Friday evening
When he returns to the house, she is not in sight. Her bedroom door is closed. He takes a seat on the front porch and props his feet against the railing. Beyond a break in the dunes, the gray ocean lolls lazily in the dull afternoon sun. A slight chill is settling in. After ten minutes, he hears her footsteps behind him in the main room. She stops at the screen door.
“Do you want me to leave?” she asks. “I can find a motel until tomorrow, then head back.”
“No, I’m fine. It was over fifty years ago.”
He rises from the chair and heads past her into the house. “C’mon, let’s make some supper. I’m working on a fish stew I’ve been perfecting for years. You cook?”
“As little as possible.”
He pours wine in two of Pam’s hand-painted glasses. She takes his instructions, chops celery and onions, minces garlic, and finishes peeling the shrimp. He fries andouille sausage in olive oil; adds the celery and onions, garlic, bay leaf, diced tomatoes, and tomato sauce to build the broth, finally adding a splash of dry white wine before dropping in the chunks of fish, clams, and shrimp; then puts together a small salad. They talk about kids—his son, Eli, a classics professor in California, teaching and raising a family; his daughter, Eppy, a researcher on arctic wildlife, who took flying lessons, quit her day job, and hooked up as a pilot and part owner of a small fleet of puddle-jumpers that shuttles hunters, fishermen, and her old research buddies into the Alaskan wilds.
“Wow!” J’nelle says. “Now there’s an independent woman for you!”
“Yeah. Proud of ’em both. They jumped way beyond me.”
“Grandkids?”
“Bess and Sally,” he says, “ten and eight. Eli’s kids. They are ahead of me too—already fluent in two languages.”
“Wow again.”
“And you have a daughter.”
“Yes,” she says, “Anna. Adopted. I assume you can guess why.”
He shoots her a questioning look.
“Abortions could be fairly crude back in those days,” she says. “I was doing it without parental help.”
He’s heard the stories, even seen some of the gruesome pictures. He cannot imagine her parents—prominent, martini-drinking, country-clubber Christians—in the same frame with any of that.
“And where is she—Anna?”
“I don’t know.”
He gets out bowls and silverware, stirs the thickening broth, and looks at her. Her frame seems withdrawn, the shoulders slumped, the hair no longer bouncy but fallen from the dome of her skull. Her earrings hang without movement or sparkle.
He asks carefully: “Do you want to know?”
“Yes and no. It was an endless string of drug rehabs and relapses. The emotional strain wore me out, plus the hemorrhage of money to rehab centers and private detectives to trace her down, and the time I was spending on my own therapy and hers. The last time she vanished to God-knows-where, I made myself let it go.”
“Where was Seth in all of this?”
“We adopted her in our late forties, and the worst of it was after he had vanished as well.”
He hands her a bowl of stew, rimmed with the poking edges of clam shells.
“J’nelle, you’ve had a tough time of it.”
She straightens and takes the bowl.
“I got tired of searching for vanished people. I got fed up with being vanished on. I got tired of crying alone in the dark. I just … got tired, and I gave up.”
In her eyes is that absent look that in the old days seemed to take her so far away and leave him so far behind. Now it is more the look of someone slammed against a wall.
She stands, holding the steaming bowl, and focuses her gaze on him.
“I’m afraid to know,” she says. “I mean, my own daughter! I wake at night from screams I hear in my sleep. And I don’t know whether they are my screams or hers or whether we are screaming at each other. I…”
She sets the bowl down and clasps the edge of the counter. Her shoulders slump even more. She speaks as if talking to a face embedded in the countertop.
“Seth and I came to this island with her once when she was three years old. He was into surf fishing then, because he said it gave him peace. We stayed at an old hotel. I have no idea where on the island the hotel was, probably farther down the sound. Maybe that was another reason I wanted to come here this weekend, to chase another memory: Seth lost in his fishing; Anna with a blue and yellow plastic pail, running on her fat little legs through the surf, searching for shells. I suppose when you invited me down here, I thought maybe, if I got close to the place again, it would somehow bring those days back, revivify them. But I knew as soon as I turned onto the island it was not going to work. Re-running old pictures through the mind is not enough.”
She straightens, bows her head, and hugs her arms to her chest. Her shoulders begin to shake.
He sets down the stew he has ladled for himself. His hand, warm from holding the bowl, rests on the edge of the counter, fingers curled and folded. So many times in their years together she cried in just this way. Silent, shaken tears. They would be in his car, driving somewhere, or walking on a golf course late at night. A long pause would set in, like a drawn breath, and he would turn to see her in the posture he sees her in now, head lowered, face hidden, and it would take him a minute to see what was happening. And he froze each time, uncertain of what he should do because he was not sure what he himself would have wanted in that situation, or maybe because she brought him face-to-face with a human complexity that was so far beyond his imagining, he was afraid to try.
“Jesus,” he says. “J’nelle, I’m sorry.”
“And,” she says, “the worst of it is—the part that makes me hurt the most—she may have had a child somewhere, a daughter, my one chance at being a grandparent, to start over and shower love on someone.”
He picks up her bowl and his and sets them on the table, then turns and rests a hand on her shoulder.
“Have a seat,” he says. “I’ll open another bottle of wine. I suspect that before the evening is over, we may need it.”