Their Chatham Cape, built in 1990, felt bigger, more open, and less compartmentalized than their house in Cambridge. She walked into the kitchen. It was nothing like their kitchen at home. The bleached effect of the white painted walls and cabinets, white appliances, white barstools, and white tile floor was broken up only slightly by the soapstone countertops and splashes of cobalt blue in various white ceramic and clear glass containers. It looked like a coloring book page that had been only tentatively filled in with a single blue crayon.
The two plates and used paper napkins on the island counter displayed evidence of salad and a spaghetti and red sauce dinner. One of the glasses still held a gulp of white wine. With the detached curiosity of a forensic scientist, she picked up the glass and tested the temperature of the wine against her lips. It was still a little cold. She felt full. She looked at the time. It was just after nine o’clock.
They’d been in Chatham for a week now. In years past, after a week away from the day-to-day concerns at Harvard, she would have been fully committed to the relaxed lifestyle that the Cape insisted on and already deep into her third or fourth book. But this year, Harvard’s day-to-day schedule itself, albeit packed and demanding, had provided a structure for her that was familiar and comforting. Meetings, symposia, class times, and appointments lay like bread crumbs that guided her through each day.
Here in Chatham, she had no schedule. She slept late, ate meals at varying times, and played everything by ear. She bookended each day with her medications, she took her butterfly test each morning, and she ran every day with John. But these didn’t provide enough structure. She needed bigger bread crumbs and more of them.
She often didn’t know the time of day or what day it was, for that matter. On more than one occasion now when she sat down to eat, she didn’t know which meal she was about to be presented with. When yesterday a waitress at the Sand Bar put a plate of fried clams in front of her, she would have just as readily and enthusiastically dug into a plate of pancakes.
The kitchen windows were open. She looked out into the driveway. No car. The outside air still held traces of the hot day and carried sounds of bullfrogs, a woman laughing, and the tide at Hardings Beach. She left a note for John next to the uncleared dishes:
Walk to beach. Love, A
She inhaled the clean night air. The midnight blue sky was punctured with backlit stars and a cartoon crescent moon. Not as dark as it would get that night, it was already darker than it ever got in Cambridge. Without streetlamps and tucked far enough in from Main Street, only lights from porches, rooms in houses, the occasional car high beams, and the moon illuminated their beach neighborhood. In Cambridge, that amount of darkness would have made her feel uneasy walking alone, but here, in this small seaside and vacationing community, she felt perfectly safe.
There were no cars parked in the lot and no one else on the beach. The town police discouraged activity there at night. At this hour, there were no screaming children or seagulls, no impossible-to-ignore cell phone conversations, no aggressive worries about needing to leave in time to get to the next thing, nothing to disrupt the peace.
She walked to the water’s edge and let the ocean consume her feet. Warm waves licked her legs. Facing Nantucket Sound, Hardings Beach’s protected waters were a good ten degrees milder than those of the nearby beaches that faced the cold Atlantic directly.
She removed her shirt and bra first, then slid off her skirt and underwear in one motion, and walked in. The water, free from the seaweed that normally tumbled in with the surf, lapped milky smooth against her skin. She began to breathe to the rhythm of the tide. As she treaded lightly, floating on her back, she marveled at the beads of phosphorescence that trailed her fingertips and heels like pixie dust.
Moonlight reflected off her right wrist. SAFE RETURN was engraved on the front of the flat, two-inch, stainless steel bracelet. A one-eight-hundred number, her identification, and the words Memory Impaired were etched on the reverse side. Her thoughts then rode a series of waves, traveling from unwanted jewelry to her mother’s butterfly necklace, traversing from there to her plan for suicide, to the books she planned to read, and finally stranded themselves on the common fates of Virginia Woolf and Edna Pontellier. It would be so easy. She could swim straight out toward Nantucket until she was too tired to continue.
She looked out over the dark water. Her body, strong and healthy, held her buoyant, treading water, every instinct battling toward life. Yes, she didn’t remember eating dinner with John tonight or where he’d said he was going. And she might very well not remember this night in the morning, but in this moment, she didn’t feel desperate. She felt alive and happy.
She looked back toward the beach, the landscape dimly lit. A figure approached. She knew it was John before she could identify any of his features by the bounce and size of his walk. She didn’t ask him where he’d been or how long he’d been gone. She didn’t thank him for coming back. He didn’t scold her for being out alone without her cell phone, and he didn’t ask her to get out and come home. Without a word between them, he undressed and joined her in her ocean.
“JOHN?”
She found him painting the trim on the detached garage.
“I’ve been calling for you all over the house,” said Alice.
“I was out here, I didn’t hear you,” said John.
“When do you leave for the conference?” she asked.
“Monday.”
He was going to Philadelphia for a week to attend the ninth International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease.
“That’s after Lydia gets here, right?”
“Yes, she’ll be here on Sunday.”
“Oh, right.”
Following Lydia’s written request, the Monomoy Theatre repertory company had invited her to join them as a guest artist for the summer.
“Are you ready to run?” asked John.
The early morning fog hadn’t yet lifted, and the air felt cooler than she’d dressed for.
“I just need to grab another layer.”
Inside the front door, she opened the coat closet. Dressing comfortably on the Cape in early summer posed a constant challenge, with temperatures on any given day beginning in the fifties, soaring up to eighty by afternoon and boomeranging back down into the fifties, often paired with a brisk ocean wind, by nightfall. It required a creative sense of fashion and a willingness to add and subtract articles of clothing many times a day. She touched the sleeves of each of the hanging coats. Although a number of them would be perfect now for sitting or walking on the beach, everything in there felt too heavy for running.
She ran up the stairs and into their bedroom. After searching through several drawers, she found a lightweight fleece and put it on. She noticed the book she’d been reading on her nightstand. She grabbed it and walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of iced tea and walked out to the back porch. The early morning fog hadn’t yet lifted, and it was cooler than she’d anticipated. She set her drink and book down on the table between the white Adirondack chairs and went back into the house to retrieve a blanket.
She returned, wrapped herself in the blanket, sat in one of the chairs, and opened her book to the dog-eared page. Reading was fast becoming a heartbreaking chore. She had to reread pages over and over to retain the continuity of the thesis or narrative, and if she put the book down for any length of time, she had to go back sometimes a full chapter to find the thread again. Plus, she felt anxious over deciding what to read. What if she didn’t have time to read everything she’d always wanted to? Prioritizing hurt, a reminder that the clock was ticking, that some things would be left undone.