Love in Maine (23 page)

There was a pale blue envelope beneath it. He pulled the card out first, before gearing
up to open the present. It was a child’s birthday card, with a cartoonish drawing
of balloons and big bubble letters that cried, “YOU’RE 6!” He smiled and opened the
card. There was a little rhyming couplet about the years going fast and having a blast,
and then a written message from Maddie on the left-hand side.

Hank set down the card after letting his fingertips skim over the slants and scrapes
of Maddie’s vicious handwriting. Her penmanship was just like she was, fast and to
the point. He stared at the box and wondered if he had the courage to open it. He
took a deep breath to fortify himself, then reached for the blue ribbon. He pulled
it open slowly and could practically feel the ghost of Maddie nearby, jumping up and
down and clapping her hands and saying something like, “Oh! I hope you love it! Open
it! Open it!”

Once he’d taken the ribbon off, he coiled it neatly and slipped it into the drawer
in the kitchen where he kept string and tape and scissors.

He removed the white wrapping paper, slowly at first, then tearing it harshly to get
the box out. It was a worn leather watch case, obviously old but well taken care of.
He opened the hinged top with a mixture of dread and hope.

She had given him the Swiss watch, the vintage Blancpain Fifty Fathoms. He had no
idea how much they went for new, but he knew that Maddie had saved up four thousand
dollars over the summer. She used to give him a weekly update on her finances, explaining
how miraculous it seemed to her that her pile of cash grew and grew just by putting
in her tips every night and leaving it alone. She cashed her paychecks and added that
money to the coffee can on Saturdays.

At first he had found it sort of ridiculous, ribbing her for her financial cluelessness.

“I’m not clueless!” she had cried. “I am actually really financially responsible.
I have assets. But this is different. This is so . . . tangible. There is such a difference
between money that I make and money that I . . . received.”

Maddie had never really hidden the fact that her family had money, but she’d never
explained why she had no access to any of it that summer, either.

He held the watch in the palm of his right hand, letting the balance and weight become
familiar to him. He touched the sharp ridges of the rotating bezel and moved the numbers
around the dial. The band was made of some kind of rubber or composite. He turned
over the watch to look at the back. Sure enough, the words
Fifty Fathoms
were engraved in an elegant script, with the word
ANTIMAGNETIC
in smaller caps just below. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the cool metal words
until the metal warmed under his skin. He liked knowing that Maddie had touched the
watch.

He removed the cheap, reliable diving watch he’d used for years and set it on the
counter, then put on the expensive Swiss replacement. After staring at the way the
watch rested on his wrist, as if it had been made for the turn of bone and skin, he
shook his head and walked over to his desk. He turned on his computer and logged into
his e-mail. All of the decisions that had plagued Hank for the past few months seemed
easily dispensed with all of a sudden. He replied to the head of the excavation team
at the University of Cyprus. He replied to the administrator in charge of the NATO
project in Athens. He replied to his contact in the R & D department at Ocean Works
Laboratories.

Life would go on. He refused to wallow. And if he got his shit together he might even
be well enough to get in touch with Maddie when she graduated. Or sooner.

The Head of the Charles was always a nightmare. Maddie had been in the lead boat for
Brown all three years, but it was always a crapshoot until a few hours before the
race. The coaches were prone to rearrange the lineups right until the last minute,
working on the best possible odds, given the weather, the course, and the competition.
Maddie had kept herself so busy for the past six weeks that she hadn’t had time to
think about Hank, except when she was asleep and couldn’t force her subconscious brain
into submission.

All of her time was spent training, rowing, or studying. Sleeping and eating were
part of training, nothing more. She fell into the robotic routine with a dismal sort
of gratitude. At least she was going to have something to show for herself. She was
in the best shape of her life, and her thesis advisor had pretty much told her she
was going to graduate with honors if she wrote the paper he thought she was capable
of.

That small bit of research she had done at the Houghton Library that day with Hank—and
Hank himself, if she was honest—had inspired her to fine-tune her research to a very
particular aspect of naval antiquity. She was in the midst of applying for a grant
to spend the year after she graduated in Cyprus, studying the historical significance
of the great galley ships—the penteconter, the bireme, and the trireme, ancient vessels
powered by oarsmen.

Two hours before the first race, Maddie found out she was going to be in the lead
boat. The coach gave her a quick pat on the back, and Maddie smiled up at her. Her
parents were somewhere in the crowd, and Jimmy had said he was going to come, but
it was too chaotic to see anyone until after her set of races was finished.

She was in the Women’s Four. The boat was so familiar, the turn of the fiberglass,
the way the seat molded to her bottom, the feel of the oars in her hands. The race
itself always dissolved into mist in her mind. Maddie always remembered the final
inhale before the gun went off, and then she was just . . . off. And then it was a
steady, grinding series of pulls and breaths and muscle that hurled her body into
a space of pure motion. And then it was over. And they’d won. Her teammates were hugging
and crying, and Maddie looked up and thought she saw Hank in the crowd, but then the
man turned and it wasn’t him, and then her friend Stephanie in the seat behind her
grabbed her shoulders and shook her and was screaming her congratulations, and Maddie
smiled and tried to look back where she thought she had seen Hank, but the crowd was
moving and shifting like the water all around her, and Hank was gone.

Or her dream vision of Hank was gone. She let herself cry, because everyone was crying
for joy from having beaten the crap out of Princeton—finally—and she thought it was
as good a time as any to completely let her guard down. When they got back to the
boathouse, the coaches and the rest of her teammates were hooting and clapping, and
everyone was thrilled. Maddie felt like she was in a tunnel, she was present, but
everything was distorted, and the volume seemed to increase and decrease at odd times.

