“I’m glad, love,” Peter said. “Then you really don’t need me, do you? Maude, just the thought of it makes me gag—”
“More than ever I need you, Peter,” I said urgently. “You just don’t know; it’s imperative that you be here. There’s no choice. I can’t understand what bothers you about it now; everybody’s coming, don’t you see, it means that everything’s all behind us, the prodigal son is forgiven, we can go on like we always have.”
“Can’t you see it’s a total charade, Maude?” Peter said. “That’s what bothers me about it. It’s a lie. Petie’s not the prodigal son—”
I cut him off in desperation. I would hear no more of this.
“Darling, that’s just a figure of speech. I meant—all right, Peter, I didn’t want to tell you, but if that’s what it takes to get you here, I will. Someone would anyway, sooner or later.”
And I told him about the incident at the yacht club the weekend before. All of it, from start to finish. When I was done there was a long silence on the line, so long I took a breath to speak, but then he did.
“God damn Gretchen to hell,” he said. “All right. I see. You’re right, I don’t have any choice. I’ll drive up from Boston that afternoon, but I’m going to be late getting there. Martin’s got some kind of lunch thing for me that I can’t cancel.”
“Oh, darling…thank you! It’ll be wonderful, you’ll see. Nobody will ever mention that business with Gretchen; that’s over. And simply everybody’s asked about you. Darcy asks three times a day.”
“Give her a kiss for me,” he said. “I miss her. I miss you, too. Maude—”
“What, love?”
“Do you remember Wappoo Creek? Do you remember what we sang that night?”
“As if it were yesterday,” I said, laughing.
He sang softly, over the wire from a long way away. “It’s three o’clock in the morning…we’ve danced the whole night through….”
“It doesn’t sound a bit better now than it did then,” I said.
“It doesn’t at that, does it? It’s been stuck in my mind lately; I’ve been singing it for days,” he said.
“Well,” I replied, “put the top down and sing it all the way up here Saturday, and hurry up!”
“I will. Listen, Maude. If anything else happens—anything unpleasant—call Micah. Will you do that? You can depend on Micah.”
“I don’t need to call Micah,” I said, puzzled. “I can take care of Darcy and myself. Don’t you see? That’s what that sad, silly scene at the yacht club was all about. I can take care of things.”
“I know you can,” Peter said. “I know you can. But I want you to promise me, anyway, about Micah.”
“Then I promise,” I said. “Get here soon, darling. I need hugs.”
“I love you, Maude.”
“Me too.”
It rained the day of the party, but an hour before time for it to start the rain stopped and a spectacular sunset broke through the storm clouds over the bay. The entire bulk of Islesboro and the Camden Hills flamed with it. Over it all hung the white ghost of a new moon. I went outside in my wrapper, face still unmade, to watch it. Micah and Tina stood beside me; they had come early for a quiet drink and to help me with last-minute details. There did not seem to be many; from the very beginning, this party had taken on its own charmed life. The flowers I ordered were the prettiest I had ever seen; the hors d’oeuvres Tina and I spent the week making looked festively elegant; the Japanese lanterns that were a Liberty party tradition looked magical in the sunset and fading storm light; Darcy had been an angel all day and was having her supper with Beth and Mike in the upstairs nursery without so much as a whimper.
“Remember when you said that a sunset like that meant the devil was burning trash?” I said to Micah, and he nodded. He looked fine in his gray slacks and dark blue blazer, indistinguishable from any of the men who would come this night, as Tina, in her pastel linen and cashmere cardigan, did from the women. As, now, they were.
“And you said this kind of sunset sometimes brought the northern lights,” I went on. “Wouldn’t that be perfect? Just the right finishing touch, a grace note.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Micah said, and we went into Liberty, and I ran upstairs to dress. I heard Micah greet Petie and Sarah and smiled. They would remember this night.
I was just coming down the stairs when a knock sounded at the door, tentative, soft. At the same moment a howl from the nursery announced the end of angelity.
