Sara saw it all as a painting. The pale figure on the shore glowed against the deep blue twilight, and the water gave off its own shimmering light. The woman in the water, also dressed in white, was a terrible, pitiable figure with her two drowned children beside her, their hair floating out around their heads like fuzzy halos; an innocent murderess.
I was the one they were afraid of, thought Sara.
She threw back her head and howled her anguish to the empty world.
NEED
After ballet, Corey liked to walk home through the cemetery. The grounds were large and well tended and offered the visitor a wealth of picturesque monuments and sentimental gravestone inscriptions, some of them dating back before the Civil War. There were columns, slabs, and spheres in abundance of the pinkish marble that was quarried locally, and among the mausoleums built to look like temples, chapels, and houses was one defiant pink pyramid.
The walk through the cemetery, like the ballet class that preceded it, was one of the few things Corey enjoyed, something she did because she wanted to and not because she was expected to or thought she should.
On this October afternoon, crunching through the dead leaves and breathing in the crisp, autumn-scented air, Corey felt pleasantly tired, and looked forward to reaching her apartment where she could have a cup of hot tea and some sandwiches before settling down to write her usual evening letter to her fiancé.
But although she looked forward to those simple things, there was also pleasure in being able to delay them. With no one waiting for her and no schedule to follow, there was no reason to hurry back. It was a beautiful day, and she knew she had at least an hour before it would begin to get dark. So she turned aside from the main path and wandered the sloping, uneven ground among stone angels and headstones until she came to her favourite spot, discovered on a previous walk.
This was a bench beneath a large old oak tree with a view of a cluster of elaborately carved tombstones all commemorating various members of the Symonds family, and a statue of a gentle-faced young woman holding a baby, with a second child clutching at her stone draperies, half turned as if looking longingly at the graves.
‘It’s as if she were saying, “Why did you abandon me, and leave us here alone?” ’ said a voice behind her.
Corey jumped up and turned to see a young man in a bright blue windbreaker. He had a pleasant, rather weak-looking face, and seemed about her own age.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’
‘I thought I was alone. I didn’t hear you walk up,’ she said, and realised she had pressed one hand against her heart; she let it drop, feeling embarrassed.
‘And in a cemetery . . . I don’t blame you for being frightened.’
‘I’m not,’ Corey said. ‘I was just startled, that’s all. I like cemeteries. I like this one, anyway. It’s peaceful. I often walk here.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I do, too. I spend a lot of time here. I’ve seen you, although I don’t suppose you ever noticed me. I’ve seen you, always by yourself, and I suppose I got to thinking that I knew you. That’s why I came up and spoke like I did. It was stupid of me, and rude – I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right, really, I understand,’ Corey said. ‘You don’t have to keep apologizing.’ He gave off such an aura of unhappiness and unease that she felt obliged to try to lessen it.
‘I can tell you like this spot,’ he said. ‘It’s one of my favourites. I love to sit on the bench and look at that woman with her children. She’s so beautiful and so sad, really a tragic subject. Her husband has left her – and it’s the ultimate desertion. He hasn’t gone to another lover, but to Death. So she knows she can never win him back. But she stares at his grave and dreams, and asks him why. You’d think that her beauty and her obvious need would make any man change his mind – but it’s too late, of course, for both of them.’
Corey felt uneasy now, her pleasant mood shattered. She had no desire to be standing in a cemetery, talking to an odd boy who had watched her without her being aware. But force of habit kept her polite.
‘I have to be getting back soon,’ she said. ‘I have things to do.’
‘You’re from the South, aren’t you?’
‘North Carolina.’
‘My parents live in Florida, so that’s supposed to be my home now. But actually, I was born here in town. My family goes way back. In fact, I’ll be buried right here in this cemetery when I die. There’s a family plot, with a space reserved for me. But you’re a long way from home. What made you come here?’
‘It’s a good school,’ she said, her voice resentful. ‘My parents thought I should have the opportunity to go to a first-rate school and see another part of the country. But I’m only here for a year. In May I’m going home. I’m getting married.’
‘You’re engaged.’
‘That’s right.’
‘He’s not here?’
‘He’s home, in North Carolina.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded quickly. ‘I thought you were . . . it’s the lonely who seek out the cemeteries. We have that in common.’
She wanted nothing in common with him. She wanted to get away, to escape to the dull confines of her furnished apartment and reread Philip’s old letters. Blandly cruel, she said, staring at the bright blue of his jacket, ‘In common? You mean you’re engaged to someone who isn’t here, too?’
‘Engaged? Oh no, I . . . I don’t have anyone. I don’t have anyone at all except my dead friends here.’
‘I’ve got to go,’ Corey said, glancing at a wrist on which there was no watch. Anything not to see the misery on his face. She walked away quickly, deliberately crunching through fallen leaves. If he spoke again, or called after her, she might not hear him above the noise she made.
When the letter came, it had been five days without a word. Corey was so excited that her hands shook, and she tore the envelope in getting it open.
It wasn’t very long. Just one page written in Philip’s precise hand. She read it through to his signature without understanding, and then read it again, her mouth going dry and her stomach beginning to hurt.
He was releasing her from their engagement, he said. Their parents were right – they were too young to make such a momentous decision. He did love her, but he felt they should both date other people and get to know their own minds better. He was sure she would agree with him, but they could talk this over at greater length when they saw each other at Thanksgiving.
Corey dropped the letter on the floor and walked across the small room to stare unseeing at the wall. Less than two months they had been apart. He hadn’t been able to last even two months.
She clenched her fists and pressed them against the sides of her head. Her mouth open wide, she breathed in ragged, tearing gulps, feeling as if she were drowning. She wept.
It was beginning to get dark, and still Corey remained slumped on the couch where she had spent most of the day since reading Philip’s letter. She had tried to call him, and had left a message with his roommate. She didn’t know what she would say if he returned her call, but she had to talk to someone, and she could think of no one else to call.
She had come to this distant, northern town, this first-rate university, under protest, in order to satisfy her parents. She saw her agreed-upon year here as a time of trial, something that must be undergone before she could be united with Philip, and so she had taken a certain grim pleasure in refusing to do anything that would make the time easier on herself. She hadn’t joined any organisations or tried out for plays, as she would have back home, and she had not made any friends. What was the point? She would be gone at the end of the year. Why should she pretend that this lonely interval had anything to do with her real life?