Isabelle finds a single boot, but then needs to hunt for the other one under the bed. There it is, a bit dusty, and lying next to one of Henry’s dress shoes. It’s fall, and the tourists are gone, and it’s an orangey crisp autumn day, all pumpkin-spice and knit sweaters and wood smoke and burning leaves in the air. A month has passed since that night at The Bayshore, a month of nights with the rod of Joe’s pullout couch across her back, since she couldn’t bear Jane’s concerned, confused eyes on a full-time basis. In those weeks, she raided the Coronas and handmade mac and cheese in Joe’s fridge, and stayed up late talking to him about her conflict over returning to Henry, and Joe’s recent breakup with the entitled Danielle. They caught up on Joe’s family, and on Maggie’s passing; he reminded her of the time when she was seventeen, when in a moment of teen rebellion she called Maggie a bitch, and Maggie grabbed her and hit her, and she went to Joe’s house to stay for the night. She’d forgotten all about this. How is it possible, this forgetting? It just is. But he reminded her of good things, too. Maggie running the food drive. Maggie yelling louder than anyone at the high school football games.
Joe had been sweet, warming up burritos for her in the microwave, leaving the light on when she was out with Henry, giving her space when they were on the phone at all hours. Joe said stuff like He seems like a nice guy, and patiently listened to all the ways Henry was being Henry again, but even better—contrite, sincere, believable, open. Finally, though, Joe booted her out of the nest.
If you’re going to do it, do it a hundred percent, he said. It was something Mr. Hopper, his old wrestling coach at Parrish High, might have told him, and Joe is as overly generous as Isabelle by nature, but she listened to him anyway, and here she is now, snagging that boot with her fingertips and she lays sprawled on the floor. Joe or no Joe, she is a believer in a hundred percent.
When Henry suggested this hike last night, Isabelle pushed Virginia’s name out of her head. Pushed: Oh, God. That sounds awful. Isabelle pretended a hike up a mountain was just a hike up a mountain, and that nothing bad had crossed her mind. Henry is so sensitive, he’s like a decaying tooth that recoils at the slightest hint of cold.
Which means there is a lot of pretending that a lot of things don’t cross her mind. She admits things have been difficult since she moved in with both Henry and his past. It’s difficult to untangle what’s her and what’s him and what’s his strange history, pressing in on all sides. Dr. Mark’s elephant in the room is not so much an elephant as two once-breathing women. Isabelle can almost smell their perfume following her as she goes about her day. As she and Henry make dinner, Virginia sets the table. As she and Henry drive to a restaurant, Sarah sits in the back. On a beach walk, Virginia follows without making prints in the sand, and while they make love, Henry uses some technique, something just a bit too rough for her own liking, that she wonders if Sarah liked.
When there’s this weird space that comes up between them, Isabelle is sure that it is her, failing at this. She doesn’t want to fail, because he’s trying so hard. She doesn’t want to fail for a million of her own reasons, too, some practical, some buried so far down she has no idea they’re even there. She has decided to trust and commit, and those are not fifty or sixty percent words to her. Those are a hundred percent words.
Henry is being kind and supportive, loving. He tries to be lighthearted, even when his fat legal bill arrives in the mail. I want to make your life easier, he told her, and so, in spite of her protests, he insisted on looking over Island Air’s finances and made a suggestion list of mutual funds for her mother’s house money, since he’s invested like a pro in the past. He also gave her a joint credit card, so that they might feel a further sense of a combined future. Isabelle appreciates all this, but it feels a little like he’s jamming right up into her, rooting around in her private family business, even demonstrating a lack of confidence in her choices. Admittedly, it’s also been helpful. The boy that built rocket ships with LEGOs has a mind for numbers, along with a love of words. His investment plan sounds like a wise one. She’s tucked the credit card in her purse and they use it when they go out to dinner together.
Also challenging? Jane and Eddie, who are acting like the protective parents she never had. Jane’s on high alert since Isabelle returned to Henry. Why is he with you every minute now? Are you ever alone? Why does he hover in the background every time I call? Eddie says goodbye to her on Fridays with a Watch your back. He’s not joking, either. I don’t like the guy, he says. He gave her a printout of one of the articles she already read, one that appeared after Sarah died. It features Virginia’s sister Mary and a few of Virginia’s other friends reminding the public that she, too, met an uncertain end. This is almost like love coming from Eddie, who still needs help turning on the computer.
