At the Scent of Water (7 page)

“I’m going to file for divorce when I get back to Seattle,” she said quietly when Theresa finished talking. Her sister didn’t seem surprised at the abrupt shift in conversation. Her eyes filled, the only indication she had heard. There was silence for a minute. Another.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Annie asked.

Theresa shook her head. Annie wondered what she was not saying. “You’ve changed,” she supposed. “Go back. Become the person you used to be.” Vain, cruel things, and she understood why her sister remained silent rather than speak them.

They went back downstairs. They talked. They had tea, and for once Dov did not offer her any exhortation. When she said she must leave, he hugged her gently, looked at her with the sad brown eyes, and said good-bye, and Annie felt desolate as she drove away. Unaccountably and unexpectedly bereft.

Five

Everyone was gone when Annie got back to Seattle. When she woke up Thursday morning, her apartment was eerily quiet. No sound of the Weather Channel, Joyce Meyer, or the
Today
show blaring from upstairs. Mrs. Larsen had told her last night that her daughter was taking her to Vancouver to see her son. There was no thumping, calling, or loud music from across the hall, either. Adrienne was at school and then would be at her father’s until Monday. She saw no evidence of the birthday party save a few paper plates in her garbage can.

She got out of bed, washed her face, and put on her robe. It was brilliant aqua cotton-polyester, zipped up the front, and she had bought it for $3.99 at the Goodwill store. She liked to imagine that it had belonged to some sweet old lady who had worn it every morning as she drank tea and worked a crossword puzzle. She didn’t like to think about how it had ended up at a thrift store. But it suited her, felt good against the cold winter mornings, and hugged her warm at night when the narrow bed seemed miles across and she couldn’t sleep.

She went to the window and compared her view with the one she had had yesterday from the hotel window in Los Angeles. This one was a little lacking. Instead of skyscrapers and bright lights, she could see the interesting, if not beautiful, landscape of the industrial section of the Ballard district of Seattle, the part tucked around the feet of the bridge. There was the Bardahl Oil sign, the parking garage, the body shop, the doughnut shop. And there was Shirley, down on the postage-stamp lawn doing her Tai Chi in spite of the overcast fog of the morning. Even early June in Seattle sometimes leaned more toward soggy spring than summer. Annie dropped the curtain, then opened the sliding door to her balcony. She stepped out onto the small back porch, a rickety affair constructed of two-by-fours slapped onto the brick façade.

“Hey, Shirley,” she called.

“Hi, Annie!” Shirley answered back without breaking the rhythm of her motions.

Her landlady’s energy fields had to be balanced, rain or shine. It was mostly rain here. That’s just what it did from September to June. Annie still wasn’t used to it. She thought of home, still parched and waiting for some life-giving moisture. Oh, the flowers would bloom, the bees would bob out in search of nectar, but the blossoms would be fewer, the pickings slimmer. By midsummer what few flowers there were would be dying on the stalk. By September the ground would be cracked and parched, the grass seared brown. She looked around her at the moist greenery and had a hard time believing that the other world existed. But it did. It was there, and they were there, even if she was not with them, and for a moment she longed to warm her aching bones in the sun of home. She shook her head. California was sunny and warm. She could find what she was looking for there.

At least it wasn’t raining today, she consoled herself. But she had known it was misty even without looking out to confirm it. This morning she had heard a foghorn down on the water. It had a low mournful sound. It had reminded her of the train whistle she had heard each night as a girl. It had passed through the station every evening, and Annie could hear the lonely sound soar upward and travel from the ridge to the room where she slept. The horn sounded again now, long, low, ominous, and she realized something quite suddenly. They were warnings, both of them. The train whistle didn’t blow to greet the stationmaster. It was a warning.
Stay clear,
it cautioned.
Get off the tracks. Something is coming, and it’s bigger than you
. And the ships, when they blew the deep shuddering blasts, were warning the other boats.
Keep away. Don’t cross my path, or you’ll soon feel the cold ocean over your head
.

