Strawberries in the Sea (23 page)

Mark spoke her name, and she went to get her packages and one letter. When she saw the list of names austerely printed on the flap of the envelope, she felt the seismic shock of her two worlds colliding.

She walked outside, seeing nothing or no one on the way. Busy with their own mail, the others seemed not to notice a strangeness about her.

“You all right?” Jamie startled her. She hadn't heard him coming through from the shed. “You're feather-white.”

“I'm all right.” She crushed the envelope in her hand and started to walk away from him. “It's nothing.”

“It's something,” he said grimly. “What in hell's so bad about that envelope that you're ready to pass out even before you open it?”

“I never passed out in my life.” But she had neither the energy nor the inclination to snap at him. “It's from my lawyer. It has to be about the divorce.”

“Oh!” At once he was cheerful. “Now you can get it over with. About time, isn't it?”

“I suppose,” she said, artificially vague. “I'd better go home and read it.” Maybe Con had changed his mind.

“I'll see you later, then,” Jamie said, but she heard him as if from a distance, and didn't answer.

Young Mr. Chatham wrote that her divorce was scheduled for next Monday. He requested that she and her witnesses come to see him at two on this Thursday afternoon, if possible. She took aspirin with hot tea and tried to pin her erratic thoughts down to practical considerations. She should haul and double-bait her traps before she left on the mailboat Wednesday; she wouldn't take a chance on going ashore in
Sea Star
, for fear of Con seizing the boat. She would have to get in touch with Jude and Leona the instant she got in, she would have to go over her clothes. And she should make a list of what she wanted to bring back with her. When she thought of returning, the pressure of the squeeze between the two worlds loosened until she could breathe better.

But she couldn't stand the house, and she couldn't go out in this fog and wind to tend to her gear. She went along the dripping path to Barque Cove, remembering how she had come out there her first night and stood in the dark and the fog in total desolation. It came back to her now, as bitter as it had been then. Nothing in between had diluted it to a tolerable mixture.

Jamie found her hunched on the old log at the brow of the beach, her face and hair wet with fog, her sweater misted with it. Water brown and white with rockweed and foam swirled noisily a few yards from her soaking sneakers. Jamie sat down beside her and said severely, “You know it's almost two o'clock? And you never had any dinner, did you? I've been in the house and there weren't any dirty dishes. Look, you wanted this divorce, didn't you? To get rid of the bastard once and for all and start living your own life? So what are you sitting here for, all bunched up like a broody hen?”

“I'm worrying about dressing up for court,” she said. “Wearing a girdle, if I have to tell you the indelicate facts to shut you up.”

“You don't need a girdle. How many pounds have you dropped since you came out here in June?”

“About eighteen,” she said with a faint stir of satisfaction. Such vanity seemed indecent when you were about to attend your own funeral. But you might as well get something out of it. . . .
She looked real handsome. They did a good job on her
.

“Come on,” Jamie urged. “Let's get you something to eat and then go down to the Eastern End.”

She'd forgotten all about his mother's invitation. I can't, she protested silently. I just can't. “
Let's?
I thought it was a hen party.”

“I just decided to go. I may buy some traps from Uncle Steve. Come on.” He put an arm around her and gave her a boost. “Or by God I'll stay right here and stare at you all afternoon.”

He was capable of it, so she got up. “All right, I'll do it to get rid of you.”

When she came downstairs in dry clothes, he had water hot for tea and wanted to fry eggs for her. She refused that and made a peanut butter sandwich.

“You look good,” Jamie told her. “The fog makes your hair curl. My mother said today that she considered you a damn good-looking woman.”

“Did she say
damn?
”

“Nope.”

Joanna didn't know that Rosa was disturbed about anything, which made it easier to hide the fact. At the Eastern End Jamie left the women and went down to the fishhouse where his uncle and his helper Willy were working. The children were in and out of the house with two dogs, and there were a cat and kittens behind the kitchen stove, so there was never any time for Rosa to be ambushed by her own thoughts. By the time the men came up from the shore, and Willy's wife came across the yard from her house, Rosa felt almost peaceful for the first time since the letter had come. She was hungry; her mouth watered for the Scotch scones with honey or home-made jam. She had never tasted such wonderful tea. Deliberately she recollected the escape from the breakers and thought, No matter what, life is best.