They are an enmeshed family. Joe plays the unflinching sibling and tells them to lay off. When Henry comes to pick her up from work one day, Jane stares him right in the eyes. It’s an animal move. It’s a beast of nature making a statement to another beast of nature. Henry would not go back there after that. When Isabelle confronted her, Jane apologized. I’m sorry, she said. I get it. I do. I can see why you’d want to be with him, after everything you’ve been through. But it was a laden concession, based on a desire to be supportive, not on true support. We just worry about you, is all.
Fly as a team, grounded as team—sometimes a team stood too solidly behind you. Sometimes you wish your team would just butt out. She gets it—Eddie and Jane have known her since she was a child, they care about her, but they don’t know Henry.
And then, too, there was the day when a detective, Ray Prince, flew in from Boston and came to their house. Ricky Beaker was like the hostess with the company VP, chest puffed out as he stood on their doorstep next to Detective Prince. Detective Prince and Tiny weren’t there to talk to Henry, which was the most horrifying thing. They wanted to speak with her. The nearest Isabelle had ever gotten to a life of crime was her appearance in traffic court for a speeding ticket. This happened in Seattle, and she was driving too fast only because Evan crashed his bike and broke his ankle.
“We won’t take much of your time,” Detective Prince said. “We just have a few questions.”
“I told Detective Prince, here, you might live with the guy, but you got a strong moral code,” Ricky Beaker said. “Remember how your mother used to report speeders on the loop? And didn’t she start that local amnesty chapter, in the early eighti—”
Isabelle was so shocked and horrified that the police were on her porch that she slammed the door on Ricky Beaker and Detective Prince, nothing she’d have ever thought was in her good-citizen repertoire. In elementary school, she’d been taught that police officers were your friends. They’d even gotten a coloring book featuring a policeman reaching toward a cat in a tree and a policewoman helping an old lady cross a busy street.
When Henry got home and heard what happened, they threw some things into a bag and went to Seattle for an impromptu “romantic” weekend, much of which was spent with Henry in their room at the W hotel, on the phone to his attorney.
It’s strange the way a life can turn. She’d been shocked when she first found out Evan had once been arrested for marijuana possession. Now pot is legal in their state and she’s living with a man that some people believe is a murderer.
Jesus. It’s best to not think it straight out like that.
“Ready?” Henry calls.
“Just a sec!”
Henry appears in the doorway as she tosses on her sweatshirt.
“Are you going to be warm enough in that?” he asks.
“It’s breathtaking.”
“Literally, for me,” Isabelle says, puffing on the incline. Henry was wrong about needing more than a sweatshirt, which she now has tied around her waist, but he is right about the beauty. As they make their way up the trail of Mount Independence, every tree that’s able is bursting color. It’s early morning, so a few sparse wisps of fog still linger like second thoughts in the valley below.
“The mist…‘How it hangs upon the trees. A mystery of mysteries!’ ”
He is cheerful. The poem sounds almost cheerful, too, for that creepy, morose Poe. She wishes that of all the poets in the world, he’d have chosen someone else to be fascinated by. Poe is another specter that whispers from the corners.
Now Isabelle concentrates hard on the burn in her chest and the pull of her thighs and the orange fire of the leaves. She tries to focus on her protesting hamstrings. Because, when her concentration slips, there is Virginia. How else could it be, on a hike like this? Isabelle pictures the photo that’s in all the newspapers, the photo Virginia’s friends released to the press after Sarah disappeared. Virginia, with her narrow pixie face and fragile cheekbones. She looks tragic, but maybe this is only because you know her fate.
“Wait. Look at this! Stop a sec, I’ve got to take a picture.”
“No complaints on this end.”
Below, the world is spread out like a Thanksgiving feast; it’s all fall bounty. There is the great, shimmering sea, and little humps of islands, and the swish-strokes of deep green and orange from the trees. Admittedly, it’s hard to focus on the feast amid the fact of below. It is far down. There are big, rough rocks the whole way to the bottom. Isabelle considers what those jagged boulders might do to your soft head and to your fragile construction of bones. She’s been up here plenty of times, plenty. With friends and boyfriends, when there was fried chicken someone’s generous mother made, when there was beer and sun lotion, bare shoulders and even a small boom box. It’s never been a place she thought of as dangerous. Only fun, only beautiful. But, look—it’s all of those things.
Henry is twisting that long lens, and there is the sha-kunk of the shutter. Now he aims it down. How can he bear it? He has told her the story of that horrible day, how Virginia seemed to toss herself off out of nowhere, how he desperately tried to climb down to save her. The CPR, the calls to mountain rescue—the wait, and then the way she stopped breathing before they arrived…The investigation by the park service, the grief of her friends and family…How can he not look at every slope for the rest of his life and see Virginia tumbling, banging, crashing, screaming? Yes, it was years and years ago, but how is this possible?
