Kathy came over in the morning to ask her to go greening with her and Maggie. “Nope,” said Van. “I don’t like dandelion greens and neither does Barry.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“I don’t mind missing it, but I’ll pick strawberries with you,” Van promised, thinking, I’ll pick them on my own island.
At noon she took a book and walked along Long Cove toward the place. It was an almost windless hour; heat bounced up from the beach rocks and the field shimmered in green light. The sea had taken on the vibrant, almost artificial turquoise that means an easterly. As she walked along the high barrier of the beach, she imagined herself walking on Jessup’s Island, absolutely alone on it except for the birds, eiders and sea-pigeons paddling in the shallows, and the medricks screaming and diving. There would be look-out places to which she would come and stand and look for Owen. When she saw White Lady at last coming up through the Thoroughfare she would hurry back to the house to start his meal, then be down at the landing to meet him. Later she would paint buoys for him while he built new pots and headed them with the trapheads she had made. There would be no one else and they would need no one else. Sometimes they’d go ashore; maybe instead of having a car to drive to the nearest town they’d go by boat, up or down the coast a bit. They might sometimes go to a dance. She hadn’t ever cared about dances, but she would like to go with Owen. It would be different to go with a lover. Now she wanted to do all sorts of things she had never allowed herself to desire. It was like having a second chance to grow up, to have youth again with the richness of maturity. All lovers should be past thirty, she thought. They’re the only ones who know what it’s all about. I must tell Owen that.
At the place she lay in the shade and read at random in the paperback poetry anthology she had bought in Limerock. Some of the poets were new to her. She struggled with the involutions of Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Donne, muttering lines aloud until suddenly their meaning became as lucid as the day. When at last she was tired of it, a long time had gone by. The sun had moved across the sky, and boats were coming up Long Cove; she got up and looked out through the trees and saw Nils Sorensen’s boat by Tenpound, Foss Campion’s a little way behind him, both boats attended by a lifting, falling cloud of gulls. She thought guiltily that Owen could be in and she hadn’t even heard White Lady. He could come upon her at any time. She lay back and looked at the sky through the spruce branches and saw a fish hawk sailing in great circles far above the gulls.
When she woke up, dazed and cold, it was late. She sat with her head in her hands, like a drunk on a curbstone, and tried to clear it; she was heavy with despair as if something—light, joy—had been stolen from her while she slept. Owen wouldn’t come now. By the sun it was suppertime for most people.
Suddenly she heard yelping laughter and the thud of running feet. She pulled herself tight together, stopped breathing as if that would make her invisible. In another moment the boys burst through the trees, Richard and one of his dark-eyed cousins. A small startled grunt came from Richard and then both boys froze into statues.
She said hoarsely, “Hello.” At once they grinned and came farther into the clearing.
“Is this your place?” Richard asked her.
“You might, call it that. I’ve never found anyone else here.” “We’ve got a place further up in the woods,” he said.
“Got a brush camp there,” the other boy offered in the husky voice of some young boys. His nose and the tops of his round dusky-red cheeks were sprinkled with freckles; his eyes looked black and were thickly lashed. He looked more Owen’s son than Richard did. He said proudly, “It’s the best one we ever made. The rain won’t go through it. We slept in it one night.”
“They wouldn’t let us cook our breakfast up there,” said Richard discontentedly. He took out a knife and began chipping away at a tree.
“That’s not spruce gum, it’s pitch,” said his cousin. “And besides, if it was gum, it’s hers.”
Richard gave her an embarrassed grin and put his knife away. “I should think you’d be baiting up for your father right now,” she said to him.
“He didn’t come home today. He went to Limerock. Come on, Pete.”
She couldn’t let them go, she flung words after them like a lasso to draw them back. “But this isn’t boat day.”
“He went in his own boat,” said Richard. “All of a sudden. He called Uncle Steve on the radio and said he was starting in right then and he’d be out tomorrow, and to tell my mother.” He shrugged. “Maybe he had a toothache like the time you went.”
“Let’s hope it didn’t hurt as much,” she said. They agreed, said so long, and went back the way they had come. She sat there until the branches had stopped moving behind them, and their voices mingled with those of the excited medricks. She was certain that Owen had gone in to call Mrs. Jessup about the island. He could have decided all at once that now was the time. It meant they would be off here by the end of the week. It meant that a week from now they would be sleeping on the island. Her stomach seemed to turn over. Coming out from between the trees into the full white fire of blazing afternoon sea and sky, having to walk with lowered head and feeling the fantastic light dancing across her forehead and crown, she thought of the children, but dismissed them resentfully. They’ve got their mother and their home and a flock of relatives to be sorry for them. They can spare me their father. I’ve got nothing but him.
Nothing was everything. The frugal world in which she’d existed had been filled up for her with a wild and prodigal sweetness, everything had become real.
“Wonder why Cap’n Owen took off for the main,” Barry said at supper time. He snickered. “Might be he suddenly got to feeling kinky so he went looking for some tail.”
“The way you talk sometimes,” Vanessa said on a manufactured yawn, “anybody’d think you had but one thought only.”
“What man doesn’t, if he’s a man? And you know what I told you about Owen. When a feller who’s lived the life he has gets to pushing fifty, he gets desperate.”
“The voice of experience,” she said.
“I’ve seen plenty of ’em, sister.” He gave her a wink and a nod. “These guys that go to get a fifth or a package of cigarettes and never come home again. Or they start going out every night, if they’re where they can, gone foolish about some little slut like Gina. Not that Cap’n Owen’s that gormless. There’s some pretty good-looking skin lying around loose over at Brigport,” he said authoritatively. “Older but better. Like they say about wine.”
She got up and began to dear the table. A week from now, she thought. We could have the table by the windows that look out to sea.