Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(54)

“She does,” I said. “I saw her at William’s seventieth birthday party and she told me that she still thinks of you.”

Bob kept shaking his head. “Boy. It makes me sad. I think she’s okay, she’s got her kids and everything, and we talk once in a while. But it’s a sad story, Lucy. Both Pam and Jim are in New York and they always will be, and I will always be here in Maine.”

We sat in silence while I absorbed this. Oh, he broke my heart!



* * *



—

After a while we began to talk again. I told him that I suspected that William and I were together now until the very end, and that I was glad—but that somehow there was an uncertainty for me.

Bob squinted at me. “What’s the uncertainty, Lucy?”

“I don’t really know.” I shifted my legs and said, “But he loves it up here now. He’s got his ‘sister’?”—I put my fingers up in quotes as I said that—“and he loves her, which is good. But he’s really excited about what he’s doing at the University of Maine now, and they seem excited about him there, so I don’t know—I mean I don’t know what will happen when this is all over.

“He mentioned his apartment in New York to me the other day, as though I would go there with him whenever we went to New York. But I told him no, that had been his apartment with Estelle, I was not going to stay there—which makes sense to me—but he seemed slightly surprised by that.”

Bob said, “Well, Lucy.” And he looked me straight in the eye. “Speaking for myself, I would love it more than anything if you stayed here in this town.”

He said that to me.

He made me feel that I mattered. Bob Burgess was the only person who seemed able to do that for me right now.





ii


By early March a number of things had happened:



* * *



—

I had finished my Arms Emory story. The story has Arms finding out that Jimmie Wagg is selling Legs his drugs, and all Arms wants to do is go find Jimmie Wagg.

Arms finds the three young men down by one of the abandoned cottages I had seen in Dixon along the river through the trees, and as Arms is kneeing Jimmie to get him into the cruiser, Sperm runs up and with his small spiky teeth bites Arms on the calf, and this inflames Arms so much that he picks Sperm up and, with his strong arms, and without even meaning to, breaks the kid’s skinny neck.

The story ends with a flash into the future: that Arms would retire from the police force, and that he would visit Sperm every single day—Sperm sitting in his wheelchair with a ventilator—in the squalid home Sperm lived in alone with his mother, and that Arms would end up loving Sperm as he had loved his own brother, shaving him gently as his whiskers started to grow on his cheeks, clipping his fingernails for him too.



* * *



—

That night I said to William, who was reading a book, “My Arms Emory story is sympathetic toward a white cop who liked the old president and who does an act of violence and gets away with it. Maybe I shouldn’t publish it right now.”

William looked up and said, “Well, it might help people understand each other. Just publish it, Lucy.”

I was quiet for a long time. Then I said, “I used to tell my students to write against the grain. Meaning: Try to go outside your comfort level, because that’s where interesting things will happen on the page.”

William kept reading his book. He said, “Just put the story out there.”

But I knew I could not trust myself—or other people. But mostly I could not trust myself: to know what to do these days. I knew that many people understood what was right and what was wrong, but these days I could not fully understand that myself. Mom! I called to my nice made-up mother, and she said, You’ll figure it out, Lucy, you always do.

I did not know if that was true.



* * *



—

But I felt very sad about Arms Emory; I loved him.





iii


And then I had both my vaccines, three weeks apart. When the woman put the needle into my arm for the second shot, I almost wept. I thought: I am free. I thought: I will see New York again.



* * *



—

William and I made a plan. I would take a train by myself to New Haven and spend a night with Chrissy and also a night with Becka in her new apartment there, and then I would go into the city for a week. William would fly down and visit with Estelle and Bridget during this time, before coming to meet me. The girls would come into the city and visit me separately, they had said this, and I had found that slightly strange, I mean that they would come separately.

And then William would meet me there, and the girls would come back to see him. I made a reservation—or William made it for me—for an Airbnb in New York.



* * *





While we waited for the three weeks to go by until my vaccine was all set inside me, Becka called and said that she had been accepted at Yale Law School. In truth, I was shocked by this. William did not seem shocked. “We always knew she was smart,” he said. And that was true. But Becka at Yale? In law school?

Becka added, “Don’t make a big deal out of it when you speak to Chrissy.”