THE ROW OF COTTAGES was uninhabited when Caroline and Marion turned off the main road. Although it was the end of October, Caroline had arranged her work schedule so they could come mid-week when encounters with the neighbors would be less likely. Even more so than their neighborhood in Seattle, the beach community was close-knit, partly by necessity but also because their bonds had been made when they were their most relaxed—what they thought of as their best—selves. As much as the sight of the ocean and sand meant vacation, so, too, did the vision that they saw of themselves in their neighbors’ eyes. I am that person, they would think, and shoulders would loosen, shoes would slide off feet.
Caroline had chosen their cottage for its relative privacy, but over the years, as the other cottages had been bought and filled with people and furniture and laughter, that first trip down the pathway from the car to their cottage, arms filled with suitcases and grocery bags, had become like walking a long welcome line, neighbors calling out invitations to dinner, children clamoring for Brad to dump his stuff, now, and come and play.
There had been other divorces, cottages divided into his and her weekends, or sold immediately. They had all sold eventually, family traditions unraveling until there seemed little point in keeping the walls that had held them. When Jack had told her he was leaving, he said the cottage was hers—and while she tried to see that as a generous act, she couldn’t rid herself of the vision of Brad’s older cousin who had always made a grand gesture of giving Brad a favorite toy when the wheel was already broken.
It’s not the cottage I want, she had almost said, but stopped herself because there was a chance Jack might take her literally.
IT WAS A STRANGE THING about the cottage, Caroline had remarked once. They could paint walls or cook crabs, have a fire in the fireplace or burn a batch of cookies while distracted by a sunset. Still, every time she returned, she was greeted by the same smell of fresh sheets and sunshine that had been there the first time, as if the house itself had a natural scent that it rediscovered each time they were gone.
“I love this place,” Marion said as she dropped her suitcase by the front door and carried a bag of groceries to the kitchen.
It was the first time Caroline had been back since the book by her bed told her what Jack hadn’t. She hadn’t stayed that time, couldn’t sleep in the bed; she and Kate had checked into a hotel fifteen miles down the road and spent the weekend not thinking about how their lives had turned out differently than they expected.
“Wine?” called Marion from the kitchen.
MARION HAD INSISTED UPON candles with dinner, the light flickering off the glass of the windows.
“Somebody told me once about burning sage to chase out the old spirits,” she said, “but I like the idea of candles better. They go so much better with dinner.”
They had cooked together in the small kitchen, moving around each other with the grace of long friendship, Caroline picking up and cutting the carrot that Marion had just peeled, Marion stirring the chicken in the sauté pan while Caroline added the onions, followed by tomatoes. Marion had brought the last of the oregano from her garden and the dusty-sweet smell filled the house when it touched the warmed oil. Caroline cut thick slices of bread, bought from the bakery near her house, and scattered the carrots across the top of the salad. Marion pulled the bottles of olive oil and vinegar from the cupboard, drizzling dressing across the lettuce, finishing with a few firm pulls from the salt grinder. As Caroline put the plates on the table, she realized it had been a long time since she had cooked anything. For months now, the only food she had been able to get her hands to take off the grocery store shelves had been rice pudding and canned chicken spread, the reasons for her choices as baffling as pregnancy cravings.
But when the first bite met her mouth, it was as if her body suddenly remembered food, and she found herself taking a second helping, another slice of bread, a third glass of wine. They ate, their conversation weaving back and forth across the table, filling the house with fresh news, old stories. Finally, the food was gone, the last of the wine poured into glasses, only the dishes left.
Caroline took a long, slow swallow, looking toward the darkened window.
“So, why do you think people do it?” she asked. “Leave each other?”
“I don’t know,” Marion answered.
“But you’ve written articles about it.”
“That doesn’t mean I know anything.” Marion’s tone was light. Caroline looked over at her, waiting. After a while, Marion gestured out toward the ocean beyond the windows.
