Folly

by Laurie R. King

  She could write none of this, not only because of Petra’s age, but because if Petra’s mother found such a letter (and knowing Tamara, she was unlikely to allow her daughter so dangerous a privacy as a personal correspondence with Rae), she could not miss seeing what lay at the base of such pure honesty: a deep and straightforward affection such as Rae had never given her own daughter, a hunger for companionship that Tamara could not satisfy—or that Rae would not permit her to satisfy.

  Rae’s relationship with her elder daughter had been doomed from the beginning. After Tamara’s birth, postpartum depression had slid, slowly but inexorably, into a full-scale breakdown, Rae’s first. When Rae came out of the hospital, three months later, she had neither husband nor child. It took her four years to regain access to Tamara, four years to prove that she was not about to slit her wrists one day while Tamara was playing in the next room (a vivid suggestion made in court by David’s lawyer). By that time, Tamara was well and truly indoctrinated against her. The child screamed when David walked out the door of Rae’s apartment, leaving his ex-wife and daughter to their first weekend alone. Tamara screamed all weekend.

  For the next five years, Rae and David shared custody—or rather, David’s mother shared it grudgingly with Rae, since it was to his parents’ house that David took the child. Then, a month short of Tamara’s tenth birthday, Rae’s second break occurred. Much of that winter was lost to Rae, but clear images lingered, seared into her visual memory by the same mechanism that had carved Bella’s happy cry of Mommy! into her hearing: the sight of Tamara frozen in the doorway of the living room, her blond hair hanging lank and unwashed in the week she’d spent in her mother’s care, staring openmouthed as Rae stripped naked, earnestly lecturing her daughter on the need for doing so—although that reason, rooted in the logic of dreams and madness, was lost in the mists; the image of Tamara being driven away by David’s enraged mother, the way her white Cadillac skidded to one side before its tires regained the road; the pattern of the blood, spreading out in the bathwater, delicate scarlet blooms curling against the white enamel. That she remembered, although nothing of the ensuing noise and tumult of David’s entrance or the paramedics. Nothing of either hospital. Nothing but muttering darkness, punctuated only by her father’s face, looking as much lost as it did angry, telling her that her grandfather William had died at the age of ninety-four, enraged to the last. Rae still believed that her second breakdown had led to William’s fatal stroke. Her father had tried to reassure her, but she knew better: The knowledge that his only granddaughter was a mental patient had killed William.

  After that, Rae had not fought David for custody of Tamara.

  Only in the years of her marriage to Alan had Rae begun to feel able to look Tamara in the eyes without a cringe, and even then, more often than not, she was visited by a quick, terrible memory, of a thing she had never revealed in thirty years of dealing with clever psychiatrists. A thing she had told only one other person in her life: Alan.

  The memory was visual, of Tamara as a tiny infant, old enough to have lost her umbilical cord but too young to have any strength in her neck—perhaps a month old. Lying on her parents’ bed shrieking with colic or hunger or wet diapers or just the jangled nervous system of the newborn, and Rae had tried everything. She’d nursed her daughter, walked her, changed her, bathed her, patted her, sung to her; nothing worked. Rae laid Tamara on the bed—gently, with immense care—and stood looking down at nine pounds of squalling, red-faced fury. Rae was not far from screaming herself, and her eyes were drawn to the shelf on which she had left twenty-one ounces of drop-forged steel framing hammer. She looked at the tool, and her gaze lowered to her own two hands, then back to the inconsolable infant. It was hard to breathe; the lusty screams seemed to fade in her hearing.

  Rae turned and left the house.

  And David got home before she did. When Rae walked in, Tamara was peacefully asleep on his shoulder.

  Rae had never told David that, instead of raging and ranting at her for this extreme irresponsibility, he should have gone down on his knees in gratitude for her self-control. She had never told anyone of her urge, not even after she had discovered how many other women went through the same thing, particularly those who were young (she had turned twenty the month before the birth), who’d undergone hard births (hers was a thirty-hour labor), who had uninvolved husbands (David worked long hours), and who had no support system (all her family and friends had been left behind on the East Coast). All Rae knew was that she couldn’t be trusted with her own daughter, who hated her anyway. It was a feeling she had never shaken off.

