Refused

At nine o’clock that night Camille was cutting butter into one-pound blocks for the morning, because she needed something in her hands.

She had chosen the hour and the room herself. He had come up the lawn to the kitchen porch at a quarter to five that afternoon, still wearing a ridiculous orange life jacket. She had met him at the screen door and had not opened it. “Nine o’clock,” she had said. “Here. After she’s asleep.” He had looked at her through the mesh for a moment, and then he had nodded and gone away. She had not expected him to go so easily.

By then she had heard all of it from her mother. Lucille had told it standing in the cottage kitchen with her hair still blown loose, angry at herself over one minute and a knitted hat. Camille had not let her finish apologising. A child who could count to sixty and open a door had been bound to get out of it sometime.

Tilly had told it differently, at supper, over buttered noodles.

“The New York person has a wedge,” she had said. “In the same eye. His father gave it to him.”

“Some people have one,” Camille had said. “Eat your peas.”

“I said I didn’t know who gave me mine.”

“I know you did, my heart.”

Tilly had looked at her for a while with that eye and then eaten her peas, one at a time. She had asked nothing more. Camille knew her daughter well enough to know the question had only been put away for later, like a piece of glass in a coat pocket.

Now the child was asleep. Lucille was staying the night, though it was a Wednesday, and she sat in the cottage with the television turned low. The monitor on the shelf above the mixer hummed. The pastry kitchen was warm and bright and smelled of the day’s sugar. Camille wrapped each block of butter in parchment and lined them up on a tray.

The oven clock said 9:00 when the porch door opened.

He came in quietly. He had changed into a dark sweater and jeans, and he stopped just inside the door and took off his boots. He set them on the mat beside the place where Arlo’s would be in the morning. She noticed that, and she noticed that it annoyed her to have noticed.

He was carrying a cardboard tray from the coffee station in the lobby, the kind with four holes for cups. There was a paper cup in each hole. He walked to the end of her bench in his socks, stopped where the tile changed colour and put the tray down on the steel.

“She told me not to mix the colours,” he said.

Camille looked. One cup held the green glass and one held the brown. The third held the clear that had gone cloudy. In the fourth, at the bottom, lay two chips of milky china, and beside them a twist of paper napkin.

“The blue’s in the napkin,” he said. “I didn’t want it knocking against the others.”

She had prepared herself for a great many things since four o’clock. She had not prepared for a man who could tell old china from clouded glass because a five-year-old had explained it to him once. It took her a moment to find her voice.

“You can come as far as the bench,” she said.

He came. He stood across the steel from her with his hands at his sides. His face under the bright lights was grey with tiredness. He did not sit on the stool, and she was glad she did not have to tell him it was taken.

“Ask,” she said.

“Is she mine?”

“She’s your daughter. Her name is Matilda Bouchard. She was born on the twenty-seventh of March, 2022, a Sunday, at the hospital in Burlington. My mother drove me. The line for the father on her birth certificate is blank.”

She had kept her eyes on him while she said it, and she saw him take it. He had known already. She could tell he had known since the dock. Hearing it aloud was different, and he put one hand flat on the edge of the bench.

“Blank,” he said.

“The clerk asked me for a name. The only one I had was Jamie Rourke, and by then I didn’t think it was worth writing down. It turns out I was right, though I didn’t know why.”

“Camille.” He stopped. She did not correct him tonight, and he seemed to understand that it was not a kindness. “Why didn’t I know?”

“I wrote to you.”

He stared at her.

“I wrote three times. Winnie had your deposit card in a box at the front desk. It had an address on it, 14 East 74th Street, and she let me copy it down. I mailed the first letter on the thirtieth of August. That one only asked where you’d gone and whether you were all right. I mailed the second on the thirteenth of September. That one told you I was pregnant. I mailed the third on the first of November. It said the baby was due at the end of March, and that I was keeping it, and that I wasn’t asking you for anything.”

