If this book were a time travel movie, it would show the hands of a clock racing around the years, shops and restaurants being boarded up, the peacocks disappearing from Scott Road then reappearing, Wicked Davey’s vanishing, Raven selling her studio, people losing jobs, the Plantation in bankruptcy then being bought, the logging trucks driving by in an endless caravan, Edward and I being taken to and from airports to find the UPS cartons we had sent ahead at our doors. We would pick up the same few people in each place, catch up, and begin again. John Grisham builds two houses on our beach road. Water gushes into and through our apartment, Arley Quick and his workmen return and rebuild floors and repaint walls. I am waking up, again and again, putting on my sailor sweatshirt, and going out into the dark with Kukla, now white around the muzzle. And there are deaths.

I am not at all the same–not since my brother Buzz died suddenly at age 64 after the third attack on his weakened heart. We had been together since I was two carrying my infant brother to drop him in the toilet, through our entire childhood which changed when I was eight and he became sick. That was the year he picked up his first tennis racquet and became a boy champion with whom I played my first and last mixed doubles tournament. Our lives rearranged again with his early marriage and children as we moved further apart, but there was always the binding force of our mother and his personality for he had both the masculine sweetness and the charm of our father.

Jill Clayburgh, my first real friend, died three months after my brother. She would be forever paused in that moment when we first went to lunch after years apart, and both arrived too early, so I walked around the block and she stood outside the restaurant waiting until I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around.

It was midnight New Year’s Eve 2010-2011 on 73^rd street and, for the first time in a long time, my mother was alone. She went to the refrigerator to get a lemon tart and, as the year changed, she fell and broke her hip. New Year’s Eve is when her own father died.

Kimie’s husband died three weeks later in Hawaii; Raven’s husband died that March. Four days later, my French cousin Dothee, died in Paris, and the next day Bettye’s husband died in Boston.

I suddenly knew four widows and I suppose I could have counted myself because I found out then that my first husband, younger than I, had died of a heart attack the year before my brother.

By this time, I had no faith left and, with the aid of Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great, almost no belief.

I walked and walked. I read Scandinavian crime novels and developed a narcoleptic interest in clothes, television’s Real Housewives smashing together in gigantic playhouses, crime shows with parental figures, and competent siblings replacing what I had lost in my own family.

Inert, I again treated the beach as a kind of sanitorium. The only thing I can say for myself during this lost time is that I did what had to be done and functioned for my mother and Edward. Otherwise, I distracted myself as the days went on with new narcotics in my narcotic place. I believed, as did the scientist and writer Miriam Rothschild: “One of the secrets of happiness is knowing how to be bored.” These were my new and insufficient reasons to wake up in the morning, ways to ward off an omnipresent and growing fear, for I now felt quite vulnerable.

 

After her New Year’s fall, my mother had entered the iron world of walkers and bed rails and dangerous physical instability. Hard to say which of us was more helpless. As my mother struggled to regain her life, I felt I had lost control of mine. How almost blithe I had been before, imagining all my dead ones drifting under the ocean waters. Now I saw a huge flock of white birds circling over a rough ocean and plunging down, dropping one by one as though shot.

Months later, my mother had a brain scan on the March day I returned to New York. I found her at her table with her Hermes blouse unbuttoned, a shocking sight, one I had never seen. I told her she looked so tired and that she should rest. She had never gotten into bed during the day in her 92 years, but this time she did, and she never got out of her bed again.

When I called Edward early one morning on the island, he said we had had a “disaster.” I thought he was fooling but, in fact, a newly-installed valve on the hot water heater had exploded, flooding our apartment.  Mike, our investigator friend, immediately came over to photograph the ruins and floating detritus.

Back came Arley Quick, back where we began nine years ago—prying up the wavy warped floors, painting all the walls with the same tinge of pink, laying in new dark wood throughout, putting things back exactly the way they had been so many deaths before. Maybe Ton and I had gotten it right in the first place. Or maybe it was a lack of conceptual energy. All the shells, with their whispers of the eternal ocean, now irked me. I banished every trace of seaside-cute that had crept in. Everything that had been destroyed made the apartment even starker than before—like my life, a series of eliminations.

We were restored to the apartment even as my mother was dying in New York and my daughter quit book publishing and moved, for what looked like forever, to California. We were all on the clock.