  She had spent the last thirty-two years, the sane and the mad, knowing that her daughter was afraid of her.

  Alan was the only one who had known the whole story behind the estrangement, Alan who saw the fear growing with her second pregnancy and kept digging until she told him the last shameful detail, Alan who took a quarter’s leave to be home when she needed someone there, for Bella, in case …

  Only there was no “in case.” Bella was an easy baby, as Rae was a different person from the twenty-year-old who bore Tamara, and the weird chemistry of the depressive mind stayed in abatement. Guiltily, Rae would watch Tamara for signs of resentment at Rae’s ease with Tamara’s half-sister, but for some reason it never surfaced. Tamara liked—no, Tamara loved—Bella, in spite of resentments past and the embarrassment of Rae’s age as a new mother. She had even begun to trust Rae with Petra, until the accident.

  Until a month after the accident, when Tamara and her daughter had stood in the living room doorway staring down at Rae in horror.

  When Rae came out of the mental hospital in December, she had fully expected that Tamara would never let her near her granddaughter again, and had been reduced to weeping gratitude when her daughter brought Petra for a visit to the informal halfway house where Rae was living. Tamara had watched her every move, but she had come, and she made no overt move to keep Rae and Petra apart. She disagreed with Rae’s decision to come to the island with a chill disapproval, but she nonetheless offered to usher Rae from the mainland over to the island, with Petra. And on the ferry over, Tamara had even permitted her mother to be alone with Petra on the outside deck, had not followed to keep them in sight when Petra wandered away down the boat. Rae was grateful, although she couldn’t figure it out.

  And she had no wish to push matters. Her letters would remain light and chatty and as boringly sane as she could contrive to sound. She would make no reference to the voices that whispered beneath the rain, or to unstoppable tears, or to booting moss-covered boulders and screeching obscenities at their refusal to get up and move.

  Picturing herself raging at the rock, Rae was surprised to find a reluctant grin tugging at her mouth. Jesus, Rae, you must have looked like … Her thoughts paused, and then she chuckled aloud—like a crazy woman.

  Still smiling, she tossed the letter to Petra on the table, shut down the light, and crawled into the sleeping bag. A horned owl hoot-hooted up the hill from the tent, a sound comforting in its evocation of her California mountains. Even Bella hadn’t found owls a threat.

  It’s only been five days, she told her fears. Muscle builds slowly in middle age, whether it’s on the arms or in the mind. Look: You stood up and turned off the lamp without even thinking about the shadow on the wall, didn’t you? There’s progress. Okay, life here isn’t a barrel of fun. In fact, it’s pretty damn miserable, especially when you’re trying to move rocks in the rain.

  But look at the plus side, she added, her eyelids drooping. You sure don’t have any trouble falling asleep. Staying asleep might be more than she could ask, but surely a day’s hard labor was a small price to pay for the delicious luxury of unconsciousness.

  The next day was Tuesday, Ed’s day. Ed De la Torre was a resident of Friday Harbor, her nearest proper town. Ed acted as unofficial mailman, taxi driver, news service, repair consultant, and delivery boy for the handful of island residents willing to pay. Event
ually, Rae supposed, she would buy a boat of her own, but she had not operated any heavy equipment, much less a car, in a year and a half, and for the time being, even a small skiff with an outboard motor seemed so … extroverted. And a small skiff with an inexperienced person at the controls would be risky in the fast waters that curled around her island, which meant a larger and more powerful boat, which would require lessons, and complicated maintenance, which in turn meant an even greater commitment to the outside world. Rae wanted to be left alone, but she was not willing to forgo milk and eggs, toothpaste and clean socks. So, she had Ed once a week—and truth to tell, although she cringed at the very idea of visitors, the knowledge that she was not utterly alone in the world was reassuring. In the far back of her mind lay the hidden knowledge that if Ed were to come to the island one day and find her note on the tent saying, “Ed, don’t come in, call the police,” the discovery would not cause him much grief.