“I think love is kind of like those waves out there,” she said. “You ride one in to the beach, and it’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever felt. But at some point the water goes back out; it has to. And maybe you’re lucky—maybe you’re both too busy to do anything drastic. Maybe you’re good as friends, so you stay. And then something happens—maybe it’s something as big as a baby, or as small as him unloading the dishwasher—and the wave comes back in again. And it does that, over and over. I just think sometimes people forget to wait.”
THE NEXT MORNING CAME gray and cool. Caroline woke up on the couch, her back stiff, and walked into the kitchen where Marion was making coffee.
“You’re a little twitchy this morning,” Marion remarked as she took a coffee mug out of the cupboard. “Want some?”
“Thanks,” Caroline answered, adding, “It was easier back at the house.”
“Sure.” Marion poured out two cups, put sugar in hers, and then drank deeply and with great satisfaction.
“Okay,” she said when she had finished. “Where’s the book?”
“What do you mean?”
“
Her
book,” Marion repeated, looking at her sideways. “I know you. It’s here somewhere; you haven’t gotten rid of it, have you?”
Caroline went into the bedroom and pulled a paperback off the shelf in the closet. The cover had a title draped across a gauzy photograph of red, high-heeled shoes.
“Original,” murmured Marion, one eyebrow raised. “Okay, come with me.”
Marion walked out the front door and down the pathway, past the closed window blinds and doors of the neighboring cottages, to the parking area. She lifted the lid of the large blue dumpster.
“Pitch it,” she said.
“But . . .”
“I know; it’s a book. Pitch it.”
Caroline hesitated, and then with an instinctive motion up and over, her arm pulled back and launched the book into the air. It landed with a satisfying thump at the bottom of the empty dumpster.
“Good girl,” said Marion. “Now, I’m going to take a walk. You can box up the rest.”
THERE WERE NOT as many books here as in the city, Caroline thought as she ran her eyes around the living room of the cottage, but the arrangement was more casual, Jack’s and Brad’s books intermixed with hers on the shelves, tossed on coffee tables, hidden in the couch cushions. She couldn’t even tell for sure whose was whose sometimes. The cottage was where Jack had brought his favorite childhood books—
Harold and the Purple Crayon
,
Robinson Crusoe
,
Huckleberry Finn
. Caroline remembered winter evenings cooking dinner in the kitchen, hearing the sound of Jack’s voice reading aloud, or later, Brad’s voice reading to his father.
What should she do with the children’s books? They were Brad’s as much as his father’s—and the thought that Jack might want them for future children made Caroline want to start a fire in the woodstove and feed it with words. But should she save them for Brad? And what would those books mean to him now? Brad’s response to his father’s leaving had been abrupt and angry, his attitude toward his mother protective. Caroline still got her son’s cell phone bill; there were no records of calls to his father.
But Brad and his father had been close before, especially at the cottage. They had all been different here, she thought as she looked around the room, their roles softened, melded, the need for efficiency falling away with every mile they traveled from the city. During those times, Brad didn’t belong to her, Jack didn’t belong to work; they all had simply belonged to each other.
She understood what Marion had been talking about the night before, about marriage; it made more sense here in this place than anywhere. Over the years of her marriage, she had experienced that ebb and swell of feeling many times. The dry days, when life with Jack was one more item on her to-do list, followed by the return of something so familiar, the gratitude she had always experienced along with a start of recognition—oh yes,
that
was what it felt like; how could she have forgotten? So often, she had felt her love for her husband return here at the cottage, in a moment when she would see Jack look up from a puzzle, or come in to help her put sheets on their bed.
Yet somewhere along the line, she had always forgotten again. And over the years she had forgotten it more quickly, easily, until even the loveliest gestures, the ones that might have brought the emotion flowing in to shore—the way Jack washed her car every Sunday so she could start the week fresh, the way she always brought him coffee while he took a shower—merged with all the other ones—his steadfast ability to sleep through the sound of a crying baby, her inability to leave on a trip without turning back twice to check for stove burners left on—all those tics and traits stored in the house that was their marriage, overrunning the space, piling up against the door like solicitations until, yes, the desire simply to walk away and leave them behind was almost overwhelming. Almost. Because the one thing she could never forgive Jack for was the way he had blown open the door of their marriage first and left. Jack-in-the-box, turning his own handle, springing up and out, hands free.
