The Long Way Back To Warmth

The Last Box

The last box Deborah Paul carried out of the apartment was the one she should have thrown away. It held, in no particular order, a ticket stub from a ferry they'd taken to an island neither of them could now name without wincing, a cracked mug shaped like a lighthouse that Daniel had bought her as a joke their second year together, seven letters she'd written him and never sent, and a photograph of the two of them at his cousin's wedding, laughing at something just outside the frame. She had meant to leave it behind. She had, in fact, set it by the door with the donation pile three separate times. And three separate times she had picked it back up on her way out, the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth, not because it wanted the pain but because the absence of the pain felt like a lie.

She set the box in the trunk of the car she'd bought used two weeks earlier, a grey hatchback with a dent in the rear bumper that the previous owner had never bothered to explain, and closed the trunk with more force than it required. The sound was satisfying in a way that embarrassed her, twelve years old, slamming doors.

"That's the last of it," she said, to no one, because there was no one. Daniel was at work, he would be at work, he was always at work, that had been one of the seventeen things she'd catalogued in the weeks after and then made herself stop cataloguing because a list of grievances was not the same as an understanding, and she wanted, badly, to understand what had happened to her rather than simply to resent it. The apartment behind her, the one they'd shared for six years and that she was now surrendering entirely, in the divorce that wasn't quite a divorce because they'd never married, the amicable un-marriage, the thing her mother kept calling "the situation" as though it were weather, the apartment stood with its door propped open, and through it she could see the bare rectangle on the living room wall where a bookshelf had been, the paint beneath it a full shade brighter than the rest, unfaded, protected. She thought, that's what I'll look like for a while, a brighter patch where something used to stand.

She was thirty-four years old and she was leaving the city she had lived in for eleven years, and she told herself this was not running away, this was a job. A good job, a specific and well-earned job, offered to her by a preservation firm three hundred and forty miles north on the strength of her master's thesis on load distribution in nineteenth-century timber framing and four years of unglamorous, exacting field work on buildings other people had given up on. Hartwell & Fen Historic Restoration had a project, an estate on the Maine coast, a shipping magnate's summer house from 1881, structurally unsound, architecturally significant, owned now by a historical trust that had run out of money twice already and was down to its last serious attempt and they needed someone who understood old wood the way a physician understands an old body, where it would bend, where it would break, what could be saved and what had to be replaced entirely, and how to tell the difference before you'd done irreversible harm.

It was, professionally, the best offer she had ever received.

It was also, she knew, three hundred and forty miles from Daniel, and she had accepted it four days after finding out through a mutual friend's careless mention, not through Daniel himself, which was its own kind of information that he'd been seeing someone since March, since before the actual end. She was not proud of the timeline. She had turned the timeline over so many times in the months since that it had gone soft at the edges, like a coin rubbed thin, and she'd made a private, disciplined decision not to keep rubbing it. The job was real. Her competence was real. The fact that she needed, badly, to be somewhere Daniel's ordinary Tuesday errands did not intersect with her own, the grocery store, the dry cleaner, the particular bench in the particular park where they'd once spent an entire Sunday afternoon deciding, wrongly, that they were the kind of people who'd grow old together, that need was real too, and she was old enough now not to pretend the two reasons for leaving, the professional and the personal, were separable. They had simply arrived at the same door at the same time, and she was walking through it.

She got in the car. The seat was still adjusted for the friend who'd helped her carry the last of the boxes down, Priya, who had cried more at the goodbye than Deborah had, which Deborah appreciated more than she could say and she moved it back to her own settings, checked the mirrors out of habit rather than necessity, and pulled out of the spot she had parallel-parked in roughly four hundred times over six years without ever once getting good at it.

The drive north took her past the exit for his office. She had not planned the route around this; she simply hadn't thought about it, and now here it was, a green sign with a number on it that used to mean something and would, she supposed, eventually mean nothing again, the way all street names and highway exits eventually surrendered their private meanings if you stopped feeding them. She did not take the exit, she did not slow down. She put the radio on, found nothing, turned it off, and drove with the windows cracked so the highway noise would have something to say instead of her own thoughts, which she had grown tired of, the way you grow tired of a song you once loved that a bad memory has ruined for you.