Move away from the ledge, Isabelle! Jesus! Maggie says, and this time Isabelle listens.
“I like you there. It gives perspective,” Henry says.
Too bad. She steps back, away. Henry is not doing anything wrong. He is not hovering around behind her with his hands raised, ready to shove. His eyes are not narrowed with evil. There is not some black cloud over his head. But it’s what he isn’t doing that turns some unsettled earth inside her. He isn’t keeping Isabelle away from the edge. He isn’t aware of what she might be feeling right now. He’s just taking pictures, like a cliff is just a cliff.
Isabelle starts to sweat. She feels like she could be sick, although it’s probably just the heat and exercise. They are the only two people on the trail. It would be so easy, she understands. No one would even hear you as you fell. What was in Virginia’s mind, when both feet were suddenly no longer on the ground?
Henry looks happy, snapping away. And then he turns and sees her.
“What?” His voice is terse.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Yes! Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Why are you over there?”
“Over here? There’s no over here. We’re on this tiny little path. There’s only here and more here—”
“Fuck.”
His whole face changes. He turns right around and stomps back down the trail. They haven’t even gotten to the top yet. His lens cap still sits on a rock. His boots spit gravel like furious tires on a dirt road.
Isabelle doesn’t follow. She just stands there. She turns hiding-mouse quiet. Stunned-deer still. This is her learned response with perhaps dangerous humans, and certainly with angry ones. Her heart thumps. She waits until it seems safe. Then she takes Henry’s lens cap and puts it in her pocket.
She follows him down, keeping several paces behind. She feels that tiptoey guilt, too, the shame that says his anger is somehow her fault. She’s turned five, trying to hide in her room after she has done bad things she can no longer remember. What can a child do to make an adult get that frightening? No idea. And while she cannot recall the bad thing, she vividly remembers the frightening adult. She remembers the hot sting of the slap, the yank of her hair as her head was pulled back, the large, twisted face, the fear that she’d be small and alone in the world forever unless she could make her mother like her again.
There is no closet to hide in on Mount Independence. She’s a grown woman, but try telling that to her stubborn psyche. Knowing these things and changing these things are on different orbits. She doesn’t even truly believe she can rid herself of certain responses, even with a hundred years of therapy. Guilt and paralysis in the face of other people’s anger is now set into the folds of her brain, as fixed as her eye color. She can’t mobilize an aggressive defense because that arsenal is boarded up and locked.
Her own anger, God, what would that even look like? She pictures a mushroom cloud, atomic, cinematic fury. What a joke, though. She’s been furious and people haven’t even noticed. After Evan, friends said, God, you must be livid, and she’d agree that she was. She wanted to be livid. She must have been, but she also guessed that livid did not feel like being the last human in a ruined landscape.
Midway down the trail, Henry stops. He shakes his head, runs his hand through his hair. His eyes catch hers and plead.
“Fuck,” he says again, but this time the word is a sigh, not an arrow. What a useful, multipurpose word fuck is. It doesn’t deserve its bad reputation, Isabelle decides. It’s practically friendly. Look, now it’s saying, This is hard, this place we’re both in.
Henry holds out his hand. She takes it. She doesn’t want to, actually; she doesn’t even want to get back into the car with him right then. She wants to be an entirely different person living in another country. But she also wants things to be okay. The need for okay—Jesus, it gets a person into the worst and most long-lasting messes. Henry also wants things to be okay right then, she’s sure, because he says, “Isabelle, I’m sorry.”
And then his face softens. The worst has passed. The child her would have chanced coming out of her room then, would have sat at the dinner table and eaten the peas even if her stomach was still full of dread.
“Henry, come on…What do you expect? It’s going to cross my mind. Of course it is. Look where we are!”
“It’s fine.”
“It doesn’t mean I think you actually did something. It’s just, wow. It’s high, up here.”
“Let’s just drop it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no…”
“I’m doing the best I can. I’m human, Henry. We’re hiking. You guys were hiking. Anyone would have the thought.”
“Well, my darling, for your information, I’m not going to shove you off this cliff. You have the car keys.”
“Shit.” She laughs.
And he laughs, too. He squeezes her hand.
“Let’s go home,” he says.
“Let’s.”
