Wet, exhausted, and humiliated, I marched up the steps to the Victory Inn. Then I cracked open the door and peeked into the lobby. Paula Victory, the owner, was sitting at her desk behind the high wooden counter, her back to me. She was humming. All I wanted to do was run up to my room, get under a steaming hot shower, and forget about the dock, the ocean, and Roy. What I didn’t want to do was let Paula see me.
The woman could be a little nosy, even bordering on rude. Earlier in the day, when I checked in, I had caught her staring at my engagement ring. Then she had the nerve to ask me if it was real. Now she’d probably want to know why I wasn’t wearing it. Because an hour after coming to your town my fingers swelled up like hot dogs, I would tell her. I could just imagine her expression then. Thank God for the room safe, I thought as I rubbed the bare spot on my finger and pictured my Van Cleef & Arpels ring safe and sound.
I took a breath and crouched down. Then I crept by the counter, water droplets falling from my clothes, and I made it to the other side of the lobby. Thank God, I thought, pulling a piece of seaweed off my leg. I could just imagine Paula wanting to know why I was soaking wet and whose car door she heard slam outside and just what this visiting New Yorker was doing here in Beacon, anyway.
As I stepped from the reception area into the hall, I heard her voice behind me. “Forget your bathing suit, Miss Branford?”
I didn’t stop and I didn’t say a word. I just took the stairs two at a time to the third floor, wishing I was on my way home. I wanted to go back to New York and be with Hayden, curl up next to him on the sofa, and watch Sleepless in Seattle. I wanted to run my hand through his shock of thick hair and trace my fingers across his freshly shaved face. We could be drinking a bottle of Pétrus and eating takeout from San Tropez, that little bistro we like on East 60th. And instead, I was wet and cold and here.
Hayden was right. I should never have come. I should have put Gran’s letter in the mail instead of driving all the way up here to deliver it. Or I should have waited a while longer for my head to clear before making the trip. It had only been a week since my grandmother’s death. We had been so close and I was still in a state of shock. Maybe that was why I hadn’t paid attention to the NO TRESPASSING sign.
From the pocket of my shorts I pulled a soggy braided ribbon with the room key attached. I unlocked the door and put the leather jacket over the chair in the corner. Then I peeled off my wet clothes and wrapped myself in a towel. I looked at my watch—six fifteen. I picked up my cell phone from the bedside table and, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I dialed Hayden. His phone rang twice and then I heard a click.
“Ellen?”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Hayden.”
“I’ve been trying to get you,” he said. “Everything okay?”
I squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could so I wouldn’t cry. I wanted him to hold me. I wanted to feel his arms around me. “Everything’s fine,” I said, but I could hear the tremble in my voice.
“Where were you this afternoon? I tried to call you a couple of times.”
I thought about the splintered dock and the Nikon at the bottom of the ocean, the current tugging it along the sand. I thought about Roy and the tired swimmer’s carry. I could not think about the kiss. “I went out for a walk,” I said, my heart aching.
“Oh, that’s good. You probably needed it after that long drive. So how’s your first trip to Maine? What’s Beacon like?”
What’s Beacon like? I’m not sure you really want to know, I thought. You and Mom were right. It was a bad idea for me to come. Look what had happened already. Maybe it was just an unlucky place. Maybe that’s why Gran left here as soon as she was old enough to go.
“Beacon?” I said. “I guess it’s like a lot of other small towns.” I took a deep breath. “Hayden, I was thinking…you were probably right about this whole thing. I mean, there’s no harm in just putting the letter in the mail. And then I could drive back to New York tonight. If I leave by—”
“What?” He sounded shocked. “Ellen, you just got there. Why would you do that?”
“But when I left this morning you said—”
“I know what I said, honey, but I was just being…you know, practical. And I was worried because you were driving up by yourself. I thought you’d get lonely. It’s way too late to leave now.”
Way too late. I wanted to cry. I looked at the round hooked rug on the bathroom floor—bright blue, red, and gold yarns had been gathered together to create a compass. “I wish you were here.”
“You know I would have come,” he said, “if I didn’t have that Peterson meeting tomorrow.”
I knew all about the Peterson meeting. Not only were Hayden and I engaged but we were also partners in the same firm, although he worked in the litigation department. “Listen to me,” he went on. “You said yourself that your grandmother wouldn’t have asked you to do this unless it was really important.”
I glanced at a framed print above the towel rack—a sailboat approaching a harbor at dusk. “I know, but my mother might have had a point when she said Gran probably didn’t even know what she was talking about at the end. Maybe she was delirious. Maybe she thought Chet Cummings lived down the street. Who knows?”
“That’s just your mother being your mother, Ellen. I know how much you loved your grandmother and I know that delivering this letter is important to you. And I’m proud of you for doing it.”
