Lucy by the Sea (12)

Bob Burgess showed up with two Maine license plates, and he said, “I’ll put these on for you.” He winked at me above his mask, and we walked over to the car with him. “Where’d you get those?” William asked, and Bob just shrugged. “Consider me your lawyer. Let’s just say you don’t need to know. There are always plates lying around somewhere, and right now no one’s going to notice that these are out of date.” He had on cloth workman’s gloves and he handed the New York plates to William after he got them off. Then he stayed and visited—we all three sat on lawn chairs on the little patch of grass on top of the cliff, and Bob said that Margaret wanted to meet me, would that be okay if she stopped by with him sometime, and I said, Of course! But I wished that I could always see Bob alone. When he left that day as William and I were putting the lawn chairs back on our porch I said, “I love that guy,” and William said nothing.





The weather stayed awful almost all the time. Cold and brown and windy. But one day in the middle of April the sun came out and William and I walked out on the rocks—it was low tide—and then we walked to a closed store that was the only other building out on this point and it had a lawn near it, and there were rocks right there too, and we sat in the sun on the porch of this closed store. And we were happy.



—

That was the first time William noticed the guard tower. It was far off to the left, and he kept saying, “I wonder what that is?” And I looked and it was just a brown tower in the distance, and I did not care.



—

We sat for a long time in the sun; the water that stretched out endlessly before us had a large streak of white from the reflection of the sun. It sort of twinkled, but mostly it was just a bright, bright white that was on a huge strip of the sea. I got up to walk toward the water and I found a robin’s egg, entirely whole except for the smallest crack in the bottom of it, so the yolk had caused it to be stuck to a small rock. Oh, it was a thing of beauty! “Look at this!” I yelled to William, and he pulled out his phone to take a picture of me, he was standing on the sloping jagged rocks, and he started to lose his balance; I watched it like slow motion and I watched as he staggered back and back and then to the side, and then he regained himself. “No big deal,” he said, but I could see that he was shaken. “Oh William, you scared me,” I said, and I ran to hug him. We went back to the house after that, but we were still happy and I put the robin’s egg stuck to the rock on the mantel above the fireplace.





That night when I went into my room to sleep I found a sleep mask on the pillow. “William,” I called out, “what is this?”

He yelled in from the room next to mine. “You’re always complaining about the skylight. And the sun rises earlier these days. I picked that up for you at the drugstore that day and then I forgot about it—”

I went and stood in his doorway. “Well, thank you,” I said. And he just waved a hand, his knees were up beneath the covers and he was reading. “Night, Lucy,” he said.





I need to say: Even as all of this went on, even with the knowledge that my doctor had said it would be a year, I still did not…I don’t know how to say it, but my mind was having trouble taking things in. It was as though each day was like a huge stretch of ice I had to walk over. And in the ice were small trees stuck there and twigs, this is the only way I can describe it, as though the world had become a different landscape and I had to make it through each day without knowing when it would stop, and it seemed it would not stop, and so I felt a great uneasiness. Often I woke in the night and would lie there perfectly still; I would take off my sleep mask and not move; it seemed hours I would lie there, but I do not know. As I lay there, different parts of my life would come to me.

I thought how when William and I first met—he was the teaching assistant in my biology class my sophomore year at college—I thought how, because of the tremendous isolation of my background, I had known nothing at all about popular culture, and I had known nothing, for instance, about the Marx Brothers, but when William would hold me, I would say, “Closer, closer,” and he told me the Groucho Marx line where Groucho tells a woman who is saying that to him, “If I get any closer I’ll be behind you.”

Then the skylight would begin to lighten and I would put my sleep mask back on and fall back to sleep.

v

And then—oh God, poor Becka!



—

As I came through the door after my morning walk, this was toward the end of April, my telephone rang; it was Becka, and she was screaming, crying, “Mom! Mom! Oh Mommy!” She was crying so hard it was difficult for me to hear her, but the gist of it was this: Her husband, Trey, was having an affair, he had been planning on leaving Becka, he told her, but now they were stuck in lockdown. Becka had found texts on his phone.

I can almost not record this, it was so painful. Becka had gone up to the roof of their building in order to call me. In the background were the sounds of sirens, one after another.

“I’m going to give you to Dad,” I said, and I did, and William spoke to her with precision. He asked her certain things: how long had it been going on, where had Trey thought he was going to live, was the other person married. He asked her things I never would have thought to ask her. And I could hear her voice getting calmer as she spoke to him. He asked her if she wanted to stay with Trey, and I could hear her say, “No.”