happened, Harry.
I’m glad too. I try to think of what else to say, but there is only this, this gladness. Then:
Do you remember, Lucy, that night on the porch? That strange night, when Joe came to find you. There was a woman who wanted to dance with me.
A woman?
Just some woman. She was nobody, really. And then I woke up and Joe was there, and you stepped from the bushes and hugged him. He must have had the wrong cabin.
That was quite a night, Harry.
I’m sorry I stayed away after that. It was childish.
But you came back, didn’t you. You came back, and everything was all right. Nothing would be here if you hadn’t come back.
A moment passes in silence, vaporous time swirling around us.
I planned to kill myself here, Lucy.
A pause. When was that, Harry?
With Meredith’s pills. Did you find them? I left them where I thought you would.
I think I did, Harry. A bottle of pills?
I tried once before, you know. With the car. After so much time, how wonderful finally to say these things. It is as if I have been carrying a heavy suitcase for years and years, only to discover I can simply put it down. It was the night before I found you on the dock.
When was this, Harry? You tried to crash your car?
I want to laugh. Crash the Jag! A thought so absurd, so impossible, I see at once how small, how meager my efforts.
Harry? Are you all right?
I’m sorry. It’s just . . . so funny. It was very odd, what happened. Almost an accident. I left it running in the garage. I sat for the longest time. The strangest thing. Lucy?
Again that pause. Is it Lucy next to me? But of course it is; it is my Lucy, come at last.
Yes, Harry?
I’m sorry, for Joe. It must have been hard for him, all these years. I wish I could have said that to him.
But now it’s she who’s laughing, a laugh that seems to come from everywhere and all around, and from the deepest caves of memory; my mother, still young, on a day we all went on a picnic and the dog got into the basket where she’d put the pie, a hound with a black nose whose name I no longer recall; Meredith, in the bar on the evening we met, laughing at something her friend had said to her, then lifting her eyes to find my own; a young girl tucking a strand of damp hair behind an ear as she tells me about the pancakes, and fresh raspberries from the farm up the road. All of these and more.
Oh, Harry, don’t you know? You helped him most of all.
How did I—?
She squeezes my hand, and at once I understand; the knowledge passes into me like a current, and the circle closes at last.
With me, Harry, she says, her voice a whisper, not even there, and I follow it into sleep. That was the present you gave us all. You brought him home with me.
The hour is late: I awaken in darkness, alone. A feeling of vivid consciousness courses through me. I can barely move—my body is the same, more wood than flesh—and yet my mind is suddenly, fiercely alive inside it. From the outer room, voices reach me like a drifting scent—Hal and Franny, talking together in low, worried tones of the hospital, the distance to doctors and machines to keep me alive—and beyond them, Lucy and Jordan, speaking to one another on the dock. Each word of their conversations is vivid to me, their voices all overlapping but somehow coherent, and as I listen my mind stretches outward to a far horizon of sound, so that not just these words but every noise for miles around is equal to every other: a girl in the kitchen humming as she scrubs a pot, the sighing expansion of the lake against the shoreline, each cylinder firing in a distant outboard and the swirling hum of its prop. Magnificent: my very atoms seem to trill with sound.
“Hal.”
A pause, then his boots on the planking and a blaze of afternoon sunlight through the open door: the day is not as far gone as I’d imagined.
“Look who’s up.” Hal eyes me appraisingly and takes a seat on the edge of the narrow bed. I lift myself on the pillow as he hands me a cup of water to drink.
“I was wondering when we’d hear from you. How are you feeling?”
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