Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [105]
My God, she thinks, sitting upright.
She slips on her dressing gown. She closes the bedroom door with a soft click. She picks up her feet, trying not to scuff her slippers along the wooden floor. She doesn’t want to wake anyone in the bedrooms off the hallway. At the bottom of the steps, she pauses for a moment and listens. She can hear the surf, never absent, and something else. A rustle of papers. Coming from the front room, she is sure of it.
“I’m just finishing this,” McDermott says when she reaches the doorway.
“Oh,” she says, surprised. “You’re up early.” A sliver of excruciatingly bright light slips over the horizon, and Honora winces away from it.
“I’m leaving,” he says, turning his head away as well.
“Now?” she asks. She leans against the doorjamb.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“My sister needs me,” he says, bending to collate the stacks of paper on the table.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“Everything’s fine,” he says.
McDermott is a bad liar, she thinks. “It’s because of last night, isn’t it?” she says, moving a step closer. He bends to his task, not answering her.
“Iwish . . . ,” she says.
His head snaps up. “What do you wish?” he asks, and she cannot tell if he is hopeful or angry.
“I’ll make you some breakfast,” she says. The sun slants in through the east windows, showing every speck of dust on the table. The side of McDermott’s face is pink. She hugs her dressing gown around her.
“I’m not hungry,” he says.
“How are you getting back?” she asks.
“Mahon’s driving me.”
“Is he up?”
“I’ll wake him in a minute.”
“I’ll make him breakfast, then,” she says.
“It’s barely five, Honora. Go back to bed.”
“He has to eat. You have to eat too, for that matter.”
McDermott is silent.
“Suit yourself,” she says.
She separates the strips of bacon with a fork, the grease sizzling in the cast-iron pan. She imagines the scent of the bacon wafting its way up the stairs and slipping under Alphonse’s door and waking the boy and sending him pell-mell into the kitchen. Twice she has heard footsteps going up and down the stairs, but so far Alphonse has not yet appeared. She longs to see his goofy face, the iron-filing haircut, the bug eyes, the shirt misbuttoned in his haste. She has hardly ever made anyone as happy as she seems to make Alphonse. Today she’ll make him swim twenty feet on his own. He can do it. Sometimes you have to push a child to make him learn.
She hears a rustle in the doorway. “Got four strips here with your name on them,” she says.
“You ought to let me starve.”
Honora, in a crouch in front of the icebox, looks up in surprise. “I thought you’d gone,” she says.
“I came to apologize,” McDermott says.
“No need to apologize. A lot of men are cranky when they wake up,” she says, standing and bringing a box of eggs to the stove. “My brothers were terrible.”
“I never slept,” he says.
“That makes two of us.” She lifts the individual pieces of bacon with the fork onto an old newspaper to drain them. She holds an egg above the empty skillet, aware that McDermott has moved farther into the room.
“I won’t be seeing you again,” he says, and she inadvertently punctures the egg with her thumb.
Her heart kicks up from its lazy morning beat. “Why is that?” she asks, trying to get the bits of shell out of the quickly cooking egg.
“Honora, look at me,” he says.
She turns, a slime of egg white on her fingers.
“Take the pan off the burner,” he says. “I want to talk to you.”
She wipes her hands on a tea towel. McDermott takes a step forward. The kitchen, on the west side of the house, doesn’t have the eye-wincing light of the front room in the mornings, but still it’s enough to see his face — pale and grainy, the eyes as blue as the ocean when the sun is setting.
“Sit down,” she says, her hands trembling