By rushing I was able to find a seat by the window, though I wasn’t facing in the direction of travel and grew nauseous every time we lurched to stop or start. I had a book with me; not one of Lev’s, just some popular novel set by coincidence on a train. A lonely girl who meets a mysterious young man and gets embroiled in his dangerous predicament, story and locomotive hurtling towards their final destination with shared volition. The tension was unbearable, but looking out the window made me sick, so I kept opening the book and slamming it shut, grumbling audibly each time I changed my mind. Ridiculous, and Unconscionable, and so on.
There were several middle-aged men seated near me, and one by one each of them tried to strike up a conversation, asking questions about my husband (Oh, no husband? they’d say, with feigned surprise) and then my work, questioning the origins of my accent, which I’d worked so hard to overcome. One fellow—I will not call him a gentleman—said, “Where are you headed? You’ll probably want someone to show you around town.” And it was to his grave disappointment that he learned we were not traveling to the same place, and that I would be meeting a companion. When his stop arrived he stood up with an expression of such abject sorrow I’d have felt bad for him, if only he didn’t smell so strongly of onions. The rest of the men I was able to silence by distributing my sandwiches.
I reminded myself that, whatever my trials, Lev was surely enduring worse. He had such a sad grey faith in the manuscript, a belief that touching it would shade something in, make apparent the whole shape of his life. Was he now hunkering down in a field, taking cover under a tarp? Was he fishing in a local river, trying to roast his shabby meal in a tin can? White meat flaking, hot and sweet and smoked. I couldn’t think of food; it made me burp. And then even my newfound friends looked at me askance, and I had to cover my mouth with a hand. A new Leo Orlov book, I reminded myself. You’ll be the first to see it. Almost the very first. The train seats were green velveteen, but not as pretty as that sounds.
When I stepped down onto solid ground, it was into a wretched and drowsy world. The sea air not so cool as I’d hoped, and the sun getting ready to set. Everything was tinged with yellow and pink, which I’m sure made me look ill. Vera waved from next to a taxicab, infuriatingly refreshed. I thought she may even have changed her outfit, but I was too exhausted to be sure.
“Come on, now, we have to hurry or we’ll never make the post office. I think they’re holding it open for us, because business hours ended some time ago. And I for one,” she said, straightening her hair, “don’t want to sleep on the porch.” She could’ve done it, though, without losing an ounce of grace; a camp-out girl in a canvas hammock. With the kerchief on my head and sallow rings beneath my eyes, I looked like a vagabond.
“Alright,” I said, and heaved my single bag into the trunk along with her full coterie of matched luggage. My only comfort was that I knew more than she did; I had a plan that would surely catch her by surprise and neuter any other minor humiliations she had in store for me. Over the course of the cab ride, I refused to answer her questions with anything other than sighs and grunts, though if she found this less than gracious, she made no indication. We argued with the security man at the post office until the postmaster emerged and brought us in, handing out keys like they were candy and giving us an overview of the town. Who was nice, who was a beast: the basic gossip. Our taxi waited outside, idling and ticking up the cost, but we were afraid that if we let him go we wouldn’t get another. We were right. The streets were black, abandoned. When we finally pushed our way into the cottage I heard a scrabbling that may have been either cockroaches or mice, though Vera insisted it was the trees outside, or the ocean in the distance.
Why hold on to all this, you might ask me? I don’t know where else to keep it. I don’t know how to put it down.
Morning tea. For me, milk, for her, sugar. No pills yet. We are still getting the measure of one another. Her black hair has a brown sheen to it if you look in the right light, and this makes her vulnerable to me in a way that nothing else has yet done. I wear an old robe to the table and she doesn’t comment on it. We both eat toast just a tiny bit burnt. Not from preference, it’s just the way the toaster is. Perhaps tomorrow, I remark, we should use forks and roast them under the broiler.
Everything has a present-tense quality when I think of it in the cabin, the cottage. Even if it was long ago. Your eyes don’t age that fast. Or do they? I’ll have to banish this shaky feeling that the past is still happening, that I could stop it if I wanted.
We decided early on that first morning to walk along the beach as far as we could go, after discussing possible routes over breakfast. It wasn’t so grim in the daytime: I could see flowers growing in the front yard, and how all the streets had black concrete and fresh lines of paint. There was a café at the end of a jetty, some distance from the rest of town and only comfortably achievable in muck boots and by judging the tide right. It appealed to us right away. I can’t imagine how they made their money, but this became our goaclass="underline" cocoa overlooking the water, with no one else around. Before we left, Vera said, “Wait here a moment,” and came back downstairs in rolled-up work pants, god knows where she got them from. Her body always seemed to be adapting based upon some hidden agenda, and I admired it. The way she existed for her own private reasons instead of existing to be seen, to be known. Though it also made me crazy. I would have liked to press her to me, whole body to whole body, whole soul, just so I’d know what I was dealing with.
Bright green grass lined the dunes and baked into yellow, receded back towards the distant inland. We had to walk through it to get to the shoreline, and already sand was starting to slip inside my shoes. Canvas sneakers, because I didn’t have boots, and anyway it was so god-awful hot. Vera had decided to go barefoot, though I warned her more than once that she’d cut her foot on a quahog shell.
“A what?” she mocked.
“A quahog. Kind of clam.”
“A what?” When I learned the word from Margaret years earlier, I’d laughed too, imagining a wee piggy burrowing beneath the sea. Now I liked it because it was funny, which wasn’t a reason I liked many things. Vera just smirked. “I’ll watch my step.”
“If you say so.”
We were bright. The sun getting high, the water cut and riveted by waves. Her pants sat loose on her little backside, and her shirt was buttoned up too high to look winning, though it did protect her chest from getting burned. We picked our way over rocks and around tide pools, cooling our heels in the salt. We passed several houses with terrible fences, picket posts all leaning out at different angles, bidden by weather or wind, strung together with bits of razor wire. The houses themselves were charming and shingled, and eventually stopped showing up.
At noon or thereabouts, we sat to rest on a piece of parched driftwood high up the tide line. We could see the café about a half mile away, and Vera inspected the soles of her feet, seeming pleased by the cuts she found there, which she claimed didn’t hurt a bit. I knew I was supposed to be getting close to her, earning her trust, but every time I tried I felt like I was moving backwards.
“Doesn’t it make you feel small?” I asked, indicating the ocean with my chin. “I can hardly stand it.” It was less the sunny waves that made me think so, and more the memory of a gunmetal sea that my orphan ship had glided through. How I’d once spotted a big wall of water in the distance, approaching us with overwhelming speed. It would’ve eaten the boat and left no trace, but instead it dropped back into the horizon without getting near enough to cause a ripple. I’d been alone on deck at the time. None of the other orphans believed me when I tried to explain.