She shuddered. The feeling that she was being warned surged through her, but she told herself she wasn’t afraid. She told herself she had entered a place where there was nothing left to be taken, and though she supposed that should have produced a fearlessness in her, she quavered for a moment, wondering if there were yet mistakes that could be made and things that could be lost.

She took one last look at Shirley, then stepped inside. She was suddenly chilly. She wished Kirby hadn’t insisted she stick to the original plan and take the week off. “Give it a rest,” her editor had said last night when she’d called to tell him she was back. “Besides,” he had put in, “I know what you’re going to tell me, and I don’t feel like having my weekend ruined. I’ll see you Monday.”

She felt restless and empty, a horrid combination. She hated days off as much as she did the weekends. There was so much empty time and so little to fill it.
It’s time to change all that,
she told herself again severely.
It’s time to move on,
and just looking around her made her realize how long she had put off the inevitable and obvious. This was where she lived, she thought bleakly, latching the sliding door. This was her life, this blank room with cast-off furniture. She laid it against the rich textured background of her past and shook her head with disbelief. But it was all she had needed, and for years—over five, to be specific—all she had wanted.

It would make packing easy. She owned the clothes in the closet and a Ford F10 truck, because the day she left Sam, it was parked in the driveway with the key in the ignition. To drive the other car she would have had to go into the house and look for the keys, and she couldn’t have done that. Not because she was making a grand exit—there’d been no one there to see it—but simply because she had to leave right then. She had to get away. She had to be gone from there, to put as much distance between herself and that huge crashing wall of pain as she could.

When she’d arrived in Seattle, she had checked into a cheap motel and slept for three days straight. When she finally awoke, she bought food at a corner grocery, washed her clothes at the coin-operated Laundromat beside a family who spoke only Spanish. She’d drawn out a thousand dollars from the checking account and paid the deposit and first month’s rent on this small apartment, giving her money to friendly, garrulous Shirley, the owner. After a week or two she also found a job through Shirley, who thought it was the universe responding to Annie’s need. What were the odds that a woman with a master’s degree in journalism would end up in her apartment? For Shirley was in charge of the Classified department at
The Seattle Times
—a mighty step up from the job Shirley procured for her, journalism degrees notwithstanding. Annie’s first job at the
Times,
the one she had accepted without argument or question, had been writing obituaries, and it had seemed right, somehow, since death was her companion, the silvery cold arm around her shoulders. If she and death were not friendly, they were at least used to each other.

Every day she had taken the bucketful of facts they delivered with the creased, worn picture of the deceased, and her imagination had gone to work. Who was she really? she would ask the surprised family. What did he look like when he was young? What were her dreams and ambitions? What did he do that was extraordinary? What did she bring to this world that can never be replaced? Almost to a one, they had loved talking to her, although their conversations were almost always tearful. They would sob, grateful someone had given them a chance to say the loved one’s name one more time, to tell the precious thing about them. “He was a wonderful teacher.” “He raised beautiful roses.” “I never heard him say a bad word about anyone.”

She collected her facts, then sat at her desk and wrote about people who were dead, and she never, ever paused to think or feel anything that first year beyond the dull, flat throb that was always there. She worked and she ate and she slept, and when that seemed to not be enough any longer, she went to the Seattle Public Library and checked out books by the armload, but always the same kind of books. Books that took place long ago, far away. Books that ended right. She read them and imagined herself going to sleep and waking up in those old-time worlds, thinking somehow that her pain would have been easier to endure in the quietness of those days, that grief would be more easily borne in the soft glow of lamplight.

Old things comforted her. Once a week or so she would go to the antique store she passed on her way home. She would walk through those musty-smelling aisles and imagine she lived in another time, in a place where her pain could not follow her. She imagined herself churning butter, carrying water from the well, sweeping bare wooden floors with a homemade broom, walking rocky paths in high buttoned shoes. She knew no sorrow would follow her there, and oh, how she wished she could find a portal that would take her away.

