The Whole World Over (68 page)

Starting at the left edge of the board, Alan spelled
BAIRN
, the final n
forming
NO
where it linked up with Greenie's
ONTO
. The B occupied
a red square. "Seven times three, plus three," he said quietly.

"Bairn?" Greenie laughed. "What is this, Celtic Scrabble?"

"I don't know what's come over me," he said. He looked at Saga.
"What happened then?"

"Oh." She shrugged. "My mom was inside the house. She never
noticed I was gone. She thought I was in the yard. When I told her
where I'd been, she told me I had a big imagination. When my dad came
home, she told him I had quite the saga to tell him. 'You
are
a saga!' he
said, something like that. I thought I'd get in trouble. I
wanted
to be in
trouble—but no one believed me."

"You never told me that story," said Alan.

"It's true," she said, "something I remember clear as anything."

They traded smiles, the expression of people who understand each
other in the midst of much confusion.

Greenie felt Alan nudge her foot with his. "You again," he said.
"Don't rush." He got up and went to the stove, took the kettle to fill it.

Greenie hadn't looked at her rack since picking up three new letters.
She saw
RHMIELA
. The e was a substitute. Many years before,
when a real e had gone missing, Greenie's father had penned the letter
on one of the two blank tiles. "Ha! Just like life," he had joked. "Occasions
for free choice diminish as you age. Though your mother will
probably tell me I'm wrong about that."

Jostling the letters, she found
HARE, HAIR, HAIL:
was
HAILER
a word? She could make
ALIEN
with an open n. "Alieno?" she said.
Saga laughed. Greenie happened upon
MARIEL,
but that was a
name.
MARE. MALE.
She focused on the L in
SELKIE. MALL.
My
mind is refusing to do this,
she thought, moving the letters arbitrarily:
MARHLEI, MHARLIE.
She stared.

M H ARLIE

Mournfully, pointlessly, she searched the board. No c. Of course not.
No place for such things. No proper names allowed. What about
improper names?

Alan returned from the kitchen with three mugs and a mason jar
filled with a variety of tea bags.

"Can you remill something?" Greenie placed
REMIL
above the
open
L.

"I think so. Flour, if it's not fine enough the first time around," said
Alan. "You of all people would know about that."

Saga nodded. Over
BAIRN
, she made
OAR
. "Believe it or not, I
need consonants."

They chose tea bags. Alan put the bags in the mugs and lined them up
on the table. He leaned down to pet Treehorn, who slept close to the
stove. He returned to the table. "You're both going to hate me." With
an
R
, he turned
OAR
into
ROAR
and then, using both hands, built a
bridge all the way to
REMILL
, crossing a double word score, to make
the word
REQUIEM
. He wrote, but did not say aloud, 40.

"Is this what they call a rout?" said Greenie.

"It's early yet," said Alan, pointing to the unchosen letters.

Greenie smirked at him. "I don't think we have to be telepathic to
predict this outcome."

Saga continued to stare at Alan's latest word, as if she might challenge
its legitimacy. "Copper," she said. "Greenish."

"Requiem?" said Alan, who seemed to understand.

She nodded.

"I'm not sure I'd have come up with that word at any other time,"
he said.

They grew quiet, reflecting. Each of them took another turn, no one
scoring remarkably, and then they agreed that it was very late. They
poured the letters straight from the board back into the box and put the
game away. Though the wind complained incessantly through the trees,
the rain had stopped. The next day was to be a nice one, according to
their crank-up radio—which they consulted only for weather and, now
and then, a hasty sampling of news. Next day, they decided, they would
explore the other side of the island.

Saga whistled gently to Treehorn, who jumped up to follow her into
the nearby bedroom, which George had requested the three of them
share. Awkwardly, Alan and Greenie said good night to her as she
closed the door.

Greenie whispered to Alan, "Someday he'll be sharing that room
with a girl his own age, and they won't be in separate bunks. We'll pretend
we don't care. We'll be very modern about it."