The mood is shaky as they head down. I don’t know if I can do this, she thinks. And he’s so sensitive to any withdrawal on her part that she knows he’s just read her mind. She feels it in their clasped hands. She feels it in the thick, weird energy between them. She might as well have spoken her doubts aloud, by the tightness that appears in his jawline. It’s hard to know what’s him, and what’s him in this situation, but it’s like he’s poised, watching and listening for rejection. It’s all quarter-inch moves and undercurrents; he reads paragraphs into her averted eyes or the slightest insincerity in her tone. But he’s right, isn’t he? Her laugh wasn’t entirely a laugh, and he knows it. She swears she can lie awake at night with a doubt or a question, and he’ll awaken and curve his body against hers to answer. He’s right, so no wonder.
After what he’s been through, it’s understandable that he needs her loyalty above all else. She forgives him things because of it. She slips her hand free.
“Race you down,” she says.
When they get home, the air between them has lightened. They got burgers at The Dive on the way back. Isabelle believes in the power of burgers plus onion rings to make most any day better. Now Henry is writing. This means he is locked away in his office, typing on his laptop in rapid bursts, long pauses in between.
Sometimes, Isabelle thinks of this as “writing,” quote-unquote. It’s disrespectful, really, but she allows it of herself, because Henry takes himself so seriously. He doesn’t want to be interrupted and he needs utter silence, as if he’s involved in delicate negotiations to prevent global catastrophe. He emerges a while later, satisfied but secretive. Still, she keeps her mouth shut. It’s his creative path. People get to express themselves any way they want. He loves the writing in some weird tormented way, same as all writers, and that’s what’s most important. His ego about it—maybe it just jabs at hers. Her past publishing job, as insignificant as it was, is the one place where she’s the competent one, the more experienced one. Maybe people in love shouldn’t have these small, unspoken competitions, but she’s pretty sure that most couples do. There will always be little splinters.
Night is coming earlier now that it’s fall, and outside the big windows of Remy’s house, it’s dusk. Isabelle stands at the glass; she’s in her socks, and her hands are tucked into the sleeves of her sweatshirt. She watches the sky, because she sees them—the few small dots of black coming, growing in numbers. Now the crows are overhead, and the long line of them stretches over the water. It’s been a while since she’s really taken them in, stood underneath them and listened to the puff-puff of wings. It’s wrong, to let something that majestic and strange become just another overlooked event.
She opens the sliding door, which screeches along its track.
“Don’t go out there, Isabelle! That deck!” Henry calls from down the hall.
He’s right. They really need to talk to Remy about replacing those rotting boards. She sticks her head outside instead. Sometimes the crows are high, high up, and sometimes lower, like tonight, low enough that you can see the ribs in their wings and their thick, round bodies, shiny and satin-black. They seem especially eerie but also especially right in this fall evening sky. You could see this hundreds of times and it would still give you a little shiver.
Mystery of mysteries!
When the crows are gone, Isabelle takes her phone into the bathroom. She locks the door. She looks up the mystery line. She’s been looking up everything lately—all furtive, clandestine searches for reassurance. It’s the sort of hunting for information that’s actually hope that you won’t find what you fear you’ll find. She locates the poem. It bothers her that it’s called “Spirits of the Dead.”
You are hiding in your own bathroom, Maggie points out.
Why is she even here with him? She can’t do this. She is not generous and trusting enough to handle any of this. What if she is not generous and trusting enough to handle any relationship? Her mother wasn’t.
Henry is reading her mind again, through the walls of his office this time, because there he is. He’s coming out of one door and she’s coming out of another, and he takes her in his arms in the hall.
“Writing is like exercise, isn’t it? You always feel so much better after you’ve done it. Thanks for your understanding, love.” He kisses her neck. He’s told her a million times that this, this phase right now, is an adjustment period. Learning to accept his past, forgiving him for lying, even moving in together at all. There will be rocky patches. It will take time. They’ll get through it together.
The word phase—listen, it’s a warning sign.
When the sun drops, it gets cold fast. He brings her one of her own blankets and wraps it around her shoulders where she sits on the couch. He’s attentive this way. Her mother would have said smothering. Clearly, she likes smothering. He makes a beautiful fettuccine. There is chewy sourdough and a lovely salad with a tart vinaigrette. She is seduced with butter. She shoves away that stupid poem as they eat—that poem with its spirits who never go away, whose red orbs are like a burning and a fever that will cling to you forever.
