He is in the water. Tom scattered him there. She told him to, to go alone in the sloop to the center of the thoroughfare and fling his father forth, to live in the atoms of the sea. To settle to the floor of the harbor and billow up when the lobsters pass, when the traps go up and come down. To twist against the rudders of the Johnnies during their races as they swing around the buoy, to shake with the ringing of the channel marker, to wash over the backs of seals and the pebbles of their own boathouse beach. He will have the best view of the jammers now, no need for the binoculars. And when the boats go too fast he can whip himself up into a storm or a fog, to slow the world to puttering motors and dropped sails, to the long bleats of foghorns, like birdcalls, I am here, you are there.
She made Tom do it. He didn’t want to. She knew her boy hated his father. Her stomach turns when she thinks of that day, watching the All-American swim to shore, rowing back to the float, climbing out of that dinghy and up the path. Her throat closes when she remembers her husband—her ocean, her heart—say to her back, “I don’t feel loved.” She had heard him, but did nothing. She came up the steps, the wet footprints of the All-American still dark on the dry wood. And there was her Tom crumpled and small in the peacock chair. Her husband had stopped on the path, not yet in view of the porch, stunned by his own realization that maybe she didn’t love him and so there was nothing to feel. She had put a finger to her lips, and took her son, silent, by the wrist, rough and fast around the corner to the south porch. They stood under a stone arch next to a broken lattice gate. She held him by both shoulders and looked up into his eyes. At seventeen he had grown three inches taller than she. He couldn’t look at her; he flailed like a tree in a storm.
“Be still,” she commanded. He went limp. “Look at me.”
From his hanging head he looked through his eyebrows at his mother. She looked beautiful, her hair a thicket, her cheeks sunburned, her eyes bright.
“Your father.”
He groaned. She would not let him go.
“He is the greatest man. Whatever he decides, whoever he turns out to be, his greatness is not diminished. Your good qualities are his; you hate him, you hate yourself. And whatever this is, I am just as responsible. I have made a hole in your father’s life. He has responded badly, but who he is with is not the issue. Look at me. Not the issue.”
And then she turned him loose like a dog desperate to be outside. He stepped off the porch into the meadow and huffed off toward the blueberries, his long legs preceding him.
And so Tom hated his father. Hated him for her. She knew her oldest had her best interests at heart. But as the baby grew inside her all she wanted was her husband; she no longer cared about the things he did and didn’t do. She saw only how alone he must have been before their split, even in the house with her. How she had left him. She kept words and tenderness from him. She left him in empty rooms to read alone. She shunned his company, his heart. So he found someone who would stay. In the moment, the difference between the young man and his wife was cosmic. But no one better than the other. No, the truth was the young man was better then. Well, kinder. And she, she was lucky. She was not better for him, not for skin or flesh or satisfaction of genetic urges; he simply loved her more. He loved the All-American. She accepted that. But he told her once that the All-American was lightning, ephemeral and brilliantly blinding, and she was the sky, expansive and sheltering, without which there is nothing at all.
Tom couldn’t understand this, the covenant that bound them. He saw only what pushed them apart, and then only the most literal aspects. Her husband had upturned a stone that lay upon his heart, and he would not be ashamed of what was beneath it. A son and a father share a bond that Tom saw broken, and he couldn’t understand how a repair was possible, so he chose to believe it was a lie. Tom could not fathom that his father liked men. Let alone the fact that he could like his wife even more.
So she handed him the ashes and said, “Make your peace. There is no second chance.” The rest of them watched from the top step of the porch. Tom put up the sails, but they hung slack on the windless sky. And so he motored out to the spot, the deep channel that ran the length of the thoroughfare. He gave them a wave, an arm stretched high and swung in arcs from one shoulder to the other. They waved back. That’s the spot; go ahead.
They didn’t speak. The sparrow called for Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody. They could see Tom on the deck of the boat, still as a perched bird. They must be speaking now. To forgive, divine, little one. And then an arc of gray mist swept up over him as both arms threw something into the sky. Gwen cheered, jumped to her feet, standing on the bottom step, and whooped and whistled with both fingers between her teeth. Libby and Danny sat on either side of their mother, hip to hip. They leaned in close, her bairns, now grown themselves. But still her children, still needing her. She squeezed their shoulders, and they leaned into her.
“A good send-off,” she told them. “We done good.”
Now, she is alone in the house, and the warmth of summer faded just a week after the children left. For hours every day she has been staring at the water. She heats up canned soup on the stove. Boils one lobster in the small stockpot for Sunday dinner. She melts butter. She paints the window frame on the south porch. She sits in the garden and pulls up marigolds. He hated them. She does all the little things he wanted to get to but never could.
Today she has to wear a hat and scarf while she drinks hot tea on the porch. Remy has told her that she must leave tomorrow. “The pipes,” he warns. The float will be pulled out once she goes on the early ferry. She is not ready yet. She taps her wedding ring against the mug.
She thinks of selling. Once she leaves, coming back will feel like looking at a photograph, a hollow substitution for a memory that will blot out the real thing over time. She takes a few steps toward the door. Stands in the spot where he died. She wonders if his spirit could’ve been absorbed by the pine planks. Untreated, after all; that was his choice. Maybe he had planned it from the start. For them to turn gray, to show their age, to soak him in, in his final moments. She laughs and scrubs the decking with her rubber sole. It grates and splinters.
She moves to the steps and sits down where she watched her oldest pour her husband into the sea. She thinks of the All-American running up the path in front of her, taking these very steps two at a time. She wonders where he left his keys. She takes a slurping sip of her tea, wishes for ice cubes to cool it.
The tea’s steam warms her cold nose. Soon she will have to start pulling cushions off chairs, and alone and tired she will have to drag the porch furniture into the house.
TWENTY-FOUR
TOM
July 11
They stood on the porch together, Tom and Libby, discussing the state of the wind. Tom just needed to get the mail in town, but Libby always had to discuss things, she couldn’t just come along for the ride.
“Never seen this many days of calm,” he said, sure that she would disagree with him. She couldn’t let him be right about anything up here.
“There’s often a lull in late July. Guess it’s just a bit early,” Libby said, “though there’s a bit of something out there.”