And there was also my wanting a child. In the city, we had a cramped, expensive one-bedroom apartment, and on Swansea, a rundown Cape Cod bungalow Will had inherited from an eccentric relative twenty-five years before. It had no heat, the original windows, an ancient kitchen, "a lot of potential," as realtors say, and "needs TLC." We were not the first people to flee the perils of the city for Arcadia, but that accounts, you understand, for the idealized view of the place I expressed in my essay. We winterized the house and tried to settle into the pastoral life the island seemed to promise. I tried to become a mother, a gardener, a short-story writer, because I was always just about to get pregnant and didn't want to start something I wouldn't be able to finish before the kid came. The short stories turned out to be the only souffles in the bunch that rose. Motherhood eluded me. So did a green thumb. And, of course, I had to revise my dreamy picture of the island.
Among year-rounders, one of the quips about Swansea is that half the people here are in AA and the other half ought to be. Another is that in winter it is a floating mental hospital. My first winter, I became good friends with a woman photographer, until I found out that her boyfriend had a collection of automatic weapons and a restraining order against him from the mother of his children, and that what he and my friend did for kicks was break into locked summer houses and videotape themselves in strange beds. The guns made me nervous.
But mostly what I discovered in the years I lived here is that winter people keep to themselves. They are not summer people-organizing dinner parties and power picnics and whale watchings-transported to another season. They keep appointments, as Thoreau did, with beech trees and yellow birches; they live on the island because, like Bartleby, they would prefer not to. Not to hustle and hassle with life on the other side of the sound. Quite a few of them call the mainland "America." Small is still beautiful, and the world is too much with them late and soon. I don't know; maybe they're shy, or maybe they're more clear-headed than the rest of us about what's important: natural beauty, safe streets, clean air, the wild wood, not the wide world beyond it.
I called my lawyer, the morning after I arrived on Swansea, to find out what my marital status was. A machine answered. I called my stepdaughter. A machine answered. When I called to get the messages on my machine in New York, my mother had called to ask when I was coming to visit her, and I realized I had to tell her about Will. Then Evan and I took a ride to the other side of the island, to the village of Cummington, the house where I used to live, to look for Henry and for my husband's will.
I thought of going to the house as I did of getting on the eight-seater airplane the night before: if there were any other way to do what I had to do, I would have done it. Evan insisted I not do it myself.
The street we lived on was modest, its shingled houses an assortment of saltboxes, old Cape Cod bungalows with dormer sheds and front porches, and a few hodgepodge two- and three-bedroom places of no precise architectural nomenclature, almost all of the shingles unpainted and in various stages of weathering. These were not beach-front properties, and most of us were year-round residents, which meant we had more in common with the cab driver from the night before than we did with Evan. The street and its surroundings were quaint, well-tended, and probably looked the way they had forty years before. Everyone, except Will and me, had a garden. And because I failed so miserably at making things grow in the ground, I had bought an assortment of colorful nylon flags to hang on the front porch. I don't mean countries; I mean long windsock-style decorations. A rainbow, an engorged tulip, a puffy bright yellow sun with four-foot streamers that twirled wildly in the wind but hung like a wet sock on a clothesline when the air was still.
As Evan turned the corner, I dreaded seeing the flags as much as anything else. Evidence of my folly, my sentimentality, my walking out on Will. Evan must have seen something on my face-a darkness, a twitch-because he reached across the gear shift, squeezed my hand, and said, "How are you doing?"
"Let's talk about something else." I kept my eyes down, afraid to look at the house, like a kid trying not to step on cracks in the sidewalk, but when I glanced up, it wasn't my house I saw, but Ben in his driveway, about to get into a car. "Slow down," I said to Evan and called out the window to Ben. He was startled to see me; he looked pale, not well. Evan pulled into his driveway and I got out of the car. It was difficult for both of us, because Ben was Will's friend, because Ben had found him, because Ben and his wife, Emily, had been witnesses to the last four years of our marriage, to the quotidian reality of it, the easy affection, Will's pain when I left. They had never puttered in their driveway and heard us shriek at each other. They had never gone out to empty their trash and heard Will holler, "I'd rather eat glass than have a relationship with you." We did not often quarrel. Our style was to withdraw, suffer silently; and to the neighbors, Ben and Emily right next door, I suppose everything looked fine. We had a sunburst flag on our front porch. Of course we were happy.
One day last summer, when I caught a glimpse of Ben coming home from work in his greasy mechanic's jumpsuit, I was startled to realize that this man who owned a service station and had never lived anywhere but Swansea was a much happier man than my husband would ever be.
He and I had never so much as brushed pinkies, but standing now on the pea gravel of his driveway, we threw our arms around each other and cried together.
A minute later, when we disengaged and I told him I was going into the house to look for Will's will, he shook his head and reached for my hand. "You can't."
"What do you mean, I can't?"
"I'll show you what I mean." He walked to his car, opened the door, took something from the Seat, and showed me two black video-cassette boxes. "Here."
While I looked at the labels, two movies I'd never heard of, Evan introduced himself to Ben. "I don't get it," I said.
"He rented them on May thirty-first. You know he was obsessed with getting them back the next day, because he hated paying extra. I found them in his bedroom. June twenty-second."
"Did you take them before the police came or after?" Evan said.
"I came back here and called the police."
"Do the police know you have them?"
"I knew that the date he took them out would tell me-"
"Why don't you walk me through what you did, step by step?" Evan said.
"I don't need to walk through it; I lived through it, eighteen hours ago."
"What you did might turn out to be tampering with evidence at the scene of a crime. It's removing evidence that could-"
"No one's thinking it was a crime."
"I haven't spoken to the police myself."
"You don't understand what I'm saying, do you?"
"Unfortunately, I think I do," Evan said.
"He's a lawyer," I said to Ben. "That's why he's-"
"I know who Evan Lambert is, for Christ's sake. I see him on TV all the time defending the Nazi baby-killer. I've changed the oil in your cars a few times, but I wouldn't expect you to remember that." Then Ben turned to me. "I called a cleaning company to come in."
"That was sweet, to think of a maid at a time like-"
"It's not a maid, Sophy."
"What he's saying-" Evan began, before Ben interrupted.
"You think I have trouble expressing myself? Is that it? And who the hell's been talking to you? What was I about to tell her, since you're so goddam smart?"
"It's a restoration company," Evan said, uncannily, "not a maid service. Am I close?"
"I think it would be easier if Ben and I could have a few minutes to ourselves," I managed to say, and Evan, visibly relieved, went back to his car.
"I'm sorry," I said softly. "I had no idea this would become-"
"I found him on the floor," Ben said as softly, "next to the bed."