Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [84]
Honora waves away her concerns. “It’s all . . . Idon’tknow . . . relative, I think.”
“I suppose it is,” Vivian says, looking down at Sandy. “This poor dog is just panting.”
“Why don’t we throw him in?”
“He hates the water.”
“Do him good,” Honora says.
Honora
The beach is flat, stripped clean but for curved white shells, smooth oval pebbles. She walks north and east along the crescent, the sun behind her, her shadow growing to one side. At the ridge of the beach, where the soft sand begins before it hits the dunes, there are groups of people here and there, summer residents, newly arrived, looking white and overdressed and slightly shell-shocked in their canvas chairs. Honora hugs her arms, trying to ward off an east wind that has just come up and is blowing the tips off the waves. She has on only a rayon skirt she made herself and a cotton sleeveless blouse. She left her shoes on the blanket after most of the men, Sexton included, fell asleep on the beach and Vivian went back to her own cottage with her wet dog. Honora walks slowly with her head bent, glancing up from time to time, always surprised, no matter how many times she sees it, by the navy of the water — a blue that appears to be alive. A sail-boat, leaning into the wind, zips along the shoreline. Tomorrow the strike will begin. It seems hardly possible.
Honora has been into Ely Falls only a few times since Christmas. It is, she thinks, an undistinguished city, dominated by its mills, long flat buildings with enormous windows and smoke billowing from their chimneys. The tenements, brick and wood, are built into the hills surrounding the city center — charmless houses with no yards, the wash hung on lines over what look to be perilous wooden porches. She has never been inside Sexton’s boardinghouse, though she has seen it from the outside: a brick building, one of many similar structures built in terraced rows. She couldn’t go inside, he said, because only men were allowed.
A chunk of bottle green glass snags Honora’s attention, and she bends to retrieve it in the wet sand. She rubs it between her palms to clean it. It is a satisfying shard, nearly half an inch thick. She tries to imagine what it might once have been. Though it looks like a bottle, it’s too chunky. Can’t be a window either. A jar of some sort? Perhaps a kind of dishware? The casing of a lantern? Something from a ship? She picks up a large white shell and lays the shard inside, cradling the shell in her palm.
“What have you got there?”
Honora flinches, startled by the voice. McDermott is slightly winded and bends for a moment to catch his breath. His hair, stiff with seawater, has dried into a comical shape. He has on a blue shirt, the sleeves rolled well above the elbows.
“Sea glass,” she says.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“It’s glass that’s been weathered by the sea and washed up on a beach. I collect it.” She holds out the shell with the piece of bottle green glass inside it. He studies it in her palm.
“Where’d it come from?” he asks, touching the shard.
“A shipwreck, maybe? Something that someone tossed overboard? A fire along the shore? Sometimes I find pieces that have melted and have charred bits inside. That’s the mystery of it, isn’t it? — the not knowing where it’s from.”
“A secret it won’t tell,” he says. His skin has pinkened from the sun. He squints in the bright reflected light from the water.
“Something like that,” she says, lowering her hand. “You were all sleeping.”
“We’re leaving now,” he says. “I came to say good-bye.”
“You’re going?” she