Delia made it into the sea as far as her knees before deciding that enthusiasm was a poor substitute for a different climate.
The next wave struck higher. She sucked in a breath, folded her arms over her chest, and retreated two steps. A woman farther out was swimming steadily parallel to the shore, apparently in possession of different nerves.
“Morning,” the woman called when she reached shallower water.
“Is it always this cold?”
“Mostly.”
Delia waited for an encouraging qualification. None came.
She took another cautious step forward, let the water reach the hem of her swimsuit, and stood there until the shock became something she could name rather than simply endure. Her feet pressed into sand that shifted beneath them. The sea tugged, withdrew, returned.
She had learned to swim in an indoor pool with painted lanes and a clock over the changing-room door. This water had no helpful markings. She stayed close enough to the beach to see each shell below her feet and lowered herself briefly to her shoulders.
It was enough.
On the sand she wrapped herself in the towel she had carried from the cottage. Her phone vibrated inside her shoe.
Her mother.
“Hello.”
“You sound out of breath.”
“I went in the sea.”
“By yourself?”
“There are other people here.”
“Do they know you’re there?”
Delia looked toward the swimmer, who was pulling on a large coat.
“I haven’t introduced myself formally.”
“Don’t be clever. Cold water can be dangerous.”
“I only went a little way in.”
Odette was quiet for a moment. Delia could picture her in her kitchen, one hand on her hip, the phone held away from her ear whenever the connection crackled. After thirty years driving buses, her mother treated most difficulties as problems that could be avoided by leaving earlier and paying attention.
“How is the place?”
“Nice. Small. I can see the beach from the window.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Breakfast.”
“Delia.”
“Toast. A banana. I bought groceries on the way.”
Her mother sighed. “You could come home, you know.”
Delia pressed her cold toes into the towel.
“I arrived yesterday.”
“I know when you arrived. I’m saying you don’t have to sit there proving something.”
“I’m not proving anything.”
“You sound miserable.”
“I’m cold.”
“That too.”
A gull landed near the swimmer’s bag. The woman chased it away with one bare foot. Delia watched the gull retreat with offended dignity.
“I want to stay,” she said.
“Then stay. I just don’t want you thinking you have to because you’ve spent the money.”
That was gentler, and harder to resist.
Delia shifted the phone to her other ear. “I don’t know if I’ll enjoy it. But I’d like to give it longer than a night.”
“All right.”
The words came reluctantly. Her mother had not learned to like Russell’s decision merely because it was final. She had called him twice on Thursday before Delia asked her to stop. He had answered neither time, which had given Odette a second grievance.
“I’m going to a film tonight,” Delia added.
“Something cheerful?”
“Probably not.”
“Of course not.”
Her mother asked about the car, the drive, whether the cottage door had a decent lock. Delia answered all three. By the time they said goodbye, the swimmer had gone and her toes had begun to ache.
She put on her shoes and climbed the path slowly, pausing to let a child and a dog pass in the other direction. The child carried a bucket with one handle broken. The dog carried nothing and looked considerably happier.
At the cottage she took a hot shower, ate another piece of toast, and discovered that the day ahead could be divided into smaller pieces. A walk to the shops. Lunch. A book for half an hour. She did not need to decide how to feel about all ten nights at once.
In the afternoon she went into town and bought a cheap notebook. The cover was orange, a color she usually avoided. She wrote a short list on the first page: bread, fruit, batteries for the small reading light. Beneath it she wrote the film title and underlined seven o’clock.
At six thirty she reached The Lantern. The foyer was empty except for Soren, who was stacking clean cups beside a small coffee machine. He wore a faded green shirt and had a pencil tucked behind his ear.
“The ticket machine and I have reached an agreement,” he said when he saw her.
“Who apologized?”
“I bought a new roll. It accepted the offering.”
She paid, and the machine produced a ticket without complaint.
“Coffee?” he asked. “There’s time before we open the auditorium.”
“Please.”
He pointed toward the little table beneath the old photograph. There were two chairs. Delia sat in the one facing the door, placing her notebook beside her purse.
Soren brought her coffee and returned to the counter. She had assumed he might sit, and was embarrassed by the assumption. He was working. She watched him count a small stack of coins into the till.
“Are you here for long?” he asked.
“Until the sixteenth.”
“Good time of year. Quiet before everyone decides they need the sea.”
“I thought everyone always needed the sea.”
“Apparently not in November.”
He came over to collect a cloth from the windowsill. “Holiday?”
She could have said yes. It would have been accurate enough.
Instead she heard herself say, “It was supposed to be my honeymoon.”
He stopped with the cloth in his hand.
The room seemed to become very small.
“Oh.”
“The wedding was called off.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
He looked down at the cloth, then back at her. “I don’t have anything useful to say to that.”
“That’s all right.”
“I almost said at least the weather’s good. Which would have been a terrible contribution.”
She laughed, though it hurt a little.
“Yes. It would.”
He pulled out the other chair but did not sit.
“Would you rather have some peace?”
She looked at the empty chair, at his hand resting on its back.
“No. You can sit.”
He did, leaving the cloth on the table between them like an unfortunate centerpiece.
“What do you do when you’re not here?” he asked.
“Work at a museum. Education programs.”
“Children?”
“Mostly. Some family sessions. I’d like more things for adults.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things that don’t start with someone talking at them for forty minutes.”
He glanced at the auditorium doors. “There goes my business model.”
“Your audience gets monsters.”
“That does help.”
She told him about an older visitor who had attended a family workshop without a child because he wanted to learn how people made ink. He had apologized three times for taking up space, then stayed longer than anyone else. She had wanted to tell him there should have been a session he didn’t need to apologize for attending.
