Ray handed me a towel when I got out. “Why didn’t you tell me, Alice? Why did you tell me he’s fine if he isn’t?”
“He’s dying,” I said, my throat straining. “He almost never gets out of bed. He’s lost so much weight I can see his skull under his skin. He can’t sit on a chair because it’s too hard on his tailbone. I drug him in the afternoon so he sleeps until the morning, just so I can get a break. He’s building the house for me to live in when he’s dead and I don’t want it. How’s that? Is that what I should have told you?”
Ray didn’t know what to say, and I plodded back through the woods to the car. Ray followed and we didn’t speak again until I’d pulled up to his house. I turned off the engine and stared ahead.
“There’s really no place for you to go, is there,” he said.
I nodded. “Anywhere I am, I’ve made the wrong decision.”
Ray put his arm around my shoulder, an awkward move in the car, both of us still damp and mostly strangers to each other. But the way he rested his face against mine, I thought we’d found in the other, for just a moment, some familiar and tender ache.
When I got home, August was downstairs on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, despite the unrelenting heat. He looked at me in my suit, my clothes in one hand, my wet towel. “Nice swim?” he asked. “See anyone?”
“I had the pond to myself. Why are you down here? Are you okay?”
“Did you swim alone?” His voice was weak, but sharply edged.
“I told you—I had the place to myself. I want to get out of my suit.” I turned to leave the room.
“No, don’t go. Take it off here,” he said. “Let me see you.”
“No,” I said, and went upstairs to the bedroom where I knew he couldn’t reach me. My fingers were stiff and inept pulling at my suit, which stuck to my skin. Nausea pressed under my tongue. I smelled steamers and pond water. But August had managed the stairs and stood in the doorway. He stared at my body. I was all health and exertion, while his chest rose too quickly. I saw how illness was scooping him out. He sat on the bed and motioned for me to come close so he could press his face against my belly. He told me I was beautiful. I thought I would cry when he reached for my breast.
“You smell like sex.” He pushed me away. I looked down at his pale, babyish head. “I didn’t take my pill before, Alice. I don’t want to sleep anymore. Why should I be asleep for the rest of my life and see nothing more? I want to see everything.” He looked up at me. “No man will ever love you again,” he said. “I’m your last. You know that, don’t you?”
“How can you say that to me?”
“How can I not?”
I saw that when he’d gotten out of bed earlier, he’d pulled up his side of the sheets to show me that he was not coming back, that I’d sleep alone. He went downstairs again where he would stay until he died, getting more horizontal on the couch every day. I lay down, but couldn’t sleep. Around midnight, I went downstairs for a glass of water.
“I know you’ve left me already,” August said, out of the dark. “I’ve made everyone hate me, even you. A bad habit of mine—to get them before they get me. Not a way to live, but not a bad way to die.”
I was a room apart but I could have already been talking to Aug’s ghost when I asked, “Did you know you were sick when you bought the land? Did you know I’d always be alone there?” He didn’t answer. “Was that your plan?”
I went to see Ray the next evening, walking past Aug who was still on the couch, but now sunken into it, a fossil in the making. He hadn’t eaten all day and he didn’t ask me where I was going. When I got to the Tillman house, Ray’s car was there, but he wasn’t. I went around to the deck and saw him down on the beach, walking the sandbars. As I waited for him, what I wished for was a hurricane to flatten the Tillman house and Aug’s land, uproot the dunes until they slid into the water and disappeared. Or a fire. But the air was motionless, and the sky a beautiful, late summer boast.
“I’m going home tomorrow,” Ray said, stepping onto the deck. It was amazing how quickly I’d gotten used to his awkward delivery. One cheek was covered with sand, as though he’d been sleeping on beach.
“Do you think you’ll come back?”
“Not for a long time, probably not unless I have to.” He sat next to me. “One time when I was here as a kid, when my father and Tillman sent me down to the beach to swim, I nearly drowned. When I looked up for my father to help me, he and Tillman had gone inside. They were fucking when I came in, scared and wet.” He let out a thin, unhappy laugh. “Funny now—not so funny then.”
Is that the memory his father had wanted to leave him with when he’d left him the house? That while one is drowning, another is making love? That life is full of such fateful contrasts? When I leaned over to kiss Ray, he pulled away and looked alarmed, but I tilted at him, pressed my lips against his closed, resistant mouth. I put his hand on my breast, but he was inert, and his hand dropped.
“Sorry,” Ray said. “It’s nothing personal, Alice. I just have to leave this place. I’m sorry.” He stood and walked to another part of the deck.
I wasn’t humiliated by what had just happened, but instead felt as though I’d emerged from a perfect swim, my body celebrating its vitality. Aug was dying, but I wasn’t, and it seemed to me then in that singular moment of solitude, this was what he’d been trying to do with the house. He’d wanted me to hear this last yell of his, see his last desire spread out in front of me, so I’d know the difference every day between living and concession. I hadn’t wanted the house before because I thought it would kill me—with grief and loneliness—but now I did. I wanted the house. I don’t know how long I sat there, or how long Ray was inside packing up his things, but at some point, I watched headlights sweep over the beach grass on Aug’s property. A car had come down the road as far as it could and parked.
“An inspiration seeker,” I called to Ray. “Even in the dark, they’re looking for something.”
The driver’s side opened and a woman got out. She took a few steps towards the water and lit a cigarette. Soon, someone else got out of the car, a hunched figure with movement that was only a memory of movement. It was August. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, what he was doing, who he was with. He rested a hand on the woman’s shoulders and turned on a flashlight. Its beam roamed over the grass, then the Tillman house, then my frozen face.
“It’s my husband,” I told Ray who’d come outside. Aug had come looking for me, and he had always known where I was.
Aug drew a path to him with the flashlight and I left the deck and Ray. I was anxious to explain everything now. Closer, I saw that the woman was Molly. Even in the poor light, I could see that she had a bitter mouth and that it was set against me.
“Look who showed up,” Aug said to me. “Isn’t it wonderful? My darling Molly, my daughter.”
She said hello with the same cold tenor I’d heard over the phone in the early summer. It seemed impossible that I’d once sat at a table with her while she’d sounded out consonants, or that I’d watched her pick apples. She’d driven from Boston, she explained, in a rental car. She and Aug had been making plans for weeks.
“You didn’t tell me,” I said to Aug.
“This is a surprise then, isn’t it?” He shined his beam on Ray on the deck, and in the slow lowering of the light, Aug dismissed him. “I was showing Molly the land. I wanted to show her where her bedroom is going to be, where the window is, the deck onto the water. At night,