6:30 P.M.
I strip out of my damp bathing suit, leave it on the cabin floor, and lie down on the bed. From the Big House, I hear Peter’s deep laugh, my mother calling to the kids to stop playing Parcheesi and get ready for the barbecue. The ceiling of our cabin is crawling with carpenter ants, brought out by the heat, the impending storm. A dusting of cardboard covers Peter’s bedside lampshade. I stare up through the skylight at the evening sunlight breaking through the trees, the dappled twigginess of the branches. Nimbus clouds float past, pregnant with rain.
When Anna and I were very young, our father planted a delicate birch sapling outside our cabin, its trunk as thin as a pussy willow. A tree planted in a forest. He said it would grow up with us, grow tall with us. Back then, before it reached beyond the roof line, the skylight above my bed was an uninterrupted rectangle of blue. I loved to lie there, staring up at the open sky, watch gulls flying the wind shear. After Conrad died, I prayed to that open sky—not for forgiveness, but for guidance, a way to move beyond the past, a clear path forward. By then, the split ends of birch branches had begun to appear in the corner of the skylight—tiny sharp strands that poked at the air. Inch by inch, year by year, the birch’s unruly mane grew into frame until it covered the windowpane, blocked out the sky. I had begged for answers, for the clarity of glass. But the passage of time brought only a messy tangle of branches marking my failure to heal.
“It’s a window,” Jonas had said, that long-ago day by the stream. And I had said, “I know.”
Last night I stared at him across the crowded table, his green eyes darkening beyond the candlelight. He stared straight back. No one flinched. Finally his lips curved into that ironic smile—relief, regret, the absurd, sad inevitabilities. We were always meant to be together. Marriage, children—nothing has changed this essential truth. If I could take back what I have done, I would do it. Every bad decision when the road forked. Every terrible choice that led me away from him. Every terrible choice that led me away from Peter. Not just fucking Jonas last night, or what we did today, what I can’t stop thinking about, what I want to do tomorrow, but Conrad—that day, that bright choppy day, when the winds turned. The truth I have kept from Peter. The lie I carried into our marriage. I picture Rosemary, her prim, bland living room, her moist cake, the rage behind her eyes. The way she thanked me for saving her life. I have never thanked Jonas for saving mine. Only blamed him. Blamed myself. Kept Peter at arm’s length, punishing him for my own sin. Built my entire life on a fault line. If I had told Peter about Conrad, about that day on the boat, I know he would have forgiven me. And that is why I couldn’t tell him. Because I did not want to be forgiven.
And the choice Jonas is asking me to make now. To leave my wonderful husband. To cause my children pain. Peter is not vindictive—whatever happens, he would never take them away from me, never create a rift between me and them. He loves us all too much for that. He is a man with backbone. It is his gravity that holds my orbit steady when I falter. I am in love with Jonas. I always have been. I cannot live without him, cannot give him up now, after waiting for so long. But I’m in love with Peter, too. I have two choices. One I can’t have. One I don’t deserve to have.
I get up off the bed. I need a hot shower and too many Advil. My body is sore. My head hurts from trying to think, going around and around in circles. Does letting go mean losing everything you have, or does it mean gaining everything you never had? I wrap myself in a towel. I should go to Dixon’s. Be with Peter, with my children.
Outside the bathroom, I turn on the shower to let the water run hot, then go in search of Advil. I root around my mother’s deep, disorganized cabinet. My hand grazes something in back, and I pull it out, already knowing what it is. One of Anna’s ancient Playtex tampons. No one else ever used that brand. The plastic wrapper has yellowed, but the little pink plastic applicator inside has held its pink. I think of Conrad peering in through the bathroom window, my legs spread wide, tampon skittling across the floor. The day I met Jonas. And I think of Anna, always shouting at me for touching her things—that I was the one she told when she lost her virginity. How sad and scared she was those last months. How Peter held me fast, every day, when the tears came. I step into the shower, stand under the hot, gushing water, hoping it will drown out my guttural animal sobs, my salted-wound despair, begging the water to make me clean, to scald away the past. Knowing that there is only one choice to make.
6:45 P.M.
We walk up our steep driveway, stop at the dirt road, wait for Mum at the triangle.
