Anna took a quick hit but the roach was cold. “Oh,” she said, rising, “your kitty! He always runs from me over at my place.” Cloud sat in his chair by the stove showing no inclination to run anywhere, his sleepy eyes registering her.
“He’s different outdoors, he’s wary,” Murdock said. “Like the rest of us.”
Anna approached the cat carefully, and when he didn’t bolt she worked her hands gently under him and, smiling, took him in her arms, petting his head, tickling his chin, whispering. She sat back down, cradling him in her lap, stroking him into a loud purr.
“He’d never let me do that,” Murdock said. “You have the touch he’s been missing.”
“I took a few mailing tubes to the Mines this afternoon and posted them. They’re safely gone.”
“Is that what makes things safe? Going?”
“I don’t know, Murdock. But when I got back from my swim, someone had been in the house. Just little indications, you know, nothing glaring. Things in my workroom somewhat out of place, a drawer not quite shut. Upstairs the closet was open, a sleeve was hanging out under the trunk lid.…”
“They got it then?”
“I’d moved it to the old cellar, Murdock, it’s still there.”
“Christ!” He crushed out his cigarette. The cat leapt from Anna’s lap and disappeared. “I wish to hell they’d found it, hauled it off!”
“But maybe now they won’t be back? I almost wish they’d turned the house inside out.”
“They have to lay low, with Billy locked up. But they’re not done with you.” He leaned his head back on the high-backed chair, closed his eyes. She wanted to touch his face, soothe it with her fingers. She squeezed the roach in her hand and stuck it in a pocket.
“Murdock, I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I had a longing for old times, the feel of them. When I smoke, I can sort of get there, you see? I wanted to remember how I
felt,
what I knew then. You don’t know what I mean.”
He looked at her across the lamplight. “Maybe I do,” he said. “I hope you got there.”
He picked up the wine and rummaged around in a drawer, finally holding up a corkscrew triumphantly. “She enjoyed wine,” he said. “And we enjoyed each other. I think I can say that to you.” He uncorked the bottle and Anna couldn’t see what he was pouring the wine into until he set it in front of her: the teak goblet.
“Thank you, Murdock.” She sipped it, smiling. “Mmm. Big, and berrylike, with, I think, a slight aftertaste of the Atlantic Ocean.”
“That’s the wine for us then, Anna Starling. That’s where we’re going. When you’re finished, we’ll walk up the beach, eh? While we can? I’ll row her down to your shore. Shouldn’t take long …”
Anna drank quickly. “To our voyage,” she said, raising the goblet. “Murdock, I’m sorry about the dope. But you have to admit it’s in a good hiding place, isn’t it?”
“It isn’t if you grew up in the country.”
“I see.”
She got up and walked slowly around the kitchen, in the dusky perimeter of light, pausing to place her finger on the pastel drawing of the forge, the heat of its fires (You know, sweetheart, I’ve been through the fires, her father said to her once when he was older and sick, and I’ve always loved you deeper than the sea), rattling gently the cobalt bottles along the sill, a filleting knife on the sink top that teetered when she touched the blade, and she ticked it a few times like a clock.
“You ready, Anna?”
T
HEY SET OFF
through the sea field, the tall grass, into the moonlit dark. Wet beach stones, awkward even in daylight, wobbled and slipped under their boots. Low swells were sifting the gravel like long sighs. Anna trailed a few steps behind him. A breeze off the sea cooled his face and he halted when she tugged at his arm.
“Did you see that up there?” she said in a loud whisper. Above the point, a set of car lights latticed the spruce trees along the cemetery road and went out.
“Probably parkers. Lovers maybe. Saturday night, Anna.” He was aware of a single star, dim as a nailhead, and then a boat a hundred yards or so offshore, barely making headway at a low, idling rumble. They wouldn’t be fishing, unless it was a pleasure boat, and if they were coming home, it wouldn’t be at a couple knots. Her starboard light bobbed in the darkness as the engine slipped into neutral and revved a bit. Something splashed near the white hull. The moon was high and very white in a break of cloud and the boat’s shadow slid up and down. Damn them.
“That boat out there,” he said. She was beside him now. “I’m leery of it.”
“Are they heading for here, do you think? Are they Mounties? God, I would hate getting us busted, that would be awful. They could go ahead and hang me.”
