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"Home," Bev says, throwing a rope with his strong, muscled arms. He jumps out of the boat--or nearly jumps, which is impressive for a man his age--and has them tied up and disembarked from the vessel in under five minutes.
"Thank you again for taking us and then coming back to fetch us," Ruby says, stopping to look Bev in the eye. The others have taken their overnight bags and are ambling away from the boat after saying their goodbyes, but Ruby lingers. "I really appreciate how easy you've made it to feel at home here."
"Ah," Bev says, brushing off her gratitude with a look of embarrassment. "It's nothing, Mrs. Hudson.” His cheeks turn a light shade of pink and Ruby realizes that he's not accustomed to people taking the time to be overly kind to him. After all, Bev is kind of a salty old bartender with a sharp tongue, and he’s also the elder statesman of the island—someone who seems like he’s always been there, and therefore is easy to take for granted.
"No, I mean it," Ruby insists, putting a hand on his arm. "You've been friendly to me and my girls, willing to run me back and forth to Christmas Key a couple of times, and one of the things I like best about you is that you don't gossip and you don't judge."
"I leave that to the womenfolk," he says, then looks even more embarrassed. "Sorry, but you know what I mean. No offense to the ladies, but you all seem to enjoy conjecture and speculation far more than any of the men I know."
"No offense taken." Ruby smiles up at him. "And you're right, I've known a lot of men and a lot of women, and we do tend to spend more time taking things apart and trying to put them back together for our own entertainment than men do. So I hear you."
"And thank you once again for your willingness to take on Tilly at the bookshop. She's a wonderful girl with a lot of endearing attributes, but not everyone gets to see that."
The gull that had been sitting and watching them with one eye suddenly lifts its wings and swoops away, leaving Bev and Ruby standing there with the water lapping against the wooden dock at their feet.
Ruby lets go of his arm, but before she does, she gives it a light squeeze. "You've done good work with her, Bev. The bond you two have is really something to observe."
She decides to leave everything else alone for the moment and to let Tilly and Bev work out any of the things that they don't see eye to eye on. Sometimes just hearing that you've done a good job raising another human is enough.
Ruby walks home with a smile on her face; there’s a whole new year ahead of her.
Marigold
For the next few days Cobb and Marigold cut each other a wide berth. He spends his days sitting on the front porch with his guitar, picking at the strings and working out a tune, and Marigold spends hers sitting at the computer in front of her bedroom window, working on a chapter that she keeps having to take apart and stitch back together. Nothing feels quite right, and it’s nagging at her like an itchy tag in the back of a sweater.
"Umm," Elijah says, standing in her doorway as he leans one shoulder on the frame. "Do you think that you two might ever speak again? Because it’s getting a little uncomfortable for those of us who are doing all the the cooking and trying to play mediator.”
Marigold turns around in her chair and takes off her glasses as she looks at her son. "Sure, buddy," she says with a forced smile. "Of course we’ll talk again. And for the record, we’re notnottalking, we're just doing our own things at the moment.” Marigold refrains from telling her son how complicated things can be in life, and in particular, how complicated his father has made things by telling her that he wants her back.
"Uh huh," Elijah says skeptically, making a face. He pushes away from the doorframe and goes back to the kitchen to make the dough for homemade calzones for dinner.
Letting someone in is always hard,Marigold types as she goes back to the document on her laptop.Letting a person know you--truly know you--is always a gamble. Being vulnerable isn't easy at any phase of your life, but it seems like it gets harder with each passing year. Take my ex-husband, for instance: at twenty I was ready to bare my soul to this man, and I did. We spent nights laying awake and talking about anything and everything, and we shared it all: hopes, fears, desires, needs. We wound ourselves around each other both literally and figuratively, and by the time our son was born, we were completely enmeshed. I stopped caring whether the modeling jobs were coming in or not, because I had these two men who needed me, fulfilled me, and kept me busy. I loved every minute of those early years, and I felt as though I was free to be my true, authentic self. But who actually knows who their true, authentic self is at twenty-two or twenty-six? Maybe some lucky people do, but not me.
Raising a child and dealing with the ups and downs of travel, fame, and life certainly did a number on us and on our marriage, but I would never tell you that the love died. I wouldn't even begin to lead you to believe that Cobb and I felt anything but fondness for one another, even in the darkest times.
