Augustus haunts these rooms far more than the rooms at Belle l’été. I haven’t lived there in nearly a decade, and once Norah arrived, I didn’t stop by very often.
In the early years after our divorce, Augustus spent little time in this house—he’d come inside only three or four times, despite how often he drove up to talk plantings for the next season at the restaurant or to claim a pig.
When Maya went to rehab and we fell to each other for comfort, our love affair started anew. He was here nearly every day, cooking with me at the island late at night, making love to me in my enormous bed, telling me about his days. Together we put together packages for Maya, and grieved over her terrible predicament. I don’t know what Norah thought was happening. It occurs to me now that she must have been lonely, waiting for him to come home to that big, empty house.
Through my open windows comes the sound of crickets, and the eternal, endless perfection of it splits me open. How many summers have crickets been singing? A million? Ten million? How can they simply offer it up every night, over and over and over?
Sitting at the island, alone except for the dogs and cats, I am swamped with a vast longing to touch Augustus one more time. Smell him. Hear his voice. How is it possible I will never see him again? That he’ll never call me by one of the multiple nicknames he had for me? Meadowsweet, it was sometimes, or Knees for the fact that I’m a little knock-kneed, or Pumpkin, or Sweetmeat.
So many nicknames, for all of us, but we all only ever called him Augustus. Not even Gus, ever. I didn’t call him sweetheart or baby or honey. Only his full name.
Which might not even have been his real name. Just as Meadow is not mine. Now that I know the truth about his childhood, our deep connection makes all the more sense. We were both lost children, and came together to make sure our girls were not lost. We might have had a lot of flaws, the two of us, but we gave our children a good childhood, so much better than the ones we’d known.
Restless, aching, I wander outside to the patio. It’s very dark along the mountains, the trees and fields silent under a quarter moon. A breeze tangles around my ankles. It should be cool this time of night, but there’s still heat in it, a puff of exhausted day falling to the earth. Fire season is coming, and it’s something we’ve all learned to fear. The fires are hotter and fiercer than they ever were before, and we’re all in danger of going up in flames without much warning at all.
Not today. Elvis pads out behind me and slumps on the flagstones, ears twitching for a minute before he falls asleep.
Augustus, Augustus, Augustus.
I close my eyes, leaning back, and imagine he’s here. To the ghostly figure I say, “You know what I’ve been thinking about?”
“Tell me.”
“Mondays.”
“Picnics.” I imagine I can feel him stretching out his long legs in the chair next to mine, kicking off his shoes to let his aching feet, destroyed after so many years standing on them, get some air. “Those were good days.”
The restaurant was closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Often, he worked on Tuesdays anyway, as much of the staff did, doing maintenance tasks, experimenting with new dishes, doing paperwork, but Mondays in the summer were family day. We’d pile the girls into the car and drive to the mountains or a lake or the ocean and have picnics. Augustus packed them himself, taking great care to include strawberries for Rory and bananas for Maya, some runny cheese and a baguette for us, along with cold chicken or something fabulous from Peaches and Pork, all of which we’d wash down with a bottle of wine and lemonade for the girls. When we arrived home, we sometimes played board games or watched movies from the video store.
“Those were some of the happiest times of my life,” he says, and I don’t have to imagine this. He’s told me many times.
“You were so good at family building,” I say. “I wish we could have had more children.”
The imaginary Augustus disappears in a puff. This is not a conversation he would ever have wanted to have, not again. We had it so many, many times.
Although we shared our two daughters, I had been unable to have another child. We tried for years, and although I was pregnant four times, I could not carry a baby to term. The most heartbreaking loss was at five months, but usually it was less.
Not that my grief was any less shattering.
Four times. Four losses. Each one left me more depleted than the last until he refused to try again, ever. We had a spectacular fight, and he slammed out of the house. “I can’t do this, Meadow. It can’t be the only thing in our lives.”