She lay down a lot—it became an activity, a way to pass the time. She lay down on the couch, reading. She lay down on the bed and, while the sky changed out the windows, was overcome by memories. She lay down on the dock and listened to the ever-changing motion of the water. She fell asleep once on the dock, no sunblock on at all, and woke with a painful sunburn, the first one she’d had in decades. (A week or so later, back in her real life, it had turned into a tan. “It’s good you went away,” Frieda said when she saw Annie. “You look great. You look rested.” Annie didn’t disabuse her, didn’t speak of her long sleepless nights, or nights when she did sleep but had dreams so urgent that she woke already tired.)

She ate only what was for sale at the farm stand in this early season, and scrambled or fried eggs and toast—it seemed like too much work to cook meat or fish, even to make a salad. At night she listened to the radio and drank wine. Half a bottle made it possible to sleep, though she woke then, at two or three, and lay awake, listening to the occasional night sounds. She’d fall back asleep after a while and dream vividly, then wake again with the room full of light, often the nearly iridescent pearly light of sun through the thick white fog that hung heavily on the lake.

She made herself take a daily walk. Once she walked partway around the lake on the path in the woods. Through the treillage of the trees she had glimpses of the expensive summer homes, some of them silent, apparently not yet opened. But at others, she could hear the shrieks of children playing. The next day, toward the end of the afternoon, it was adult voices that floated over to her from an elegant old house, the clink of ice in glasses, the laughter of the cocktail hour. It was hard to come back to the cottage after that, hard to feel her solitude.

On the fourth day she was there, she made a reluctant trip to the little town store—she needed toothpaste and she wanted a newspaper. She thought she might also get some tuna fish and mayonnaise, just to vary her menu.

John Lawrence was there at the back of the store in what she and Graham had spoken of as his “uniform”—jeans and a plaid shirt. She saw that he was lifting boxes from a shopping cart, putting them on the shelves. He called out a greeting. Then, when Annie began to set her things on the counter, he came to the front of the store to ring her up.

“Annie,” he said in greeting, nodding once on the word. He stepped behind the counter and began to slide the groceries past himself on its worn wooden surface with his right hand, while his left hand danced on the register, putting numbers in. “I was sorry to hear about Graham,” he said. “He was a fine man.”

“Thank you,” Annie said.

How gracious, she was thinking. That was the way to do it. Simple. Plainspoken. It seemed to her at that moment, remembering the complexity of the sympathy of some of her Cambridge friends, remembering what had felt like the insufficiently grateful or articulate responses she had tried to speak or to write back to them, that there was something vainglorious about their articulate commiseration. Don’t tell me what Shakespeare said about death, or Auden, or Tillich, or Annie Lamott, she thought now—she’d had all of these offered to her. Don’t make me have to find a way to rise to any of that. Just say what John said, let me just say thank you, and then move on.

She remembered Felicity Rogers’s question to Sarah: “Don’t you think it’s better that he died before your mother?”

And Peter Aiello standing in the front hall later that day, holding her hands between his. “It’s like a huge tree has fallen, a tree that was shading us all, and now we’re just all blinking away in the sunlight,” he had said.

Annie was struck dumb, this was so elaborately unlike what she felt.

“Don’t you think?” he’d persisted. What had she answered? She couldn’t remember.

Now, coming out into the sunlight with her bag of groceries on her hip—yes, she thought, blinking in the sunlight, but here, now, only because of the contrast with the dimness of the country store—she stopped for a moment to look at the bulletin board.

Unedited for at least several weeks, she noted. Obsolete events: a multifamily yard sale that had happened on May 31. A dinner for seniors in the town hall a week before. But new things too: there was an open meeting of the town selectmen coming up on July 1, a meeting to downgrade the classification of some of the town roads to “unmaintained”—nothing near her, she noted. There was a reading in the middle of August at the town library, a reading by a writer whose work Annie knew and liked. Maybe she’d go, if she were up here.

Would she be up here? She didn’t know. She had a sense abruptly of how open, how shapeless, her life was. How empty and without rules. She felt, for a moment, the physical sensation of loss, a wave of it. After a few seconds she shifted the grocery bag to her other hip and made herself focus on the bulletin board again, made herself try to concentrate on the words in the notices.

A lost dog. No date. Somebody with old windows you could take away for free. She remembered then that at some point Graham had spoken of exactly that—acquiring old windows—the idea being that he would build a cold frame off the side of the cottage when he got enough of them, something Annie had been sure would never happen. Graham was full of such projects, begun and then abandoned. The vegetable garden. The studio he was going to make for Annie in the shed. More bookshelves for their bedroom. The bookstore was the only context in which he always finished what he’d started.

There was the announcement of a music program at Lake Scarborough, a program that offered master classes with the members of the quartet in residence. Which quartet would also perform at a public concert—Schumann, Beethoven.

She might go, Annie thought. She would need to start doing things at some point. Learning to do things, alone. She looked more closely for the date and saw that it had already passed. Ah. She’d missed it. She looked at the announcement again. The Wadsworth quartet, they were called. The cellist for this quartet, she saw now, was named Sofie Kahn.

She stepped closer to the bulletin board to look at the photo. It was hard to tell, but it looked like the Sofie Kahn she remembered. And how many professional cellists with that name could there be, after all? She felt oddly breathless. She turned away to go to her car. Where she sat for some minutes before she started the engine, trying to order the chaos of her thoughts.

The last time Annie had seen Sofie Kahn’s name was perhaps thirty-five years earlier in a New York Times review, an almost entirely positive review of Sofie’s debut performance at Carnegie Hall. Annie had been young and ambitious for herself at that time, and she had felt a pinch of envy reading the piece: Sofie had made it then, into the world of public achievement, in a way that Annie wasn’t sure was ever going to happen for her. But she’d been pleased for her old friend too, pleased that the hard work of music, begun so early in her life, had brought its reward.

Sofie Kahn. She hadn’t thought of her in all these years. Their childhood, their girlhood, together.

Which girlhood Annie was calling up in the car all the way back to the cottage, and later, while she unpacked the groceries, and still later than that, while she made her supper in the shadowed kitchen, while she ate it alone on the front porch.

When she lay down to sleep in the cottage that night, it occurred to Annie that this long afternoon of calling up her youth with Sofie Kahn was the first time since Graham had died that she’d managed to sustain thinking about anyone or anything else for longer than a few minutes. After a moment’s almost childish sense of accomplishment, she felt a sudden sweep of grief so strong that she began panting and had to sit up in the dark room to catch her breath.

16

In the late 1940s and ’50s, Annie and Sofie Kahn had been in the same grammar-school class in a public school in Hyde Park, on the south side of Chicago. Sofie was small, like Annie—the other girls and most of the boys in their class towered over both of them—and maybe as much as anything else, this was what drew them together. But they also both had fathers who worked at the University of Chicago, another bond that made them different from many of the other kids.

They lived in different areas of Hyde Park though, neighborhoods separated by the tracks the Illinois Central Electric trains ran on. In order to see each other after school, one or the other of them had what seemed at the time a long walk. But in that other world, where children at nine or ten or eleven could move around unaccompanied, this wasn’t a difficulty.

By Sofie’s preference, as Annie remembered it, they went to her apartment more often than to Annie’s house. That was fine with Annie. She liked the sense of peace at the Kahns’. It felt welcoming to her.