Strange Fits of Passion (25 page)

"I'm sorry," he said.

There was a silence in the room.

"You know," he said after a time, "I don't want you to go, but maybe you should think about that, just to be on the safe side." His arms had stiffened against me. "Just to another town or something, somewhere a little further north maybe."

I had had this thought too, almost immediately, at the clinic in Machias, but I had rejected it even before it was fully formed. I couldn't leave the cottage now. I couldn't leave Jack. I didn't have the strength. I knew that.

"When does the season start up again?" I asked.

"April," he said. "But I could push it a little. Get her in mid-March."

"Do that," I said.

***

Later, when he was sitting at the kitchen table and I was making tea, I asked him what it was that he had studied in college, what he had thought he might do with himself after he graduated. It was still dark outside, and I could see our reflection in the windows: myself in my flannel nightgown and my cardigan sweater, my hair too long and loose over my shoulders; Jack in his flannel shirt and sweater, his body half turned toward me so that he could watch me at the stove. We looked, in the windows, like a fisherman and his wife, who had risen early to prepare her husband's breakfast. I thought that we did not look anything like a love affair—rather something homelier, more familiar. This vision in the windows held me for a moment; we appeared to be something we were not, could not ever be.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

I shook my head. I brought the tea and some toast to the table.

"You'll laugh," he said, "but I suppose I thought I'd be a college teacher one day. I went to school on a track scholarship, and I thought I'd be a track coach myself. I loved running—there's nothing like it, not even lobstering—and then I had a great professor for English lit, and somehow I sort of thought I'd do both: teach and coach."

"Do you ever think of going back to it—school, teaching?" I asked. I was thinking of the books I had found on his boat.

"No," he said quickly and dismissively. "Not since I left."

"Do you mind?"

"No." He said it with finality, as if it were something he had put behind him years ago.

We ate the small breakfast. He said that he would haul his boat on Friday if the weather was decent, and that he would then begin to mend his gear. He always took his wife and daughter on a small trip in February, he added, a kind of vacation. He wasn't sure where exactly they would go this year; he himself wanted to go down to Boston to see his son, who was at school there, but his daughter was vigorously lobbying for somewhere warmer. There was an edge to his voice; he talked more rapidly than he usually did, and I responded the same way, as if we sensed that whatever it was that we had wanted to tell each other, or might want to tell each other during the winter months, we had better say it now. I was wondering if I would continue to wake early, before daybreak, after he was gone.

The sun broke the horizon line. I could see there a sliver of molten red. I thought how odd it was to hate the coming of the day, as if we were night creatures who disintegrated with the light. I stood up and went to the door, waiting for him. I always hated the moment when he left the cottage. I watched him rise from the table, put on his waders and his yellow slicker.

"Maybe I won't let you through the door," I said playfully, snaking my arms around him between the slicker and his sweater. "Maybe I'll just keep you here all day."

He buried his face in my hair. He put his arms around my nightgown, lifted the nightgown so he could feel my skin.

"I wish you would," he said.

***

The next morning—it was the Wednesday—Jack didn't come. I woke, as usual, just before daybreak and waited, but I didn't hear his footsteps on the stairs. I lay in bed, straining for the sound of his motor on the lane, but I heard nothing except the first cries of the gulls, the lapping of the waves against the shingle. I watched as daybreak came, then the dawn itself. When the sun broke above the horizon line, I knew that he would not come at all. It was the first time since the fog that he had failed to visit me, and I felt empty, as though the day itself had lost its color.

Caroline woke shortly after sunrise. She seemed, as the doctor had predicted, perfectly fine, but I continued the antibiotic as I had been told to do. I put her on the braided rug after I had fed her, and looked out my windows to the end of the point. The green-and-white lobster boat bobbed in the water as though mocking me. Eventually trucks came and parked by the fish house, and men got out, but Jack was not among them. I tried to think of all the reasons why he had not come. There had been a crisis at home. Perhaps Rebecca had caused a scene of some kind. Possibly Jack had told her after all. Or Jack had decided to make a clean break with me—that would be like him. Yes, that was it. When he'd said goodbye yesterday, he'd known it was for good, and that's why he'd held me in that way. He'd said goodbye, only I hadn't known it.