And there were dark times. Cobb’s hard-won sobriety is a well-known topic, so I'm not telling tales out of school here, but for the twenty years we were married, I watched him try to self-medicate and to prop himself up with chemicals of one sort or another. He used them when he was happy, sad, afraid, or feeling celebratory. He used them so much that Elijah and I often felt that if the house was on fire, he'd save his drugs first.
Is that a kind thing to say? No. Is it truthful? Well...I don't know. You'd have to ask Cobb. But that's how it felt, and therefore, that's how I experienced a big portion of our marriage. He tried and failed at counseling and rehab a number of times (and again, this is well-known, so I think Cobb would be fine with me sharing this information) but ultimately, the one thing that pushed him to be successful at it was my leaving.
If that seems counterintuitive—leaving to saving someone—then that's okay. I'd tried everything at that point, and I'd done absolutely everything I could think of. I'd staged interventions. I'd gone with him to therapists. I was encouraging. I kept all alcohol out of the house. I traveled with him everywhere he went--but still, he found ways to get high. People poured him alcohol when I wasn't looking or invited him to share their drugs. It was simply not working, no matter how hard I tried to save him myself. I didn’t have the tools to do it on my own.
So, as many women do and for many different reasons, as we entered our forties, I left. Our son was over twenty at that point, and I felt I'd preserved the family unit through so many highs and lows, just to keep us all going. But at what point is a woman owed her own chance at survival? Happiness? Peace? And at what point does staying no longer equate to love, but become simply enabling? So I left. I told Cobb that I'd always love him and that I'd always be here if he truly needed me, but that he needed to find his "reason" alone. Because a person does, right? A person has to have their own reason for living, for striving, for getting up each morning and deciding to fight for another day.
Marigold stops typing here as she feels the winter air come in off the ocean. The book she started writing blindly and for her own personal catharsis is coming along, and even if she does absolutely nothing with it, the writing itself is healing. It’s like a meditation of sorts. The remembering, the thinking, the ruminating--it all helps her as she works through her feelings about her life.
On her desk, her phone lights up with notifications from Instagram. She'd posted a bunch of shots of Christmas Key while they were there, including a shot of herself at the pool, a selfie she took where she's in a bikini top and sunglasses on New Year's morning, drinking a cup of coffee in solitude. The comments, as usual, range from complimentary ones about her looks, her good luck to be living in such a gorgeous part of the world, and love for her ruffly flowered bikini top, to the blatantly rude, where people ask her what the hell she's thinking taking selfies at her age, or what kind of woman is so desperate for attention that she would post a photo where her cleavage is visible. (These particular comments coming mostly from men who undoubtedly seek out plenty of photos on their own time where cleavage is visible. They hypocrisy of it astounds her.)
Marigold takes even breaths as she skims the comments, letting them roll in and out of her head without giving them much credence. Good or bad, she simply acknowledges them and moves on, then sets the phone down and folds her hands in her lap. She casts her eyes out the window as she thinks of how these interactions with strangers online fuel her desire to keep writing. Because they do—they make her want to speak up even more--and she doubles down on her resolve to keep writing, and in the next chapter to address her thoughts about the way people love to comment on her looks as if they are her only value, and, more importantly, the way they feel free to do so.
"Mum?" Elijah calls out, his voice semi-urgent but not panicked. Marigold closes her laptop and stands, picking up her phone as she does and sliding it into the back pocket of her cargo pants. "Mum, where are you?" he shouts again, sounding more urgent.
Marigold leaves the solitude of her bedroom behind as she walks barefoot down the wooden floors of her hallway. "What's up, buddy?" The front room has been completely denuded of Christmas decor. The tree is gone, the decorations packed away for another year. "Everything okay?"
The front door is open, and Marigold steps around the couch, frowning to make out what she thinks she's seeing there. It's a lump, a figure on the porch.
"Elijah?" she says, puzzled. And then, with rising panic, "Cobb?"
Marigold falls to her knees in the open doorway as she realizes that what she's seeing there outside her beautiful, cozy English countryside cabin at the beach is the most horrible thing she could have imagined: Cobb, lying on his back on the wooden porch, one hand over his heart, his eyes closed and his face gray. Next to him, his guitar has fallen to the deck, a new crack visible across the body that echoes the crack spreading through Marigold’s heart.