Caroline worked steadily, sorting through belongings, filling boxes. By the time she was finished, it was late afternoon; Marion had come back from her walk long before and had gone out for groceries. Caroline grabbed one last paperback, left on top of the refrigerator—a thriller, the kind Jack had been reading the past few years. A piece of paper fell out from between the pages. She picked it up and looked at it, and again more closely. A biopsy report. Type: Prostate. Results: Negative.
Caroline scanned the paper for the date and found it at the top of the page. September, a little over a year ago. Kate had been five months into her chemotherapy.
Caroline stared at the date. She hadn’t known. That simple fact could mean so many different things about her husband, their relationship, and she realized as she stood in the kitchen of their cottage that it had been years since she could have said with any certainty which one was true. Gently, she put the paper into the front of the book and laid it back on top of the refrigerator. Then she took the last of the boxes out to the car.
MARION AND CAROLINE Sat in the front porch chairs watching the light disappear from the sky, blankets around their shoulders, the air chill on their faces. Marion looked over at Caroline.
“You’ve done good work,” Marion said. “Come sit in front of me and I’ll work on your shoulders.”
Caroline gratefully moved over in front of Marion’s chair. Marion had taken classes when she was writing an article about the various massage schools in town and it turned out she had a real gift, but she had simply laughed at the idea of trading journalism for massage.
“I’ll just give to my friends,” she had said, and she had been good as her word. Kate had said the one upside of chemotherapy was Marion afterward.
Marion placed her hands on Caroline’s shoulders and held them there, pushing down gently, firmly. Caroline’s shoulders relaxed, her chin lifted.
“You had a big day. You doing okay?” Marion asked.
Caroline nodded. She sat, eyes closed, feeling Marion’s hands find their way into muscles, her fingers moving gently, searching as if they could hear something ears could not.
When was the last time, Caroline wondered, that Jack had touched her, she had touched him, like this—a natural overflow of affection, as simple and essential as water? It had been like this early on, Jack’s fingers resting for a moment on her lower back, her cheek, as he passed by.
When their son was born, so early, the doctor had said that massage was important; it would help him grow, be able to go home sooner. Caroline had sat by Brad’s bassinet in the hospital, her fingers moving in small circles over his chest, in soft, long sweeps down his bird-bone legs and arms, love flowing through her fingers into his body. Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me. Her life reduced to one child, two hands, hers.
It had been three weeks before they could bring Brad home, to a house that Jack left every morning, his parental leave long since used up, leaving Caroline in a cashmere world of skin. She would watch Jack get dressed, buttoning, zipping, buckling, while she lay cocooned in bed with the baby. What could touch you in a land of metal elevators and wooden desks, when all that was uncovered were hands, a face? She, who spent her days in bare feet and a bathrobe, living skin to skin with another human being, could not imagine at the time. Did not even think about it, her own world so full that any human being besides her baby was at best an appendage in her life.
But now, she wondered. How cold it must have been in all those clothes.
When was the last time she and Jack had really touched each other? Maybe that’s what Jack had meant when he talked about wanting to be in love—not just hands on skin, but that feeling of being seen, understood. Maybe it had just become too hard, with all those lawns to mow and grocery lists, all the accumulated roles of their lives between them.
But sitting there on the porch, Caroline realized with a sense of small quiet surprise that the roles in her well-stocked bookshelf of life were leaving, had left, one by one as they had come. Kate was healthy again. Brad still called home for his mother-fixes, as he called them, but he was no longer the reason for Caroline’s life. Cooking and cleaning were simpler now, fertility, or not, no longer an issue. She knew how she liked to dress, didn’t spend a lot of time worrying or shopping. And now she was no longer a wife—all the caretaking slipping away, leaving her weightless, open.