WINNA DROVE HOME questioning herself. Why had she jumped to the conclusion that the poetic thief was her grandfather? She’d never been attached to her Poppa Edwin, who worked long hours every day of the week but one. On Sundays, she would find him in the library behind a newspaper or one of his history books. He seemed alone—maybe the loneliest person she had ever known—sitting in the shadows, huddled under his reading lamp, his feet propped up on the footstool, a cloud of cigar smoke circling his head. Though he had a large appetite, he looked like a string bean. He was afraid of everything: cold drafts, not chewing each bite of food twenty times before swallowing, your stomach being eaten away by the Coke you just drank, your features freezing into the ugly face you just made.
When Winna was very small, she would sit on his lap and he’d blow big floaty smoke-rings for her. When she got tired of that, he would wiggle his ears. He taught her how to wiggle hers. She wondered if she still could. Wishing for a mirror, she flexed her ear-wiggling muscles and laughed at herself.
Winna thought back to his long canoe-like feet. He’d ask her to put her own small foot up next to his and they’d laugh at the difference. When Juliana wasn’t looking, she would urge her grandfather to drop his false teeth. If her grandmother caught him doing that, he’d get a scolding. Besides Cuban cigars, he had a passion for ice cream and ate a dish of it every night before bed.
She had loved him because he was funny and he was her grandfather and because you are supposed to love the people in your family, but he had never offered to show her his world, nor asked to enter hers.
Winna shrugged her shoulders. That’s the way men were back then—none of this diapering babies, pushing strollers around, giving mom a break from childcare like Hugh does for Emily.
In an attempt to organize her thoughts, she stopped along the road to make notes. She parked in grass growing alongside the right lane, so close that the car shook as tractor-trailers barreled past.
On a notepad, she wrote: Check details in J’s story—read between the lines. Go with evidence not coincidence. “Chloe says she doesn’t believe in coincidence,” she said aloud. “But I do.”
Her thoughts turned to the present. Who is searching the Seventh Street house? She couldn’t imagine. Did someone tamper with my brakes—what about the stair rail? She returned to that night her brakes had failed: John’s kisses, driving down the mountain, sharp curves, hidden precipices, pumping the brakes, the sound of her tires screaming on the curves. Did someone want her dead? Who?
Cars and trucks whizzed past, their wakes violently shaking her car. A driver leaned on his horn as he approached. She clapped her hands over her ears. Terrified, she restarted her car and moved farther to the right, off the road. She was shaking.
Winna took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. She wanted to believe that she was suggestible, that the break-ins had threatened her sense of security, that she was imagining that someone had wanted her to drive off that mountain. Had the stairs been tampered with—and the rail? No one had suggested it. Did Seth say the rail had been touched up with paint? She knew it hadn’t—at least not under her direction.
Look into the fall. Make list of break-ins and dates, she wrote. Where was Todd? Where was Seth? Where was—she paused, her hands broke out in sweat as she wrote, John?
THE HOUSE IN New Castle welcomed her home in a way that it hadn’t the other day. She stocked the kitchen with food and settled in. On her way home from the market, she took a detour into town and drove by the old house—Walt’s house.
Mornings, Walt and lawyer lady were at work and she would not be seen. She stopped the car and stared at the large gray-shingled house where she had lived for over twenty years, where she had been under the illusion that she was living the good life as a wife and mother. The front door glared at her. Thinking red or a deep forest green too traditional, Winna had the door painted bright yellow. She drove away feeling like a peeping Tom, wondering what was wrong with Walt’s new wife, why the door had not been repainted.
Settling in back at home, she called her realtor and made an appointment for him to come see the house. He could come later that day. She called the kid who mowed the lawn and paid some bills. She followed that with business calls. A cup of tea in hand, she rang two old friends. She called Emily to tell her about her find—Adolph Whitaker was a thief—at least she thought so. What did Emily think?
“Sounds pretty obvious to me,” she said.
After lunch, she was ready to rest. To help get the house in Grand Junction out of mind, she picked up a book she’d been reading and stretched out on the window seat in the living room with a pillow under her head.
“Sometimes I feel loneliest when I’m with people,” the heroine said. “Solitude is different. In solitude I enjoy being with me.”
Winna had suffered loneliness after her divorce. She stopped to think what solitude meant to her. Her work required solitude and she thought of it as her friend.
The following words she read aloud: “I’ve lived with him for years, now there is something in our blood and bones that no change in us can alter.”
She read it again thinking of John, not Walt. Something still lingers in our blood and bones that no changes in us have changed. The words hit her hard and her eyes filled up with tears. Was that something the reason her marriage had failed? Why she and Walt had never experienced the intense physical love she had shared with John?
She had hidden her past from Walt. She wanted him to believe she was good, unspoiled, a virgin—someone he could proudly marry. She had never again wanted to hear the ugly words Johnny had spat at her—words and thoughts that were part of the culture then.
She had never been able to let herself go and had always been guarded in her response to Walt in bed. Then it came to her—that long-ago vow she had made when she thought she was pregnant with Johnny’s child. She had promised God that she would never want sex again.
Now, she wondered how different things might have been if she had loved him freely. Winna sat up and put her feet on the floor, wiping her tears on the back of her hand. She felt like a door had opened in her mind, like Walt had been wronged, like she could finally see what she had done to the marriage. She wished she could tell him that she now understood why he had sought the love of another woman. Maybe someday she could.
Feeling thankful, like a light had gone on in her mind and heart, she lay down and clasped the book to her breast. Closing her eyes, she let herself rest again. She thought about the house, the one where she lay in a window seat with a view of the ocean. She had lived there nearly three years, not enough time to collect many memories—but one came to mind.
After the separation, Emily had come for a visit. She had stayed half the week with her mother and the rest in town with her father. Emily had always loved the island and its history. Everywhere in the landscape and the architecture one saw traces of the past.
One morning, Winna woke up to the smell of coffee and found Emily making French toast. She no longer remembered why she had burst into tears in front of her daughter, but she thought back to the moment when Emily had embraced her and whispered in her ear, “Mom, you don’t really love Dad. I’ve known that for a long time. Right now you are just jealous because he has someone else.”
Winna had felt hurt by her words and wanted to protest, but instead she kissed her daughter and held onto her embrace. Emily was right. The marriage was convenient, not nurturing—not for her, not for him.
After breakfast, Emily cleaned up while Winna toured the garden to see what was left after the frost. She found butternut squash, beets, and cabbages. Chores done, they decided to take a walk in the woods.
Heading across the lawn in the back of the house—over a fence and around an overgrown field full of goldenrod and roseberry bushes—they came to a stone wall built hundreds of years before around a small field. Inside, the field had reforested with trees—oaks for the most part. Animals must have grazed there because the grass was trim. The scene was almost park-like, but an eerie light radiated from the overcast sky through the trees down to the nibbled grass. Emily stopped at the wall and gasped. In that light, the old field seemed enchanted. As if they had come to the edge of a window into the past, they stood there in silence unwilling to move or speak.
From her perch at the window, Winna turned on her side, tucked a second pillow under her head, and looked out at the view. She promised herself that early tomorrow morning she would visit the enchanted field. She wanted to see if her camera could capture the feeling she and Emily had experienced in that place. She would go, knowing that once missed, an image is gone forever.
She fell into a peaceful place and slept for a while. The doorbell woke her. Disoriented, she sat up and looked around at the room and out to the sea. She answered the door, inviting the realtor in.
“I am so sorry,” Winna said. “I didn’t have time to call to cancel our appointment. I just now realized it—I could never sell this house.”