I reread that sentence. She’s hit the nail on the head. But she isn’t done.

I’m visiting my childhood home for the first time in years. The trip was a spontaneous thing, or so I tell myself. I wonder now, though, if I’ve been waiting, just waiting for the right time, maybe waiting until the pain of staying away became worse than the pain of coming home.

Her fingers still, then fall away from the keyboard. Raising resigned eyes to mine, she says, “Memory is life experience. When we deny it, there’s a hole where it should be.”

I’m still thinking of that hole an hour later. She’s given a name to what I sometimes feel. It comes at odd times, down times, times when a dream wakes me or when I hear the sea in the dark and sense a vague emptiness, a distant shadow, the motif of a song that I don’t know, but do.

Having taken a raincoat from the mudroom hook, I’ve come down to the beach. Rain falls on my hood, my shoulders, my bare feet. It falls on the sand, thick drops dappling what was dry before and leaving a new sheen on the rest. Meeting it, the waves rush in with the force of the storm to break like dominoes along the shore, and retreat. The clouds overhead aren’t dark, just dense.

Growing up here, I used to find these clouded days soothing. Rather than a complex world of color, there is one, and the simplicity is striking. It also haunts. Standing with my hands deep in the pockets of my wet raincoat, I sense that emptiness off in the distance.

The sound of the sea soothes, I tell myself, then repeat the thought to drum it in. But that distant emptiness haunts, perhaps more vividly now that I’m here. It reminds me of past pain. Maybe, too, it calls me back.

So, was I waiting, like Margo, just waiting for the right time? Did Jack’s phone call open a window that I couldn’t shut again? And if so, what now? Is it possible to live in the moment of today’s Bay Bluff, when the place is overrun by the past?

Chapter 19

The dilemma continues to haunt me as we ready for another dining room dinner, this time plus one. Ignoring the rain, Joy has gone out for fresh flowers to augment yesterday’s arrangements. She enjoys working in the garden, enjoys doing what her grandmother did before her. I feel guilty having kept her from this. But I wasn’t ready to be here.

I’m not sure I am now. All three of us? With Dad? And more questions than ever? And Anne not her usual sunny self and Margo not her usual confident self? And Billy Houseman? And rain enough to frizz all of our hair?