第 16 页

“I hate to do this to you, Jean,” she said, trying her best to make her voice sound natural, “but I think I’ll call it a night. I’m tired, and I’ve got a long drive tomorrow. I’m glad you had a good time at the wedding.”

Jean’s eyebrows rose slightly at her friend’s abrupt ending to the evening.

“Oh . . . well, thank you,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

Adrienne could feel Jean’s uncertain gaze on her, even as she made her way up the stairs. After unlocking the door to

the blue room, she slipped out of her clothes and crawled into the bed, naked and alone.

She could smell Paul on the pillow and on the sheets, and she absently traced her breast as she buried herself in the smell, fighting sleep until she could do so no longer. When she rose the following morning, she started a pot of Coffee and took another walk on the beach.

She passed two other couples in the half hour she spent outside. A front had pushed warmer air over the island, and she knew the day would lure even more people to the water’s edge.

Paul would have arrived at the clinic by now, and she wondered what it was like. She had an image in her mind, something she might have seen on one of the nature chan-nels—a series of hastily assembled buildings surrounded by an encroaching jungle, ruts in a curving dirt road out front, exotic birds chirping in the background—but she doubted that she was right. She wondered if he had talked to Mark yet and how the meeting had gone, and whether Paul, like she, was still reliving the weekend in his mind.

The kitchen was empty when she got back. She could see the sugar bowl open by the Coffeemaker with an empty cup beside it. Upstairs, she could hear the faint sound of someone humming.

Adrienne followed the sound, and when she reached the second floor, she could see the door to the blue room cracked open. Adrienne drew nearer, pushing the door open farther, and saw Jean bending over, tucking in the final corner of a fresh sheet. The old linens, the linen that

had once wrapped her and Paul together, had been bundled and tossed on the floor.

Adrienne stared at the sheets, knowing it was ridiculous to be upset but suddenly realizing it would be at least a year until she smelled Paul Flanner again. She inhaled raggedly, trying to stifle a cry.

Jean turned in surprise at the sound, her eyes wide.

“Adrienne?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

But Adrienne couldn’t answer. All she could do was bring her hands to her face, aware that from this point on, she would he marking the days on the calendar until Paul returned.

“Paul,” Adrienne answered her daughter, “is in Ecuador.” Her voice, she noted, was surprisingly steady.

“Ecuador,” Amanda repeated. Her fingers tapped the table as she stared at her mother. “Why didn’t he come back?”

“He couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

Instead of answering, Adrienne lifted the lid of the sta-tionery box, From inside, she pulled out a piece of paper that looked to Amanda as if it had been torn from a stu-dent’s notebook. Folded over, it had yellowed with age. Amanda saw her mother’s name written across the front.

“Before I tell you,” Adrienne went on, “I want to answer your other question.”

“What other question?”

Adrienne smiled. “You asked whether I was sure that Paul loved me.” She slid the piece of paper across the table to her daughter. “This is the note he wrote to me on the day that he left.”

Amanda hesitated before taking it, then slowly unfolded the paper. With her mother sitting across from her, she began to read.

Dear Adrienne,

You weren’t beside me when I woke this morning, and though I know why you left, I wish you hadn’t. I know that’s selfish of me, but I suppose that’s one of the traits that’s stayed with me, the one constant in my life.

If you’re reading this, it means I’ve left. When I’m fin-ished writing, I’m going to go downstairs and ask to stay with you longer, but I’m under no illusions as to what you’re going to say to me.

This isn’t a good-bye, and I don’t want you to think for a moment that it’s the reason for this letter. Rather, I’m going to look at the year ahead as a chance to get to know you even better than I do. I’ve heard of people falling in love through letters, and though we’re already there, it doesn’t mean our love can’t grow deeper, does it? I’d like to think it’s possible, and if you want to know the truth, that conviction is the only thing I expect to help me make it through the next year without you.

