Chapter 6: Everything
We talked until four in the morning.
Marco brought us coffee at one point, set it down without a word, and went back inside.
The harbor below went completely still.
The last lights on the water went out one by one.
David told me about his wife, Helen.
Thirty-one years.
A schoolteacher.
She had loved crossword puzzles and terrible puns and the particular smell of old bookshops.
She had d*ed of cancer six years ago, quickly, the way some people do — there one month and gone the next, before anyone had properly prepared.
"I wasn't ready," he said.
"I don't think you can be.
But I was especially not ready."
"Neither was I," I said.
"Thomas had a heart attack.
A Tuesday morning.
He was making toast."
David looked at me.
"He was fine," I said.
"And then he wasn't.
The paramedics said it was very fast.
I've always tried to be grateful for that."
"Does it help?
Being grateful?"
"Some days." I wrapped both hands around my coffee cup.
"Other days it just feels like something I'm supposed to say."
He nodded.
He understood that.
I told him about the four years since Thomas.
About the way the house had felt too large and too quiet.
About my daughter, Meg, who called every Sunday and worried too much and meant well in every possible way.
About the friends who had slowly stopped knowing what to say to me, not out of cruelty but out of the simple awkwardness of being happy when someone near you is not.
"You get smaller," I said.
"That's the only way I can describe it.
Your world gets smaller and smaller and you tell yourself it's manageable and you stop noticing how much you've given up."
"Until someone asks you the right question."
"Until Meg asked me the right question, yes."
He smiled.
"She sounds like Catherine."
"I think they would get along terrifyingly well."
We talked about Malta.
About why he had come back here after Helen, why the island had felt like the right place to be alone.
About the particular quality of the light in the late afternoon, the way the old stone caught it and held it, warm and amber, like the place was storing heat against the coming dark.
"I came for a week," he said.
"That was eight years ago.
I've come back every year since."
"And Ruth."
"And Ruth." He was quiet for a moment.
"She found me at a low point.
I had been telling myself for two years that I was fine.
She saw through that in about forty minutes." He paused.
"She was a nurse.
Retired.
Very direct."
"What was she like?"
He thought about it carefully.
"She laughed at the wrong moments.
She had no patience for self-pity, including her own.
She sent me letters written on the backs of old envelopes because she said buying proper stationery was an admission that you had too much time on your hands." He stopped.
"She was wonderful."
"I'm glad you had her," I said.
He looked at me.
"That's a generous thing to say."
"It's a true thing to say."
The sky to the east had begun to change.
Not light yet — just a faint shift in the quality of the dark, a loosening.
"Eleanor," he said.
"What happens after nine o'clock?"
I had been thinking about that for hours.
"I go home," I said.
"To my house in Shropshire.
To my garden and my Sunday calls with Meg and my life as it currently is."
"And?"
"And I don't know yet." I looked at him.
"That's the honest answer.
I came to Malta to say yes to things.
I didn't come to make permanent decisions at four in the morning."
"That's fair."
"But I also know," I said carefully, "that I am not the same person who landed here six days ago.
And I don't think I want to be."
He was quiet.
"I'm not asking you for anything," I said — echoing his letter back to him, and watching him recognize it.
"I'm only asking you to know that this week was not nothing to me."
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he reached across the wall and placed his hand over mine.
We sat like that while the sky continued to change.
At half past five, he walked me back to my hotel.
At the door, he stopped.
"Can I write to you?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"On proper stationery?"
I almost laughed.
"On whatever you like."
He nodded.
He looked like a man who had put something down that he had been carrying for a long time.
"Safe flight, Eleanor."
"Thank you, David." I paused.
"For all of it.
Even the confusing parts."
I went upstairs.
I packed my bag.
I sat by the window and watched the light come up over Valletta — the old stone going from grey to gold, the harbor filling slowly with color.
At eight o'clock, my phone buzzed.
A message from an unknown number.
*I forgot to mention — I have a very good friend in Ludlow.
About twelve miles from Shrewsbury, I believe.
I've been meaning to visit him for years.*
*— D*
I read it twice.
May you like
Then I picked up my bag, walked out of the hotel, and got into the taxi to the airport.
I was smiling the whole way there.
