“Darling, I really think you haven’t any choice, if you want a life.”
I looked off into the darkness beyond the circle of the candles’ guttering light.
“I can’t see ahead,” I whispered. “I can’t see what comes next. Only white, like on a broken TV set: snow. I can’t see.”
“Why do you have to?” she said, reaching over to touch my hand. “Why not just rest in the moment? It’s what Retreat is for, exactly that.”
“I have to know.”
“Nobody does, darling. That’s one of the other true things I know. Nobody knows what’s ahead.”
“How can they stand it?”
“By taking nothing for granted,” she said fiercely. “By being willing to dare anything, everything. And then…by letting it go. T. S. Eliot said it better than anybody: ‘Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to be still.’ ”
Later, after I had helped her back to the big bedroom and watched her smile at me and close the door, I went back and lay on the sofa before the dying fire. I knew I should get up and go upstairs to bed, but my head was spinning and the fire was hypnotic, and I was afraid I would lose the fragile envelope of white peace if I left it. I pulled the old Hudson Bay blanket that was always kept on the back of the sofa over me and lay in the fire-leaping darkness. I felt alone on the planet but somehow sealed in a cocoon of warmth and timelessness and nowhereness.
“I let you go,” I said to my mother and father into the darkness. “I do.”
Zoot came padding in sometime later and leaped softly onto the sofa and curled into my side, and I drifted, the fire whispering on one side of me, Zoot’s light steady breathing on the other.
“I let you go,” I whispered, and slept.
Chapter
Fifteen
The next morning, those two malignant ghosts were gone. I was sure of it, for the drumbeat of fear that had festered viruslike in my blood for the past two years was gone too. Not muted, not in abeyance, but gone. I sat on the edge of the sofa in the chilly room, staring at the dead ashes in the fireplace and testing deep breaths, and then I leaped to my feet and ran to the porch and put my head out the screen door and sucked salt-sweet, spruce-sharp air into my lungs until I felt my heart would burst with it. Only then did I realize that I had not dared draw deeply of the air of the world for many, many months. I could have wept, shouted, flown off the earth with the joy of it. There is no way to tell how the absence of fear feels to someone who has not known it for a long time, someone who has been sure they would never know it again.
The bay and sky shimmered with the satin blue of early morning, and the water lay as still as a mirror, misted off at the point where it washed Islesboro and Little Deer. I could not see all the way to North Haven and thought we would have weather of some sort later. Not, though, until twilight at least; that left all of this perfect day to run through the colony: down to the water, around to the yacht club, in and out of the birch thickets, up to the lips of the cliffs—everywhere I had run as a child, tasting it all once more, feeling once again its benison. I would look in on some of the cottages and see who was there; I would say hello to the people I had known before….
The fear smashed me like a breaking wave. I literally staggered back under it, and sat down on the edge of the chaise, and hugged myself, fighting for the breath that had come in deep drafts only a moment before. I put my head down on my knees and rocked, waiting it out. Waiting it out. I don’t think I ever felt so hopelessly certain—even in the hospital—that there was nothing ahead for me but death.
There is a certain smug conventional wisdom that says suicide is an act of supreme cowardice. Even the impulse to it, many say, shows a singular lack of character, of moral fiber, of plain old-fashioned gumption. Brave people don’t do that. We used to laugh grimly at that in the hospital. The bravest people I have ever known, I knew there: the ones who got themselves through another day without ending their lives. Don’t think it isn’t possible to kill yourself in a mental hospital. There are quite a few ways, and by the time you have been inside a month you’ve heard them all. They are just about the only gifts the patients have left to give one another. It is easier to stay alive there, though. You are surrounded by people who are doing it with you. Outside…outside is dangerous. I sat on the screened porch of Liberty in that tender morning and knew I was in grave peril of my life.
And then the monstrous fear began to ebb, and soon it had slunk back to its familiar post-hospital level: simmering but on low. If I took my Xanax, if I moved slowly and lightly and did not breathe deeply, I could manage this day. But only with someone beside me.
It is nearly impossible to explain, also, how terrible the anticipatory fear of the fear is: almost worse than the main event. It is this foreshock, which shimmers around you like the aura of a migraine before it begins, that drives you to seek company, to avoid being alone at all costs. In the company of people there is a sort of shadowy baffle between you and it. It will have to go through them to get to you. Before the hospital I used to spend whole days in a mall, or tagging after an exasperated Hank on weekends when he did errands and played golf or tennis. I even once invited a Jehovah’s Witness lady into my apartment and pantomimed fascination; she stayed for hours and came back many times, and such were my straits that I was always overjoyed to see her. She must have wondered where she had failed when at last she knocked and found me gone. I would have let anyone in, bought anything, in those days.
Now I hauled myself up off the chaise and padded in to wake Grammaude. My shrink had said it might come back; well, here it was, and I would see it out, but I would do it in company. It was, after all, the deal: I would wait it out in Retreat, and Grammaude would provide the company.
I heard her coughing before I reached her door and knew she was awake, but when I came near I saw she had taped a message to the closed door. Darling, it read, I’m going to have a day in bed. The wages of sin. Can you manage? Food in fridge. And it was signed MGC.
