It’s 1975, and he’s sixteen. He feels the cold on his wrists and his ears; drifts of snow rise up behind him to the first floor windows of the high school. She’s across the street. It’s just the two of them, somehow. She’s hopping on one foot and he doesn’t understand why. Seeing him, she smiles, then waves him over, calling his name. He notices her pearl earrings. She’s lost her clog in the snow and he digs it out, taking his gloves off, his hands turning numb and red. A lavender wool sock covers her foot, with a hole beginning in the toe, and a cable running from her ankle to her knee. Still kneeling, he slips the clog onto her foot. She rests her mittened hands on his shoulders for balance, and now we know where we are. This is the beginning of a love story. Her braid falls in his face, and he smells lemon shampoo.

♦—

A year has flickered by. They enter the graveyard through the back entrance, off Gun Hill Road. This is where everyone goes to get high, to drink, to make out. They find a spot by the pond. He sits, with his back against one of the tall trees, and she curls up beside him. She’s brought their second grade class photo. She’s in the front row, sitting on the floor, smiling at the camera, her head cocked just a little to one side. Her red dress has a Peter Pan collar, and her bangs end just above her dark eyes. He’s in the back, off to the side, laughing, looking at the boy next to him. He had a crush on her even then; he tells her how nervous he was to hold her hand during square dance in gym. She says she still has the Valentine he gave her that year. He kisses her on the cheek and then she kisses him on the mouth.

♦—

The lilac trees are blooming in her front yard. She cuts off several branches and brings the heavy stems into the kitchen, plunging them into a vase of cold water, inhaling the familiar scent. She brings him to her messy bedroom in that old creaky house; her parents are gone for the afternoon, taking the T into Boston for the ballet or perhaps the opera. His laugh fills the room and makes her smile. The dark hair on his body covers more than she imagined. She releases her single thick braid, shaking her head, and he runs his hands through her hair, down to her waist now, teasing out the kinks. She closes her eyes. Later, her sheets smell of him until they don’t.

♦

They gulp down the cold water at the bubbler before leaving the tennis courts. She lets the water stream down her chin, laughing, and he kisses the water drops. They’ve left all the windows of the station wagon rolled down during tennis practice but the car is still hot and so he speeds up as he drives, moving the still breeze through the vehicle. They’re tired and sore and heading to his house for dinner. He turns up the radio so they can sing along with Fleetwood Mac. She tucks her legs up onto the seat, and he wraps his arm around her shoulder. They’re still wet with sweat but they don’t care. She leans her head against his chest. The stone walls and green velvet hills stream by and we wish we could stay with them in this moment forever.

♦

They’re memorialized in the 1977 yearbook: Couple Most Likely to Get Married. There’s a posed photo of them, with him on one knee. She’s standing, looking down at him, her hands clasped in his, her eyes full of laughter, her smile wide. She signs this photo in some yearbooks but not all.

♦

The graduation night party is at someone’s house on the North Shore. There’s an enormous lawn and then a row of bushes that separates the land from the sea. Everyone is wasted. She’s a firefly: moving, talking, laughing, crying. He sits on the stone wall with his friends, waiting for the night to end, wanting to be only with her.

♦

They spend a week together with her family at their summer home on the Vineyard before leaving for separate colleges. They hitchhike up island from the ferry. The house is almost on the top of the hill, and the living room has large windows that look out onto the ocean. Lobster boats appear and then disappear close to the horizon. Rose hips shudder in the hot wind. If we listen carefully, we can hear the waves. She makes up the bed in the guest room for him, leaving notes under the pillows. The room is on the third floor, just above her room, and there’s a knot of wood in the floor that has a hole in it. He can look down to see parts of her as she sleeps, restlessly, just before she wakes: a tanned knee, an elbow, strands of hair made golden by the sun. They all use the outdoor shower but he cannot get the sand out of his sheets.

♦

He’s starving, and the smell of lobsters and clams and bluefish scents the air. They eat fried clams sitting at a picnic table in Menemsha. She wipes the grease off his chin. The gray clapboard shacks lead up to a gas station, with the beach and jetty beyond. She runs ahead, nimbly stepping from rock to rock. He’s slower, less sure-footed, stopping and crouching down to pick up a small pink starfish in a puddle of seawater. When he looks up, he can no longer see her. The fog has settled in and he doesn’t know that it’s just for a moment, that the wind will pick it up and carry it away. He doesn’t want to lose her, but we’re sensing that he will, and he starts trying to walk faster on the rocks. His sneakers are slick, and he slips. Then she’s there, in her purple shorts, and she grabs his hand to help him over the last few rocks. They are at the very end of the jetty and the big orange sun is on the move now; they can see it getting closer and closer to the dark sea. He gives her the pink starfish and they are quiet as the sun disappears.

