I woke before the light. I have always woken before the light. In Boston I had a phone by the bed and an alarm set for six-fifteen and a second alarm, at six-thirty, set in a different tone, in case the first alarm had been turned off in my sleep by a hand that did not yet know it had given up. In Marble Cove, on the second morning of the rest of my life, I had a phone I had not plugged in and a clock on the dresser with the kind of hands that move when you are not looking and have, when you do look, somehow covered the distance you asked them to cover. I lay still for a moment and listened to the cottage.
The cottage was not quiet. The cottage had its own kind of silence, which was the person makes when she not asleep and is waiting for you to notice. The wood of the porch ceiling ticked once as the house settled toward the dawn. The radiator under the window, the one my grandmother had bled every October for forty years, gave one long, slow exhale of steam and then was still. A screen somewhere down the hall was breathing, very slightly, against the frame, the way a sleeping animal's rib cage breathes when the animal is, in fact, asleep. From somewhere outside, far off, across the lane, came the sound of one gull, and then the sound of another gull answering, and then the sound of a third gull that had not been called and was saying so, and then the harbor resumed its holding silence, which was not silence at all but the deep, slow breathing of water against a wall of stone that has been breathing against it for two hundred years.
I had not yet opened the folded paper that said my name. I had put it, last night, in the drawer of the bedside table, in the same place my grandmother had put her own reading glasses, beneath a small amber bowl of paper clips. I had put it there with the side that said Ada facing up. I had slept on the far side of the bed, the side my grandfather had slept on, so that the paper, if it spoke, would speak toward my ear. It did not speak. It lay in the drawer and waited, the way everything in this house had learned to wait.
I got up. I put the kettle on. I walked through the cottage and opened every window, in the order my grandmother had taught me, which was the order of the compass: the east windows first, because the morning comes from the east and a house should meet it; then the south, because the south holds the day's warmth longer; then the west, because the west lets go of the day politely; and last, the north windows, because the north was where the harbor was, and the harbor was where the bad weather came from, and my grandmother had believed that you should never open a north window without first looking out of it to see what was coming. I looked out of every north window. The lane was empty. The trees had not yet decided what to do with the new light. A black squirrel ran down the trunk of the maple at the corner of the property, stopped once as if it had heard something, and went on. I opened the window. The air that came in was October-cold and smelled of pine and of salt and, faintly, of something I did not then have a word for and have not since found a word for, that was the smell of a place deciding whether to remember me.
I walked the property. My grandmother had walked the property every morning she was home, and she had been home, in the years I had known her, almost every morning. She had walked the way a person walks when she is not checking on a house but checking on a relationship. She had paused at the woodpile and counted the cut logs. She had paused at the lavender bush and held a sprig between two fingers and then let it go. She had paused at the back step where my grandfather had last set down his coffee cup, on the morning he had not come back inside, and she had paused there longer than she paused anywhere else, and she had always, before she moved on, placed her hand flat on the wood of the step, the way a person places her hand on a shoulder. I did not place my hand on the wood of the step. I was not yet ready to do that. I counted the logs. I held a sprig of lavender. I walked back inside and poured the kettle.
I drank my tea at the kitchen table, in the chair where my grandmother had sat, on the side where her elbow had worn the smooth patch in the armrest. I did not open the drawer. I drank the tea and I looked out at the back of the cottage, where the lavender had been, and at the man in the gray coat, who was not there today. The rake he had been using was leaning against the back of the woodpile, in the place where tools were leaned in this house, which was against the wood that was not yet split. The rake had not been there yesterday. I had the strong impression, in the way a person has a strong impression about a thing she is choosing not to verify, that someone had, sometime in the night, set the rake where it would be found by the woman who had been taught, since she was six, to look for it.
I rinsed my cup. I put it upside down on the drainboard, the way my grandmother had put every cup, because she had believed, as she had told me once, that a cup left right-side up was a cup that had decided it was finished, and that a cup turned over was a cup that was offering itself back to the kitchen for the next person. I did not know who the next person would be. I set the cup down and turned it over and let the kitchen have it.
I had been told, by the lawyer and by the company, to begin. My grandmother had been of the same mind, but on her own terms, which were the terms of the house. I decided to do what she would have done, and what she had done every autumn morning she came home. I would walk the inside of the house first, room by room, and not touch anything I did not need to touch. Then I would drive. Then I would walk the outside of the property, in the order she had walked it, beginning at the lavender and ending at the front gate. Then I would begin. The drive came second. The drive was the test of whether the morning had given her permission.
