All the Beautiful Lies(8)
Harry’s phone vibrated in his jeans pocket but he ignored it. He stayed on the bench until he was cold, pulling his sweater on, then stayed awhile longer.
When he finally stood, his legs felt stiff. He was out of shape, he realized, having spent all the last semester writing his thesis, crouched over his laptop. He’d stopped swimming, and he hadn’t played squash since before Christmas.
He checked his phone. Several friends from college had texted or called. He put the phone back in his pocket, feeling irrational, unfair anger at their concern. They cared for him, but Harry dreaded the inevitable conversations. He wasn’t always good at talking. Words and sentences filled his brain—he felt as though he was constantly narrating his own life—but bringing those words from inside his brain and out into the world had always been difficult for him. When he was younger he’d suffered from a lateral lisp, his words often coming out with embarrassing hisses. Speech therapy had corrected it, teaching him to let the words flow from the top of his tongue, and not from its sides, but the lisp had done its damage.
He silenced his phone, and decided to finish the remainder of the cliff walk before turning back toward Grey Lady.
He scrambled up a short incline, then ducked to get under a wind-bent tree. It was the highest point of the walk, and one of the narrowest sections of the path. A sharp drop led to a cluster of black rocks, green and slick where the seawater reached during high tide. Waves slapped at the rocks, sending out fans of spray. The path was packed gravel, and slabs of shale. It wasn’t slippery, but it wasn’t completely flat, either. He kept walking, and almost missed the small bouquet bunched together and left leaning against the twisted root of a white pine.
He bent and picked up the bouquet; it was made from bittersweet with its familiar red berries, some still cocooned in yellow, that bloomed in the autumn. These had somehow survived through the winter, the berries shrunken and almost black. They had been bound together loosely by a long strand of grass. Harry looked at the stem ends of the bittersweet; they had been broken, not cut. Whoever had put together this bouquet had done it impulsively, without using clippers or proper string. And had it been meant for his father? Was this the place he had slipped? He’d ask Alice if she knew exactly where he’d fallen. It seemed suddenly important. He’d also ask her if she’d left the bouquet, but he doubted it. He put the bittersweet back where he’d found it, some of the wizened berries popping off the vine as he rested it against the tree.
It was fully dark when he reached the driveway of Grey Lady. He paused, wondering if he could get away with entering the house and going straight to his bedroom. He’d brought some cheap bourbon with him from college and maybe he could drink himself into oblivion, stay that way throughout the next few days. There was a soft glow of light coming from the bay windows, the curtains now drawn.
Instead of walking directly to the front door, Harry cut diagonally across the short front yard and stood in front of the windows. There was a gap between the curtains, and he could see through the living room and into the kitchen, now fully lit, where Alice was moving around. There was a glass of wine on the island, and a cutting board loaded with vegetables, but Harry watched the way Alice was moving, twitching her hips a little as though she was listening to music. She turned and found her glass of wine and took a long sip. Her face was slightly distorted by the window glass, but she looked . . . was it happy? No, not exactly, but she did look peaceful, at ease. Harry watched for a while longer, getting colder, waiting to see if her expression changed. But it didn’t—she continued to move through the kitchen, light on her feet, her lips now moving along to the music Harry couldn’t hear.
Chapter 4
Then
Edith and Jake got married the following summer in the city clerk’s office in Portland, Maine. Alice went, and so did one of Jake’s dull friends from the bank. Afterward, they all drove back toward Kennewick, stopping in Ogunquit to eat a late lunch at a fancy restaurant made almost entirely of glass. It was built on a bluff with a view of a rocky stretch of coast. Edith and Jake pointed out houses they’d like to own if they ever won the lottery. Alice ordered the prime rib because her mom told her she could have anything she wanted.
After the wedding, Edith and Alice moved into Jake’s three-bedroom condominium at the north end of Kennewick Beach, up near the lighthouse. The building, except for its location, was not that impressive on the outside, just a three-story, grey-shingled box segmented into four equal condos, each with two parking spaces under the unit. But the condo interior was impressive. Jake had hired an interior decorator, and everything inside was spotless and shiny, with a kitchen full of gadgets and plants. The only thing Alice missed from their rental house was the wooden floors, the way they felt on her bare feet. Here, there was white shag carpeting, spotless because Jake had a cleaning woman who came every week. Also, Jake instituted a no-smoking-in-the-house policy. He smoked his occasional cigarette on the second-floor deck, and he insisted that Edith did as well, even when it was freezing out.
“He doesn’t expect you to clean the house?” Alice asked her mother, when she learned about the cleaning lady.
“No,” Edith said, as though she’d been asked if she was a cannibal. “Of course not. He makes good money, you know.”
Alice wondered what her mother would do with all her spare time now that she didn’t even have a house to take care of. Actually, she didn’t wonder. She knew that she’d drink more. It hadn’t bothered her that much when it was just the two of them, but now it worried her because there was a third person in their family. Did Jake know what his new wife was really like? Would he want a divorce and they’d all have to leave their beautiful-smelling new home?