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He laughed at that. “You know, I believe you would.”
“He’s a good man, Papa. You’ll see.”
“Well,” he said, “he seems to be. And I’ll do whatever I can, whatever is in my power, to make sure that you and your young man have a happy, prosperous life.” He paused, and smiled. “You, and anyone else who might come along. That’s a promise, my dear. I know you love him, and I believe he loves you, too, and that’s no small thing. But that’s not why I’m giving you my blessing.”
She stepped back to look into his face. “Why, then?”
Her father laid a hand on each of her shoulders and gazed unflinchingly into her eyes. The look on his face was one she’d never seen before: full of love, but also something darker, something savage. He looked like a man about to declare war.
“Because you’remydaughter.Myblood. If he doesn’t do right by you, girl, I trust you to give him the hell he deserves. And I want you to promise me, Miriam. A promise for a promise. If the worst comes to pass, if it goes bad, you come to me. Do you hear? You come to me.”
Gooseflesh rippled over her skin, but she met his gaze without flinching.
“I promise.”
But it was a silly promise, one forgotten nearly as soon as she made it, swept away by jubilation at her engagement, the thrill of Theo’s hand in hers as she introduced him as her fiancé, the excitement of planning the wedding that would take place in just a few short months. By the time she and Theo say their vows, it’s the very last thing she’s thinking of—and by the time she falls into his arms on their wedding night, this time pillowed by soft white linens instead of a rough and dusty bearskin laid over a dirty floor, she’s not thinking of it at all.
And Papa keeps his promise. The newlywed couple has everything they could ask for, everything they could ever want—except a house of their own, but it hardly matters when the Day family already owns the finest damn house in Bar Harbor, now fully rebuilt and grander than ever. Maybe that’s why, although it’s supposed to be only temporary, Miriam and Theo stay on at the Whispers. First in Miriam’s own bedroom, where they settle in immediately after returning from a honeymoon in Niagara Falls. (Miriam tries and fails not to smirk at the sight of Smith, struggling to drag her heavy luggage up the stairs.) A year later, Mother and Papa move into the rebuilt north wing, Smith exits for parts unknown, and she and Theo take the master bedroom, with its connected dressing rooms, private veranda, and sweeping views of the bay. Mother says it’s to give them their privacy; Miriam suspects that it has more to do with the very expensive, very luxurious radiant heating system Papa had installed in the floors of the north wing. At any rate, she’s glad—for the extra space, but also to have her mother still so nearby. She already suspects what the doctor will confirm in another few weeks: she’s pregnant.
She’s twenty-one when Richard comes into the world, squalling and red-faced, his little fists waving in the air even before his eyes open, like he’s fighting an unseen enemy.
Twenty-two, and pregnant again, watching from the newly rebuiltpier at sunset as her husband’s boat comes in, one hand resting on her burgeoning belly and the other holding Richard on her hip. Patches, seven years old and still spry, runs circles around her legs.
Twenty-three, and a mother twice over, to the rambunctious toddler who has begun to look more like Miriam’s father than anyone else, and to a baby girl who was born two weeks ahead of schedule with a full head of thick, dark hair. Theo’s uncle, visiting for the first time since the wedding, chucks the sleeping infant Diana under the chin and says, “This one’s Greek for sure”—and then looks nervously over his shoulder when Roland Day scowls and harrumphs behind his newspaper.
Time moves like a river. Fast, faster.
