The Shadow Box(14)

“What are you doing up so early?” I asked, my heart racing.

“Good morning to you too,” he said. He held out his hand to help me up. “I heard you leave, and I figured you’d be beachcombing. Less than a week till your show. You fiddling around on some last-minute shadow box things?”

“Yes,” I said. “There’s one I haven’t quite finished.”

“Well, it’s Sunday, my only day off, and I was hoping we could go out in the boat,” he said. “It’s a photo opportunity. The Shoreline Gazette is sending a photographer—you know, Chase family outing, humanize the candidate.”

“Everyone already loves you, Griffin,” I said. Could he read my true feelings? The idea of having to play the role of smiling wife, standing at his side during the election, shook me to the core.

“You’ll come out on the boat?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said, because of course was always the right thing to say to Griffin. “Should we have breakfast first? And let me put the stuff I collected in my studio.”

“Claire, what are you doing with dead shellfish?” he asked, noticing a pile of crab carapaces I’d placed on the rock ledge. “You want your work to sell, don’t you? Collectors aren’t going to buy if it smells like rot.” He smashed his foot down on the fragile shells.

I steeled myself, pretending not to care. At one time I would have reacted, but I had learned. There was another way.

“You’ll thank me,” he said. “When you walk into the gallery on Friday and people aren’t holding their noses. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

One of Griffin’s favorite moves was to hurt and insult me, then make me say I agreed-understood-admired him for having my best interests at heart. There was no point in fighting it.

“Why do you come here anyway?” he asked.

“I love the beach,” I said.

“I’m not talking about the beach,” he said. “I’m talking about this cove. It’s full of traumatic memories for both of us.”

“Oh, Griffin,” I said. “Remember that night when you walked me home, toward Hubbard’s Point, and you said the night was about us, that we should remember it for our kiss and for the shooting stars?”

He stared at me. Did he realize I was mocking him? This moment could go either way; I tensed, ready for the blowup. But he decided to let me stroke his ego. “You’re right,” he said. “That night was our beginning.”

“It was,” I said. I looked into his sea-green eyes and tried to remember how I had felt on the blanket, waiting for his kiss. He was still the handsomest man I knew. His gaze was penetrating—in his cases, he looked straight into the defendants, saw who they were, and used his knowledge to convict them. When he focused those eyes on me, I felt he could see into my soul. I had always felt that way.

“When I first walked up just now,” Griffin said, “I heard you say something.”

“I don’t remember,” I said, thinking: I’m going to leave him. And I’m going to tell what I know. “Talking to myself, I guess.”

I waited for him to challenge me, but he didn’t. He just stood there looking at me. Then he broke into a big smile.

“Let’s go back and have breakfast,” he said, his smile widening. “I really want to get out on the water—it’s going to be a perfect day.”

We started walking. When I was young, I thought that living at Catamount Bluff would be the luckiest, most wonderful thing that could ever happen. I would look at the big house where the road ended at the sea and imagine the people who lived there. The naive girl I used to be had pictured Griffin and his friends in blue blazers, girls in summer dresses, gin and tonics on silver trays, and all the happiness and confidence and goodness that must come from the ease of that life.

Six years ago, we got married just down the road, in a small ceremony at the Lockwoods’ house. Alexander and Ford were Griffin’s best men. Our only guests were Leonora and Wade, Jackie and Tom. I wore a dove-gray dress and a wreath of flowers in my hair. Griffin wore khaki pants and a white linen shirt. He held my hand when we stood in front of Enid Drake, justice of the peace, and kissed me in the middle of the ceremony, before she pronounced us husband and wife.

“A little impatient, are we?” Enid asked, smiling.

Griffin ignored her, just smiled and kissed me again before Enid could resume the ceremony.

We were a lightning storm together—but without the thunder, no fighting, nothing but electricity. I had felt insane desire for him that summer after college, tried to bury it during the years I was with Nate, and was overtaken again, from the minute we reconnected at that Black Hall cocktail party.

When I walked home from the cove that day, my jacket pockets were full of beach finds. Griffin headed into the house through the kitchen door, and I ducked through the hedge to my studio. I took a deep breath—this was my true home, far more than the big house. It calmed me to come in here.

My collections were organized in baskets and pottery bowls—different ones for mussel shells, quahog shells, periwinkles and moon shells, green sea glass, brown sea glass, interesting bits of seaweed, and driftwood. I emptied my pockets, putting every object where it belonged. The sea-scoured twigs went directly onto my worktable—I would be incorporating them into my last piece.