“I thought you might be cold.”
“Thank you.” He placed the blanket on my shoulders and then began to walk back inside. “Stay,” I said. “I’ve had enough of my own thoughts.”
He nodded and stood beside me. For a few moments we both looked out at the view.
“Did you ever finishA Moveable Feast?”
I turned to him in surprise. “Yes.” He had given me the book when he’d driven me back to Horseshoe Cliff, and I had it still. “I can’t believe you remember.”
“We had a conversation about Paris. I told you how I traveled with my friends around Europe.” He looked down at his hands, his expression suddenly pained. “I can’t tell you how many times I went over that conversation in my head afterward.”
“Really? Why?” I’d gone over it in my own mind countless times, but it had never once occurred to me that he might have done the same.
“Later, after I drove you home, I thought of how I must have sounded, talking to you about traveling through Europe when... when...”
I remembered studying his expression when he drove up to our cottage. I remembered how Bear had sat on the porch with his beer and barely moved, a dark mountain of resentment, of silent fury. Now that I had been away from Horseshoe Cliff for four years, I had a sense of how it must have appeared to Will. Run-down. Bleak. Battered by coastal winds and rain and the unrealized dreams of our sad, hopeful parents.
Fancy car,Bear had said as Will drove away.
“It’s been years,” I said. “All this time you’ve been upset with yourself for telling me that you traveled in college?”
“I wish I were as proud of my finest moments as I am ashamed of my mistakes.”
He gazed out into night, the lights of the houses below us, the Bay beyond. I liked how serious he appeared. Even when he wasn’t speaking, I sensed his mind at work.
“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I wouldn’t call that conversation a mistake. I enjoyed it. I’ve thought about it since then, too. And never in the way that you’re thinking. You made me wonder what my life could be like if I went to college. You inspired me. I wasn’t listening with closed ears. I knew you were speaking from a place of kindness. Right from the beginning, you were only kind to me.”
He turned toward me. “‘Closed ears,’” he echoed. “My mother is right about you. You speak like someone who loves words.”
Four years earlier, he had been nice to me, but distant. Now, he seemed more open. I thought that perhaps it was because I was older. I was a college graduate, and I had a job and an apartment. I was an adult.
“You know,” he said, taking a step closer to me, “that weekend was surprising in a lot of ways. I’ve never forgotten it. I hope you won’t mind me saying this, but meeting you made me realize how little I really knew of life. I’d been so immersed in my studies, and you... you were like a breath of fresh air.” My expression must have revealed my surprise because he looked momentarily stricken, then laughed. “Oh no. Did I just create a new moment to feel mortified about for the next four years?”
“No, no. It’s just I don’t think ‘breath of fresh air’ is how most people would have described me then. There wasn’t a big emphasis on oral hygiene in my childhood.”
His smile flashed and then was gone. “Oh, Merrow,” he said quietly, “you have no idea how lovely you were, do you?”
I looked out at the water.You’re disgusting,Bear whispered in my ear. I shivered. What would my brother say to me now, I wondered, in my green silk dress and golden heels, my hair as tame as it had ever been, the Langfords’ soft blanket draped over my shoulders?
Will cleared his throat. “It’s a beautiful night.” He rested his hands on the railing. “I’ve always loved the hills across the Bay at sunset. The way they seem to turn purple.”
I smiled. “‘The golden day is dying beyond the purple hill.’”
“Yeats?”
“No, it’s an old folk song. My father taught it to me when I was a child. This time of day reminds me of it.”
“Will you sing it?”
I had never been shy about singing. My voice was not beautiful, but it was mine, and my father had always told me that he loved to hear me sing.
“The golden day is dying beyond the purple hill,”I sang.“The lark that sang at dawning, in dusky wood is still.”
I closed my eyes and felt the salt wind of Horseshoe Cliff against my face as I sang. My father had taught me the song as a round. Years later, Amir and I had sung it together, echoing each other in a solemn, contented loop as we lay on the bluff at night with a canopy of stars overhead.
A tremble entered my voice on the last stanza.
“And soon above the meadow, the silver moon will swing. And where the wood is darkest, the whip-poor-will will sing.”