 

At the grief group we always had something sweet on the table—usually it was a tray of the psychologist’s brownies, still warm and sweating pimples of moisture like tears under the Saran wrap. A December Thursday had been my first time at the grief group and I was sitting next to Raven. I had a list of nine names of the recently dead in my back pocket. But I was there because of my mother, Norma, who had died at the end of July, a day before Edward’s and my late brother’s birthday.

She died quite as she had lived, five months after she got into bed—93 by then—and she rose above the process, refusing it, never discussing it, never admitting that she was blind, disconnecting from the indignities, kind to me, ever ladylike to the hands who tended her in her home, living in a dream world of the past, and the books I read—mostly Colette. If elegance was refusal, she had mastered it. She was already a lovely pale spectre of herself. My youngest brother Ace and his wife Arlyne were there every day.

I was an orphan now. My occasional childhood fantasy had been realized quite without the anticipated fun.

I had recently emptied my mother’s apartment. The vintage clothing experts staggered out with armloads, each thinking he or she had outsmarted me. They entered her closets, eyes dancing over the 18 Hermes bags, the shoes with silk and velvet shoetrees, the now vintage clothes, often with the labels cut off for that was my mother’s way. The rooms with her hallmarked silver and pewter, what remained of her paintings and the chairs she had sat in, her rare books, grew emptier and more filled with her exquisite and, as it turned out, timeless taste. I appreciated her at last as a great collector.

Her glove drawers alone were heartbreaking, an abundance of white kid, all lengths, brown suede, black suede, sable- trimmed, embroidered, sheer, velvet striped, red leather with little buttons, antic Deco prints—gloves for her long slim fingers and polished nails—gloves filled with her love of beauty for its own sake and shocking extravagance.

There were documents, too, showing how wrong I had been to think my mother had never worked. There was her certificate in botany from the New York Botanical Gardens when she went back to school and a book from when she was a docent at the Museum at Temple Emanu-El. For years, she had run the holiday boutiques for Camp NYDA, a summer camp for diabetic children.

Just because she and the rest of my diminished family had expected me to make trouble, I gave everyone the things they wanted. As Proust wrote, “Attachment to an object always brings death to its possessor,” and I suppose in The Diamond I had written a novel about that. We all needed peace and respite and I followed the example of my mother who throughout her life had been supremely and self-destructively generous.

I never got to the list in my pocket on my first visit to the grief group. They had been at it for a while and knew each other’s stories and soon I learned their vocabulary —grief triggers, bereavement services, coping, refueling, acceptance, caretakers and loved ones forever linked. There were tears snuffled up and wiped away and an air in the room—forlorn, heavy, lost in the wreckage of grief. All forms of it– some years old, some quite new, all abiding. Some were filled with guilt, some with hidden relief, self -reproach, fury at deaths both expected and unexpected. Each face was lined by the particular trowels of grief, with darkened pouches under the eyes and the stray hairs of misery’s neglect. We were defined here by one event—and who we were in other places, what we had done, did not matter. The original hysteria and numbness were over and a general miasma had set in, an air of distress way beyond anything the counselor could help as she tried to open up and tie together the ultimate privacies of grief.

Raven sat there all dressed up, everything kind of flowing when she moved, wrists stacked with turquoise bracelets, scarves streaming. All over the island, people still smiled and swiveled in her wake for, as her mother said, the clothes just fell on her. She had been married as long as I had and had spent 13 years trying to keep her handsome husband alive through cancer, falls and seizures and severe drug reactions while piecing together services from various agencies– none of which I knew about when I first came to know her.

Kimie, who would never have gone to a group like this (as I might once have said of myself, yet here I was in a back room at the Fernandina Council for the Aging) was way ahead of us all. A lifetime reader of spiritual books, a believer that in death the soul goes back into happy fields after a sojourn in the “dirty muddy sad field” that is earthly existence, she was somewhat prepared. She believed we are here, learning for a short time, but the spirit never ends with the material body. Her world was filled with angels, spirits, and the books of those who died, saw the other world and returned to testify to it. We argued gently and consistently over all this, for she had become my dearest friend.

After a while, I felt like an intruder and a voyeur at the grief group. I had my brother and mother in my brain forever and, unfortunately, my vision of her last months. I would have to extend my grief to stay on and so I left, carrying off a final few brownies for Edward in a paper cup.

