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Chapter 29
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
