Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [96]
At the end of February, as soon as the love scenes with Mr. Plummer ended, I got on a plane to Cumberland Island. Behind, in my apartment, were red roses from John, now dried, that I hadn’t managed to throw out, the comforter he’d given me at Christmas, and a letter asking me to wait for him. In it, he wrote how difficult the separation had been and how he might have done things differently.
He went on to describe the recent funeral of Murray McDonnell, outside of whose barn we’d had our first kiss. In the eulogy, one of Mr. McDonnell’s sons had said that most of his father’s life before he married was spent trying to capture the heart of his wife, Peggy. “I thought, that’s me,” he wrote. “I spent most of my teenage-adult years trying to capture the heart of the girl next door—you. I realize you can’t be in contact, but it can’t be that way forever. Let’s wait a season or so and see what the times bring us. The stakes are different now and I understand what they are. In the meantime, I think about how cold it is outside and I hope you are warm warm warm.”
On Cumberland, I stayed with friends. I slept and I read. I walked the soft paths. I rode horses on the north end and gathered clams and oysters for midnight feasts. I played with my friends’ towheaded children, and we hunted for arrowheads in the marshes near Dungeness. Gogo Ferguson, Andy’s sister, had invited me. “Come, I’ll take care of you,” she’d said. And she did. Slowly, in a place that held memory, I began to shake the sadness. I tried not to think of his letter. There were shards of hope in it, hope that pulled at me, hope that had become what was most painful.
The day before I left the island, I walked the wide beach alone and wondered if my heart would ever heal, if I would ever fall in love again. I spoke aloud as if the air would answer. At the lip of the shore, pipers, oystercatchers, and gulls stood as silent witnesses facing the sea and a bruised sky. It had been warm for February, but now the wind was picking up, and thick clouds rolled in from the west. The winter beach was different from when I’d walked here with John almost five years before. It was littered with moon shells and the broken backs of horseshoe crabs. Soon it began to rain, spotting the pale sand gray.
A red truck drove up alongside me. It was Pat from the Inn. His hair, once wild, was short. He leaned over the passenger’s seat, and we caught up. He was married now with daughters. He asked if I wanted a ride back to Greyfield.
“Thanks, I’m going to walk.”
“Looks to be a downpour.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
He stared at me, bemused. “You’ve changed.”
“How’s that?”
“You don’t remember?” He grinned as if it were an answer. “You don’t, do you?”
I shook my head.
“When you first came here years ago, you really didn’t like the rain.”
It took me a moment. A dry truck. A flowered dress. August heat. A boy I loved. I began to smile, remembering. “No … No, I didn’t. But I like it now, I like the rain.”
I watched as the truck pulled away. It turned inland, got smaller, and disappeared over the high dunes on the path to Greyfield. I dug my hands into my pockets and kept walking. I walked past the Rockefeller gazebo and the Nightingale Trail. I walked past a herd of horses at Sea Camp and the salt marshes near Dungeness. I walked as far as I could on the empty beach in the cool winter rain.
I had bought him a compass, but I never gave it to him that night. It was there in the pocket of my jacket as I walked, my fingers warm on the metal. I kept it with me for a time—in a drawer or on my bureau; sometimes I held it. Until one day, without knowing how, I could no longer find it.
He had called