Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [110]
“Vivian,” Honora says. “I’m not sure when I’ll be able to tell Sexton. So let’s just keep this between us for now, all right?”
Vivian makes a gesture at her mouth of turning a key and throwing it away. Honora dutifully eats the crackers and peanut butter and drinks the glass of milk. The nausea of earlier is gone now, though the sleepiness that seems to have infused her limbs is still there. She pushes the crackers away.
“Oh, Vivian,” she says.
Honora walks out onto the beach. It is too hot inside the house, and she needs to breathe.
She strolls, keeping her head down, searching the sand for the telltale hints of color, the shapes that look like New York and Kansas and Louisiana. She is sweating beneath her dress and has to pull the rayon away from her body to cool her skin. She walks into the ocean, the icy water sending welcome shivers through her shins.
She remembers McDermott’s face hovering close to hers. The smell of soap and sweat and gum and cigarettes mixed with the low-tide scent of the sea. The tree that sounded like water.
She bends to retrieve a shard of opaque white sea glass, but discovers it is only a shell.
He put his hand under her skirt, and it would not have mattered to anyone except McDermott and herself.
She digs her toes deep into the wet sand as she walks.
She said to McDermott, I wish.
She finds a piece of brown pottery with a ragged edge and drops it into the water.
He said to her that she was afraid.
She surveys the beach and the ocean and the cottages in the dunes, and she knows that she was afraid. Not of physical love, which she longed for. But of who she would become.
It might have been, she thinks now, the single worst decision of her life. Because now . . . because now she can never even think about being with McDermott. She is pregnant with her husband’s child.
In two years or three years, she thinks, she will have a small companion on her walks. Honora can see, for the first time, an image of a child bending his head to the sand, looking for bits of treasure. He will have Sexton’s dark blond curls, perhaps her own brown eyes. He will glance down and find an azure piece of sea glass, its edges smooth and safe, and will hold the prize up for his mother to see. And she will call him Seth. If it is a boy, Honora will call him after her brother, whose atoms she has imagined all these years floating just beyond her reach. Seth will be reassembled after all.
You got your wish, McDermott will say.
A shudder of regret, deep and obliterating, moves through Honora’s body, as if a small quake were rolling along the beach. She kneels on the sand to let it pass through her.
In another life, he said.
An incoming wave washes itself up the drop-off and then slides out again. A wet speck of color catches Honora’s eye. She staggers to her feet. She runs and puts her foot on the bit of glass. When a second wave has receded, she bends down to retrieve the treasure she has caught with the ball of her foot. She cannot believe her luck. A shard half an inch in diameter and an eighth of an inch thick lies in the palm of her hand. Hardly worth noticing if it were a brown or an ivory. She holds it up to the light.
Crimson.
Scarlet.
Bloodred.
Alice Willard
Dear Honora,
I am so happy about your news I hardly know what to do with myself. I am writing you straight back even though Mr. Pollop just brought your letter this morning. I just knew that when Harold went he was making way for a new life.
I will come to Ely Falls when the baby arrives. I wouldn’t miss it for all the world. Your letter said that you thought you were two months along. Have you guessed at a due date? Will you go to a clinic? I think you should, and so does Dr. Kennedy. I know you said you weren’t telling anyone just yet, but Estelle had Dr. Kennedy this morning for one of her spells (which are just a way to get attention if you ask me) and I could see his car outside, so I went over, and I had to tell him, didn’t I? He said straight away that you should have it in the hospital and that you shouldn’t even