I tried to come to terms with this possibility, tried to believe it and accept it. But I couldn't. I walked around the rooms, empty-handed, while Caroline played on the floor. I couldn't sit still. Was he telling me I should go now? Leave this town and find another?

But I couldn't leave. I had no will to leave. And I couldn't go without first speaking to Jack. I had to know if he meant never to come again.

I dressed myself and then the baby. I wanted to drive into town and find his house and ask him why he hadn't come, but I knew I couldn't do that. Down by the fish house, I could hear men talking. I wanted to go down there, ask of Jack—the hell with Willis—but I knew that was an absurd idea too. Instead I bundled Caroline into the sling and took her out for a walk. I didn't think a walk would harm her, not if she was dressed warmly enough.

The air was dry and light and stinging, like chilled champagne. It hadn't been the weather that had prevented Jack from going out on his boat, I knew that. I walked fast down to the edge of the point and back again. If someone had seen me walking, he would have said that I looked angry. I glanced up at the cottage, but I didn't want to go inside it yet. I veered south, walked along the shore toward town. Because I was walking fast, I went farther than I ever had been before. The tide was peeling back, leaving a firm patch of sand. The low-tide smell drifted in on a breeze from time to time and then wafted away on the fine, dry air. I walked until my legs ached and my back was sore from the weight of Caroline in the sling. But it was what I had wanted, I realized—to tire myself out.

I walked back more slowly than I'd set out. I'd been gone almost two hours when Caroline began to cry. It was past the time when I should have fed her again, and I knew I had to get back to the cottage soon to do that. I picked up my pace.

I rounded a bend and saw the cottage on its promontory. Outside the cottage, on the gravel drive, there was a car I hadn't seen before, an old black Buick sedan. Julia Strout was standing on the steps to the cottage, looking out over the point.

She saw me then and waved. I waved back. I made my way up the slope.

"Thought you might have gone for a walk," she said. "The baby's OK?"

"She's hungry," I said. "I've got to nurse her. How are you?"

Julia said, Fine, thank you, and held the door for me; we both entered the cottage. I took Caroline out of the sling and shook off my coat. I sat on the couch in the living room and gestured for Julia to sit down too. She did so but did not take off her coat.

"I got a call from Jack Strout this morning," she said, looking at me carefully as she said this. I tried to keep my face composed, but almost immediately I could feel a sharp squeeze inside my chest. I took a deep breath of air. I wanted to open a window.

"He said that the baby had been quite sick," she said. "And that you'd asked him for help morning before last and he'd taken you into Machias, to the clinic."

I nodded.

"Baby's all right now?" she asked.

"Better," I said. "A lot better." I realized that I was sitting stiffly in my chair, that I was breathing shallowly. I also became aware of the fact that the milk was no longer flowing. Caroline had stopped nursing and was looking up at me. I tried to breathe evenly and deeply to relax, to let the milk flow again. Take it easy, I said to myself.

"Anyway," she said, "he wanted me to tell you that he had meant to come by today to see if the baby was OK and if you needed anything, but his wife, Rebecca, got sick in the night herself—a bad stomach virus, he said—and he couldn't leave her. And he thought, if I was coming out this way, I could look in on you myself."

"That was ... that was nice of him," I said feebly. "And of you," I added quickly. "You can tell him that Caroline is fine now. I'm fine. We're all fine."

Julia looked at me oddly. My voice sounded high and tight in the small room. I was trying to figure out how to get a message back to Jack through Julia, but I couldn't think clearly.

"Actually," she said, sitting back in her chair and unbuttoning her coat—it was warm in the cottage—"I was on my way out here, anyway. This may be nothing, and I don't want to alarm you, but I thought you ought to know. I saw Everett at the store early this morning—I go over every morning to get the milk and the paper—and he said there was a fellow from New York into the store last evening asking questions about a woman named Maureen English."

