silent darkness that separates Earth from a faraway, unknown planet. That meeting brought me straight back, without the necessary decompression. Where was Chris? What were you all doing there without Chris? I didn’t understand anything. I thought he would show up any moment. Maybe he had gone to the mill to wrap his present and give you all a surprise, and things had just happened in a rush. But no, he wouldn’t have come back without telling me. What he wanted to resolve wasn’t going to be resolved at least until what had just happened had happened: the birth of your daughter. And plus, while they moved you to the ambulance boat, I heard you calling your mother to tell her what had happened and say they’d be taking you to Cape Cod Hospital, that you were fine and that the girl seemed to be in perfect health. Not a single mention of Chris.
When I was back on the farm, I hit *67 and called his business phone. It rang five times and went to voicemail. That scared me even more. Chris had told me he never had his voicemail activated. I hung up without leaving a message. What was happening?
I caught the ferry to see if his truck was still parked at the Hyannis terminal. It was.
I called Mark to ask him for another appointment for the filling. And in passing I asked him a few questions about you. How crazy was what happened with that girl, right? What was she doing on the island? And her husband? How terrible, missing out on your daughter’s birth. He wasn’t with them? He told me it had all been so fast that there wasn’t much time to talk about practically anything.
I tried to convince myself that everything was OK, and by OK, I mean that he was alive, that the birth had happened when he was off on one of his business trips and that you had talked to him before. The thought didn’t get me far because it didn’t make any sense that you were on the island without him. None at all. I called his business phone a few more times, always with the same result: it went to voicemail. Something was wrong.
It was two days before I dared to type into Google: Chris Williams + WTT + Providence. The third result sent me to the webpage of the Providence Journal obituary section, where I found his entry. A photo of him smiling with the following text below it:
WILLIAMS, CHRIS M., 35, died on May 13, 2015. Beloved husband of Alice and father of Olivia Williams; son of Christopher Sr. and Betty Williams; brother of Tricia; and grandson of Arthur and Lisa Williams and of Alfred and Josephine Reis, deceased. Chris graduated cum laude from the University of Virginia with a degree in business administration and was the owner of WTT. He was an intelligent, effervescent, sincere, strong and hardworking man who lived life as an endless series of adventures. Chris was a committed father and husband. He always supported the people he loved and made the world shine with his presence. Chris will be loved and missed by all those who knew him. We will never forget you. RIP.
Chris had died. And I had lost my will to live.
It was hard for me to gather the necessary energy to go to the Swan Point Cemetery. The thought of seeing you there made me panic, but I had to do it. I needed to be near him. I wanted to say goodbye to him. I didn’t manage to.
I didn’t ride Nessy again after the day I found out about his death. Horseback riding for me is like breathing, an automatic, involuntary function. It gives me life. My father got worried. Jeffrey got worried. I was incapable of telling them anything. They didn’t understand what was happening to me. Honey, tell me what’s up. Maybe I can help you, my father said. But I was catatonic. I didn’t react and I started to shut up inside me everything that I could. At night I would go to the mill, lie down on the mattress and hug the quilt even though it was the middle of summer. It didn’t smell like Chris anymore, but I imagined it still did, and I would cry all night regretting that I hadn’t pushed things further, that I hadn’t tried to snatch him out of your hands, even if you were pregnant.
I rewrote the letters we had sent each other, his and mine. It was easy to burn them at the time because I knew them by heart. I had read them dozens of times. I was sure I had forgotten some details and omitted information, but the important thing, the basic thing, our story, remained intact. And when I finished recollecting them and rounded off the collection of missives—with the days when they were sent included—I started writing more letters. New ones. I went on with our story, Letters that I would slip through the slot in the door of the mill. I didn’t dare go back inside.
I felt guilty. Very guilty. In my mind I couldn’t stop analyzing all the variations that would have prevented him from leaving. I didn’t know the details of his death, just that he had died the same day he left the island. That two days before he couldn’t stop complaining—even though he wasn’t a whiner at all—about how he felt dizzy, his vision was blurred, and he had a bad headache. Symptoms that seemed psychosomatic, the prelude to reaching a complicated decision like leaving his dream half-finished.
I thought about going to see you; I needed to talk, to share my mourning, but I barely had any strength. I didn’t dare leave the farm. As if there weren’t any oxygen past the fences marking the borders of the property. The last time I had left not just the island, but even the farm, was when I went to the cemetery. My father brought a psychiatrist, a very prestigious one from Boston, friend of a friend of a friend, who was on vacation in Nantucket. He diagnosed me with depression and agoraphobia.
Right when all this was unraveling, Jeffrey was happy and was getting over our breakup. He had his emotional life back; he was going out with a girl from Martha’s Vineyard, from a very good, proper family. Even so, he was as worried as my father or more so, and he came to see me every day, though many times I wouldn’t even leave my bedroom. Then one day he confronted me.
“This is because of that guy, the one who came here, right?”