“Don’t wait for me,” she yells from halfway up the driveway.
But we wait. I’m barefoot, in a linen dress, flip-flops shoved in a straw bag, flashlights for the walk home, trying to keep my insides at bay. Maddy has run on ahead—she likes to be first—with Finn racing down the dirt road behind her. I watch my mother’s slow progress. Her knees aren’t what they once were. She’s wearing her same old jeans—slightly too short, slightly too wide, and a cotton Indian shirt that covers her behind, as she likes to say. The pond frames her ascent: a glass-blue horizon line, waist-height, behind a fretwork of trees. I pretend to listen to Jack arguing with Peter about why we need a beach sticker for White Crest Beach. The surfing is better, and it only costs thirty dollars for residents.
“We’ll see,” Peter says.
I swat at my ankles. I’m being bitten alive by blackflies.
A horsefly lands on my arm. Its quail-speckled wings settle. Horseflies are slower than blackflies—bigger and easier to kill, but their sting is ten times worse. I swat it. Kill it. Watch it tumble to the dirt road and twitch once before dying.
“Who has the bug spray?”
Peter reaches into a canvas bag.
“Here I am,” my mother announces. “The flies are back. I’m glad you decided to come with us, Eleanor,” she says. “Though I wish you’d put your hair back. It looks so much nicer when it’s out of your face.”
We are coming up to the Gunthers’ house when my mother stops. The Gunthers’ vicious German shepherds are long dead. So are the Gunthers. I don’t know the family who bought the house. Yet I still feel a tinge of nerves, expecting the high-pitched barking, the saliva, the growling, gums exposed for the kill, every time I approach their white wooden fence, now partially rotted away, fallen into the dark underbrush along with everything else.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mum says. “The red onion.”
“Jack can run back,” Peter says. “It’ll take five minutes.”
“Why am I always the one who has to do everything?” Jack grouses. “Why can’t Maddy or Finn go?”
I can see the muscle in Peter’s jaw clenching. “Because you are currently making up for your utterly shit behavior to your sainted mother this morning.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’ll go.” I start back without waiting for Peter to contradict me. I know every fucking family is unhappy in its own fucking way. But right now, for a few hours, I need Happy Family. Until I am safely on shore, I need to hold on to this truth like a life preserver. Not let go.
“Can you grab me a sweater?” Peter calls after me. “It’s going to get chilly.”
A white cat I’ve never seen before is sitting on the deck outside the screen porch. There’s something about a white cat that revolts me—a ratlike porn-y quality. The cat disappears into the bushes when it sees me coming. The bottom half of a chipmunk lies on the deck, its furry tail dangling between the wooden slats. I know I should clean it up, but it’s disgusting and I may as well let the cat finish his dinner. I leave it there and go to our cabin to grab Peter a sweater.
The top bureau drawer is open. Peter, I think, annoyed. I’m always careful to shut it tight to keep the moths and spiders out. I shove the drawer closed. My jewelry box is out on the bureau top. Odd, because I know I didn’t leave it there. I open it to check if anything is missing. Nothing has been taken, but something has been added. A piece of folded paper lies atop my tangle of earrings and necklaces. It has been cut in the shape of a snapping turtle. Inside is my green glass ring. Jonas has had it all these years. Since we stumbled back into each other in the Greek coffee shop. Since that spring evening on the pier. Since the beach picnic where I first met Gina—Anna’s last summer on the pond. I wonder where he has kept it. Hidden away. A tiny secret. It’s such a small thing, a worthless tin thing, its gilt long gone. Yet, when I put it on my finger I feel a powerful sense of completion—as if I’ve finally been made whole, restored—like a Venus de Milo whose missing arm has been found, trapped under the earth for centuries, and, at last, reattached. I close my eyes, allowing myself this, at least. I remember the moment he gave it to me. His clammy, shaking hand. Saying goodbye. Two children who would always love each other. I stick the ring in my pocket, crumple the paper turtle, toss it into the wastebasket, and grab Peter a sweater.
7:15 P.M.
