Chapter 1 — The Mailbox
(POV: Eden)
The road into Half Moon Bay narrows the way I remember, the way the throat of a kept promise narrows: gradual, then all at once. The headlights catch a sign someone has repainted in the last eight years — Welcome to Half Moon Bay, Pop. 1,247 — and the seven still has a serif and the four still doesn’t, and that’s how I know I’m home.
I am not home. I am here for a week. I keep saying it inside my mouth like a vitamin.
The U-Haul takes the bend up the south bluff in second gear, and the rain finds me in earnest. The truck is more vehicle than I need for a week — the lawyer said the cottage would need clearing either way, and the Vancouver depot had nothing smaller on a Wednesday. Cedar smoke from somebody’s chimney. Wet asphalt. Salt. The smell of the place comes up the open vent and finds the part of me I had filed away under do-not-open, and the part comes out and stretches.
The mailbox is still the mailbox. Calloway, hand-painted by my mother in 1992. The C is the C my mother made. I sit in the cab with the engine running for a long minute, looking at it. There is something tied around the post that should not be there.
A red ribbon.
A short, neat bow.
I have not seen one in eight years and I know it the way you know a phone number you tried to forget.
I get out of the truck. The rain has weight to it now, the kind that means business. I walk to the mailbox. I touch the ribbon and then I take my hand back as if it had bitten me. I stand in my mother’s headlights and I tell myself, very carefully, what to do next.
Then a knock. Right by my ear. On glass — only there is no glass, because I am out of the truck — and I turn so fast my shoulder hits the side mirror.
It is him.
For a second the rain does not exist. He is standing two feet away in a navy oilskin with the hood down, hair flat to his head, water beading along the line of his jaw. He has a flashlight in one hand and the other hand is open at his side, palm out, the way you keep a hand when you are trying not to startle a horse.
The shape of him has not changed. The rest has. There is more weight in his shoulders, a beard he did not have at twenty-two, a fine white scar at the corner of his lip that I do not remember and will not ask about. He looks like a man who has been outside in winter for eight years.
“Eden.”
He says my name like he is testing whether it still belongs in his mouth. It does. That is the awful, useful thing about names.
“Sawyer.”
The two syllables go out of me in a small white cloud and disappear over his shoulder. Behind him, down the bluff, I can see the marina lights through the trees, smudged into halos by the rain. The headland lighthouse swings its pale beam across the bay and back. I count: one Mississippi, two, three. The same count my mother used to tell me when she put me to bed. *Watch for the light, sweet pea. It comes back. It always comes back.*
I am twenty-eight years old. I am a woman with a rented truck and a B.C. driver’s license and a U.S. passport in the glove box. I am not eleven. I am not twenty.
He has not moved. The flashlight is angled at the gravel between us. The rain hits the back of my neck and runs in under the collar and I do not flinch because flinching, in front of this man, in this weather, in front of the C my mother made, is not something I am going to do tonight.
“Hank’s funeral is Thursday.” It comes out flatter than I meant. I clear my throat. “I drove down from Vancouver. The lawyer’s office —”
“I know.”
“You know.”
“Patty told me yesterday. The boys at the marina knew before noon. There aren’t a lot of secrets here. You remember.”
I remember.
He looks past my shoulder at the truck, at the U-Haul behind it. It’s a small one, the smallest size they had. Half a life, packed loose. He sees that, I think. He sees that I came down with everything I would need to stay and nothing more than I would need to leave.
“I’m here for a week,” I say, because someone needs to say something true. “Thursday’s the funeral. I’ll sign the papers Friday. Sunday’s ferry, and I’m gone.”
“All right.”
The All right does a lot of work. It says he has heard me. It does not say he believes me.
His eyes go past me to the mailbox post. I watch them stop on the ribbon. I watch the line of his jaw set. I watch the hand that is not holding the flashlight close into a loose fist and open again at his thigh. He has always done that — at the boatyard, at twenty-two, when somebody on his crew had done something foolish and he was choosing what kind of man to be about it.
“How long has it been there,” he says.
“I just got here.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Then I don’t know how to answer.”
He nods, once, as if I have given him a real answer. He steps closer to the post and tilts the flashlight at it without touching the bow. The red is a bright, particular red. It is not a thing that has been out in this weather for any time at all. The bow is dry on the underside.
A halyard slaps a mast down in the marina. A single tin note, then another, then quiet. I have not heard that sound in eight years and I would know it in my sleep.
“Don’t touch it again,” he says.
“I already touched it.”
“Then don’t touch it a third time.”
He says it without heat. He says it the way he might tell a deckhand not to step on a wet line. I find that I am, of all things, grateful for the tone. I had been afraid he would be gentle. Gentle would have undone me. This will not.
“All right,” I say. I have heard the words come out of his mouth ten minutes apart and now I have given them back, and it is very strange, and very small, and very steadying.
He straightens. The lighthouse beam comes around — one Mississippi, two, three — and lights for a quarter of a second the gravel drive, the porch, the U-Haul, the rain itself in long silver lines, and his face. Whatever I had thought was locked down in him is not locked down. It is being held in place by something I can see the cost of. Then the beam swings and his face goes back into shadow, and only the angle of his shoulders is left to read.
“I’ll walk you to the door.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
He waits. He is going to walk me to the door. I am going to let him.
I move first because if I do not move first I am not sure I will move at all. The gravel is loud under my boots. The porch boards are loud under my boots. The third one from the door drops a half-inch and lifts again — the small private music of a house that knew me before I knew it.
At the door I find that my hand has gone cold around the key in my pocket. I do not take it out. I turn instead, with my back to my father’s house, and I look at Sawyer Reeve standing on my father’s porch in the rain.
He is closer than I thought he would be. Two feet, maybe less. The flashlight is off now. There is no light between us except what falls from the bulb on the porch ceiling, the same yellow bulb, the same thin yellow circle on the boards.
He looks at me a long time.
He looks like he has been making a decision and has just made it.
“Eden Calloway,” he says, low and steady, as if he has been carrying the sentence around since he saw the headlights climb the bluff. “You shouldn’t have come back.”
