They left at sundown. The breeze had died, and when they walked up from the wharf, slow with reluctance and tiredness, the house was lighted up and there were two more cars in the yard. “Family’s come in for Sunday night supper with Ma and Pa,” said Owen. “Likely telling her to run the price up five thousand dollars more.”
“I won’t go to the door,” said Van, unwilling to end the day with Mrs. Jessup’s relatives. Owen was better able to brush people off; her adjustment was too new and too fine. “But tell her from me that that lunch was the best meal I’ve ever had.”
“She’ll think I’m some damn poor provider.”
She waited in the car for what seemed a long time. The dusk made her eyes heavy, and she was almost asleep by the time he came. “I had to meet Tom,” he said, “and two of the sons were there. Digging their graves with their teeth, from the looks. She better tell them to watch their blood pressure. Tom’s a sorry-looking old party. And all of them but her trying to sell me the island, you’d think they were so poor they didn’t have a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of.” He had the car backed around and headed down the tunnel of spruces; the lights picked up bright eyes at the side of the road. “I told them I was a lobsterman and it cast a strange silence over the audience. A proper pea-soup fog. But she came out to the door with me and said, ‘I don’t care what the rest of ’em think, I’d rather sell it to a lobsterman so there’ll be traps piled on that wharf again and an honest stink of bait around the fishhouse.’”
Van said, “She’s a gull after all. She’ll be full of fight till something brings her down.”
“Ayuh, I like her. I told her we’ll come again, even if the island is sold.”
We’ll come again. It had the comfort of a magic phrase. It conjured up a security which lasted, even in her sleep, until she awoke the next morning.
It was very early, and rain drummed on the roof and ran down the windows with a deathly monotony. She opened her eyes to the gray pallor in the room, shut them quickly again, and curled deeper against Owen’s back. But it was too late. She was awake, and the night was over. Sometime during that night they had been transported from one country to another, from light to dark, from serenity to squalor. Even the room had changed from last night’s warm cave to the poor shelter of refugees; it seemed as if the rain were falling inside it.
Tears fall in my heart as rain falls upon the town. Or was it, Rain falls upon the town as tears fall in my heart? Each time she said it to herself, the phrase grew in pathos until she was on the verge of crying. It wasn’t fair, to be shown all this and let that be the end of it. Why did I have to meet him, she demanded of a faceless jury, if I couldn’t keep him? And I can’t ever go back to what I was, I took off all my shell for him, peeled it away layer by layer, and now I have nothing to protect me. No, I’ve been like a drunk, dancing and singing and giving myself to men, and now it’s the next day, and I haven’t even got pride left, or what passed for pride with me. I haven’t got him. The strong legs and shoulders and the brown skin, and the feel of his hair under my hand, his lower lip, the way he looks at me sidewise and lets me run on as if I were his child. And then the times when there is no age between us, because he’s right, there is no special age for loving, there are just lovers.
She put her hand to the curving hollow between throat and shoulder where his head had been. Suddenly a sob broke from her, and she put her wrist against her mouth and bit it frantically to use up the passion of grief, but he had already been waked. He turned over to her and gathered her against him.
“What is it?” he kept whispering, with little hard squeezes of his arms. “What is it?”
“I don’t want to go back.” She was ashamed for admitting it and humiliated by crying. “That’s all. You weren’t supposed to know.” She tried to get away, but couldn’t. “I was just going to get it over with before breakfast. All nice and tidy.” She couldn’t stop crying, or escape either.
“I don’t want to go back again either. Good Christ!” he groaned. “When we left that island yesterday it was like going back to the police or the guillotine. I wanted to stow you in that car and keep driving eastward.”
She held her breath, listening. Close by her face his flesh was wet from her tears, and she touched it delicately with the tip of her tongue. “I keep trying to figure it out.” He spoke heavily like a man exhausted. “Is it because I’m at the age when a man makes a goddam fool of himself? Because I’ve had to behave for seventeen years or so, for lack of opportunities? If I’ve been losing sleep like a green kid and breaking into a sweat at sight of you—” He began kissing her forehead and wet eyelids. “If the first time we were together it was like the first time in my life for me with anyone—well, how much of it was because I wanted it to be that way? Because I wanted, at my age, to be in love—guts, feathers, and all? Well, maybe that’s it. But you don’t come up for air, shake yourself like a dog, and go home and forget all about it.” He forced her face upward till he could look into it. “I don’t want to go home and forget it. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to give you up. I’m not going to.”
She felt shaken, literally, out of breath and sense. “The family—”
“They don’t run my business. I can live without them, I have before. I walked away once and was gone for seven years.”
“Where were you? What did you do?”
“We’ll save that for later. We’ll have the rest of our lives.” The words made her shudder with an almost sickening emotion and he tightened his grip.
“But you came back,” she said against his cheek. “You were drawn back to the island and the family. You’ll always be drawn.”
“I went back,” he said harshly, “because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
They were quiet for a few minutes, then she said with diffidence, “What about your own family?”
“I’ve been thinking about them. And this is how bad it is with me, how deep you’ve gotten into my bones. I want the rest of my life with you. It’s like wanting air to breathe or water to drink. I have to have it to survive. It’s no sense cursing because we’ve wasted so much time. We’re going to grab what’s left. . . . My kids—” He broke off, then started again. “Joss is finishing high school. The other two’ll grow up soon and be off on their own. I love them, but I can’t wait.”
“Laurie?” she asked timidly.
“She’ll do all right. She doesn’t figure on falling apart for anything. She can stay there in the house on the island. The whole thing can be hers except my boat and gear . . . I told Mrs. Jessup last night she’d hear from me inside two weeks, one way or the other.”
