When we started up the hill to the inn, we again became silent. The Rover slowed down. Matt had turned on the floodlights. They illuminated the drive and the inn’s snowy lawn.
“Do or die,” Margo said, and Lily shot her a sharp look.
We stood together on the sidewalk. Margo, Lily, and I linked arms, with Lily in the middle, forming a cortege according to age and height. It has always seemed appropriate that I, the oldest, am also the tallest. We marched through the snow. Henk stood at the door. The light shined on his back; his face was shadowed. I painted it with anger. The door opened and Henk, coatless, stepped out.
“
Liebchen
,” he said sternly, “we have been waiting to decorate the tree.” I felt shocked to see his eyes look so sad.
Margo and I both started to take the blame, to explain all about tampons, when suddenly Sam in his ski jacket rushed around Henk. He grabbed me by the arm. We ran into the yard, past the floodlights, gathering speed, down the narrow path between the leafless gorse bushes. Briars snagged our trousers. The inn behind us glowed, but the path was black. We knew we had hit the beach when we felt soft sand yield beneath our snow boots. Taking a sharp right, we ran until we reached the tidal pools, dizzy with lungs full of winter air. Shapes flew through the sky. They were patches of cloud, spots before our reeling eyes, ghosts of our loved ones, the aurora borealis. Sam’s eyes were smiling, golden. He wrapped his arms around me, put his lips on mine. We were breathless from running. He held me so close. The shapes kept moving.
Chapter 21
T
he next day was brilliantly sunny and frigid. Static tingled through my hair and along the fibers of my wool sweater, making me itch and shake my head. Sam and Matt went outside, to shovel all paths on the inn’s property. I reclined on a couch in the living room, changing position constantly and wishing I had something good to read. Lily and Margo played checkers on a low wicker table; Lily, unable to bend, directed Margo which of her checkers she wished moved when it couldn’t be easily reached. Henk pretended to read a medical journal while watching Lily. My mother dozed in the armchair beside me, a blanket across her legs, a mystery open on her lap.
As if the static were invading my body, I felt anxious, though I couldn’t think why. All of my loved ones were near. I could hear Sam’s shovel scraping the pavement outside. Since Lily’s decision to follow her instincts and take the sea cruise with us last night, I could even, by a generous stretch of the imagination, feel benevolent toward Henk. Right now he was regarding Lily with an expression of pained adoration.
My mother wakened suddenly, startled but smiling. “What a dream!” she said to me.
I smiled, encouraging her to tell it.
“It was about the tower in this inn—where you and Sam sleep. Only in the dream it was a library, and your father was there, dressed in his Glen plaid suit—you know, the one from the Collins Shop—waiting for you to return your overdue books.”
“How odd!” I said, but it was only four minutes before I found the opportunity to excuse myself and fly up the ladder-stairs.
The turret room was empty, ice-cold in spite of the sun streaming through the windows. My heart crashed. I had been positive my father would be here; ever since last summer I had thought he would appear to me in the turret. Shivering, I stood in a patch of sun. Down below I could see Matt, foreshortened by his thick clothes and my angle of vision, rolling a ball of snow, building it into a snowman. Sam was nowhere in sight. Pressing my face to the cold pane, I strained for a glimpse of him.
Suddenly a cloud covered the sun. I peered at it, a cumulous cloud, impossibly high and fluffy, alone in the sky. It was a summer cloud; it had no place in the December weather pattern. I stared at it, silhouetted against the sun. A bird perched on its edge. A seagull, perhaps, flapping its wings. Or a wisp of vapor, breaking free. Or a figure gesturing wildly. I squinted, then tore downstairs for the binoculars.
Fortunately they stood on a bookshelf at the foot of the stairs. I avoided everyone. Tearing back to the turret room, I had the glasses pressed against my eyes even before I reached the window. There, on the cloud’s rim, stood my father in his Glen plaid suit, waving. Throwing open a window, I waved like a maniac. My breath came in gasps. For so long, since my transatlantic flight, I had saved up things to tell him, questions to ask. Trying to shout, I croaked instead. The glasses wavered, then found him again. He was pointing deliberately at his mouth, as if he wanted me to read his lips. Panic boiled inside me. What could this mean? Did he actually expect me to lip-read? This visit, like the last, was celestial. Had he become permanently skybound?
I stared through the binoculars. He held a navy blue wool coat with a raccoon collar, a far cry from his usual Chesterfield, over one arm. He gestured at his watch, then pointed again to his mouth.
“Get
down
here, goddamn it!” I yelled.
“I can’t,” my father said quite clearly.
How bizarre! I thought, watching his lips and hearing his voice. “Can you hear me?” I mouthed.
