Thus, when I think back about that snowy meeting, I cannot, even though I wish it with all my might, picture Ginny turning her head and smiling at Mary Ann in recognition. No, when I picture that moment all I can see is the figure in the gray coat with the hat, and when she turns her head toward Joyce House, she has no face. There is but a void. A woman grasps Santiago’s arm, but she is not Ginny, she is a terrible darkness.
I am trapped next to that window, with the rain distorting my view, always looking out, and never able to see the face of the woman I love.
1998: 6
Minerva listened to Veruca Salton her Discman as she walked to town, thinking the trip might lift her spirits, but the peacefulness of the streets did little to soothe the nervous twinge that had invaded her waking hours and that she was unable to either explain or wave away.
She supposed it was the stillness of the summer that caused this discomfort. In the daytime—with commuters off in Boston or at some other workplace location, with the town devoid of students to patronize its two cafés and its one bookstore—there was a sense of melancholy enveloping the brick buildings that lined the core of Temperance Landing. Its yellow-and-white city hall building, with the date 1667 proudly engraved above its doors, and the imposing library in the Beaux Arts style lay quiet and forlorn.
She thought the town was charming. It looked like the towns they depicted on Christmas cookie tins. A place like she’d never visited except in old Hollywood movies where Cary Grant played the hero. But now she perceived a forced cheerfulness embedded in the wood and brick and mortar, and behind it the shape of something sharper and unpleasant. The campus too had begun to shed its elegant appeal, like paint that is peeled away by the elements.
She had thought the summer, alone by the sea, would provideher with a chance to focus on her work, but instead the silence of Stoneridge lay heavy upon her shoulders. The incident in the movable stacks added to the feeling of malaise. Well, no matter. She needed to keep going through Beatrice Tremblay’s papers, needed to coerce herself back into a semblance of order.
She dropped off the film she needed developed and bought herself a cup of coffee, then walked back the way she’d come, glancing at the houses with the plaques that testified to their venerable history. There was a gray house with a yellow door and a plaque that readRobert Thorndike, Mariner, 1723. A pink housewith its oval plaque that declared this had been the home ofJeremy Lutter, Bricklayer, 1806. Charming tidbits of the past.
Isaiah Marsh, 1887, lost at sea.
She paused before that red house and gazed at the plaque, wondering how exactly Isaiah had been lost. A freak storm, or a trip from which he never returned? Had he fallen overboard or been murdered by a resentful crewmate? Minerva hefted her backpack from one shoulder to the other.
When she arrived back at the dorm, she took a nap for far longer than she’d intended and woke up feeling wrung out rather than refreshed. Hideo arrived soon after.
He helped her carry Thomas’s boxes into Ledge House. They dumped them in the old library, under the shadows of stuffed ducks and owls, instead of dragging them to the basement. In the end, someone in the residence office had phoned Thomas’s sister and the sister had promised she’d call back and see about picking up the boxes. It made no sense to drag the boxes up and down the basement stairs, so they’d stay in the library for now.
“You could write him up, you know,” Hideo said when they were back in her kitchen.
She took a can of Diet Pepsi from the refrigerator and handed it to him before she prepared her second coffee of the day. “There’s no proof he drew on my door, even if it’s obvious it was him. He’ll become more insufferable if I say anything and they’re not going to boot him out during the summer.”
“If you don’t get it down on paper, you’ll never get rid of him.”
“I don’t want to talk about Conrad,” she said, and flicked on the light in the kitchen. It was getting late and soon Karnstein would come by to have its dinner. The glow of the kitchen enticed the cat during the evenings.
“Did you tell Hannah what he said to you?”
“Yes, I told Hannah about him. It’ll be added to his file and in the fall we’ll have a mediation session.”
Hideo poured himself half a glass of soda while he shook his head. She grabbed her cup of coffee and sat across from him.
“So what’s Carolyn Yates like?” Hideo asked. “Did she actually speak to you when you went to her house?”
“Sure, we’ve spoken. She seems to have been a former artist and a debutante who married well. In Beatrice Tremblay’s diaries she paints a picture of a fashionable, privileged woman.”
“And her grandson, that Noah, what’s he like?”
“He’s the grandson of a privileged woman.”
“I mean, is he cute?”
“How would I know?”
“You have eyes.”
He was a bit vulnerable behind the bluster, she thought. She had a fondness for stray animals and slightly damaged things—the chipped frame of a mirror, the weathered pages of a book that has been kissed by the rain, the sweater that has been nibbled by a troublesome moth—which primed her to look kindly on a man like him. But she ought not to. Strays bit sometimes, and certain old books were suffused with pernicious mold.
“My eyes are busy,” she said. The coffee was too hot. It scalded her tongue.
“Sometimes I think you want to play at being Emily Dickinson, secluded in a brick house and feverishly writing by candlelight.”
She didn’t. She admired, even envied people like Hideo, who could swiftly navigate the world, smiling and laughing and making friends while she was coiled tight inside her head. These days, she felt even more removed from everything, the silence of the dorm and the summer heat that spread across campus lulling her into a restless half sleep.