I took the rental car out of the gravel crescent. I drove the half mile from the cottage to the harbor road. The morning was a slate morning. The slate had been wiped clean by the night's last rain, and a thin sun was sitting behind it, somewhere off to the east, throwing no shadow and giving no warmth and yet managing to make the wet bark of the roadside pines look the way wet bark looks when a person is being told, very politely, that she is being seen.
The radio was tuned to a station I did not recognize. It was a classical station, the kind that plays one long piece across an hour and does not interrupt itself for the news. The piece was a cello suite. I had not asked for a cello suite. I had not, in fact, turned on the radio at all this morning. I had started the car, and the car had offered me the cello suite as if it had been waiting, the way the cottage had been waiting. I let it play. The cello was being played by a woman. The woman's playing had the kind of patience that does not ask the listener to do anything, and so I drove without being asked to do anything, and we moved, the cello and the car and I, along the harbor road at the speed the road asked us to move.
I drove north. The harbor road runs along the inland edge of the harbor for about a mile, then turns inland itself, at a stone wall that has been there since before the Revolution, and climbs slowly up toward the cliff road and the lighthouse and the chapel and the small cluster of gray-shingled houses that has been, since my grandmother's girlhood, the summer side of Marble Cove. In the summer the houses have sails and bicycles on the porches. In October the houses have storm windows and nothing on the porches. The road climbs. The harbor falls away beneath you. You can see, from the highest point of the cliff road, the entire town laid out as if it had been set down by a careful hand and not yet been lived in: the dock, the church spire, the library with its one copper dome, the courthouse with its white pillars, the low bulk of the Pinnacle plant on the far side of the harbor, its two stacks lit at night, on the rare nights they were lit, like a pair of upright cigarettes left burning on the edge of the sea.
I had not been up the cliff road in twelve years. The last time I had been up it, my grandmother had been driving. She had driven at the speed the road asked her to drive, which was the speed of a woman who had driven the road every week of her adult life and who believed that a person who knew a road well should not pretend to be in a hurry on it. She had pointed out, as she always pointed out, the place where the wall had been rebuilt after the hurricane of 1938. She had pointed out, as she always pointed out, the heron that lived in the marsh at the foot of the cliff and that she had named, without ever telling me why, the Clerk. The heron had not been there this morning. I looked for it without admitting to myself that I was looking for it.
The cello suite ended. I reached for the dial to find another station. The dial was already moving. It was moving in a way I had not given it. It moved, with a small, clean click, from the classical station to a station I had not known existed, a station that was playing, of all things, a hymn I had not heard since I was small. The hymn was being sung by a choir that was, from the sound of it, the choir of a small Marble Cove church, probably the Congregational Church on Harbor Street, and the hymn was the one my grandmother had sung at the bedside of every person she had ever sat with at the end. She had sung it to my grandfather. She had sung it to my mother. I had not heard it sung in twenty-two years. I listened to it for as long as it lasted, which was about ninety seconds. I did not touch the dial. When the hymn was over, the dial clicked itself back, very gently, to the classical station. The cello suite had ended. A piano was being played. The piano was playing a piece I did not recognize, in a key I did not know the name of, and the morning continued.
I parked at the cliff. I sat in the car for a moment. I looked out at the harbor. The harbor was very still. A single fishing boat was coming in from the offshore grounds, and the man at the wheel was standing up to see over the bow, and the gull on the bow of the boat was standing on one leg, and the boat was moving at the speed the boat had decided to move, and the gull had not yet decided whether to take off. From somewhere far down the harbor, from the direction of the dock, came the sound of a halyard slapping against a mast in a wind that had not yet reached the cliff. The halyard went on slapping for a long time after the wind had gone on. Then the wind reached the cliff. It came in across the water in one long breath. It smelled of salt and of cold and of something older than salt. The pines at the edge of the cliff moved in the way pines move in October, which is to say they did not move.
I got out of the car. I stood for a moment at the cliff's edge, in the place where my grandmother had always stood, and I let the wind put its hand on my face. The hand was cold. The hand was the hand of someone who had been asked to come and had decided to come. I did not, in that moment, know whose hand it was. I did not, in that moment, ask. I stood and I let the hand stay where it had been put.