I catch up with the others as they approach the turnoff to Dixon’s. His driveway is actually a section of the Old King’s Highway. Past Dixon’s house, the road dead-ends at a wide field, overgrown with goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. But beyond the far edge of the field, hidden under the shade of the woods, the ancient road reappears. When we were young, this was our secret route into town. We could walk the whole four miles—all the way from Becky’s house to the Penny Candy store—without ever going on the tar road. Sometimes, after a heavy rain, we would find bits of pottery or arrowheads unearthed from the steep banks. One year I found a small medicine bottle, plum purple, sea-glassed by time. I imagined some Pilgrim tossing it from a wagon or saddlebag into the thick woods with a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure no one had seen him littering. The bottle had lain there untouched for two centuries—gone directly from his hand to mine.
The trail comes out of the woods at the Pilgrim cemetery, a long-deserted graveyard. It fascinated us: the rows of small sunken tombstones carved with winged death’s heads, wind-worn and pitted, their epitaphs barely visible, filled with lives, with resignation. Most of the dead were children. Temperance, Thankful, Obediah, Mehetable. Aged 3 wks, aged 14 mo. and 24 d’s, 2 yr 9 months, 5 d’s. All facing east. On Judgment Day, the children would arise to face the dawn, hoping to be placed on God’s right hand, to be judged among the righteous.
The smell of mesquite and hamburger wafts up the driveway. “Yum,” I say, catching up to the kids. “I’m starving.”
“You must be, after that long swim,” Mum says.
“I want three hamburgers,” Finn says. “Can I have three hamburgers, Mom?”
“It’s not up to Mom,” Jack says. “You have to ask Dixon.”
“What about hot dogs?” Finn says.
“What I need is a stiff gin and tonic,” Peter says. “And I’ll shoot Dixon if all he has is that Almaden swill.”
“He uses them for lamps,” my mother says.
Peter looks at her, confused.
“You fill them with sand,” she says.
“Sand.”
“Clearly you missed the seventies.”
“Elle, I think your mother may have incipient dementia.”
She swats him with her hat. “Given the amount we used to drink, we had to use them for something.”
“If you’re not feeling well, Wallace, I’m happy to walk you home.”
“Your husband is intolerable.” She laughs. “It might be time to think about divorce.”
Finn and Maddy look distressed.
“Mum.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m joking. It was a joke,” she says to them. “I adore your father, as he knows perfectly well.”
“Your grandmother has always been a great wit,” Peter says.
I take Finn’s hand, crouch down beside him. “Your grandmother was being silly—you know how silly she can be. Daddy and I love each other. We always will.”
About fifteen people are milling around on the front lawn, the usual Back Woods crowd, chatting, eating Kraft cheddar on Wheat Thins, drinking out of plastic cups. A makeshift bar has been set up on a round picnic table, citronella candles burning.
“Right, then,” Peter says. “Into the fray?”
The first person I see is Dixon’s wife Andrea. Even now, all these years later, every time I see her I think of that Monopoly game and Dixon walking across his living room naked. Dixon and Andrea got back together three years ago after running into each other at a rare-book auction. They were bidding against each other for a signed first edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Dixon says he didn’t recognize her at first, she was so changed. Andrea’s mass of curly red hair is now a tidy gray bob. She’s traded in her African tribal earrings for tasteful pearl studs, replaced her Peter Max dove button with a pink ribbon. Her son is an investment banker. He lives in Colorado and trades in clean energy, she says, as if that makes it ecologically acceptable. She still believes in world peace. Andrea is deep in conversation with Martha Currier, a fraying ex-jazz singer from New Orleans who has a modernist house overlooking the beach and is never without her turbaned head scarf. Martha is smoking a Virginia Slim through a long ivory cigarette holder. Andrea waves the smoke away from her face every time Martha exhales, but Martha ignores her and, if anything, seems to exhale more directly into Andrea’s face each time. I have always enjoyed Martha.
My mother ducks behind me as we approach the gathering. “Shield me,” she says. “Just until I’m safely past Andrea. Before she corners me and asks me how I am, in that ‘interested’ way, and then waits for me to give her a sincere answer. As if anyone ever wants to get stuck in an actual conversation at a cocktail party.”
I laugh. “I couldn’t agree with you more. Which is rare. Small talk and move on.”
