“I suppose so.”
“And we had a row, you know, not too long before he died. The last time we met, a god-awful almighty row. I think you should know that, before you hear it from someone else. It’s been a weight on my mind ever since. And he stormed back to Maitland, to the plantation, and that was the last I saw of him. Until I went to identify his body. What there was of it.”
My lips are numb from the ice. I set the glass on the round marble table next to the armchair, and as the two connect in a soft clink, something else occurs to me. “What ring?”
“Ring?”
“How you identified him. He had a ring, you said.”
Samuel turns. “Yes. It was your wedding ring. The one you gave back. He kept it on him. I’m not sure how, in a pocket or something. The fire got to it. But I could still make out the inscription. Your initials, and his.” He reaches into his pocket. “Here it is, if you want a look.”
I stare at his grim expression. At his outstretched hand. The sunlight catches a glint from somewhere within that dense landscape of palm and mangrove, and I think, It can’t be my ring; it’s too small. But of course it is. Dull and bent, no longer a ring but a piece of burnt scrap. It might be anyone’s old ring, but Samuel says it’s mine, Samuel says it’s the ring that Simon placed on my finger three years ago amid a litany of Christian vows, and unlike my late husband, and for all his faults, Samuel is a straightforward man who speaks only truth.
I realize I have stopped moving, stopped breathing, and before this paralysis becomes permanent I spring from the armchair and make for the opposite end of the room, where a broad, high window looks not eastward toward Europe but north, in the direction of New York City. I place my hands on the windowsill and breathe in large, shallow gasps, staring upriver at the ships coursing the tranquil blue water.
Behind me, Samuel swears and apologizes. I hear footsteps, and the click of wood, and the clink of glass, and a moment later, just as I’ve recovered the ordinary rhythms of respiration, my lemonade glass reappears at my elbow. I snatch it away and Samuel says, Careful!
But it’s too late. I’ve already gulped down the first few ounces, and my throat bursts into flame. The cavities of my head fill with smoke.
“My God! What did you put in it?”
“Gin.”
Another spasm. I set down the glass on the ledge. “Isn’t that against the law?”
“Not to drink. Only to buy.”
“You had to have bought it somewhere.”
Samuel shrugged. “The liquor cabinet was already full when I arrived. What’s a fellow to do but drink?”
I lift the glass again, and this time I sip more carefully, and the gin has its proper effect. Tamed by lemonade, in fact, it’s what you might call tranquilizing. My pulse settles, my nerves simmer down. The chasm between my ribs fills with something or other. The warmth on my shoulder, I realize, belongs to Samuel’s hand. I shrug it off and turn to face him, and that’s my second mistake, greater even than the reckless gulping of Samuel’s particular recipe for refreshment.
Maybe it’s his grim, unhappy expression. Maybe it’s the color of his eyes. His smell, or the gin, or the memory of my wedding night, or God knows. Maybe it’s the effect of a sleepless Pullman sleeper, clackety-clack all the way from New York. My eyes, which have remained dry for the past three years, dry and dignified throughout every last thing, start to liquefy at last. I bend my face to the side, but not soon enough.
“Stupid girl,” he says, “crying for him.”
But his voice isn’t without sympathy, and his chest—broad, covered with characteristic plainness in a white shirt and a light gray jacket, unbuttoned—possesses a strange power of gravity, like the earth itself. I find myself leaning toward him, or rather toppling, like a stone tower whose foundation has just turned to sand. An inch or two away from his collar, I catch myself, startling, but not before his right hand discovers the blade of my shoulder, and this gentle, masculine pressure finishes me. My forehead connects with the side of his neck, at the slope where it meets his clavicle, and my fingers rise to hang from the ridge of his shoulders. He goes on cradling my back with his one palm—the other hand, I believe, remains at his side—and says nothing, not even the traditional Hush, now or There, there. Thank God. I don’t think I could have survived any words. His skin and his collar turn wet, though I’m not really sobbing. Not crying as you ordinarily imagine the act of sorrow. Just a small heave every so often, and the streaming from my eyes, which continues for some time. I don’t know how long. I’ve lost the sense of passing minutes, here in the damp, warm hollow of my brother-in-law’s neck.
I wake unsteadily, discombobulated by the heat and the sunlight slanting through the window glass between a pair of pale, billowy curtains. By the unfamiliarity of the bed in which I lie. A white sheet covers me, and beneath that I’m wearing only a petticoat. A clock chimes from somewhere in the room, but by the time I remember to count the strokes, it’s too late. Several, at any rate. A soft knock sounds on the door, and I realize that’s the sound that roused me in the first place.
I straighten myself. Lift the sheet to my neck, and that’s when I remember Samuel, and our embrace, and going to bed for a nap. The rest is blurry. I glance fearfully to the side, and I’m relieved to discover I’m alone.
“Who is it?” I call.
“It’s me. It’s Clara.” A tiny pause. “Simon’s sister.”
There’s something about sisters, isn’t there? At the sound of Clara’s voice, I find myself struck by a gust of yearning for my Sophie, as fierce and destructive as one of those tropical hurricanes that are said to strike these shores from time to time. Sophie, all grown up now, whom I have left once more to bear the burden of our past on her own slim shoulders while I pursue some chimera of my own making, some delusion of salvation in a foreign land.
Clara. Another surprise. But why not? Of course she would accompany her brother Samuel to Florida, since she didn’t have any other family of her own. Parents dead, and all the marriageable men killed in France. That’s what you did, if you were a good maiden sister: help your brother carry his burden. I should have been expecting her, really.
“Come in,” I say.
The door cracks open. “Someone wants to see you,” says a woman’s sweet voice, and Evelyn races through the crack and bounds onto the bed.
“Mama! Mama! Aunt Clarrie cake!”
“Oh, my! Did Aunt Clara give you cake, sweetheart?”