Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

He hummed to the snail. Ira had taught him this, down at Mother Rock — it drew the things out. Ira said Vera had taught him, and one of her brothers had taught her. (Who had taught the brother?) Albert guessed the snail might mistake the humming for water, or maybe the company of another snail, something, in any case, to see or do or eat, which is why, half a minute after he’d started humming, he stopped, feeling guilty. His growing sense was that promises were almost impossible to keep, even if you seemed to have kept them, because by the time the thing panned out, whatever you had imagined and wanted when you had made or received the promise had changed. He and Bea had done what they had said they would do, they had borne each other up, they had loved each other, if one was flexible with terminology. Their vows had served them, to a point. But the point was behind them now — they had outgrown the arrangement. Bea would not ask him to tell her about his lie. She had barely heard him. And so they had failed, in fact, to do what they had promised, which was, if you stripped it all down, yanked off the pretty shell, to protect each other from themselves.

“Let’s not talk about that anymore.”

She stood over him, her voice gentle. He patted the rock, realizing too late that he was growing cold. But Bea was warm from her brisk walk, and leaned into him, apologizing, so he leaned into her, fending off his chill.

“I’m going to find my own apartment,” he said.

Bea shrank. “Because I’m giving the girl money?”

“That has nothing to do with it. That’s your decision to make. But you won’t make it. You’ll bring her here. You’ll bring them all here.”

She was silent for a minute.

“But you don’t need your own apartment.”

“You’ve lived in a box,” he said. “I’m letting you out.”

“You can’t. You didn’t put me there.”

“But I can let you out. I’ll push, if I have to. Imagine a mother duck, shoving her young from the nest.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Imagine a man, then, pushing you out of a box.”

“You’re talking about yourself. Every time you say ‘you,’ you mean ‘I.’”

“I mean both of us, maybe.”

“I can’t keep the house myself. Where will I go?”

“You’re already here.”

She shrank further. It always surprised him, how well he knew her body though he had never seen it unclothed, how he could perceive the slightest shifts in her temperature or heart rate. He held her hand. “It’s not a tragedy, Bea, to do what you want to do. Even if it feels right — or easy, God forbid.”

She was silent for a while. “Ira won’t live forever.”

“And you can drive now,” he said encouragingly. “You can travel. I’ll travel with you.”

She sniffed softly, in a way he knew to be laughter. “You’ll travel with Mr. Knapp.”

“Do you know, Beatrice Haven Cohn, that in some parts of the world, twenty-seven is not so old?”

He’d forgotten the snail, tucked into his palm between their hands, but she took it from him now and chucked it into the water. They waited for the plonk. “So you’re not asking me.”

“No.”

“Will you go to Knapp’s tonight?”

“Probably.”

He followed her gaze across the harbor, to the lights of the town. She sat for a while, seeming to consider, then leaped to her feet. “Let’s get you back, then,” she said, and started to walk.

“Slow down,” he said. “You’ll twist an ankle.”

“Again, you’re worried about yourself. Enough. I’m hungry,” she added, with a bare little whimper that made him want to cry. But she slowed, and they walked home arm in arm, and after he had warmed soup for her, and toasted bread, and toasted more bread — he had never seen her eat so much — he went out again. It was later than he’d gone before, the guests gone home, and still, again, Lyman let him in.

If you flew above Essex Bay — thirty years later Josiah would do this, holding Susannah’s hand, bound for a month in Paris, astounded as the familiar curve of beach and dune and river came into view, the place they lived flattened into color, white and blue and green, the effect bizarrely tropical — you would have seen a rowboat and a swimmer charting a slow, steady course between the shore and Hog Island. This was the deal they had struck the night after Josiah thought she’d drowned. He’d taken her to their bed, and made love to her, and it was good, and afterward, he said, “I’m done trying to have children.” She was quiet for a long time, curved against him, her hair smelling of salt. Finally, she said, “I’d like to swim the Boston Light. I know I’m not Trudy Ederle, but I’d like to try.”

It was an eight-mile swim, nearly four times as far as she had swum before.

She needed him to come home from work when the tides were right and follow her out into the bay. Josiah’s pulse began to throb. He had the sensation, as he told her he was afraid of the water, that he was meeting Susannah again, for the first time. She looked quizzical, and for the briefest moment, disappointed. “You’re quite a man,” she said, and he pulled his hand away from her leg, seizing with regret for having told her. But she put his hand back. She wiggled closer to him. “So you’ll have something to reach for, too.”

They had until next July to train. It was the middle of October now, the water cold enough Josiah wouldn’t even put his feet in, but Susannah hated swimming pools and insisted on two more weeks in the bay. Josiah rowed. His worry for himself had shifted easily onto Susannah. She had slathered herself in petroleum jelly and lard, but what if she froze anyway? What if she swallowed water, or was taken out on the tide, and he could not save her? What if the whitecaps that rose up quickly some afternoons overwhelmed her? But he understood that she had to swim, and so he rowed. He was used to seeing the sandbar rise up beneath the boat now, the water so shallow he could see the ridges on the backs of horseshoe crabs. He was getting stronger on the oars. In a few more weeks, he would be elected mayor. Fiumara had pulled out, forced by allegations of terrorist involvement. The allegations were vague (Josiah’s father had been involved in stirring them up, though Josiah would never know this) but there was the man’s socialism, too, and with Sacco and Vanzetti dead, people’s tentative sympathies in that direction had shriveled. The men were on their way to being forgotten.

Josiah was resolved to his fate, but determined to serve only one term. If Coolidge could pull out in front of the whole nation, Josiah thought, he could do the same in Gloucester. Granted, Coolidge’s son had died — some people said this was behind the president’s decision — but Josiah had his reasons, too. There was, for instance, the fact that he didn’t want to be mayor at all. This, too, he had told Susannah. That had been a relief.

In the meantime, in the abstract, he would continue overseeing the quarry. But Susannah would be manager now. She would do the work she already knew better than he how to do, in the corner office that had belonged first to her father and then to her husband and from which she could see, if she pressed her cheek against the wall, an unimpeded view of Ipswich Bay. She would close the doors some days, unable to speak for the grief that seized her, for all she had agreed to let go, but with time this happened less. She was free now, her mind unclouded with thoughts of her body, her body no longer bound by doctors and false hope. She lost track of her cycles. She kept Sam Turpa on. Her door stayed open.

Caleb was not there to naysay these changes. A month ago, he had dropped off a card inviting Josiah and Susannah to dinner in his formal dining room, where he had laid out one of his prized maps on the table. South America! he had cried as they entered. He would go for a few months, maybe a year. Chile, Argentina. He would see about a trek into Patagonia. He would write them. It would be good to get away.