The watch, the bracelet, broken things…Isabelle replays the words in every combination. The bracelet, broken things, the watch…She thinks of them while she showers, with her head tipped back to the warm water, and she thinks of them when she leaves for work and sees Tiny Policeman parked across the street, eating a maple bar and sipping coffee before he starts the cruiser’s engine and pulls out behind her. She thinks of the words as she takes the hand of a tourist stepping out of the Beaver, a woman traveling alone, and she thinks of them as Eddie starts the propeller. She thinks of the words as the hundreds of crows fly silently overhead in the early hours in a pink sky, heading to who knows where.
Too, the words come to her as she swims in the Caribbean Sea off the Playa del Carmen, and while drinking margaritas with Henry and doing laps in the blue tile pool of La Casa Que Canta. The trip was a surprise. Henry gave her the tickets under her pillow with a note: You said you needed time to think. Let’s think together somewhere new and beautiful.
After broken things, the bracelet on the beach in front of their own house that day, and even after a romantic vacation for two, the apologies keep coming. Or rather, versions of apologies because they are not, not this time, the actual words I’m sorry. There are small acts of kindness. Blankets pulled to cover shoulders, little cluckings and tendings. A special bar of chocolate, her favorite music played during dinner. Agreements and compromises.
And now, something even larger.
When she returns home from work, there’s an offering: a stack of poems on the coffee table. Attached is a note that says Read me, with a smiley face. There’s a sharpened pencil set on top.
The bracelet, the watch, broken things…
“Are you sure?” she calls to Henry, who is in the kitchen.
“Very.”
It’s an offering because he thinks they’re good. He thinks they’re a way to woo her, to bring her back to him, to think well of him. To admire him, and want him. The pencil is a little biscuit tossed to the puppy.
He wants to draw her to him again, because he knows she’s far off. Even after the candlelit dinners on a Mexican beach, even with lovemaking and life going forward, she’s absent. His hand grabbed her wrist in a moment of fury, and it broke something, and since then she is in this strange state of suspension. She is staying as quiet as possible, so that he does not glimpse the constant electrical impulse sending a repeating message. The message is not Leave now. The message is Manage the beast. Manage the beast, until you can sneak away. Probably because Leave now was not an option back in the early days of the broken machine. Only Manage the beast was.
Too late, she understands: If you are trying to manage a beast, it is already impossible to manage the beast.
“Do you want me to read these now, Henry?”
“Please. I need your professional input. I think I finally may have a collection on my hands.”
It’s a minefield. And she’s maybe not in the best frame of mind to do this thing. Frame of mind, what a strange phrase. She wishes her mind had a frame, so it might stay contained in a reasonable rectangle. It has gone rogue. It is plotting secret escape at every turn. She does not want out because she’s suddenly convinced he is guilty of something horrible. No. She doesn’t believe that. She can’t. She wants out because he’s a difficult and temperamental man with a weighty history, a man she can no longer tolerate, a man who will not take this news well. She wants out because he grabbed her wrist and crossed her most cherished line, and because she can’t handle any of it—the watch, the bracelet, the broken things—any longer.
She takes her hat off by the pom-pom ball, making her hair stand up with static. She unwraps the scarf Jane made her.
He brings her a glass of wine, sets it down next to the pages.
“I have to use the bathroom first,” she says. She doesn’t. What she has to actually do is move the watch and the photo and the bracelet back into the boot from their current place in her jacket pocket. She goes to their room, listens for the sounds of cooking—a fork against a bowl, the clatter of dishes. Safe. She shoves everything down into the boot, closes the door quietly. All day while she’s at work, she worries that she’s somehow forgotten to bring the stuff with her, that he’ll find it, that she’ll come home to a furious Henry. She checks her pocket repeatedly to make sure the objects are still there. When she feels the edge of the photo, the watch, the bracelet, she’s relieved, but also…What? Properly disturbed. Reminded. She needs these reminders daily, multiple times a day. This is your life now and don’t forget it, even if this won’t be your life forever. She knows it’s not forever, because there’s this feeling, a feeling that something is about to happen. It follows her everywhere.
She removes her coat, hangs it on the guitar hook.
“Wow. You must have had to go badly.”
“What?”
“Using the bathroom while wearing that big coat.”
He misses nothing. It’s become a part of living with him, the microscopic examinations, the little suspicions. She explains things she never had to explain before. She justifies, because he thinks something is strange, and he is right. “Couldn’t wait,” she says.
“I don’t expect you to read the whole thing tonight, of course,” Henry says. “You’ll want to linger.” He can’t resist hovering. When she sits on the couch, he actually places the pages of the manuscript on her lap.
“I’m sure.”
“You read. I’ll finish dinner. Stroganoff sound good? I’m thinking of all the most rich and delicious things so you won’t just move the food around on your plate.”
It’s true—she hasn’t been eating. Nothing sounds good lately. Not the fancy meals at that hotel, not Henry’s fine cheeses and meats dribbling bloody juice. Jane has been ordering in lunch for the crew, shoving roast beef sandwiches at her, and little igloos of potato salad. She can stomach Cream of Wheat and bananas. Her dream meal may be frozen dinners back at her childhood home. How could she have ever sold the place?