  She had been led to understand that most of her fellow island hermits who used Ed’s delivery services had cell phones or short-wave radios to call and ask him to bring along a steak or some toilet paper or the part they’d forgotten to order for their sump pump. Rae refused to entertain the idea of a cell phone, declaring to others that it would be an unbearable intrusion, while admitting to herself that she detested the things for their role in the death of her family. Her flat refusal had driven her daughter wild (“What if you get sick?” Tamara demanded. “What if you fall down?”), but Ed had just commented that a cell phone probably wouldn’t work there anyway, and instructed her to hang a white shirt or something out over the peeling No Trespassing sign on the end of the promontory if she found she needed him to stop by on one of his other days. He was often passing, he said, or one of her neighbors would get word to him.

  So Tuesdays were Ed days, sometime before noon, he had told her, depending on the tide. By eight o’clock that morning Rae was up, her body bathed and her hair washed with laboriously heated water, the dry crescents of dirt pried out from under her fingernails, a small duffel bag of dirty laundry packed and ready, a precise list of the next week’s supplies written down.

  Now what? she wondered. With her first visitor due, she wasn’t about to go and get stuck into the filthy demolition work that awaited her. If Ed was to be her sole link with the outer world, she wanted to start off with a good impression, and although when he had brought her to the island the other day he had seemed so phlegmatic as to be half asleep, she couldn’t take a chance. Best to do something not too physical while waiting for him—and not too far away: If she missed him, she’d be condemned to beans, rice, and dried milk by the end of next week.

  She carried duffel bag and grocery list out of the tent, zipped the door shut to keep out the slugs and her red squirrel neighbor, and put the two essentials for Ed on her folding canvas chair. The clearing itself was as tidy as a trampled meadow dominated by tarpaulin-covered building material could get, and most of the projects that awaited her were major. There was one, however, that shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours and involved a minimum of grime.

  One thing Rae would require fairly quickly was a sturdy, all-purpose workbench. She had already decided where she wanted it: tucked into the trunk of the forty-foot-tall, high-branched madrone at the east side of the clearing where she had buried the ashes. The ground was flat there, and lightly shaded, but mostly she wanted her workbench there because from one side she would be looking up at the house, and from the other down at her cove. Too, Alan and Bella lay close by.

  Rae caught up her carpenter’s belt and snugged it over her hips. The morning was warmer than the previous few, with a promise of sun, and she had traded the fleece pullover and jacket for a lightweight vest that had been Alan’s. The tool belt fit normally now, the hammer’s handle bumping its customary spot on her leg as she walked over to the madrone.

  She had thought to build the workbench out of 2×4 lumber, of which she certainly had plenty, but there in the clearing with the stacks of building material at her back and the only human intrusions decidedly temporary—tent, fire pit, canvas-sling chair, and folding cook center— she realized that a crude, functional block of a table would be, quite simply, an eyesore. Of course, building sites and works in progress usually were eyesores, but something in her drew back from the idea of placing one, deliberately, here.

  She shifted around to fix her gaze on the shore, and a picture came suddenly to mind, of a staircase she had once driven two hours to see, a wide descending curve of mahogany and birch, elegant, clean, and vastly expensive, its gorgeous, gleaming sweep of laboriously polished handrail supported entirely by… rough, peeled branches. The house’s owner had possessed the good sense to leave the stairway alone, not gussy it up with carpeting and pictures along the wall, and the high windows in the curving wall had set off the staircase as if it were a piece of sculpture. Rae had always coveted that sweep of stairs, had often thought about ways to use the beautiful incongruity of natural and worked woods. This might be the time. Not that she was about to dive into the woods and hack away at young trees. For one thing, such green wood was useless for building, and beyond that, she could just imagine the furious argument she would have with the people who had preserved this island over the years. But live trees were not her only source of wood.