“I’ll give you children,” she promised, wanting to give him more than she could touch or embrace or imagine. There was nothing great enough for a gift. He didn’t answer, just lay back and gazed at the ceiling, holding her in one arm. The grayness paled in the room and the rain fell steadily on the roof. Van was not yet able to rejoice, there had been too much all at once. Then she remembered there must be more.
“I have to tell you something,” she said. “If it makes any difference I want to know now.” He turned his head toward her, his eyes questioning. “That story I told you about myself was a lie. It’s true that I was a state ward, but the other yarn, about my mother and father, I made that up out of whole cloth as I went along. I don’t know who my parents were. Chances are I’m somebody’s mistake that was left on a doorstep somewhere. I’ve got no one that I know of.”
“You have someone now.”
She went on quickly before the words could break her down. “When I was small I used to get a postcard signed “Mama” now and then. But the welfare people couldn’t ever trace her. My caseworker told me, when I was older, that my mother probably hadn’t deserted me because she wanted to; she might have been scared or sick. She explained to me very nicely about people being sick in their minds. It was supposed to keep me from thinking I’d been coldly rejected, or something. What it did was make me wonder about once a week if she was in a padded cell somewhere and I was heading that way myself.”
“Poor kid,” he murmured, stroking her hair back from her forehead. “Jesus, what people do to young ones and never turn a hair. But it’s gone by now. You don’t need anybody but me.”
They lay there in silence and slept again, but the sleep was shallow and fidgety from their exhaustion.
They hardly spoke on the way back to Limerock. The land that had been a haze of green gold when they had driven through it on Saturday was now sodden in the rain. When they reached the motor lodge the rain had given way to a chilly fog. After Owen turned the car in to the agency, he called Limerock for a taxi. They went across to the restaurant and had coffee. The few other people in the warmly lit room were mostly salesmen talking business over breakfast.
Owen sat with his elbows on the table, shoulders hunched and head sunk forward. She drank her coffee quickly, though it was very hot, and poured more. Suddenly he looked up at her and smiled.
“I don’t know if I told you how much I like that color on you. What do you call it? The shirt.”
“Apricot.” She was ridiculously pleased, and had to keep from touching it like the preening women she despised.
He nodded amiably and she knew he had scarcely heard her. It was as if his declaration had driven a wall between them; until now he had been centered in whatever he saw their relation to be, but now he was distracted and absorbed by all that had to be done. She was actually second to the new concerns. She felt a brush of cold, which angered her because she should have been feeling warmth and joy. She put her hand across the table and touched his, the one with the fingers gone.
“How soon will you let her know?” she asked. His head jerked up, a sort of wild astonishment flashed youthfully across his face. “The woman who owns the island,” she added, and he sat back.
“Oh. Next week.”
“You thought I meant Laurie.”
“What if I did? She’s on my mind.”
“Naturally,” she said coldly. “I won’t tell Barry until you’ve talked to her.”
His nod was more of a chopping jab with his chin. He drank his coffee fast. “More?” she asked him.
“No, I think the cab’s here.”
She would have liked to sink into a trance state at will, and never open her eyes or think until she was back on Bennett’s Island. She did the best she could on the way to Limerock, but the trick she used to have, of veiling her consciousness against her surroundings, had been lost somewhere. Owen sat in his corner, head turned away toward the fog outside. His disfigured hand lay on his knee and she wanted to take it, in some hope of establishing contact with yesterday, but she couldn’t do it.
He got out at the north end of Main Street, and paid the driver. “I’ll see you later,” he said to Van. Where, when, she wanted to ask, but didn’t. At the Marshall house she had to walk around a happy cluster of island women just setting out to shop, discussing where to meet for lunch and what the movie would be tonight. They included her in their innocent gaiety, nodding and smiling; one cried heartily, “You come in from somewhere in this fog?”
“Must have come by gull,” another said, and they all laughed, their excitement and pleasure embracing her. She forced a smile and said, “Oh no, I came Saturday. I’ve been somewhere else for the weekend, that’s all.”
“Oh!” They were reassured. “I didn’t think anybody in his right mind would set out for the main this morning,” one said. She watched them go under the dripping elms toward Main Street, and thought, This time yesterday. . . . Then she went inside, and from the kitchen at the end of the long hall she heard Mrs. Marshall’s ringing tone, and went toward it. An elderly woman rocking and knitting by the stove smiled. “Morning! Eva, you’ve a visitor.” Mrs. Marshall turned from peeling a turnip at the dresser.
“Hello there! Your room’s ready. My cousin, she got off to Boston on the eight o’clock bus this morning. You have a good weekend?”
“Too good,” said Van. “I’m tired. We islanders can’t stand this fast pace.” They were amused by that and she was cynically proud of herself. There was a time when she would not make an effort; now that she was obliged to, in order to keep from being conspicuous, she had discovered unknown talents in herself. They were carrying on the joke now, and she smiled, only half-hearing, and went up to her room.
When she shut the door behind her, depression swamped her. Everything about the weekend was a dream, Owen an illusion that had passed through her unconsciousness. She would never see him again, never dream him again. She sank down onto the bed, staring about the room in quiet horror, as if she didn’t know how she’d got there.
But the room was indisputably real and she was in it. Tomorrow would inexorably come, and the return to Bennett’s. No illusions here. “How can I?” she heard herself whispering. “I can’t.” Yet she would go back because she had nowhere else to go.
She took off her outside clothes and lay down on the bed, pulling the extra blanket over her. Outside on the gables there was a constant conversation of sparrows. From Main Street the sound of traffic was like the rote on the outer shores of the island. Make it Jessup’s Island, she thought as if she were praying. I’m on Jessup’s Island, in the fog. . . . She slept.