If I close my eyes, I can see you walking along the beach on our first night together. With lightning flickering on your face, you were absolutely beautiful, and I think that’s part of the reason I was able to open up to you in a

way I never had with anyone else. But it wasn’t just your beauty that moved me. It was everything you are—your courage and your passion, the commonsense wisdom with which you view the world. I think I sensed these things about you the first time we had Coffee, and if anything, the more I got to know you, the more I realized how much I’d missed these qualities in my own life. You are a rare find, Adrienne, and I’m a lucky man for having had the chance to come to know you.

I hope that you’re doing okay. As I write this letter, I know that I’m not. Saying good-bye to you today is the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do, and when I get back, I can honestly swear that I’ll never do it again. I love you now for what we’ve already shared, and I love you now in anticipation of all that’s to come. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I miss you already, but I’m sure in my heart that you’ll be with me always. In the few days I spent with you, you became my dream.

Paul

The year following Paul’s departure was unlike any year in Adrienne’s life. On the surface, things went on as usual. She was active in her children’s lives, she visited with her father once a day, she worked at the library as she always had. But she carried with her a new zest, fueled by the se-cret she kept inside, and the change in her attitude wasn’t lost on people around her. She smiled more, they sometimes commented, and even her children occasionally noticed that she took walks after dinner or spent an hour now and then lingering in the tub, ignoring the mayhem around her.

She thought of Paul always in those moments, but his image was most real whenever she saw the mail truck com-ing up the road, stopping and starting with each delivery on the route.

The mail usually arrived between ten and eleven in the morning, and Adrienne would stand by the window, watching as the truck paused in front of her house. Once it was gone, she would walk to the box and sort through the bundle, looking for the telltale signs of his letters: the beige airmail envelopes he favored, postage stamps that depicted a world she knew nothing about, his name scrawled in the upper-left-hand corner.

When his first letter arrived, she read it on the back porch. As soon as she was finished, she started from the beginning and read it a second time more slowly, pausing and lingering over his words. She did the same with each sub-sequent letter, and as they began to arrive regularly, she re-alized that the message in Paul’s note had been true. Though it wasn’t as gratifying as seeing him or feeling his arms around her, the passion in his words somehow made the distance between them seem that much less. She loved to imagine how he looked as he wrote the let-ters. She pictured him at a battered desk, a single bulb illu-minating the weary expression on his face. She wondered if he wrote quickly, the words flowing uninterrupted, or whether he would stop now and then to stare into space, collecting his thoughts. Sometimes her images took one form; with the next letter they might take another, depending on what he’d written, and Adrienne would close her eyes as she held it, trying to divine his spirit.

She wrote to him as well, answering questions that he’d asked and telling him what was going on in her life. On those days, she could almost see him beside her; if the breeze moved her hair, it was as if Paul were gently running a finger over her skin; if she heard the faint ticking of a clock, it was the sound of Paul’s heart as she rested her head on his chest. But when she set the pen down, her thoughts always returned to their final moments together, holding each other on the graveled drive, the soft brush of his lips, the promise of a single year apart, then a lifetime together.

Paul also called every so often, when he had an oppor-tunity to head into the city, and hearing the tenderness in his voice always made her throat constrict. So did the sound of his laughter or the ache in his tone as he told her how much he missed her. He called during the day, when the kids were at school, and whenever she heard the phone ringing, she found herself pausing before she answered it, hoping it was Paul. The conversations didn’t last long, usu-ally less than twenty minutes, but coupled with the letters, it was enough to get her through the next few months.

At the library, she began photocopying pages from a va-riety of books on Ecuador, everything from geography to history, anything that caught her eye. Once, when one of the travel magazines did a piece on the culture there, she bought the magazine and sat for hours studying the pictures and practically memorizing the article, trying to learn as much as she could about the people he was working with. Sometimes, despite herself, she wondered whether any of

the women there ever looked at him with the same desire she had.

She also scanned the microfiched pages of newspapers and medical journals, looking for information on Paul’s life in Raleigh. She never wrote or mentioned that she was doing this—as he often said in his letters, that was a person he never wanted to be again—but she was curious. She found the piece that had run in The Wall Street Journal, with a drawing of him at the top of the article. The article said he was thirty-eight, and when she stared at the face, she saw for the first time what he’d looked like when he was younger. Though she recognized his picture immedi-ately, there were some differences that caught her eye—the darker hair parted at the side, the unlined face, the too se-rious, almost hard expression—that felt unfamiliar. She re-membered wondering what he would think of the article now or whether he would care about it at all.

