The Pandora Key (39 page)

“Let…me…go.”

With one hand supporting his head and the other on his chest, I couldn’t wipe my tears. They ran in a furious stream down my face and dripped from the tip of my chin onto his collar.

I took my hand from his side. Rachel was crying, too, trying to get her arms around him. I lifted him enough that she could put his head and his shoulders in her lap and hold him. “I came back,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave you. I came back for you, baby.” She held him tight. “I love you, baby. I love you.”

Somehow, he found the strength to lift his hand and reach for mine. I took it and held on. I held on to him as tightly as I’d ever held on to anything, and I regretted every moment I had shut him out or held him distant and not let him close to me. I looked into his face, his soft, sweet face that had so often been etched with fear and doubt and pain and bleak acceptance, and I wondered if the meaning of a man’s life could be found in one moment, if his whole life could be lived for the purpose of getting to that single moment—a moment without fear.

He closed his eyes, and I reached down and touched his cheek with the back of my finger. I smiled, because he had shaved, which meant it had been a good day.

42

WE DROVE DOWN TO THE CAPE ONE MORNING IN EARLY April to spread Harvey’s ashes. We’d had a hard time picking the spot. The only times I had ever seen him completely at peace were when he’d been reading, so I suggested Widener Library in Harvard Yard or Copley Square across from the Boston Public Library.

Too boring, Rachel had said. Harvey was a lot more fun than that.

“What’s your idea?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did you get married?”

“In a synagogue in Brooklyn, but that was because my mother insisted. He would have been fine with a justice of the peace.”

“First date?”

“That jazz club I told you about. It’s been gone for years.”

“Favorite date?”

She had to think about it, but then I could see in her face that we had our place.

We took the Truro exit and drove down toward Wellfleet. She couldn’t remember the address, but she remembered the street and thought she could recognize the house. After driving around for ten minutes, winding in and out among the expensive homes, she spotted it.

“There. That’s it. I remember that rooster wind thing on top.”

I parked on the next block. We walked back to the house, the scene of Harvey and Rachel’s favorite date years before. They’d come to a wedding of a friend of Rachel’s at this house on a warm Saturday night in August, toward the end of the season. They had danced under a tent on the beach, and that’s where she wanted Harvey’s final resting place to be, the only problem being that it was a private beach. It said so on the sign hanging on the big gate with the chain and the heavy padlock.

I looked back at the house. No lights on. No one stirring. There had been no cars in the driveway. I checked the fence for wires. No visible signs of an alarm.

“Screw it,” I said. We were about to break the law anyway by scattering human remains on a beach belonging to someone else. I handed the urn to Rachel, found a good foothold on the wooden gate, and climbed over. She handed Harvey across, then scrambled over behind me.

The walk to the beach was a long one, over a planked bridge that spanned the rolling dunes. The sound of the surf grew louder as we walked toward it. By the time we’d reached the steps down to the beach, the rest of the world had fallen away.

Being a private beach at 10:00
A.M.
on a workday, it was deserted. The smell of seaweed was in the steady, cool breeze. Seagulls dipped and whirled overhead, while smaller shore birds played chicken with the waves, scavenging the wet sand they left behind. But it was easy to picture the place in the summer with umbrellas and canvas chairs and kids and suntan oil.

Rachel stood in the sand with her eyes shaded against the morning glare. The sun was trying to break through the mighty steel bands of clouds that had wrapped us tightly since October.

“It was a big wedding,” she said. “Harvey said he wouldn’t come, but then I told him about the entertainment. They hired a big band to play live. They put the whole thing up over there, this big white tent with a dance floor inside. I’d never seen anything like that. Harvey had such a good time dancing that night. I think we were the last to go home.”

I offered the urn to her. She looked at it, then pulled the sleeves of her sweater down to keep her hands warm and wrapped her arms around her. She turned to face the wind and said, “You do it.”

“Do you want to say anything?”

“I wish we’d brought champagne. We had champagne that night.”

“Do you think he’d like the water or the sand?”

“The sand,” she said. “Most definitely.”

“Then we should turn around.”

We turned and faced the dunes. The wind from behind whipped my hair around and into my face. I took the lid off and handed it to her. With my back to the ocean, I spread Harvey’s remains along the beach. They call it ashes, but it was heavier than that, and grainier with small bits of bone. I painted a wide swath where Harvey and Rachel had danced and drunk champagne, and I was glad that Harvey had wanted to be cremated, because I never bought into that whole thing where you put the body someplace—in a hole in the ground or a stone mausoleum—so you can come and visit, because after the soul departs, the body doesn’t matter anymore. You might as well be ashes, and who would want to picture Harvey for all eternity the way he was at the end?

I pictured Harvey wearing lightweight linen pants, a short-sleeved sport shirt you might see in the 1940s, and a thin woven belt around a slim waist. I pictured him dancing on the beach with his girl, nimble and graceful and happy. I had never seen it myself, but I could imagine it.

As we walked back to the car, there was the slightest thinning in the cloud cover off to the west. It wasn’t much, but just enough to let us know that winter would eventually let go.

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