The Night Mark. Tiffany Reisz

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СКАЧАТЬ about the imminent destruction of the Sea Islands. Those people taking pictures of the Chapel of Ease wouldn’t have set foot inside it during a Sunday service. Maybe it was simply human nature to only love a thing after losing it. Maybe they should all lose more things so they could appreciate what they had. Faye could count her possessions now on her two hands—car, camera, laptop, suitcase of clothes and shoes, phone, her beloved grandmother’s necklace and an old ring she couldn’t wear because it was much too big for her hands. Yet she wouldn’t get rid of it. Not to her dying day.

      The shots of the cemetery turned out better than she’d anticipated. If they didn’t end up in the calendar, she could sell them to a stock-photo website. When she packed up her gear in the car, she had a missed call. The voice mail message said it was Pat Cahill calling and he was more than happy to hear someone had finally gotten suckered into buying one of his masterpieces. If she wanted to see him today, he’d be painting the marshlands on Federal Street, and she surely couldn’t miss him. He’d be the old man on the front lawn covered in paint.

      On the way to Federal Street, Faye’s phone rang again. She didn’t want to answer, not because she was driving, but because this time she knew who was calling.

      “Hello,” she said, keeping her voice even, flat, unemotional. It was easy for her to do, too easy.

      “That’s all I get? Hello?”

      “Hello there? That better?” she said.

      “You know I’m not the bad guy, remember? You can at least fake being polite to me.”

      “Hello there, Hagen. How are you?”

      “God, you are really something.”

      Faye heard his aggravated exhalation on the other end of the line.

      “What do you want?” she asked. “I’m driving and can’t really talk.”

      “I don’t want anything. I’m calling to see how you’re doing. Call it a bad habit.”

      “I’m fine. Just working. How are you?”

      “Working. Look, I found some stuff of yours in the guest room closet. Do you want it?”

      Faye should have known he wasn’t calling just out of the goodness of his heart.

      “What is it?”

      “I don’t know. Do you really want me digging through your stuff?”

      Faye sighed. Hagen had a gift for making things more difficult than they needed to be.

      “How am I supposed to tell you if I want it or not if you won’t tell me what it is?”

      “You could come here and look at it.”

      “You can look in the box.”

      “I don’t want to.”

      “Hagen, I didn’t keep pet snakes. You can look in the damn box.”

      “I think it’s Will’s stuff.”

      Faye fell silent. She saw a gas station on the right, pulled in and shut off the car. It took her ten full seconds before she could speak again.

      “It’s not Will’s stuff,” she said finally. “I have a few things, and his family has the rest.”

      “And what about, you know... Will?”

      Faye rubbed at her forehead. “I would not leave Will’s ashes in a cardboard box in a guest room closet. I scattered them in the ocean two years ago.”

      “Without me?”

      “I was in Newport visiting family. It seemed like the right time and the right place.”

      “Without me, you mean. He was my best friend,” Hagen said.

      “He was my husband.”

      “Yeah, so was I.” Hagen nearly shouted the words, and each one landed on her like a heavyweight champ’s fist. A right, a right, a left and then a brutal jab straight to the solar plexus.

      “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I had to do it alone.”

      “You were alone?”

      “Yes,” Faye said. “I mean, except for a bird. There was a big white bird there, too. Maybe he knew Will.” She laughed at herself, and fresh hot tears fell from her burning eyes.

      “You don’t sound good, Faye. Where are you?”

      She wished he wouldn’t talk to her so gently. It made it harder to stay angry, and she needed her anger. It gave her energy.

      “I don’t have to tell you that.”

      “Jesus, do you think I’m going to stalk you or something? If I was obsessed with you I could have dragged the divorce out a couple years. It could have been ugly. I didn’t, though, and I don’t remember you saying thank you for that.”

      “I’m supposed to thank you for not torturing me with a protracted divorce? Okay. Thank you, Hagen. Thank you very much.”

      The pause between her last words and his next words was so long she thought he’d hung up on her. No such luck.

      “I was never going to be Will,” Hagen said at last. “And it wasn’t fair of you to expect me to be him.”

      “I never expected you to be Will, and I didn’t want you to be Will.”

      “Because no one could be Will, right? Except Will, because Will was perfect.”

      “Will wasn’t perfect,” Faye said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “No one is perfect. Especially not a man who left dirty dishes under the bed and never cleaned a toilet in his life. But this is what Will was—Will was the man who loved me, all of me, even though I yelled at him and called him a thoughtless child when he almost burned the house down trying to cure a baseball mitt in the oven. He cleaned the oven, he bought me flowers and he told me he was sorry. So no, Will was not perfect. Will was better than perfect. He was too good for this world. The world didn’t deserve him and neither did I.”

      In the pit of the night when Faye was alone with her thoughts and her loneliness, she would tell herself that Will was too good for her. It was her only explanation for why he was taken from her. The only explanation that ever made sense.

      “Hagen, I know—I do—that you thought by marrying me you were honoring Will, doing what he would have wanted you to do, doing what he would have done in your place. I thought so, too. But it was a mistake.”

      “I kept you from killing yourself for nearly four years and you call that a mistake?”

      Faye shrugged, shook her head and remembered the night Hagen had taken the pill bottle out of her hand. By the next day every gun, knife and pill in the house had been locked in a safe.

      She didn’t have the heart to tell him half the reason she’d had that pill bottle in her hand was because she’d married him.

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