Bea went into her bedroom to change so they could go out for drinks and dinner. She closed the door, quietly, and sat down on her bed. William, here, in her home. She almost expected him to be gone when she reemerged, that he was just a mirage, that she had somehow conjured him up by spending all that time with the photographs. It was unreal. She had opened the door to the flat and there he was. How many times had she had this dream, that he would be here, in London. That he would be in her world. That they would be together again.
And yet, like with so many dreams, the reality flickered. The William in her dreams was not the one who was here. The one in her dreams was the one from six years earlier. Unpredictable. Angry. Sweet. Pushing at boundaries. Crashing into walls. This William was different. He seemed to have settled, to have taken on the mantle of a life that didn’t quite fit. He had always been able to move easily through that world; she never thought that he’d end up living there. It was as though the fire within him had died back. She was reminded of that New Year’s Eve dance, so long ago, when they were all dressed up. Acting like the adults they wanted to be. He looked beautiful that night, but he didn’t look like the William she loved. This William, too, wasn’t the person she had known.
The more she heard about his life, the sadder she became. What promise he had, what potential. She had convinced him to go to Harvard, to experience it for them both. And at the beginning, he had. His letters were full of the stuff of university, the excitement of it all. Then the letters began to come less frequently and when they did arrive, it was as though he didn’t know what to write about anymore. She didn’t want to hear about old friends or parties or new bars. In a way, she had been relieved when he stopped writing. Now he was about to get married, to have a baby. To be sure, this pregnant fiancée had a touch of the old William in it. How upset Mr. and Mrs. G must have been. She wasn’t surprised that Mrs. G didn’t mention it in her most recent letter.
She slipped on a dress and quickly braided her hair, applying fresh lipstick. When she opened the door into the living room, William was on the sofa again, but he, too, had changed: a clean shirt, a new tie. He’d combed his hair, which was now cropped so close to his head. Not a curl remained. He stood up and bowed.
“M’lady,” he said.
“Kind sir.” She curtsied, holding her dress with both hands. “What’s your fancy? A neighborhood pub? Or do you want to go down to the center of town, to see some of the sights?”
“Let’s stay here,” he said. “In your neighborhood.”
Over dinner, they talked mostly about London, about the effects of the war. He’d seen it in Paris, too. He said that northern France—which he’d seen from the windows of the train—felt desolate. Few buildings from before. She told him how, when she first got back, she got lost again and again, even when she was in the old neighborhood. If she’d known to turn left at a church and then right at the market, she’d walk blocks longer than necessary because the markers were no longer there. There was so much unfamiliar sky.
“Well, that must have been beautiful,” he said. “Remember how we’d lie on the grass in Maine and stare up at the sky?”
“This wasn’t Maine sky. London sky. Mostly gray. Mostly not so beautiful.”
He nodded and took a sip of wine, leaning his head back against the wall of the booth and closing his eyes. “I dream about Maine,” he said. “The water. The sky. The sound of the seagulls. The smell of the pines. Just like it took you time to relearn this city, it’s taken me quite a while to realize that the island is no longer ours. Funny how places become part of who we are.”
“That news made me sad. Your mother must have been beside herself.”
“I think they argued about it forever before doing it. They found my tuition money somewhere, mostly through scrimping and saving. But there wasn’t enough for Gerald.”
One day in the post Bea had received a large box from Mrs. G. In it were things from the Maine house: a berry pail, an enormous pine cone, the quilt from her bed. And a little note tucked inside. I wanted you to have these things, dear. We needed to sell the house. I know you loved it just as we did. Savor these things. Hold your memories inside them. Much love, Mrs. G. She wrote back to her immediately, with a million questions, but she never responded to what Bea had asked. She rarely wrote about Maine again. Bea repacked the box and put it in the back of her closet. It was too hard for her to have those things in her life.
“I took Rose up there in July,” William was saying. “I borrowed Mr. Lasky’s boat and we rowed across, pulled ashore by the forest. Lasky told me the new people are from New York and only up in August. So we stayed in the house for a night, you know, so Rose could see it. So she could understand.”
Finally, the William she knew. The William who would take a risk. “And,” she said. “What did she think?”
“She hated it. She doesn’t like doing the wrong thing—the sleeping in someone else’s bed, the drinking of someone else’s wine—and she didn’t see it the way we do. I wanted her to love it, to share it, but that didn’t happen.”
“We know this,” Bea said, conscious of drawing the two of them together in a shared understanding, one that excluded this Rose. “It’s hard to understand someone else’s past.”
“Mostly she just found it cold and wet.” He stopped talking and looked around the pub. “I’ve been trying to save money to buy it back,” he said, not looking at her. “I want it back. When she got pregnant, and I knew I was going to have a family, I wanted it even more. I want my child to have our childhood. She doesn’t want that. She wants to buy a place on the Cape. I don’t think we’ll ever have the money for that. And I don’t much want to be there.”
Bea didn’t know what to say. She had forgotten, for a moment, that he was about to have a child, that he was about to get married, that he was starting this new life, one that she wouldn’t be a part of. She wanted to keep talking about Maine. Our childhood, he had said. As if they’d always been together. “Tell me your favorite memory from there,” she said. “What is that moment from the island that stays with you?”
He smiled then, and the old William returned. Not so much in the way his face looked—how handsome he was now, movie-star looks, really—but in the way his body relaxed into the booth. “I can’t choose just one. Here are the first ones that come to mind, though: Lying on the floating dock, spent, having beat you or Gerald or both of you, even better, feeling the sun on my face. Roasting marshmallows over the bonfire, the sparks rising in the night air. Watching Father bring his catch back from the boat, his glasses dotted with seawater.” He paused. “And you. That final summer.”
“Yes,” she said. “Those are all good.” And she looked at him and he looked at her and somehow, they were back there, on the island, their last night together. They sneak out, after everyone else has gone to sleep, and run along the path into the woods. He leads the way, his hand held back to grasp hers. They run to the shore, where she learned to swim, where the water is a bit warmer, and they drop their clothes onto the rocks and wade in. It’s so cold and she has to put her hand over her mouth to stop from screaming, but she doesn’t want him to see her body so she moves as quickly as she can into the deeper water. She walks out far enough for the water to rise to her chest and then she holds her breath and pinches her nose and ducks down, until she’s completely under the water, and then she comes up laughing, her body shaking with cold. Okay, we did it, she says, barely able to speak her teeth are chattering so. Now let’s go, and they move with the waves toward the shore, and she sneaks a look at his body, before they wrap towels around themselves and pick up their clothes, using the towels as cover as they dress.
On the way back to the house, in the woods, she trips on a root, and they both fall to the ground, out of breath, laughing. He sits up and pulls her to him, and she climbs onto his lap so that they are facing each other. But it’s dark there, the blanket of trees overhead. The fog is heavy. There’s no moonlight and no stars, and she can’t see his face. She doesn’t know whether he’s smiling, so she explores with her fingers. His cheekbones. His eyebrows. His chin. The surprising softness of the new hair on his face. The mole by his eye. His mouth. He is smiling. And then he’s doing it back to her, with such a light touch. She wouldn’t have thought he could be so gentle. One eyelid and then the other. One ear and then the other. Her nose. They kiss, and he tastes like salt, and then she wraps her arms around his neck and he wraps his arms around her waist and they sit like that, her cheek against his neck, his breath on her hair, not moving, feeling as though this is right, feeling as though this is what all these years together have been leading to. This one moment. This one glorious moment.