A cab pulled up, and Daniel reached out to open the door for me, but I wasn't ready to go. I wanted what I always wanted from him: a more tender parting. "One other thing, if I may," he said.
"Yes?"
"Tomorrow morning, you must get in touch with your divorce lawyer, get a copy of your husband's will, and write his obituary. Get it to the island paper, and if you'd like me to, I'll fax it to a friend at the Times. Ring me later, would you, and let me know you made it?"
That was evidence of shock too, leaving New York that way, with no thought of plane or hotel reservations, of arriving on the island when everyone I knew there would be asleep. Taking off without calling Will's daughters or Ben Gibbs, who'd found Will, or Annabelle, or the medical examiner, who must have been summoned to the house to sign a piece of paper that said Will was dead.
In the commuter terminal was a bank of telephones, and after I bought my ticket, I began frantically making calls. I called my mother, whose line was busy. I called Annabelle, whose phone rang and rang, which meant she was on-line. I called the last number I had for my stepdaughter Ginny, and got a phone company message that the number had been disconnected. I knew she worked at a TV station in Maine, but I couldn't remember its call letters. I phoned Western Union, which said they did not have telegram service in the tiny California town closest to the cabin on the mountain where Ginny's sister, Susanna, lived, with no telephone and her new baby, Rose, whom Will had never gone to see.
Henderson must already have left for Switzerland, but I was so agitated by then that I called him anyway and started talking to his machine. "I'll bet you can't tell from my voice that I'm a widow. Or can you? I hadn't really thought of it that way, the W word, until this minute. I'm at La Guardia, and you're probably at Kennedy or in the air. I'm going to Swansea. I'm going to Boston on a big plane and then to the island on a little plane. You know how terrified I am of those little planes, eight-seaters with no co-pilots. Did I say already that Will is dead? The police told me it looked as if he died in his sleep, but his friend Diane thinks he killed himself. The weird thing is that I'm fine. I mean, I can walk and talk and sign my name and remember my calling-card number. Tonight I'll probably stay in the awful motel by the harbor where Will used to keep his boat. I'm sure they'll have a room; it's not the height of the season. I know you're going to be fasting, but I hope you won't be too weak to call me. I'll leave a number on your machine when I know where I'm staying. Hug, hug, kiss, kiss."
I kept talking to myself, although I wasn't sure my lips were moving. I went through the security gate, and my house keys set off the alarm. I walked to the end of Gate C in a trance and said to myself, "I'm fine, I'm fine."
But I could not sit still, could not sit down, so I circled the area, up and down the rows of chairs, past the newsstand, the bar, the clusters of commuters with their cell phones and laptops and summery seersucker jackets's lung over a shoulder, the men and women both. I am not really a widow. A glance toward the window, the parking lot of planes, the giant birds with their logos, their mechanics, tiny trucks like golf carts hovering around their talons.
Call me the widow that almost was; that's what I should have said to Henderson. Then speak to me as if from a pulpit, as if I were a supplicant, a congregant, a believer. And let this grief pass over me, as the angel of death passed over the houses of the Jews and their firstborn sons one night in Egypt. But I have no blood of a lamb to sprinkle on my doorpost to let the angel know to spare me. Only this sudden wetness trickling down the inside of my thigh, and the faint bleachy scent of it. Excuse me, I would like to make an announcement here at Gate C-3, with nonstop service to Boston's Logan Airport, and lots of luck getting to Swansea at this ridiculous hour, ten days before the Fourth of July. Will you turn off your cell phones and laptops and Palm Pilots long enough to listen? I want it stamped on my boarding pass, too. That I am not really a widow. That I forgot in my shock to bathe, so you can smell it on me, what I was doing when the police rang. That's a Britishism, a Danielism. Ring me later. Ring me as soon as you get there. And call me the widow manqué, the semi, demi, quasi, ersatz, crypto, mini-widow, and tell me, if you have any idea, what it is I am supposed to do now.
The Island
"Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all."
– Kenneth Grahame,
The Wind in the Willows
4. The Wild Wood
THE LAST PERSON to board the Island Air's eight-seat Cessna on the ten P.M. to Swansea squeezed in beside me in the back row, a large man in a short-sleeved knit shirt whose bare forearm brushed against mine as he belted himself in. It was dark and humid on the tarmac, even darker and more humid inside the cramped, shrunken cabin, but Evan Lambert and I said each other's names simultaneously. "Small world," he said.
"Small plane."
So small, it was like being in an elevator, and I didn't know how to tell Evan why I was here without announcing it to all assembled. So small, there was no easy way I could acknowledge his latest high-profile client, the German nanny baby-killer, without causing a collective stir in this almost airborne soup can. "I've been following your moves," I said softly.
"Is that so?"
"You're always on my radar."
"Same here, kiddo." We had been lovers twenty years before and friends for the last nineteen, but could go long periods without speaking. He didn't even know Will and I had separated, that I no longer lived on the island. Evan and his family were summer people; for the last four years, Will and I had been year-rounders. "You coming back from somewhere exciting?"
"New York," I said. The pilot flipped on the ignition, and the propellers flared. It was cozy and small scale, as if we were in the backseat of a car and the driver had just switched on the windshield wipers. "Are you down for a long weekend?"
"Yeah. Mavis and the kids went down last week for the season. I had a meeting late today that went on longer than I expected. I missed my reservation on the six o'clock flight. You're obviously the reason why."
"Hold my hand," I said. "I hate these take-offs and landings. And everything in between." Against the flimsy armrest between us, he turned over his forearm and opened his palm. I covered it with mine and held on tight, too tight, but he would understand soon enough. What gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we all have. Was this something Evan used to quote to me in that distant summer we traveled together?
"How's Will? I think the last time we saw you guys he took the boys and me sailing. The outboard conked out, and we had to paddle into the harbor. The ferry almost ran us down. Were you there, or was it Mavis?"
The twin engines were noisy, cranking harder the faster we taxied down the runway. I got a whiff of diesel fuel and said a prayer and leaned my head against Evan's shoulder, which I had not done in twenty years, but I needed my mouth close to his ear so that I could speak into it softly, which I also had not done in twenty years. He smelled faintly of Irish Spring, and for an instant that rumbling speck of a plane about to lift off and take us on the thirty-minute trip down the peninsula and across the sound might have been the mobbed over-night ferry we took from Athens to the coast of Turkey the summer we were twenty-five, joking about sailing to Byzantium, no country for old men, the young in one another's arms, Evans young arms smelling of Irish Spring; he carried around a supply of it in his knapsack. I used to kid him that if we ever got separated I could get a bloodhound to go after that smell, and I wondered now if he could identify the familiar scents rising from my skin. We were off the ground, shot into the air as if from a cannon, bumping and rattling in this tin box over the suburbs south of Boston. His hand must have hurt, I was squeezing it so hard. I remembered it was Camus who said somewhere that fear gives value to travel, but I wasn't sure he meant a short hop over the water to the place where you used to live. That wasn't travel; that was just going home.