Nights in Rodanthe (20 page)

She stood without moving, taking it all in, before finally exhaling and putting down her suitcase. As she did, she saw the
note that Paul had written her, propped on the bureau. She reached for it and slowly sat on the edge of the bed. In the quiet
of the room where they’d loved each other, she read what he had penned the morning before.

When she was finished, Adrienne lowered the note and sat without moving, thinking of him as he’d written it. Then, after folding
it carefully, she put it it into her suitcase along with the conch. When Jean arrived a few hours later, Adrienne was leaning
against the railing on the back porch, looking toward the sky again.

Jean was her normal, exuberant self, happy to see Adrienne, happy to be back home, and talking incessantly about the wedding
and the old hotel in Savannah where she had stayed. Adrienne let Jean go on with her stories without interruption, and after
dinner, she told Jean that she wanted to take a walk on the beach. Thankfully, Jean passed on the invitation to go with her.

When she got back, Jean was unpacking in her room, and Adrienne made herself a cup of hot tea and went to sit near the fireplace.
As she was rocking, she heard Jean enter the kitchen.

“Where are you?” Jean called out.

“In here,” Adrienne answered.

Jean rounded the corner a moment later. “Did I hear the teakettle whistle?”

“I just made a cup.”

“Since when do you drink tea?”

Adrienne gave a short laugh but didn’t answer.

Jean settled in the rocker beside her. Outside, the moon was rising, hard and brilliant, making the sand glow with the color
of antique pots and pans.

“You’ve been kind of quiet tonight,” Jean said.

“Sorry.” Adrienne shrugged. “I’m just a little tired. I guess I’m just ready to go home.”

“I’m sure. I was counting the miles as soon as I left Savannah, but at least there wasn’t much traffic. Off-season, you know.”

Adrienne nodded.

Jean leaned back in her chair. “Did it go okay with Paul Flanner? I hope the storm didn’t ruin his stay.”

Hearing his name made Adrienne’s throat catch, but she tried to appear calm. “I don’t think the storm bothered him at all,”
she said.

“Tell me about him. From his voice, I got the impression that he was kind of stuffy.”

“No, not all. He was… nice.”

“Was it strange being alone with him?”

“No. Not once I got used to it.”

Jean waited to see if Adrienne would add anything else, but she didn’t.

“Well… good,” Jean continued. “And you didn’t have any trouble boarding up the house?”

“No.”

“I’m glad. I appreciate your doing that for me. I know you were hoping for a quiet weekend, but I guess fate wasn’t on your
side, huh?”

“I suppose not.”

Perhaps it was the way she said it that drew Jean’s glance, a curious expression on her face. Suddenly needing space, Adrienne
finished her tea.

“I hate to do this to you, Jean,” she said, trying her best to make her voice sound natural, “but I think I’ll call it a night.
I’m tired, and I’ve got a long drive tomorrow. I’m glad you had a good time at the wedding.”

Jean’s eyebrows rose slightly at her friend’s abrupt ending to the evening.

“Oh… well, thank you,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

Adrienne could feel Jean’s uncertain gaze on her, even as she made her way up the stairs. After unlocking the door to the
blue room, she slipped out of her clothes and crawled into the bed, naked and alone.

She could smell Paul on the pillow and on the sheets, and she absently traced her breast as she buried herself in the smell,
fighting sleep until she could do so no longer. When she rose the following morning, she started a pot of coffee and took
another walk on the beach.

She passed two other couples in the half hour she spent outside. A front had pushed warmer air over the island, and she knew
the day would lure even more people to the water’s edge.

Paul would have arrived at the clinic by now, and she wondered what it was like. She had an image in her mind, something she
might have seen on one of the nature channels—a series of hastily assembled buildings surrounded by an encroaching jungle,
ruts in a curving dirt road out front, exotic birds chirping in the background—but she doubted that she was right. She wondered
if he had talked to Mark yet and how the meeting had gone, and whether Paul, like she, was still reliving the weekend in his
mind.

The kitchen was empty when she got back. She could see the sugar bowl open by the coffeemaker with an empty cup beside it.
Upstairs, she could hear the faint sound of someone humming.

Adrienne followed the sound, and when she reached the second floor, she could see the door to the blue room cracked open.
Adrienne drew nearer, pushing the door open farther, and saw Jean bending over, tucking in the final corner of a fresh sheet.
The old linens, the linen that had once wrapped her and Paul together, had been bundled and tossed on the floor.

Adrienne stared at the sheets, knowing it was ridiculous to be upset but suddenly realizing it would be at least a year until
she smelled Paul Flanner again. She inhaled raggedly, trying to stifle a cry.

Jean turned in surprise at the sound, her eyes wide.

“Adrienne?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

But Adrienne couldn’t answer. All she could do was bring her hands to her face, aware that from this point on, she would be
marking the days on the calendar until Paul returned.

“Paul,” Adrienne answered her daughter, “is in Ecuador.” Her voice, she noted, was surprisingly steady.

“Ecuador,” Amanda repeated. Her fingers tapped the table as she stared at her mother. “Why didn’t he come back?”

“He couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

Instead of answering, Adrienne lifted the lid of the stationery box. From inside, she pulled out a piece of paper that looked
to Amanda as if it had been torn from a student’s notebook. Folded over, it had yellowed with age. Amanda saw her mother’s
name written across the front.

