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I’ve made this awful pilgrimage…I’ve come back for more…
Kevin wished, as
he often did, that he had known the poet John Berryman.
“When I was young,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, holding her sunglasses in her hand,
“—little, you know—I’d hide in the wood box when my father came home. And
he’d sit down on the wood box and say, ‘Where’s Olive? Where can Olive be?’
This would go on, till I’d knock on the side, and he’d act surprised. ‘Olive,’ he’d
say, ‘I had no idea where you were!’ And I’d laugh, and he’d laugh.”
Kevin looked over at her; she put her sunglasses on. She said, “I don’t know
how long that continued, probably until I was too big to get into the wood box.”
He didn’t know what to say to this. He squeezed his hands in as tiny a gesture
as possible, looking down at the steering wheel. He felt her big presence, and
imagined—fleetingly—that an elephant sat next to him, one that wanted to be a
member of the human kingdom, and sweet in an innocent way, as though her
stubs of forelegs were folded on her lap, her trunk moving just a little as she
finished speaking.
“That’s a nice story,” he said.
He thought of the boy cleaning the fish, how his father had held his hand out
to him. He thought again of John Berryman.
Save us from shotguns & fathers’
suicides…Mercy!…do not pull the trigger or all my life I’ll suffer from your
anger….
He wondered if Mrs. Kitteridge, being a math teacher, knew much
poetry.
“Look how the wind’s picked up,” she said. “Always kind of exciting, long as
you don’t have a wharf that floats away, like ours used to do. Henry’d be down
on those rocks with the waves—Oh, God what a fracas it was.”
Again, Kevin found himself liking the sound of her voice. Through the
windshield he saw the waves coming in higher now, hitting the ledge in front of
the marina hard enough to send a spray far into the air, the spray then falling
back languidly, the drops sifting through shards of sunlight that still cracked its
way between the dark clouds. The inside of his head began to feel as choppy as
the surf before him. Don’t go, his mind said to Mrs. Kitteridge. Don’t go.
But this turbulence in him was torture. He thought how yesterday morning, in
New York, as he’d walked to his car, he had for one moment not seen it. And
there was that prick of fear, because he’d had it all planned and wrapped up, and
where was the car? But there it was, right there, the old Subaru wagon, and then
he knew what he’d felt had been hope. Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn’t
want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope
springing up within him any longer. That awful story of the man who jumped—
and survived—walking back and forth for an hour on the Golden Gate Bridge,
weeping, saying that had anyone stopped to ask why he was weeping, he
wouldn’t have jumped.
“Mrs. Kitteridge, you have to—”
But she was leaning forward, squinting through the windshield. “Wait, what in
hell—
” And moving faster than he would have thought possible, she was out of
the car, the door left open, and had gone to the front of the marina, her black bag
left on the grass. For a moment she disappeared, then reappeared, waving her
arms, shouting, though he couldn’t hear what she was saying.
He stepped from the car, and was surprised by the force of the wind that
whipped through his shirt. Mrs. Kitteridge was shouting, “Hurry up! Hurry!”
Waving her arms like a huge seagull. He ran to where she was and looked down
into the water, the tide higher than he’d have thought. Mrs. Kitteridge pointed
with a repeated thrust of her arm, and he saw the head of Patty Howe rise briefly
above the choppy water, like a seal’s head, her hair wet and darkened, and then
she disappeared again, her skirt swirling with the swirling dark ropes of
seaweed.
Kevin turned, so that as he slid down the high sheet of rock, his arms were
spread as though to hug it, but there was nothing to hug, just the flat scraping
against his chest, ripping his clothes, his skin, his cheek, and then the cold water
rose over him. It stunned him, how cold the water was, as though he’d been
dropped into a huge test tube containing a pernicious chemical eating at his skin.
His foot hit something steady in the massive swooshing of the water; he turned
and saw her reaching for him, her eyes open, her skirt swirled around her waist;
her fingers reached for him, missed, reached for him again, and he got hold of
her. The water receded for a moment, and as a wave came back to cover them,
he pulled her hard, and her grip on him was so tight he would not have thought it
possible with her thin arms that she could hold anything as tightly as she held
him.
Again the water rose, they both took a breath; again they were submerged and
his leg hooked over something, an old pipe, unmoving. The next time, they both
reached their heads high as the water rushed back, another breath taken. He
heard Mrs. Kitteridge yelling from above. He couldn’t hear the words, but he
understood that help was coming. He had only to keep Patty from falling away,
and as they went again beneath the swirling, sucking water, he strengthened his
grip on her arm to let her know: He would not let her go. Even though, staring
into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing through
each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired
woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like
a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean
—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look
how she wanted to hold on.
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