she’d taken the stand hung inside the large wooden armoire. My father took it out, opened one of the boxes, and placed it inside. Then he turned and looked at me, his face suddenly very grave. “Someone should know the truth, Henry,” he said. “If I died suddenly, no one would.”
I said nothing, but only stood before him, a grim apprehensiveness settling upon me.
“The truth about Miss Channing,” he added. “About what really happened.”
I felt my heart stop. “On Black Pond?” I asked, trying to keep the dread out of my voice.
He shook his head. “No. Before that. In the lighthouse.” He lowered himself onto the bed, paused a moment, then looked up. “You remember when I came here the day of the … accident?”
I nodded.
“And Miss Channing and I went into the cottage alone to have a private talk?”
“Yes,” I said, remembering how he’d stood by the mantel, Miss Channing in a chair, her eyes lifted toward him.
“That’s when she told me, Henry,” my father said. “The truth.”
Then he told me what she’d said.
She had not wanted to go to the lighthouse that afternoon, Miss Channing told my father, had not wanted to meet Mr. Reed, be alone with him again. For it seemed to her that each time they were together, something unraveled inside of him. Still, he’d asked her to meet him one last time, asked her in letter after letter during that last month, until she’d finally agreed to do it.
He was standing against the far wall of the lighthouse when she entered it, his back pressed into its softly rounded curve, the old brown jacket draped over his shoulders, his black hair tossed and unruly.
“Elizabeth,” he whispered. “I’ve missed you.”
She closed the metal door behind her but did not move toward him. “I’ve missed you too, Leland,” she said, though careful to keep a distance in her voice.
He smiled delicately, in that way she’d noticed the first time she’d seen him, a frail, uneasy smile. “It feels strange to be alone with you again.”
She remembered the few times they’d been alone in the way he meant, with his arms around her, his breath on her neck, the warmth of his skin next to hers.
“You haven’t forgotten, have you?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No,” she admitted.
He drew himself from the wall, staring at her silently. The chamber’s single light glowed faintly from behind a cage of wire mesh, throwing a gray crosshatch of shadows over his face. “How has it been for you, Elizabeth? Being away from me?”
She looked at him sadly, mournfully, knowing that she would never allow herself to be taken into his arms again. “We have to go on, Leland,” she said.
“Go on to what?” he asked. “To nothing?” He seemed on the verge of sweeping toward her.
“I can’t stay long,” she told him quickly, then glanced out the small square window of the door, the playing field beyond it, the boys of Chatham School scurrying about in a game of touch football.
“Is it so hard to be with me now?” he asked, an edginess in his voice.
She shook her head wearily, now regretting that she’d come at all. “Leland, there’s no point in this. The only answer is for me to leave.”
“And what will I do then, Elizabeth?”
“What you did before.”
His eyes darkened, as if she had insulted him. “No. Never. I can never go back to the life I used to live.” He began to pace back and forth, his cane tapping sharply on the cement floor. “I can never do that, Elizabeth.” He stopped, his eyes now glaring at her. “Do you want to just throw me away? Is that what you want?”
She felt a sudden surge of anger toward herself, the fact that she had ever let him love her as he did, or loved him in return, ever pretended that they lived in a world where no one else lived, where no other hearts could be broken.
“We can go away, Elizabeth,” he said. “We can do what I always planned for us to do.”
The very suggestion returned her to her own childhood, to a father with grand notions of freedom he never followed out of love for her, how bereft she would have felt, how worthless and unloved, had he been taken from her by any force less irresistible than death. “You know I won’t do that,” she said. “Or let you do it.”
He stepped toward her, opening his arms. “Elizabeth, please.”
She lifted her hand, warning him away. “I have to go, Leland.”
“No, don’t. Not yet.”
She looked at him imploringly. “Leland, please. Let me leave, still loving you.”
He stepped forward again, closing the space between them, staring at her needfully, but now with a terrible cruelty in his eyes. “Sometimes I wish I’d never met you,” he told her. “Sometimes I wish that you were dead.”
She shook her head. “Stop it.”
He closed in upon her, his hands reaching for her shoulders.
She turned and grabbed the handle of the door, but he suddenly swept up behind her and jerked her around to face him, his hands grasping at her waist.
