I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(34)
On the first anniversary of Joseph’s death, it was John who found her.
Telling herself for weeks beforehand that it would be just another day, that Joseph would be no more lost to her on that day than any other, Edith had planned a short visit to his grave, a bouquet of flowers from the garden he’d planted and a little box of seashells in her hand, and nothing more. This she stuck to, sitting on a folded blanket she’d brought, running her hand over his gravestone, tall and white among the old pocked and tilted ones, and telling him about that morning’s canoe trip, how the shy, mica-thin gibbous moon had hung in the sky right along with the freshly risen sun, reminding her of the two of them; about the little girl guest from the week before who could, at three and a half years old, read from the newspaper; about how Edith had matted, framed, and hung his photographs of her so that she could remember being seen through his eyes every day; about the basket of apples someone had left on her doorstep; about how her love for him didn’t just abide but grew, fanning like a vine over the walls of the house he’d given her, sending tendrils into every corner of her life.
She stayed dry-eyed and composed, feeling that he was there with her, listening, searching for signs that she was all right. This feeling lasted all day. She came home to her silent house, glad she hadn’t scheduled any guests for that day, grateful to be alone. But then, after midnight, the grief rose, many-winged, inside her chest, beating at her ribs, bruising her from the inside out, so she ran out into the rain that had started a few hours before, ran across the highway, and onto the empty beach. Until she felt the wet sand under her soles, she didn’t realize she’d forgotten shoes. For a moment, she felt like a crazy person, her last lucid thought before she became one. For hours, she paced the water’s edge, sobbing, shouting, and swearing into the noise of the waves.
By the time John found her (she never learned how he knew she was there but assumed someone had called to report a lunatic loose on the beach), she was quiet, dazed, sodden, shivering, raw-throated, her hair like seaweed down her back, her thin shirt transparent.
“Here now, here now,” he said.
He draped first his jacket then his arm over her trembling shoulders and gently led her to his still warm, still running car, and drove her home. For the first time since Joseph had died, John came inside.
“Wait here,” he said, and she stood in the kitchen, holding on to the counter to steady herself, until he came back with a towel, some wool socks, Joseph’s old dark green, cable-knit sweater, and the quilt from the first-floor bedroom. He held the sweater up like a mother dressing a child and dutifully she ducked her head into it; then he walked her to one of the fireplace chairs, wrapped her in the blanket, and asked her to sit, while he built a fire. She put the socks on herself, and once the fire was truly going, he helped her dry her hair.
Then, he sat a few feet away, not in Joseph’s chair, but in one he brought in from the kitchen and, in his kind, low, level voice, began to talk. About growing up in Baltimore, about baseball, about his attempts, after his sister moved away, to make bread and piecrust, about the history of Antioch Beach. Gradually, Edith’s shivering stopped, the chill and achiness seeping from her body, the firelight dancing over her face, until her bones seemed to grow soft and pliant as candle wax, and she believed she had never been so grateful to be warm. John’s voice kept on, long and even as a horizon. In time, it grew fainter. At some point, she interrupted its flow to say thank you. When she woke up, morning lit her windows, and John was gone.
Chapter Fourteen
Clare
The first morning I woke up in Edith’s house, a neighbor named Louise Smits showed up at the front door with a pie. Blueberry peach with a lattice-top crust, insanely aromatic, and so fresh out of the oven that she had to use oven mitts to carry it to my house from her own at the other end of the street. Considering it was barely nine o’clock, I figured she must’ve gotten up at the crack of dawn to start baking, and I was touched and grateful. Even when I began to suspect her visit was less welcome wagon and more reconnaissance mission, which happened within the first two minutes, I remained touched and grateful because I was a pie girl from way back, and Louise Smits’s pie was an especially glorious one, purple and gold bubbling up between the latticework like molten heaven. Plus, I had a pretty wide curious streak myself, especially when it came to Edith, and Edith was what Louise had come to discuss.
When we’d dispatched the pie to the kitchen counter, and Louise had refused my offer of coffee (I’d brought two grocery bags of provisions—and, when it came to provisions, coffee topped my list—and had spent no small part of the morning fiddling with the old-fangled electric percolator until it produced a drinkable brew), we sat at Edith’s kitchen table to talk. Talking turned out to be Louise’s talent. If talking were a sport, Louise would’ve been a marathoner. I don’t think she took more than two breaths during the entire conversation.
“Now, are you a relative of Edith Herron? Ever since we heard that a young woman had inherited this house from her, we’ve been speculating as to who you might be. A granddaughter was the most common guess among those few folks left around here who even remember Edith existed, although from the looks of you, I’d say more like great-grand. You can’t be far out of your teens, now can you? Of course, I never did hear that Edith had a child at all, much less a great-granddaughter. As a matter of fact, I never heard she’d gotten remarried, though of course you don’t have to be married to have a baby, not these days, and I guess not even back when Edith would’ve had hers, although heaven help the girls who went that route. Edith might have, though. She was just that different from the rest of the women in this town, according to my mother. The truth is I never heard much about Edith’s fate after she left town. For one thing, my family moved away right after Edith did, December 1956. We were in the process of packing when we heard she’d gone. We went to Arizona for my father’s work. From beach to desert, just like that. We rented our house instead of selling, which turned out to be lucky for me. I just moved back to town two years ago, mainly because of my grandchildren. They’re up in New York, but they love this place. But even when I lived here, I was just a young girl when Edith took off for God knows where. I don’t remember even so much what she looked like because at that age, girls are all caught up in their own worlds, but I heard about her back then, from my mother and her friends, or overheard I guess is the more accurate term. I gathered that everyone expected Edith to leave after her husband died, and no one, not a soul, ever thought she’d open a guesthouse. A woman on her own with all those people, total strangers, male and female, coming and going. Made you wonder, I guess. Although according to my mother, Edith was head over heels for her husband, before he died and after, too. My mother said no woman should be that wrapped up in another human being, let alone a man. So are you?”