“Before I tell you,” Adrienne went on, “I want to answer your other question.”

“What other question?”

Adrienne smiled. “You asked whether I was sure that Paul loved me.” She slid the piece of paper across the table to her daughter.
“This is the note he wrote to me on the day that he left.”

Amanda hesitated before taking it, then slowly unfolded the paper. With her mother sitting across from her, she began to read.

Dear Adrienne,

You weren’t beside me when I woke this morning, and though I know why you left, I wish you hadn’t. I know that’s selfish of
me, but I suppose that’s one of the traits that’s stayed with me, the one constant in my life.

If you’re reading this, it means I’ve left. When I’m finished writing, I’m going to go downstairs and ask to stay with you
longer, but I’m under no illusions as to what you’re going to say to me.

This isn’t a good-bye, and I don’t want you to think for a moment that it’s the reason for this letter. Rather, I’m going
to look at the year ahead as a chance to get to know you even better than I do. I’ve heard of people falling in love through
letters, and though we’re already there, it doesn’t mean our love can’t grow deeper, does it? I’d like to think it’s possible,
and if you want to know the truth, that conviction is the only thing I expect to help me make it through the next year without
you.

If I close my eyes, I can see you walking along the beach on our first night together. With lightning flickering on your face,
you were absolutely beautiful, and I think that’s part of the reason I was able to open up to you in a way I never had with
anyone else. But it wasn’t just your beauty that moved me. It was everything you are—your courage and your passion, the commonsense
wisdom with which you view the world. I think I sensed these things about you the first time we had coffee, and if anything,
the more I got to know you, the more I realized how much I’d missed these qualities in my own life. You are a rare find, Adrienne,
and I’m a lucky man for having had the chance to come to know you.

I hope that you’re doing okay. As I write this letter, I know that I’m not. Saying good-bye to you today is the hardest thing
I’ll ever have to do, and when I get back, I can honestly swear that I’ll never do it again. I love you now for what we’ve
already shared, and I love you now in anticipation of all that’s to come. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
I miss you already, but I’m sure in my heart that you’ll be with me always. In the few days I spent with you, you became my
dream.

Paul

The year following Paul’s departure was unlike any year in Adrienne’s life. On the surface, things went on as usual. She was
active in her children’s lives, she visited with her father once a day, she worked at the library as she always had. But she
carried with her a new zest, fueled by the secret she kept inside, and the change in her attitude wasn’t lost on people around
her. She smiled more, they sometimes commented, and even her children occasionally noticed that she took walks after dinner
or spent an hour now and then lingering in the tub, ignoring the mayhem around her.

She thought of Paul always in those moments, but his image was most real whenever she saw the mail truck coming up the road,
stopping and starting with each delivery on the route.

The mail usually arrived between ten and eleven in the morning, and Adrienne would stand by the window, watching as the truck
paused in front of her house. Once it was gone, she would walk to the box and sort through the bundle, looking for the telltale
signs of his letters: the beige airmail envelopes he favored, postage stamps that depicted a world she knew nothing about,
his name scrawled in the upper-left-hand corner.

When his first letter arrived, she read it on the back porch. As soon as she was finished, she started from the beginning
and read it a second time more slowly, pausing and lingering over his words. She did the same with each subsequent letter,
and as they began to arrive regularly, she realized that the message in Paul’s note had been true. Though it wasn’t as gratifying
as seeing him or feeling his arms around her, the passion in his words somehow made the distance between them seem that much
less.

She loved to imagine how he looked as he wrote the letters. She pictured him at a battered desk, a single bulb illuminating
the weary expression on his face. She wondered if he wrote quickly, the words flowing uninterrupted, or whether he would stop
now and then to stare into space, collecting his thoughts. Sometimes her images took one form; with the next letter they might
take another, depending on what he’d written, and Adrienne would close her eyes as she held it, trying to divine his spirit.

She wrote to him as well, answering questions that he’d asked and telling him what was going on in her life. On those days,
she could almost see him beside her; if the breeze moved her hair, it was as if Paul were gently running a finger over her
skin; if she heard the faint ticking of a clock, it was the sound of Paul’s heart as she rested her head on his chest. But
when she set the pen down, her thoughts always returned to their final moments together, holding each other on the graveled
drive, the soft brush of his lips, the promise of a single year apart, then a lifetime together.

Paul also called every so often, when he had an opportunity to head into the city, and hearing the tenderness in his voice
always made her throat constrict. So did the sound of his laughter or the ache in his tone as he told her how much he missed
her. He called during the day, when the kids were at school, and whenever she heard the phone ringing, she found herself pausing
before she answered it, hoping it was Paul. The conversations didn’t last long, usually less than twenty minutes, but coupled
with the letters, it was enough to get her through the next few months.

At the library, she began photocopying pages from a variety of books on Ecuador, everything from geography to history, anything
that caught her eye. Once, when one of the travel magazines did a piece on the culture there, she bought the magazine and
sat for hours studying the pictures and practically memorizing the article, trying to learn as much as she could about the
people he was working with. Sometimes, despite herself, she wondered whether any of the women there ever looked at him with
the same desire she had.