June 1951
Joseph became a photographer for the local paper, one that served not only the string of beach towns, but the entire southern portion of the state. Before he offered him the job, the editor, Beau Fleeger (cigar chomping, fast talking, bighearted, all of five foot four), warned Joseph that it’d be pretty damned tame stuff after what he’d been doing in Europe, but Edith knew that her husband would delight in it. Holiday parades, high school football games, fireworks, society weddings (as much as there was a society), political rallies, ribbon cuttings, even the occasional funeral or petty crime (trespassing, break-ins, public drunkenness, a gas station attendant robbed at gunpoint): it was what Joseph had missed most during the war, all the small, scattered pieces of the precious and luminous ordinary, evidence that life insists on continuing.
Then, on a summer afternoon, one week shy of Edith and Joseph’s first anniversary, the Driver twins, Robbie and Susie, twelve years old, were out in their dinghy checking their crab pots when a storm hit. Except for its sudden and unexpected arrival—bruise-colored clouds materializing along the tree line to the east, then a rush of wind spilling them like ink across the sky—the storm was unremarkable, no hail, no flash floods, no miles of downed power lines. Wild, tree-snapping winds, some stomps of thunder, spatters of lightning. A typical summer squall, short-lived as a tantrum, certainly not the kind of weather event that kills people. Except that the Driver twins never came home, a fact their parents discovered only when they returned from work, hours after the storm had fled the scene, blowing out as spasmodically as it had blown in.
John Blanchard, the town’s chief of police, hastily put out a call for a search party, and half the town showed up, men, women, teenagers. Known for his cool head, blond hair, and perpetual air of calm, John was Joseph’s friend. The two men ran into each other at crime scenes and town events, and occasionally, John called when he needed photos for a police file. In the case of the search party, he left the role Joseph would play ambiguous, saying only, “Better bring your camera.”
“To photograph the happy Driver family reunion,” said Joseph.
“Hell, I hope so,” replied John.
Because she couldn’t bear to be home by the phone, at loose ends, swinging between hope and dread, Edith tugged on a pair of blue jeans and the knee-high rubber boots Joseph had given her for Christmas and went along.
Some of the searchers set out in boats, others combed the woods edging the salt marshes, hoping the kids had put ashore and taken shelter amid the trees. Just before dark, the Drivers’ neighbor, eighty-year-old Roger Payne, found the boat, overturned, empty as a husk, and floating farther out in the deep waters of the bay than anyone had dared imagine. Most people went home after that, disheartened, promising to come back at daybreak, hungry less for their dinners than for the lamp-lit rooms and solid floors of their houses, the living faces of their own children. They wanted to watch fireflies hover and flicker above the cut grass of their lawns, to pull tricycles into the safety of backyard sheds.
A few kept searching, including Edith, Joseph, and John in John’s skiff. They navigated the maze of channels and inlets and ponds, kept close to the water’s edge, raking flashlight beams through the marsh grass and brush, disturbing sleepy birds: black ducks, clapper rails, and willets, and once a blue heron, breath-stoppingly huge, that broke from a clutch of shrubs and, after one prehistoric cackle, winged silken and liquid-necked, noiseless as a paper airplane, low across the water and into the night.
They found them just as the sun slipped above the horizon to simmer in the tall grass and beam pink against the white sides of the houses far to the west. Robbie at the mouth of an inlet, snagged in the talon-like roots of the pine trees that gripped the shore’s edge and hung out raggedly over the water. And Susie, not twenty-five yards away, lying facedown in a plot of thickset, feathery plumed phragmite weeds. They were both fully dressed, except for their shoes. Even Susie’s hair had stayed braided.
Once the three of them were ashore, John Blanchard took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “We’ll need to photograph them, Joseph. Just for our records, not the newspaper. God knows, no one wants or needs to see this.”
Joseph just nodded, but in the morning light, he looked not merely sad but haunted, his eyes hollow, his mouth trembling. When he raised the camera, his hands were shaking, so without a word, Edith took the camera from him, wiped the tears from her face, and stepped into the tea-colored water, stirring up tempests of silt with her boots. As she photographed first Robbie, then Susie, she tried to put her emotions away, to focus only on the act of taking accurate pictures, but in the end, whatever it took to turn a dead child into any other two-dimensional scrap of light and shadow, she didn’t have it. The details pierced her: the exposed strip of pale skin on Robbie’s leg where his shorts rode up, the straight line of Susie’s carefully parted hair. Edith moved around the children, catching them from a variety of angles. By the end, she heaved with dry-eyed, audible, chest-burning sobs that didn’t stop, not when John and Joseph lifted the twins into the boat, not when she covered each with the blankets they’d brought to warm them, if only they had found them alive.
But later, at home, she did stop, and it was Joseph who cracked, shivering and weeping and saying, “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.” Edith understood that it wasn’t just the deaths of these children that were shaking him to the core, but also all the deaths from before, during the war. She built a fire, even though it was summer, wrapped her husband in quilts, rocked him in her arms, and wove a cocoon of words, descriptions of every loveliness that crossed her mind, birds and mosses and flowering plants, the sound of a creek rattling through woods, a cluster of cabbage butterflies fluttering, dance-like, on a patch of ground. She gave him morning coming through their bedroom windows and the shapes of leaves. She gave him the names of things.
Because the pain of losing the children hung on hard, Edith would do it for weeks, this whispered comforting, and each time she would lie awake long after he’d fallen asleep, enfolded in two sorrows, Joseph’s and her own, but also in a radiant, awestruck gratitude at what she understood was the great honor of her life, not being loved but loving, soothing this good man, making him feel safe.