Sitting on the edge of the tub in my towel, I thought about Gran on the last day of her life. Only a week ago we were together in her living room in Pine Point, the Connecticut town where she had lived for years and where my mother still lived. I could see Gran looking so elegant, sitting on the pale blue sofa, her silver hair pulled back and pinned above her neck in the chignon she always wore. She was scratching answers onto the Wall Street Journal crossword puzzle with a fountain pen.
“Ellen, what’s a five-letter word for ‘sufficient’?” she asked me.
I thought for a moment, sliding back against my chair, biting into a McIntosh apple. Through the bay window I could see the edge of the slate patio behind the house, ringed by the rose garden, and the swath of green that stretched down the hill to the iron gates at the far end of the driveway. Lawn mowers hummed in the distance like lazy bees.
“Plenty?” I said, ticking the letters off in my head. “No, that’s six.”
A breeze floated through the open window, trailing with it the smell of freshly cut grass and rose petals.
My grandmother muttered something and then turned the newspaper around for me to see. On the page opposite the puzzle, an ad featured a waif of a model wearing a black, boxy-looking dress made out of shiny, crinkly fabric.
“Looks like a rubbish bag,” Gran said. “Whatever happened to the kind of clothes Jackie Kennedy used to wear? Now, there was an icon.”
“Jackie Onassis,” I said, correcting her.
She waved a hand at me. “She’ll always be Jackie Kennedy. No one accepted that man as her husband.”
“Well, I think she did, Gran.”
“Nonsense,” my grandmother said. “What could she have seen in him? Of course, he was wealthy, but he wasn’t even attractive. Not like her.”
I got up from my chair and sat down on the sofa next to my grandmother. “Well, maybe he was attractive in his own way,” I said. “She probably felt safe with him. Kind of like a father figure. After all, she’d come through a horrible experience with the assassination.”
“That’s not a reason to get married,” she said, shaking her head and bearing down on me with her green eyes.
My grandmother began to write something on the crossword puzzle. “Aha,” she said. “The word is ample,” and she started to spell it, but when she got to the letter p she stopped. Her body tensed and her head dropped back against the sofa. Her eyes were closed, but there were deep wrinkles by the sides, as though she were squinting, and her mouth was rigid. I knew she was in pain.
“Gran?” I took her hand. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?” My heart was pounding.
She tensed again and it looked as though everything in her body had seized up. Then her head flopped down on her chest.
“Gran!” I screamed, terrified. I clutched her hand tighter. The room seemed to be tilting, everything moving away from me. “Gran, please,” I said. “Tell me you’re okay.” I felt sick to my stomach.
Then she said my name, her voice faint and breathy.
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m here, Gran.” Her skin was cold. I could feel the fragile bones beneath the surface. “I’m going to call an ambulance.”
“Ellen,” she whispered again. Her face was white, her eyes were still closed.
“Don’t talk,” I said. “You’re going to be all right.” I don’t know whom I was trying to convince more—Gran or myself.
I picked up the phone and pressed the keys for 911. I had to push hard because my fingers felt like jelly. They made me spell the name of the street twice, even though it’s simple. Hill Pond Lane. I must have been talking way too fast. After that I ran to the kitchen and yelled down to Lucy, my grandmother’s housekeeper, asking her to find my mother at the Doverside Yacht Club and then to go to the end of the driveway and flag down the ambulance when she saw it.
I ran back to my grandmother. Her eyes were half open now but they weren’t moving. She stared at me. Then, grabbing my wrist with a strength I found surprising, she pulled me close. My ear was near her cheek and I could smell her lavender perfume. “Please,” she said, the word hardly more than a puff of air. “There’s a letter…I’ve written. The bedroom.” Her grip tightened again. “You…take it to him…Ellen.”
“Gran, I—”
“Take him the letter. Just…promise.”
“Of course,” I said. “I promise. I’ll do anything you—”
Her fingers fell from my arm and a wisp of air came from her mouth. Then she was still.
That night I searched for the letter, starting with the table next to my grandmother’s bed. In the drawer I found three pens and a pad of paper with blank sheets, two pairs of glasses, a pack of Life Saver candies, and a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.
I searched her desk—an antique cherry writing table from Paris. Wednesday’s Pine Point Review, the local weekly paper, was on the top. Opening the one drawer in the center of the desk, I found an address book. I thumbed through the pages, feeling alternately comforted and saddened by the familiar up-and-down pen strokes of my grandmother’s handwriting. There was no letter.
Her walk-in closet greeted me with the smell of lavender. Hanging rods held Chanel suits and sale-rack department store dresses side by side. Shelves displayed sweaters of every color from peach to cranberry. I brushed my hand over a pink sweater. The cashmere was soft as a cloud.