Alan stared at her. She had hoped he would hear the implications. She
wanted to tell him that aside from anything else, they were parents.
They were the parents of George Glazier, a boy nearly six years old,
inquisitive, loving, optimistic, and—whether or not he'd outgrow it—a
little secretive. They were parents, and for the time being that's all they
were.

"Are you staying with me?" he said. He added quickly, "Upstairs?"

She told him she was, if he didn't mind. They brushed their teeth
together at the kitchen sink, using the last of the water in the kettle. It
was still warm and a little salty. Greenie went up first, while Alan went
to the outhouse.

She turned on the battery-powered lamp. The wet clothes she had
shed lay in a heap beside the window. She hung them on hooks; next
day, if the forecast was correct, she would lay them on rocks to dry in
the sun. Quickly, she climbed into her parents' old bed. Alan had made
it up with two splayed sleeping bags, their puffy linings patterned with
fishermen and leaping trout.

She'd made a last call to Charlie that morning, from a phone booth in
a town just south of New Hampshire. She had stopped the car when she
knew that he would be awake but still at home. He'd greeted her with
wary surprise. Where was she? Was everything all right?

"I'm in Massachusetts," she'd said.

"Our home state." He spoke warmly but without enthusiasm.

"I didn't really sleep last night."

"I'm not surprised."

From the phone booth, Greenie had watched two women herd several
small children across the street. A crossing guard held up traffic.

"Are you still there? Are you sure you're all right?"

Greenie told him then that she was not all right. She told him that she
loved him, that she couldn't believe she was going to tell him what she
had to tell him. She did not insult him by saying she had no choice
(she did) or by repeating over and over how much she loved him (oh
God, she did, repeating it endlessly inside her head). She did tell him
that by spending the previous night in New York, among Alan's and
George's things, she had been confronted by just how much she would
lose—and how much she would risk never knowing.

"That doesn't surprise me," he said, and then he was silent a long
time. Greenie let him think—or compose himself. At last he said slowly,
"You know, when you e-mailed me before you left, you told me you
were going home. Home. That's the word you used."

Greenie sobbed. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it that way."

"Yes, you did." His tone was almost forgiving. "I always thought
this would happen, if you want to know the truth. I don't mean that
vindictively."

Greenie was about to protest—what kind of an I-told-you-so was
this?—when she realized how stupid and selfish it would be; like Owl
when he tried to be upstairs and downstairs at the very same time. "Can
I see you when I come back? Because I'll be back. I don't know for how
long, but I will."

Charlie had sighed, then sighed again. "Oh Charlie, I don't know,"
he said. "But if we don't see each other soon, we'll see each other later. If
life doesn't throw us together again, we'll figure out something. Something
different." Halfheartedly, he laughed. "Yeah. Different. Because
you know what's so obvious now, Charlie? That you're not Charlie. Not
the long-lost soul mate I thought I'd found."

While she struggled not to tell him he was wrong, he said, "That's not
the slightest bit your fault, Greenie."

"Can I write to you?" she asked. "Please?"

Firmly, he said, "No. Not now."

After hanging up, she'd stood in the phone booth and cried into her
hands until the crossing guard caught sight of her and motioned concern.
Greenie had run to her car and driven on through the rain to the
marina.

When she was in high school, a couple whom Greenie's parents knew
had split apart, the husband leaving the wife for another woman. A few
months later, he returned. When Greenie had remarked that the wife
must be happy to have him back, Olivia had raised her eyebrows and
said, "Yes and no." A marriage that survived an affair, she said, was like
a fine china cup whose handle had snapped off. You could glue it back
on, but you would always see the place where it had broken, and you
would never be completely confident that, as you held it in your hand, it
would not break again in that very same spot.