“How he can stand spending more than ten minutes with her is beyond me. The woman is as boring as a box of salt.”
“It’s mysterious,” I say, steering her clear.
“Well, he claims she’s still a dynamo in the sack. Which I assume means she gives good blow jobs.”
“Mum, that’s disgusting.”
“I agree. It is very disturbing. She has such a small mouth.”
“I meant, you are being disgusting.” I laugh.
“Don’t be such a prude.”
“I don’t want to talk about Dixon’s sex life. He must be almost eighty.”
From across the lawn, Dixon waves to us. Mum waves back. “He’s still a very attractive man. He could have any woman he wants.”
“Any woman over sixty-five.”
“Don’t be so sure. He’s always been very sexual.”
“And now I’m stuck with an image of Andrea with a penis in her mouth.”
“At least it means she’s not talking. Can you be an angel and get me a vodka? Rocks, no soda.” She sits down in an Adirondack chair. “And if you happen to see any peanuts. Oh, thank God,” she says as she sees Pamela approaching. Pamela is wearing a long lavender caftan and chunky amber beads. “Pamela, sit.” She pats an empty chair next to her. “Save me from these people.”
Pamela laughs at Mum in her lovely, good-natured way. She thinks my mother is wonderful, for reasons I cannot fathom. But then, Pamela is the kind of person who always sees the best in everyone. Even Conrad.
The summer after Conrad moved in with us, Pamela took me and Anna into town for fried clams. “Now then, you two,” she said when we’d settled into a booth, “I want all the news. Is Leo behaving himself? He can be a bit of a scoundrel, that one. But what a lovely man. Your mother seems exactly herself, as always.”
“I think they’re okay,” I said.
“And Conrad? It must be a bit of an adjustment having a brother.”
“Stepbrother,” I said.
“Do you want the truth or the lie?” Anna said.
“I’ll leave that up to you. Clam strips or whole bellies?”
In the end, we decided on the truth.
We told her how awful he was. How he was always creeping around. Stood at the icebox drinking milk straight from the carton so neither of us could ever have cereal for breakfast. The gross pubescent beard that he refused to shave.
“He uses up all the hot water every morning,” Anna said. “Jerking off in the shower. It’s disgusting. I mean . . .”—she put her finger down her throat, pretending to gag—“imagine what he’s thinking about.”
I was sure Pamela would be horrified. Instead, she told Anna she sympathized—the situation sounded positively beastly. Was it possible, though, that Anna might be blaming Conrad for her having been sent away to boarding school, Conrad’s taking over her bedroom? “Because,” Pamela said, “however repugnant his behavior, that is not his fault. In fact, it’s the last thing on earth he wanted. All he wanted was for his mother to love him. So, if you can, try to remember that he is suffering. Be kinder. Both of you.” She bit into a clam belly, squirting juice all over the table. “You have the most beautiful eyes, Anna. I’m always meaning to tell you. That pale gray. If you see our waitress, I need hot sauce.”
Dixon is manning two kettle-shaped Webers, dressed, as always, in white duck pants and a blue linen shirt, barefoot and tan, tongs in one hand, a martini in the other, not a splatter of grease on him. His gray hair, still damp from the beach, is pushed back slick over his head. Three roughed-up surfboards are leaning against the side of the house, his wet suit flopped over a wooden sawhorse, drying. He’s the only man I know who stills swims straight out into the sea at high tide without hesitation. Mum is right—he is a handsome man, even now. A Downhill Racer, a Hubbell. He waves Jack over, gives him a firm handshake and hands him a spatula.
Peter is at the bar. I watch him pour two inches of gin and a small splash of tonic water into a glass. Only then does he add three sad little cubes of ice. They float around like turds on the sea. Brits love to drink, but they make tepid, vacuous cocktails. I come up behind him, put my arms around his waist.
“Who that?” he says.
“Ha-ha.”
He turns around and kisses the tip of my nose.
“My mother is requesting vodka. One ice chip.”
“Roger that. You?”
“I’m going inside to find where Andrea has hidden the decent wine.”
“I’ll whistle three times if I see her coming.”