I may have blanched then, or perhaps the shock registered some other way on my face, for Julia said quickly, "Are you all right?"

"I'm having some trouble," I said, making a gesture that indicated the nursing.

"You're sure?"

"Yes," I said. "This man...?"

"Everett thought the fellow was some kind of private detective, although the man didn't say exactly," she continued. "Everett said he knew of no one named Maureen English, and then the fellow described the woman he was looking for and said she was traveling with a baby, and Everett said he didn't know of anyone like that, either."

I shut my eyes.

"The man left and hasn't come back," Julia said. "Everett thinks he's gone on to another town. He told him to try Machias, but the man said he'd already been there that afternoon. He said he was trying all the towns along this part of the coast. He'd had a tip the woman he was looking for was in the area."

I opened my eyes. I tried to breathe normally. There was no hope of any more milk now, and Caroline had begun to fuss.

"I have to make her a bottle," I said, and got up.

Julia followed me into the kitchen.

"I think you'll be OK," she said. "Everett thinks the man believed him. He thinks he's moved on."

I nodded. I wanted to believe her.

"Does Everett know if this man spoke to anyone else in town?" I asked.

Julia shook her head. "He doesn't know, but he doesn't think so. It's only logical that someone would try the store first. It's the only place that looks half alive in town."

Normally, I'd have smiled at that.

"Let me hold her while you fix the bottle," she said.

I gave Caroline to Julia. I warmed some milk on the stove. My shirt was sticking to my back, and I realized I'd been sweating.

"You should go to the police," Julia said. "I don't mean Everett. I mean the real police, in Machias. If you're that afraid."

I shook my head. "I can't do that," I said. "I'm better off if he doesn't know where I am at all. If I went to the police, they might have to notify my husband and tell him where I am. I don't know how this sort of thing works, but I can't take any chances."

I took the bottle from the stove and retrieved Caroline. We went back into the living room. Caroline resisted the bottle at first, but then settled down to it. Julia sat across from me, as before. She still had her coat on.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" I asked.

"No," she said. "I can't stay."

She said that, but she did not get up to leave. She watched me giving the bottle to Caroline. I thought that she might be lingering to make sure that I was all right before she left.

"Jack's been around?" she asked.

I kept my face focused on Caroline. The meaning in Julia's question was unmistakable. She hadn't said, "So my cousin was helpful, was he?" or, "So you've met Jack, then." She'd said,
Jack's been around?

I didn't know how to answer. Perhaps she was only fishing.

"Well, he helped me that one time."

She nodded slowly.

There was a long silence in the room.

"I'd be glad if Jack had some happiness," she said finally after a time.

It was, if she really didn't know anything, an extraordinary thing to say. But even as she said it, I could feel the ground begin to shift. I sensed that somehow we had entered new territory now. Where it was better not to lie. It was tempting territory. Or perhaps I only interpreted it as such, because
I
wanted not to lie, to tell someone the truth.

"I think he's had some happiness," I said cautiously, looking away from her and out the window.

She changed the subject then. "Your face looks better," she said. "A lot better."

I nodded and tried to smile. "Well, that's good at least," I said.

She stood up then.

"Now I've
got
to go," she said, all business. "I'm on my way into Machias. Can I get you anything in town? Anything for the baby?"

I shook my head. "No," I said. "We're fine." I stood up too. "Thanks for coming by. I mean it."

She put on her hat and gloves and walked toward the door, and I thought she would leave then, as briskly as she'd come in. Instead she paused, looked out at the cars parked by the fish house. I sensed that she was on the verge of saying one thing more, of saying the one thing she'd really come to say, but that her reserve, her code, inhibited her.

"I'll be by to check on you again in a day or two," she said. "Or Jack will."

"I love him," I said recklessly.

She turned. She looked stunned at first, but I knew that this was because I'd spoken, not because she didn't suspect the truth. Then she nodded slowly, as if confirming her own imaginings.