Кристина Клайн - A Piece of the World

Walton is. Engaged. To be. Married. Am I missing something? Engaged to be married to me? I look at her blankly.

Walton is engaged to be married.

To someone else.

In all the ways I’ve thought about his silence, considered its sources, this possibility never occurred to me. But why not? It makes the most logical sense. He stopped writing abruptly. Of course—of course—he met someone else.

I feel as if I am emptied out, filled with thick, heavy air. I can’t think or see; it fills me to my eyes. I try to remember what Walton looks like. A straw boater with a black grosgrain ribbon. A linen jacket. Soft girlish hands. But I can’t envision his face.

“Christina? Are you all right?” Ramona’s face is stretched into a ghastly expression. I look into her eyes. It’s as if I’m watching her through a scrim.

“Why.” A tiny word, one syllable, not even a question.

She sighs. “I’ve asked myself a million times, and Walton too; I’ve begged him for an answer that makes sense. I don’t even know if he knows, except . . .” Her voice trails off.

“Except . . .”

“Except.” She twists in her chair. “The distance. And his parents.”

“His parents.”

“He told you, he said. That they—disapproved.”

“He didn’t say that.”

“He didn’t?”

Leaning back in the chair, I close my eyes. Maybe he did.

“His mother is an awful woman. A striver. She wanted—wants—a certain kind of life for her golden boy. And she kept bringing around the daughter of a friend, a girl at Smith, and I just think after a while he thought, what’s the use, I can’t fight it anymore; the easiest thing is to give in.”

“The easiest thing,” I echo.

“I suppose she’s not a bad sort, really. She’s all right.” Ramona shrugs. “Though of course I never said that to him; I only told him how vexed I was, how disappointed. On your behalf.”

By the way she’s telling me this I can see that she has spent time with this woman, that they have all been out together. “What is her name.”

“Marilyn. Marilyn Wales.”

I contemplate this for a moment. A real person, with a name. “He never even . . . wrote to explain.”

“I know. It makes me so angry. We argued about it. I told him it was unconscionably rude. He said he couldn’t do it; he begged me to write to you myself, to tell you, and honestly I refused.”

I feel as if I’m being whipped, every word a lash. “You knew I was waiting,” I say slowly, my voice rising, “and you wouldn’t put me out of my misery?”

“Christina?” Mother calls from upstairs. “Everything all right?”

I look steadily at Ramona and she looks back, her eyes filling with tears. “I am so sorry,” she says.

“Everything is fine, Mother,” I call back.

“Who’s there?”

“Ramona Carle.”

My mother is silent.

“He didn’t deserve you,” Ramona whispers.

I shake my head.

“Yes, he’s smart, and he can be charming, but quite honestly he is a weak man. I see that now.”

“Stop,” I say. “Just stop.”

Leaning forward in the rocker, Ramona says, “Christina, listen to me. There will be other fish in the sea.”

“No, there won’t.”

“There will. We’ll find you a great catch.”

“I have hung up my rod,” I say.

This seems to break the tension. Ramona smiles. (It was hard for her to be this serious! She isn’t constitutionally cut out for it.) “For now. There’ll be more expeditions.”

“Not in this leaky boat.”

She laughs a little. “You are as stubborn as a Maine coon, Christina Olson.”

“Maybe so,” I tell her. “Maybe I am.”

WHEN I GO to bed, I never want to get up. There’s an ache deep in my bones that won’t go away; I jolt awake in the night sobbing in pain. Nothing will ever get better. It will only get worse. I pull the blue wool blanket Papa made tighter around me and finally drift to sleep. When I wake several hours later in the astringent light of morning, I bury my face in my pillow.

Al comes into my room. I can hear him, see him, though my eyes are shut and I pretend to be asleep. “Christina,” he says softly.

I don’t answer.

“I found some bread and jam for breakfast. Sam and Fred are in the barn. I’ll bring eggs to Mother and Papa when chores are finished.”

I sigh, tacit acknowledgment that I hear him.

Behind my eyelashes I see him look down, hands on hips. “Are you sick?”

“Yes.”

“Do you need a doctor?”

“No.” I open my eyes, but I can’t rouse myself to an expression. He looks back at me steadily. I don’t remember ever holding his gaze like this.

“I would like to kill him,” he says. “I really would.”

My bed feels like a shallow grave.

I TAKE THE stack of letters from Walton, tied with their pale pink ribbon, and place them in a box. Part of me wants to set them on fire and watch them burn. But I can’t bring myself to do it.

At the top of the first flight of stairs is a small closet door on the side wall. When no one is around, I slide the box into a dark corner of the closet. I don’t want to see his letters. I just want proof that they exist.

IN TOWN NOBODY says a word about it, at least not to me. But I see the pity in their eyes. I hear the whispers: She was abandoned, you know. Their sympathy fills me with a shame so deep that I can understand why someone might sail off to a distant land, never to return to where he’s from.

GETTING READY FOR a late afternoon sail with my brothers on a warm June day, I tuck the shell Walton gave me into my pocket. On the sloop I stroke it with my fingers, probing its rough crevices and silky exterior. It’s the perfect weight and shape to nestle in my palm. Toward the end of the trip, as the sun dips in the sky, I move to the back of the small sailboat and sit alone, peering down at the scalloped water. How easy it would be to slip over the side and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Blackness, only blackness, and merciful unconsciousness. I taste the tears running down my face, salty sweet in my mouth. Before long, no doubt, my brothers will marry, my parents will weaken and die, and I will be alone in the house on the hill, with nothing to look forward to but the slow change of seasons, my own aging and infirmity, the house turning to dust.

Walton and I sat together at the back of the boat just like this. I adore you, he whispered in my ear. How devoted he was; he couldn’t get enough of me, loved only me. Only me. His solid shoulder against mine, his long finger pointing toward the sky, the constellations, all the names I learned so eagerly: Orion the Hunter, Cassiopeia, Hercules, Pegasus. I look up now at the darkening sky, as solid as slate. The stars are washed away, present only in memory.

Closing my eyes, I lean over the side, the salt spray on my face mingling with tears. I weigh the shell in my palm—this cameo shell that has no place with the others. A store-bought trinket with no history, no story. I knew, deep down, when he gave it to me that he didn’t understand anything about me. Why didn’t I recognize it as a warning?

I feel a hand on my arm and open my eyes. “Nice night, isn’t it,” Al says mildly. “Careful back here. It’s slippery.”

“I’m all right.”

He tightens his grip on my arm. “Come sit with me.”

“In a minute.”

“Did anyone ever tell you you’re as stubborn as a mule?”

I laugh a little. “Once or twice.”

We gaze out into the dusk. On the shore, faint lights glow in the windows of a faraway house. Our house. “I’ll stay here with you, then,” he says.