Now, in her parents' bed, waiting for Alan, Greenie felt herself fill
with rage, not just at her mother but at herself, for taking at face value
so many judgments Olivia had made. What, then, would Greenie and
Alan's marriage look like if it "survived"? A porcelain sugar bowl,
both
handles snapped off and glued back on? Was something broken and
then salvaged automatically devalued? What if it became more precious
because
you saw how fragile it was?

Like Greenie, Alan had dressed for bed in two layers of clothing.
When he joined her—without hesitation, because the air was so frigid—
she asked him about Saga. Whispering, he told Greenie about Saga's
accident and about her family. He said, "She's someone who went
through a terrible, sudden loss of self and doesn't realize how much
she's recovered. And now this."

"Are you taking her as a patient?"

"No," he said. "Or I wouldn't be telling you this. But I'm going to
help her. She has other friends too, in the city. She's not helpless."

Wind trespassed loudly on the silence. Windows rattled in their frames.

"You remember that old cliché, ordinary unhappiness?" said Alan.
Greenie said she did. "Well, Saga needs to understand that she's nearly
achieved ordinary forgetfulness. Not quite, probably never, but almost.
It's like she's come to idealize memory itself. She thinks the rest of us
walk around remembering everything we ever did or saw or said."

Because they were whispering so softly, and because the room was so
cold, they pressed against each other, side to side. "It's amazing what
people get through—or get over," Greenie said, and then there was
nothing more to say. They had no further ways of reasonably delaying
their arrival at each other.

Alan asked if he could look at Greenie's hands.

"My hands?" She pulled them out from under the sleeping bag. Alan
took them and held them toward the light from the lamp, turning them.

"Ouch," she said when he twisted one of her wrists too far.

"That's new." He pointed to a thin welt across the back of her right
hand.

"Thanksgiving pies," she said. "Twelve. Six flavors."

"Impressive. And this?" A patch of scar tissue on the center knuckle
of a pinkie.

"I've had that since school. It shows up when I get a lot of sun."

A chef's hands were like a map, a history of culinary mishaps, scattered
with scars from slashes, punctures, burns, run-ins with cheese
graters, meat cleavers, grills on open fires. Greenie bore no scars from
cuts—she had always been good with knives—but she had a collection
of tiny burn marks, some white, others pink; a plum-colored lozenge on
her inner left wrist. After Alan finished his examination, he turned off
the lamp.

"You're still wearing your ring," he said.

She couldn't answer. Even in the panic of departure, she had remembered
to bring it with her. She had put it on when she left New York
for Maine. If Alan had looked closely at her finger, uniformly brown
beneath the ring, he would have known that she had not worn it all
summer.

He sighed: such a familiar, freighted sound. "Greenie, I don't know
what we're doing here, really, but George and I have to return to the city
in a few days. At the latest. You can stay—but we're going back. My life
is there, and it's very busy now. George's school is back in session."

Her throat felt as if it had shut completely; how was it that she could
still breathe?

"So that's up to you," he said. "Well, obviously." He waited. He
sighed again. "There's a lot I have to tell you, a lot I've decided."

She managed to say, "Same here."

"I guess I need to know how much time there is to tell it in."

"A great deal of time, I think."

"A 'great deal'? You 'think'? Greenie, if you came all this way,
dragged me all the way here just to separate one more time—"

"What I meant was, I
hope.
" She said, carefully so that she would not
have to repeat herself, daring to elevate her voice from a whisper, "You'd
let me stay, wouldn't you? I mean, go back with you and George?"

Through a window, bright light entered the room. Greenie knew the
sound of a cabin cruiser, loud and guttural. This was its headlight,
which passed away before the puttering of the motor.

"Are you coming back to George or to me?" he asked.

"The truth," she said, "is that to me, right now, you are inseparable. I
want you both. I can't think of you apart right now. Or myself apart
from you." She laid a hand on his chest, so that he knew she meant
him.

THE MORNING OF THE WEDDING
, Greenie arrived at the mansion
before six. McNally was to arrive at seven, Walter at eight.

"Well,
this
half is calm. It is."