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Eventually they emerge atop the cliff. Theodore’s friends glance at her, some skeptical, some curious, but when Theodore says, “Clear a path, fellas,” they all step aside. He comes up beside her as she approaches the edge.
“Well, here we are,” he says. “It’s wide open down there. All you have to do is jump. I can go first, to show you.” He pauses. “Or we can jump together.”
Miriam takes a deep breath, gazing out over the pond, the opposite bank with its own jagged cliffs, the dark copse of trees beyond. The water laps gently far below; the sun beats its fierce warmth against her bare shoulders. For several long moments she stands still, poised on the precipice—of the cliff, of the rest of her life. The air seems to shimmer, full of possibilities, and she thinks that whatever happens next, she will always remember this day, this moment, as the one where everything changed.
Very soon, everything will. At this very moment, in a hospital in New York City, a man with sweat on his brow and a drying bloodstain on his shirt is asking an operator to please ring the Day house in Bar Harbor. Moments later, the telephone in the drawing room at the Whispers will begin to trill. In another forty-five minutes, Miriam will arrive back home to find her father’s car idling on the piazza with its doors flung wide open, her mother sitting in the front seat pale-faced and clutching a handkerchief, as Papa frantically throws things into the trunk and shouts at Miriam toget in, get in.She will be told that her brother Edward, sweet and handsome Edward who promised he’d come to visit before the summer was out, has been struck by a city bus and may not live through the night—and her horror at the idea that she might have delayed their departure will consume her all the way home, only to be replaced by anguish when they learn that he died barely an hour later, before they had even made it over the state line into New Hampshire.
The Day family will not come back to Bar Harbor this summer.
It will be a long time before she sees Theodore Caravasios again.
Later, much later, Miriam will think of this moment and wonder if she ever had a choice at all. She will wonder if she jumped because she wanted to, or simply because the path that fate had chosen for her led in one direction: forward, over the edge into nothingness.
But in this moment, it doesn’t feel like fate. It feels like a choice, her choice, and hers alone, and she doesn’t need anyone—not even Theodore Caravasios—to show her how to make it.
“What do you say, Miriam?” he says. It’s the same question Harold asked her—only this time, it actually feels like a question. His voice is curious and warm, and she turns to him with a smile.
“Geronimo!” she says, and leaps alone into the open sky.
7.
2014
December
I was alone and cold when I woke the next morning, shivering under a blanket. I reached automatically for my phone, swiping it to check for messages and then chuckling at my own foolishness. For the next week, at least, Adam and I would be saying our good mornings and good nights in person.
Last night had been a very good night.
I shivered again, remembering. We hadn’t dared stay long in the little powder room, but later, after everyone else was asleep, I woke to the creak of my door opening and the soft tread of his feet as he crossed the room, the weight of his body as he slipped into bed beside me.
“We have to be quiet,” I whispered as he put his lips against my collarbone, my shoulder, my bare breasts.
“Quiet, I can do,” he’d whispered back. “Just don’t tell me to be quick.”
The clock on my phone said 7:03a.m., but the sky was the same flat gray as always, and the fog was thicker than ever. I listened for the sounds of people waking up, a creaking floorboard or the clink of coffee mugs, but there was nothing, not even the wind. Was I the only one awake? Maybe, I thought. Diana and William had gone up to bed just after they had arrived, but I didn’t think they’d gone to sleep; when I passed their door two hours later, I’d heard the murmur of voices having what sounded like a whispered argument. Richard was still on West Coast time and would probably sleep until noon, just in time to wake up and have a three-martini lunch—if he’d even made it back to his room before passing out. Adam had told me he was setting an alarm for eight o’clock, which was when my mom usually started moving around. And Mimi—her room was just below mine, which thanks to the acoustics of the house meant that everything she did down there sounded like it was happening right next to me. I’d woken in the night to the sound of her climbing out of bed and pacing the floor, maybe to use the bathroom, but when I listened now, there was nothing.
If I got up now, I would have the place to myself—but what I really wanted, suddenly, was to get up and get out. Not forever, but just for a little while. Just to delay whatever was coming when Adam and I met again in the cold light of day.