I stood outside her door taking careful breaths, eyes closed, struggling not to wrench the door open and go in and beg her to stay with me. And then I got a pencil out of the old Royal Copenhagen mug that stood beside the telephone and wrote beneath her initials, Booze is the answer. I’ll see you at dinner. I signed it DCO and went downstairs and dressed and forced myself out into the day.
I decided on the shingle beach in front of the Little House where my aunt and uncle summered. Grammaude had said they were going to Bar Harbor this morning; that meant a full day, I remembered. And my older cousins were not in Retreat this summer. I don’t think they came often; girls who married out of the colony usually did not. I would probably have at least a part of the beach to myself. I could watch people that way, and dash into their midst if I had to, but unless things got too bad I could be apart from them too. It was no morning to meet the colony.
I sat on the top step of the Little House and watched brown children playing in the cold shallows. Like children in my time here, they had a sameness about them: square, towheaded, possessed already of long faces and definite chins, dressed in faded, unfashionable bathing suits with Yaycamp T-shirts over them against the bite of the sun. I could almost see my mother and my Uncle Petie among them, and my older brother, the legendary Sean. Even, if I stretched it, small Mike Willis and myself. When I first came to Retreat, according to Grammaude, I was laughing and fearless and gregarious, the darling of the colony. That was in the days before my remembrance began, before the disappearances of my mother came too often and lasted too long, before the screaming and the slaps and tears and rages started in earnest when she was home, before my father began to go to other cities and then other states “for interviews” and not return. Before the trickle of coarse, middle-aged Irish “companions” for me became a steady stream; before the green-walled, linoleum-floored convent boarding schools that taught me guilt and self-disgust and patience. A very long time ago indeed.
My own child would be here no
w, if I’d amounted to anything, I thought, and realized that no matter how bitterly I had come to hate this place later, I would still, if I could, give my child the gift of Retreat summers. There was still, despite everything, a quality of timelessness and indelibility on this beach. It would be a powerful amulet for a child.
Then why had it failed me? Or had I failed it?
A tiny child, smaller than the rest, tagged after the larger children as they sprinted up the beach after their bored teenage au pair. At least that had changed; in my day it had been nannies or doting grandmothers. For me, it had usually been Grammaude. The older children looked back and laughed at the small one, and she sat down on the pebbles and wept bitterly, until the impatient girl came back and scooped her up, chiding her. The sting of tears surprised me.
That’s me, I thought.
And it was me: the child I could remember, at any rate. By that time I was not a popular child in Retreat. Not like the small spawn of the families who had summered there for generations. Oh, there were the Boston Chamblisses on one side of me, but one had only to look at my fiery hair and listen to my novenathickened speech to realize what was on the other side. And the children knew it and, unlike their elders, were not slow to tax me with it. Over my furious little head the raffish shade of my mad mother, Happy, hovered, and the loud Irish presence of my father, Tommy; and there was still the pale ghost of my Uncle Petie’s dead baby, for the colony still talked of that at their dinner tables all these years later, and their children talked of it with alacrity to me. The weight of all those specters was too much for me. Volatile by nature, I became fierce and truculent; I got into fights and blacked aristocratic blue eyes and blooded aristocratic small noses when some child called me the grease monkey’s daughter or pointed out that my mother slept with anybody at all, and spent half her time in the crazy house, and had just the past winter tried to kill herself by cutting her wrists with the night nurse’s nail scissors.
I swore too, with a proficiency that only my mother could match and from whom I had learned it, and was given to long spells when I simply vanished into the woods or sneaked out in my older cousins’ Beetle Cat and could not be found for hours. The wildness and the solitude of Cape Rosier were its earliest and best gifts to me, and I went out into them like a wild thing and stayed until someone hunted me down. It was usually Grammaude.
I was a born tomboy; by the time I was six I could swim like a fish and was learning to sail like a native child under the tutelage of old Micah Willis, and there was not a tree in the colony I had not climbed, not a slanting roof, or a rock, or a cliff. I sassed old ladies who were syrupy to me, ignored old gentlemen who were debonair and charming, would not pass canapes at parties or go to square dances at the yacht club or wear anything but blue jeans. I was the only child in colony memory who hated Yaycamp. The children thought I was queer and unfeminine and common, and the adults thought the same, and in time it was decided that my manners, despite the best efforts of my grandmother, were nothing they wanted their offspring to emulate. If it had not been for Grammaude, who seemed simply not to notice that there was anything wrong with me or to hear any of the talk about me, and for Mike Willis, I would have spent all my time alone.
But there was Grammaude. And there was Mike.
I am told that I played with him the entire summer that I first came to Retreat; that even though he was almost four and I was not quite one and a half, we were instantly and almost uncannily inseparable. I don’t remember that summer at Retreat, of course. But I remember the next one—or at least I remember one incident from it.
It was two summers before I came to Retreat again; my grandmother did not come the summer after my first one, and the next summer my mother was spending her last long stay at home and was savagely and crazily protective of me, letting no one near. So I was four and a half when I came the next time. After that, I never missed a summer again until the last one, when I was seventeen.