“Speak up, sweetheart—I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
I spoke in a loud voice, leaning out the window. “Dad, are you coming to Margo’s wedding? Is that what you want to tell me?”
“No, I’m not. I’m not able. This is my cloud. What I want to say—”
“Your
cloud
?” I choked. “Dad, you’re not stuck on that cloud alone—forever, are you?”
He grinned and shook his head. I heard him chuckle and felt glad to see he had had his teeth fixed. “Now listen, because we don’t have long. It’s getting harder to reach you, my angel. I must leave; I know you’re happy.”
“Oh, I am. I love Sam, Dad.”
“I know that. And Margo loves Matt, although I never thought she’d fall for a guy with a beard. I’m glad he shaved it.”
“What about Lily? Is she happy?”
“Well, she’s getting happier. Finding her way, just as we all do.” He chuckled again, reaching up to touch the rim of his left ear, the way he always did. I chuckled along with him. “Henk is okay, Una. A real horse’s ass, but he means well. He’s insecure.”
Then I did scream. “If I hear that once more…” I shouted.
“But you will hear it. Because he is, and he needs your patience. Your
love
, in fact, Una,” he said sternly. “Make him part of the family. All right? Will you?”
“All right,” I said sullenly, thinking my father had a hell of a nerve ordering me to like a man he had never even met.
We’ll see
, I promised myself.
“It will be easier than you think,” he said, reading my mind.
Watching him grin on his cloud, though, made me smile back. “Dad, you seem happier,” I said finally.
“Well, I am.”
“Did you come into Mom’s dream? Is that how you reached me this time?”
He hesitated. “Yes, and it wasn’t fair.” He shook his head, as if trying to dispel a painful thought. “It wasn’t right. She still…loves me too much. The way I love her. Troubled, unfinished business, Una. I can’t get her hopes up. I’m not coming back.”
“Never?”
“Not for a long time. But I’ll always know. What you’re doing, whether you’re happy.”
“I love you, Dad!” I called out the open window.
“I love you, sweetheart!” he called. “Now look away, before I drift out of sight. Make yourself busy, so you don’t see me go.”
I studied his face through the binoculars. Oddly, it was getting younger. The skinny cheeks, the curly hair (now browner than it had been before he died), the lively eyes. It bore a striking resemblance to the Air Force photos of young James Cavan. His grin was wide, steady. “Remember!” he called.
“What?” I asked.
“Everything! Now go get busy.”
I waved without seeing, closed the window, and walked to the door. Sam was rushing up the stairs. We hugged tightly, and although he had just come in from outdoors, I was colder than he.
“Put on a jacket,” he said. “We’ll take a walk.”
When we stepped outside the sky was sparkling, and I felt sad to see that it was cloudless.
Walking east toward the promontory, we watched glistening black cormorants drying their wings on the rocks. The sun had melted all snow from the beach, though it clung to the hillside and lawns along the bluff. Sam wore a heavy winter sweater and leather ski mittens. His windburned face gleamed. I brushed his red cheek with the back of my hand. Removing one mitten, he clasped my hand and put both our hands into the pocket of my ski jacket.
“Matt is excited. He considers this his high point as an innkeeper—entertaining at his own wedding,” Sam said, squinting into the sun. “This sky—it reminds me of summer.”
“Yes, it does. Me too.”
“We’re on the same wavelength.” He squeezed my hand. Glare ice frosted the promontory’s rocks and seaweed. The tide was low.
“I’d fall for sure today,” I said, gesturing toward the tidal pool where I had slipped last September.
Sam stopped abruptly, then walked away from the water, toward the brush bordering the sand, pulling me along. From a bayberry bush, wind-whipped and denuded of leaves, he pulled two rolled blankets.
“I took a break from shoveling and hid these here,” he said. “Somehow I thought we’d need a break from the others. Though the visit is going very smoothly.”
We shook out one blanket, laid it quickly on the sand, then stretched out together and pulled the second blanket around us.
“You’re fabulous to think of this,” I said, my teeth chattering as my body, warm from the brisk walk, became as one with the frozen beach. But presently, pressing against me, Sam’s body heat permeated our myriad layers of cotton, wool, and feathers. He gave me a long, warm kiss.
“Now you can tell me,” he said.
“Tell you what?” My jaw was growing rigid again with the effort of not chattering.
“Why you were yelling out the window of our room. I could hear you all the way down the beach—I ran back to the inn, and that’s when I met you on the stairs.”
How could I tell him that I had been having a conversation, my last for a long time, with my father, long dead? For that matter, why didn’t I feel sadder about that fact? Subdued, perhaps, but content; he had promised to watch over me forever, and perhaps no daughter could ask for more than that. I studied the bright flecks in Sam’s eyes and thought of gold dust swirling in a green torrent. His eyes were smiling, waiting.