I didn’t answer.
“You don’t have to tell me what happened. I don’t need to know. Because what I do know is you’re in love with him. Sometimes I would fly over the island, not because I wanted to spy on you, but because I didn’t have any other option, and I would pass close to the mill and see you from up there, working, fixing the roof, painting boards, taking a dip to cool off or drinking a beer, and I could tell. From up there, I could see what you were denying down here. But from up there, I didn’t care. Because up there, you see everything with a different perspective. You realize how small and insignificant we are. And that’s what we’re going to do right now, go up in the seaplane.”
He dragged me gently to the hydroplane. From then on, he took me out every day for an hour. First along the coast, by Cape Cod, in circles, always without losing sight of the island, and little by little, it started to go away, almost without me realizing it, naturally. It seemed as if I were tracing a new map of my life. The tide of blame and affliction that had wiped away everything slowly started to recede, making way for a deep and heavy grief. The grief I didn’t mind; it felt like a friend I enjoyed passing the time with. It wasn’t aggressive. I let the grief get into bed and sleep with me. I gradually got my appetite back and resumed my activities on the farm. I started to open my doors, or at least stop closing them.
Then you showed up, Alice. You moved to the island. And what seemed like it might be a new setback to my delicate state had the opposite effect. I liked it. It intrigued me so much that it awakened me. Why had you decided to come live here? Had Chris talked to you about the island? No, it didn’t make sense. Because in that case you would have come to claim what was yours. The mill, the land and the pony. And why did you lie about the date and the circumstances of Chris’s death? You told Miriam your husband had died two months before the date in an airplane accident. What were you hiding? Why didn’t you ask about Chris? I couldn’t find an explanation for all that.
Maybe you had discovered part of Chris’s lie, or part of the truth, depending on how you looked at it. In any case you’d had to have been following some clue he had given you to make it this far. You’d found a crack in Chris’s master plan, a crack you could slide into. But it was obvious that clue hadn’t led you to me, because you didn’t approach the farm or the mill, and because I crossed paths with you several times—sometimes because I made it happen with my heart pounding violently beforehand—without getting any kind of reaction or response. But maybe you weren’t lost, just looking for Chris.
I never sought you out, never started a conversation with you, out of pure wariness, because I always had this gnawing question of how much you knew; did you know who I was? I didn’t want to seem false or hypocritical pretending to be nice with you when you might know my history with Chris. So I gave you your space, your time, so things would happen naturally, getting myself ready for the moment that sooner or later would have to come. Because if not, what was the point of you coming to live here?
Alice, you helped me break out of my cage. It was a very slow process. At first, I was afraid of you, I thought you were stalking me, watching, following, spying. That at any moment you would corner me, and I wasn’t ready for that. But when I started to realize you didn’t associate me with Chris, I relaxed, and little by little, I became closer to you. I was so curious that sometimes I followed you—I had the feeling sometimes that I was spying on you. I even went to Karen’s birthday just to be with you.
Then my father came in and stole the show. In his life’s slow unraveling, his path to forgetting, his longing to reunite with my mother, he started to frequent your house, the house my mother lived in when she was a girl. I even came to think my father knew everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything: that he was faking his episodes of Alzheimer’s to provoke an encounter between us. But no, unfortunately, what was going on with my father was involuntary and irreversible.
Alice, you helped me get over Chris’s death, because meeting you and your daughters brought me closer to him. I lived anchored to an unresolved fantasy of our future together that his death had shattered, and the shards were still inside me, cutting and wounding me. Little by little, the three of you pulled out all those slivers of glass that had grown into my body, and that opened a path to the certainty that Chris had done what he had to do and that I wasn’t his soul mate. You were, Alice. I wanted to hate you, and I ended up being on your side. On both your sides, on the side of your family. It happened the day Snow White gave birth to Sunset. That day I took a photo of you, a true family photo. That photo made me feel I finally had Chris back. I had re-encountered him through you all. You had helped me to say goodbye to him and carry on with my life. And after all you had done for my father, it was my turn to help you. So you could say goodbye, too, reconcile with him and get on with your life.
When I left the photo on Chris’s tombstone, I thought about putting a rock on it so the wind wouldn’t carry it away. To be sure you’d see it, but I didn’t, because that photo wasn’t for you. You already had yours. That’s why I took two. That one was for Chris. His dream, our adventure, had reached its end. It had worked. And now, from the grave, he was the one who had to make the final gesture. Hand over your gift to you, the key that would open the mill, your retreat, your painting studio. It wasn’t up to me to do it. It was up to Chris whether that photo would still be there when you all arrived—because I knew you would go—a few hours later. I couldn’t force it; I could only give it a little nudge.
That’s why when I saw you come to the farm today, many days later than I’d imagined—I suppose because of your own inner struggle—I knew by your expression what you were here for. And you knew by mine that I knew. And that I was here for whatever you needed from me.