Somewhere past the state line the land began to change. The flat, familiar sprawl of exurb and strip mall gave way first to hills, then to trees crowding closer to the road, dense and dark green even in early June, and then, she came over a rise two hours later with the windows still down, to a smell she hadn't anticipated and that hit her with unreasonable force, salt. Cold salt air, threading in under the pine smell, telling her the ocean was near before she could see it. She had grown up four hours from any coast. The smell was not nostalgic. It was, instead, entirely new, and there was something in that, in encountering a sensation with no history attached to it, nothing it needed to be measured against, that made her throat tighten in a way she hadn't expected and didn't examine too closely.

The town was called Black-water Cove, which she'd assumed from the name would be moodier than it turned out to be. It was, in fact, almost aggressively picturesque in the way of towns that had figured out, sometime in the 1990s, that their economic future lay in being photographed; a single main street of clapboard buildings painted in shades that coordinated a little too well, a harbour with lobster boats angled at the particular diagonal that suggested someone had arranged them, a hardware store, a bookshop, a diner with a hand-painted sign that read THE GULL'S REST in letters going gently to seed at the edges, which she liked immediately and without reservation, because it was the one piece of the town that looked lived-in rather than staged.

Her rental was a cottage a half-mile out of the centre, small, salt-stained, with a kitchen that had not been updated since some optimistic decade in the recent past and a claw-footed tub that she suspected would become, over the coming months, the single best decision of this entire upheaval. The landlord, a retired schoolteacher named Fran Doucette who wore three sweaters simultaneously despite the June warmth, met her at the door with a set of keys on a piece of driftwood and a story about the previous tenant's cat that Deborah did not fully follow but nodded along to anyway, because Fran's kindness was evident even when her narrative logic was not, and kindness, Deborah had learned in the last several months, was a thing you took wherever you found it and did not question too closely.

"You're the one fixing up the Ashworth place," Fran said, not quite a question.

"Trying to," Deborah said. "Starting Monday."

"Good luck to you." Fran said it the way people in small towns said things that were both genuinely well, wishing and quietly loaded, a phrase doing two jobs at once. "That house has eaten three contractors and a very expensive engineer from Portland, eaten them alive. You a superstitious woman?"

"No," Deborah said, and then, because Fran was still looking at her with an expression that suggested this answer was inadequate; "Should I be?"

Fran considered this for what felt like a genuinely long time, standing on the crooked front step with her three sweaters and her keys of driftwood, the harbour bell somewhere down the hill knocking softly against itself in the wind. "Ayuh," she said finally. "Little bit, can't hurt." And she left it at that, and went back down the path to her own house next door, and Deborah stood alone in the doorway of a cottage she had never seen before that afternoon, in a town she'd chosen from a map and a job posting, three hundred and forty miles from every room that still held the shape of the life she used to have, and felt, for the first time in eleven months, something that was not quite happiness but stood close enough to it to cast a shadow in its direction. Possibility, maybe, or just the absence of the specific weight she'd been carrying, set down for a moment on an unfamiliar step.

She carried her boxes in one at a time. The one with the mug and the letters and the photograph she left in the trunk. Not because she'd made a decision about it. Just because the day was getting on, and there was only so much a person could carry across a threshold in a single afternoon, and some things, she thought, standing in the small bright kitchen as the light went gold and then rose over the water she couldn't see yet but could hear, some things could wait until she was ready to know what she thought about them.

Fran's voice came faintly from next door, calling something to the cat that did or didn't exist. A gull complained somewhere close by. Deborah unpacked the kettle first, because tea was the kind of ritual that made a strange kitchen feel briefly like a life, and she stood at the window while the water heated, watching the last of the light lie down gold and orange across a lawn gone slightly wild, and did not think about Daniel for eleven whole minutes, which she counted afterward, embarrassed at herself for counting, and pleased despite the embarrassment, because eleven minutes was eleven more than she'd managed in longer than she wanted to admit.

Monday, she thought. Monday she would see the house that had eaten three contractors alive. Monday the actual work, the work she was good at, the work that didn't ask anything of her except precision and patience and an eye for what could still be saved, would begin. Tonight there was only the kettle, and the gull, and Fran's driftwood key ring warm from her pocket on the counter, and the strange, top-of-a-hill feeling of a life about to tip forward into a shape she couldn't see yet.

She let it. For once, for the first time in a long time, she simply let the not-knowing sit there, unresolved, and did not reach for a list to organize it into something smaller.