THE HOUSE WAS DARK, as she’d known it would be. She thought he was in South America, but she was not certain. In Argentina, maybe.
She unlatched the garden gate and walked down the path, around the main house and down to the cottage, past the roses and the quince bushes all in darkness but the concrete path brighter than the grass and the earth around it. At the cottage she unlocked the door and went in.
She put her briefcase on the counter, and for a moment it looked to her as though a light had come on and gone out again in one of the windows at the main house. She watched a while longer to see if the light came back but it didn’t. The house still dark, a brick mountain looming in the night. Then a light flashed again, but now she could tell that it was only the reflection of the headlights of a car going by in the street. It wasn’t Jack.
She hesitated for a moment, then took the key from her purse and walked back up the path to the house. The bushes were full of their fruit that no one picked any more. When Andrew had been small, they used to make quince jelly together, the boy helping her pick and mash, and later in the coldroom in the basement taking the jars from her hand and setting them on the low shelf with the labels pointing front. In later years an English neighbour came to pick some of the fruit, but that ended too.
She unlocked the back door, pushed it open and listened, then reached for the light switch and stepped inside. Cold, damp. Stairway air. Up she walked, feeling like an intruder, turning on lights as she went: the hallway; the kitchen, all modern and unused like a showroom; the TV room; the living room; her study with the door closed; his study with the door open. She paused for a moment, then stepped inside.
Bookcases, his desk, tray after tray with his rock samples. On two large corkboards maps full of pins with little flags for copper, gold, and silver, all the treasures of the earth. And prominently on the keyboard of his upright typewriter, the thing she’d been hoping for, a sheet of paper with his handwriting on it: Argentina, Río Negro, Aguada de Guerra. And a telephone number. She took the piece of paper, folded it, and put it in her pocket. Over at the southern hemisphere map, she looked for Argentina and Río Negro. There. A little pin with a silver flag in Aguada de Guerra.
At the door she looked back into the room that was so completely filled with him. For a moment her vision shimmered, and she pressed a finger to her eyebrow. Not now, she said to it. Not now.
That night she slept on the couch in the living room at the main house. She got ready in the bathroom, and then in their bedroom gathered pillow and duvet off the bed and dragged them into the living room. She found a nightgown and put it on and crawled into the nest. Light from passing cars brushing the ceiling. Once in the night she thought she heard the telephone and she stumbled to it thinking it might be Andrew, but there was only the dial tone and the receiver cold and heavy in her hand.
Later in a dream she saw him on a canvas stretcher in the desert, and she was his nurse to make him well again. Except that she could only occasionally glance at him through the heat-shimmer before she had to go back to counting grains of sand from one hand into the other. So many grains of sand. When she finally walked over to the stretcher she had exactly the same number of grains in each hand, and that seemed important. She meant to tell him, but he was gone and there was only the empty stretcher.
“Dear Margaret,” Aileen had said to her not that long ago. “He was a good boy and he knew what he wanted and that’s exactly what he did. Stop questioning him and yourself. Let him go. He would want you to.”
They’d been sitting in Aileen’s living room in Sweetbarry and the sun was going down red, red on Gull Rock out there, and red upon the tips of the tallest trees in her father’s little forest, the cedars and the pines.
She and Aileen had been friends and neighbours in Sweetbarry all their lives, and that long weekend she’d flown there simply for Aileen’s strength and kindness and for help with her own thinking, which was like wandering a dark maze with no way out.
It had been several months after Andrew had been killed and his coffin had come home empty, and eventually she had told Jack face to face that she was hoping he’d understand, and that she believed she still loved him, but that she could not live with him right now. Rather than increase her strength, being with him actually weakened and distracted her. From this, she said. From what she needed to learn to do now. From finding her way back to herself. If it was all right with him, she would be moving out of the main house for a while, into the little wooden cottage at the bottom of the garden to be alone.
This had been one morning in the hallway, in the light from the open bathroom door. Jack had stood looking at her, so very careful with her now.
“The cottage,” he’d said. “Really? I don’t know what condition it’s in, Margaret. As you know, Andrew and his friends used it off and on but nobody has really lived in it for years. Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Jack.”
The place did need repairs, and she decided to take care of those herself. She queried the men at the lumberyard in great detail about what she would need and how to do it, and she made lists and bought tools and supplies, and got on with it: new flooring in two areas in the kitchen and bedroom where the boards were rotten, repairs to plaster where it had come away from laths, repairs to the siding on the south wall, and new roofing shingles in several places.
Altogether the repairs took five weekends. On the last weekend Jack was home, and he watched from the kitchen window and at times from the walkway. She was up on the roof, fitting and hammering, and while getting up there had been relatively easy, coming back down was not. Jack didn’t say anything, asked no questions and knew better than to offer help. But he brought down two electric heaters from the main house and set them on the path not far from the cottage. She would have liked to smile at him but she feared it might make her weep, which she didn’t want to do any more, and so she did not smile. He stood for some time, then he turned and walked back up to the house and stepped inside and closed the door.
In the morning she tidied couch and bedroom and put everything back exactly the way it had been. The night gown she refolded along its creases and put it back in the same spot in the same drawer in the dresser. Like a thief she tiptoed from room to room making sure there were no traces of her having nested there the night. In the hallway she picked up the receiver and listened and put it down again.
She went to work by subway as usual, and in her office she closed the door, unfolded Jack’s note and smoothed it on her desk. She took a deep breath and let it out and then dialled the number and asked for Señor Jack Bradley. Her Spanish was good enough for her to understand that the girl was asking for her name and number so that Señor Bradley could call her back.
When he called, Jenny was in the room taking dictation for the meeting with the Chicago client that evening, and Margaret asked her to come back in fifteen minutes and close the door on the way out.
“Is everything all right?” he said.
“More or less. I have a question. Where was Andrew on that last mission? I know it was in Ethiopia, but was it in a hot and sandy place?”
There was a silence on the phone, and even across these thousands of miles of wire she could feel him shifting down into his careful mode.
“You want to do this all over again? It won’t change with the retelling.”
“Just tell me if it was hot and sandy.”
“Probably. In places, anyway. There are highlands and there’s the Ahmar mountain range but that’s a bit further north. South in the Ogaden region, where he was, there’d be some vegetation but there’d also be stretches of desert.”
“On an airstrip.”
“Yes, on an improvised airstrip. You know that.”
“He wanted to be like you,” she said.
“Like me. Are we back to that now? He wanted to be like me and so it’s my influence on him, again. Or the lack of it. I never wanted to be a pilot or a soldier. Not after I saw how the war messed up my father. I wanted him to become an engineer, and he made a good start at it. He got his first degree and could have gone on, but then he discovered flying. Why are you doing this again? I thought we were done with the blaming.”
“I’m not blaming you. But you know he admired you and wanted to be like you. The military history in your family.” “No, I don’t know that. Not after what my father did.” More silence on the phone then.
“Wait,” she said quickly. “Jack…I don’t mean to…” And he did wait a while, but when she took too long he said, “Take care, Margaret. I’ll probably be home on Monday. We need to talk.” And he hung up.