Her voice was level. She had told this to nobody but her mother and Winnie, and she had wondered whether it would shake coming out. It did not.

“They all came back here, to the inn. None of them had been opened. Somebody had printed across the front of every one, right over my handwriting. Refused. Return to sender.”

She did not say what colour the ink was, or how hard the pen had been pressed. Those were hers. She had looked at that green for five and a half years and she was not going to describe it for his benefit like a witness.

He had gone white. She had seen him sunburned and laughing, and half asleep on an iron bed. She had seen him in a suit this week, asking about flour. She had never seen his face like this.

“I never saw a letter,” he said.

“No?”

“I never saw one. I never held one. I swear that to you. If one had reached my hand I’d have been on the road that night.”

“That’s easy to say in April of 2027.”

“I know it is.”

“Someone at that address took three envelopes out of the mail over ten weeks and wrote the same thing on each of them. Once could be a mistake. A house doesn’t send back three letters by accident, Mr. Hallett. Somebody looked at my handwriting three separate times and made a decision.”

“Yes.” He said it at once. “I think that’s right. I don’t know who, and I’m going to find out.”

“That’s your business. It doesn’t alter anything in this kitchen.”

He was quiet. The compressor on the walk-in started up behind her and ran. She picked up a block of butter, found she had already wrapped it and put it down again.

“May I see them?” he asked.

“No.”

“I’m not doubting you. I only want to see what was done.”

“They’re mine. They came back to me and I’ve kept them, and nobody takes them out to look at but me. You’ll have to manage with my word. I managed for a long time with nine of yours.”

He flinched at that. She knew the nine by heart and so, she saw, did he. My father is ill. I have to go. Sorry. Under them there had been a single letter J, which had not even been his real initial.

“Then I’ll tell you my side,” he said, “and you can believe as much of it as you like. I didn’t have a phone that summer. I left it in a drawer in New York the day I walked out, so my father couldn’t ring it. I never had your number. I saw you every day, and I never needed one.”

“The inn has a telephone.”

“I was coming to that.” He took his hand off the bench and straightened, as if he meant to say the next part standing up properly. “The inn’s number is on its letterhead. It’s in the book and it’s on the website. I’ve known where to find it every day for almost six years. Nobody kept it from me. I didn’t call.”

She waited.

“I’d given you a name that wasn’t mine. I’d been up here for eleven weeks hiding from my father, sailing an eight-foot boat and telling myself it was a life. He fell on a Monday. He was dead on the Friday. After that I couldn’t think about this place without thinking about where I’d been when it happened. I was ashamed of the name and I was ashamed of the hiding. Then I was running a company I didn’t know how to run, and every week it got harder to pick up a phone and say who I really was.”

“So you asked your mother about the mail instead.”

“Once, in October of that year. I asked whether anything had come to the house for a Jamie Rourke. She said nothing had.” He shook his head. “I decided that was your answer. I decided you’d gone to Lyon and thought better of me, and that you were right to. It suited me to believe it, because it meant I didn’t have to call and hear you say so.”

“That’s a very comfortable story.”

“It was. I’m not offering it as an excuse. Whoever sent your letters back did something to both of us, and I’ll deal with that. But nobody refused a telephone call, because I never made one. That part is my fault, and nobody else had a hand in it.”

She had wanted him to say something she could despise, and he had not done it. He had put the blame on himself before she could. She did not know what to do with a man who did that. It was a good deal harder than being angry at him.

She did not let herself soften. She had a rule, and tonight it mattered more than usual.

“I don’t know whether I believe you about the letters,” she said. “You lied about your name for a whole summer and you were good at it. You ate at our table. You let Winnie put you on the payroll as Rourke. You let me say that name in the dark.”

“I did.”

“So forgive me if I don’t take the next thing you tell me on trust.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

“And I never went to Lyon. Since you were wondering on Monday. I wrote to the school in October and gave up my place. That letter got where it was going.”

