Amy Goodrow had never liked her mother. She loved her, Olive knew that. But Olive also knew the history told over and over again by Isabelle, that Isabelle had been a single mother with no parents or family alive to help her, and she had moved from a small town in New Hampshire to Shirley Falls, Maine, when Amy was just a baby…. Olive knew every bit of it. Amy’s loneliness, Amy’s affair with a teacher, and how when Isabelle found out about the affair she cut off the girl’s hair, Olive knew the whole story. And Olive had met Amy a number of times these last few years, and her husband, and their one son (totally unimpressive to Olive), but Olive knew this: Amy was doing her duty to a mother she loved but had never liked. Why did a child move so far away if she did not want to live a whole new life? Even Isabelle had said that, and she and Olive had that in common, Olive’s son, Christopher, was living in New York City when he could have stayed so much closer—
Olive sat up. These words went through her mind: I will kill myself. Christopher will be sad, but not that sad, he’ll get over it. I will kill myself. She thought how she would do this. With a knife and her wrists? That was too frightening. And then she thought of her father taking his gun. And she thought of her mother, so young—fifty-seven at the time, and then dying just a few years later, so young—and she thought about herself and what her father’s suicide had done to her. In fact, she did not know what his suicide had done to her, but deep within herself, she knew that it was not good.
—
Saturday there was still no word from Isabelle.
And Olive thought: I am not going to walk over and say goodbye.
—
And then on Sunday—at noontime—Olive’s phone rang, it was Isabelle’s number, and Olive stared at it, and then she picked it up and said flatly, “Hello?”
“Come over here,” Isabelle said. “Olive, I told them no. I just told them, finally, as they were signing all these forms and stuff, I just said, ‘I am not going.’ And you could tell at first that they didn’t believe me, and finally I asked Arjun to leave the room, and I said to Amy, ‘Listen to me, Amy. I know you want me near you. But Maine is my home. It has been my home since you were a baby, it has been my home with my husband. And this is now—even here in this nursing home—my home. I have my friend Olive who I will never be able to replace, and, Amy, I am not going. You will have to declare me incompetent—and maybe you can, but I will fight you on that—and I am telling you, I can’t go, and I am not going.”
Olive said nothing.
“Did you hear me?” Isabelle said.
“Tell me again,” Olive said.
And Isabelle said, “Olive, I am exhausted, and you are telling me to tell you everything again? No, I’m not going to. But they just left. They left, Olive!”
And Olive said, “I will be right there.”
2
Even by the third week of April, Maine is still chilly, though at least the forsythia had finally, in some spots, just barely begun to bloom. But many people in the town of Crosby, so ready for spring, are more out and about than they have been so far all year. Also, the sun does not set until seven-thirty, and this gives people a kind of deep breath without their even quite knowing it. Curtains are drawn later.
And so it happened that one evening during this time the curtains had not yet been pulled in the home of Margaret Estaver and Bob Burgess, and while only a few people witnessed what happened, it went around town very fast: The couple had a big fight. The one person who first saw this was walking his dog by the house and—feeling unconsciously sheltered, as we have said, because of the sense of safety this couple provided to the town—looked into the lit windows and slowed down. Margaret Estaver was facing her husband with a look of absolute hatred.
A few minutes later an older couple walking by on the opposite side of the street saw Bob Burgess suddenly raise his arm, and he appeared to be yelling. This couple walked across the street to get closer to the house, and they did, in fact, hear yelling, and yet they could not make out any words, and they strolled on past, alarmed. And then Margaret flung the curtains shut. This news made its way through the small town, but probably not as much as you might think; people were uncomfortable reporting this about Bob Burgess and Margaret Estaver, and so in the end, only a dozen or so people heard about what was seen through the windows in the large brick house in the center of town.
—
It was quite an altercation: Margaret, earlier that very day, had given a sermon at the Arlington Street Church, the Unitarian church in Boston. The day before she and Bob had traveled to Boston, Margaret had ordered a car for them because she did not want Bob worrying about the Boston traffic even though he had said he would be fine driving there. But no—she wanted to hire a car. This is how excited she was about being invited to speak at that church. “We’ll take an Uber!” she had said.
No trees had leaves yet, and the streets of Crosby seemed dirty as Bob and Margaret left town. As the car pulled onto the highway, Margaret reached into her briefcase and brought out the sermon she was to give the next day. Bob could not read in a car, it made him carsick like a kid, and so he sat beside her and watched the trees go by, listening to his music with his earphones in. He had already heard Margaret’s sermon—four times—and told her he thought it was brilliant. A slight uplifting came to him: He realized he was glad to get out of town. The combination of Helen’s death and the Matthew Beach case weighed on him continually, he understood this now. And by the time they reached New Hampshire the highway seemed cleaner, more cheerful somehow. But the sky was gray, and it remained gray until they came to Massachusetts, and then the sky cleared and the sun shone down. Margaret reached over and squeezed Bob’s hand. “I think it’s pretty good,” she said, and he pulled out his earphones and said “What?” And she repeated what she had just said. “Of course it is,” Bob answered.