♦

The sand is hot on her feet as she runs toward the water. She hears him running behind her and she wades into the cold, stepping on squishy seaweed as the water rises to her knees, her crotch, her waist. A big wave comes rolling in and she dives neatly into the middle of it, coming up on the other side. She swims farther out, her stroke strong, to the big expanse of water, where there will be no more waves. He arrives there, too, and they face each other, treading water. His face is tan, his black hair slicked back. He leaves tomorrow. She wants a fresh start, a new beginning of her own. We understand this desire, we too want to be free, but we still hoped this wouldn’t happen. She wraps her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. He is so familiar to her. The scar bisecting his eyebrow. The freckle above his lip. And then she tells him, out there in the calm. He closes his eyes and slips out of her grasp, swimming under the surface, heading back to land.

♦

He parks his car on the long sloping driveway, and he can hear the music and the laughter as he walks up the icy path. It’s hard to see who’s inside the barn; the only light comes from colored Christmas bulbs threaded along the walls and climbing up the tapered wood ceiling. The music is blaring out of huge speakers: Peter Frampton, or maybe it’s the Eagles. He doesn’t want to be here. He’s known these people for too long. Suddenly, she’s by his side and puts her hand on his arm. He gives her a kiss on the cheek. She hugs him then, and he wants more than anything to pick her up and wrap his arms around her, to feel the weight of her body pressed against his, the light touch of her fingers on his skin, but he knows he can’t. They talk for a few moments but he cannot hear what she is saying.

♦—

Her Bjorn Borg poster won’t stay affixed to the brick walls of her first apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up on West 85th. She leaves her windows open, even in the winter; heat waves rise visibly from the radiators. She stands in the windowless galley kitchen, inhaling tea steam from her mug. An hour before, in a Chinese restaurant, someone told her that he’s here, in the city, trading bonds on Wall Street. Her boyfriend is taking a shower, singing “Private Eyes.” The door to the bathroom is open and he calls to her, singing the refrain. She laughs as she tells him to wait. She kicks off her heels and begins to undress, the phone cord wrapped around her, as she dials directory assistance. East 91st. It’s unlikely she’ll run into him. She wishes things were different. He must be in one of those new skyscrapers that are rising all over the city, changing the landscape.

♦—

He watches late-night TV, the sound off, in his dark bedroom. When he finally sleeps, he hears sounds of the trading room in his dreams and shouts orders to an empty apartment. He’s still asleep when his girlfriend calls from a pay phone, yelling above the crowd. He was supposed to meet her in Central Park for the rally. Pressing the phone against his ear, he says he can’t come: too much noise, too many people. The connection goes dead. He eats Chinese food with the curtains pulled tight, watching the rally on the evening news. A million people, they say, and he knows she’s there, perched on someone’s shoulders, singing the harmony to “We Shall Overcome.”

♦

She waits for the 1 at 86th Street, heading downtown. The express rumbles through on the middle track. The train is almost empty and there he is, in a suit and a gray overcoat, rolling by. She puts her hand up to wave and, after a moment, he does the same. Maybe she sees him smile. Then the train grows smaller, melting into the black tunnel. The red lights glare until they disappear around a corner. She’s not sure, later, if it was him after all.

♦

He sees her by the fountain at Lincoln Center. She’s with a man in an elegant suit, and she’s laughing, hard, covering her mouth with one hand as always. It was the sound, the wave of her laugh, that made him look over. He stays to the side so she can’t see him. She’s all dressed up, in heels and a black velvet dress that almost touches the ground. Her hair is piled on top of her head, and her lips are so red against her pale skin. He can’t help staring. She’s beautiful, and we wish he would go over and say hello. He watches them walk into the Opera House. He’s relieved he’s going to the ballet.

♦

At work, between clients, she sits in her cubicle and opens an envelope from her sister. The announcement from the Globe is carefully clipped. There’s no photo of the girl. We want there to be a photo. She reads the announcement and now she knows more than she wants to know. She conjures up an image: wavy blond hair, blue eyes, straight white teeth. Little gold hoop earrings. She looks at his typeset name and runs her finger along the black letters. It doesn’t seem like the boy she knew. She’s surprised by his middle name. Maybe she never knew it. He’s a vice president now. She refolds the announcement and tucks the envelope into her top desk drawer. The wedding was held outside of Chicago at a country club on a mid-August day.