She is twenty-five. Twenty-seven—no, twenty-eight, and this is when she realizes she’s stopped counting her own birthdays, instead marking time by the number of candles on her children’s birthday cakes. Seven for Richard, five for Diana. She marvels at how fast it passes, how she seems to turn around and find another year gone. So much has changed. So much has stayed the same. Patches is an old dog, white-muzzled and contentedly sleeping his days away, waking up only to follow the rays of the sun as they shift from window to window. He doesn’t come down to the pier with Miriam anymore, and Miriam herself doesn’t go as often as she used to. Theo has two boats now, theRed Skyand one other, calledSprite, that he charters from the marina on summer weekends for wealthy visitors to go deep-sea fishing. This side business was Papa’s idea. For the first year, Theo’s clientele consisted almost solely of Roland Day and his friends, but it’s quickly become lucrative, more so than his own work. He wears a jaunty white captain’s hat when he takes folks out on the water, also at Papa’s suggestion; he says it completes the image, so that clients know they’re in good hands, and Miriam thinks he looks terribly handsome, even though Theo privately grumbles to her that he thinks the hat is ridiculous.
Later, she’ll remember this year as a good one. One of the best. Happy and busy and full of laughter, the family gathered for dinnerin the evenings, the table set for six or eight or even ten. Papa hires a cook and a housekeeper and the Whispers is bustling once again, this time with amateur fishermen and their wives, who cluck delightedly over the children and often join Miriam for tea while their husbands are out on the water.
She is twenty-eight when Papa’s health begins to decline, and he and Mother tell her they’ve decided to return to Egg Harbor. The winters are too hard, the doctors too far away. The Whispers succumbs once again to emptiness. The summer guests, who were always her parents’ friends more than her own, send their regrets and stay elsewhere.
She has never been so lonely.
She shouldn’t be. She knows it’s absurd, when she’s been so fortunate—and when she has this lovely home, two beautiful children, a loving husband to keep her company. Some people had tried to tell her that time would eventually cool their passions, that there would come a day when she didn’t want to melt every time he looked her way, but they were wrong. She loves him as fiercely as ever, burns for him the way she always has. They even still slip out to the island as they did years ago on that one frigid night, waiting for the reach to freeze solid and then sneaking out like teenagers from their own house, laughing and clinging to each other as they cross the ice.
But then the winter of 1958 is unseasonably mild, and the ice never comes—and the next winter, it’s as if he’s forgotten. Not just the island, the cabin, those stolen moments in the dark, but Miriam herself. He leaves for the docks earlier, comes home later, lingers downstairs smoking or reading long after she’s gone to bed. Sometimes he falls asleep down there and never comes to bed at all, so that when Miriam wakes up and stretches her hand out in the dark, she finds herself alone, his side of the bed empty and cold. He reaches for her less and less.
She tells herself things will change—they must—as the temperature falls, the frost creeps in, the world covers over in snow. She waits a week, and then another. On the last day of January 1959, with the temperature hovering near ten degrees and the wind blowing wildlyover the snowdrifts, she walks the pine path alone to the cove. A hard walk, her cheeks burning against the wind, her arms crossed protectively over her tender breasts, a bone-deep exhaustion setting into her body before she’s even halfway there. But she makes it, leaning out to poke a stick into the water. It goes two inches into the snow, and no farther. The ice is as hard as granite.
She smiles as she makes her way back along the path, imagining how she’ll wink at him across the dinner table. “Wouldn’t you know,” she’ll say, “the reach is frozen solid. It’s pure ice all the way across.”
She imagines how he’ll smile at her. How he’ll remember what he’s somehow forgotten. How they’ll wait until after dark, until the children are asleep. She imagines the delicious weight of him as he lays her against the floor, taking her by the hips and moving slowly inside of her.
As she reaches the garden wall, she falls to her knees and vomits.
At dinner that night, there is no wink, no smile. Instead, she passes the potatoes across the table and says, “We’re going to have another baby.”
Richard thinks about this for three or four seconds, then asks if they can name the baby Captain Kangaroo. Diana, confused, says that if they’re having a baby kangaroo, she’d very much like if it could sleep in her room. Patches, resting against Miriam’s foot under the table, makes a littlewhuffnoise and twitches in his sleep. But Theo doesn’t say anything, not for a long time, gazing at her with an unreadable expression on his face.
“Are you sure?” he asks finally.
“Pretty sure,” Miriam says.
“You look so pale.”
“I was sick earlier. I’ll be all right.”