After a month or so she had called home to tell them she was still alive but carefully planning her calls for times when she knew no one would answer the telephone. She had called Sam first, not particular about the time because she knew he would not be there no matter when she called. “I’m safe,” she’d told the machine, her heart still thumping to hear his voice on the message. She’d called Sam’s mother, Mary, on Sunday morning when she was sure to be at church, again leaving a message. She had called Papa, and that had been the hardest. She had spoken to him at his office, not caring to risk a tart lecture from Diane. He had been kind, which had been infinitely harder than if he’d been angry. “You know I love you, darling. Come on back home whenever you’re ready.”

She had not spoken to anyone else. She had not had the heart for it. It had hurt too much, and hurt was something she could not receive any more of.

So she went about the daily duties she’d appointed for herself, ritually, without deviation. She rose every morning, put on her clothes, combed and braided her hair, and went to her job, sweater tied around her waist, lunch sack clutched in her hand—peanut butter sandwich, apple, can of diet soda—some book of long ago under her arm. She went down to the basement of the
Times
building to her small corner desk, to the piles of other people’s lives. No one cared what she wore or what she thought or who she was or who she had been or what had happened to her, and there was comfort in that anonymity.

Papa had come to visit her after six months or so. She still remembered the uncharacteristic soberness, almost grief in his eyes when he had seen her and her dismal apartment. He had brought a little cheer with him, along with carefully edited news of home. He had stayed four days, all he could spare away from his practice. He had cajoled her into cooking for him, and for just a moment she had caught a glimpse of the person she had been, but then he left and the image disappeared.

She had gone on. Years had passed, and finally she began to feel something stirring inside. She’d noticed it with a sense of alarm, as if a dangerous animal had begun to prowl its cage. The first time it happened she’d been walking down the street, had looked into a shop window and seen a beautiful blue dress. It reminded her of the one she’d worn to Sam’s graduation, and for a brief moment she’d wanted to go inside and try it on. She’d walked on quickly, frowning, clutching her book and her lunch as if they could somehow protect her from these stirrings.

At the same time the powers at the
Times
had noticed her stories. She began getting comments and praise, and they had offered her a promotion, and in spite of the fact that part of her still wanted to burrow down in the cool, dark basement and be ignored, she had taken it. She was good at her work. She found stories everywhere she looked, for she saw beyond the events to the real people and to the forces behind them. It wasn’t just an automobile accident, a business failure, a stock market slump, a layoff. These were all slices in the screen that separated people from reality. It was as if, for most of their lives, people lived in a gauzy, diaphanous world, a hazy, filmy curtain between them and the stark pain of life and death. But once in a while the veil tore. That was where the pain was. That was also where the story was, and she was good at peering through the tear and writing about what she saw. It was familiar territory.

Her features had appeared regularly in the
Times,
and then the wire service picked up her story and she won the prize. Now she felt another change stirring. Suddenly the small apartment seemed too small, too familiar, and she was feeling something she hadn’t felt in years. Loneliness. She wanted something permanent. Something real. Something hers, for she had never really felt this was home. Somehow she had felt obliged to live with her bags half packed, her status somewhere between visitor and permanent alien. She supposed it was natural, considering. But it was time to move on. She would do it. She was ready. Max Kroll had assured her the job at the
Los Angeles Times
was hers if she wanted it. And she wanted it. She was finally ready to stop roaming, to step into this new life that was being offered.

She made a pot of coffee and poured herself a cup, sipping it slowly. She looked at the telephone, went toward it, picked up the receiver, pressed the button to play her saved messages and felt like a drunk uncorking a bottle. She didn’t know why she was doing it again. It was hardly comforting, but even if his words were hard, there was his voice, tucked away. A part of him that was familiar, controllable, that she could call forth whenever she wanted.

“Annie, it’s Sam.” His voice, resonant and deep, felt like a dash of cold water on an exposed nerve. It sent her adrenaline surging, and she didn’t know what prompted her to torture herself again other than a desire to inflict self punishment.

“I’ll be there again this year,” he said. “One more time,” and she heard again that mixture of weariness and ominous finality.

She closed her eyes now and could see his dark hair brushed away from his high fine forehead, his symmetrical features, his warm skin, and his startling blue eyes. She could see the quick flash of his smile, his even white teeth. She could feel the smooth linen of the tablecloth under her hand, could hear the low murmur of the voices of the other diners, could hear the clink of silver on china.