I scurried downstairs in my socks, clutching my heavy winter boots in my hand. The last of yesterday’s coffee was still in the pot; I poured it into a travel mug and set it in the microwave, taking it out before the one-minute countdown was done so that it wouldn’t beep. Five minutes later, I was outside with my boots and coat on, the coffee warm in my hand, my breath visible in the air. A frost had settled in overnight, feathering everything in white. I trudged through the gardens toward the pine path where I’d walked withMimi yesterday, pausing in the spot where she said she’d seen the fox—remembering the strange mix of certainty and sadness in her voice, as if she’d known her mind was playing tricks on her. I looked around just in case, but there were no telltale paw prints in the icy grass, no signs of life at all. The house loomed, great and gray and still against the sky, its dark windows like sightless eyes. The world seemed to be holding its breath, waiting. The only thing moving was me, into the forest, into the fog. My feet carried me forward as my mind traveled back and found him waiting there.
Last night had been so exciting, all those long months of tension and anticipation burning away in an instant as we came together in the dark, and I’d been so caught up in the moment that it never occurred to me to think about what came next. That I would still have to run into him on the stairs or sit across from him at breakfast and pretend that he was just a friendly acquaintance, just a member of the staff.
It had been so much easier to pretend nothing was happening when nothing had reallyhappened, when we weren’t even a real couple because it was against the rules. When we talked about the relationship, it was all about what might eventually happen: Someday we’d go out on a real date without worrying that someone would see us. Someday we’d take a weekend trip way up north, snuggling up in a little cabin by a lake somewhere as summer gave over to autumn and the leaves began to turn. Someday we’d drive across the country in search of weird landmarks and greasy roadside food, stopping whenever and wherever we wanted to, with no particular timeline or destination in mind. Adam was all about someday: he had a lifetime’s worth of plans for us before we’d ever even kissed for the first time. But when I teased him that he might be getting ahead of himself, he had gotten serious and quiet and said, “I’m not getting ahead of anything. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, and I know exactly what I want.”
Adam put a lot of stock in what was meant to be. He told me he believed in fate, soulmates, all of it. In his world, there were no accidents.
Of course I thought it had to be bullshit. The idea of a guy whodidn’t play games, who wanted to make plans, who liked me just the way I was and wanted to organizehislife to spend more time withme? This was clearly suspicious, a too-good-to-be-true scenario that I warned myself not to trust. I’d had a million flings that started out like this, guys who couldn’t get enough of me one minute only to suddenly discover that I was just a little toothisor not enoughthat,a few disappointing degrees shy of the girl they’d thought they were getting—a girl whom, no matter how hard I tried, I could never quite turn myself into. But then Adam was so demonstrably not like Colin or anyone else who came before him.
From the start, the relationship had felt different; it had to, when most of our time together was chaperoned by a rotating cast of senior citizens, including my grandmother. We had spent so many hours just talking, sharing stories while we walked or sat or did puzzles with Mimi, so that I felt I knew him better after only a few weeks than I’d ever gotten to know Colin even after we’d been hooking up for months. I knew he didn’t like ice cream; I knew he played the guitar left-handed but swung a baseball bat from the right; I knew he rented a tiny apartment above an old lady’s garage, shopped secondhand, and ate cheap, because he wanted to go back to school for his nursing certification. I knew the most expensive thing he owned was his winter coat. He told me about his childhood in Miami, raised by a beloved grandmother who had broken his heart when she passed away; he told me that it was his memories of her that spurred him to become a caregiver and work with the elderly.
And before I knew it, I was sharing things, too: I told him why I’d left New York, including the gory details. I told him that part of the reason I visited Mimi so often was because getting lost in someone else’s past was preferable to dealing with my right-now. I even told him about my dad and the cat whisperer and the YouTube twins, and though I played it up like it was funny, he put his hand on mine and said he wished that hadn’t happened to me, that it must have been hard.
But I didn’t let myself fall for him. And when Adam talked about all the things we would do together someday, I kept my mouth shut. I told myself I’d learned my lesson when it came to making plans—and I told him that I didn’t believe in fate, or anything like it.
And yet I couldn’t help noticing how things seemed to be falling into place, as if God or the universe or some mischievous Christmas spirit had conspired to make this happen because it was supposed to, whether I wanted it or not. We were spending the holidays together, like a real couple, and all thosesomedayswere suddenly more likeany day now. I had resisted the fantasy, and it became real anyway.
Until we tell them.
