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“Well, someone needed to,” Gwyn says. “And all that the rest of them will remember now is the tree.”
“And maybe the cake.”
She smiles. “And maybe the cake.”
Then she turns the doorknob, leaving Eve behind, and goes inside to her family, for tonight, while it is still hers.
Maggie
Maggie is sitting on the swing, by the edge of the cliff, smoking. She is smoking too many of Eve’s cigarettes. The last time she had a cigarette was during the U-Haul drive from California to New York. Before that, it had been a long time. But during that trip east, when they’d stop at roadside diners, they’d share triple-decker BLTs and sweet iced coffee and one cigarette each before getting back in the truck, trying to drive through the night. We’re done with these things when we get to New York, she remembers telling him. Now she is having several and not thinking about it, except to decide whether she is having another. She is deciding to make the next one her last, and is looking out at the ocean, and trying not to think about anything else too much, except for how long she has been out here, which seems long. Too long, already. She should be inside, helping to do something.
She reaches into her pocket to light the final cigarette, and drops her lighter beneath the swing’s seat. She leans down to pick it up, and something underneath the swing catches her eye—writing engraved on the swing’s underside. On a metal plate screwed into the swing’s underside. It is hard to make the words out in the darkness, but she flicks the lighter open and tries.
She thinks it is a poem, at first, but then she realizes it is a song. The lyrics to a beautiful song, a song she recognizes. She runs her fingers along one of the stanzas:
And you shall take me strongly
In your arms again
And I will not remember
That I ever felt the pain.
She holds her fingers there, over the words. There is something in them that hits her. It hits her now, when she needs it to most, something about belief. She doesn’t know how she and Nate will get through this, but she also knows that she believes in him. How can that be? Maybe because, in the end, belief isn’t supposed to make sense, at least not all of the time. In that, it finds its power. It gets to creep up on you and carry you forward. Until you can carry yourself again.
She pulls her hand away. She has heard the song before. She can’t remember who sang it (it’s on the tip of her tongue . . . why can’t she remember?) but she starts humming the melody. It is coming back to her a little at a time—the melody—which isn’t the worst way to begin to remember the rest.
And she hears footsteps. She looks up, from beneath the swing, thinking it is going to be Nate, coming back for something, but it is Gwyn, walking quickly toward her—out of her dress, and in a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved button-down top.
“You’re back?”
She smiles. “I just came back to the house to change, and I got some overnight clothes for Georgia, pack her up a suitcase.”
“She’s staying at the hospital?”
She nods. “She’s okay, though. Just a little wound up. Denis just got there, right as I was leaving, and he is going to stay with her. Thank goodness for that at least. And Nate went to get us all rooms at the inn on Second House Road. But he should be back soon. He wanted me to tell you that he’d be back soon.”
She is quiet, not eager to think about Nate coming back, about going to the inn with him or staying here. About anything they have to talk about. Sleep, all of a sudden, seems so far away.
Gwyn sits down on the swing, beside her.
“Are those yours?” she says, and points at the pack of cigarettes in Maggie’s hand. “Please tell me you don’t smoke.”
Maggie didn’t remember she was holding them, and immediately gets embarrassed and starts to explain—not usually, just tonight—but then she looks back at Gwyn, who is holding her hand out for one.
“Of course not,” Maggie says, and hands one over.
Gwyn lights it up, taking a long drag, closing her eyes against it. Maggie watches her, considers telling her that they are Eve’s cigarettes she is smoking. Would it matter to her? It seems beside the point. If Maggie is right about Eve and Thomas, or, if she is wrong, it will come out soon enough, and either way these cigarettes are not part of the story.
Maggie points back in the direction of the house. “I’m planning to head back inside and to pack some things up for you guys. Like the photographs along the staircase? Things that seem like they might get waterlogged. If it starts to rain again.”
Gwyn nods. “Thank you for that.”
“Well, maybe you should see what I’ve managed to do before you actually thank me. I am terrible at cleaning.”
“It gets easier.”
“Maybe. But I was standing in the library for less than ten minutes when I saw the swing through the window and decided I had to come out here instead. I had to take a break.”
