Chapter 25 The Hairpin

I spent what was left of Saturday telling myself Vivienne Sutter's parting line meant nothing, and on Sunday I did the thing I'd been putting off for five weeks.

The wind had turned in the night. I woke at six to it pushing at the back bedroom window, and it wasn't the raw, sleety wind of the past month. It was soft. It smelled of mud and wet grass.

The first mild day of the year, the Sunday of the long Patriots' Day weekend, and by eight Dora was out on her front step in a cardigan with her eyes shut and her face turned up to the sun.

By ten I'd handed the twins over. Tamsin had promised them the swings at the harbor park, then lunch at Dora's, where there would be clam chowder, which Pippa claimed to hate and ate three bowls of every time.

Tamsin took one look at my face on the doorstep and asked where I was going. I said, "A drive." She said, "Not without your phone charged," and checked it herself.

On the passenger seat beside me was a bunch of crocuses from Helen's yard, wrapped in a damp paper towel and a plastic bag. Purple and white and the loud yellow. I'd cut them with the kitchen scissors at nine, kneeling in the wet grass by the back fence where Helen had planted them the year I started school.

She'd planted them, she'd said, so that every spring I'd have something that came up before anything else did and didn't ask permission.

---

Gull Point Road ran north out of Bramport along the top of the cliffs. It closed every winter from the first hard ice, and this year it had reopened on Friday. There were still sandbags along the shoulder from the March storms.

I drove it slowly, the sea far below on the right, until at the top of the long rise there was only sky and water and the road bending away in a tight curve above the lookout.

The hairpin.

I pulled onto the gravel on the inside of the bend and turned off the engine and sat there.

I'd never been up here on purpose. I'd lived in Bramport most of my life and I had avoided this bend by habit, never by decision. When I was a child it was just the cliff road, the place the teenagers raced and the school bus wouldn't go in winter. After I was thirteen it was something else, and I had made a rule about it, and kept the rule.

I picked up the crocuses and got out.

The wind came at me at once, warm and enormous. Below the lookout the sea broke white on the rocks a hundred feet down. The guardrail along the outside of the curve was new galvanized steel. Behind it, if you leaned, you could see a few rusted stumps of an older rail, bent outward, where something had gone through.

Thirty years ago this March.

Beatrix had told me in a hotel tearoom in Zurich, on a gray June afternoon three years back, with the DNA report on the table between us. A storm. Night. A car through the old rail and down. A young woman dead in the wreck on the rocks, the passenger door open to the sea, and a baby seat empty in the back.

The police had searched for a week. Then they'd decided the storm surge took the baby, and closed the file, and Beatrix had buried a coffin with nothing in it.

*Lost to the sea*, Beatrix had said, and spat the words out.

I knelt down by the new guardrail and laid the crocuses at the foot of one of the posts, on the concrete. I tucked the paper towel around the stems so the wind wouldn't take them. Then I stayed there on my knees on the gravel and tried to feel something for a woman I had no memory of whatsoever.

I had her face. Everybody said so. I had her chin and her stillness and, according to Philip, her eyes. I had no idea what her voice had sounded like.

But I knew this bend.

I knew it for another reason, and the reason came up through the rule like blood through a suture line that hasn't held.

Ice. A night so cold it hurt to breathe. The windshield of Helen's old car glazed over and the wipers dragging, and Helen saying *oh God, oh God, Margot, stay in the car*, and not staying in the car.

Headlights pointing the wrong way. Something on its roof. A sound that I knew now, after medical school, was a person breathing badly, and that I'd known then only as a sound I didn't want to hear. Helen's feet running away up the slope toward the lookout. The cold of the road through the knees of my jeans.

My mitten. Pale blue wool. Something dark on it that wasn't water.

And counting. Somebody counting, over and over. Slowly. Out loud. One, two. Up to a number and stopping, and starting again.

I opened my eyes. The crocuses were still on the concrete.

I stood up and brushed the gravel off my knees.

---

I heard the car before I saw it. It came up the long rise behind me, slowing for the bend, and I thought it would go past. It didn't. It pulled onto the gravel behind mine and stopped, and the engine cut, and the door opened.

Rhys got out.

He saw me. He stopped with one hand still on the top of the car door, exactly as he'd stopped in the consult room doorway on my first day.

Neither of us said anything. The wind filled the space where the talking should have been.

Then he shut the car door and walked over. Not close. He stopped a few feet away along the guardrail, facing the sea, in a gray sweater and a dark jacket, his fists pushed into the jacket pockets. The wind flattened his hair.

