The Cloisters(93)

“Right. So you didn’t know. I understand. Ann, look, I’m so sorry.”

And she looked it, Michelle did. Her face was creased, and when I glanced down, I noticed she was holding my hand.

“When?” I asked.

“Yesterday. Apparently she was sailing to a small island on Long Lake. But she didn’t check that the plug was in. It wasn’t, and the boat took on water. She didn’t have a life preserver on board. She tried to swim ashore, but a storm rolled in. It was impossible.”

“Oh,” I said, now looking down at the hands in my lap, Michelle’s and mine, tangled together. I didn’t know if she expected me to cry or not, if she needed a performance of emotion. I didn’t know what I needed.

“Yes,” said Michelle. “Particularly tragic because it appears to be the same way her parents passed away. Really, none of us can fathom it.”

I sat in silence next to Michelle until she gave my hands a squeeze and released them, the collective mourning period ended. “Why don’t you take a little time, go home, take a few days off. This will all be here for you when you get back. We need you very much, Ann Stilwell. You’re doing great work here.”

I thought of what a difference it was from our first meeting. The summer had changed all of us, had rearranged the fabric of our realities. The Fates—the Moirai—I thought, had been busy weaving.

“How did you find out?”

“Leo called me,” said Michelle, after a moment of hesitation.

I said nothing to that.

“You should feel free to go. Why don’t we agree that you’ll come back on Thursday, or next week if you need the time? Really, whatever you need. After the summer you’ve had up here, I wouldn’t blame you if you quit.”

“I’m not quitting,” I said, pushing back my chair and standing up. “I’d like to take a walk, but after that, I’ll be back. I want to be here; I can’t imagine going through this anywhere else.”

Michelle looked at me and smiled.

“All right,” she said.



* * *



I walked down the hill away from the ramparts of The Cloisters, their uneven outline still visible through the trees, until I stopped at a bench. Under the low, arcing limb of an elm tree, I pulled out my phone and for the first time since leaving Long Lake turned it back on. There were four messages from Rachel, but I listened to none of them. I simply scrolled until I found his name and called Leo.

“I was her emergency contact,” he said, before I could even get a word out. “Can you imagine?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Were you there when it happened?” he asked.

“No.”

“Probably for the best.”

“When did they call you?”

“Last night. I called Michelle right away.”

I realized I was sitting on the very edge of the bench, one hand gripping the side so tightly my knuckles had turned white.

“What did they say?”

I could hear him readjusting the way he was sitting on the other end of the line. “That she had drowned. She probably tried to swim for shore but misjudged the distance.”

I stayed silent.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said finally. And some part of me meant it; I marveled that it might actually be true.

“Seems fitting,” Leo said.

“How so?”

“That fate would intervene when no one else would.”

Still, I was quiet.

“I have to go, Leo.”

“Hey,” he said, waiting a beat. I imagined him running his hand through his hair, a cup of coffee nearby. “Would you be interested in getting dinner or something? We’re playing a gig at the—”

“Leo,” I drew his name out, long and soft. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” he said, shifting uncomfortably again on the other end of the phone. “Well, if you change your mind—”

“I have to go. Maybe—I don’t know.” If things were meant to work out with Leo, I knew they would, no matter how much I resisted or he pushed.

And with that, I hung up and released my grip on the edge of the bench, flexing my hand until the blood returned. After a busy summer at The Cloisters, now, at the end of August, the park was quiet again. No groups lay sprawled on blankets, no readers dangled their sandals absently, no children chased balls. I was alone, with only the breeze off the Hudson for company and the solid rock wall of The Cloisters behind me. The grasses, I noticed, were beginning to dry—high and brown, just as they had been that day in Walla Walla. He would have been happy to see all that I had accomplished here, my father.

I thought of that day, of the way he had said to me, hard and certain: It’s not your fault. Before I arrived at The Cloisters I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t. So I buried the shame and devastation and guilt as deep as possible, beyond the reaches of my memory and my life in Walla Walla, beyond even my own grief. But the summer had cracked it all open, and here, in the late-summer sun, I could finally see the truth. My father had been right all along. It hadn’t been my fault. That fate had been meant for me, it was always going to find me, no matter how long I hid from it.

Ultimately, I decided not to listen to the messages Rachel left me. I deleted them all so I wouldn’t be tempted to go back and listen to her voice, the lilting singsong. I erased her text messages, too, because I couldn’t bear to see them. But the pictures, I kept those. I left them on my phone so I could remember what the summer had been like, what we had been like, what I had been like, before.