Lucy by the Sea (14)

And then he told me that Horik had had no business for a few weeks now, or very little business, and he said that he trusted the man completely, that he had told him his daughter’s life depended on the car being clean. Then William called Becka and told her to be ready at nine the next morning. “The guy is not going to open the door for you, you just take one suitcase that you can lift and get in the backseat. He will text you as he pulls up to the curb.” He added, “Wear a mask and gloves. Horik has to stay safe as well.”



—

And so that is how Becka got to Connecticut and into the guesthouse. Horik dropped her off and Chrissy and Michael were waiting in the driveway, though they stood a long way from her, and Chrissy yelled to her, “The place is all made up for you!” Chrissy brought Becka’s food to the door for two weeks, and Becka did not get the virus. They were—for me—a terrible two weeks and I spoke to Becka each day, and yet toward the end of the two weeks I could hear a change in her voice, she was more collected. She always said, “Can you put Dad on?” And I did. I was struck by this, and it made me feel more warmly toward William, that his daughter wanted to speak to him as much as she did to me, during this time of her enormous distress.

When Becka’s self-quarantine was up, she stayed in the little guesthouse. “I like it here, Mom, it’s so cozy,” she said. “And I can see Chrissy any time now, and we all eat together every night.” She was still able to work online as a social worker for the city of New York.

So there was that. Becka had survived, was surviving.



—

I have come now to think of this as The First Rescue Story.

The Second Rescue Story arrived a month later.

Though in the end, neither rescue was successful.



—

But somehow this made me care a great deal about Bridget; she suddenly seemed very vulnerable to me, and it had something to do with Becka. Once I even called Estelle myself to see how they were doing, and she said, “Oh Lucy, it’s so nice to hear your voice!” She said Bridget went up and down, and I said, Yes, so did I.





Five

i

It snowed on the first day of May. It snowed two inches, coming down in thick flakes and curling into the outside windowpanes, and I could not believe it. “I hate snow,” I said, and William said tiredly, “I know you do, Lucy.”



—

William came back from his afternoon walk—his shoulders were sopping wet from the snow that had fallen on him from the trees, his sneakers were soaked—and as he sat on the couch, unpeeling his wet socks, showing his white old feet, he said, “I walked over to that tower.” I did not know at first what he meant. But he told me that he had researched it, and it was a tower built during World War II to look for submarines, and there really had been German submarines that came up to this coastline. He said that just a little farther down the coast two German spies had gotten off a submarine and made their way all the way from Maine to New York City. It was huge national news and they were convicted of espionage and sentenced to death. But President Truman had commuted their sentences, and eventually they were freed. William said, “Nobody even remembers this now, but those towers are there because the threat was real.” I did not know what to say.



—

I have written about this before, but I should just say that William’s father had been a German soldier and he had been captured in a ditch in France. He was sent as a prisoner of war to work on a potato farm in Maine, and he had fallen in love with the potato farmer’s wife—this was Catherine, William’s mother. Catherine had left the potato farmer and run off with the POW from Germany, although that took a year or so because William’s father had had to go back to Europe after the war and do reparations.

During that time Catherine, it turned out, had a baby girl with the potato farmer, and then she left them both, her baby daughter and her potato farmer husband, because William’s father had come back to America, to Massachusetts. And William had not known about this other child—this half-sister called Lois Bubar—until long after his mother had died, he learned about it, as I said, last year.

William’s father had died when William was fourteen; Catherine never remarried, she had doted on William, who thought he was an only child.

ii

It was a few days after William had walked to the guard tower that I was looking at my email when I saw something forwarded to me by my publicist. Do you know this woman? my publicist had written.

It was an email from Lois Bubar, William’s half-sister. She had sent it to my publicist asking that it be forwarded to me. In just a paragraph she said that she had been thinking of me during this pandemic, she hoped very much that I was all right in New York City and that William was all right too. She ended by saying, “It was so pleasant to have met you that day, and ever since I have felt very sorry that I did not agree to see William. If you speak to him, could you please tell him that, and tell him that I wish only good things for him. Please tell him I hope he is safe. Sincerely, Lois Bubar.”



—

I did not especially care about Lois Bubar right then, I will admit that. It was Becka that I could not stop thinking about.



—

But when William came back from his walk, I showed him the email, and I was a little surprised by his response. He sat down and stared out the window at the ocean and did not say a word. “William?” I finally asked, and he turned to look at me; he looked slightly stupefied. “I’m going to write to her,” he said, and I said, “Okay.” He spent the afternoon writing drafts of an email to this woman; only when Becka called did he put his computer down.