It surprised me to feel Evan's hand on my cheek, his other hand, the hand not holding mine. He had reached around as if we were lovers and pressed his palm to the side of my face, holding me tighter against his shoulder, because he could tell I was uncommonly afraid and suspected it was of something beyond the obvious. "Sophy, what is it? Is everything all right?"
I shook my head against his collarbone and explained what I could.
Once on the ground, he insisted I spend the night at his house; he would call his wife from the airport to let her know. "I don't think we have house guests until Saturday," he said, "but if I'm mistaken, the couch is extremely comfortable. Certainly better than the Harborside Motel." When the line was busy at the pay phone in the one-room terminal, Evan shrugged and said, "Let's find a cab and take our chances." Remembering these banalities a day or two later, I could see hints of what I came to learn, but that night I was not looking hard, except to notice Evan's aging. When we were young, he had a male model's raging good looks; he could have been a Kennedy Now he had the black bags under his eyes and the modified middle-age spread of all those important men on TV news shows, but he still had a young man's energy, a full head of auburn hair barely flecked with gray, clear blue eyes, full lips I remembered kissing.
He took my bag and drew an arm around my shoulder with avuncular concern. I was grateful for his tenderness on the plane, the offer of a place to stay on the remote West End of the island, the view I knew I would wake up to if I slept on their couch, if I managed to sleep at alclass="underline" the sliding glass doors overlooking the redwood deck and the ponds beyond it and the ridge of sand dunes beyond them, and the roar of the ocean from over the ridge.
But what I remember most vividly now, looking back on my arrival, stepping out of the terminal, was the shock of the island air against my skin, in my nostrils; how soft it was after the molten lava of the city, as soft as dusting powder, the coat of a puppy. The sky was sapphire blue and strewn with stars, a shower of gold dust. Across the sidewalk, to the curb and the waiting taxi, I felt myself choke at the memory of my first visit here, the summer I met Will, when I was convinced that no harm could ever come to anyone on this island, that the pristine beauty of the place was a gorgeous vaccine against death. But I had left Swansea in another season, in mid-March, when it seemed to me a metaphor for my marriage: cold, windswept, uninhabitable.
"We're going to the West End," Evan told the cab driver, "to the end of Heron Road."
It would be a long ride, fifteen miles of winding country roads, a sudden change in the landscape, opening up to meadows and ponds, views of the ocean, the tip of the island, Evan's secluded compound. I braced myself for the ride, because I knew it would be beautiful, because I had left Will here, because I still had not told his daughters that he was dead, because it had been so much a part of Will's and my life together, even though we lived on the East End, ten miles in the other direction. A mile down the airport road was a tiny village, Twin Oaks, with a library, a bed-and-breakfast, a bakery, a one-room schoolhouse, a church surrounded by a white picket fence, and across the street from it, on the lawn of the bed-and-breakfast, the only weeping willow on the island, which makes frequent appearances in photo books about Swansea. Every Saturday morning, the driveway of the school became a farmers' market, where I used to buy tomatoes, corn, bunches of cilantro, potatoes the size of my little toe. For long stretches, our taxi was. the only car on the road. For long stretches, I remembered how thoroughly I had forgotten that this was once my life. I used to cook dinners, run a reading series at the public library, write the occasional article for the island newspaper, "Coping with Summer Visitors," "A City Girl Moves to the Country," "Why I Love My Solitude," but I did not love it nearly so well as I imagined I would.
"I haven't been back since the day I left in March," I said to Evan.
"Why didn't you call me?"
"When?"
"Anytime. To let me know you'd left Will. You'd left the island."
"You're always busy. I'm always reading about you being on TV. 'Evan Lambert, talking to Ted Koppel last night on "Nightline," and the night before that, to Dan Rather, and the night before that to Larry King-' Don't wince, Evan. You love the controversy that swirls around you. You're almost as happy on TV as you are-" I noticed the cab driver, an older man with curly white hair as thick as Harpo Marx's, swerve his eyes to the rearview mirror to get a gander at this man so much in the news, but he got me instead.
"I'm wincing," Evan said, "because I don't understand why you read about me being on TV."
"You'll laugh."
"I could use a laugh."
"When I was packing the car to leave the island, I packed the VCR and forgot the TV, and when I did remember it, there was no room left. I actually keep the VCR plugged in to remind me to buy another TV, but so far I-"
"The settlement was so bad you cant afford it?"
"There is no settlement."
"What does that mean?"
"If you walk away with nothing, there's no settlement."
"I hope you didn't pay someone a lot of money for that legal advice."
"This is not what I want to be thinking about at the moment."
"Goddammit, you should have called me."
"So you could represent me? I can't afford you, Evan. And I didn't kill anyone."
"That's hardly what I-"
"Unless I did," I whispered. I told him what Diane thought, although I didn't mention Daniel and me, or that Will had seen us together. Evan was quiet, but not for too long. "People get divorced all the time. Most of them don't kill themselves. And you don't know if he did."
"He was bereft," I said quietly.
"You know what?" He was speaking softly, too.
"What?"
"So was I, when you left me."
"Jesus, Evan, don't flatter me."
I was.
"You noticed that I was gone, but I left because you were so distracted by your own ambition, you barely knew I was there."
Neither of us said anything, lost in the whorls of our history. Or so I imagined, until Evan spoke again. "I find it hard to believe your lawyer let you leave the marriage with nothing."
"Before I left the island Will said to me, 'If you want out, you leave with what you came with. Otherwise you can sue me, and I promise I will be a real S.O.B.'"
"That doesn't sound like Will."
"It wasn't, usually."
"That's why the law is there, Sophy, so that a vindictive husband can't-"
"I know why it's there. And I know I didn't want to drag my life and his through the mud."
"Sophy, there's a house on Swansea. That alone… How much is it worth?"
Again I noticed the cabbie's gaze on me in the rearview mirror. This was not New York or Boston, where there are a few more degrees of separation between lives; there was a good chance this guy knew people who knew Will or me.
"I'm not going to talk about money tonight."
"Are you legally separated?"
"Or about legal matters."