After all, the island had done what she had wanted it to do; the divorce was only an interruption. When she came back, she would pick up her new existence on the other side of the interruption.

She felt eyes on her, willing her to look up and around. Jamie's eyes, across the kitchen table, penetrating in their determination to read, to
know
. Con never tried to see that deep; he used his eyes as magic or a weapon. She gave Jamie a small one-sided grimace, almost a wink, and his face smoothed out unconsciously into relief and pleasure.

For the rest of the day she kept a truce with herself. She went to bed before dark, afraid that Jamie would come up and one way or another the fragile armistice would be broken. Sympathy would be deadly at this point.

He did come, and knocked softly. After a moment or two, he went away. She read a spy story that meant nothing to her, tried a Gothic and threw it across the room, blew out the lamp and lay awake. It was a terrible night, with a graveyard hush after the wind dropped. The fog lifted, so she didn't even have the horn at the Rock for company. She went over the whole thing with Phyllis and Con from the first, she composed long, exhausting, pointless conversations with them both, and it was all rather like being lost on a desert and scorched beyond the relief of tears. She didn't fall asleep till nearly daylight, and was awakened around seven by the Percy boys having a fight between the houses.

Her clothes felt damp, she shivered at their clammy touch, but didn't bother to build a fire this morning; she warmed herself by the open gas oven while she drank several cups of coffee. When she went out to haul everybody else had gone, so there was no need to dispense sunny greetings here and there.

Being aboard the boat did nothing for her. The best one could say for the day was that it wasn't windy, rainy, or foggy. But its very calm was enervating, the flattened sea was a sad gray, the wood black against a dead-white sky, and even the rocks looked bleached to an ugly pallor. Rosa was cold as she hauled her traps and baited them, but the chill seemed to come from inside her, and spread numbingly outward into her limbs. Even if the sun had been shining she would have been cold.

She put extra bait on her traps to take them through the next week. Because she was late getting out, she didn't meet anyone or even come within signaling distance as she usually did, and that suited her. Once she saw Jamie well outside Goose Cove Ledge, alongside his friend Matt Fennell. She hoped they'd go seining again tonight, to keep Jamie away.

When she got back to the wharf a lobster smack was tied up beside the car. She recognized her, an old-timer in the bay exotically called
Zuleika
. The skipper had been a friend of her father's, and he was a Birch Harbor man, so he would know all about Con. She swerved toward her own wharf, and then decided that if she got rid of her lobsters now she could go home and burrow in like a woodchuck in her den and perhaps get this rotten freeze out of her belly if she had to drink up Edwin's liquor to do it. She'd found the rest of the Jim Beam under the sink; it gleamed now like a lighthouse in blackest night.

She eased
Sea Star
in to the car, bracing herself to be True McKinnon's robust tomboy daughter. But it wasn't Aldric Thomson with Mark after all. The new captain was a young man with brawny shoulders and a broad fresh-colored face, constantly and lazily smiling. His thick dark sideburns and the hair curling out from under his cap in the back made him look old-fashioned, like a steamboat captain. His deckhand and engineer was a chubby boy with even longer hair, and immense sunglasses in spite of the gray day.

Rosa realized when Mark introduced them that her name meant nothing to either man. The captain showed an indulgent and patronizing interest in her and the boat, and made the usual jokes about Woman's Lib. It was easy enough to take; anything was easy from someone who didn't know about Con. Watching Mark weigh her crate, she heard the engineer say something about taking his wife to the movies that night, and she said to the captain, “Are you going to Limerock from here?”

“Straight as a gull flies. Want to go?”

“Yes,” she said, and he laughed with surprise.

“Can you be ready in”—he looked at his watch—“half, three-quarters of an hour?”

“You'd better believe it.” She cast off the line that held her to the car.

“Here, don't forget your money!” Mark passed her some bills and the slip across the washboard.