You’ve got the money. You’re hardly stuck. Just go! Maggie says. Easy for her to say.
“Henry, if you keep looking over my shoulder, I can’t read.”
“Well, of course, I’m nervous. As a writer, you pour your heart and soul on the page.”
“I understand.”
“You should just experience it first, before you take the pencil to it. I’m sure that’s what the real editors do.”
She lets the comment sit—in part, because she doesn’t want to fight. But there is another reason she says nothing. A sick feeling is overtaking her. Some sort of horror, because right away she sees that the poems she’d found in the desk were only castoffs, ruses, maybe; not the poems, not these poems. These are entirely different. As she glances quickly through the pages, her palms go cold and she feels that almost blue lack of oxygen in her head that means she might pass out. These are poems about women, lost women, lost loves.
The lines swarm and swirl, and words leap out, words like tremulous and Heaven with a capital H. There is “The Sea, To—,” which she recognizes as an echo of Poe’s “The Lake, To—,” with a similar narrator finding solace in water, in spite of its treachery and danger. She sees “To the First Mrs.—” and “For Ginnie,” with the echoes of Poe’s own lost-love poems, “Annabel Lee,” “Lenore.” More words jump: Luminous, Beauty, Taken, Alone. Mystery, Flight, Toll, Tomb, and Kingdom. She glances through. There is grief and more grief. Slumbering, Heartache, My Darling…
“They’re meant to be read in order.”
“I am reading them in order.”
“I heard you flipping pages. Which one are you on?”
She can barely speak. “Henry, I’ve only started…”
“I’m just wondering, because you’re so quiet.”
“I’m on…” It’s hard to breathe. “ ‘Gone Before.’ ”
“That means you’re on the third one already? You really shouldn’t rush. Poetry shouldn’t be rushed just because it’s brief.”
The ceiling seems to be lowering. The walls are coming in. “Henry, I can’t read them if you’re going to act like this.”
“Like what? I thought you had experience working with writers.”
“They weren’t exactly in the same room with me, breathing down my neck.”
“Well, of course you worked on books about hiking trails. And Northwest B&B’s…”
“Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”
“I’m just saying, you aren’t an expert in poetry.”
“It sounds like you need to hire an expert.”
“You don’t need to get touchy, Isabelle. I’m only remarking on the fact…”
Her head hurts. Her wine is already gone. Something’s burning.
“I smell charred—” she says.
“Shit!” he says. “Fuck!” There’s a rattle and clang and he shoves the pans off the stove. “Well, scorched meatballs are nice. How about that for dinner? Is my cooking as good as my writing?”
“I haven’t said a word, Henry!”
“Exactly! That’s exactly my point! You’re just sitting there with your mouth in some disapproving line…” He’s waving a towel at the smoke detector, which is shrilling.
“I’m taking it in…”
“Three poems already, and nothing? Not one peep? Not a simple sigh? I’m just looking for an overall impression…one kind utterance!”
“If I say something too soon, it’s wrong. If I say something too late, it’s wrong! I like them, Henry! They’re…surprising. I’m a little…I can feel you…pouring your heart out!”
“Pouring my heart out? Jesus. You make me sound like a schoolboy. These were women I deeply loved.”
The poems are on her lap. The fourth one, “The Subsequent Lover,” stares up at her. Isabelle puts her head in her hands. But then the weight of the manuscript is gone, whooshed away, snatched up. “Forget it. This was a bad idea.”
“For God’s sake!” she cries.
The smoke detector is silent. The darkness behind the windows makes Isabelle feel she’s alone with Henry on their own solitary planet, spinning together in the vast, awful universe.
“This is just…I wanted to share my soul with you. My life…What this has all been like for me…The depth of my devotion. Never mind. Just, never mind. This is worthless.”
He shouts the word worthless in her face. She can feel the heat of his breath, even though her eyes are tightly shut. She starts to cry. It’s all too much, too fast. There’s so much failure and mess that despair takes over. Everyone is here, in this one room. She and Henry, Virginia and Sarah.
The front door slams.
Good. He’s gone. Her heart cracks open, but she doesn’t sob. She doesn’t weep over where she’s ended up. She doesn’t snivel and blub and bawl about needing a plan and not having one. No, when her heart cracks open, she stops crying. There are no tears. She’s frozen. Every part of her is frozen and stunned except that tiny flame, growing tinier.
She hopes he’s gone for a long while, but she knows he won’t be. Now’s your chance! Maggie shouts. Isabelle could grab her purse and the hiking boot and just go.
She doesn’t go, though, because she’s a deer in the headlights, and there are a lot of headlights. A traffic jam of them. So many headlights, and all of them so bright that she’s immobilized. The poems are shouting, too. Screaming warnings. What does it mean that he’s written them, and what does it mean that he actually hopes they’re published? He wants to live in peace; he wants his privacy. But does he also imagine the whole world reading his poems, seeing his genius, finally understanding him?