I let myself in the kitchen door. I have always loved the Dixons’ kitchen—the poppy-red floorboards, the worn breadboard counter, the musky smell of Band-Aids and cumin and glasses of ginger ale. Every time I’m in this kitchen I have an urge to pull a stool up to the counter and eat a bowl of cornflakes with milk and heaps of white sugar. I open a cupboard above the sink, grab a wineglass. High up on a shelf is a yellowing Cuisinart base that probably hasn’t been used since 1995. Beside it, an old Salton yogurt maker gathers dust. Seeing it makes me think of curdled milk, sanctimony, and other people’s parents having sex.
There’s a just-opened bottle of decent Sancerre in the fridge. I fill my glass and wander into Dixon’s study. Beyond the windowpane Peter brings my mother a can of Spanish peanuts. He has stolen the vodka bottle from the bar and hands it to her. She takes it without a flinch, glugs. Hands it back. He laughs, sits down on the arm of her Adirondack chair. Lights a cigarette. Whispers something in her ear that makes her swat him. But she is laughing, too. No one else can make my mother relax into her old self the way Peter does. He has some perfect combination of kindness, mean-spirited wit, and I-don’t-give-a-fuck that makes her happy. In a way, Peter saved her all those years ago, after Leo disappeared, after her baby died, after she found my journal. Peter woke her up from a daze, turned the lights back on in our old apartment. Made all of us feel it was safe to be happy again.
Maddy and Finn come running over and clamber around him, flocking to him like baby ducks. He swats a mosquito that has landed on his left arm, opens his palm to show the kids that he got it. And in that tiny gesture, I feel an overwhelming sense of relief. And of gratitude.
I head past the living room to the upstairs bathroom. A few of the older crowd have come inside. They are sitting around a fire, engrossed in a conversation about birdcalls.
“For me, it’s the chickadee. Chick a dee dee dee . . . So sweet. Like little hopping bits of corn,” someone is saying.
“The chickadees are disappearing from our property in droves,” I hear Andrea say. “I’m convinced it’s the neighbor’s cat. They refuse to bell it. I’ve called the National Park Service, but they insist there’s nothing to be done.”
“I’m partial to the blue jay’s screech.” I hear Martha Currier, her deep, raspy southern accent. “Though I know that puts me in a minority.”
Dixon’s house has two staircases. The wide stairs I climb now lead to the formal part of the house—the grown-ups’ side. Here the rooms are beautiful, elegant. Each of the guest rooms has antique wallpaper—sprays of pale rosebuds or lily of the valley against a robin’s-egg blue. The master bedroom has always been my favorite room in the world. As a child, I used to dream that one day I would have a room exactly like it. Hand-painted wallpaper with lush white peonies drooping in jade-green leaves; a romantic canopy bed, eyelet curtains, a worn wide-board floor; a fireplace with a neat stack of wood and kindling beside it; a claw-foot tub in the bathroom.
The kids’ stairs are steep and dark with no banister—just the close press of walls on either side to steady you. They lead directly from the kitchen to the “dorm”—a loftlike room with high windows and bunk beds lining every wall. This was the sleepover house when we were kids, the place where we could sneak in boys for spin the bottle, smoke clove cigarettes. The only way to access the dorm from the grown-ups’ part of the house was through a Jack and Jill bathroom that we could lock from our side.
The guest bathroom is occupied, so I go to use the one in Dixon’s bedroom. When I open the door, my heart sinks. Andrea has redecorated. The old-fashioned peony wallpaper has been stripped, the room painted in an eggplant tone. The beautiful canopy bed is gone, replaced by a beige-linen upholstered bed, plank floors tastefully covered in herringbone sisal. There are matching mid-century dressers and Simon Pearce glass lamps. I could kill Andrea. I only need to pee, but I’m tempted to take a shit in the toilet just to make a point.
Instead, I go down the long hallway to where it dead-ends at the Jack and Jill bathroom. I am locking the door behind me when the dorm-side door opens and Gina steps inside.
“Hey,” she says, as if meeting in a bathroom is perfectly normal. She pulls down her jeans and sits on the toilet.
I stand there, mute. He is here is all I can think, heart racing, breathless.
