“She wants…I don’t know. She wants to go on walks in the mountains and have picnics. She wants to have a nice time.”
“How sweet, Caleb. Good for you finding such a nice girl, finally.”
His gaze might as well have been an awl. “She wants me to love her.”
Marian couldn’t catch her breath. She knew he was setting her up to ask if he had given this woman what she wanted. But she would not. She felt like a snarling dog. “Are you going to marry her?” He flinched. She said, “So you’re actually just as conventional as anyone. You’re going to live in a sweet little house with a sweet little woman and make a bunch of babies and read the newspaper every night with your slippers and pipe.”
“I don’t know!” Nearly a shout. “What do you want me to do? Stay here and be ready in case you need a letter delivered? Not that you ever say thank you. Should I wait around in case you need someone to tell you how completely justified you are in doing exactly what you want, when you want, even when it’s the worst possible decision you could make? Or in case you want me to fuck you once every five years? And then you’ll just go off again without even saying goodbye.”
He spun and walked rapidly away, then dropped into a squat, his head in his hands. She went to him, knelt in the dirt. He sat back, pulling her with him. His embrace was painfully tight. With one hand, she gripped the end of his braid, tugged it. “I’m sorry,” she said into his shoulder. “And thank you for delivering my letters.”
He was quiet for a long time, his face buried in her neck, clinging to her. Finally he said, “Next you’re going to say goodbye.”
“I don’t do that.”
“But you’re going to leave.”
Against his chest, she nodded.
Seattle
December 1941
Two months later
As soon as Jamie stepped into the exhibition, wearing a borrowed, too-short tuxedo and holding a saucer of champagne, he looked for Sarah Fahey. For weeks, he had nursed a fearful hope she would attend.
In the years since he’d come to Seattle for his purchase prize, he had avoided the city, largely for fear of running into Sarah or any of the Faheys. But fear of what? What could they do to him now? In better moments, he thought: Nothing. In low moments, he had cataloged four nagging yet irrational fears. First, he worried they might conclude his entire career had been an attempt to climb his way into their echelon. Second, he was afraid they would somehow make him realize his work was ridiculous and he was an impostor. Third, he feared he would still love Sarah, and, fourth, he feared he would not.
But those last two were particularly silly because, he’d decided, really the only reason she persisted in his thoughts at all was that their separation had been so abrupt. She was like a book with the final pages torn out, leaving him at the mercy of his imagination. If he were to see her, she would no longer be an enticing mystery but a real woman, no longer a dream sylph his mind could turn to when things went awry with other women （as they always did） nor a magical solution to all the riddles and disappointments of his existence. Also, he theorized, he’d been so starved for love when he met her, so desperate for a life of his own, that he’d blown their youthful romance wildly out of proportion. It had been a summer of kisses, no more. If he could just see her, he would be cured of her.
And quite probably she would be married, which would be a resolution in itself.
In any event, enough was enough. To refuse this exhibition would have been lunacy. He’d arrived two days before the opening to supervise the installation and had spent his free hours wandering around the city, taking in a decade’s worth of change. On his walks, he’d gleaned a bittersweet enjoyment from remembering the boy he’d been in this place. Thinking about Sarah felt acceptably nostalgic in Seattle, not pathetic, as it did elsewhere. In his clapboard house on the Oregon shore, he sometimes looked at the old drawings he’d kept of her, her teenage likeness still stirring him, and afterward felt gloomy and ashamed.
But then, there she was. Though they were separated by a noisy, spangled crowd, though her back was to him, he couldn’t have missed her. She was looking at an Emily Carr painting, her small head with its careful upward twist of glossy brown hair silhouetted against swarming brushstrokes, trees and sunlight swirled together in a euphoric vortex. A triangle of bare back showed above the lustrous emerald dip of her evening gown. These things—the twist of hair held by a pearl-studded comb, the delicate, exposed spine—had no obvious visual connection to the girl he had known, but still he’d recognized her without hesitation or doubt.