I drove on. The road bent away from the cliff and dropped back down toward the harbor, and at the bottom of the bend was the chapel, the small white Marble Cove chapel that has, since 1792, been the chapel of the people of the harbor and of the people who have come to the harbor to be buried. The chapel had a single bell in a single tower. The bell was not ringing. The door of the chapel was, I noticed as I passed, very slightly ajar, although the chapel was, as far as I knew, not open in October. I did not stop. I did not get out to close the door. I drove on. The door would still be there when I came back.
I parked at the dock. The dock is the heart of Marble Cove. The dock has been the heart of Marble Cove since the dock was first built, in the year the town was a town, and it will go on being the heart of Marble Cove for as long as the town is a town. The dock has a coffee shop at the near end, called The Driftwood. The Driftwood was not yet open. The Driftwood is not open in October. The Driftwood has never, in my memory, been open in October. The Driftwood opens the third Saturday of May and closes the Sunday after Columbus Day, and in the weeks in between, the Driftwood is the place where, if a person knows where to look, she can find a small tin pail of fresh coffee left on the back step by the woman who runs it, and a hand-painted sign that says Help Yourself, and a chair on the dock, and the morning.
I sat on the dock for a long time. I did not have a coffee. I did not have a chair. I sat on the gunwale of the nearest boat, an old lobster boat called, in faded green letters on its transom, the Margaret M., and I looked out at the harbor. I did not know whose boat it was. I did not know, in that moment, why the boat was called the Margaret M., although I was to learn later that it had been named, by its owner, for my grandmother, in the year of my grandfather's death. I did not yet know this. I sat and I looked out at the harbor and the harbor looked out at me and neither of us asked the other for anything.
Then I heard my name.
I heard it once. It was spoken in my grandmother's voice. It was not loud. It was spoken from somewhere behind me, on the dock, at the distance at which a person would call the name of someone she had been waiting for. I turned. The dock was empty. The dock had been empty when I had sat down. The dock was empty now. There was no one behind me. There was no one on the dock. There was no one on any of the boats. The gull that had been standing on the bow of the Margaret M. was not on the bow. The wind had not changed. The halyard was not slapping. The morning was very still.
I did not get up. I sat on the gunwale and I waited, the way a person waits when she has heard something and is not yet ready to decide what she has heard. I waited for a long time. The name was not spoken again. The harbor did not call me back. The morning continued. A cloud moved across the thin sun and then moved on, and the slate was wiped again, and the wind came back, very gently, and the boat rocked once under me, as if the boat had decided, all on its own, to be sure of me.
I drove home. I took the harbor road at the speed the road asked me to take it. The cello suite was over. The piano was being played by a man, and the man was playing a piece I did recognize, a piece my grandmother had played on the upright piano in the parlor on Sunday afternoons when the weather was too bad to walk the property. The piece was called, I had once known, but had forgotten, and then remembered, and then forgotten again, For Margaret. I did not turn off the radio. I let the piece play. When the piece was over, the dial clicked itself off, and the car was silent except for the sound of the tires on the wet road.
I parked in the gravel crescent. I turned off the engine. I sat in the car for a long time. The cottage was where I had left it. The rake was still leaning against the woodpile. The morning had given me, I thought, the permission it had given my grandmother on every October morning she had come home, and the permission had been, as her permission had always been, not a permission to begin but a permission to know that I had not yet begun and that the cottage would wait for me to begin.
I got out of the car. I walked to the back door. I had not yet decided whether I would open the drawer before I went to see the lawyer. I had decided, in the way a person decides a thing she does not yet have the words for, that the lawyer would wait for me until tomorrow. The drawer, I thought, would also wait. The cottage would wait. The morning would wait. I would walk the property, the way my grandmother had walked it, from the lavender to the front gate, and then I would come inside and put the kettle on and begin. I would begin tomorrow, in the lawyer's office, with the lawyer's polite letter in my hand and the company's less polite letter in my bag, and I would sit across from a man whose name my grandmother had underlined and I would ask him, in the only voice I had, what he had been retained to do.
I reached for the back-door handle. Behind me, at the edge of the gravel crescent, on the part of the lane where, when I had left this morning, no car had been parked, a black sedan with Massachusetts plates was now parked, engine off, driver still inside. The driver was a man. The man was sitting very still. He was looking, I thought, at the rake. I had the impression, which I did not verify, that he had been looking at the rake for some time. The morning, which had been quiet, was, I noticed, no longer quite as quiet as it had been.
I went inside.