On the top of a built-in dresser stood a collection of photographs in silver frames. One showed my grandparents on the day of my grandfather’s graduation from the University of Chicago medical school. He had his arm around Gran. They stood in front of a stone building with a massive Gothic arch. Her chin was tilted upward slightly as she looked at the camera, her long, swanlike neck encircled by a strand of pearls. My grandfather gazed at her, a smile spread over his whole face.
An oval frame held a photo of my grandmother and me at Alamo Square, a park across the street from my grandparents’ house in San Francisco. I was ten, so Gran would have been fifty-five. Looking at the photo, I was struck by the similarity in our looks. We had the same green eyes and long auburn hair, although Gran had always worn hers up. I remembered the day the picture was taken. I had a camera slung over my shoulder and some tourists, who thought we were also tourists, offered to take our picture together. We stood in front of a huge bed of red flowers, both of us smiling, my grandmother’s yellow house visible in the background.
I put the photo back and gingerly began opening her dresser drawers, telling myself I was doing what she’d asked me to do. I sifted through a drawer where she had stashed clothing receipts, owner’s manuals for long-departed appliances, paper-clipped stacks of foreign currency saved from trips abroad, years of birthday and Christmas cards she had received, and a copy of the announcement from Winston Reid when I became a partner. There was no letter.
I went back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of her bed. Whatever she had written wasn’t there. Maybe she hadn’t written anything at all, I thought. Maybe she was delirious at the end.
My grandmother’s bookshelves were laden with novels and biographies and family photographs, and I glanced across the room at them, wondering what to do next. I gazed at the paintings on the walls—seascapes and landscapes. She had even framed a couple of photographs I had taken as a young girl—driftwood on the beach and an old pair of sneakers.
I opened the bedside table drawer again and saw the book—One Hundred Years of Solitude. As I picked it up, a sheet of pale blue paper fluttered out from between the pages. Gran’s initials were embossed in script at the top of the paper—RGR. Ruth Goddard Ray. I recognized the tall, upright letters of her handwriting as I looked at the name of the person to whom the letter was addressed: Chet Cummings. Under the name was the address, 55 Dorset Lane, Beacon, Maine. It looked like a draft; the page was full of scratch-outs and changes, but I knew I’d found the letter.
I took a deep breath and began to read.
Dear Chet,
I’ve thought about writing to you so many times but I’ve always been afraid to do it. I guess I imagined you would send my letter back, unopened, and I would find it in a stack of mail, the canceled stamp staring up at me, your handwriting scrawled on the side—“return to sender.” Or perhaps you would simply ignore it, tossing it into the trash with the orange rinds and coffee grounds and the day-old newspaper, and I would never know what happened. Poetic justice either way. Still, I didn’t want to face that disappointment.
Perhaps there is something about turning eighty that has created this urgency to finally write to you after sixty-two years and has given me the strength to deal with the outcome, whatever that may be. Having survived eight decades, I feel it’s time to resolve matters I’ve neglected and, more important, to make amends.
In truth, I couldn’t have written sooner because it wasn’t until recently that I knew where you were. The last thing I heard was that you were in South Carolina. That was about fifteen years ago. Then one day this past March, I discovered you had moved back to Beacon. I was using the computer, looking up the address for a breeder of roses in New Hampshire. With no particular thought in mind, I typed your name into the search box and then added, “Beacon, Maine.” And, suddenly, there you were! On Dorset Lane. You can’t imagine my surprise. With that one little click of a key I had found you. I must have sat in front of that computer holding my breath for a full thirty seconds after I saw your name.
It took me another three months after that to decide to actually write to you. But here I am, finally putting pen to paper, and what I want to say is that I’m very sorry about what happened between us and I am writing to ask you to forgive me. I did love you, Chet. I loved you so much and I loved what we had together—our dreams for the future, our dreams of a life together in Beacon. When you came to Chicago and I told you I didn’t love you anymore I was lying. I think I was trying to convince myself because it was easier that way—easier to make a clean break. At least that’s what I believed at the time. And everything I did from that point on I did with that in mind—a clean break.
I know what my leaving cost you in the end and I can never forgive myself for that. If I hadn’t left you the way I did, you wouldn’t have left Beacon and you wouldn’t have lost the thing that meant so much to you. I’ve always felt responsible for that loss and I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.
I have many wonderful memories of those days we had together. It would make me happy to know that at least a few of your memories of me are good ones. I wonder if you ever think about sitting under that oak tree, with the cicadas buzzing, and, at night, the crickets. Or how the ice used to cover the blueberry bushes in the winter, giving them that dreamy look. Or how we used to sell the pies for your mother at the roadside stand.
I still think of you whenever I see blueberries.