“Get that, will you, Petie?” I called. “It’ll be the boys from the inn with the shrimp; it’s too early for anybody else yet. I’ll see what’s going on up here.”
I started back up, and then I heard Petie say, “Mama?”
I turned slowly and came back down the stairs, staring at him. Petie had not called me Mama for years. I stopped. His face was oddly fragmented; it looked as if it might fall away, feature by feature. Behind him stood the new sheriff, the one who had stopped Peter and me those times, when the Austin Healy was new. Last summer. I could not remember his name.
“Mama,” Petie said again, and took a step toward me. I stepped back. I began to shake my head, back and forth, back and forth.
“Mama. Dad, it’s about Daddy….”
I took another step back, staring, shaking my head. Petie came on toward me with his awful face.
“He…the car went off Caterpillar Hill,” Petie said, and began to cry. I stepped back again. I felt as if there was nothing in the world but space, cold and limitless, behind me. Here it was, then: the precipice.
“That can’t be right,” I said, shaking my head. Stepping back.
Hands caught my shoulders then, and held them hard, and I felt a body behind me, a body that held me still as I tried to step back once more. Micah. I stood still in his grasp.
“I’m so goddamned sorry, Miz Chambliss,” the new sheriff said, his voice trembling. “Some folks from over to Penobscot was parked at the overlook, watchin’ the sunset, and the car just come straight up the top and veered off and…went on over. They called me from Bagaduce Lunch; we got a car right on down there. We…the car was at the bottom, not far from where those woods around Walker’s Pond start. We found some papers with his name on ’em in the glove compartment, but we haven’t found—we haven’t found Mr. Chambliss yet. We got backup comin’ in from Brooksville and Castine, though….”
“Go back and look, then,” I said. “Do it now. He could be hurt; you might not hear him call.”
“Ma’am, he…the top was down,” the sheriff said. “It’s a drop of a thousand feet there at the overlook.”
I shook my head. Micah’s hands tightened on my shoulders. I tried to make a picture of it come into my mind, but there was nothing but blankness, whiteness. I could not see Peter. Something was wrong about all this.
“What was he doing on Caterpillar Hill?” I said wonderingly. “This is all wrong; that wasn’t Peter. Peter would have turned right for Brooksville. Caterpillar Hill isn’t on his way…. This is all wrong….”
“Maybe he wanted to look at the sunset,” the sheriff said in a low voice. “Lots of folks do from up there. I’m sorry, Miz Chambliss, I surely am. But it was his car.”
And still I shook my head. No, no.
Petie cried quietly in Sarah’s arms. Tina came in from the kitchen, her face bleached the color of long-dried bone. I shook my head.
Micah turned me around with both hands and looked down into my face. His was still and intent. I noticed that he had cut himself just below his ear, shaving. There was still a tiny trickle of dried blood.
“Peter does that,” I said, reaching up to touch it.
“Peter is gone, Maude,” Micah said. “You’ve got to know that.”
I looked at him. I felt his hands and his arms. I could not make a picture come; I could not find Peter in my mind.
“Micah,” I said, “I always thought it would be the sea.”
His face wrenched and crumpled
in pain then, and he pulled me against him, and I shut my eyes and the pictures came: the panorama of hills and ponds and inlets, islands and ledges, and finally the open sea, burning in that sunset, burning; the little green car hanging in that lambent air for a split moment; a man—had he been singing, had he really?—a man with fair hair spinning up and out, and out, and out, and then down….
At some point, I thought, blackness beginning to slide in at me from the sides of my vision, at some point, it must have been almost like rising to meet the young moon. The figure fell, and fell, and the blackness slid in, and I followed it down, and I heard myself crying aloud into Micah Willis’s chest as I, too, fell, “Micah, I don’t want to go to the porch! I don’t want to go to the porch!”
Chapter
Fourteen
I went back to Retreat in a rusted 1979 Pontiac Fire-bird with a bumper sticker that read SHIT HAPPENS. I had admired that sticker enormously the entire time I was in the hospital; so much that Leroy Greene, whom we called Mean, suggested I drive it the two thousand miles to Maine when I was discharged, instead of flying as I had planned to do.