“Not a Mountie boat. Wouldn’t be after you anyway, or me either, not by sea. They don’t know a thing about us.”
“Isn’t it white? It looks a kind of white to me. Livingstone and Billy’s boat!”
“They wouldn’t be in it then, and they don’t own the boat, somebody else does. That’s Livingstone’s problem. He doesn’t own anything, and he won’t when this is over. But they’ve scotched my plan. Best to get off the beach. They can see us, but not who we are.”
“We could watch from my house,” Anna said. “We could wait there.”
“We’ll walk then. See if you’ve had any visitors.”
He took her by the hand and led her over the familiar rocks that had slid and tumbled all these years under his feet, storms and tides jumbling them, always on the move, boulders shifting so slowly you barely noticed them sinking deeper in the sand, and still he could follow them without falling, even in the dark he never fell, and that was good, he was proud of it. They didn’t speak as they went, the sea the only sound, its long breaths, a gasp of gravel, a pause, another. Who was this woman whose hand was in his? Where were they going? It was like he had caught hold of her passing by. The boat, whoever was manning it, was not coming for them, not here. He helped Anna up the short bank, up the path he had trod so many times to the red house, across the shorn patch of lawn. Under the frenzied moths of the back door light, monkshood bloomed like blue and white bits of china. He knew she was scared, he could feel it in her skin, and he drew her hand to his lips quickly, it was what he felt like doing at that moment, he never broke stride, he had no regrets. She squeezed his hand before she released it, unlocked the door and stepped inside, and Murdock turned away to set his eyes toward the water. He had to pay attention, he had to take heed of the unordinary, Connie had not, he had let himself be run down. Rosaire, God love her, nothing had been ordinary anymore once she knew, and he knew, that she was dying. He kissed her brow one afternoon as he was leaving, and she said, sleepy but alert, Murdock, that has the feel of a final kiss to it. He turned back to her and kissed her mouth, her warm, feverish lips. My Murdock, she said. Wasn’t the very sharpness of love in knowing you would lose it, had to lose it someday, along with every act that made it sweet and good? Always underneath it, like a cold hidden spring, there ran the force of separation, the powerful chill would hit you, sometime. Rosaire. All her tones and notes, her embraceable, wonderful, physical self.…
The boat had a small searchlight going now, a shaft of light driven down into the water, not aimed at the shore, and he heard Anna’s voice behind him, “Murdock, come inside, they’ll see you.”
“One minute.” He took out a small pair of binoculars he’d tucked inside his jacket, directing them up toward the cemetery: he could barely make out the markings, the parked car was a Mountie’s.
“I don’t know if that’s good or bad, Anna,” he said. “We’ll think good, what with the boat out there to catch his attention. And we won’t give him anything to look at.”
Murdock went from room to room with the flashlight, Anna behind him pointing out what was amiss. He finished by flipping the rug back and then lifting the cellar door, putting the beam on the bale that lay a few feet from the steps, fixing it there as if he’d exposed a housebreaker.
“We’ll get rid of that tomorrow, so help me God,” he said.
They stood inside the back door, just the sound of their breathing in the darkness, moths clinging like petals to the screen.
“We’re okay,” he said. “That boat is heading off, no visitors from there. We can ease back.” Wasn’t that one dispiriting consequence of getting old, worry and easy fright? But fear was part of love anyway. Fear gave it its point, its cut: as a boy, he had felt it that night in his bed, his mother absent from the kitchen below, his father pacing, weeping, raging at himself and her in the oil-lamp light, while Murdock lay overhead afraid to move, to make a sound lest his dad be obliged to tell him what she had done.
But how could you love without risk, how could you stir your heart in that way without it?
Anna switched on the ceiling light, looked at him, then turned it off.
“I just wanted to see you,” she said.
“You can’t stay the night alone,” he said.
“I know.”
Murdock took her face in his hands and pressed his mouth to hers. They stood there in each other’s arms listening to the old house creak as it cooled in the night wind. Just slightly, almost imperceptibly, they swayed to it.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Anna, carrying her sandals, walked barefoot through the fine cool sand of the point. She nudged the charred spokes of a driftwood fire, its smoke no more than steam. Crushed beer cans, a few butts. But for that, the shore was clean. Late-night revellers? Had the patrol car watched them? They’d heard nothing during the night, she and Murdock, but each other.
