"Who is it? Who could it be?" There wasn't a soul who knew I was here.
"I didn't ask."
It was one of my twin stepdaughters, who began crying the instant she said, "It's me, Ginny." When she was calmer, she said, "How could his heart have given out? He was in such good shape. He sailed, he didn't smoke, he-"
"Where are you?"
"In Maine, where I always am."
"Who told you all of this?"
"Remember my friend Melanie? She called from the island. She thought she was making a condolence call. She said, 'I'm so sorry, I just heard.' I thought she meant your divorce, so I said, 'Well, it's sad but it's not the end of the world.' She said, 'Ginny, I know you had issues with your father, but this is a little cold for my taste.' 'My father? What are you talking about?' Then she told me." Ginny cried some more, and I was as comforting as I could be in this medium, at this distance, given that I was still trying to determine how she had found out where I was. It had to have been the cab driver, who must have recognized Evan and known someone who knows Ginny's friend. But we had been talking in the cab about the possibility of Will's having killed himself. How had Ginny come to the conclusion that he had suffered a heart attack-unless the cab driver passed that on, wanting, perhaps, to soften the blow?
Ginny said she would track down her sister in northern California, and we agreed to talk tomorrow about what to do next. Before I hung up, I said, "I'm sorry I haven't called you since your dad and I split up. I wanted to. I thought about you, but it was awkward."
"I understand."
Evan and Mavis were at the dining room table when I returned to the big room; it looked as if I'd interrupted them. Evan leaped up, and Flossie followed him to the bar, her claws clacking like castanets across the wood floor. She was an enormous, mostly black, Newfoundland, except for the dramatic white rings around her deep brown eyes and four white paws. She stood glued to Evan's side and nuzzled the bottle of Tanqueray at the edge of the liquor cabinet. "You know you can't mix, Flossie," he said. '"Never mix, never worry.' Isn't that a line from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Sophy, can I get you anything?"
"I'm fine."
"Darling, a brandy?"
"I'm happy with my wine," Mavis said, "and I just took a Klonopin. Don't want to overdo it. Do you want something to help you sleep tonight, Sophy? I've got a stash."
"Of?"
"Mood stabilizers, tranquilizers, antidepressants, the usual."
"It's part of Mavis's cultural studies program. The culture makes us mad and the culture then allows us to regulate and reinvent our madness. Isn't that the way it works, darling? R. D. Laing plus Timothy Leary? Or are they passé?" An old-fashioned seltzer spritzer, the glass cylinder a lovely aquamarine, appeared in Evan's hands, and he squirted a noisy shot into his glass of Scotch. Flossie, sitting at his feet, barked a staccato, seal-like yelp. Evan squirted another shot. Flossie barked again.
"Evan, you'll wake the boys."
"Sorry, Flossie, your mother says no nightcap tonight. But maybe she'll give you a Klonopin. Which goes very well with California Merlot." Squirt, squirt. Bark, bark. "Because you're such a good dog." Yelp, yelp.
I looked from Evan, smiling down at the dog, to Mavis and saw her eyes close and her mouth tighten in a gesture of squelched anger that I could tell went very deep. The dog barked, unprovoked, a few more times. Evan squirted seltzer a few more times. I reached for a pear from the fruit bowl in the center of the table and felt stupidly sorry for myself, piteously sorry, because all I wanted was for them to sit down and let me talk about Will and Ginny and the cab driver reporting everything he'd heard, but there were stronger currents at work in this water. Evan's allusion to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was turning out to be apt. The soothing, selfless company I craved had evaporated-if it had ever existed.
"Sophy." I looked up to see Mavis gazing at me with a glimmer of the care I needed. "What a nightmare for you. You must be devastated."
"I'm not sure what I am."
"It's shock. Thank God for it. And for Klonopin. Are you sure you don't want half a milligram? I don't suppose you know yet about the funeral. Did you talk to your stepdaughter about it?"
"No, but Will told me last summer he wanted to be cremated. We had one of those conversations that feels unnecessarily morbid, but turns out not to be after all."
"Speaking of people dying," Mavis said, "did you ever finish that novel about Nadia Boulanger's sister?"
"As a matter of fact, I was working on it today. But it's not going too well." I remembered that I hadn't called Daniel, and now it was too late.
"A toast to Will," Evan said and held up his glass. "To our memories of Will, Sophy's memories of Will. He was a good man."
Our glasses clinked. Mavis said, "He was indeed," and her voice cracked. A quick torrent of tears slid down my face, though I didn't sob or convulse; only this water over my cheeks and chin like a sudden summer shower. I brushed it away and saw Evan and Mavis with their eyes on me in exactly the kindly way I needed. Mavis reached over and covered my hand with hers. I was sure that what I was identifying as pain in their eyes was aching empathy with me.
It was later that I learned both of them had received devastating news in the past few hours, reiterated in the phone calls they had been taking since my arrival. My itinerant pain, I would soon discover, was only one cause of the stricken looks on their elegant, affluent faces.
But all I knew at that moment was that I needed to talk and felt the need fiercely, like a great hunger, like lust. I told them the story of the day I met Will when I was hitchhiking on Honeysuckle Road. They told gracious stories about Will too, and I knew what good hosts they were, despite what happened later, because the truth was that they were both as lost in their own secret suffering-secret not only from me but, for the time being, from each other-as I was lost in mine.
I stayed up until four in the morning, writing Will's obituary on a computer in Evan's study. When I woke up, I faxed it to the island newspaper and to Daniel's office, with Evans phone number and a brief note- Found an old friend en route to island. With him until further notice -which I wanted to be as ambiguous as possible.
5. Island Marxism
I felt the road curve and dip sharply as it ran alongside the Lawson's sheep farm, and then began to climb the hill that passed the old cemetery, studded with headstones from the island's earliest European settlers. A moment later the landscape changed, as it does on the island so suddenly, and we were on the same sweet two-lane road now swathed in leafy trees, dense as a rain forest, the trees seeming to bow across the road to one another, like fingertips touching. None of the sweet narrow roads on Swansea leads anywhere except to other narrow roads or to the ocean or one of the harbors. When you come to the edge of the land here-but wherever you are, really, on the island-you feel you are in a place quite apart from every other you know: the colors, the light, the proportions of things, a sense that this was the world before the world was made.
I FOUND THIS the other day in an old issue of the Swansea Sentinel; it's from an essay I wrote four years ago, soon after Will and I moved here to live year round. We had left New York after a series of violent crimes that came too close to our lives: a friend was murdered when a man followed her into her building, several blocks from ours, forced her into the elevator, and onto the roof. You would know her name if I mentioned it; it was news for weeks. She was the third friend in six months who'd had a gun pointed at her, though the others came to no harm.