Gina grabs a wodge of toilet paper and wipes herself. “When did you guys get here?”
“Maybe half an hour,” I manage to say. “We walked.”
“We weren’t planning to come, but his mother was threatening to make a tofu stir-fry.” She flushes the toilet and stands up to zip her jeans. She has a full Brazilian. A sudden self-conscious worry blazes through me as I picture my own old-fashioned pubic hair. Did it bother Jonas? Turn him off? He is used to something else. Smooth, childlike.
“Your turn,” Gina says.
I cannot look at her. I cannot look away.
She opens the medicine cabinet and finds a tube of Neosporin, squeezes some on the tip of her finger, takes a Band-Aid out of a box. “I did something to my foot earlier,” she says. “Just a little scratch, but it hurts like hell, and now there’s a blood blister. Jonas thinks I stepped on a crab.”
I watch her rub ointment on the wound in a tidy circular motion. She peels the little strips off the back of the Band-Aid, stretches it over what is clearly a nothing scratch, smooths both ends over her skin just so—lovingly. I’m fascinated by the care she gives herself, the importance of every gesture. It’s like watching one of those women who actually brush their teeth for the full two minutes. I wait for her to leave, but she takes a lip gloss out of her back pocket, leans in to the mirror. I have no choice but to sit down and pee with Gina two feet away, underpants around my ankles, the barest weight of Jonas’s ring nudging me through my dress pocket.
“I forced Jonas to drive here,” Gina says, making a pout, checking that her lips are perfect. “By the time he got home, it was the total witching hour for mosquitoes at our place. God knows where that man disappears to.”
My pee stops midstream in a tiny gasp, before starting again. Gina turns, looks at me, at if she is considering something. I still myself, like a deer sensing a hunter in the blind.
But she smiles. “You won’t believe this, and I probably shouldn’t tell you, but I used to think it was you.” She dries her hands on a guest towel. “It seems so ludicrous now. I actually followed him once. Turned out he’d been trying to find some osprey nest all summer.” She laughs.
“He loves these woods,” I say, and reach for the toilet paper.
Crossing the dorm on our way back downstairs, Gina says, “Have you seen the new master? Andrea did an amazing reno. She finally convinced Dixon to get rid of that hideous wallpaper. They’re gutting the kitchen next.”
“I grew up in that kitchen.”
“Yeah. But have you seen it?”
She will never know how close she came to losing him.
“This room must have been the ultimate teenage crash pad.” She gestures to the wall of bunk beds. “Jonas probably made out with some girl on one of those.”
“He was much younger than us.”
I follow her down the narrow staircase.
“But you must know if he had girlfriends or whatever,” Gina says over her shoulder.
My hair still smells of pond water.
My mother is exactly where I left her, Peter still perched on the arm of her chair. Citronella tiki lamps cut circles of light into the dusk.
“I’m getting a burger,” Gina says. “Want one?”
I scan the lawn for Jonas, feel a queasy tightening. I find him in the shadows beyond the grill. He is staring at me. He’s been waiting for me. I reach into my skirt pocket, close my fingers around the green glass ring, steady myself. “I think I’ll wait a bit.”
Gina crosses the lawn to him, wraps her arms around his waist, shoves her hands into his back pockets. Ownership. She must sense my stare, because she turns her head quickly, like a puma picking up a scent, looks out into the dark. Jonas whispers something in her ear and she smiles, turns back to him.
“Hey, wife,” Peter says. “Where’ve you been?”
“With Gina. Peeing.”
“Have some peanuts.” My mother passes me the can.
“I was upstairs in the kid’s bathroom. Gina opened the door from the dorm side without knocking and came in. Sat down and took a pee in front of me.”
“She’s vulgar,” my mother says.
“Your mother is on the warpath tonight.”
“I’m not on any war or any path,” Mum says. “I simply told Andrea that none of us likes the new landscaping she’s had done. It isn’t ‘woods.’”
“That was very politic of you, Mum.”
“If she didn’t want my opinion, she shouldn’t have asked me what I thought of her improvements in the first place.”
“Your mother told her it looks bourgeois.” Peter laughs.
“If she’s going to lecture us all about native plants, she shouldn’t do an herbaceous border.”