  Some of the driftwood on her beach was bound to be too rotten to support anything greater than its own weight, but if she could find some pieces that had been in the water just long enough to be worn down, but not long enough to have gone spongy …

  It took her an hour and cost her a bashed shin and a leg wet to the knee, but she collected a sizable tangle of silvery wood, each piece as thick as her wrist and interestingly twisted. She carried the wood up the hill, dumping it at the foot of the madrone tree, determinedly ignoring the ache down her left arm, and then she stood with her hands thrust into her back pockets, trying to call the structure into being before her eyes.

  But the safety and comfort of work was broken. More than that, standing over the wood in that position made her feel uneasy, made her aware of a cold trickle of sweat between her shoulder blades. She became conscious of a powerful desire to hurl the silver wood back into the sea and dig out the 2×4s.

  The problem was, building a workbench that was more than a mere functional arrangement of milled lumber called for a commitment Rae did not know if she was able to make. Once upon a time, back in another life, Rae had been a woodworker, a woman whose hands and heart transformed dull, dead trees into glorious pieces of usable furniture, teasing the material into stunning, one-of-a-kind tables and cabinets and dining room chairs. Once upon a time, Rae had stood with her hands in her hip pockets, leaning forward over the exciting potential in a slab of walnut or oak or ebony, planning, thinking, shifting the cuts in her mind. Once upon a time, Rae Newborn would have leapt at the chance to wrap a driftwood-based worktable around the madrone, playing lightheartedly with nature’s Art Nouveau shapes of gray, sea-soaked wood against the crisp, cinnamon-colored shavings curling off the velvety green inner bark of the living tree. Once upon a time, sixteen months before, in another lifetime.

  Before the phrase “drunk driver” had ripped through Rae Newborn’s life. Among the myriad reasons for her being on Folly was the sense that building a house would be a way of putting her empty hands to work that did not require much participation of heart. Woodworking was an intimate relationship; house building was just a job. Rae was not ready for another intimate relationship.

  Or so she had thought, until she found herself standing, hands in pockets, a tangle of driftwood at her feet.

  But damn it, she needed a workbench.

  What did it matter which wood she built it from?

  She nudged a branch over to one side with her boot, and noticed an interesting arrangement of knots. Then she saw another, down at the bottom of the heap, that seemed to mirror the angles of the first one, and she knelt down to slide it out. She placed the two together, running her hand
s up and down them with the same motion her daughter used to feel a horse’s leg. She reached out for another branch, then another, and soon she was shifting her entire collection back and forth, seeing how the strengths of one upright blended with the intricacies of another, balancing curve and straight, playing with the wood until she was satisfied not only that her bench would stand even if she set an engine block down on it, but that it would please her when holding nothing more than a mug of wildflowers.

  Then Rae went to the tent, and for the first time in seventeen months, she snapped open the clasp of her big, heavily dented metal toolbox. She took from it a crosscut saw, a set of rough chisels with their mallet, her old-fashioned bit brace hand drill and its box of bits, and the sleek aluminum spirit level. Laying the tools down near the driftwood branches, she reached behind her to flick the tape measure from its pouch at her spine, and bent to work.

  Weaving a selection of sea-worn driftwood into the strong underpinnings that she needed was no easy task. Each piece had to balance and lock into the next, resisting the tension and compression that would make the bench twist and collapse. By drilling and chiseling a hole to feed one branch into, by trimming and angling and sinking cross-supports, she could link the parts up into an airy yet solid whole. The sawdust smelled of brine, the wood was tacky to the touch and oddly unlike the tree it had been, and Rae was completely lost in her miniature silver forest when the voice boomed from behind her.

  “Mornin’ there, Mizz—”

  The words strangled in the boatman’s throat as Rae shrieked and jumped backward, her hammer leaping of its own volition into her hand. He reacted in kind, braced for a vicious fight, and they stared at each other across the upright snarl of partially attached driftwood, the wild-eyed woman and the equally startled man who had come up behind her back. Ed recovered first. With a visible effort he wiped the tightness from his face and straightened, taking off his baseball cap and running a hand over his mahogany-colored tonsure. When his arm went up, Rae glimpsed a band of geometric tattoo around his wrist, oranges and lapis blue.