♦

He cuts through the park on the way to the playground on the West Side, his daughter asleep in the stroller. The line for Shakespeare in the Park is long, snaking itself around a field. He hears his name and there she is. She waves him over, calling his name. When he gets halfway, she runs over and hugs him, her fingertips cool on his neck. She feels smaller but surprisingly familiar. His daughter wakes. Those lips, she says, gazing into the stroller. They talk for a few moments and then he says he must go. Let me walk you, she says. They make their way slowly, and he still knows how to make her laugh. He hadn’t realized how much he misses her. He sees the playground in the distance and wishes it away. Let’s get together, she says. Yes, he agrees, but we know they won’t.

♦

Her mother insists on inviting his parents to the wedding. She decides to add his name to the list as well, even though the wedding will be small. A Tiffany crystal bowl arrives in the familiar large turquoise box. The regrets card comes back in a handwriting she doesn’t recognize. She’s annoyed that he couldn’t take the time and yet she’s also relieved. The wedding is on the beach at the Vineyard; her dress, later, smells like the sea. Sand gets in everyone’s shoes. She loves that her husband lifts her up when the tide starts to roll in.

♦

Snow muffles the world on Christmas Eve. The girls are asleep upstairs in his old room. He and his wife are sleeping in the den; he’s glad they made it home before the heavy snow began to fall. The next morning, after the girls open presents, he takes them sledding, to the big hill up by the high school. They pass her parents’ house on the way. He looks up, instinctively, at her bedroom window above the driveway. He hasn’t thought about her in a long while. The apple tree, which he climbed so many times to reach her, is gone, only a stump remaining under the snow. He goes down the white hill again and again, first with one daughter and then the other. The best rides are when they all go down together, his legs and arms wrapped around them both. His younger daughter starts crying from the cold and he pulls them home on the sled, tracks carving through the packed snow.

♦—

It’s her lunch hour, and the nurse injects the dye. There’s silence in the cold room as the doctor examines the x-ray on a light box. Her bikini-bottom-shaped uterus is black; there’s white fog where her ovaries should be. The doctor explains the photo, drawing in the missing parts. This explains the infertility, the doctor says. Let’s make an appointment to talk about next steps. She wonders if there’s any relationship between her blocked tubes and her abortions. Her first was with him. He drove her into Boston and waited, sitting in the lobby for hours, using a felt-tip pen to inscribe their names on his sneakers and jeans. Then she lay in the back seat while he avoided potholes on the way home. He snuck in her window late that night to bring her homemade brownies and to fill up her hot water bottle.

♦—

He’s in his new office, high above the Hudson, staring out at the Statue of Liberty far below. The building is moving slightly with the wind. In three hours, he has to fly to Dallas, and he won’t be home for his older daughter’s swim meet tomorrow. He’s missed so many things. The girls show him their class pictures, and he knows no one. His younger daughter tells him about learning how to square dance, and he tells her that’s how he met his first girlfriend. Mommy? his daughter asks. No, he replies. Before Mommy. A long time ago. He watches the planes lining up to land at Newark, shaking in the sky.

♦

The maple leaves are turning. The small pond is littered with them—yellow and orange spots floating and drifting on the dark green. It’s beautiful and yet her father’s still dead. She isn’t prepared for the mounds of dirt on either side of the hole, nor for the machinery needed to lower him in. Her husband takes the twins back to the house; they aren’t used to seeing her out of control. There are so many people here that she hasn’t seen in years. She’s hugging someone and she looks to the next person and there he is. She cries then, with his arms wrapped around her, her head against his chest.

♦

The little plane soars over Buzzards Bay. He’s joining his family for the last five days of their two-week vacation on the Vineyard. They’re thrilled to have him here at last, and after he kisses his wife for a long moment, he picks each of his daughters up in turn, swinging them around, their feet off the ground. They’re both too old for this but neither complains. The next morning, they take him to their favorite beach. In the early afternoon, when both girls and his wife are asleep under the shade of the big striped umbrella, he walks down the beach. He doesn’t recognize it but we think this must be the same stretch of beach, and the flat calm beyond the waves. He throws rocks against a pile, cracking them open, hoping to find crystals inside. He’s heard that she moved to Vermont with her husband and boys; he imagines an old farmhouse, with wide-planked pumpkin-pine floors and candlelight. He wonders if she misses the beach. The next night, he takes his family to Menemsha where they eat lobster, dripping with butter, and watch the sky light on fire.

♦

She watches, over and over, as the planes fly into the buildings, as the cloud of smoke rolls down the street, as the thousands walk uptown, their faces covered in ash. The firefighters’ whistles wake her from sleep. Her husband knows two men who were there, who climbed to the roof, who called home. They argue about how much to let the boys see, they fight about so much now. She’s glad to be here, living in the woods, so far away from it all, but she worries. She looks him up on the Internet and learns that his office is in Midtown now, not downtown. But he could have been there. She scours the Times every day but sees nothing, hears nothing from friends and family. When the house is empty one morning, she decides to call. The assistant answers. Can he return the call? What’s this in reference to? She hangs up and stares out the window at the expanse of forest that never ends. He’s in a meeting. A spider makes its tentative way across the glass.

