Emily watches the turn of the water below, stretch of beach sweeping out as the plane banks. The horizon tilts. She leans back into the seat, the steady loss of altitude lifting up through her ribs. How do you attract a shark? She seeks a glimpse of her hotel, but the bird’s-eye view is disorienting. Throw some blood into the water. Cars are toys, buildings flattened into geometric shapes. The sun reflects up off the water and shatters into shards of blinding light. It has to be my blood, but that’s okay. She squints at the land, recognizing the shape of a lighthouse. This shark is a fly, drawn to anything sweet.
Emily thinks of Francesca floating and how she would wake gasping out of the night. Who knows how many nights she spent looking out the window, over the stars, searching for the trees that bordered Francesca’s family property. Like their outline might spell out some secret. Emily wanted to talk to someone, to ask if this was normal, but there was no one. Her mother, stony and silent at the dinner table itself, when she was there at all. Her father, mysterious and strange in his manhood, a foreign country no passport would grant passage to. She wrote letters instead and tucked them away, the written word soothing long before the therapist came and instructed her in the ways of keeping a journal.
The air blows in off the water, cold and raw. Emily pulls her sweater tight. A shuttle waits to take her to the luxurious little inn. The roads of Nantucket twist and turn upon the dunes like a snake fighting the encroachment of the sea.
This is perfect. Here is a broad beach, here is dune grass growing like hair out of the sand. Above it all is an open sky full of sunshine. Here on the waterfront is the apotheosis of all bedrooms, perfect and warm, furnishings appointed with functional beauty and arranged to trick the eye into maximum comfort. It is a tableau; this room looks like a dream until she steps into it, and then it is no longer a dream. It becomes reality, spun out of the presence of her flesh. An illusion of vacation, like spider webs jeweled in morning dew, doomed to destruction by the merry ankles of a child. The clock ticks harsh seconds into life. She puts down her bags. The panes of glass rattle in the breath of the sea.
Emily changes her clothes. She thinks of a shower but pulls on the sundress and sandals, ignoring the film of canned airline air upon her skin. At the restaurant there is the kind of food she hasn’t eaten for years, things grown in a local garden, cutlets fished out of the frozen Atlantic and served with truffle butter. She is hungry. She knows the food will be fresh, the flavors painstaking and arranged to complement one another.
As she brushes her hair into a ponytail, she remembers the first time she had fish chowder, plain and simple. A moody summer day, sullen and cold, the sound of waves turned funny in the banks of fog and white light everywhere, the sun pounding down into the mist. No tomatoes in the broth, no distant kinship with bouillabaisse: just cream and butter, onion and milk, potatoes and codfish so fresh she imagined it flopping on the cutting board in the kitchen, the chef holding it down by the gills and perhaps uttering a quick prayer as he administered the killing slice.
At first, Emily imagined the moments leading up to Francesca’s death. Could she have known somehow that morning, when she got out of bed and began her daily rituals, that by midnight she would be dead? As she bathed did she think of the stream, of swimming in it, the sound of splashing water filling her with idle recollection of simple childhood pleasures? How would she know? A sense of foreboding perhaps, a cloud over her heart. Déjà vu, spinning and somber, as she crossed the stream on her way to work. Did Francesca’s last breath taste of sleeping thyme, cooling in the darkness after a long day of heat, and the frothing spray of green water, or did it taste of her lover’s mouth, polluted by his supper and tainted by the wine bottle he’d been mouthing before he picked her up? Did she die in anger and fear, or was it over so quickly that the triggers of her body had no time to fire? Young Emily tried to conjure up this level of fear, such wholesome and total yearning for life, such scrabbling desperation, but her measure of years made a poor yardstick.
Later, she told herself the stories of what might have been: Francesca growing old, sitting in the sun with a basket of figs in her lap. Francesca in the market and heavy on her feet, belly round and pregnant beneath her cotton dress. Francesca running away to France, studying painting at the Sorbonne, making love to her girlfriends in the afternoon and to her boyfriends at night. Francesca making bread in a restaurant’s kitchen. Francesca dancing barefoot on a moonlit beach, reading stories to her children, teaching her granddaughters how to grow tomatoes and organize a bookshelf. Francesca dying slow, at home in her well-worn marriage bed, her gray-haired daughters feeding her soup from a wooden spoon.
By the time she got halfway through college, Emily was hip-deep in psychology. She learned that she was projecting all of her different selves onto the myth of what-might-have-been, using the memory of Francesca to act out all of the lives that she herself might never have. Emily constructed those fantasies out of a wish to counterweigh the other things, the secret things and the painful things, the tight threads that bound her darkest self to a woman who had been no more than a cutout in the background of her exotic childhood until death made her so much more: resurrected into a dark doppelganger, wrought of nightmares and shameful lust. Emily told the stories in an act of contrition. She did it to make peace with Francesca’s life, to understand her own childhood, and to keep the haunts at bay.
Guys like Foyet don’t understand that. She follows the path up to the restaurant, vibrant green thickets of beach roses rambling alongside. The sharp sweet scent blows into her face as surf hisses into the sand. The restaurant’s pavilion is open, but no one’s dining al fresco. Wind snaps at the edges of the umbrellas. Inside the restaurant, it is like firelight. I don’t know. Maybe they do, in their own way.
All the lives ended at another’s hand, all those filmstrips cut short. Emily feels her blood heavy in her veins, slow and hot.
It still frustrates me. Life’s fragility struts in the face of its profligacy. She thinks of cherries weighing down wet branches, famine in one year and an attack of ripe fruit in another, all those sweet red bombs falling. Perhaps I’m not so far gone as I thought.
Emily takes a small table by the window, ordering the lobster tails with white cornbread stuffing, and she watches the place where water yields to sand. She sips from a glass of white wine. The beach is empty so early in the season, and she understands why; the waters are choppy, whipped into whitecaps. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be warm, almost hot, but today it’s still spring.
The waiter places a cup of chowder before her. She holds it for a moment, warming her fingers.