Forgive Me

Eleven

For four days, Nadine woke early in Hanks guest bedroom. The winter sun streamed through the panes of the upstairs windows; even when Nadine closed the white shutters, the light worked its way underneath her eyelids. Besides the hissing of the steam heat, the house was utterly quiet. Nadine’s dreams–which had always been blissfully blank–were filled with images like shrapnel: the clay Madonna on a sick child’s bedside table, the knot of skin where a Haitian boy’s ear had been. Ann’s wedding ring, nestled amid Jim’s spare change in a glass dish on his dresser in the Surf Drive house.

In her pajamas, Nadine made coffee and drank it in on the front porch, looking over the large yard, which led to a dirt road and then the beach. The yard was made for dogs and children, thought Nadine, but there was only Hank and his fragile patient, drinking coffee, wrapped in a scratchy red blanket. By the front door was a row of fishing rods and a green plastic tackle box.

In the afternoons, they would read in the living room. They had visited Nantucket Bookworks and bought each other books for Christmas. Hank was working through War and Peace and Nadine was revisiting Cry the Beloved Country. They sat at opposite ends of the couch, propped up by pillows. Once in a while, Hank would read a sentence to Nadine, or she would look up to find him focused on her, not his reading.

“What?” she said once, catching him staring.

“Oh,” said Hank, “I just hit a boring part. You thought I was gazing at you?”

“No,” said Nadine, smiling.

“Good,” said Hank.

After a lunch of cheese, sliced apples, and bread, they shopped in town and then sat on the beach. They told each other ribbons of stories: Nadine’s summer in South Africa, Hank’s mother in Florida, who was growing forgetful, the young girl he’d just diagnosed with diabetes. “That must have been tough,” said Nadine, when he described telling the girls parents.