Across the lawn, the younger kids are playing horseshoes in the dusk. Jonas and Gina come toward us, balancing paper plates and drinks.
“Maddy should put on more bug spray. The mosquitoes love her,” I say.
Jonas pulls up a chair beside me, puts his hand on my arm. “Mind if we join you?” he says to everyone, but only to me.
I stand up. “I left my wine upstairs.”
This time I lock the bathroom door from both sides, leave the lights turned off. I lean against the windowsill, listen to the sweep and rustle of the trees, the wafting murmur, the tinkle of glass and conversation. Ever since I was old enough to question my own instincts, my mother has given me the same piece of advice: “Flip a coin, Eleanor. If the answer you get disappoints you, do the opposite.” We already know the right answer, even when we don’t—or we think we don’t. But what if it’s a trick coin? What if both sides are the same? If both are right, then both are wrong.
My wineglass is on the bathroom windowsill where I left it. Downstairs on the deck, Peter and Jonas are talking. Peter says something, and Gina laughs, throws back her head. Both men smile. It’s surreal, unfathomable. Only hours ago, it felt like the world was daydreaming, suspended in the sky. I stare into the dusk, picturing the old abandoned ruin, the quiet of the woods, Jonas’s frank, open-eyed stare. I slide down the wall, pull my knees to my chest, cocoon myself, sucker-punched. I have made my choice: to give up this love that pulses, aches—for a different kind of love. A patient love. A love love. But the anguish is raw. Outside, I hear my mother calling out across the lawn to where Dixon stands at the grill, demanding a hamburger. “Bloody,” she shouts. “So I can hear it moo. And please do not lecture me about salmonella. I’d far rather die from diarrhea and dehydration than eat gray cardboard meat.” I hear Peter’s full-throated, easy laugh. “I swear, Wallace. One of these days I really am going to have you committed.”
When I come downstairs, Jonas is at the kitchen sink running his hand under cold water.
“There you are.” He takes his hand out of the water and holds it up. There’s a red scalding, a sear mark, running diagonally across his palm. “I was getting your mother a hamburger. I grabbed a metal spatula that was lying on the hot grill.” He leans back against the butcher block counter. I want to eat him, his lazy, languid confidence. Ingest him, absorb him.
“Come over here,” he says softly.
“You need butter.” I go to the fridge, find a stick of butter, peel back the waxy wrapper. Jonas puts out his hand and I rub butter over the sizzled skin. His fingers close over mine. I pull away, put the butter back in the fridge.
“Elle?”
“What?” I say, my back to him. Whatever he has to say, it will be unbearable.
“I doubt Dixon wants a smear of my burnt skin on his toast tomorrow morning.”
“Right.” I take the butter back out of the fridge, break a chunk off the top, throw it in the trash, find a clean dish towel and toss it to him. Contain myself. “Wrap it in this for now.”
“I left you something at the camp,” Jonas says. “In your cabin. Look for it when you get home.”
“I found it,” I say. “I went back for an onion.” I reach into my pocket and pull out the ring. “I didn’t know you still had it.”
He takes the ring from me, holds it up to the light. The little piece of green glass glows like kryptonite. “My New Year’s resolution that year was to forget you for good. And suddenly there you were, shrieking at some poor asshole in a coffee shop.” He slides the ring onto my finger, over my wedding band.
All I want is to tell him I’m his. That I always have been, always will be. Instead, I take the ring off, put it on the counter. “I can’t.”
“It belongs to you.”
I fight to keep my voice cool. “I’m going to join Peter and the kids. I’ll send Gina in to bandage that hand up properly.”
Jonas looks pale, unnerved, as if he has felt a ghost go by, been touched, ever so lightly by the frost of a passing sleeve. “Put it back on.” His voice is hard.
I take his hand and kiss his burnt palm, try to hold it together.
“There,” I say as I would to Finn. “All better now.”
I move to leave, but he pins my hand hard to the counter, staring at me like a drowning man.
“Let me go,” I say, my voice no more than a whisper. “Please.”
Behind us I hear a creak. Peter is standing in the doorway on the far side of the room.
“Oh, hey,” I say. “Jonas burned his hand.”