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Which is when she remembers—an answer popping into her mind. “It’s ‘Sweet Thing,’ right? It’s ‘Sweet Thing’ from Astral Weeks. That would have made me crazy, if I didn’t remember,” she says, the whole song from under the swing coming back to her. “And there’s a great story behind it, why he decided to write it. I’ll have to check. I’ll have to look that up again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The song,” she says. “The song under the swing.”
Gwyn shakes her head as though she had no idea what Maggie is talking about, and whether she does or not, Maggie can see it: how tired she is. Like Maggie. Maybe more than Maggie. She is too tired to discuss this.
“You know, I’ll show you tomorrow,” she says.
Gwyn smiles. Then, as if thinking better of it, and doing it anyway, she bends down and kisses Maggie on the cheek.
“It is nice meeting you, Maggie Mackenzie.”
“It is nice meeting you too, Gwyn.”
Maggie watches Gwyn walk away, waits for the car ignition to start, and then taking a deep breath, she gets up herself, gets off the swing, planning to head back to the house.
But instead of going back to the house, she takes the steep fifty steps down to the beach, the rocks meeting her at the bottom, giving way to smooth sand, giving way to the ocean—right there, suddenly right there—for her to step into.
She slides off her flip-flops and walks into the midnight water, flinching as it freezes around her feet, her thighs. She is hoping it will make her feel clearer, but it is only making her colder. Still, she turns and looks back in the direction of the house. She can see it fairly clearly—all the lights on. She can even make out the tree, the injury, still firmly rooted in the strangest place. She keeps looking anyway.
It may not be what she thought she was searching for, but maybe it will turn out to be what she needs. Because safe or unsafe—safe and unsafe—it is starting to feel like it is her home that she is looking at.
Gwyn
There is a moment in every relationship when you see the whole thing. The question is when does the moment come? Is it the first time you see the person and instinctively know that things between you are going to work out, or fail? Is it a moment in the middle when you’ve experienced a loss—a parent’s death, a sickness—and this person gets into bed with you and holds you all night, until you feel guilt, incredible guilt, at any time you ever questioned him? Or is it a moment toward the end, however you get there, when you realize that there is something behind this person’s eyes that you were never able to touch, no matter how hard you tried?
You can only guess at it, where things really end, where they really begin, and so Gwyn knows it is possible that she is wrong that it begins and ends and begins again here. That this quiet moment is her moment. Years from now, it just may define tonight for her, or the end of tonight for her, the end of one part of her life, the beginning of another.
It’s also possible she’ll forget it. It doesn’t feel possible now, but that is the thing when you are still in the middle of something. You can’t believe the gods or the universe or all the incontrovertible proof to the contrary. This too shall pass. This, too, doesn’t get to count for everything.
Gwyn takes a deep breath, standing in the middle of the driveway, looking around herself, listening to all the noise. This is one of the other things she loves about Montauk—one of her small, forgotten things—how loud it gets here after a storm. She can hear the ocean from where she is standing, she can hear people on the street, and she can hear cars all the way down on Old Montauk Highway.
It is enough, in its way, to make her question her instinct. Her gut instinct to go back into her house and take just a few of her things with her. Right now. To pick up a few of her own things that may be getting damaged, things that she needs and loves, and that one day will remind her what she had in this house. To get them now, before it is too late.
But she makes a decision. It isn’t the most important decision she’ll ever make, maybe even that night, but she decides to ignore what her heart is telling her to do, and not to go back into her house. Not now. Not when she’ll find other proof for herself, as if she needs other proof, that there was a family here. That, soon, they will be gone.
Instead, she reaches into her bag, and finds her keys, and takes them out, and goes to get into her car. She gets into the car and turns on the ignition and quickly turns out of her driveway.
She is going to drop off these clothes for her daughter, and she is going to stay with Thomas, for tonight, at the inn on Second House Road, and she is going back to the hospital tomorrow and she is going to do what is needed. For her daughter. But she isn’t going into her house tonight. She isn’t even going to look at it in her rearview mirror, or consider it at all.
Call it what you want. But soon enough, less than a year from now, or a little more than a year from now—in the brief space of time where it looks like Thomas may actually marry Eve; in the brief space of time right before they sell their house to a young couple from western Massachusetts, the ones who were willing to go into debt to buy it, the ones who want to turn it back into a full-time home—Gwyn takes this car on a road trip out to Oregon, to stay for a while with her sister and the journalist. At least that is her plan, originally. But she stops along the way in a northern Arizona city, where she walks into a hotel barroom and finds a man sitting there, yellow socks peeking out from beneath his dress shoes. She recognizes him in the way we get to recognize the people we are supposed to meet, the ones we have been waiting our whole lives to meet. Does that mean that Gwyn turns out okay, just because she’s found someone else, someone who wants to see her? No, not as far as she is concerned. As far as she is concerned, it means she turns out okay because she believes—in that hotel barroom, for the first time in such a long time—that she should be seen. It is a bonus, of course—an immeasurable bonus, the immeasurable bonus of her life—that the man with the yellow socks has been the one to do it.
And for tonight, at least, she is done. With this house, this piece of her life, the whole damn thing.
She isn’t angry. She isn’t hopeful. She is simply done. For tonight, Gwyn is done trying to pick up what cannot be saved.
Maggie
Maggie is trying to pick up what can be saved. She is sitting on the living room floor, the half-filled wine box by her side, books and picture frames and candlesticks and vases surrounding her. She has grabbed newspapers from the kitchen, from the recycling bin there, and is beginning to spread them around her—beginning to get ready to wrap everything around her up—when she looks up and sees him standing there in the
doorway, leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed across his chest.
Nate. He looks like he has been standing there for a while, watching her. He is still holding his car keys in his hands, between his fingers.
“You’re back?” she says.
“I’m back.”
