Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [51]
As though he read my mind, he pulled me close, one fishnetted leg on his, and looked at me with what appeared to be wonder. “I can’t remember being this happy. Why is that?”
“I don’t know why. I don’t know, it’s strange. We’re different—”
“But you know me, you know me.”
“I know you.”
“It’s like we’re simpatico.” We both smiled when he said it.
“I keep trying to go slow, but I can’t. I can’t help myself.” He pushed my hair back and kissed me. Then, pressing his forehead to mine, he said solemnly, “I can’t imagine us fighting ever.”
“Me either,” I said back, as if it were a vow, a good thing, a thing of mystery and of promise. And with that, the words of caution were banished from my mind, and we sped off on the wet city streets to the latticed iron doors of his mother’s apartment building.
Slowly I began to meet his family. A cousin here and there. Easter with his sister. And on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, after stopping for the night at Brown for Campus Dance, we were on our way to Red Gate Farm, his mother’s 464-acre retreat on the southwestern end of Martha’s Vineyard. I had been there once before, but it was in winter, and we had been alone. On a morning when the sky was bright, he had taken me to the cliffs and told me the Indian legends—how they buried their dead facing east to the sun. Ancient graves had been found over the years, he’d said, in the tangled briar of his mother’s property.
This time I would meet his mother. There had been greetings and goodbyes at holiday parties, and polite conversation, but nothing that she would have recalled. And even if she did, this was different. I was the girl he’d done the play with. I was nervous and anxious, and I overpacked.
On the Steamship Authority ferry from Woods Hole, we inched across Nantucket Sound to Vineyard Haven. We’d rushed from Providence up Route 195 that morning to make an early boat. Friends he’d invited caravanned behind us. We rallied in the ferry parking lot, and the cars stayed on the Woods Hole side. It was that time in late spring that aches with possibility, the time when it’s forever cold in the shade, sometimes warm in the sun, and hovering always is the errant promise that there will be more.
The Islander was clean and smelled of diesel. It was windy on board, but none of us stayed below. Excited for the weekend ahead, we planted ourselves on the upper deck looking for sun. Halfway across, John disappeared, and I lay sprawled on a bench in the center of the midsection—one leg bent, the other dangling out of a summer skirt, an arm propped over my eyes. Heat rose from the metal and wood, and my back was warm with it. I felt the engine’s droning hum, the shift of pitch and drop over water.
A trickle of air buzzed in my ear. It stopped, started, then stopped again. I opened my eyes to find John crouched beside me, his face close to mine.
“You’re sweet,” he said loudly when I groaned. “Are you grumpy? Hmm? Just a little?”
I shook my head, and he watched me yawn.
“Oh, so sweet. Did anyone ever tell you you’re sweet? Don’t be too sweet, or I’ll bite you. Come on, get up, get up. No breaks for you,” he half-sang. “C’mon—I’m the boss of you.”
I rubbed my eyes and tried not to smile. “You are not the boss of me,” I insisted. But, laughing, I followed him around the pilothouse to the breezy side of the boat.
We were almost there. White houses and low green hills. He turned, his hair already salty from the air. “See—aren’t you glad you’re here?” It was my first ferry ride there, and the first time for anything is an occasion, he said. He pointed out the places. West Chop Light, the yacht club, the sails of the schooner Shenandoah—and that way, down and around, to Oak Bluffs and the storied gingerbread cottages.
“What do I call her?” I asked. I knew the answer but wanted to make sure. He didn