She also found some photos of him in old copies of the Raleigh News and Observer, meeting the governor or at-tending the opening of the new hospital wing at Duke Medical Center. She noted that in every picture she saw, he never seemed to smile. It was, she thought, a Paul she couldn’t imagine.

In March, for no special reason, Paul arranged to have roses sent to her house and then began having them sent every month. She would place the bouquets in her room, assuming that her children would eventually notice and mention something about them; but they were lost in their own worlds and never did.

In June, she went back to Rodanthe for a long weekend

with Jean. Jean seemed edgy when she arrived, as if still try-ing to figure out what had upset Adrienne the last time she was there, but after an hour of easy conversation, Jean was back to normal. Adrienne walked the beach a few times that weekend, looking for another conch, but she never found one that hadn’t been broken in the waves.

When she arrived back Home, there was a letter from Paul with a photograph that Mark had taken. In the back-ground was the clinic, and though Paul was thinner than he’d been six months earlier, he looked healthy. She propped the photograph against the salt and pepper shak-ers as she wrote him a letter in response. In his letter, he’d asked for a photograph of her, and she sorted through her photo albums until she found one that she was willing to offer him.

Summer was hot and sticky; most of July was spent in-doors with the air-conditioning running; in August, Matt headed off to college, while Amanda and Dan went back to high school. As the leaves on the trees turned to amber in the softer autumn sunlight, she began thinking of things that Paul and she might do together when he returned. She imagined going to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville to see the holiday decorations; she wondered what the children would think of him when he came over for Christmas din-ner or what Jean would do when she booked a room at the Inn in both their names right after the New Year. No doubt, Adrienne thought with a smile, Jean would raise an eyebrow at that. Knowing her, she would say nothing at first, preferring to walk around with a smug expression that

said she’d known all along and had been expecting their visit.

Now, sitting with her daughter, Adrienne recalled those plans, musing that in the past, there had been moments when she’d almost believed they’d really happened. She used to imagine the scenarios in vibrant detail, but lately she’d forced herself to stop. The regret that always followed the pleasure of those fantasies left her feeling empty, and she knew her time was better spent on those around her, who were still part of her life. She didn’t want to feel the sorrow brought on by such dreams ever again. But some-times, despite her best intentions, she simply couldn’t help it.

“Wow,” Amanda murmured as she lowered the note and handed it back to her mother.

Adrienne folded it along its original crease, put it aside, then pulled out the photograph of Paul that Mark had taken.

“This is Paul,” she said.

Amanda took the photo. Despite his age, he was more handsome than she had imagined. She stared at the eyes that had seemed to so captivate her mother. After a mo-ment, she smiled.

“I can see why you fell for him. Do you have any more?”

“No,” she said, “that’s it.”

Amanda nodded, studying the photo again.

“You described him well.” She hesitated. “Did he ever send a picture of Mark?”

“No, hut they look alike,” Adrienne said.

“You met him?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Where?”

“Here.”

Amanda’s eyebrows rose. “At the house?”

“He sat where you’re sitting now.”

“Where were we?”

“In school.”

Amanda shook her head, trying to process this new in-formation. “Your story’s getting confusing,” she said.

Adrienne looked away, then slowly rose from the table. As she left the kitchen, she whispered, “It was to me, too.”

By October, Adrienne’s father had recovered somewhat from his earlier strokes, though not enough to allow him to leave the nursing Home. Adrienne had been spending time with him as always throughout the year, keeping him com-pany and doing her best to make him more comfortable.

By budgeting carefully, she’d managed to save enough to keep him in the Home until April, hut after that, she would be at a loss as to what to do. Like the swallows to Capis-trano, she always came back to this worry, though she did her best to hide her fears from him.

On most days when she arrived, the television would he blaring, as if the morning nurses believed that noise would