Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

“I’m sure.”

He had changed, Birdie thought. Either that or she was being duped. He had mellowed; he had loosened and lightened. And his hair! It was so long.

They climbed the stairs together. Birdie had consumed her usual glasses of wine, but because of Grant’s presence, she drank more-or because of his presence, it affected her differently. She felt tipsy, giddy, girlishly nervous like she hadn’t since those long-ago weekends in the Poconos when Grant used to visit her room in the middle of the night.

In the bedroom, she changed into her white cotton nightgown. She gave thought to changing behind the closed door of the bathroom, but that seemed ridiculous. Grant had been her husband for thirty years. He had seen her naked thousands upon thousands of times. And still, she felt self-conscious and shy, especially since she heard the rustlings of him changing on the other side of the room. When she was in her nightgown (it wasn’t exactly lingerie, but it was new that summer-bought for nights with Hank-and pretty and feminine) and he was in his pajamas (ones she had bought him at Brooks Brothers years earlier), they looked at each other and smiled. She was nervous!

“Here,” he said, beckoning. “Come sit with me on the bed.”

She obeyed, grateful for the directive. She sat on the bed and Grant sat next to her and the bed groaned and Birdie thought they might snap it in half. They had made love in these very same beds. Birdie remembered those occasions as ones of fulfilling a spousal duty; she remembered being worried that the children would hear or Bill and India would hear (because Birdie and Grant could certainly hear them) or her parents would hear. She remembered the acrobatics and flexibility required to copulate in these narrow beds. She wanted Grant to speak before she embarrassed herself.

He said, “I meant what I said about taking a five-year vacation. I’m retiring, Bird.”

She gasped. Men like Grant didn’t retire. They worked and worked until they had a massive coronary sitting at their desks. “When?”

“At the end of the year.”

She was tempted to express some skepticism; he wasn’t really retiring. He would say he was retiring, but he would still go in to the office each day to keep tabs on his clients and his cases.

“Honestly?” Birdie said. “I can’t believe it. I never thought you’d retire. I thought you’d die first.”

He said, “My heart’s not in it anymore. The fire has gone out.”

“Really?” Birdie said. She was tempted to ask where his heart was and what would restart the fire, aside from her flicking away her cigarette.

“Really,” he said. He turned her face and kissed her. He kissed her like some other man. God, it was weird-this was Grant, right?-and it was thrilling, too. They fell back on the bed and Birdie realized she was going to make love to her ex-husband and she nearly laughed at the amazing wonder of it. Grant!

Later, when it was over and she lay spent and light headed on the bed, and Grant was heavy and snoring on the other bed (sleeping together in the same bed had seemed unnecessary), Birdie wondered about other couples who had divorced and then remarried. Had they been drawn back to their marriages out of loneliness, because they could find nothing better? Had they been drawn back out of habit? Or had they been drawn together as if they were two new people with new things to discover and appreciate about each other?

As she fell asleep, Birdie prayed for the latter.

They had one full day left, and one half day. Normally, Birdie spent the last day packing up, cleaning, gathering laundry, and cooking strange meals with the odds and ends left in the fridge. But as Grant reminded her, a cleaning crew came in after they left, and if they ended up throwing away half a stick of butter, the world wouldn’t end. Grant wanted to make a few sandwiches, walk to North Pond, sit on the beach, swim, and do a little fishing. He wanted Birdie to come with him.

“And look,” he said, setting his BlackBerry on the counter, “I’m leaving my phone here.”

Birdie said, “What about Chess? And India? It’s our last day…” It was all well and fine for Grant to want a romantic day with Birdie alone, but she had come to the island for a reason, and that was to spend time with her daughters and her sister.

“We’ll all go,” Grant said.

Birdie made coffee and bacon and blueberry pancakes. Grant ate seconds, then thirds. He smacked his lips and said, “I’ve missed your cooking, Bird. I haven’t had a home-cooked meal since we split.”

Birdie tried to think of a response to that (she didn’t believe him), but before she could, Tate and Barrett walked into the kitchen. Birdie beamed. She had feared Tate wouldn’t come back, but of course, here she was. She wouldn’t miss their last day.

“Breakfast?” Birdie said.

“Starving,” Tate said.

Barrett dropped off the final bag of ice as well as the cleaning supplies Birdie had requested. “This is it,” he said. “The last drop-off.”

India descended the stairs. “I think I’m going to cry.”

“It must have been quite a month,” Grant said.

“Oh, it was,” Tate said.

“Can you come for dinner?” Birdie asked Barrett. “And bring the boys? Please?”

“And spend the night?” Tate said. “Please? The boys can sleep in the bunks.”

“The boys are with their other grandparents this weekend,” Barrett said. “But I’ll come for dinner. And that means I can spend the night. But I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

“Damn right you’ll sleep on the sofa,” Grant said.

“I want to sleep with Chess anyway,” Tate said. She misted up, and Birdie handed her a paper towel; they were all out of Kleenex. “I can’t believe this is over.”

They still had today. One last, brilliantly blue Tuckernuck day, which seemed incredibly precious. Birdie had let other days slip by carelessly, it seemed now. She hadn’t appreciated them enough; she hadn’t wrung the life out of each minute; she hadn’t lived as fully as she might have. So much time wasted longing for stupid old Hank!

She would not squander today! She made lunches for everyone and packed chips, drinks, plums, and cookies. They walked together along the trail to North Pond. It was a bright, hot day, though the air was pure and clean and decidedly less sticky than it had been, and Birdie thought that what she would miss the most when she was back on the mainland tomorrow was the sterling quality of this air, the absolute purity of it. She wondered if Grant could appreciate the unadulterated beauty of this island now that he wasn’t consumed with the SEC’s pending case against Mr. So-and-so. There were wild irises blooming and red-winged blackbirds and the pervasive scent of Rosa rugosa. Tomorrow, Birdie would be back on I-95 with the Cracker Barrels and the Olive Gardens and the Targets; even the rarefied acreage of the New Canaan Country Club and her favorite bistro and independent bookstore would seem like offensive, man-made artifice. Would she be able to bear leaving? She had no idea. It felt like this every time she left: like her heart was being ripped out.

They reached the pond and they set up camp: chairs set firmly in sand, towels spread, lunch cooler placed in the shade of the chairs. Grant had brought his fishing pole and he took Tate with him to the other side of the pond. India wanted to walk out to Bigelow Point; she couldn’t finish her book, she said, because she’d lost her reading glasses.

Birdie was aghast. “You lost Bill’s reading glasses?”

“Lost them,” India said. She seemed strangely unconcerned. The glasses she had treated like a pet-washing them with Windex and a paper towel each morning, keeping them around her neck at all times except when swimming and sleeping-were lost? “They might turn up, but I kind of doubt it.”