She was not afraid, she would not hide. She would have her swim as she had every day in the lee of the point. Murdock was not far and he’d be back, she knew that, they were in this together.
The high grass of the point’s broad field drooped with finespun moisture, running brilliantly through the grey air to alder bushes and the rushes bordering the pond. She glanced back at the red house, then undressed slowly, as she had last night, but with Murdock helping, tugging gently at her clothes, blouse, jeans, today more conscious than usual of her body, feeling strong in her black swimsuit, she could stroke out near the eddy now, flirt with its pull as it curled around the point. At her feet lay the thick heel of a bottle, abraded into foggy green stone. A wine-coloured jellyfish pulsed in the shallows but she waded past it, the water moving in cold circles up her legs. A soda can flashed in the bottom sand. She stopped, sifting water slowly through her hands. He had unbuttoned his shirt and draped it neatly over the back of a chair, then his jeans, slowly unclothing himself, as if he were preparing to bathe or swim, pale but for his darker face and forearms, lean, somehow chaste, she thought. He had touched her face, a gentle tarry smell on his hands, like rope on a wharf. She had skimmed her fingers over the muscle of his shoulders, his chest, felt him tremble along the hard ridge of his back, his pleasure seemed to flow through her, out of his own unselfpitying solitude, she took it gladly into herself, and not until much later, when she awoke suddenly and felt him next to her, did she remember that the name he’d whispered was one not her own. She didn’t care, that didn’t diminish anything, every touch had been sincere. In the dark, her face to his, everything for a while felt locked out except for the space they lay in, holding each other, to Anna it had all come down to these moments, a pure feeling of invincibility that could never last. In the warmth, in whispers, she told him about the bridge and the dog, how cold it all had been but was finally leaving her. He said he was sure that was the worst thing Connie ever did, and how awful to go to his grave with it.
It was barely light when he kissed her and left, I’ll be back later, I’ll bring your car, he said, but ring me quick if there’s anything unusual.
She dove, groaning in the cold water, but after a few hard strokes she felt good and she turned on her back and floated, breathing in the pearl-white sky, oddly at ease, unmoored. Tonight they would take the marijuana up, she and Murdock, ferry it off to sea. And what more would go with it? She was afraid something of her maybe, of them, once the tension had dissolved. They had in a sense, the two of them, smoked it all, every grain of it, burned it all away.
A
S SHE CLIMBED
the path home, the well-tramped grass of her comings and goings, and turned out of the spruce grove and into the field, the house looked as it always had, from this distance, gazing seaward from the hill, stolid, weather-wracked. She wanted to keep this morning as it was, and the night before. She stopped. The spare-room window was raised high as she’d left it, open like a shout, the pale green curtain flapped crazily in its mouth. She studied the house as she might draw it again, its details, angles, shadings, what point of view it would offer now, what perspective, here on the outside as she was, at this spot. She took one slow step and then another. Her metal sculptures lay hidden some in the grass, taller now, Willard had not mown. One had come apart, just fallen in pieces. Oh that she’d let Murdock teach her how to weld. At the steps she pressed her damp towel to her face and then broke off two lemon-yellow lilies to sketch. By evening they’d be shut and spent, their petals mush.
The kitchen was tidied except for things set out for supper. Chanterelles she’d picked among the spruce above the road, her own gnarly-fingered carrots waiting to be rinsed of their clay, basmati rice she hoped he’d like, a sturdy yellow onion. In the fridge, the fish she’d bought in town yesterday, the chilled bottle of Australian chardonnay. She had prepared for a guest, yet it seemed more than that, as if she were putting the whole house in order. She couldn’t remember anymore exactly how it had looked the day she stepped into its cold front hall, or just where items had been in the kitchen, what she’d grabbed from cupboards. But bit by bit her mark was disappearing, she was gathering her belongings, an act that had seemed casual for a while, natural, as if it were happening unconsciously, guided by … what? By the season, by the changing light? She was not a cottage person, fleeing summer’s end. She didn’t
want
to leave, she didn’t want to be
made
to leave. Murdock had been here, had spent the night with her. She had to step back, slow down. The woman from away.