When they come up for air, Kristie feels an ache deep in her groin. It’s almost indecent, how turned on she is. She hasn’t felt like this in a very long time. “You want to come in?” she whispers.
7.
Louisa
Time at Ships View is elastic, just as it’s been since Louisa was little. An hour of reading on the porch can pass slowly, infinitely glorious, and yet the days stack quickly on top of each other, accumulating into a pile before you’ve even noticed. Louisa’s room, the Pink Room, has two single beds and faces the ocean; it’s always been her favorite room but she hasn’t been here as a singleton in a long time. It’s a treat to return to it every night. She falls asleep to the gentle moaning of the foghorn at the end of the Rockland breakwater and wakes to the sound of the waves slapping lightly at the rocks. She sleeps like a baby here, and her babies sleep like babies too, and time goes by and by and by.
Steven texts more often than he calls, which means that mostly she can deliver one-word answers, or answers in the form of emojis, or no answers at all. No, Louisa didn’t pay the June electric bill before they left. Yes, the recycling needs to go in the building bin on Friday. How’s her book going? If she doesn’t want to answer it’s easy enough to pretend she’s been somewhere else—easy enough, in fact, to be somewhere else, without her phone: lying in the sun on the rocks, walking Otis in Owls Head Park, taking the kids into town for ice cream, sitting with her dad when Barbara isn’t there.
The first week rolls by like this, and then the second. Louisa often wakes before everyone, fills one of the Damariscotta mugs with coffee, and sits in the quiet dining room, at the long table. She looks alternately out the giant picture window at the water, pinkish at this time of day, sometimes misty, always breathtaking, and at her mostly empty Pitcairn notebook. She has the idea that the notebook will allow her to move freely in or out of the house while capturing her brilliant thoughts, which she will then transfer to her laptop. Sometimes she writes a few words or—when she’s feeling really ambitious—a sentence, but she almost always turns back to the water before going any further. That’s okay, she tells herself. She has until September. It’s only June!
One morning Louisa finds a letter addressed to Steven on the table where they put outgoing mail; they bring the mail to the Owls Head post office at the top of the hill once a day, and collect theirs at the same time. The envelope is addressed in Abigail’s cursive—she must be the only kid left on the planet who writes in cursive—and the flap isn’t sealed all the way. Before she has time to acknowledge what she’s doing Louisa has slipped one finger inside the flap and pulled out a sheet of flowered paper that she recognizes as the paper she bought Abigail for Christmas, along with the fountain pen she had asked for. (Abigail definitely belongs in another century; she told Louisa recently that she wants to learn to whittle. Whittle!)
Dear Daddy,
When are you coming? I know you have to work and make your podcasts and blah blah blah but it isn’t the same here without you. It’s still better than Brooklyn in the summer though and I have been in the water every single day even though the warmest it has been was sixty-one degrees and usually it’s colder. If you put your face right under immediately without even thinking it’s bareable [sic] and that’s the only way I can do it but Matty always goes in really slowly which is why he hardly ever goes under. It’s so much harder if you let yourself feel the cold. Speaking of water, how is Gavin? Please tell him I said hi. He’s a really good goldfish and he’s been alive for thirteen months which is a pretty long time so please please please take really good care of him and don’t overfeed him because overfeeding is deadly for goldfish. Just ask Claire. Remember her goldfish only lived for two weeks and even though I warned her about the food she didn’t listen.
On our VERY FIRST day here you will NOT BELIEVE what happened. We found a dead seal. We had to call the Mammal People and they came and took it away on a stretcher.
We didn’t see a shark bite, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one there somewhere.
See what you’re missing by staying in Brooklyn? I bet you haven’t found any dead bodies.
If you don’t have time to write back can you please email and I can read it on the iPad. I will continue to write to you the old-fashioned way because I think that’s CLASSIER.
Love, Abigail.
Louisa puts her hand on her heart and taps it twice. Children. She sticks a stamp on the envelope.
When Louisa is in Maine she takes pleasure in small tasks. In Brooklyn, small tasks plague her. (A birthday gift for Abigail’s friend Janey! An oil change for the minivan! Matty’s checkup with the optometrist!) One morning Annie says she needs someone to stop by the post office to pick up the mail and then buy the lobsters for dinner from the Owls Head Lobster Company at the dock. Louisa offers to go. She’s extracting her car keys from the detritus on the telephone table—Abigail’s turned-over copy of Summer of the Swans, Claire’s sandwich crust?—when her father comes down the stairs and says, “Are you off somewhere?”
“I am, Daddy.” Louisa studies her father. He’s wearing a navy-blue polo shirt and a pair of khakis. His hair is parted neatly on the side. He’s freshly shaven, and he smells like the Royall Muske he’s always worn. He looks . . . well, he looks normal. His eyes are clear and bright; his spine is straight. “I’m going to the post office, and then the lobster pound.” She hesitates, then chastises herself for hesitating. “Do you want to come?”
He nods. “Yes. Sure, the post office and lobsters. I’ll come.”
The post office is only one mile away, but even so Louisa is nervous. Louisa and Martin have made the trip to the lobster pound, how many times together? A few times per summer times thirty-nine summers . . . but now she’s not sure which Martin she’s going to get.
They drive up the hill, passing the entrance to the old logging roads, passing the homes—more modest than Ships View—that sit on the opposite street from the water, and Louisa finds herself thinking about her eighth-grade social studies teacher, Mrs. Wolf.
When Louisa was in her final year of middle school at the Waynflete School in Portland, Mrs. Wolf asked the Hon. Martin R. Fitzgerald to visit the eighth-grade classes to talk about his work on the Maine Superior Court, where he served before he was appointed to the supreme court. The judge was busy and could afford only forty-five minutes, so Mrs. Wolf gathered all the classes in the arts center for him to speak to everyone at once from the stage. Louisa remembers how she was horrified by the whole event—no eighth grader wants to call more attention to herself, for any reason. But Mrs. Wolf had been so happy to have Martin there. (Looking back from the vantage of adulthood, Louisa is pretty sure that Mrs. Wolf, a divorced single mother of eight-year-old twins, was flirting with her father.)
What does Louisa, driving now toward the Owls Head post office, remember of her father’s visit to her school? She remembers that he cut an imposing figure. She remembers that his voice was deep, steady, sure. She remembers that the moment he began speaking her classmates were rapt with attention. She remembers that Clay Hansen wanted to know if any judges ever showed up to court wearing only underwear under their robes, or nothing at all! (Not that Martin knew of.) She remembers her dad’s advice, which he has repeated over and over again, and that he actually believes and actually lived in his time on the courts: Leave the world better than you found it.