a moment, looking out at the Reach, and Bill was there as she had suspected he might be, standing about halfway between the island and the Head, standing on the Reach just like Jesus-out-of-the-boat, beckoning to her, seeming to tell her by gesture that the time was late if she ever intended to step a foot on the mainland in this life.
“If it’s what you want, Bill,” she fretted in the silence. “God knows I don’t.”
But the wind spoke other words. She did want to. She wanted to have this adventure. It had been a painful winter for her—the arthritis which came and went irregularly was back with a vengeance, flaring the joints of her fingers and knees with red fire and blue ice. One of her eyes had gotten dim and blurry (and just the other day Sarah had mentioned—with some unease—that the firespot that had been there since Stella was sixty or so now seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds). Worst of all, the deep, griping pain in her stomach had returned, and two mornings before she had gotten up at five o’clock, worked her way along the exquisitely cold floor into the bathroom, and had spat a great wad of bright red blood into the toilet bowl. This morning there had been some more of it, foul-tasting stuff, coppery and shuddersome.
The stomach pain had come and gone over the last five years, sometimes better, sometimes worse, and she had known almost from the beginning that it must be cancer. It had taken her mother and father and her mother’s father as well. None of them had lived past seventy, and so she supposed she had beat the tables those insurance fellows kept by a carpenter’s yard.
“You eat like a horse,” Alden told her, grinning, not long after the pains had begun and she had first observed the blood in her morning stool. “Don’t you know that old fogies like you are supposed to be peckish?”
“Get on or I’ll swat ye!” Stella had answered, raising a hand to her gray-haired son, who ducked, mock-cringed, and cried: “Don’t, Ma! I take it back!”
Yes, she had eaten hearty, not because she wanted to, but because she believed (as many of her generation did), that if you fed the cancer it would leave you alone. And perhaps it worked, at least for a while; the blood in her stools came and went, and there were long periods when it wasn’t there at all. Alden got used to her taking second helpings (and thirds, when the pain was particularly bad), but she never gained a pound.
Now it seemed the cancer had finally gotten around to what the froggies called the pièce derésistance.
She started out the door and saw Alden’s hat, the one with the fur-lined ear flaps, hanging on one of the pegs in the entry. She put it on—the bill came all the way down to her shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows—and then looked around one last time to see if she had forgotten anything. The stove was low, and Alden had left the draw open too much again—she told him and told him, but that was one thing he was just never going to get straight.
“Alden, you’ll burn an extra quarter-cord a winter when I’m gone,” she muttered, and opened the stove. She looked in and a tight, dismayed gasp escaped her. She slammed the door shut and adjusted the draw with trembling fingers. For a moment—just a moment—she had seen her old friend Annabelle Frane in the coals. It was her face to the life, even down to the mole on her cheek.
And had Annabelle winked at her?
She thought of leaving Alden a note to explain where she had gone, but she thought perhaps Alden would understand, in his own slow way.
Still writing notes in her head—Since the first day of winter I have been seeing your father and he says dying isn’t so bad; at least I think that’s it—Stella stepped out into the white day.
The wind shook her and she had to reset Alden’s cap on her head before the wind could steal it for a joke and cart-wheel it away. The cold seemed to find every chink in her clothing and twist into her; damp March cold with wet snow on its mind.
She set off down the hill toward the cove, being careful to walk on the cinders and clinkers that George Dinsmore had spread. Once George had gotten a job driving plow for the town