Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [173]
A moment of joy. Then of disbelief.
As if in a trance, she moves the six or seven steps to the door and opens it.
“Olympia,” he says.
She backs away from the door, and he steps over the threshold. He gazes steadily at her, as if he, too, cannot believe in the apparition before him. She turns and walks into the kitchen, knowing that he follows her. Her heart beats so hard inside her chest, she has to press a hand to the bodice of her dress to still it.
“Olympia,” he says again.
She turns, and he removes his hat.
His face is older, but still he has high color. His hair, which has been cut short, is receding slightly at his brow. He seems leaner to her, more wiry than she has remembered. But it is his eyes that claim her most. They are old eyes, older than his body, hollow and lined, as if the weight of the past four years — no, nearly five now — had settled in those orbs, had done its damage there.
They stand on either side of the kitchen table, each taking in the other.
“I came as soon as I heard,” he says finally, breaking the silence.
She cannot speak.
“I have been away. Deep in the country. I have come just now by train from Minneapolis.”
She shakes her head and puts a hand on a chair back to steady herself.
“Minnesota,” he says.
She lifts her chin.
“When I returned to the boardinghouse in Minneapolis where I was staying, there was a letter from Mr. Tucker. And I have read just now about the suit in the newspapers. Indeed, there is hardly any other news at all.”
Turning her back to him, she stares out the window over the sink.
“No one knows I have come,” Haskell continues. “I shall not tell anyone. Not even Tucker. I fear my presence, as I am still legal guardian, would complicate and perhaps jeopardize your suit.”
She sets her jaw hard.
“I am at the Dover Inn,” he says. “I daresay I shall not run into anyone I know there.”
She pivots and leans against the lip of the sink.
“Olympia,” he says, laying his hat on the table.
“Would you like some tea?” she asks in a quavering voice, and she can see that he hardly knows how to answer her. “I shall put a kettle on,” she adds. “If you would leave me for a moment, I shall bring it into the front room.”
He hesitates, but then he seems to understand. “All right,” he says, and with reluctance, he walks through the swinging door.
When he is gone, she wraps her arms over her head and sinks to the floor, the skirts of her dress billowing up and out as she falls. She leans her head forward into her arms and weeps silently. Of all her imaginings, scarcely sane, she has not imagined this. She is gullied out, like the clay in the marshes. He has done this to her.
She pulls herself to a standing position. She finds a handkerchief in the pocket of her dress and blows her nose. Hardly knowing what she is doing, she fills the kettle with water, only then realizing that she cannot leave him waiting for her in the front room.
He is looking out at the ocean, his elbow resting on the thin window ledge, his other hand in the pocket of his trousers, and she sees that he has not lost the elegance of his gestures for all his time in the country.
He hears her skirts and turns.
“I have never been here when it was not summer,” he says. “The beach is quite majestic without people.”
“Nature is often seen at her best without people,” she says.
“You know, I hardly feel the guilt now,” he says. “What is left is the punishment.”
“Your children,” she says.
“The guilt is dulled. It is the loss I feel most keenly. The lost years one can never have back.”
“Why did you go so far away?”
“Catherine requested it. I could not refuse her.”
Olympia is silent, thinking of that request and of the circumstances under which it would have been made.
“To think I have not seen you since that night,” he says, studying her intently.
“It was a terrible night.”
“More dreadful than any I have ever experienced,” he says. “I was awed by Catherine’s pain, by its depth. It would not exhaust itself. She threw herself