Marguerite Waits by the Water

"You're going to the shore again," her sister said, not a question, watching Marguerite tie her cloak. "You go every evening now."

"There's nothing else to do in this house after supper."

"You could stay and hear the rest of the letter from Aunt Odile."

"I could." Marguerite was already at the door. "I'd rather watch the fishing boats come in."

There was, in truth, nothing remarkable about the shore most evenings: a few boats, the ordinary tide, nothing that should have pulled a young woman out into the cold air night after night when a warm parlor and her aunt's letters waited perfectly comfortably behind her. Marguerite couldn't have explained the pull if her sister had pressed her on it. She only knew that watching a ship's silhouette on the horizon, imagining where it had come from and where it might be bound, gave her something the parlor's familiar, well-worn conversations never quite managed to.

"What do you actually think about, out there?" her sister asked once, catching her at it.

"Nothing in particular."

"You've been standing at that same rock for an hour. That's not nothing in particular."

Marguerite considered how to answer that honestly. "I think there's more to my life than this house and this town, and I don't know yet what the more actually is. Standing here doesn't answer the question. It just feels less like waiting for nothing."

"You'll wear yourself out hoping for something that isn't coming," her sister said, not unkindly, more than once across those years.

"Maybe. I'd rather wear myself out hoping than never once let myself hope at all."

She kept walking down to that shore for years, through winters that made the habit really uncomfortable and summers that made it easy, never quite able to say what exactly she expected to find there, only that the alternative, accepting that this town and this parlor were the whole of what her life would ever offer her, felt like a surrender she wasn't yet prepared to make.

When the stranger finally did arrive, and her ordinary life tipped into something considerably larger than any evening on that shore had ever shown her, Marguerite found the moment felt less like sheer luck than like a debt finally being paid. She'd spent years insisting, to herself and to a sister who thought she was simply being foolish, that more was out there waiting for her. She hadn't been foolish. She'd only been waiting for the specific evening when the waiting would finally have somewhere to go.