♦

He and his older daughter are in the car, a road trip to visit colleges. He can’t remember the last time it’s been just the two of them. He’s awkward with his daughter now, always sure he’s saying the wrong thing. There’s a boyfriend, and his wife wants him to find out the details. Are they sleeping together? Do they use protection? What will happen when they graduate? He can’t ask. He thinks he knows the answers, he thinks he knows what she must do. His daughter refolds her long legs, her eyes closed, an iPod blaring in her ears. He misses his little girl. The road is dark, and the headlights stretch out in front of the car, cutting through the fog.

♦

Jackson Browne is playing on her old record player and she turns the volume up all the way. She finds she still knows every word, even remembers where the record skips, and she and her sister hold each other and sing along, sitting on her lumpy bed. The rented dumpster is parked in the driveway at the old house. Opening her bedroom window above, she can smell the lilacs from the front yard. She begins to throw things down: tennis trophies, stuffed animals, bell-bottom jeans. In a box to mail home, she places a clay imprint of her five-year-old hand, her first tennis racket with its wooden frame, and handfuls of photos. She tucks the Valentine that he gave her in second grade into the zipped interior pocket of her handbag. She and her sister get drunk, and she forgets to call home.

♦

The Connecticut shore is a blur as the train rattles north on its way to Boston. He sleeps in his old bedroom, a poster of Jimmy Connors still on the wall, and the next morning he tells his parents about the separation. His mother has made pancakes, and she responds to his news by pointing out a woodpecker on the bird feeder. His father asks whether there are others. No. They just grew apart over time. He pictures wisteria climbing up the side of a house. As he wanders around his old town, he worries about his girls. But they are both in college now; they have begun to create their own paths. Ice drips from gutters. A willow tree’s branches are so heavy that he cannot imagine they will ever spring back. In his top bureau drawer he finds a frayed piece of purple ribbon. He can see it tied around the end of her braid.

♦

She’s out in the world without her ring. Her finger has a permanent white line of skin, given how long she’s been married. She tries to remember to put suntan lotion there so it won’t burn. Her husband has been sleeping with someone else for over a year. Now she questions everything. She and her sister take the twins—teenagers now—to the house on the Vineyard for a week in August. Sleeping in the room on the third floor, she sees the hole in the floor that he told her about and wakes before sunrise each morning to watch her boys sleep. She spends hours wading in the eddies in Menemsha, searching for a pink starfish.

♦

He finds a card from her in his mailbox. His mother has died. He has thrown away so many of these letters from friends, without even reading them, finding too much sorrow in the words. But he opens hers. Her handwriting hasn’t changed. The words don’t sound like her, though. She writes about a dinner with his family but he has no memory of it. We had hoped for more. Still, seeing his name on the envelope in her familiar scrawl stops him cold in the mailroom of his apartment building. He tries to write back but he can’t manage to begin.

♦

Her son’s dorm room is tiny, with cinderblock walls, and it smells stale. She opens the window wide and makes the bed, shaking out the red plaid sheets before pulling them tight across the mattress. Her ex-husband is with their other son across campus. She leaves a note for this son under the pillow, and then she takes a walk, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses. His older daughter went to college here, and she e-mailed him when her boys got in. She stands in the middle of the beautiful garden he told her not to miss. The white and orange day lilies are waving in the breeze, the purple pansies cover the ground, and she feels adrift. Even the sun is on the move.

♦

He’s up early to watch the men’s final. Djokovic beats Federer on Centre Court in five sets, then drops to his knees on the worn grass. At that moment, he knows without knowing that she’s watching too. He looks through her Facebook page on his laptop. She’s back in New York, living in Brooklyn, working as a social worker. He buys tickets for the Open and then messages her on Facebook, hesitating just slightly before hitting return. She responds, almost immediately, as though she’s been waiting for him. We knew this moment was coming, too.

♦

They’re eating dinner together at the Pearl Oyster Bar in the West Village. Her smile hasn’t changed, and his laugh is a slow, familiar comfort. This is the ending we’ve been moving towards, the one we hoped for, that final moment of resolution. But now we pause. So many things are different. He’s surprised by her brittleness. She wonders when he became so conservative. We begin to question if it will last. It turns out we have a hard time believing in a happy ending. The candles flicker as the door opens; the almost full moon casts a white light on the street, beckoning us outside. We turn and look at them one last time before we leave. We wish them well. Tonight is the first snowfall of the season, and there’s a whole glittering city to explore.

Subscribe to Read More