He shut his eyes briefly. She had saved for that year since she was nineteen, and he knew it, because she had told him so on the dock one night with her feet in the water. He had asked her a hundred questions about it. She remembered being surprised that a sailing instructor could ask such good questions about what a year abroad would cost.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s a small thing to say against a thing that size.”

“It is small.”

“The scar on your arm—”

“That isn’t on the list.”

He stopped. He put his hands in his pockets, and she guessed it was to keep them still.

He stood very close across three feet of steel. He smelled of cold air and the lake. His sleeves were pushed up, and she could see the old pale line on his palm when his hand moved. Her body remembered him and had no sense at all about it. She took hold of the edge of the tray until that passed.

“What does she know?” he said. “About me. About her father.”

“She asked when she was three. I told her that her father lives far away and doesn’t know how to find us.”

He did not speak.

“I chose those words carefully. I wasn’t going to tell her you were dead, because I don’t lie to her about things she can check. And I wasn’t going to tell her you didn’t want her. I thought it was true, and I still wasn’t going to hand that to a three-year-old to carry around.” Her voice had roughened in spite of her, and she steadied it. “So that’s what she has. He lives far away. He doesn’t know how to find us. She’s never questioned it. She thinks it’s a problem of maps.”

“It was true,” he said, very low. “You told her the truth without knowing it.”

“I don’t know it now.”

“No.”

“She told me at supper that you have a wedge. She told me your father gave it to you. She tells people she doesn’t know who gave her hers. She isn’t sad about it. She says it the way she’d tell you she only has one blue.” Camille looked at the napkin in the fourth cup. “She’s exact, and she puts things together. I’d have liked a week to think, and I haven’t got one.”

He looked at the monitor on the shelf. He had been glancing at it since he came in. It gave out nothing but its small steady hum, which meant a child was breathing sixty yards away.

“I want to know her,” he said.

It was simply said, and there was nothing of the owner in it. If he had demanded, she could have fought him. This was harder to hear than a demand.

“You don’t get to want things yet,” Camille said.

He took that standing still.

“You found out five hours ago. I’ve had five years. I’ve had every fever and every tooth. I had the afternoon in August when Arlo carried her up that lawn with her lips blue. I did all of it believing you’d read my name on an envelope and sent it back. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you’ll find out who did. That gets you a hearing. It doesn’t get you a daughter.”

“What does?”

“I don’t know yet. When I know, I’ll tell you. Until then you stay on your side of the lawn.”

“All right.”

“And you’ll go on deciding about this inn as if you’d never seen her. If I find you’ve kept nineteen people in work as a present to me, I’ll despise you. If I find you’ve sold them to get clear of us, I’ll do worse.”

“The inn gets a fair decision. I told Winnie that before I knew anything.”

“Then that’s everything for tonight.”

She covered the tray of butter and carried it into the walk-in. When she came out he had not moved. She took the cardboard tray of cups off the bench. It weighed almost nothing, and she held it level so the colours would not jump.

“Thank you for bringing these,” she said, because she had been brought up properly. “She’ll count them.”

“They’re all there. Forty-three and the blue.”

So he had counted them himself. She did not answer.

She went to the panel by the door and pushed the switches down, one after another. The lights over the ovens went out, and then the lights over the bench, and then the last pair by the sinks. The kitchen went dark except for the green numbers on the oven clock and the small red eye of the monitor.

“I start at five,” she said into the dark. “Pull the door shut behind you. It sticks.”

She took the monitor off its shelf and went out across the porch. The flagstones were cold through her clogs and the sky had cleared completely. There were more stars than she had seen since the autumn. She walked the sixty yards without hurrying, with the cups held in front of her.

At the cottage step she turned and looked back, though she had told herself she would not.

The kitchen window was black, and the porch door had not opened. He was still standing in there in his socks where she had left him. She found she did not want to know how long he would stay.
***