Postscript

MOST OF THE HOUSES at Ogunquit were shuttered against the blinding day, silent in their gardens above the beach.

Sara and Matt came up the hill from the beach, looking over their shoulders at Hannah and Rachel. The two girls walked some way behind them, barefooted, brown from the sun, Hannah with her hands slightly outstretched, balancing shells carefully in her cupped palms. Occasionally, she would look up at Rachel, who walked steadfastly beside her, so much taller, so much more silent, head bowed, carrying their towels.

From where she sat on the porch, Anna could see them coming.

She smiled. This had been her viewpoint for the last few months, every morning watching the sea from exactly the same point where her mother had sat each day, coffee cup in her hands. Thinking of her now, Anna could almost see Grace superimposed on the picture ahead of her, almost see her turning at the gate, where David now stood, to glance back at her daughter.

Anna bit her lip. She rested her hands on the paper in front of her. She looked down across the porch, at the cat lying in the deep shade on his side; at the newspaper lying on the chair, and at the tubs of flowers. She tried to remember what they were called, these beautiful pink blooms that almost swamped their container, and were echoed along the path to the gate. Sometimes when the light was strong, like today, she had to wait to let herself understand the world in front of her, to put a name to shapes. It had been two years, but she still had a problem naming. It was only colors that she could remember easily.

Colors, and her mother among the same shades; her mother bending over the flowers, watering them carefully, brushing back the almost-white hair from her face. And her mother’s eyes, her own eyes, and Rachel’s—that color—green of such depth. Green, David’s color. The color of life.

She looked at David, imagining Grace next to him. Her mother would have stood with her arm casually linked in his. They would have been talking together. She could visualize them, even though she had never seen them together in life. They were cut from the same cloth, David and Grace: single-minded, unshakable. Tears came to her eyes, and she smiled at herself. It was always like this now. Everything flowed close to the surface. Some kind of defensive circuitry in her head, the system that had kept her feelings in check for so many years, had been defused. She cried often. In frustration at her incapacity to do the most seemingly simple tasks. In grief, at remembering. In joy, in David’s arms. Most often, this last. He had never left her. He had never gone home, or even considered it.

Anna looked down now at the palette beside her.

The oak leaves were long dead, and their shade was dull to any ordinary glance. But, in one sense, in the sense of color, in the sense of Grace’s tender and ghostly presence, they lived. In them she could see the palest cadmium red and lemon yellow, the raw sienna, and phyllo blue. She looked at them with an almost idle speculation on their possibilities.

A mixing of pigment to their color would produce a minor miracle. She could add permanent rose to them, and they would become mid-blue, or violet. Ultramarine would turn them pink. Cadmium yellow would make the shade green again.

Even the dead leaves. Deepest green.

David was opening the gate now. He was talking to his sister, taking the beach mats from her hands; laughing at something that Matt had said. Then he glanced back at Anna, and smiled.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and saw the flooding images.

The woods and the water, the long reaches of open fields. Wilson’s world of miracles. Ravines in shadow, the falling of rain, the mile upon mile of scent and shade; the passes of light and isolation. The lilies that grew, that flourished, in the driest places; the trees that clung on to life, established from the merest thread of soil, out of nothing, and climbed out of the dark; drenched woodlands full of overpowering sweetness. The snow, the sunlight.

All the paths that she had walked with David in the past.

The sure road that ran between them, unfolding ahead of them, a way through the mountains.