“Somebody must be waiting on the pier for her,” said the captain.

“Ayuh, and he's just crazy about me in oilpants,” said Rosa. “Really turns him on.”

She left them laughing and went across the harbor to her mooring. When she walked up by the Binnacle, Maggie came out. “Come on in and have a mug-up with Kathy and me. We're going to read the tea leaves. We've got to do something desprit on a day like this.”

Kathy, Terence Campion's wife, called from inside the screen door, “Come on and get your fortune told, special bargain rates on Tuesdays.”

“Gosh, I hate to miss that,” Rosa said, “but I'm going in on the smack.”

“Oh
boy!
” said Kathy. “If I didn't have kids I'd run off myself, and go to the movies, eat a pizza, and come out on the mail boat tomorrow.”

“Have a good time, Rosa,” Maggie said, knowing nothing of the divorce.

Rosa washed up at the sink and changed into fresh clothes. She packed a bag, checked the gas stove to be sure everything was off, and took her list from under the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. As
Zuleika
cleared the harbor, with a couple of goodbye toots of the whistle, Rosa remembered that she hadn't locked any doors. It didn't matter; no doors, locked or unlocked, had kept her from losing what she had already lost. Besides, she cared only about her guitar out of all the things in the house, and the island wasn't a thieving light-fingered place.

She could have left a note for Jamie, though. She was ashamed at not having thought of it or of him either. But this all slipped rapidly through her mind like the foam on
Zuleika
's bow wave, lost forever in the boat's wake. She stood bundled in her loden coat with her back braced against the wheelhouse and watched the steel-blue waves of the mainland hills come inexorably toward her.

At first the skipper turned the wheel over to the engineer, and stayed on deck trying to make conversation with her. She should have been flattered, she thought dryly; but she felt unable to make any sort of response, let alone the kind he expected. She told him she didn't feel well, that was why she was going ashore.

“If you want to lie down, there's bunks up in the
foke
and the blankets are passably clean,” he said. He was a good loser, though he must have had so many women ashore that this encounter wouldn't even count as a loss.

“Thanks, but I need the air,” she said. “I'm afraid I'll get seasick.”

He went back to the wheel, and the engineer came out with a couple of life jackets for her to sit on. She thanked him, he disappeared down the companionway, and then rose again silently holding up a steaming mug. It seemed rude to refuse all their attentions, and maybe if she accepted one they'd leave off. She took the mug of coffee, which was too sweet and had too much milk in it, but she nodded and smiled at the boy, who then vanished for quite some time.

From the wheelhouse behind her she could hear the crackle of voices from the radio transmitter. Now and then the skipper talked with another boat. They all sounded so carefree, with their jokes and quips; she felt envy like a grinding stomachache, and it was no good telling herself that they had their problems. Never mind what anyone else had or didn't have, for her there could be no agony, not even in a physical sense, worse than losing Con.

A
t the lobster company wharf in Limerock the skipper told her he'd be glad to drive her down to Seal Point if she wanted to wait until the lobsters were unloaded. His persistency was a compliment, and briefly she considered the effect on Seal Point's more malicious gossipers if she were seen driving through the village in an Italian sports car. But she was tempted for only a moment, then shook her head.

“I've got to get home just as fast as possible,” she said. She remembered she wasn't supposed to be feeling well. “Maybe I can get an appointment this afternoon,” she added. He was charmingly sympathetic and called a taxi for her from the office.

In the gray day and the thick dark shade of the maples, her house looked gloomy and cold. One of Leona's boys had been mowing the lawn; this mainland grass seemed almost too rich and thick after the wind-burned turf of the island slopes. The delphiniums were blooming all for themselves, the peonies had gone by. The catbirds were noisy and exuberant all about the place.

Inside, the house felt as chilly as it had looked from the outside, in spite of the thermostat having been left at sixty. She turned it up, wiped a film of dust out of the bathtub, and ran a hot bath. She soaked in it for a long time. Sometimes the telephone rang but it was never her ring, because nobody knew she was here yet. The taxi driver had taken the back way into town, and she had the same expansive sense of invisibility as when she ran away from here in the fog.