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“I’ll come with you,” I said, but by the time I had found my boots and coat, she was already gone, so I followed her footprints. Through the fresh fallen snow, from the front door to the side to the back, where they crossed the veranda and went down the stairs to the garden. The footprints turned right at the long stone wall, then veered away through the trees to the pine path.
I heard Adam’s voice behind me then. He called my name, and I looked back to see him standing on the veranda, waving. I waved back, but I didn’t wait. I kept going.
I think maybe, even then, I knew something was wrong.
And I think I knew because she did. My mother: her footprints danced away ahead of me, and I could see from the length and shape of her stride that she had started to hurry. The tracks disappeared down the pine path, into the darkness of the trees. I chased them. Faster, my breath coming in puffs, my heart starting to race. Matching my strides to hers, slowing down only when I came to the fallen tree in the middle of the path—but I was alone and climbed over it easily, the trunk cold and slimy beneath my hands, and in the back of my head I heard Mimi’s voice saying,The path goes on, we just can’t get there,and realized she was wrong. We could get there. We could have gotten here anytime,shecould have gotten here anytime, because the tree wasn’t really that big after all. Certainly not big enough to stop a spry and determined old woman from crossing over, from going out to the place where the sea lavender grows, where she used to walk so often as a girl, a young woman, a wife.
And that was when I heard it. A howl, wild and keening. It was a terrible sound, the sound of an animal trapped and dying, and every hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I listened between the trees, barely breathing, waiting. The howl ended. There was silence.
Then it began again.
I ran toward the noise, down the shadowed path to the place where the woods ended and the rocky coastline began, letting go of my coat so that it flapped open, but I no longer felt the chill. I ran even though that voice inside me, that cold and logical voice, was suddenly awake again and telling me,No, don’t,turn around, because whatever was making that sound was something I didn’t want to see. I ran, the trees passing in a blur beside me, until suddenly they fell away and I was standing in the cove, and the howl had started again, and the howling animal wasn’t an animal at all, but my mother.
She was on her knees at the edge of the frozen reach, her hands bare, pounding her fists at the ice and snow that was already turning red with her blood. Her mouth was open, and she was screaming, and the scream was living anguish wrapped around a single word:No.
No,she screamed,no, no, no,as her fists hit the ice and her knuckles split open and the ice didn’t crack at all. Not a crack. Not a flaw. It was clear, so beautifully clear, that frozen water smeared with blood.
He caught up to me then. Adam. He must have been coming after me, tracking my steps as I had tracked my mother’s, running at the sound of her terrible cry. He saw me, and he saw what was in front of me, and he gathered me up in his arms and said, “Don’t look, don’t look.”
But I had already looked. I had already seen.
I would never stop seeing it.
My mother on her knees, howling.
Her knuckles bruised and bleeding.
The snow, falling fast now.
The ice, and what lay beneath it.
Mimi’s eyes were open. Open wide in her pale frozen face, open wide below the frozen surface of the sea that drowned her and then pushed her back to shore. Gazing into the flat gray sky forever and seeing nothing at all.
15.
1948
Summer
She is nineteen and luminous in her ivory dress. She walks over rose petals to meet him at the altar, a blushing, beautiful June bride. Later, one of her mother’s friends will cluck and frown and saywhat a shamethat there weren’t more people there to see how lovely she looked. St. Saviour’s is a small church already, and even then, as Miriam makes her way down the aisle, the pews are only half-full. But then, this is no grand society wedding. The invitees who might have made an event of it all declined to attend, sending regrets from their new summer homes in Newport, Cape May, Nantucket. The announcement that runs a week later in the New York papers will be small and mostly overlooked, except by Harold Chandler, who will angrily crumple up the page, put a match to it, and use it to light a cigarette. Just as Roland Day predicted, Bar Harbor’s moment as a seaside enclave for the rich and famous is over—and the few families who returned after the fire have been as left behind as the island itself.
But Miriam doesn’t care about any of that. She never wanted it: not the parties, not her picture in the paper, not the two-faced friends who would invite her to lunch and compliment her hat and then gossip furiously about her the moment her back was turned. She only wanted Theodore Caravasios.
And she has him.
There had been one terrible week in which she wasn’t certain she would prevail. The chaotic confrontation that began when Smith screamed the household awake went on all the way until dawn. Mother had slapped her hard across the face, then burst into tears. Papa had raged and ranted for hours, scathing Miriam for her deception, her carelessness, the scandal she might have caused to the detriment not only of her own reputation but of her family’s, too. There had been shouting, then pleas, then angry promises. Miriam would be sent away, he said—to a distant relative, to a convent, to a city overseas where she would never see that boy again, and she should count herself lucky that this was all that would happen, because what Papa really wanted to do was throttle that disgusting greaser with his bare hands. He cajoled and threatened; he begged her to tell him that she hadn’t gone out into the night by choice, grabbing her hard by the shoulders and saying, “You tell me the truth, child. If he harmed you, if he forced you.” That was when Miriam lifted her chin and looked him dead in the eye and said, “The only person hurting me is you, Papa,” so that he reddened and released his grip, looking ashamed. Oh, they had fought.
But in the end, she was right. Her father would not, could not, stand in the way of her marrying the man she loved.
It was the first day of the New Year, a subdued affair at which the conflict hung like a dark cloud over everything, when Papa knocked at the door of her room.
“All right then, child,” he said. “I’ve made up my mind. Your mothersays I’d be a fool to allow it, and she might be right. But fool or no, it’s done. I telephoned your Mr. Caravasios this morning . . . and I told him he has my blessing.”
Miriam had flung herself off the bed with a shriek, embracing him so fiercely that she nearly sent both of them toppling. “Thank you, Papa,” she said. After a long moment, she stepped back. “Does Mother know?”
“Of course. Whether she approves is another matter, but that’s between you and her. As for me, I’m still not sure I approve. But,” he added with a sigh, “I also know better than to enter a contest with my own daughter to see which of us can be more stubborn.”
“I’d win, you know. I’d reject every suitor who came my way and become an old maid just to spite you.”
