Tidal Flats. Cynthia Newberry Martin
37
Listen to the story told by the reed, of being separated.
“Since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound.
Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say.
Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.
—Rumi
The darkness that night contained three things: a wife in Atlanta, a husband in Afghanistan, and an agreement that was to hold them together forever. In Atlanta, after Cass turned off her lamp, she paused. The darkness was always there, always waiting for the light to go out. When the hand of the alarm clock she and Ethan had bought together ticked to the next second, she lay down and pulled the thin spring covers over her shoulders all the way up to her neck. Underneath the darkness was where she slept; it was where we all slept. A phone ringing in the middle of the night didn’t so much break the darkness as become the sound of it.
The Agreement
When Cass and Ethan had been going out a year, they rented a friend’s cottage in the west end of Provincetown, and the June weather cooperated—a crisp warm during the day and cool at night—until the last day when they were socked in with fog and rain. The windows had been open but now were stuck. Being her mother’s child, Cass leaned her forehead on the pane, allowing glass to stand in the way of what she wanted. But after a while, she straightened. Every problem, her father had always said, was just a problem to solve. She found tools in a toolbox and pried the bayside windows open. Then she closed her eyes, drinking in the salt spray and listening to the comforting sound of the foghorn.
Ethan came up and reached behind her, crossing easily into her territory, bending for her black sweatshirt that had fallen to the floor and returning it to her.
“Let’s go out there,” he said. “In it.”
Wearing old baseball caps and slickers, they grabbed water bottles and headed farther west. Usually, they walked past the breakwater on a mission for the beach, but this day they had no mission and veered left to take a closer look at the magical, man-made rock pathway that struck out across the water, splitting it into harbor and marsh and leading to the fingertips of the fist of the very very end of Cape Cod.
Ethan stepped through the opening in the fence. “C’mon,” he said, turning toward her.
It was just past high tide, and the water was full and rough, uncontained, splashing against the boulders. Out here, unprotected, the wind was stronger, throwing the rain around. One bird, a black-headed, orange-beaked tern bumped up and down with the gusts, holding steady but making no progress.
At the start, the rocks were close together and stepping from one to another was easy, but they were rain-soaked and slippery, and Cass didn’t risk lifting her gaze from the next spot her foot would go. Then the gaps increased. One small misstep and her leg would be wedged between these rocks that were alike and different—sharp and uneven and every shade of gray with streaks of pink and yellow and green. She yelled ahead, asking Ethan if it was granite.
He stopped. “Did you say something?”
She repeated her question, staring at him standing there on top of a giant boulder in the middle of rushing water.
He nodded. “Brought over from Quincy in the early 1900s I think.”
“Ethan.”
He turned toward her again.
“It’s like Stone Mountain. It’s like … I don’t know, but I think it means something.”
He held his arms out to the side and tilted his head. “Granite’s our rock?”
“Well, we’re official now,” she said, grinning. “We have a rock.”
The night Cass met Ethan, he’d told her he felt more himself in Afghanistan than anywhere else. Three months later, at Stone Mountain on a humid day in August, she’d told him she wanted a husband who came home at night and that she didn’t think she wanted children. They had continued the climb in silence; she assumed they were done. But they hadn’t gone far when, standing on the