Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(50)

ii


One night there was a huge storm with high winds and we lost our power. I woke in the night because I was cold, and William was already up. “The power went out,” he said, not unhappily.

I said, “What do we do?” And he said, “We wait.”

“But I’m so cold,” I said, and he went and got the other quilts from the other beds, but they were not enough to stop me from shivering.

As a child I had often not been able to sleep at night because I was so cold. I thought of that now—how there had been a few nights when I had called out to my mother because I was so cold, and she had brought me a hot water bottle! I could still remember the rubbery smell of it, it was red, and not very big, but it was so warm, and I wouldn’t know where to put it on my body, because wherever I put it, the comfort I felt from it was just enormous, but it made the rest of my small body feel bereft, and so I would shift it around from place to place; all this I remembered that night we lost our power.



* * *



—

The next morning Bob Burgess brought us over three flashlights. “Keep one upstairs all the time, and keep the other two downstairs so you know where they are.”



* * *



—

That same morning William drove me to my studio and then he went to L.L.Bean. When he picked me up later that afternoon he was quiet, but he reached over a few times and touched my hand as he drove. And when I went into our bedroom there were two down quilts, white as fluffy snow, looking so beautiful there on the bed.



* * *



—

At night William and I slept holding each other.



* * *





In December, I noticed a drop in my mood. It had to do with my brother’s death; it was no longer Vicky calling me selfish, it was the single, horrifying fact of Pete’s death. It felt to me as though my entire childhood had died. You might think—I would have thought—that I wanted every part of my childhood gone. But I did not want every part of my childhood gone. I wanted my brother alive, and he had died alone in that small house. I thought how he had not wanted to go to the hospital with the virus and I remembered how frightened he had been of getting that shot as a kid in the doctor’s office, and I could not stop the sense of sadness; it was a sadness that went so deep it was like it was a physical illness.

And it got dark so early and it was so wintry and cold that I could not walk as much as I had when we first arrived in Maine. And there were no more social gatherings, it was too cold, and also Covid had come to Maine and was all over the state, and so we had to be very careful. I went most days to my studio over the little bookstore, and really, I might have gone mad without it. I still almost went mad. Everything seemed very difficult. To even clean the two bathrooms in the house seemed beyond me, though when I finally did clean them I noticed I felt better. For a few minutes. As is true with many people who feel poorly, there was a sense of shame that accompanied this. I did not want to tell William, and what was there to tell him anyway? There was nothing I could do but hold on.

But he knew, I think, and he tried to be good to me.

I was very grateful to have William, but grief is a solitary matter.



* * *



—

One night I lay awake in bed and I remembered this: After my father died, he came to me many times in dreams. He was checking on me, and then he would go away. But the last dream I had of him was this: He was in his red Chevy truck and he was driving it erratically; he looked sick, as he had been before he died. And in the dream I said to him, “It’s okay, Daddy, I can drive the truck now.”

Oh, the memory of this filled me with both happiness and sadness. I had loved him, my poor suffering very damaged father.

I can drive the truck now, I had said.



* * *



—

But as time went by I did not feel that I could drive the truck. I felt that I was only barely hanging on.





iii


On January sixth, as I came in from my afternoon walk to the cove, the television was on and William said, “Lucy, come here now and watch this.” I sat down still wearing my coat and I saw people attacking the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and I watched this news as though it was the first days of the pandemic in New York, I mean that I kept looking at the floor and had the strange sense again that my mind—or body—was trying to move away. All I can remember of this now is watching a man smashing a window again and again, people pushing up against one another as they got into the building while the policemen tried to hold them back. Many different colors swam before me as I saw people climbing up walls, all moving together.



* * *



—

I said to William, “I can’t watch this,” and I went upstairs to the bedroom and closed the door.



* * *



—

And then I remembered this: When I was a child we went to Thanksgiving at the Congregational church in our town, as I have said, and I remember that the people who served us the food were nice to us. And there was one woman, her name was Mildred, she was tall and—to my eyes—old, but she was very kind to me. And what I remembered now was hearing Mildred say to someone that whenever she drove by the building where her husband had died—years before—she turned her head and looked away because she could not stand to look.