She was happy to find William still asleep when she woke early in the morning, the light just making its way into the room. She studied his face for a long time, memorizing it, trying to make this face the one she would recall in years to come. He was leaving the next morning, and she didn’t know when she’d see him again. She held her hand over his face and outlined the contours of his lips, his eyes, his nose in the air. The lines that were beginning to form around his mouth and his eyes. He was even more beautiful now.
She didn’t want to think about what had happened the night before. She’d thought about it happening for so long that she was too aware throughout. They hadn’t had sex before she left. She’d slept with a few others over the years, sometimes thinking about him rather than them, feeling afterward as though she didn’t quite understand the fuss. It seemed wrong to be intimate with men whom she didn’t know. They were messy, rushed encounters, having everything to do with want and nothing to do with need. But with William it was both, and she wanted it to feel right, to be with him. She thought they could become the people they once were. But it was wrong, in so many ways. He was engaged, for Christ’s sake. He was going to have a baby with this Rose. And yet, it was William. Together, they would always be fifteen and seventeen, on the cusp of something. How sweet that moment is, that moment of before. When anticipation is everything. When everything is new. When there are no consequences, when there is no after.
She showered and dressed, and as she made coffee, she decided to keep him busy for the day. To keep his mind off his father, to avoid talking about the night before. She made a plan and then, when he got up, they set out. She showed him the neighborhood. Where her school had been. The building where she’d grown up. Their church. By midday it was drizzling, and he was dragging, so they sat down on a bench in the park to rest for a moment. She opened up her umbrella to shield them from the rain. He stretched his legs out and groaned as he lit a cigarette.
“You’re tiring me out, Trixie,” he said.
She frowned and shook her head at him. “What do you think,” she said. “Is this what you imagined? Do you remember me telling you about all these places?”
“Yes, of course I remember,” he said. “It’s not what I saw, though. I never thought about how urban it all is. How different from home. How odd it must have been for you, to live the way we did.”
“Yes,” she said. “My memory of those first days, maybe the first year, is one of size. Everything was large, compared to what I was used to.”
“What was it like on the other side, then? When you came back?”
“What you would expect. Dirty, compressed, gray. Everyone was thin and hungry. And yet there was joy here. Flowers springing up in the ruins. It was familiar, too, it was in my bones. As though this place is part of who I am. As though I was always meant to be here. As though I belong.”
William nodded. “Just like what I was saying last night about Maine. I can’t quite imagine living anywhere other than New England.”
“Well,” she said, looking away, disappointed in his lack of curiosity about the world. What happened to the boy who wanted to escape? “I guess we’ve both ended up in the right place, then. One old England and one New.”
“Across the pond,” he said. They were silent for a moment. A group arrived, a bit away from them, and began setting up to play cricket. “Where does that come from?” he asked, his eyes closed. “That phrase?”
“We learned about it in school,” she said. “It’s an old expression. It was originally ‘across the herring pond.’ It meant a trip, paid for by the king. A chance to be transported elsewhere. From before the American Revolution.”
William nodded. “I like that, ‘to be transported elsewhere.’”
“I remember thinking about it when I crossed the first time. The Atlantic seemed like it would never end. As though there would be no land on the other side. That we would just keep sailing and end up, one day, back in Britain.” She didn’t add that, when she crossed in ’45, on the way back, she wished that they wouldn’t be able to dock. That they’d be turned back. Then she’d hitchhike from New York back to Boston and walk right into that sunny kitchen. I’m here, she would say. What’s for dinner? And they would all be there, and rush at her, drawing her to them. She would be home. She wasn’t sure she’d ever wanted something more, either before or after that moment.
“Such a typical Brit,” she said finally, “thinking that the world begins and ends here.”
“We’re all like that, don’t you think,” William said. “Loyalists.”
“Yes, well, easier for some than others.”
“What does that mean?” He sounded annoyed, as though she was insulting him. It seemed so easy, now, to get under his skin. She didn’t much like it.
“I don’t mean you. I mean me.” She gestured to the men playing cricket. “I don’t know the rules.”
“What? So what. Neither do I.”
“My point exactly. My favorite team? The Red Sox. My favorite place? Maine. My favorite food? Your mother’s muffins. And yet here I am. This is my home. My mother is here. I belong here and yet I’m in limbo, really, caught between two worlds. I can’t seem to find where I fit.”
William nodded but didn’t respond. She wondered whether he could understand. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He smiled.
She stood then and reached out her hand. “Let’s keep moving,” she said. “There’s so much more to see.” He took hold of her hand and they set off, together, and yet not.