They do something unusual. They leave the dishes. Henry hates to have a messy kitchen in the morning. But this night, he takes her hand, and they drop clothes along the way to their bedroom. Her worries drop away, too, and her incessant thoughts quiet. It’s just her naked self and his, animals in their den, mates. His eyes catch hers in the dark and hold. She sees who he really is in there, thank goodness. That’s Henry, and God, Henry feels so good.
“I love you,” he whispers.
“I love you, too,” she says. He can tell she means it because she does mean it. She means it thoroughly and completely. She’s crazy about that man, even if people might say she’s just plain crazy. She’s sick and tired of people and what they say. All people—the sensible voices in her head, and her mother, and Virginia and Sarah, and newspapers, and Jane and Eddie, and detectives. All of this worry and weirdness is worth it. He’s right. It’s an adjustment period. It’s hard, but in the end what matters is that it’s the two of them getting through this together.
There will come a day when this strange time is in the past. Isabelle forgets, though, that both strange times and the past are a burning and a fever that can cling to you forever.
While both Isabelle and Henry are more likely to be reading than watching sports, Henry occasionally likes to catch a game on TV, especially now that the New England Patriots are playing the Seattle Seahawks, meaning Henry’s brothers are texting him various bets and taunts and he is texting them back bigger ones and so forth and so on. Before this day, Isabelle would not know a Patriot from a Bruin, but Henry has appointed Isabelle his Seattle rival, surprising her with her first-ever sports jersey. While Evan would watch sports alone or with his friends (including Heather the Snowboarder, probably), Henry has made it all good, American fun. He wraps tiny sausages in biscuits, and he has made a three-layer dip. There are hot wings coming.
Midway, Isabelle wishes she had a book, even if Henry is explaining all the parts that make it entertaining—one player’s sad childhood, another’s inspirational comeback after an injury. There is lining up and crashing and more lining up and crashing and that announcer voice and shrill crowd hum that make her brain feel like it’s a blinking fluorescent light.
Henry looks adorable in his Patriots shirt, though, and she jabs his ribs with her feet from her end of the couch. He grabs her ankles and scoots her on her butt as she shrieks.
“Looking for trouble, Missy?”
“Your players are losers.” She knows nothing about it. He yanks her ponytail and then tickles her madly and she tries to get him back and then they start kissing, and then he flips her around so that she’s on his lap.
“I make football better, right?” It’s the perfect Sunday.
“You are the official pain in my ass.”
She gets him again, with her elbows and fingertips, and the crowd cheers and they miss a big play.
“Aw, shit, what’d we miss?” he asks, but it doesn’t matter. In two seconds, his pants are down, and her new jersey is off, and her mouth is on him, and no one cares about any game. It’s over fast, the great kind of fast, hard and physical, same as smashing players. He collapses on her. Oh, they are sweaty.
“Look at us,” she says. She feels so happy. They’re half on the couch, half off, and there are napkins dotted orange from wings tossed on the floor, and strewn pillows and clothes. Her hair is bunching from the band.
“We win this game,” he says. He strokes her face, but then suddenly he lifts off of her. “Stay right here. Hell with it. I was going to wait until some big, important moment, but why? This is perfect. This is what I most love about us.” This last part he shouts from the far-off land of the inside of their closet.
He’s back. He’s naked. She’s sitting up, panties back on, clutching her shirt. “Just a sec,” he says. He shoves on his pants, belt dangling. Of course, she sees what’s in his hand.
“Be my wife,” he says.
My. Something Evan never said. Maybe something nobody ever said, certainly not her own disappearing father, or even her mother, whose my was more mine, or even me, indicating ownership, and giving her the sense that she was a Christmas tree laden with ornaments and tinsel and popcorn strings and blinking lights and non-blinking lights, still required to be merry in spite of the weight and the fire hazard.
But Henry’s my feels—right then, anyway—like the softest, most safe version of my. A longed-for version. The coziest belonging, the big dream fulfilled, a merging without suffocation.
My, though. My at all…Well, never mind that right now, she thinks.
He slips the ring on her finger. They admire it and smile at each other. The smile is an answer, Henry knows. Look at her, with a diamond ring! She and Evan bought plain gold bands at an online store. He’d take his off to shower and leave it on the sink for days. How strange and old-fashioned this ring feels, like she’s completed something in a way she never had with Evan. It’s beautiful. She’s never been a jewelry person, but she loves how it glints like the tips of waves do on a sunny day. And, you know, she has time, she tells herself. She has time to let her questions resolve themselves. Right now, she can just enjoy this strange, new weight on her finger. Right now, she can just sink into this relieving feeling of her uncertain future, settled.
“It looks a little big for you, actually,” he says.