"What about you?" I said. "Did your dad ever talk to you about it?"
"Not since Jesse died."
"What does your mother think?"
"She hadn't spoken to him in ages. A year or two."
I hardly knew how to answer. Clare's audacity, taking over the funeral, was breathtaking, but apparently I was the only one who found it objectionable. "Henderson and I will come by later. You'll be in the yellow house all day?"
"As far as I know."
As far as I knew, I would leave Will's immediately, with his laptop, and head to the Lighthouse Motel, where I could read the diary in Henderson's presence, because even though I was determined, even though I knew I had to do this, dread coursed through me and mixed with the feeling of disbelief that filled me since the police first called. He was not dead. He could not be dead. Here I was in his house. There were eggs in the refrigerator and a block of cheddar cheese cut at an angle, slices shaved off, and half a container of yogurt and a bottle of Jamaican hot sauce we'd bought a year ago in Boston. He was almost here, wasn't he? Almost home?
I closed the laptop, hoping that the diary would exonerate me. If it didn't, would I hand it over anyway? If it didn't, would I edit it before returning it? I didn't think I had the nerve-or the bad character-to delete or doctor Will's words, even though I could make changes without leaving fingerprints. Maybe I could call that ghost-writing. But if I did, who would I be then? Surely not the same woman who'd bought the bird feeder and the happy flags.
On my way out, I took the flags down from their hooks on the front porch and tossed them into the backseat of my rented car-the nylon sunburst, the rainbow, the engorged purple tulip. How could he have kept them flying after I'd left, when he'd removed every other sign of me from the house? Then I understood. To him the flags might as well have been dish towels, because I had never told him the real reason I had bought them in the first place.
I drove the long way to the motel to avoid going past the yellow gambrel. Another absurdly beautiful morning, the sun blaring with a trumpeter's insistence, the green of every leaf on every tree saturated with color, with light. Roses, snapdragons, and peonies were in full bloom in Karen Griffin's garden on the corner of Pine and Schoolhouse Road, Karen herself in a pale blue sunbonnet bending to cut a few stems and toss them into the wicker basket hanging from the V of her bent elbow. She is the great-great-granddaughter of a whaling captain, and the sixty-year-old daughter of the revered, recently deceased journalist and preservationist who edited the local paper for decades and wrote twenty books, most of them, in one way or another, odes to the fragile natural beauty of the island and its eccentric inhabitants. By whom he did not mean Evan and Mavis. Or Will and me. He meant old-timers like himself, to whom the island is truly home, those who care about the play of sunlight against the leaves, the quality of the shade, the welfare of the fish and the fishermen. I don't mean to say we don't care, only that our caring is somewhat seasonal, contingent, driven a little too strongly by what's in it for us. Even I, who had been a year-rounder for four years, am a city dweller at heart, an urbanite who doesn't mind the country as long as there are plenty of people like myself, and the daily New York Times, nearby.
A temporary reprieve. Henderson was not at the motel, and I had made a deal with myself that I didn't have to read the diary without him. I put the laptop at the foot of the bed I had not slept in and picked up This Week on Swansea! from the dresser. It was mostly advertisements. Seaplane rides, a store called Hats in the Belfry, the only movie theater on the island, sunset sailing trips with wine, hors d'oeuvres, and chamber music. I lay down on the bed with it and skimmed the calendar of events for the last few days, imagined myself a tourist reading this for the first time, how charmed I'd be, how impressed with the mix of island quaintness and imported Boston high culture.
A kite-flying competition, pony rides for charity, a strawberry-shortcake social on the lawn of the Episcopal church, the showing of a documentary about Noam Chomsky, a chamber music concert at Town Hall (Mozart, Sibelius, Dvorak), a walking tour of nineteenth-century houses, lobster rolls and clam chowder at the Quaker Meeting House ($7.50, $3.95, brownies extra), and a recital of songs at the Historic Society (Schubert, Debussy, Webern, Lili Boulanger). Her name stood out the way my own would have, tilted me into a specific moment in my history with a force I had not expected. My abandoned Lili, whom I had first read about in a music encyclopedia more than a year before, when all of her heartbreaking might-have-beens had made me painfully aware of my own.
Thoughts of her fused with thoughts of my abandoned Will, whom I had left here to die, left because I was dying, left because if I had stayed, it would only have been to make him happy, to be the bright, sunny bulb, the happy flags in his life of fear and regret and secrets. One night not many months before, as I tried to sleep next to him in that room where he died, kept awake by the howling of the winter wind and my own unhappiness, I startled myself with the question that came to me and the answer that followed: But what about me? If I stay, I will wither away like the plants in my sorry garden, the yellow tomato vines, the drooping irises, the tulips that never open.
At breakfast the next morning, Will asked how I'd slept. We were at the kitchen table, eating granola and halves of grapefruit, drinking coffee. The wind was still blowing, and it looked like rain. "Fine," I lied. I was making a list of friends to invite the next summer-because even after that awful night, I could not imagine a way out-when Will said something that made me wince. He said he loved me. I love you. The basic uniform, no frills. Subject, verb, object. I looked up and tried to smile, although I was close to tears. Then, thinking, perhaps, that I was moved by what he had said, he went on. He said he loved me more than he ever had, and that even though he was depressed about his estrangement from his girls, the granddaughter whom he could not yet go to visit, and of course the death of his son, our love was the bedrock of his life.
He reached for my face to wipe away the tears that had come. There were not many; I was wound very tight. "Thank you," I managed to say, knowing, as he knew, that that was not the proper response.
"Let me make another pot of coffee." That's what I said next, as I stood up. It was in that instant of rising that I understood I was going to leave.
On the knotty chenille bedspread of the Lighthouse Motel, my entire body flinched at the memory of that breakfast, that peculiar, private declaration: Let me make another pot of coffee.
Will did not challenge me, did not ask what I meant by "Thank you." He did what people do when confronted with evidence that their love is not returned; he ignored it as long as he could. He drank the fresh pot of coffee and hoped for a better day, more sunshine, less wind. He made plans for spring and for summer and said "we," as he had for the ten years of our marriage.
When I left him a month later, I knew I was not Nora leaving the doll's house, not Nora fleeing a man who had wanted to infantalize and diminish her. A different sort of woman leaving a different sort of man, another time, another place. But I may as well have been Nora: it took everything I had to walk out the door, drive my rented car onto the ferry, and abandon my life and this paradise too.
As I put down the magazine and closed my eyes, I could tell I had been holding my breath. I inhaled. I exhaled. I told myself that the choice had been whether to live his life or mine. I was so still, so intent on stillness, that when the phone rang, I clenched. Then sighed in relief. It's Henderson, I thought. Thank God it's Henderson.