Tidal Flats. Cynthia Newberry Martin
Читать онлайн книгу.
to shed their clothes, leaving a trail to the shower. Their first meal—eggs and bacon, toast with jam—eaten standing in the light-filled kitchen, each of them by that point too hungry to wait. Day two just the opposite, unfurling in slow motion. For the sake of time zones, they would plan to rise at a normal time but could never do it. When eventually they did, she would sit on the counter while he made coffee, happy he didn’t like the way she made it so she could watch him roam the kitchen where he seemed more like something exotic than something that belonged. They would stay in their pajamas, watch movies, do his laundry. Day three would take the shape of a day, but one with a deckle edge. Computers on laps opened as an afterthought, some part of him touching some part of her. But by day four, neither could resist the siren call of the real world.
On this day four, as they lay in bed, jackhammers from the construction site across the street revved up. Ethan jumped. She reached for him, but he was already standing, and her arms landed in the warm indentation where he no longer was. He picked up a pillow from the floor and threw it at her, something the first one to leave the bed often did, their way of saying they didn’t want to leave the other behind. She turned to watch him cross the room, her eyes fixing on the boomerang-shaped scar that dipped below his waist until he disappeared into the bathroom.
With one kick, she extricated her feet from the sheets and rolled out of bed to their wall of windows. Sunlight peeking from behind the buildings in downtown Atlanta. Between here and there, traffic on the connector. The green on the trees, sparse but already there, now at the beginning of March. It would only be a matter of months before everything fell into place—Ethan home for good and Cass in charge at Howell. Planning, that’s all life took. A little planning.
She could hear the shower, could feel the humidity rising. Ethan almost never shut doors. He said he didn’t want anything between them. But there were often continents between them. And that endless gray ocean.
But soon there wouldn’t be. She stretched, feeling the world expanding around her. The windows misted over. She drew a heart with her finger and felt like a teenager. They were about to enter a new phase, one where alone would finally be wiped off the map. The shower stopped, and she looked over her shoulder. When she turned back to the window, the heart was already gone.
Ethan emerged with a towel around his waist. She tapped the ottoman away and stepped backward into the easy chair, sitting with her knees to her chest. Boxers, button-down, jeans. Soon he’d head to his studio, but he’d be home later this same day—like a normal husband.
“Sorry about the timing of this Boston trip.” He glanced over while threading his belt through the loops. “I’m not ready to leave you yet.”
“Sometimes you are?”
He tilted his head in her direction as he sat on the end of the bed. Brown socks, city boots.
“Supper request?” she said.
He stood and scooped his wallet from the oblong wooden bowl on top of the dresser, then he leaned over her, his hands on the arms of the chair.
Normally, she didn’t enjoy being trapped.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he said.
“To Boston?”
“Think about it.” And he tweaked her nose as if he were about to claim he’d stolen it by showing her his thumb. “You know I don’t care about dinner.”
“Maybe I’ll just grab something from the market.”
He left the room, and she hopped up, getting to the front door in time to hold it open, in time for the kiss that only had to last eight hours.
Before he disappeared down their third-floor hallway, he turned and said, “Tidal Flats, babe.”
She smiled, eased the door closed, and leaned back against it. Sunlight poured through their French doors, filling the room. The morning in full force. After three days of Ethan, she missed the Fates.
In the bathroom, she picked up her fat-toothed comb and parted her straight, blonde hair in the middle. At the end of December, right after Ethan left, she’d had it cut shoulder-length, but now the ends fell down her back again.
She adjusted her light gray towel on the bar and then took Ethan’s dark gray one off, refolded it, and hung it back, all the while wondering if he were done, or if he would try to squeeze one last trip into the nine weeks that stretched like a suspension bridge across a deep and wide gully, their anniversary on the other side.
Bathroom light off, covers up on her side of the bed, and on his. Married. Before Ethan, she hadn’t even held this picture in her head; she wouldn’t have known how to.
She stepped out of the apartment, closed the door, and headed toward the elevator. He always told her as soon as he knew he was going back. Sometimes a trip would be planned weeks in advance, and sometimes he’d be leaving that night. She was used to not knowing when. What was different this time was not knowing if.
2
Howell House could accommodate three residents, and the staff had referred to these three women as the Fates for as long as Cass had worked there. No one knew who’d first given them the name or how it had been intended, but Cass took it as a sign.
On her way over, she avoided the sidewalk cracks as if she were trying to make sure she stepped on solid ground. Look up—May was always telling her to look up—and there were the lacy pink and white flowers of the dogwood trees. Columbus was where she’d first seen them—the four strong petals, flawed around the edges, surrounding the heart center.
At the coffee shop, her usual medium latte with coconut milk. Back on the sidewalk, as her steps quickened, her worn canvas messenger bag rubbed against her thigh. Inside the bag, her slim laptop and a copy of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the first book she’d read to May almost four years ago. Now May wanted to read the book again. At the intersection, Cass stopped and took a sip of coffee.
“Is he home?” Vee asked, out of breath.
“Where’d you come from?”
“I saw you from the bus.” Vee was thirty-two, three years older than Cass, and tall, with shiny, black hair that looked as if she’d taken the scissors to it herself, in the dark.
“Is that glitter in your hair?” Cass asked.
“You like it?”
“I do, actually.”
“How is he?”
“Wonderful.”
“Maybe if Dillon left for two months, he’d be wonderful when he got back.”
“Ha,” Cass said, leaning forward to push the button. Dillon was an alcoholic and Heathcliff-ish, according to Vee. Cass had never met him. Ethan hung out with her and Vee every once in a while, but she and Vee were friends, not the four of them.
“Those buttons don’t do anything,” Vee said. “They’re there to make you think you have control.”
Cass stared at the light, willing it to change. “He might be home for good.”
“I don’t care what the two of you agreed to,” Vee said, her hand waving in the air as if it wanted to fly away, and her tattoo—a tiny bird in flight toward her wrist—sneaking out of her sleeve. “Everybody in the world wants The Afghan Woman guy to keep going to Afghanistan.”
Cars passed in a blur. “I thought you were on my side.”
“You know I am.”
“He brought up the agreement himself this morning.”
“And I woke up thinking about it,” Vee said. “But I mean, do you want to be that person, the woman who stopped him from going back?”
Cass stepped away from the curb and looked at Vee. “I’m not stopping him. He wants more than