I'd stopped looking at her by that time. I was doing the math and trying to figure out what to say to her when the meeting was over. After Grace said, "Let's take a ten-minute break," and I saw Crystal head for the door, I leaped up and followed her into the vestibule. "Are you leaving?" I asked.
"Just for a smoke."
"I'm Sophy, by the way."
"Crystal."
By then we were on the brick walkway in the church yard, a dreamy, manicured cloister between the parish house and the church, an outdoor enclosure thick with the scents of jasmine and, now, cigarette smoke. Crystal was taller, rangier than she'd looked sitting down, wore old scuffed cowboy boots, tight jeans, a thick belt with a heavy Native American buckle, not typical island attire, and I thought I might have the wrong Crystal. She held out a rumpled pack of Camels to me, but otherwise was preoccupied. I shook my head. "I think I've been looking for you," I said. "I've been looking for someone named Crystal Sparrow." Her eyes shifted to me when she heard the name, and her soft face hardened in fear; she probably owed people money, or worse. "It's about my husband, Will O'Rourke."
"He said you guys are divorced."
"Separated."
"Guess I got the timing wrong. He's not too happy about it, that's no secret." She was defending herself in case I was about to pounce.
"So you don't know that he's dead." It wasn't a question, or an accusation, either, although she was so startled, it must have sounded that way. Then I remembered her voice on Will's answering machine. What was it she'd said? She was sorry about the other night?
"What do you mean?" she said now. "Since when?"
"No one's quite sure about any of it. The autopsy isn't completed." I was holding back a lot of information, because I was afraid of two things. One, that if I told her Will had died twenty-three or twenty-four days ago and suicide was suspected, she might fear she'd had something to do with it. Two, if she was afraid of that, she would simply turn on the heel of her cowboy boot and take off and do what she always did: pick up a drink. I cared, in a not inconsequential way, that she not do that, but I cared more that she stay with me, tell me what had happened between them, because something must have.
"How do you even know I know him?" she said, her eyes squinting with suspicion.
"I had to go through his mail after he died. He sent you a letter that was returned to him, No Forwarding Address."
"How'd you know to find me here?"
"I didn't. I just heard your name and thought you might be the same Crystal."
"So you didn't come here for me?"
I shook my head. "I came for me. I've been having a hard time since he died."
After that, I didn't need to coax anything out of her until the end. She just started talking, and I listened.
13. In Search of Another Note
IT HAD TO DO with her son, how she met Will.
Define heartbreak: a nine-year-old kid with Crystal for a mother. That was heavy on my mind as she told me the story, and so were the echoes of other stories.
It started with a quarrel between Crystal and the boy, Matt, though she didn't say at first what it was about. But he got awful mad, she said, and stormed out of the house, stormed three-quarters of a mile down the dirt road to Fresh Meadow Lane, but she didn't know that until later. She thought he'd gone to the pond or over to his friends the Lawlers', whose house was the only other one at their end of the road, about five hundred feet away through the brambles.
She didn't own any property, so they had to move, like a lot of islanders in that situation, twice a year. When summer came, they left the house in the woods so that the owners could rent it-a tiny two-bedroom nothing, Crystal said-for fifteen-hundred dollars a week, just because of the pond. You know, Chester Pond? The usual summer shit, she said, and then we've got to live in a tent in my sister's backyard till Labor Day, because she's got every room in her house rented for the summer to college kids who are waiting tables. It's hard on the kid, she said, hard on all of us.
I started to feel impatient, with how far the story was straying from the end of Will's life, but I needn't have.
"The next thing I know the day of that humdinger fight Matt and me had"-here she became more animated than I had seen her-"there's this noisy motorcycle roaring down our dirt road, and I look out the kitchen window and it blasts to a stop right next to my car, kicks up a shitload of dust. There's my kid hopping off the back with a fat grin on his face and this guy I'd never seen driving it. 'Course I couldn't see much with the helmet, but they start slapping each other high fives and yukking it up.
"Then I hear this voice through the kitchen window-he says to Matt, 'You wait there, kiddo,' and he starts toward the kitchen door, and I panic. This island isn't the friendliest place in the world. I don't know who the hell this is; he could be a social worker. I've had a few of them at my door over the years. So I stick the bottle of Jim Beam in the cabinet with the cereal and the peanut butter and tell myself to remember to move it before Matt sees it, because he'll dump it down the drain.
'"Is anyone home?' That's the first thing I hear, then a knock on the edge of the screen door.
'"Who is it?' I'm still at the sink, and the door's about eight feet away, and all I can see is half the man's body through the screen.
'"My name is Will O'Rourke. I wanted you to know your son was hitchhiking on Fresh Meadow Lane. I almost didn't see him coming around the turn. Scared the hell out of me. I stopped as soon as I could and went back to make sure he was all right. And to tell him to hitch farther down the road, on the straightaway.'
"I was at the screen door, saying thank you. I must have said it three or four times. He interrupts, real serious, 'Could I talk to you for a minute?'
'"We're talking now.' But that wasn't how he meant it. I'd stuffed a few pieces of gum in my mouth and grabbed a Diet Coke, so I didn't look like the drunk I was-that's what Matt and I'd fought about, the bottle of whiskey. We'd had a tug of war with it; I won. And he ran away.
'"Would you mind opening the door?'
"I opened it and stood there, kind of suspicious, chomp-chomp-chomp on the Juicy Fruit. 'Course he'd taken off his helmet by now, and I could see Matt out of the corner of my eye, circling Will's motorcycle, touching it, stroking it, in hog heaven. Will looked familiar. A salty-looking guy like someone you'd see around the shipyards. I was hoping Matt hadn't told him what we'd fought about. Hoping that's not what he wanted to talk to me about."