“Give you a little breather before you get there to take up your life of ladyhood.” Mean grinned. “Go roarin’ in there flyin’ all your flags. Wear your heart on your bumper.”
“Oh, Mean, what a great idea!” I said. “It really might be just the thing. But I couldn’t just take your car.”
“Go on,” he said, turning back to the pool table in the day room as if the subject held no more interest for him. “I ain’t likely to drive the fucker again in several lifetimes.”
That was true. In addition to being treated at Peachwood for chronic long-standing alcohol and drug addiction, Mean was prohibited by the State of Georgia from driving in the foreseeable future. Mean collected DUIs as frequently as he had collected yardage for the Atlanta Falcons in his short but splendid career as a running back. He himself saw the car only when his brother Errol drove it up from Zebulon, Georgia, to visit Mean once a month. Mean had two or three other cars, a Mercedes and a BMW, I think, on blocks in a garage near his condominium in Buckhead. But it was the twelve-year-old Pontiac he asked Errol to bring. I knew it was a real love with him, and I did not think he had any others. Mean was enormous, black, singularly uncharismatic for a sports hero, and…mean. I was the only person at Peachwood he spoke to on a regular basis. I have always been proud and honored by that.
So in the end I did take the Pontiac, promising to return it in the fall when I came back to Atlanta, and, pocketing the substantial sum for airfare that my grandmother had sent to see me to Maine, I set off on the long three-day drive that would bring me, finally, to Cape Rosier.
For a full day I felt splendid: indomitable, tough, and free. Part of my euphoria, I knew, was the result of the red and yellow Xanaxes with which I had left the hospital—a month’s supply. I had taken them three times a day in the hospital, and they had put the panic at a remove I could tolerate. I loved those pills. And on that first day, I felt as if the world streaming by just beyond the interstate was one pane of glass away from me. I did not have to do anything at all about it but drive. Maybe I never would.
But another and very potent part of the well-being undoubtedly came from that bumper sticker. SHIT HAPPENS. What an admirable, cool, hard-edged sentiment: just the one I wanted to take all those miles and flaunt in the face of that beautiful place that had so nearly killed me. What a fine, supple statement of control and contempt and wellness. The new Darcy O’Ryan. Don’t fuck with me.
“It might not be a bad idea, at that,” my shrink said when I told him about driving the car to Maine and the bumper sticker. He was young and shaggy-haired and a little overweight; I liked him as well as I liked anyone, which was not much. To let my defenses down enough to admit full-blown liking was also to let the fear in; I knew that. But I thought he was less full of shit than anyone else in that absurd place, and I knew he cared what happened to me. He also kept the Xanaxes coming. I would have cooperated with Charles Manson for less.
“Why?” I said. “I thought you wanted me to fly. Didn’t you say the stress of driving all that way wasn’t a good thing right now?”
“Yeah,” he said, polishing his glasses on his shirt cuff. “But you’d be going under the protection of your own personal amulet. And it’s a damned good statement of condition for you right now. ‘Shit happens’ is an angry statement. It’s the closest you’ve come in nearly a year to admitting you’re pissed off. And now you’re proposing to go right up there into the teeth of the enemy and say it, even if you say it on your bumper. Excuse me; Mean’s bumper. Not bad, Darcy.”
“How many times do I have to tell you I’m not angry?” I said. “I’ve never once felt angry; what I’ve been feeling for more than two years is fear, plain and simple. I don’t know why you can’t understand that. Are shrinks afraid of fear?”
“You’re nothing if not angry,” he said. “And you should be. Anybody would be. If you could just once feel it and admit it, you’d have been out of here months ago. You’re mad at your mother, you’re mad at your father, you’re mad at that feckless jackass of an ex-fiancé of yours, you’re mad at yourself and the world, and you’re mad at the very place you’re about to go. If I could have found another place to take you for three months I’d have refused to consider this Retreat place, but I couldn’t, and the rules say you have to be in someone’s care for three months after release, and you’re ready to get out of here, even if you don’t think you are. Keeping you would be worse than sending you to your grandmother. You’re getting way too attached to this little demi-paradise. Incidentally, you’re mad at your grandmother too. So, all in all, confronting everything at once may not be as bad as I thought at first. At least you’re ready to admit how you feel via bumper sticker, if not head on.”
