Lucy by the Sea

Lucy by the Sea Plot Summary

Introduction

March 2020. The daffodils bloomed outside Lucy's Manhattan apartment as William, her first husband, stood in her doorway with an urgent expression she hadn't seen in decades. "I'm picking you up tomorrow morning and we're leaving," he said, his voice carrying the weight of scientific certainty. Lucy had no idea that stepping into his car with her small violet suitcase would mean abandoning everything she thought she knew about her life. The virus was spreading through New York like wildfire, but Lucy couldn't grasp the magnitude. She thought they'd be gone for two weeks, maybe three. She left dirty dishes in the sink and didn't pack her laptop. William drove them north to a weathered house on the Maine coast, where the Atlantic crashed against dark rocks and two small islands sat like sentinels in the distance. As they pulled up the rocky driveway, Lucy caught her first whiff of that biting salt air and felt the profound displacement that would define the months ahead.

Chapter 1: Sudden Departure: The Flight from New York

The morning William arrived to collect Lucy, the city sparkled in early spring sunshine. Basketball players moved across distant courts, traffic hummed along the FDR Drive, and life pulsed with its familiar rhythm. Yet William's urgency cut through the normalcy like a blade. He'd already called their daughters, begging them to leave Brooklyn. Chrissy and Michael had fled to Connecticut. Becka remained trapped with her poet husband Trey in their apartment, where refrigerator trucks would soon line the streets, filled with the dead. William had seen what Lucy couldn't yet comprehend. His friend Jerry lay dying on a ventilator. The scientist in him understood exponential curves, viral loads, and the mathematical certainty of catastrophe. "Yours is the life I wanted to save," he would tell her later, his voice breaking with exhaustion and fear. The drive to Maine stretched through changing landscapes, from urban sprawl to rural emptiness. William wore plastic gloves to pump gas, carried surgical masks in clear bags, and spoke of quarantine protocols Lucy found theatrical. She rolled her eyes at his paranoia, not knowing that Jerry would be dead within days, not understanding that the world was tilting off its axis. When they reached the weathered house perched on its cliff, Lucy felt the familiar revulsion of entering someone else's space. The smell of other people's lives mingled with the harsh salt air. Patchwork quilts on the beds depressed her. The plexiglass porch blocked her view of the endless ocean. William cranked the heat high, but she shivered in layer after layer, remembering childhood nights when cold was her constant companion. That first evening, they ate pasta at the scratched dining table while rain lashed the windows. William had brought wine for Lucy, anticipating her needs with the precision of someone who had once shared her daily rhythms. Outside, the storm transformed the ocean into something wild and magnificent, lightning illuminating the water in sudden, brilliant sheets.

Chapter 2: Quarantine on the Coast: Adapting to Isolation

Two weeks of isolation stretched before them like an eternity. Lucy walked the narrow road alone, past houses where curtains twitched and faces watched from windows. The old man Tom sat smoking on tilted steps, calling her "de-ah" with genuine warmth. She didn't know he had likely scrawled "GO HOME NEW YORKERS" on their car window, local resentment made manifest in dripping paint. The ocean became her obsession and her comfort. At high tide, dark water swirled over rocks in hypnotic patterns, seaweed streaming like copper hair. At low tide, she picked among periwinkles and searched for starfish, her balance precarious on the slippery stones. Those two islands straight ahead never moved, never changed, becoming her fixed points in a world suddenly unmoored. William threw himself into domesticity with the fervor of a man discovering a new continent. He cooked elaborate dinners, demanding praise for every meal, then retreated to work on a Van Gogh puzzle while Lucy cleaned his messes. Their old patterns reasserted themselves with uncomfortable familiarity. She would hate him after dinner when he stopped listening, when his eyes glazed over as she spoke. She'd walk down to the water in darkness, swearing at the stars. Television became their portal to catastrophe. Night after night, they watched New York City transform into a war zone. Ambulances screamed down familiar streets. Hospitals overflowed with the dying. Hart Island filled with mass graves, wooden boxes stacked in red clay trenches like some medieval plague pit. Lucy found herself looking at the floor, unable to process the yellowish images of suffering that flickered across their screen. The world they had known was ending, frame by frame, in their living room each evening. And still Lucy couldn't quite believe it was real.