“Hey, beautiful!” Strong arms grabbed her and pulled her into a hug, and Maddie’s
stupid, gullible heart flew into a crazy, joyful dance. She whipped around, and her
brother Jimmy was holding her and patting her back and congratulating her on her grand
achievement.

He so wasn’t Hank. She hugged him back and cried.

“Wow. Since when did you turn into such a bawl-baby?”

Maddie laughed and wiped her face. “Since we just kicked ass, that’s when.”

Jimmy smiled and gave her one last squeeze. “You know, I’m not really supposed to
be here, but Mom and Dad are so happy for you, and I wangled my way in. Great job!”

“Thanks, Jimmy. I’ll see you at dinner tonight.”

The imaginary sightings went on like that for the rest of Maddie’s fall semester.
She knew it was part of her emotional crack-up or whatever it was that she was going
through. It just seemed so impossible that she had been with the right guy and it
hadn’t worked out. In that, at least, Hank was right: Maddie was spoiled. She had
been raised to believe that with hard work and integrity, things would work out for
Ms. Madison Post. She no longer believed that.

She knew it was spoiled to think that way, with all of her privileges and a future
that was basically laid out before her, but inside it felt shadowy and thin compared
to how she’d felt in Hank’s arms last summer. By Christmas, Maddie was entirely capable
of masking her disappointment. She suspected that many people lived their entire lives
masking their disappointment. Perhaps that’s all that was meant by grand philosophical
euphemisms like “The Human Condition.”

Or “Adulthood.”

Maddie’s nieces and nephews were at just the right age for the perfect holiday celebration,
jubilant and enthusiastic about the cookies and milk for Santa and the carrots and
celery for the reindeer, and not overly concerned about the quantity of presents under
the tree. Everyone descended upon Maddie’s parents’ place for the holiday weekend.

On Christmas morning, they were all sitting around opening presents, the fire crackling,
the paper ripping, when Maddie’s mother looked up. “Oh, dear, I forgot that something
came for you in the mail last week, Maddie.”

Laura got up and left the living room, where all the grandchildren were tearing through
their gifts and sitting cross-legged on the floor in their pajamas while their parents
sat in their bathrobes drinking coffee and watching the clock for when they could
have the first eggnog or Bloody Mary.

Returning to the living room a few minutes later, Laura handed Maddie a small box
wrapped in brown paper. It was covered in foreign stamps, and her name and address
were spelled out in a beautiful masculine script. It felt like him already.

Maddie looked up. Her mother was smiling, and her father looked away as if it were
none of his business. Feeling a little idiotic, all she wanted to do was hold the
unopened package. She loved the way it was so meticulously wrapped and the way each
of the stamps had been placed with exquisite care at the upper edge. It was so Hank.

Her two oldest brothers were busy talking to each other about which college football
game they were going to watch first, but their wives, Isabel and Georgia, were staring
at Maddie expectantly from across the room.

“A secret admirer?” Georgia said with a raised eyebrow.

Maddie took a deep breath and opened the package. She did it carefully. She wanted
to preserve the brown paper and all those stamps and his handsome handwriting, and
frame it or do something special with it eventually. After she’d removed the paper,
she opened a small cardboard box, which had tiny wood shavings that were keeping an
even smaller box delicately afloat in the packing material. She took out the small
jewelry box and opened it.

An ancient silver coin winked out at her. Maddie touched it cautiously with tingling
fingertips, feeling the ridges of the ancient profile, then gently took it out of
the box and held it up to the light.

Her mother gasped. “Oh, darling! What is it?”

Maddie folded her fingers around it in a possessive move that surprised her mother
and herself. Her unspoken answer:
It is mine
. She held it like that for a few seconds, then opened her palm and held it out to
her mother.

“Here,” Maddie offered. “It looks like there’s a description in the box. I think it’s
second- or third-century BC. You hold it while I read about it.”

Laura Post took the artifact out of her daughter’s hand and examined it closely, pushing
her reading glasses up her nose to have a closer look. “How gorgeous.”

There was a small folded piece of pale blue paper tucked along the inside edge of
the cardboard box. Maddie unfolded it and began to read. An academic description of
the gift, in Hank’s strong confident hand, told of the face of the goddess Athena
on one side and the full form of Herakles on the reverse. It was from 280 BC and . . .

And then Maddie couldn’t read it very clearly anymore because it was all stupid beautiful
things that he could never say in real life about how she was his goddess and he was
trying to complete his labors and how he hoped that she would wait for him for just
a little while longer because they were two sides of that coin and—

“Is that a description of the coin, Maddie?” Her father reached for the thin airmail
paper, and she folded it up quickly and tucked it back into the box. “No, it’s nothing.”
She wiped her cheeks with the sleeve of her robe, and everyone was kind enough not
to ask her why she was a weepy mess. “Apparently the coin is Lucanian,” Maddie explained.
“Third century BC.” She asked her mother if she could have it back for a moment, and
then Maddie passed it to her father.

While her enthusiasm and bravado had come from her mother, Maddie’s love of old, beautiful,
solid objects had come straight from her father and his parents’ side of the family.
This house. Everything in it. Old. Beautiful. Solid. It was a strange kind of wealth,
really, because it felt like everything had always been there. There had never been
any evidence of acquisition. Everything was just there.

Maddie’s paternal great-grandparents had been antiquities scholars at Harvard. Everyone
always joked that her great-grandmother had been the smart one because the woman’s
husband had only spoken four languages and she had spoken six. They went on long,
dangerous trips. They were nineteenth-century adventurers.