A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [9]
The pellucid light was not an omen, Innes decided, picking up the streaked suitcase. Such displays were merely facts of physics—of luminosity and angles, of wavelengths and emissions.
Agnes didn’t actually know if there was an Innes Finch in Halifax at that time. The odds would be much against it, wouldn’t they, though she supposed that it was possible. More astonishing things had happened. Maybe there was only an Ian Finch or an Innes Findlay. But Agnes’s Innes was now so real to her that when she thought about the incident, it was his narrative that intruded. This was a pattern, if not actually a habit, that Agnes was familiar with. Over the years, she had had to learn how to translate the global to the personal for her students, and she found she often did this in her own life as well. Whenever she witnessed or learned of an event too horrific to be absorbed, she began—not entirely subconsciously and not without some will—to imagine a specific person affected by that tragedy so that she could better understand it. She’d done it the previous spring when she’d seen, in her rearview mirror, a woman in a Volvo lose control of her vehicle, swerve erratically, and then begin to tumble end over end away from Agnes as she watched. She still thought from time to time about the woman’s bewildered face, and then about her life as it might have been, even though she’d had only a second’s glimpse of her. She could still see the woman’s kitchen with its granite counter, and her son, perhaps fifteen, who sat at that counter eating cheddar cheese on Wheat Thins, his backpack slung against a chair, an algebra book spread out and touching an empty milk glass. Agnes imagined the boy waiting, at first oblivious and then mildly concerned, past 6:00, and then 7:00, until his father walked in the door—he, too, puzzled and then alarmed. What had happened to his wife, the boy’s mother, who was just then lying in a hospital in Maine and who would, Agnes had decided, survive her horrific accident?
Agnes had done this as well after the catastrophe at the World Trade Center earlier in the fall. For days, Agnes had walked around in a kind of disbelieving daze until she’d happened to read a paragraph in the New York Times describing a young Hispanic woman who had died on the 102nd floor of the North Tower. As soon as Agnes had set down the paper, a life had begun to spool backward from the moment the woman had reached out toward the coffee machine and Flight 11 had struck the building. That woman was real to Agnes now, her life elaborate and complicated, and whenever someone mentioned the tragedy, Agnes had what amounted to fond memories of the woman and her daughter.
Innes Finch knocked on a door opened by a woman holding a skein of red yarn. Mrs. Fraser owned the house to which he had traveled and in which he had arranged to stay for several months. She seemed surprised to see Innes, though he had written that he would arrive before 4:00. Perhaps it was his appearance—tired, windblown, and on no account prepossessing—that made her hesitate.
“Come in,” she demanded, perhaps wishing to make up for the tepid greeting. Innes stepped over the threshold and dripped onto a tiled floor. He held the suitcase, self-conscious now about the axle grease. He could have wiped it off in the harbor. He could have demanded that a steward do it for him, though Innes had never been good at giving orders. “I’m Mrs. Fraser,” she added unnecessarily, her hands imprisoned in the wool.
Behind the skein of yarn was a structured bosom that Innes guessed would be hard to the touch. Mrs. Fraser was fifty-five possibly, fifty if she was unlucky in her looks. Her hair was as tightly corseted as her body, though her