“A bit,” Julia said. “He wore a waistcoat and gold-rimmed glasses. He took silver dollars out of my nose.”
“Silver dollars? Out of your nose?” Katharine repeated. “It was a magic trick. I kept the dollars for years. I still have some, in a little wooden box.”
“Can that motorboat get out of here at low tide?” asked Edward.
“He knows every rock on this coast,” Julia said. “He grew up here.”
“Who is it?” Edward asked.
“Dan Ellsworth,” Julia said.
“He a neighbor?” Edward asked.
“The local contractor,” said Julia. “He built a house up the cove last year. He's a nice guy. He came over when I arrived this summer and offered any help I might need.”
“Nice for you to have a neighbor,” Katharine said. “I worry about you, all alone here.”
“I'm all right,” Julia said.
Though it was true she was alone. Last week, slicing cheese, she'd cut her finger. The bright blood had startled her. She'd thought of the Plath poem: What a thrill! My thumb instead of an onion. Something something … then all that red plush. It was a shock that her body could do something so dangerous, gush with such arterial splendor. Dizzied by the sight, she'd been oddly slow to react. It had taken her long moments to remember what to do: hold the finger beneath cold running water, find something to bind it. There was no one to help her, she'd understood suddenly: she was alone now with her body. It was her task to protect it.
“Do you ever think of living here full-time?” asked Edward. “When you retire?”
“Oh, that's too far off to think of. And I don't even have tenure yet, I may have nothing to retire from,” she said cheerfully. “I may have to go on working my whole life.”
Julia had thought vaguely about her future, but only vaguely, and only up to a certain point. Everything was meant to get better, wasn't it? That was how you planned your life, looking ahead, toward improvement. It was easy to imagine yourself older: white-haired, spry, entertainingly outspoken, freed from convention. But not really old— incapacitated, mind gone, body failing, unable to care for yourself. How were you to plan for that? No one wanted to reach that place.
She didn't want to, and she didn't want her parents to, either. She wanted them to be no older than they were here, right now, on this sunset point of land, the three of them watching the reddening, waning light as it flooded across the liquid surge of the tide.
“Just don't put us in a nursing home,” Katharine said, out of nowhere.
Turning back, Julia saw a man standing on the porch. He raised his arm, calling against the wind and stepping down into the meadow.
“Who is it?” Katharine asked.
What she feared was not recognizing someone she knew. Worse, someone in her own family. Would it come to that? How long would it go on, this slow tide eating at the edges of her mind? She felt the deep shame of illness, the need for secrecy; she wanted no one to know. “I can't see against the sun,” she said.
“It's Stevo!” Julia said, her face alight. “He must have gotten a ride from the bus station.”
Steven headed down the path toward them, his strides loose and long, his face ruddy and gilded in the setting sun. The others began the trek back, Edward shuffling determinedly in the lead, Katharine and Julia following, arm in arm. It's a procession, Julia thought. The elders, greeting the young monarch. She wondered if Steven saw himself as the future of the family.
Walking down through the meadow toward them, Steven was struck by the sight of his grandparents in the wide landscape. They seemed suddenly small and insubstantial against the billowing grass, the moving blue water. All three were smiling at him, irradiated by the raking light. His grandparents seemed suddenly, shockingly, old: Edward's pale face lined and papery, Katharine's thin hair blowing in wisps. And his mother's face, polished by the setting sun, looked worn—was she becoming old, too?
They met in the middle of the field; around them the long grass was blown in smooth flattening swaths by the evening wind. Steven leaned over to hug them. He was taller than his father, he was taller than everyone else in the family, and Julia liked this. Julia thought it proper that Steven should be so tall. She thought he should have whatever he wanted.
“You're back,” Julia said.
“Hey, Ma,” Steven said, putting his arms around her.
She hugged him, clasping his young man's body, strange and familiar. She patted his sweatered back: it was odd how much the body meant, how it reassured. And how odd—wonderful—to feel your son taller and stronger than you; to understand, in your own body, that he had passed beyond you in certain ways, that he was carrying himself forward into the world without your help. It was reassuring, too: this body would protect yours, care for it.
“Let me look at you,” she said, standing back. “Have you changed into a West Coaster?” The question was only a pretext to hold him longer, to gaze into the beloved face. What she wanted was to eat him whole. “No,” she announced, “you still seem like Stevo.”
Steven waited, smiling, allowing himself to be hugged, gazed at, discussed. Adored. As a teenager, her embraces had embarrassed him and he'd resisted them, but after the divorce things changed. He became patient and indulgent, protective of his mother.
One night, up here, he'd wakened to hear Julia walking around in the room she had shared with his father. The house was silent—it was very late—and in that absence of sound the creak of the floorboards seemed loud. It was strange to think of his mother waking up alone in that double bed; he wondered what she was doing, in the middle of the night. His mother, in her worn white nightgown—was she getting a blanket? Was she cold? Steven lay in his own bed, listening. He could not hear separate footsteps, only the creak of the floorboards. Was she lonely? What was she thinking? When it was quiet again, he went on listening, imagining her alone in the room.
After that it was not possible to think of his mother as oppressive, her embrace intrusive. After that he thought of her as alone, vulnerable.
Now Steven moved close to Katharine and put his arm out for her, taking Julia's place.
“Why, thank you,” Katharine said demurely. “I may be a little slow now, but I hope you know I climbed Mount Washington when I was younger.”
“I know that,” Steven said. “Katharine ‘The Goat’Treadwell.” Wasn't that what you were called?”
Katharine laughed with him, confused. The Goat?
He slowed his steps to match hers as they all made their way back through the blowing grass to the house. The sky was now wild, streaming with sunset.
Supper was in the dining room, where the wide floorboards had once been painted deep blue, but were worn in places down to bare wood. Against one wall stood a heavy mahogany sideboard, holding a white ironstone pitcher filled with daisies. Against another wall was an ancient daybed, beneath a faded Currier & Ives print of the celebrated trotter Lucy. In a corner, on a rickety spool-legged table, was the only telephone in the house.
They carried in plates and sat down around the battered drop-leaf table.
“Well, Steven,” said Edward, unfolding his napkin. “Tell us what you've been doing.”
Steven told them about Seattle—the forest, the project, the loggers. When he began to describe the confrontation, Julia put down her fork.
“You chained yourself to a tree, in front of loggers with chain saws?” Julia asked. “You never told me that.”
“No,” said Steven, “I thought it more prudent not to.” He grinned at her. “It wasn't ‘in front of chain saws.’They weren't going to cut us in two.”