Fondly, Ruth
I stood in my grandmother’s bedroom, holding the letter, thinking about her writing to a man she hadn’t spoken to in over sixty years. What was this love affair they had? She would have been eighteen, just a young girl. After all these years she was writing to apologize for leaving him. I sat on my grandmother’s bed, holding the blue paper in my hand, wondering about Chet Cummings and what he would think when I handed that piece of paper to him. Was he really her true love? Was theirs a secret romance she never dared to speak of?
Draped in my wet towel in the bathroom of the Victory Inn, still holding the cell phone to my ear, I wondered what my grandmother’s life would have been like if she had married Chet Cummings. She wouldn’t have had the English Tudor house with its six bedrooms or the rose garden or the fountains or the acres of grass that were so green in the summer and smelled so heavenly when cut. She would have lived in Beacon. She would have given birth to my mother in Beacon and my mother might have stayed and married and given birth to me in Beacon. And I would have grown up a country girl, living in a small town, isolated and far from all the things I love. I couldn’t imagine life without my favorite museums, the jazz clubs, coffee shops on every corner, Broadway, the Brooklyn Bridge. Life without all of that seemed so bleak.
“Are you still there?” Hayden asked.
I switched the phone to my other ear. “Yes, sorry. I was just thinking about Gran. I was wondering what it would have been like if she had stayed in Beacon.”
“Well, luckily, she didn’t,” Hayden said. “Or I might never have met you.”
A drop of water fell from my hair and landed on my lip. I could taste the salt. “Yeah,” I said. “Luckily.”
I glanced down at the compass rug. Maybe I needed to find out about this part of my grandmother’s life for her. It was like helping her put the final letters into her crossword puzzle.
“I guess you’re right, Hayden,” I said. “I should stay and deliver the letter. She asked me to do this and I promised her I would.” I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, cradling the cell phone to my ear. “But I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow night,” I said. “Thursday at the latest.”
“Perfect, because the dinner is Friday night and there’s only one person I want by my side.”
I couldn’t miss the dinner. Hayden was being honored by an organization called New York Men of Note for all of the pro bono projects he had been involved in over the years, from chairing the Literacy Coalition to spearheading the capital campaign for the Guggenheim.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be back long before then. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” I closed my eyes and pictured Hayden being handed his award by the mayor. I was so happy he was being recognized that way. And it could only help him in his run for city council next year. Not that he needed the help, of course.
His father, H. C. Croft, was the senior senator from Pennsylvania and head of the Senate Finance Committee. His uncle Ron Croft had been governor of Maryland for two terms, and his cousin Cheryl Higgins was a congressional representative in the Rhode Island legislature. On top of that, his late great-aunt Celia had been a suffragette. Besides steel, where they had made their fortune, politics was the Croft family business, and they were naturals at it. I knew Hayden’s father and uncle pretty well, and they were both charming, charismatic men who could draw a crowd while attending a charity ball or popping into a hardware store. The media were already buzzing over Hayden’s decision to run.
“I’m so proud of you,” I said. Then I sent him a kiss through the phone.
When I hung up I saw that I’d missed a call from my mother. My heart started flipping like a fish out of water. I couldn’t talk to her. Not yet, anyway. She had a sixth sense when it came to knowing that something was wrong with me and I wasn’t about to upset her by telling her I’d fallen into the ocean and almost drowned. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell her that I’d kissed a perfect stranger. She’d be so worried she’d probably drive right up to Beacon. So I decided to send her a text message. All well, lovely inn, talk 2 you soon. XOX. All right, I felt guilty about it, yes. It was a bit of a stretch. A big stretch, since none of it was true. But tomorrow I’d figure out what to tell her.
I turned on the shower to let the water heat up. Tomorrow would be a much better day all around. I had a ten o’clock conference call, but that would only last about an hour, and right after that I’d swing by Mr. Cummings’s house, have a nice chat, give him the letter, and then head back to Manhattan. I’d get home just in time for a vodka and tonic and dinner on the terrace if it wasn’t too hot outside. Lovely.
Testing the shower with my hand, I found the water tepid. Paula had warned me about that when she showed me the room. “The hot water takes a little while to get all the way up here from the heater in the basement,” she said, stretching her arms out as if to demonstrate the distance.
I waited another minute and finally the bathroom was filled with a delicious steam. Standing on the compass rug, I watched the N, S, E, and W letters disappear as the fog enveloped me.
I stepped into the shower and let the hot water cascade over my head and down my back. Running my hands through my hair, I let the water chase away the sticky salt. It was heaven. Then I emptied a tiny bottle of shampoo on my head and worked up a good lather, inhaling the clean, floral scent. Just as I was about to rinse out the shampoo, the water temperature plummeted. The water came out in an icy stream and I stood under the spray, shivering, cursing the Victory Inn, cursing Beacon, cursing the entire state of Maine. And then the tears came.