I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(16)
From her to him: a cookbook called The Home Book of French Cookery (after he mentioned that during his postwar years in France, he’d developed a love of French food) and the promise to make him a new dish every week; two solo canoes, made in Maine and so fluidly ribbed and curved that they seemed less constructed than grown.
Edith and Joseph would spend hours paddling the inland bay, threading the narrow salt marsh channels that opened out to ponds, Edith carefully collecting flora and fauna, scooping crabs or moon jellies into buckets, hungry for the names of everything, Joseph content just to look and talk about what he saw. They sat in their separate canoes, but Edith felt she had never been so close to anyone, the salt pond waters laid down like a cloth of gold between them.
From him to her: a camera, a compact black-and-silver 35-millimeter. He taught her how to use it, how to develop her photos in the tiny, magical, chemical-smelling darkroom off their kitchen. Edith avowed that the elemental differences between them appeared in their photographs, their souls made manifest in silver gelatin, delineated in black and white and gray: Joseph’s all wide views, everything airy, included, and soaked in light, never without a slice of sky; hers close-in, all detail, edges, obliquity. Her photos surprised her. She meant only to capture the small specifics that intrigued her, but the resulting prints riddled and tricked: horseshoe crab tail transformed to a pointed skyscraper, salt marsh hay to a child’s tousled hair. She saw her work as shy, elusive but Joseph looked at her photos of him—the landscape of veins on the back of his hand, the nape of his neck after a haircut—and caught his breath at the intimacy. She looked at his of her—silhouetted in her canoe backed by waves of cordgrass, head thrown back, face to the sun or standing at the ocean’s edge before a storm, shoes dangling from her fingertips, hair whipped by wind—and felt that she was seeing herself, for the very first time, as she really was.
Chapter Six
Clare
I was only looking for a place to catch my breath.
But the instant I practically fell into the tiny outdoor alcove—surrounded on three sides by high, manicured boxwood, a secret compartment of green containing one white bench—and saw the old woman I’d come to think of as my old woman, I felt as if we’d planned it. She wasn’t reading or drinking coffee or looking at her phone (if she had one) or doing any of the things people do when they’re sitting on a bench alone. Her hands lay one upon the other on her pale yellow cotton skirt, and when I stumbled around the corner and saw her, she turned her face to me serenely and patted the spot on the bench next to her.
“Don’t talk,” she instructed. “Take a moment,” and I obeyed, sitting, shutting my eyes, and pulling the clean morning air into my chest.
Except for my hyperventilation and desperate, crablike scuttling away from my bridal brunch, my wedding morning could not have been lovelier: cool and crisp, greens and golds running wildly over the surrounding hills, the forget-me-not sky interrupted only by translucent, wedding-veil clouds. Zach had gone golfing with all his male family members, his severe discomfort with them eclipsed only by his insistence on doing our wedding entirely “by the book,” including the mandate that the groom not set eyes on his bride until she walked toward him down the aisle.
With just my people there, the informal brunch should have been easy, but a sleepless night had left me wired and restless. Everything—my relatives’ smiles, the bowls of berries, the glass pitchers of juice, the diamond on my finger, my new white-and-green Stan Smith sneakers—looked overbright, garish even, and despite the lofty ceilings, sheer curtains, and delicate chandeliers, the room felt airless and like the walls were closing in. And because, in these ways, the room resembled my own chest cavity, after a few sips of obnoxiously orange apricot nectar, I turned to my mother and, gasping a little, said, “I’m sorry but I just need—” and, before I could finish, she said, “Do it. Whatever it is, go ahead,” so I bolted for a side door and stumbled out into the air.
I don’t know how long I sat on that bench with my eyes shut, but eventually, my breathing slowed and my rib cage expanded and the rushing river sound inside my ears went away along with the dark red static on the insides of my eyelids, and only then did I open my eyes and say, “I’m sorry.”
“Unless ‘Sorry’ is your name, there is no reason whatsoever to say it.”
“I’m Clare,” I said, putting out my hand.
She took it. Her hand was as long and thin as mine but much softer and cooler, her loose skin as silky as talcum powder. “Pleased to meet you, dear Clare. I’m Edith.”
“It’s my wedding day.”
“I thought maybe it was.”
I sighed, a deep, stretched-out sigh that seemed to begin at the soles of my feet. “I feel like this is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath in months.”
“I’ve always found that phrase funny. ‘Catch,’ as if it’s gotten away and you have to chase it down with a butterfly net.”
I smiled. “Butterflies, again. You’re right. That’s how it feels.”
“So tell me. You and your fiancé had a whirlwind romance? A short engagement?”
“Yes. I mean, Zach and I have been together for a year, but since we got engaged in early February, it’s been like falling, like one long, breathless fall.”