Will's will. When I opened my eyes I saw at Ginny's bare feet the white envelope she had brought from upstairs. "Is that your father's will?"
"This? Yeah." She plucked it from the floor while the phone book slid off her lap. "Here." Holding it out to me with the most studied indifference, as if she were passing me a newsletter from her congressman or a Coke can to be recycled.
It was a slender wad of papers I began to read as I moved to take refuge in the kitchen. The page on top was not his will but a life insurance policy he had had since his children were small. The last time I'd seen it, my name was listed beneath the girls', and I had been entitled to a third of the $300,000 payout. It did not surprise me that my name was no longer there, but I was surprised to find it replaced by Diane Schaefer Berg, Cambridge, Mass., who was to receive my entire share. The papers were dated a month after Will and I had separated.
When I flipped to the next page, I was looking at the will. My eyes fell to my name, in the fourth line-"I am married to Sophy Chase"-and to my name in the next line: "I give one dollar to Sophy Chase, who, in anticipation of a divorce that she requested, entered into an agreement with me to define our respective financial and property rights and all other rights, remedies, privileges, and obligations which arose out of our marriage."
"Who were you talking to when I came downstairs before, that you told you wanted to cremate Daddy?"
I had not made it to the kitchen, only to the dining room table, and when I turned to look at Ginny, she was still studying the phone book, backlit by the sun. I was startled by the glare, the way you are as you come out of a movie theater in the middle of the day. I don't think my hands were shaking, but my voice was. I must have sounded scared or flustered, or maybe the word I mean is "humiliated." "The coroner," I said, but the c caught in my throat, and I had to start over.
"When will he have the results?"
"Why don't you put down the phone book for a minute." She did, reluctantly, and I got my voice back; it had been a touch of stage fright. "Come and sit down at the table. There are a few things you need to know." She complied. She took an orange from the fruit bowl and rolled it between her palms and then against the table, like a ball of dough she was trying to smooth. Sitting at the head of the table, I laid out what I thought she needed to know, one, two, three. I spoke more softly than I usually do, and more slowly, because I knew the restraint would help me control my rage. Part of my anger was at myself, over the unfairness of taking any of this out on Ginny, but there it was.
Yesterday, Ben Gibbs found him naked on the floor beside his bed, but according to the phone bill in the stack of mail, the last phone call he made was on May 31.
Diane Schaefer Berg, Daddy's friend since grade school, married to a physicist at MIT, suspects suicide.
The coroner said it was not a stroke and that he'd been dead too long for them to detect a heart attack. He wasn't sure how much he'd be able to learn, given the length of time Daddy had been dead. My version of "no blood left."
And if you were thinking about a viewing and an open casket, the coroner told me that there is nothing much left to say goodbye to.
She closed her eyes as the tears poured over her face every which way, as much at the news as at my bluntness. But I don't know whether she understood what had motivated it: the wallop of the will, the specter of her mother's arrival, the sudden ascendancy of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost into the funeral of my atheist husband. Ginny's hair was mostly dry, but her face was sopping wet and swollen, and she pressed her palms to her cheeks and let her head drop into them. I did not get up and comfort her, my stepchild whose father had died. I was, genuinely, for the first time, the wicked stepmother she used to accuse me of being. But I knew I was just angry at all of them, including Clare, whom I barely knew, and Will, who was dead, and I was about to apologize, to explain myself, when I heard the front door open and Evan call my name. At the sound of his voice, Flossie woke up from her nap under the dining room table, where I had forgotten she lay, and hurled herself to the door, barking to the salsa beat of her undipped claws clicking against the floor.
"We're in here," I called back.
Ginny pushed away some of her tears and blew her nose in a napkin. I expected to hear a clatter of feet and gear and children's voices, but Evan was alone, red-faced from an afternoon on the water, still wearing a canvas sailing cap, which he removed as he came to the table to shake Ginny's hand.
"I'm sorry about your father. What a terrible shock. I'm afraid we can't put you up for longer. My brother and his wife and kids arrive the day after tomorrow, and every room is-"
"My mother's coming and renting us a place for the week."
"Lucky she could find anything so close to the Fourth of July weekend." He turned to me, and I noticed that his knees were sunburned. The hair on his forearms had blond highlights. There seemed to be more gray at his temples than there had been in the morning, and deeper lines on his forehead. I wondered whether I looked as old as he did. "How was the rest of your day?"
"As good as can be expected."
"I'm here to pick up Seth's asthma medicine and feed Flossie, but if you want to join us at the clambake, Mavis and the kids are already there. It's a few miles down the beach. If you take our Saab, you can leave early."
"Only on Swansea," Ginny said, and you could see her face lose its darkest scrim. "You come for a funeral and end up at a clambake. Daddy would have liked that, wouldn't he?"
I had to smile, but I could feel the tightness in it, and the fury. I wanted to remind her that ten minutes ago she would not eat anything that moved in salt water except seaweed.
"Did you get the message that your mother called?" Evan asked me. "Mavis said she left it on your bed."
"I haven't been up there. Did you tell her?"
"No. We thought you'd prefer to."
When I'd called her first thing that morning, I left a vague message. On Swansea for a few days; give me a call. I did not want her rushing to the island, thinking I needed her help or her comfort, when I knew that I would end up helping her, comforting her, chauffeuring her, this woman who had hauled me and her friend Gladys-Whoopi Goldberg in the movie-across the country thirty-five years before in pursuit of a man whose leave-takings she chose to read as a series of hints that he wanted to be found. Now she was frail and forgetful-too forgetful to be properly quixotic and keep track of her delusions-but I still had to tell her that Will was dead, just as I had to inform the bank and Visa and the pension department of the Central Intelligence Agency.
On the short drive to the Winstons'-Ginny and I followed Evan in his car-there was a woman hitchhiking, thumb pointing in our direction, but we weren't going far enough down the road to do her much good. I didn't stop, but I drove slowly enough to see that she bore some resemblance to me-to me twelve years earlier, thumb out on this same road, her hair in wiry curls because of the sea water, the salt air; a pair of cutoffs, an embroidered Indian blouse; a can of beer. Dumb girl, I thought. I'd never have hitched holding a beer can, even back when I drank the stuff. I didn't drink like that anyway, the slow, steady infusion, the morphine drip, my best friend the bottle. I binged. I could go for weeks with nothing. Then I'd have fourteen beers or seven gin-and-tonics or four giant happy-hour margaritas, whatever it took to render me speechless and horizontal. I knew Will for three weeks before he saw me take a drink. Then he saw me take six.