Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(40)

“Why did Isabelle have to go over the bridge?” I asked.

And Charlene said it was because Isabelle had fallen and broken her leg and when she got out of rehab she couldn’t live alone again. “It’s so sad,” Charlene said.

We sat in silence for a bit, and then Charlene said, “But Olive goes to see her every day. They say that Olive goes into her room and reads her the newspaper every day from front to back.”

“Oh man,” I said.

And Charlene said, “I know.”

We agreed to meet again two Fridays from now.





vii


A week or so later—how do you know the time in a pandemic—but at some point after this, William, when I came back from my afternoon walk, was lying on the couch, and he said to me, “Lucy, I’m dizzy. I’ve been lying here for an hour waiting for you to come back and I am really dizzy.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” I said, sitting on the couch by his feet.

“I don’t know.” He said again, “But I’m really dizzy.”

“Drink some water,” I said, but I saw that he had a glass near him, and he reached and finished it, and I was scared. I called Bob Burgess. And Bob said he would call his doctor on his cellphone, it was okay, he and his doctor were friends.

Within five minutes Bob called back and said that the doctor had said to drink a liter of water and that the doctor would call him in ten minutes. So I made William drink four more glasses of water, and slowly he stopped being dizzy. But it was as though I had become stuck inside a block of wood, that is the only way to describe it. I sat there and we waited. William finally sat up. He looked old to me. And he didn’t look at me, he just kept looking around the room. We waited more and William said he was far less dizzy, but then he lay down again and he fell asleep. I could not think, or feel, or anything, while we waited. An hour later William’s phone rang and it was Bob’s doctor, and after he talked to William for a while he said it was dehydration, that it was hot out, and people had to be careful.

So that happened. And then I made us scrambled eggs for supper and William seemed cheerful. But I was not cheerful.

The rest of the evening I felt quietly awful.



* * *



—

But after we went to bed that night and William had gone to sleep, I had a sudden memory: When I was very young they had shown us some movie in school. I have no memory at all what the movie was about, but I remember the anxiety of the teacher as she had to get the projector to work, and it did work, and this is all that I remember:



* * *



—

At the very beginning of the movie was a blue screen with many white ping-pong balls bouncing around on it, and every so often a ping-pong ball would bounce into another ping-pong ball and then bounce off again. This went on, the ping-pong balls bouncing around randomly and randomly hitting into one another. And in my memory I thought—even back then, so young—I thought: That is like people.

My point is, if we are lucky we bounce into someone. But we always bounce away again, at least a little.

And I thought of this that night, how my ping-pong ball had bumped into William’s, and yet always—a little bit even now—bounced away, and I thought of David, whose ping-pong ball had really gone away from me now, and I thought of how Bob Burgess was right now with Margaret, who did not know that he needed a smoke on occasion; he was alone in that need. Except for when his ping-pong ball briefly bumped into mine and I knew about his need for a cigarette. And our ping-pong balls had bumped into each other when he called the doctor for us. And when we were together.

I thought of Charlene Bibber living alone, afraid she would lose her mind, and my ping-pong ball touching hers just briefly.



* * *



—

I had a sense then of being old, and William is even older; I thought how our time was almost done, and I had a real fear that William would die before me and I would be really lost.

In the middle of the night, William suddenly snorted after a snore, and he woke up, and he said “Lucy?” And I said “What?” And he said “Are you there?” And I said “I’m right here.” And he went back to sleep immediately; I could tell by his breathing.

But I did not go back to sleep. I stayed awake and I thought: We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.



* * *





A few weeks later I found out that William did not like watching me floss my teeth. He did not say this, but slowly it came to me that every night—or many nights—when we were talking in the living room I might floss my teeth and a certain look went over his face, I mean he became extra closed down, and I suddenly said, “William! Do you hate to see me floss my teeth?”

And he said, “Kind of.”

“Why haven’t you told me?” I asked.

And he just shrugged.

I felt really embarrassed. And part of this was remembering how I had not liked seeing his shoes when we were young and married.



* * *





One night during this time Margaret and Bob and William and I went down to the marina for dinner. They did not let people inside the restaurant, there was only one section of the porch that was open, but it was a very popular place, a lot of people from New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts were there. You could see by their license plates, and also I could tell from just seeing the people themselves, how they were dressed, differently from the locals, and I was surprised the whole summer by this, how people continued to come to Maine in the middle of a pandemic. Even while I, myself, had done the same thing.