September 1953
Later, once she had dragged herself far enough out of her swamp of grief to look back, Edith understood that it was the guests who had kept her going. This despite the fact that she resented them, sometimes fiercely, on and off, for at least the first year, resented their presence, outsiders tromping all over her and Joseph’s sanctuary, their voices crowding out the memory of Joseph’s voice, their carefree, cut-loose vacation happiness reminding her piercingly, hourly of every joy she had lost.
The guests forced her out of bed. They forced her to wash her face, brush her teeth, apply a touch of makeup, and get dressed, not in the blue jeans she’d favored when her house was empty, but in a neat dress or pair of pedal pushers. They forced her to pay attention, to button each button in the right order, to bathe regularly, to not lie facedown on Joseph’s side of the bed for hours or days wishing she were dead.
Each morning, she would tiptoe from her attic bedroom and down the stairs, avoiding the creaky spots as she passed the second-floor bedrooms where the guests stayed, and would start the percolator, set the table with her wedding plates and flatware and with little cut-glass bowls of jam and butter, slice peaches or melon or bananas, mix up a batch of drop biscuits, put them in the oven, and then would go out in the backyard with her coffee and sit in a chair, drinking and watching the sun toss coins across the canal and tiny jellyfish beat like gauze hearts just below the surface of the water. For those few stolen minutes, she found she could let go, second by second, of everything that haunted her until her mind was empty as a scoured bowl and all she knew was flavor on her tongue, air against her face, the small, dazzling details of her scrap of world. Then, she would go inside, ready to smile and chat, to fry and pour, to lean over the open oven to check for just the right amount of goldenness.
She was busy, busy, busy, but also—for the first time she could remember—bored. She learned what she would never have imagined: that heartbreak and boredom could be paired. Apart from the guests, most people stayed away. No more cocktail party or dinner invitations, no more of the interminable coffees that she, rocked with loneliness, might even at long last have welcomed.
Out of sheer desperation, despite her terror at how painful it might be, Edith began to venture out alone in her canoe. The first time was a horrible, racked, air-gulping, hair-tearing ordeal, and she swore she’d never go again. But one afternoon, when the guests were at the beach, she found that she missed, down to her bone marrow, the very specific sight of sun glazing the mussel-studded bank of the salt marsh at low tide, that lacquered, rainbow-suffused black. By the third time, she didn’t cry. By the fifth, the sensation that Joseph’s canoe was gliding along parallel to her own comforted her instead of torturing her. On the sixth trip, she took her camera, and—in narrowing the sprawling, intractable everything into one small, contained rectangle after the next—felt tiny stirrings of hope.
John Blanchard dropped by now and again to check on her with a genial, matter-of-fact concern for a woman living alone that never tipped over into condescension or judgment. In the months following Joseph’s death, Edith had a handful of male callers—Donald Smith dropping off a casserole his wife had made; Richie Fulton, barely out of his teens, who cut her grass and trimmed her bushes; old Len Pilgrim, an avid bird-watcher, who came around occasionally to brag about his sightings to the only other person he knew who cared; and a few bachelors and widowers, slick-haired and sheepish, who brought flowers and never got farther than the front lawn—all of whom were subjected to searing, raised-eyebrow scrutiny by Edith’s neighbors.
Because of his job, John was mostly, however grudgingly, granted the benefit of the doubt, but Edith knew that even he wasn’t gossip proof. Joseph had told her his story: divorced after a brief marriage, his wife a restless type who should never have gotten married to anyone, least of all steady, quiet John, a few years spent living with his widowed sister and her little girl until a couple of years ago when she met a tourist at the boardwalk, married him, and moved away. Single, tall, blond, and blue-eyed, with an unshakable aura of quietude and the ability to deflect flirtation like those new Teflon pans, the women in the town regarded him as either utterly dreamy or the dullest man in the world. How much of this he realized Edith wasn’t sure, but she did know that, while he’d sit on the screen porch or at the backyard table and talk for an hour, he steadfastly and politely refused her invitations to come inside the house.
On the first anniversary of Joseph’s death, it was John who found her.
Telling herself for weeks beforehand that it would be just another day, that Joseph would be no more lost to her on that day than any other, Edith had planned a short visit to his grave, a bouquet of flowers from the garden he’d planted and a little box of seashells in her hand, and nothing more. This she stuck to, sitting on a folded blanket she’d brought, running her hand over his gravestone, tall and white among the old pocked and tilted ones, and telling him about that morning’s canoe trip, how the shy, mica-thin gibbous moon had hung in the sky right along with the freshly risen sun, reminding her of the two of them; about the little girl guest from the week before who could, at three and a half years old, read from the newspaper; about how Edith had matted, framed, and hung his photographs of her so that she could remember being seen through his eyes every day; about the basket of apples someone had left on her doorstep; about how her love for him didn’t just abide but grew, fanning like a vine over the walls of the house he’d given her, sending tendrils into every corner of her life.
She stayed dry-eyed and composed, feeling that he was there with her, listening, searching for signs that she was all right. This feeling lasted all day. She came home to her silent house, glad she hadn’t scheduled any guests for that day, grateful to be alone. But then, after midnight, the grief rose, many-winged, inside her chest, beating at her ribs, bruising her from the inside out, so she ran out into the rain that had started a few hours before, ran across the highway, and onto the empty beach. Until she felt the wet sand under her soles, she didn’t realize she’d forgotten shoes. For a moment, she felt like a crazy person, her last lucid thought before she became one. For hours, she paced the water’s edge, sobbing, shouting, and swearing into the noise of the waves.
By the time John found her (she never learned how he knew she was there but assumed someone had called to report a lunatic loose on the beach), she was quiet, dazed, sodden, shivering, raw-throated, her hair like seaweed down her back, her thin shirt transparent.
“Here now, here now,” he said.
He draped first his jacket then his arm over her trembling shoulders and gently led her to his still warm, still running car, and drove her home. For the first time since Joseph had died, John came inside.
“Wait here,” he said, and she stood in the kitchen, holding on to the counter to steady herself, until he came back with a towel, some wool socks, Joseph’s old dark green, cable-knit sweater, and the quilt from the first-floor bedroom. He held the sweater up like a mother dressing a child and dutifully she ducked her head into it; then he walked her to one of the fireplace chairs, wrapped her in the blanket, and asked her to sit, while he built a fire. She put the socks on herself, and once the fire was truly going, he helped her dry her hair.
Then, he sat a few feet away, not in Joseph’s chair, but in one he brought in from the kitchen and, in his kind, low, level voice, began to talk. About growing up in Baltimore, about baseball, about his attempts, after his sister moved away, to make bread and piecrust, about the history of Antioch Beach. Gradually, Edith’s shivering stopped, the chill and achiness seeping from her body, the firelight dancing over her face, until her bones seemed to grow soft and pliant as candle wax, and she believed she had never been so grateful to be warm. John’s voice kept on, long and even as a horizon. In time, it grew fainter. At some point, she interrupted its flow to say thank you. When she woke up, morning lit her windows, and John was gone.