Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(53)

I did not know yet when I would have mine.



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And somehow during this time I often felt sad. It was February and it was very cold. I only saw Bob once a week when we bundled up and went for a walk by the river. The days were getting longer, though, and Bob pointed out how at this time of year when the sun was setting it was not “going away, the way it felt in December,” is what he said, it was “just getting ready for the next day.” I saw what he meant, as the sky would break open with a yellow glow as the sun was setting and then shoot pink across the clouds.



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But otherwise I really saw no one else, and William was often on the phone to people he had worked with—or to Lois Bubar’s son—and he was very excited about the work he was doing at the university.



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Everyone needs to feel important.



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—

I thought again about how my mother—my real one—had said this to me one day. And she was absolutely right. Everyone has to feel like they matter.



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—

I did not feel that I mattered. Because in a way I have never been able to feel that. And so the days were hard.



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—

At night I started once again to wake while it was still dark, and I would lie there and think about my life, and I could make no sense of it. It seemed to come to me in fragments, and the fact that my brother had died, and that my sister had resented me her entire life, sat like a dark wet patch of sand on my soul, and then I would think about when the girls were little, but they were somehow not always happy memories for me, because I seemed only to remember how William had been cheating on me for so many years during that time, and so what I might otherwise have thought of as a good memory was not one.

I thought of how my life had become so different from what I had ever imagined for myself during these—my last—years. I thought of how I had pictured Christmases with Chrissy and Becka and eventually their children—and David!—in one of their apartments in Brooklyn. But now neither child lived there, and neither would probably ever return.

I thought of how I would live out my days in this house on a small cliff on the coast of Maine with William, how Bridget would come to us in the summers; perhaps she would even come for a Christmas, how did I know?



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—

I wondered if I had become too frightened to return to New York again. It was funny, but I felt that in my enclosed world I had somehow become worse about that—about my fears, I mean.

I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone.

Because it was.

I knew this was true.



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—

I told Bob about that as we walked one day in late February by the river. The day was not terribly cold, and the river was not frozen as it had been. Bob walked with his hands in his pockets and looked at me sideways, his mask covering most of his face. “What do you mean?” he asked, and I tried to explain how I had always been a frightened person, and how I was afraid now that when and if I ever got back to New York, how would I do it? I said I was no longer young, and Bob said, “I know.” But then he said, “It’s funny that you call yourself a frightened person. I think of you as brave.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. I stopped walking to look at him.

“Not a bit,” he said. “Think about your life. You came from really hard circumstances, you left a marriage that was not working, you wrote books that have really reached people. You married another guy who was wonderful to you. Sorry, Lucy, but that’s not what frightened people do.” He started to walk again. “But I know what you mean about New York. Margaret hates the place, so she no longer makes the trip with me, but I’ve been thinking how when I finally get my shot, what will it be like?”



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—

It was quite a walk that day.



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—

Bob spoke of his brother, Jim, who lived in Brooklyn with his wife, Helen. Bob had not seen them in over a year, though Jim had just gotten his first shot. Bob said to me, “Honestly, Lucy?” He sat down on a granite seat so he could have his cigarette. He pulled a cigarette from the pack and lit it, then put the pack back into his pocket. He exhaled and said, “Jim has kind of been the love of my life. How strange is that?” He looked at me. “I mean, I have just loved that guy so much, and he did break my heart, but I have just always—I don’t know—he’s like the furnace that has kept me going.”

“Oh Bob,” I said. “Oh God, I get it.”

“I mean, when Pam left I was a mess.” He told me how he had moved to a fourth-floor walkup in Brooklyn to be near his brother, and how Jim had made fun of the place, calling it a “graduate dorm.” Bob said he drank too much during those days, he didn’t like to think about them now, and then he had finally moved to a doorman building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “And to really tell you the truth?” He shook his head as he took another drag on his cigarette. “To tell you the absolute truth, I wish Pam had never left. Oh Lucy, I wish she could have had her kids with me. I miss her, and I think she still misses me.”