The truth is, even in their small church in Crosby there was often a very slight sense of unease for Bob as he watched from the third-row pew, his wife standing before the congregation in her long white robe and speaking to them all about Love and Charity and all the other stuff. His unease, he realized, was because there was a certain manner that overtook her at such times, though he would be hard-pressed to say exactly what it was. But sometimes he had the image of a child playing dress-up and being excited by her importance. So it wasn’t always easy for Bob to watch. But people loved her. Bob loved her.
He looked out his window as the Boston skyline appeared.
—
In the hotel, he felt a gladness. He liked the spaciousness of their room; he liked seeing people in the lobby and in the hallway. They had dinner in the restaurant downstairs, and Bob asked Margaret again if she was sure it was all right that he did not attend the service, and she waved a hand and said it was totally fine with her, she was just glad to have him along. She had already told him not to come to the service, and he had been privately relieved. As we have just mentioned, there was often a vague discomfort he felt when he watched her preach. She said now, “Really, Bob, you wouldn’t be comfortable, especially at the coffee-hour reception after, don’t worry.” So Bob was going to meet an old friend who lived in Boston, and the next morning Margaret said, “Okay, I made sure we have late checkout at two, so I’ll come back to the hotel by one and I’ll pack up and then we have an Uber waiting for us at one-fifteen.” The service was at eleven followed by the coffee hour, and Bob said, “Yeah, that’s more than enough time, Margaret.”
—
And so the next morning, after Bob had seen his friend Koby, who talked almost without stopping about his divorce and the new woman he was seeing, and who after two hours had finally said “Tell me what’s new with you, Bob,” and Bob found he had little to say, Bob went back to the hotel and he lay on the bed, and a secret sadness moved through him. He understood that this had to do with the friend he had just seen. (He would tell Lucy about it.) He often had waves of soft sadness move through him; he knew this about himself and accepted it. But also, he knew it was because of Helen and because of Matt Beach and how much Matt was depending on him.
Then he sat up and looked around and saw that Margaret’s clothes were piled on her suitcase, and her overcoat as well; the day was a nice one and she had not needed to wear her coat. He hoped her sermon had gone well; he assumed it had.
At one o’clock, Margaret had not returned. He called her, and she did not pick up. Bob folded up her clothes and put them into her suitcase. He made sure to get all the chargers, the phone charger and the charger for her computer and the one for his, and he put them into the small brown bag he always transported them in, and he zipped up his own suitcase. He called her again at one-fifteen, and again she did not pick up. He texted her, and she did not answer.
On his phone was a locator app, and he checked to see where Margaret was, and she was still at the church, two blocks away. He could not figure it out. Anxiety swam through him. He left a twenty-dollar bill on the desk for the chambermaid, and then bumping his way through the room he was able to get the door open and he rolled their two suitcases out, Margaret’s overcoat folded across his arm. Down he went in the elevator.
—
Bob was a person who was not comfortable being angry. Years ago, his therapist in New York City told him that this was because of his childhood and the fact that he had killed his father. His therapist—oh, what a kind woman she had been!—had explained that he never dared to get angry because he carried within himself this vast guilt. But now his irritation grew into real anger. He was worried about the Uber that was coming to pick them up, and he kept leaning down into cars and asking if it was theirs, and the drivers all shook their heads. And when Margaret finally sauntered through the front door of the hotel at twenty minutes past three, pulling her phone from her bag she announced, “Oh, the Uber canceled.”
They had to wait for another one; it took more than half an hour to find a driver who would drive them to Maine, and Margaret talked constantly about the event she had just attended. “They loved me, they just absolutely loved me, Bob. And when I got to the part— What’s wrong?” She frowned at him.
“You said you would be back at one. We had to check out, and you didn’t answer your phone, and I couldn’t figure out what had happened.”
“Oh Bob, honestly.” And then she continued to talk about how well her sermon had gone over. Bob did not speak all the way back in the car except for once when Margaret said, “How was Terry?” And Bob said, “Koby.” And Margaret said, “Oh, right, Koby. How was he?” “Fine,” said Bob, and he looked out the window.
He could not for the life of him understand why he was so angry at this woman. But it seemed to bubble inside him—bubble, bubble, it went. And it did not go away.
—
As they entered the town of Crosby, Bob finally understood. He had felt abandoned. That is why he was so enraged. He remembered how, as a child, he had once gone to a Cub Scout meeting and his mother had forgotten to pick him up after. For over an hour he sat on the steps of the church where the meeting had been, and he began to cry. He was small, six or seven years old, and then his mother finally showed up. “Stop crying,” she said as soon as he got into the car. But he had not been able to stop. “Where were you?” he asked, and she said, “Oh come on, Bob. I was visiting Jeannette and I forgot the time. Stop the crying!”
As Bob looked out the window now, he realized that this is what had happened, and he thought: When we get back, I will explain this to Margaret, and it will be okay.
—
But it was not okay.