"I come up here every spring," he said. "When the road opens. The first weekend." He frowned at the water. "I don't know why. I've done it since I was twenty. I drive up, I stand here, I drive back."

I kept my eyes on the water.

His eyes went down to the foot of the guardrail post. To the crocuses on the concrete, purple and white and yellow, shivering in their paper towel.

"Who for?" he said.

I watched them shiver.

"Someone I never met," I said.

He waited for more. I gave him none. After a moment he looked back at the sea and didn't push, and I noticed that. Five years ago he would have pushed until I gave him something he could use.

"The boxes," I said instead. I hadn't meant to. "In the closet."

"Yes." He said it to the sea.

"You kept my things."

"Yes."

"The dress." The wind took the word and I had to say it again. "You had the dress cleaned."

"It was on the bathroom floor," Rhys said. "For a week. I kept walking past it. Then one morning I couldn't walk past it anymore, so I picked it up." His jaw moved. "I couldn't think what you do with a thing like that. So I had it cleaned. Then I couldn't think what you do with it clean."

"You could have thrown it away."

"I could have." His eyes were on the bright new rail. "I throw things away every day, Margot. Contracts. People. I'm good at it." A gull dropped past us, folded, and swung up again on the wind. "I couldn't do that one."

"You threw away the hall table."

He was quiet for a moment.

"The first winter after you left," he said. "I'd come in at night and put my keys down on it, and the papers were still lying there. They weren't, obviously. The housekeeper had cleared them the day you left. But I'd see them."

He turned his head and looked at me for the first time since he'd got out of the car. "So I had it taken away. It didn't make any difference. I still put my keys down where it used to be."

I looked at the sea, because I couldn't keep looking at him.

"Pippa," he said, after a while. "Yesterday. At the door."

"I was there."

"I know." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "I've watched grown men try to put Vivienne out of a room for ten years. Lawyers. My father. Pippa did it in about four seconds, with sauce on her chin."

"She'll want you to know she was very polite about it."

"She was." The almost-smile went, and he looked down at the crocuses again. "I should have asked for that key back a long time ago."

He was quiet again. Then he said, "I nearly died here."

---

He told it to the water, not to me. It was the most he had ever said to me at one time, in three years of marriage and five weeks of this. More than at our wedding. More than the night of the gala.

"Two days into 2010," he said. "I was nineteen. Home from college for the break. There was an ice storm. Everyone said don't drive, and I drove, because I was nineteen and I'd had a fight with my father and I wanted to be somewhere else."

He pushed his fists deeper into his pockets.

"I came around this bend too fast. The car went across the ice and hit the old rail and flipped. I don't remember it flipping. I remember the sky being underneath me."

He touched his right side, below the ribs, without seeming to know he was doing it. I knew what was under the sweater there. A long white seam, slightly raised, puckered at one end. I'd seen it every day for three years and never been told where it came from.

"I was upside down for about forty minutes," Rhys said. "Something went into my side. I couldn't get out. I couldn't feel my hands. It was so cold I stopped shivering, which they tell me is bad." He breathed out. "I'd have died here. I'd have gone to sleep and died here, on my roof, in the ice."

Nobody drove past.

"Vivienne kept me awake," he said. "She was there. She found me. She stayed at the window the whole time and talked to me and held my hand until the ambulance came. Forty minutes, on her knees on the ice. She was eighteen." His eyes dropped to the guardrail. "I woke up in the ER at St. Ansel and she was the first thing I saw."

I watched the sea. A wave came in and broke white on the rocks and drew back, and another came in behind it.

Somewhere below us, on those rocks, a woman I couldn't remember had died in the dark with her car door open, and thirty years later the same rocks were catching the sun.

My hands were in my coat pockets. In the left one, still, my fingers found the cellophane twist of Philip's peppermint, and closed on it, and held on.

"Interesting," I said.

Rhys turned from the sea to me. He'd heard something. I saw him hear it, the same way he'd heard the whoosh in Felix's chest on the seawall: a sound under the sound, there and then gone. He frowned. He didn't know what it was.

I turned away from the rail and walked back to my car.

The gravel crunched behind me. He'd followed. Two steps, and then he stopped.

I had my keys out. I had the door open. I was halfway into the seat when he spoke, and his voice wasn't the one he used on boards, or on lawyers, or on me five years ago in the hall on Lantern Row. It was rough and puzzled and almost young.

"She told me a joke," Rhys said, at my car door. "I've lost it."