The poems tell a story of lost love and utter devotion. And they tell a story of a large and doomed ego. It scares her, that ego. For the first time, she’s honestly frightened of who he might be. For the first time, her doubts seem real. She knows what happens when fragility and rage and thwarted desire mix. She has a childlike urge to run to her bedroom, hide in her closet; sit on her toy box with her ears plugged.
She peeks out the blinds by the front door. Tiny Policeman has not followed Henry. Instead, he’s there, parked out front. He’s talking on his phone. The dome light of the cruiser is on.
He is there, so she is safe, she tells herself. Right. Maggie scoffs. Ricky Beaker keeping you from harm? Remember the Tostitos? One time, while trying to apprehend a shoplifter at the Front Street Market, Ricky Beaker had a run-in with a display of potato chips and ended up breaking his arm. A deputy from Orcas had to come and run the police department until he got his cast off.
Right then, Isabelle misses her mother. In spite of the golf club memories, and her fear, she misses her mother so bad. She misses her voice on the phone, her humor, her roast with rosemary potatoes. She has some toddler desire to crawl on a lap and cry and have safe arms around her. Probably, she’s just missing something she never had, but still.
And then, another package comes.
It arrives at her work again. She sees it before anyone else, because she’s the first one there. She’s been going to the community pool very early every morning to swim laps. She swims because there is no place for all her anxiety except exercise. And she swims because it’s an approved way to get out of the house before Henry even wakes up. Swimming is a good thing, he thinks. The best form of exercise. A fine way to stay in shape. So she does her laps alongside old Cora Lee from the Theosophical Society, who, in her green suit, is thin and shriveled as an aging celery stalk. In the calm burble of underneath, Isabelle listens for some larger plan, something beyond the current one, which involves stepping quietly backward until Henry is so disgusted with her that leaving becomes his own idea.
That morning, her hair is still wet when she arrives at Island Air. The fog hasn’t even lifted, and Tiny Policeman isn’t on the job yet. But the package is there, shoved through their mail slot, stuck halfway in and halfway out. She knows it’s for her, because of the stamps: images of a strangely patriotic kangaroo with a British flag in the background. Also, smaller ones of animals, candidates for an adorable children’s book—koala, wombat, Tasmanian devil. They could all go on a journey together and find the real meaning of friendship.
She snatches the package. Now, she looks over her shoulder to see if Jane or anyone else is coming. Silly—it’s too early. The doors are still locked, shop is closed; the seaplanes are tied down next to the dock, propellers silent. It’s strangely quiet, without the usual rumble and roar of floatplanes leaving and floatplanes arriving.
Isabelle turns around. She heads over to the big storage center, where her old things are kept, and where Island Air’s ancient Zenith is parked, too, waiting for repairs. She crouches behind the far cement wall. A squirrel stops to stare at her from an evergreen tree. She rips open the envelope.
Photocopies, this time. Handwriting. Five pages of paragraphs, short and long. No dates, just messy, looped writing; the kind of writing meant only for your own self.
It’s a journal.
She crouches there and reads. It’s freezing outside, even though March is coming, even though Isabelle’s wearing Jane’s scarf and a hat over her wet hair. The morning has that cold smell of far-off snow and leaves burning.
He’s just trying to help. That’s what he says. So why do I feel like the box I exist in is shrinking and shrinking?
More, more: I can’t make a move without comment. Every clothing choice, every decision about food, or my body, or even which direction to go when I drive…I can’t take it anymore…I am thinking a lot about Virginia.
Sarah. Entries from Sarah’s journal.
This could be Isabelle herself writing. All of those lines—hers.
“No,” she says aloud. She must have said, because there’s the puff of her own breath. The morning darkness lifts; the sky has a stripe of pink. And here they come—the crows on their morning commute. First, just a few black bodies, working hard against the sea draft, and now more and more, a wash of inky satin on pink. Isabelle holds those pages on her knees. She chooses one thick bird among the many, and imagines she is that creature, heading somewhere else.
They come and they come. And after the mass of them passes over, after there are only the few stragglers left, Isabelle rises. She peers around the corner of the storage building. No one has arrived yet. She walks out to the dock. She stands at the end. She rips and rips and rips the pages into tiny pieces. She lays them down into the water and lets them soak and sink and be carried away.
There are too many pages to keep, and there is enough in that boot already. She won’t need those pages to remember the words, anyway. Especially those last words, the ones that tell her that the watch and the photo had once been Henry’s, and that Sarah had seen them and doubted, the way Isabelle is doubting now. Sarah doubted, and then she was gone.
Today, I found a photograph, hidden in a box in the garage. Virginia, wearing that watch from Henry’s drawer…
The sprinkles of white paper disappear like snowflakes. Behind her, Isabelle hears a car approaching. It is just Jane, who waves. Isabelle waves back, thankful that the bits of journal have now vanished. She has some strange feeling that she is part of a plan, though this may just be her usual passivity, her urge for rescue, since she does not have a plan of her own. Still she feels it, an odd connection to the package-sender. It’s almost a motion deep under the ground, a riffling in the air currents. It’s disturbing, and yet it feels like propulsion. Of course, there’s always a strange energy just before an earthquake, just before the plates shift, and everything trembles and wrecks.