The party … soon found themselves on the sea-shore; and lingering only, as all must linger and gaze on a first return to the sea, who ever deserved to look on it at all.
—Persuasion
The sun streamed in through the southeast window of the tower at five thirty in the morning, waking Emily from a fitful dream in which Luke and Brock dueled on the beach with starfish for weapons, while their seconds—Mayor Trimble for Brock and Sunny Longman the unsunny waiter for Luke—cheered them on, with Dr. Griffiths standing by to mop up the blood.
Between the sun and her screaming bladder, Emily knew she’d never get back to sleep. The sky was clear, and breakfast was hours away. She slipped into chinos and a wool sweater and headed to the beach.
The lawn of Windy Corner sloped gently downward toward the water but ended abruptly in a rock-faced cliff about ten feet high. A rough wooden stairway intersected the rocks. At the bottom, a short stretch of low dunes gave way to a broad expanse of smooth, packed sand. The difference in tides here was dramatic, and the tide was currently near its low ebb.
The beach was public, but only rarely did walkers from town venture this far north, and never at this early hour. Emily had the beach to herself. She stood for a moment, feet planted shoulder-width apart and arms raised in a V, soaking the cold salt-laced wind in through her pores. At Windy Corner she still felt somewhat like a visitor, but here on the beach she was home.
She strolled aimlessly, stopping to peer at shells and stones and driftwood, loading her pockets with smaller pieces but having no real idea what she would do with them. She skirted a flock of gulls, startling them into flight, then followed a line of paw prints up near the high-tide mark, nose down like a tracking dog. The paw prints led her into loose sand, then abruptly turned and looped back. She stopped and looked up.
The prints had led her to the mouth of the Sacred Cove. A tiny cove—more of a cave, really—no more than ten feet across, the opening much narrower, and high enough on the beach that the tide rarely reached it. This was where she and Luke used to come to be alone. Say it straight, Emily—this is where they had come to make love.
Memories washed over her, irresistible as an undertow. They’d worked together at the ice-cream stand on the beach downtown. He’d won her with hardly a word—a smile from those teasing eyes was enough. That, and telling her she was beautiful. She’d never heard that word from anyone else, never thought it could possibly apply to her. It brought her down like an ax on a young fir.
She’d loved him so much she could taste it. It tasted like the sea and the sand and the mingled sweat of their bodies and the old wool blanket he spread out in the cove when they made love. It tasted like freedom and adventure and possibility, like all the endless things she could become by only pointing her finger and saying, That one.
Would that sixteen-year-old girl have pointed to a safe, slightly boring tenured professorship and a marriage based more on companionship than passion? The mature Emily doubted it. Those choices had come only later, when so many other possibilities had been washed away in the tide. Along with Luke himself.
But now he was back in her life. Or seemed ready to be if she wanted him. Would the moving finger point his way? She called to mind the words of the Rubaiyat—“The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
No, the past could never be rewritten. Whatever the future might hold, they would have to build it from the ground up. And this time they had better not build on sand.
* * *
Emily fortified herself with another of Agnes’s admirable breakfasts and changed into her “business” clothes, reflecting that she was quickly running out of things to wear. She asked Agnes about doing some laundry, but Agnes replied, “I regret to say, madam, that the washing machine is broken. I hope to have it repaired tomorrow morning.”
Emily was on her way to her car when a man came around the corner of the house, a hoe over his shoulder, whistling. His girth so nearly equaled his modest height that he rolled more than walked, his feet serving merely as rudders. A thin fuzz of white hair sprang up above the smooth, round, ruddy face of a Dickensian philanthropist, but his garb—a clean and smartly pressed blue jumpsuit—somewhat spoiled the impression.
His roll and his whistle came to an abrupt halt when he saw her. He swept off a nonexistent cap and bowed to her. “Billy Beech, at your service, ma’am. Gardener, handyman, and general factotum. As employed by your late aunt, God rest her soul, and I presume to hope by your kind self as well.”
He even spoke like something out of Dickens.
“Emily Cavanaugh.” She shook his proffered hand. “Beech. Are you related to Agnes?” Had any other two people been concerned, she might have asked if they were married; but it was impossible to imagine the dour Agnes married to this smiling beach ball.
“My late lamented brother was Agnes’s husband, and a better husband never walked the earth, though I say it. I do my best to look after her, as Bobby would have wished, but I’m sorry to say my efforts are not always accepted in the spirit in which they’re meant. She’s an independent old girl, is Agnes.” He chuckled, setting his several chins and massive belly aquiver.
“I haven’t seen you before. I take it you don’t work here every day?”
“Three days a week, ma’am: Monday, Wednesday, Friday as a rule, though I did take Monday off out of respect for the dead. You may have glimpsed me among the mourners, ma’am, but I wouldn’t presume to introduce myself at that most distressing time.”
The vision of Billy in full Victorian mourning gear, complete with top hat draped in black crepe, nearly set Emily aquiver herself, but she controlled herself with an effort. “Well, Billy, everything seems to be in good order here as far as I can see, so I guess you may as well carry on as you have been.”
“Thank you kindly, ma’am.” He swept his hand to the ground, folding his spherical girth in half in a way that suggested it was filled with something more compressible than fat and organs—marshmallow, perhaps, or memory foam. “I shall endeavor to give satisfaction.” He straightened, and the marshmallow foam instantly regained its spherical shape. He rolled off, whistling, toward the flower beds that lined the drive, and Emily proceeded to her car.