Chapter 3: Distant Children: Family Fractures and Healing

The call came on a bright April morning as Lucy returned from her walk. Becka's voice shattered through the phone lines, raw with betrayal and rage. Trey had been planning to leave her, conducting his affair through hidden text messages while they remained locked down together. "Mom! Mom! Oh Mommy!" she sobbed from the rooftop of their Brooklyn building, sirens wailing in the background like a soundtrack to urban apocalypse. William took the phone with surgical precision, asking the right questions, cutting through emotion to assess the damage. How long? Where was the other woman? Did Becka want to save the marriage? When Becka said no, his response was immediate: "We're going to get you out of New York." The extraction played out like a military operation. Horik, William's longtime driver, would brave the infected city, his car sanitized with Lysol, every surface scrubbed clean. Becka would wait with one suitcase, masked and gloved, for a text signaling his arrival. No contact, no unnecessary risk, just precision-planned rescue from a marriage that had become a cage. Meanwhile, Trey called William directly, his voice tight with defensive anger. When he accused William of throwing stones from glass houses, referencing William's own history of infidelity, something dangerous flickered in William's eyes. "You know why I did it, Trey? Because I was an asshole. Welcome to the asshole club. Asshole." The phone went dead, and Lucy felt a strange satisfaction at her ex-husband's brutal honesty. Within days, Becka was safely quarantined in the Connecticut guesthouse, her voice gradually losing its ragged edge. Chrissy and Michael welcomed her with careful distance, leaving food at her door for fourteen days. But Lucy could hear the change when Becka called, a new maturity threading through her voice, as if betrayal had burned away something childish and left steel in its place. The first rescue was complete, but Lucy sensed it wouldn't be the last.

Chapter 4: The Tower and the Sea: Finding Purpose in Confinement

William walked to the guard tower every afternoon, rain or shine, his shoulders set against the wind. Built during World War II to watch for German submarines, the structure called to something deep in his historian's soul. Those U-boats had been real, carrying spies who made it all the way from Maine's rocky coast to New York City. His own grandfather had profited from that war, Nazi gold flowing into Swiss accounts, blood money that William had inherited and spent decades trying to rationalize. "I am in mourning for my life," he announced one rainy morning, quoting Chekhov with unexpected literary flair. The admission hung between them like morning mist. He'd taken his grandfather's tainted fortune, built his career on Nazi profits while his father had refused the same inheritance. The guilt ate at him like acid, especially as the world seemed to fracture along the same fault lines of hatred and greed. But salvation came through microscopic enemies. Lois Bubar's potato-farming relatives faced parasites threatening their crops, climate change extending growing seasons in dangerous ways. William found new purpose in their agricultural crisis, his scientific training suddenly relevant to soil and survival instead of abstract research. The University of Maine welcomed his expertise, his grandfather's blood money finally serving life instead of death. Lucy discovered her own refuge in a cramped studio above Crosby's main street. Bob Burgess and William had conspired to give her something she'd never possessed: a room of her own. The simple space with its overstuffed chair and bright lamps became her sanctuary, where she could write without the weight of shared domestic spaces, without the constant negotiation of marriage pressing against her concentration. The guard tower and the studio, history and art, guilt and redemption. They were finding their reasons to stay, their purposes in this strange new world that had claimed them from their former lives. The ocean kept its rhythm outside their windows, indifferent to human plans, washing the rocks clean with each tide's patient persistence.

Chapter 5: Reconnections: Navigating Old Love in New Circumstances

The massive panic attack hit Lucy like a rogue wave on a calm summer night. Lying in bed, she pictured her abandoned Manhattan apartment and felt nothing but revulsion. David's cello stood in the corner like a monument to loss, his absence more present than any memory. The apartment that should have felt like home seemed like a tomb, and the thought of returning there alone made her hyperventilate in the dark. She stumbled outside to the cliff edge, where moonlight turned the water silver and her breath came in sharp gasps. When William found her sobbing on the stairs, her words tumbled out in broken fragments. "I am so homesick, but I have no home to go to. The only real home I ever had was with you and the girls." William's arms enfolded her with surprising strength, muscle memory from decades past. "Closer," she whispered, and he gave her the old Groucho Marx line that had made her laugh when they were young: "If I hold you any closer, I'll be behind you." Some jokes survive everything, even divorce and twenty years of separate lives. What followed felt both inevitable and shocking. They were past seventy, past the age when bodies mattered most, but tenderness had its own logic. William's prostate surgery had left him diminished in ways that once would have seemed tragic. Now Lucy discovered what her long-ago friend had told her about impotent lovers: "You would be surprised how little difference it makes." She was wrong, but she was also absolutely right. They began sharing a bed with the shy formality of elderly newlyweds. William still snored; Lucy still woke in the middle of the night and sometimes retreated to her own room. But when anxiety grabbed him in pre-dawn darkness, she'd feel him stir and slip back under his covers, their bodies finding familiar accommodation despite everything that had changed. The girls would learn about their reunion eventually, but for now it felt too private, too strange to announce. They were writing a new ending to an old story, and the next chapter remained unwritten.

