The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [15]
— You’re good at this, she says.
— Good at what?
— Surprises.
Once there was a sudden trip to Mexico. Another time, during a Christmas visit, he took her to the Ritz for the weekend when she thought they were driving into Boston to see an orthopedist for his back. Today, after the meal at Julia’s, he said only that he wanted to take a drive to pick up her Christmas present. Just the two of them. Julia would stay with Mattie, who, at four, would not be separated from her new toys.
They leave the town of Ely and drive toward Fortune’s Rocks, where the summer houses are. As a girl, on her walks from the village to the beach, she used to imagine that these houses, which sit empty ten months of the year, had character and personality. This one proud and a little showy, and then, after a particularly brutal storm, a bit chastened. This one tall and elegant, an aging beauty. This one challenging the elements, pushing its face forward, foolhardy. Another too quiet, sullen, unadorned, as if unloved. Yet another separated from the others, self-contained, unruffled by the crush of summer people or the long, lonely nights of winter.
— I can’t imagine what this present is, Kathryn says.
— You’ll see.
In the car, she allows herself to close her eyes. It seems she dozes only a minute, but when she wakes, it is with a start. The car is in a driveway. A familiar driveway.
— You’re feeling nostalgic? she asks.
— Something like that, he says.
She peers through the windshield at the house. It is, she thinks, as she has so often thought before, the most beautiful house she has ever seen. Sided with white clapboards, the house is two stories high, with a generous wraparound porch. The shutters are a dusty blue, the muted opaque of the ocean on a hazy day. The upper story is cedar shingled and long weathered, and it curves shallowly, as though someone had shaved a slice out. Perhaps it is a mansard roof — she has never been exactly sure. There are dormers in that upper story, evenly spaced, that seem to suggest comfortably sleeping bodies behind them. She thinks of old hotels, old oceanfront hotels.
Wordlessly, Jack gets out of the car and climbs the steps to the porch, and she follows him. The woven rockers and the wide floorboards have weathered to an ageless gray patina. She stands at the railing, looking across the lawn and down to the shoreline, where the water ebbs and flows over the rocks so that it seems it is the light itself that gathers and spills, gathers and spills, and then falls back into the sea.
In the distance, there is a haze on the ocean, a fresh, clean haze that comes only on fine days. She cannot precisely see the islands; they are there, then not, and then they seem to hover above the water. To one side of the lawn lies a meadow; to the other, orchards of dwarf pear and peach. By the porch is an overgrown flower garden oddly planted in the shape of an arched window, an oblong with a fan attached. In the arch is a white marble bench, now covered with vines.
A sudden east wind rises and blows across the porch, bringing with it a faintly damp chill, as it almost always does. In a minute, she knows, there will be whitecaps on the water. She hunches her shoulders inside her coat.
Behind her, Jack unlocks the kitchen door and enters the house.
— Jack, what are you doing? she asks.
Bewildered, she follows him through the kitchen and into the front room, a long space that runs the width of the ocean side of the house, a lovely room with six pairs of tall floor-to-ceiling windows. On the walls is a faded yellow paper, peeling at the seams. There