“Why do you think I’m mad at Grammaude?” I asked, and realized that this was the first time in nearly twelve years I had called her by that childhood name. He noticed it too, and I flushed with annoyance.
“For not protecting you that last summer,” he said. “What else? You were only seventeen years old. She should have done better by you.”
“She tried,” I said, surprising myself profoundly. I had not remembered that my grandmother had tried to stay my course that summer in all the years since. I had thought of her little at all. “She didn’t know I was sleeping with him,” I added softly.
“Did she not?” the shrink said. “I think she did. How could she not? Okay, Darcy. I approve. I’ll okay the car. Go on up there and tell her how you feel. Think about it on the way. Get it straight in your mind, once and for all, and tell her. You won’t really start to heal until you do. And may the shit be with you.”
And he grinned, the full, sweet child’s grin that I saw infrequently and loved, and I hugged him, and on the duly appointed day I said goodbye to Mean and the few other people who meant something to me, loaded the Pontiac, and rolled out of the Peachwood driveway in the sunshine of a hot June day, my purse full of Xanax and SHIT HAPPENS riding with me, as my shrink had said, with all the power of an ancient clan amulet. And the first day was good.
But on the evening of the second day, as I pulled into the Holiday Inn I had chosen just outside New Haven, I saw that something dark and as impervious to fingernails and even a metal nail file as Krazy Glue had splashed over the bumper sticker so that it read, IT HAPPENS, and my well-being vanished in an instant. IT HAPPENS was not the same thing at all, not at all. IT HAPPENS was a sort of powerless mental shrug, a free-faller’s fatalism. I had spent two years trying to pull myself out of free-fall. I went into my room and ordered a hamburger and a martini for dinner and took three Xanaxes before the nibbling edge of the terror shrank back. Before I did, I counted out my remaining Xanaxes on the bedspread. Enough to last, at this rate, for ten days instead of the thirty I had bargained on. I knew my shrink would send me another prescription, but not until this one had been taken as directed. Twenty days in R
etreat without either my drug or my SHIT. Well, then, I would just have to find a way to get more of the former. I should be able to convince some country doctor I needed Xanax. Providing, of course, any doctor on Cape Rosier would have heard of it.
Either that or I could die. It was not that I had not thought of it before.
It was three o’clock in the morning before the lonely, swishing hum of the passing big rigs faded, and I slept.
It is about an eight-hour drive from New Haven to Retreat. I left at six, my eyes grainy with fatigue, the Xanax humming in my blood like music. The familiar hammering of my heart was not so pronounced at first, but after I left I-95 in Boston and picked up old U.S. 1, which snakes its way up the entire coast of Maine, it began to pound once more. With each passing mile, each glimpse of harbor and village and weathered gray shingle, each breath of pine and salt, each wedge of pure June-blue sea and sky, the fear carved out another inch of conquered territory, so that by the time I reached the Camden Hills I was dry-mouthed and light-headed with it. I took another pill with my Wendy’s lunch in Rockport, and another when I reached Orland and turned south on 15, toward Cape Rosier and Retreat. Always before, when the fear was at its worst, it shut off outside sensation and perception like a petcock, but now color and fragrance and sights and sounds and resonances dove at me like sharp-beaked birds.
“Expect more of the panic attacks, and maybe worse, before they ease off completely,” my shrink had told me. “Panic disorder doesn’t ever just roll over and give up. It’ll come back for a sneak attack or two or three. And you’re going back to a place where there’s a trigger every half mile. You’re in charge now, though; remember that, even when it feels as if you aren’t. Now you know you can just wait them out, and when they’re over you’ll still be you on the other side of them. You know that. You didn’t before; that’s the difference. And you can always call me if it gets too bad.”
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