Chapter 6: Letting Go: Surrendering the Past

The men from town drove to Manhattan like conquerors returning from a distant war, packing Lucy's life into boxes and loading everything onto trucks. She directed the dismantling of her apartment through FaceTime, watching Marie, her cleaning lady, sort through possessions that suddenly seemed foreign. Most of the clothes went to Marie, most of the kitchen equipment, most of the linens. David's cello and her towering plant were the only things that truly mattered. The plant arrived looking shy and displaced on their Maine porch, eight feet of green resilience that had survived months of pandemic neglect. David's cello went to the upstairs bedroom with trees pressing against the windows, where it could rest among old books and forgotten quilts. Lucy felt the strange lightness of having cast off material anchors, of floating free from everything except what could fit in four cardboard boxes. Her hair fell out in clumps after a disastrous home dye job, clogging the ancient bathtub drain until William lay half-inside it, attacking the blockage with baking soda and vinegar like a suburban alchemist. When his efforts failed, Lucy poured in bleach and vinegar with reckless determination until the water ran clear. Small victories felt enormous in their contracted world. They officially became Maine residents, trading New York driver's licenses for local credentials with the solemnity of immigrants claiming new citizenship. The decision felt both practical and profound, acknowledgment that their Manhattan lives had truly ended. At seventy-one and sixty-four, they were starting over in a state where Lucy had never imagined living, surrounded by ocean and seasons that moved at different rhythms from the urban pulse they'd known for decades. The apartment that had held twenty years of marriage to David was gone, reduced to forwarding addresses and canceled services. Lucy waited for grief to overwhelm her, but felt instead a curious relief, as if she'd been carrying a weight she hadn't realized was there. Sometimes the most profound changes happen not in dramatic moments, but in the simple act of letting go.

Chapter 7: The World Beyond: Venturing Out After Vaccination

The needle slipped into Lucy's arm with barely a pinch, but the relief flooded through her like warm honey. Freedom. She could return to New York, see her daughters, remember who she used to be before the world changed. The train from Boston carried her south through a landscape she barely recognized, empty stations and shuttered shops marking the pandemic's trail like archaeological ruins. Chrissy had grown thin again, dangerously so, her marriage to Michael cracking under the weight of three miscarriages and lockdown's enforced intimacy. She sat by the Central Park duck pond with fury radiating from her sharp shoulders, planning an affair with methodical precision. "Don't do it," Lucy said quietly, and watched her daughter's eyes widen with recognition above her mask. The conversation that followed felt like surgery without anesthesia. Lucy spoke of her own affair decades earlier, the loneliness that had driven her toward betrayal, the price they'd all paid for choices made in desperation. She watched Chrissy's anger transform into something more complex, grief mixing with relief as understanding dawned. By the next day, Chrissy's potential lover had revealed his true nature, his rage at her hesitation exposing the violence beneath his charm. "He got scary, Mom. Really, really scary," Chrissy admitted, and Lucy felt the terror of near-miss catastrophe, the bullet that had whistled past without finding flesh. The reunion with both daughters in the park felt like stepping into sunlight after months underground. Chrissy ordered a chicken salad sandwich and ate both halves. Becka spoke of law school with quiet confidence. They were different women than they'd been before the pandemic, scarred but stronger, their roots driven deeper by the storm they'd weathered. As Lucy watched them drive away in their shared Uber, she felt the ancient recognition that had come to her during pregnancy: these were never truly hers. Her job had been to help them into the world, then let them find their own paths through whatever wilderness awaited. The pandemic had completed some essential separation, burning away the last illusions of permanent connection.

Summary

When William finally joined Lucy in the city, stepping out of a gray car with his brown suitcase, they embraced like survivors of some unimaginable disaster. "I love you, Lucy Barton, for whatever it's worth," he whispered against her hair, and she felt the weight of everything they'd lost and found in their strange year of exile. They would return to Maine together, to their house on the cliff where the ocean never stopped its patient conversation with the rocks. The pandemic had stripped away illusions like old paint, revealing what lay beneath the surface of their carefully constructed lives. Lucy's marriage to David, beautiful as it was, had been built on his constant presence, his reliable devotion. Without him, the apartment had become a mausoleum. But with William, she'd rediscovered something more complex: not the desperate need of young love, but the companionate recognition of two people who'd seen each other at their worst and chosen to try again anyway. The future stretched before them uncertain as weather, but they would face it together, two ping-pong balls that had bounced apart and found their way back to each other in the vast randomness of existence. In the end, perhaps that was enough.

About Author

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Elizabeth Strout

Strout delves into the intricacies of human relationships and the complexities of small-town life through her richly detailed narratives. By focusing on the subtleties of everyday existence, she investigates the quiet yet profound moments that shape individual lives. Her writing often brings to the forefront themes of loneliness, connection, and resilience, presenting characters who are deeply flawed yet intensely relatable. Strout's method involves creating multi-layered characters and interweaving their stories to reflect the broader tapestry of human experience.\n\nHer book "Olive Kitteridge," which earned her the Pulitzer Prize, is a prime example of her ability to craft interconnected stories that reveal the depth of ordinary lives. Meanwhile, "Amy and Isabelle" showcases her skill in portraying the nuanced dynamics between mothers and daughters, earning critical acclaim and several prestigious awards. These works offer readers a chance to reflect on their own lives and relationships, drawing them into the emotional landscapes Strout so vividly portrays.\n\nReaders benefit from Strout's keen observational eye and emotional honesty, which provide a sense of empathy and understanding. Her stories resonate with those who appreciate the complexities of human nature, offering insights into both the struggles and joys that define us. This short bio highlights Strout's role as a significant figure in contemporary literature, underscoring her impact as an author who captures the essence of life's quiet moments. As her stories continue to reach a wide audience, her influence grows, inviting readers to explore the depths of her characters and, in doing so, explore themselves.

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