It’s only a matter of time before I run out of money, a week or two at most before my thirty-nine-dollars-a-night room at the Bay View Motel taps the last of my savings and I’ll have no choice but to stop the car. But for now, I keep driving. I had not intended to wait like this when I came. My first day back I drove straight from the Seattle airport to Greenbank. But when I pulled up to the house and saw Madeline’s bicycle on the porch and the old metal swing set in the front yard, something caught in my chest, and I knew I wasn’t ready yet.
I’m gone to them, I tell myself each morning when I drive by. What does another day matter? Another week?
In the afternoons I go to the beach at Deception Pass and watch the seagulls riding the air currents beneath the high trestle bridge. Sometimes I think about Brian, about his mouth against mine when he kissed me that first time in Marrakech. It seems right to me that we should each have found an island, that he is somewhere on a beach as well, with the soft green hills of Tortola in the distance. That night at Ivan’s when I told him about the meeting with Stringer, he listened without saying what I knew we both were thinking, that nothing was over, that Robert Stringer was only a tiny part of something larger.
Dr. Delpay told me once that memory resides mainly in our sense of smell. I didn’t understand him at the time, but I’m beginning to. There is something about the air here, the all-pervasive smell of the sea, the sweetness of wet cedar, the rich must of rain-soaked underbrush, that is so perfectly familiar. I know now that I will never remember everything, but I’m beginning to glimpse my past.
The last few days, I’ve grown bold enough to sit in the park across from Madeline’s school and watch her with the other children at recess. Last night I walked into the woods behind my grandparents’ house and spied while the two of them made dinner and Madeline sat on a stool at the counter, her feet dangling off the ground. It was just like watching myself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As ever, my heartfelt gratitude to the innumerable people at Henry Holt, SobelWeber, and Orion responsible for turning my ugly duckling manuscript into a beautiful book. Thanks to Nat Sobel, Judith Weber, Jack Macrae, and Jane Wood for their tireless readings and rereadings. A special thank-you to the incredible Vicki Haire for her superhuman copyediting skills. Thanks also to my family and friends, especially my husband, Keith, and my adoring cat, Frank.
Jenny Siler
Jenny Siler grew up in Missoula, Montana. For much of her life, she has travelled and worked her way around the world, starting as a prep-cook in the scullery of a men's soup kitchen, through working in a fish cannery in Alaska pulling salmon roe, to being a nude sketch model at an art museum in Frankfurt. Her work, she says, has defined her and her writing.
