The next morning, I called his doctor and got something to help Aug sleep through those dismal hours of each dwindling day when he wandered or ambushed. Not his dismal hours, but mine. The house of a dying man is a museum of intentions, and I couldn’t bear to be in it. By 5:00, he was out for the night, his breathing raspy, the cat sleeping loyally between his skinny legs.
Some evenings, when Aug was in his narcotized sleep, I drove up and down Route 6, not sure what I was looking for. I wondered if I wasn’t waiting to see an accident, a sharp disaster that would define the day. One airless evening, I found myself turning off New Town Road and driving towards our property. I parked at the end of the dirt road and trudged through the beach grass and the rugosa and the dip between the hills and onto the dunes. I didn’t know if it was the view or the walk or the smell of salt and roses that left me breathless. There was a party down on the beach, and a bonfire that was pale against the sky. I knew nothing about it, but I missed being part of it anyway. The tide had pulled out and water skimmed the sandbars. Behind me, the Tillman house was yellowing in the lowering sun, and I walked over to it. I peered in the waterside windows and saw a day bed covered with a faded Indian print bedspread, a couple of canvas chairs, a table bleached by the relentless light, a closed door. Empty of people, but full of the suggestion that you could live there and feel something every day. Maybe this was the house I was meant to live in. I lay down on the splintery deck, my hands over my chest. I was content, even, thrilled to be illicit and undetected, to have found this place where no one would find me. They’d never look for me there. The bugs tuned up, testing their wings. Then there were footsteps inside the house, a light went on, a door opened, and a man came out, stretched his arms up and let out a long, low fart.
“Holy shit,” he said, looking at me. He was Ray, the owner of the place who’d spoken at the selectmen’s meeting. He backed towards the door. It was absurd to think I could scare anyone, and I laughed, first from my own fear and embarrassment, and then because I didn’t know what else to do. He looked at me on his porch like I was an animal or a drunk.
“I am so sorry,” I said. “Obviously, I didn’t know anyone was here. I’m mortified.”
“I know you. You’re the wife of the guy who wants to build the house. You were at the town hall meeting.” He was clearly amused and still puzzled.
“I’m Alice and I don’t know what I was thinking.” Ray had the soft, sleepy look of someone who’s fallen headfirst into relaxation. “Actually, I was thinking no one was here or I wouldn’t have come. Didn’t you say the house was empty?”
“Was empty.” He turned his face at a slight angle. “Then you’re not here to get me on your side?”
“Of course not.”
“You’d be amazed. People do this all the time, just walk up here and stand on the deck like the place is open to the public. Then they try to talk to me.” He made a gesture like he was swatting at a fly. “And I don’t want to talk to them.”
“It is the famous Tillman view, after all, a national treasure. The source of all inspiration.”
“So people keep reminding me,” he said, shrugging.
The fire at the beach party flared. “I should go. I’m sorry again.”
“It’s okay. Stay—I mean now that you’re here, you might as well. I know it happens every night, but at least watch the sunset.”
I smiled, a public joke that felt almost private. Ray seemed as glad for the company as I was to have found it. We sat on the deck drinking beer, our legs over the side. He said that he hadn’t planned on staying after the selectmen’s meeting, but had changed his mind after his first night in the house, which he’d found compelling but confusing. He wasn’t used to the light, the colors, or the absence of urban noise, the smell of moonlight cooling the water. He’d visited a few times as a kid when his father was there with Tillman and while his mother, not his father’s wife anymore, waited out on the road in the car doing a crossword puzzle. There was more to the story, it practically pounded to be let out, but he stopped there. He had a kind of halting manner about him that felt in part like resignation, in part sadness. He averted his eyes too often, ran one hand over the other, and occasionally looked at the place on his wrist where his watch usually was.
“How’s your husband?” he asked. “Actually, forget it, you don’t have to tell me. It’s just I heard—people have told me—that he fell after the meeting.”
“Do you see? They’ll say anything. He’s fine. Going ahead with the plans.”
“Pissing people off.”
I told him how I was pursued during the day, and how I’d started only going out evenings because of it. I did not tell him about how I blacked Aug out until morning with something strong—for my own good.
“Same with me,” he said. “I can’t go anywhere without being ambushed, cornered, followed. What a funny town this is. Looks nice from the outside, but inside, it’s all this grinding self-righteousness and privilege. Personally, I don’t give a shit one way or the other about how this works out.” He nodded towards Aug’s land. “But I can definitely see why you’d want to put a house there. For the view. If you like that sort of thing.”
He seemed pleased that he could make me laugh. But a view was nothing you could hold or take to bed with you or trace the borders of. A view wasn’t what you saw, but what you felt when you saw it—and what could I feel when it was about the end of my husband? I pictured him, lips caught on dry teeth, drugged for the night. Who knew what Ray felt? I said I had to go, but it was fully dark, and I couldn’t see my way back. He found a flashlight and stood on the deck with it, providing me with a beam of light to follow through the grass until it became too faint to see, but by then, I’d found my way back to the road.
The late July air sucked up the last drops of moisture, and when I came back from a walk one morning, I was covered with dust and Aug was downstairs looking over a set of architect’s plans FedEx had just delivered. He’d spread them across the table and in the hazy morning sun, his body was as shocking as his strange new energy. His hair was a wild frizz, and he was all dip and slack tendon, his limbs held together by loose string. It was alarming enough to stop me in the doorway. He waved me over to the drawings, and traced the geometry of windows, doors, roof peaks, corners. He was punishing me with every lovely detail, reminding me of what I’d said I didn’t want, but to me, these plans were stamped with his absence. I tried to leave, but he caught me by the wrist.
“And this,” he said, pressing two fingers against the violet paper, “is the bedroom and here’s the window facing the water.” He swept a hand over where the water would be. “What do you think?” He smiled patiently, but I could see the anger behind it. He brushed the dust off my face.
“Are you really going ahead with this?” I asked. “I thought we were done with this.”
“No, dear, you were done with it. Did you really expect I would stop fighting now?”
I retreated to the kitchen. “What would you like for lunch?” I called out. My chest ached, my hands were freezing. I thought about sitting on the floor for a few hundred days.
“I want,” he said. “I want. What I want is,” but he was unable to finish the sentence. He’d exhausted himself. I heard in his want all the disappointments in his life, which included me now, but I didn’t help him finish his thought or make his way back to bed as I once might have. I rolled up the plans and put them behind the couch.
What I wanted, for an instant, was for him to be dead already, for all this to be over. I could leave then and never come back.
At the end of the week, Diana, defender of endangered species at the selectmen’s meeting, showed up at our house. She carried a clear plastic cage the size of a small purse. There was something she wanted to show August,