“I was talking to my father,” I said.
“But your father is—”
“Dead.” Oh, how I hated the word! His body was dead, but now he was an angel. I wanted to explain it to Sam. “Can you understand that I talked to him? That I looked out the window and saw him in the sky?”
Sam hesitated, then laughed. “Maybe I can. If my parents died I might look for them in the sky. Did you really see him?”
“I swear it, Sam. And it wasn’t the first time, either.”
Sam laughed loudly. He pulled me so close my lips were against his neck. His dark hair contrasted startlingly with his creamy white sweater. Our legs entwined, and Sam still laughed.
“I believe you, Una,” he said, and we laughed together for a while, lying under the blanket. Looking past his shoulder, I watched the tide rising, waves licking the rocks. I saw the black zone of shore glistening under ice, like onyx, like moonlight shining on a bottomless black lake.
“You love your father too much to let him go,” he said finally.
“That’s one way of explaining it. Would you still believe me if I told you that it’s more complicated than that?”
“You’ve come to the right man—I’ve made a career out of studying seaweed. Do most people consider seaweed complicated? We scientists keep very open minds.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“My love,” he said before kissing me. His lips tasted warm and salty and made me think of last September. We lay on a winter beach beneath a summer sky. Nestled together, we were perfectly warm now. We went on and on, and the seasons whirled.
“This is it,” Sam said. When I opened my eyes, his were open, watching me. The sky was dazzling, cloudless.
This is it: I knew what he meant. This moment, lying together on the sand, was a moment of truth. Years later we would remember it absolutely. Clear and fair, like the first line in an architect’s design, this moment would serve as a cornerstone. I recognized it for what it was because I had known others before. They have perfect clarity. Nothing occurs to mark the passage of time; I looked around and saw no ships trailing smoke across the horizon, no clouds skidding through the sky, nothing growing closer or more distant to show the seconds ticking by. The day held still. I knew what I had to do.
“Did you ever think we’d be spending Christmas together in the turret room?” I asked.
Sam hesitated. “I can’t honestly say I considered it impossible.”
“Really?” I asked, thrown off guard. “Tell me why.”
“I trust my instincts. I remember spending time with you last September, wanting to know everything about you right from the start. You talked about your sisters in a way that seemed fierce, and it made me jealous. To be loved that way—”
“But I
do
love you that way,” I said, frowning at the way his eyes looked hard and worried. “In fact, I love you more than anything.”
Sam relaxed his eyes and hugged me hard. I thought about what I had just said, about loving him more than anything. That meant more than Margo and Lily; until Sam, that concept had been impossible. I thought of my sisters and their changes, major changes like marrying and having a baby, and I loved them more than ever. Then I thought of my mother and of the tender way my father had spoken about her, and I felt overwhelmed. Thinking about love in quantities too great to measure or apportion seemed talismanic, a sign that I was right in thinking of the interlude as a moment of truth. I glanced around, to make sure time was holding steady. A tanker, or perhaps a freighter, was coming into view near Block Island. But it appeared stationary, far enough away to preserve the illusion.
“Sam,” I said, looking straight at him. “Will you marry me?”
He stared back without flinching, and I slowly turned ice-cold. I believe I felt drops of sweat spring from my forehead and instantly freeze. Then I saw him start to smile, a smile that changed to a grin: the best grin I have ever seen. He said nothing. Instead he kissed me.
He wanted the kiss to go on; I could tell by the way his body pressed close to mine, the way his hand worked through my hair to squeeze my neck. I felt colder than ever, and I began to tremble. Was this kiss a way for him to gather his thoughts, to buy some time before declining? I pulled back.
“Sam,” I said, trying to quell the panic. “
Will
you marry me?”
“Yes, Una,” he said, grinning again. “I will marry you. This is great—you’re really proposing to me?” He looked delighted and amused.
“I really am,” I said solemnly, quietly.
“I’ve had this feeling that we were taking it for granted, the future and everything. I guess that stems from the fact that I can’t imagine being without you. Can’t imagine it.” Still beaming, he shook his head. Sun struck his wavy hair, turning parts of it golden.
“Taking it for granted? You mean you didn’t consider a proposal necessary?” I asked.
I must have been frowning because Sam’s finger traced my lips until I started to laugh. “Here I am,” I said, “feeling embarrassed about proposing to a man who has just accepted.”
“You have a way of homing in on the worst parts,” he said fondly. “When I said I take our future for granted, you should have listened to the next part: I can’t imagine being without you.”