What We Carry Home

Claire Bennett drove into town with the radio off because she did not trust music to keep her from thinking. The road into Marlow’s Crossing narrowed after the highway and clung to the shoreline, the pavement ragged where winter and salt had taken bites out of it. A gull rode the air above the harbor like a ragged flag while the docks lay low and patient, lines coiled and waiting. The town had not changed so much as settled into its age: the same low buildings, the same church tower that looked smaller against sky she had left behind, the same neon letters jutting from windows, dull in daylight. Her car passed the old feed store, Mrs. Alvarez sweeping the stoop. A dog watched her go with a single bleary eye.

She had not been back willingly in ten years. There was habit and a hundred reasons—work that went where stories paid, a city that kept breathing even when she could not—but none of those reasons looked like the soft urgency that had made her book the earliest flight and drive back. Thomas Bennett had collapsed at the boatyard. No one had known whether to call the hospital or call a funeral parlor the first winter he did not answer a call. He had never been the kind of man to fall half awake at his bench and not come up again. He had been the kind of man who could smell a loose board and fix it before the tide remembered how to bite.

The house on Harbor Lane had the same sag and leaning welcome as it had in childhood: a porch with a stubborn swing, a screen door that slapped in a wind like a small hand closing. June had texted a single line the night before—We’re keeping his things in the workshop—and nothing in that sentence told Claire how to move through the hotel of her guilty memory. When she stopped the car and shut the engine off, the harbor sounded louder than it had from the road: the low thud of the ferry bell, a radio playing something older than she felt.

June was waiting on the porch with her hands tucked into the pockets of a flour-dusted apron, a line between her brows like a permanent crease. She had stayed. That knowledge had been a quiet bar in Claire’s chest for years: not a betrayal exactly, but a timetable of who kept what. June’s hair was pulled up tight, her face more like their mother’s in the light. She did not move to hug Claire. Instead she said, I didn’t know if you would come, which meant—if you were asking—things that had more than one answer.

They let the kettle talk until both hands cooled, until June made tea she hardly drank and told Claire, more a statement than a question, He’s in the back room. He’s sleeping a lot. He calls things by other names. The house smelled of lemon and sawdust, a smell that was all their father and all his work. The notion that anyone could simply stop was like learning a language without vowels: you could guess the sentence, but not the edge of it.

Thomas Bennett looked smaller than Claire remembered when she stepped into the room where he lay propped against pillows. The skin at his temples was thin as paper. He had the stubbornness of someone who’d been carpenter and parent and town voice for the better part of sixty-seven years, and now he was a person who mislaid words. He blinked at her with an irritability she understood—like when a drill refuses to bite because the bit is wrong.

You came back, he said, as if in answering he had solved a puzzle neither of them wanted to hold. His voice had the rasp of someone who had spent a lifetime talking over the wind. Claire wanted to say she had always meant to but had been busy with other lives, with other rooms full of strangers that called her by her first name. Instead she sat down and let the room keep breathing around them, the two of them like separate halves of a habit.