Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(12)

And the woman went away, but I was so embarrassed because people were looking at me, and I looked down at my hands until William came out. He put the groceries in the back of the car; he did it as though he was irritated, and so it wasn’t until we drove away that I told him what had happened, and he shook his head and said nothing. I said, “William, I hated getting yelled at!”

He said, not nicely, “Nobody likes getting yelled at, Lucy.”

He said nothing else the whole ride home.



* * *



—

When we got back to the house William cut an orange into four pieces and ate them, and the sound he made, slurping them, made me go upstairs to the bedroom I was staying in. “They had toilet paper,” he called out to me.



* * *



—

Mom, I cried inside myself to the nice mother I had made up, Mom, I can’t do this! And the nice mother I had made up said, You are really doing so well, honey. But, Mom, I hate this! And she said, I know, honey. Just hang in there and it will end.

But it did not seem like it would end.



* * *





I should say this:

It was during this time that I noticed that I hated William each night after dinner. It was usually because I felt that he was not really listening to me. His eyes—when he glanced at me as I spoke—seemed to not really be looking at me, and it made me remember how much he could not listen. Or listen well. I would think: He is not David! And then I would think: He’s not Bob Burgess! Sometimes I would have to leave the house in the dark and walk down by the water, swearing out loud.



* * *





The day after we had gone to the grocery store it rained, and by afternoon I was so restless that I took a walk with an old umbrella I had found on the porch. When I came back I said to William, as I sat down on the couch, “You weren’t even nice to me after that woman yelled at me. Why couldn’t you have been nice?”

The rain was hitting against the windows, and outside the ocean splashed on the rocks and all seemed brown and gray. William got up and went and stood in the doorway of the living room, and when he didn’t say anything I looked up. “Lucy,” he said. He said it with difficulty. “Lucy, yours is the life I wanted to save.” He walked over toward me but he did not sit down. “My own life I care very little about these days, except I know the girls still depend on me, especially Bridget; she’s still just a kid. But, Lucy, if you should die from this, it would—” He shook his head with weariness. “I only wanted to save your life, and so what if some woman yelled at you.”





iv


One night after that rainy day I saw a sunset. It had been cloudy all day, and just before the sun went down the clouds had broken, and the clouds were suddenly a brilliant orange that spread up against the sky, I could not believe it, and the color got sent back over the water toward the house. You had to stand on our porch and look through the far window to see it, but the sky kept changing as the sun set farther, higher and higher the deep red went. I called to William and he came and we stood there for many minutes, and then we finally pulled up chairs to watch it. What a thing! And so we watched for these sunsets as time went by, and sometimes they arrived: the most golden orange glory in the world, it seemed to me at those times.



* * *





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.