Our rebuilt apartment was finished now and, as I looked around at its pristine surfaces, it occurred to me that it would be a really good time to sell it. Immediately, I thought of Miami—hotter, more Latin now, crammed with color and nocturnal goings on, like gallery openings and movies with subtitles and the clunk of expensive car doors slamming in front of ever new concept restaurants. A refreshment of joy. Ola Chica! There would be impatient women rather like the Housewives in bandage dresses and hobbling shoes, scurrying valet parkers, boutiques with skimpy European beach clothes, people speaking with accents not southern, semicircles of tan and toned tushy flesh peeking out of bikini bottoms. For a moment, I dangled the idea of this warmer more thrilling place over Edward who looked distressed–Edward, who was not a fan of change, Edward, who had his office set up here and his files, which had mysteriously all survived the total destruction of our flood, reinstalled. Edward had grown a benign little thing on his back and, when the dermatologist removed it, she said it was actually called a “barnacle.” Edward had his tennis buddies and his routines refined over what had now become ten years.

Ten years! Ten years on the beach.

And the whole time I had kept a small soft red leather bag unzipped in my closet wherever I was and kept adding to it little bits and pieces of clothing for the next place. Unlike Edward, I always had my foot out the door, was always looking away, looking forward.

The deaths in my family, Lily’s relocation to LA, had removed some of the ties of New York. I was no longer going to be giving big family dinners with my precious plates and silver goblets for religious holidays.

And just then, along came Dotty and her friends walking on the beach. We met up with her other friends Leanna and Brad. I knew Leanna was a magnificent cook, had recently left her business as a wedding planner and caterer. She was from the north and, in her twirling kitchen competence, reminded me a bit of Tamasin Day- Lewis and that long ago dinner in New York. I suggested she teach us all to fancy-cook.

We began a series of dinners, preparing many-step recipes and drinking Veuve Cliquot. The women would gather in the afternoon and the men would show up for dinner. It was very 1950’s suburban I suppose, but quite healing and finally, after ten years, Edward’s and my circle expanded. I sat at Brad’s big well-set table and saw everyone in a kind of amber glow of belonging—a most pleasant inversion of the grief group.

There was now this little set organized around fancy food, living on the island, not working as they used to, and a bit of age. I at last realized that perseverance and time with its unpredictable developments like falls and disease and death and floods—could resolve ambiguous situations more than conscious decisions could. As most of the world knew, conscious decisions are a luxury.

It was time for a party. I would invite them all home. The restaurant Barney Greengrass would Fed-Ex bagels and bialys, Nova Scotia salmon and their famous sturgeon, vegetable cream cheese and rugelach, food that spoke of Jewish New York and a part of my roots. There was even dark bread, and this time I got it right.

Raven came, of course, and all the others. Kimie was in Hawaii, and I knew such an event would have been impossible for her. Dotty and Mike were sort of the fulcrum, the binding force and there was Fero, the retired surgeon, and his wife, Nancy.

It was hard for Raven as the only person not paired. She did not speak much and nor did I, so I poured the coffee and tended to them all, listening and rather pleased at those I had assembled, jealous of those who still had mothers in their nineties. I saw myself emerging from my lost years.

Then, too, I could feel the presence of my ghosts, all the departures– my family, my former husband who saw me placed in another far off Florida, my cousin Dothee who might see in the winter beach the cold air of our summers in Trouville, cracking open the tiny crevettes at lunches that never seemed to end, Ton Luyk approving the reconstruction of his vision out of the wreckage, Jill with the abiding glamour of an old star, the missing husbands drifting by as Raven waved her fan and others laughed and the new green cups were emptied. It was even good to know that if one of us, seated on the chairs I had stripped and painted long ago, keeled over, there was Fero, the doctor who would know what to do.

We were packed together at our old gateleg table, fully expanded now, on the new dark floors with potted lilies and orchids spread around and new striped glasses from Target that looked somewhat Venetian and some of the dishes my mother had given me over the years.

No one could see in to where we sat, for we had gotten new windows, after all, heavy enough to bolster us against hurricanes and tinted dark to discourage creatures crawling from the ocean where the ancient turtles swim and wait.

My two worlds had come together with time, with things from my past in New York and proven friends from here, and I was one with the waves pausing until they were pulled back out, only to return, strengthened or diminished, again, ever again.

The red leather bag, unzipped and already half- full, waited in the closet.