At four and a half, a child remembers the things that divide its life. What I remember is Mike Willis.
I think it must have been the first day he came to Liberty with his mother, Beth, who had taken care of me that first summer and had been persuaded by Grammaude to do it again. As he had that first summer, her son Mike came with her. She was always rather protective of him. It was far too early for him to help out in the family boatyard, and there was no one else to leave him with. Having him at Liberty was no problem; Grammaude always loved Mike. She has told me over and over that on the morning when he and Beth came into the kitchen, I looked up from my cereal and grinned as though I had seen him only the day before and said, “Where you been?”
I don’t remember that. But I remember something else. I remember something about the day that puzzled me; I could not figure it out, and then, at the end, when Grammaude was reading to us from The Jungle Book and his mother called to him that it was time to go home, I said, “Why are you going home with that lady?”
“I have to. She’s my mother,” he said.
“No, she’s not either,” I said, troubled and uneasy.
“Well, she is too. Who else would she be?” Mike said.
“I don’t know. But if she’s your mother, where does she go?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, go. Mothers go away. Where does yours go?”
“She doesn’t go nowhere,” Mike said, scowling. “She just comes here and goes home, and I go with her.”
“Well, then, where does your daddy go?”
“What’s the matter with you? He goes down to the boatyard and then comes home,” he said.
I began to cry. “You lie,” I sobbed. “You lie. They go away!”
My grandmother reached down and gathered me into her arms, and through my tears I saw Beth Willis lean down and whisper something to Mike, and he came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder, tentatively.
“I ain’t gon’ go off and leave you this summer,” he said gruffly. “I’ll come every day, if you want me to.”
“I don’t,” I sobbed. “I hate you, and I don’t want you to come over here any more.”
But I did want him to come. And he did, most days after that, for the entire summer, and all the summers that came afterward. From the very beginning, Mike Willis was with me. He even went into exile with me. If it cost him much, I never knew it.
He was not an outcast when I first remember him. He was a tough, cheerful, sweet-tempered little boy with a wide, gap-toothed white grin and his father and grandfather’s crow-black hair—like theirs, usually in his eyes. He did not boast or show off, but something about him drew the eye and commanded attention. I think it was his sheer competence and his innate self-confidence. Mike could do almost anything with his hands, play any sport, outswim and outsail even the older colony boys, hold his own in any fight. Even though he was a native—and that still mattered in Retreat then, and probably still does now—he was something of a leader for the young people. He was a native but with a difference: his grandfather was the confidant of one of the colony’s acknowledged doyennes, Maude Chambliss, and his father was not only a member of the yacht club but had been commandant only a year before. The Willises were village, but they were different too. I always heard that they had been thick with the Chamblisses since my grandmother and grandfather were young. It had something to do with the formidable old woman who had been my great-grandmother, but I could never remember what.
So Mike Willis was not, before I came back to Retreat, a pariah. He chose that role himself, and he did it for and with me, and I remember well the summer that he did it. Indeed, I remember the day and almost the hour.
I was seven that summer and he was nearing ten. He had watched my steady descent into disreputability with an equanimity uncommon for a boy his age, championing me when I got myself in too deep, consoling me gruffly and matter-of-factly when I was hurt or angry, spending more and more time with me alone because I refused to stay around the others on the beach or at t
he yacht club. But still, the other children flocked around him like chattering birds when he would let them, and on this day we were the center of a small flock, he and I, sitting on the dock of the Willises’ boatyard in sweaters and long pants because of the chill fog that had becalmed that morning’s Beetle Cat regatta. All of us were restive and cranky because of that and were playing a desultory game of mumblety-peg, strictly forbidden by all adults we knew, on the soft silvery wood of the dock, simply because Mike’s father had gone to Ellsworth and his Grandfather Micah was inside caulking a Winslow dinghy. I thought sourly that there were too many Winslows in the colony; there were three in this group around Mike, and I liked none of them. They were handsome, autocratic, and uniformly mean.
One of them, Gretchen, named for her grandmother, who was keeping her that summer, cut her slanting green eyes at Mike Willis and said, “Let’s cut our wrists and be blood brothers and sisters. I bet you’re scared to do it, Mike Willis.”
She was a year older than he, but she followed him everywhere that summer with those eyes. I saw her do it; I watched her all summer, watching him.
“Not,” Mike said, deftly flipping the pocket knife off his ear and into the wood, where it quivered upright.
“Are,” Gretchen said.
“Not,” Mike said, and pulled the knife out of the deck and made a swift, deepish cut in the little blue delta of veins in his brown wrist. Blood welled up and spilled over, spattering on the gray wood. My stomach heaved and my head spun, but I did not look away. The others gasped and murmured, and Gretchen Winslow gave a little shriek of surprise. Mike stared at her levelly.
After that, of course, all of them cut their wrists. No one would dare not, after Mike had. Most only scratched the skin enough to produce a beading of blood with much squeezing, but everybody did it. Then Mike handed the knife to me.
“Want me to do it, or you want to do it?” he said.
Colony Page 45