Soren listened, turning the cloth over once between his fingers.
“Did you make the ink?”
“Yes.”
“Did it work?”
“On the table. On his sleeve. On the paper, eventually.”
He smiled. “Sounds like a successful afternoon.”
“It was.”
The door opened. Two women came in shaking rain from their coats, although the sidewalk had been dry when Delia arrived. Soren rose to serve them.
She finished her coffee and carried the cup back to the counter herself. He thanked her while searching for change. Their conversation ended there, unfinished in a way she found unexpectedly pleasant.
The film was quieter than the previous night’s. Nobody screamed except once, during an argument about a cracked bowl. The family in the inherited house took turns wanting to sell it, save it, escape it. Delia disliked one sister, then understood her, then disliked her again. Near the end, the youngest brother drove away without telling anyone where he was going.
Before he left, there had been a scene in the kitchen that Delia could not stop thinking about. The oldest sister washed a cup while the others argued in the next room. She washed it for so long that the sound of the water became uncomfortable. Then she turned off the tap, dried her hands, and went in to tell them she was hungry.
Nothing dramatic followed. Someone ordered food. They ate from paper cartons at a table covered with documents. The youngest brother gave his sister the last piece of something she liked without looking at her.
Delia had felt her throat tighten at that. She kept her eyes on the screen and waited for it to pass.
The woman beside her shifted, reaching into a bag. For an absurd second Delia thought she had noticed and was offering a tissue. Instead she took out a peppermint, unwrapped it with tiny, painstaking movements, and put it in her mouth.
Delia was relieved. She was also, shamefully, disappointed.
She missed being known well enough for someone to notice before she spoke. Russell had sometimes known her that way. She could remember an evening when he had taken one look at her after work and ordered the food she wanted, not the food she insisted was easiest. Remembering it didn’t fit neatly with the man who had stood at her door on Friday. She sat with both versions while the brother on the screen carried a bag down the stairs.
The film offered no music to tell her what to feel about him. He looked into the kitchen, saw the cup drying beside the sink, and left without taking it.
Someone near the front coughed. A seat creaked. Delia became aware of the edge of the armrest beneath her thumb, the warmth of the room, the fact that she had finished her water without noticing.
The brother put his bag in the car. For several seconds he sat behind the wheel. Delia expected him to go back inside and say something, even something inadequate. She wanted the sister to hear him leave rather than discover it later.
He started the engine.
“Oh, come on,” Delia whispered.
The peppermint woman turned her head. Delia sank lower in her seat.
The final shot stayed on the empty house.
The lights came up.
Delia sat still, irritated.
Outside the auditorium, Soren was leaning against the counter while a man explained why the film had been too slow. Soren listened with the practiced patience of someone who had heard variations of the complaint before.
When the man left, Delia put both hands on the counter.
“You said the ending was good.”
“I said I thought so.”
“He just leaves.”
“Yes.”
“We don’t know where.”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
Soren folded his arms. “He finally gets out of the house.”
“But he could drive around the block and come back.”
“He could.”
“Then I’ve watched two hours for a man to go around the block.”
His mouth moved before he managed to keep it straight. “I don’t think that’s the intended interpretation.”
She knew she was being unreasonable. Part of her enjoyed it. Nobody here needed her to be gracious about the last week of her life. She could be a woman annoyed by a film.
“I wanted to know what he did next.”
“I liked having room to imagine it.”
“You run a cinema. You should want them to finish the job.”
“They finished that job. You want another film.”
She looked at him, then laughed reluctantly.
“All right. Maybe I do.”
He pushed away from the counter and gathered the abandoned schedules into a neat pile. His hands moved quickly, without much care for whether the edges lined up.
“There’s a walking group tomorrow,” he said. “Along the coast path. Public thing. A few locals, a few visitors. I’m going if the weather holds.”
“Is that your way of changing the subject?”
“Yes. You’re dangerous near an unresolved ending.”
“How long is the walk?”
“Couple of hours. They turn back if the rain gets bad. Starts at ten by the beach steps.”
She looked toward the glass doors. Outside, the rain had stopped. The streetlights made pale circles on the wet sidewalk.
She could picture herself arriving at a group of strangers, uncertain where to stand, pretending to examine the view. At work she put people at ease for a living. She had forgotten how much effort it took to be the person waiting for someone else to do it.
“I don’t have proper hiking boots.”
“Walking shoes are fine. It’s a path, not an expedition.”
“I might slow everyone down.”
“There are usually people who stop to identify every bird.”
“Can you identify birds?”
“Gulls. With confidence.”
She looked down at her shoes. They still held a little sand from the morning. There was a damp mark at the edge of one sock where the sea had got in.
Soren began to say something else, then stopped. He was waiting for an answer, not building a case.
“All right,” she said.
“Ten?”
“Ten.”
He wrote his number on the corner of her cinema schedule. “In case you get lost finding us,” he said, then reached for the empty cup someone had left behind her.
On the walk back, Delia called her mother. Odette answered immediately.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes. I hated the ending.”
“Of the film?”
“What else?”
“I don’t know. You ring at this hour, I worry.”
“It’s nine fifteen.”
“I can worry at nine fifteen.”
Delia smiled into the dark. She told her about the house and the brother, the bowl everyone kept fighting over. Her mother listened and said she would have sold the place in the first ten minutes.
“That would have made a very short film.”
“And saved you an evening.”
At the cottage, Delia put her walking shoes by the door where she would see them in the morning. She opened the orange notebook, found the page with the shopping list, and added ten o’clock beneath the film title.
Then, because she had agreed before thinking to ask, she wrote one more thing.
Check the weather.