A Splendid Gift Read Online Free Page B

doesn’t call her, and the wait is eternal. She tries, without success, to reassure herself by considering all of his other commitments—his efforts with Washington and his publishing deadlines, not to mention the stress from his turbulent wife. All of these are valid reasons for his silence. But every hour passes more slowly than the next. She stares at the phone, and eats ice cream straight from the freezer to placate her nerves. She tries to hide her distress from Stephen, but when it becomes too hard, she asks her parents to take the boy to the beach so she can continue to remain at home, still hopeful that the pilot might call.
    The summer air is so thick and stifling that, despite the fans running in the apartment, she feels she is suffocating waiting for him. When Stephen returns home, she goes to the fire escape to shake out his swim trunks. The smell of the sea clings to the cloth as briny as seaweed, and the sound of the sand falling out over the ironwork reminds her of rainfall and soothes her.
    The next day she sends her son for yet another overnight stay with her parents. Stephen hardly looks at her as he’s leaving. When he departs, she swears to herself that it’s the last time she’ll put her life on hold for the pilot. But that afternoon, she hears a sudden rapping on her door. His knock is impatient. Exuberant. When she opens the door, he is standing there with an armful of roses and a bottle of wine, and smiles. He pulls her into his arms, and all the harsh words she had planned to say to him—after she had sworn to herself she could no longer endure his absences—vanish immediately from her mind.
    When he again leaves her later that afternoon, she finds he has scattered poetry for her around the apartment. “
My heart is healed in your arms
,” he scribbles on paper torn from a Chinese menu. Taped to the mirror, she finds another scrap of paper, this one containing a single line in English:
“You are my eternal embrace
.
”
She tucks them within the pages of her copy of
Wind, Sand and Stars
so that his words are all nested together, and smiles to herself.
    All those days she just spent waiting for him have slipped away from her mind. She takes the flowers he brought her to her nightstand and savors their intense fragrance. She slips into her nightdress and calmly finishes the last bits of her cigarette. The memory of him fills the room, and for the first time in nearly a week, she no longer lies awake yearning for the phone to ring or a knock at the door. Instead, she can now sleep.
    ***
    Early that evening, he returned to find the house in Eaton’s Neck empty. He walked past the open French doors of his study and headed toward the dining room where the housekeeper had stacked the mail. In a neat pile were several bills, a letter from his American publisher, and a note from a local girl, Adèle Breaux, inquiring whether he was in need of English lessons. He left them on the table and went over to the bar to pour himself a glass of gin. The air was hot. From the bay window, he noticed the water in the harbor was perfectly still. He took a few sips of his drink before refilling the glass, and then walked outside to the porch and sat down on one of the deck chairs.
    As he looked toward Duck Island, the memory of Silvia standing in her living room stoic but breaking, haunted him.
    He gazed at the large linden tree, then focused back to the copper beech near the water’s edge. He imagined Silvia sitting beside him there, the sunlight on her face and a glass cupped in her hands.
    But even though Consuelo thought nothing of disrespecting their household with her many lovers, he couldn’t bring Silvia and Stephen to Eaton’s Neck, despite how much he would have loved to see the boy play on the lawn or to have her sleeping beside him at night. He knew Silvia would have delighted in the grandeur of the grounds and its rooms with their arched doorways, mantels carved in white marble, and high windows