The Lavender Hour

by Anne Leclaire

  After a few minutes, I got up and began to prowl the house, searching for clues. There was a flight of stairs at the far end of the living room that led to a second floor. In the weeks I had been coming to the house, I had never had cause to go up there. The first few risers creaked, but I found if I stepped on the edges close to the wall, I made no noise, probably a needless precaution. The way the television was blaring, he couldn't hear a herd of bison storming through. Upstairs, a narrow hall opened onto two bedrooms. The first held a set of twin beds. A woman's sweater over the arm of a chair and a robe folded at the head of the bed marked this as the room Nona was using. The second held a large bed but little else, so barren it might have housed a monk. Even with nothing in sight to suggest it, I knew this was Luke's. In the closet, there were more empty hangers than garments. Two pairs of blue jeans, a half dozen flannel shirts, three short-sleeve cotton ones, one pair of chinos. Shoved in the back was a dark gray suit that looked as if it had had little use. A pair of brown loafers on the floor.

  I heard a car door slam out in the drive and made it back down the stairs just as Nona came up the front steps.

  “HOW WAS the service?” I asked. My voice was steady, although my heart was pounding. Had I remembered to close the closet door?

  “There was a new minister,” Nona said. “A woman. Personally I prefer a man up in the pulpit.” She nodded toward Luke's door. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Someone named Rich phoned. He said he'd be by later in the week to pick up your trash. And Paige stopped by.” I might have told her then about leaving Luke alone while I ran his errand, but before I could, Nona interrupted.

  “How was she?”

  “Paige?”

  “Yes. Was she high?”

  “Not so I could tell,” I said.

  “I don't like her coming here when she's high. She's tough enough to deal with when she's cold sober. Like her mother, that one.”

  The moment to tell Nona that I'd left Luke alone passed. Well, there was nothing to tell, really. I had only been gone a few minutes. He was fine. He was fine, and we were finally talking.

  BY THE time I pulled up at Faye's later that afternoon, the sun had broken through. Her house was at the end of the street on a bluff overlooking the sound. A wide veranda flanked the east and south sides. A week before, rushing the season, Faye had set out wicker rockers, and now they swayed in the breeze.

  Inside, the house was filled with the scent of roasting chicken. She had pulled a small drop-leaf table out to the glassed-in porch. “I thought we'd eat out here,” she said. A mass of purple hyacinths sat on a side table, spilling their fragrance into the room, a bunch so large, I couldn't have contained it in my arms. Thrifty in most ways, Faye splurged on cut flowers throughout the winter. An extravagance her soul demanded, she explained to me.

  “Shall we have sherry?” Faye had changed from her usual sweats to a long skirt in a faded blue, a concession to the holiday. I admired the way she crossed the room. In spite of her size, she still moved like the dancer she had been in her youth.

  “I met Luke today,” I said, accepting the glass.

  Faye's eyes widened in surprise.

  “He asked me to get him some Coke.” I didn't mention the Win-stons or the fact that I'd had to leave the house to get the soda.

  “And?”

  “And we exchanged about five sentences. Then he more or less threw me out.”

  “Good,” Faye said.

  “Good?”

  “It's a start.”

  “I guess so. At least I got to meet him.” I sipped the wine.

  “And to talk,” Faye said.

  “Well, let's not get carried away here,” I said, laughing. “It wasn't exactly a 'Let's be friends' kind of conversation.”

  “Give him time.”

  I swallowed. “How much does he have?”

  “Time?”

  I nodded. “He looks terrible.”

  “He's not dying any faster than anyone else in this life. This second is all we have.”

  “You know what I mean, Faye.”

  “The one thing I know is that you can never tell how long someone has.”

  “You must have some idea,” I pressed. “I mean, what are we talking about? Weeks? Months?”

  “Yes,” Faye said.

  I stared. “What?”

  Faye returned the gaze. “Yes,” she said again.

  I waited, wanting more. Out on the sound, a single gull curved in and landed on the jetty in front of her house.

  Faye sipped the sherry. “The truth is,” she said after a few minutes, “patients you would swear wouldn't last an hour live on for weeks, and others who you would think still have a great deal of time slip away overnight. A person's will plays a part in it. Sometimes a patient hangs on, waiting for one particular day that holds importance for him. A holiday or an anniversary. A birthday.”

  “But usually you have some idea, right?”

  She nodded. “Sometimes. But the only thing I can tell you with certainty is that every death is different.”

  “Really?” How many different kinds of death could there be?

  “Each death is as unique as the person who is dying. Just like each life is different.”

  “If you had to guess, how long do you think Luke has?”

  Faye poured us more wine. Out on the jetty, a second seagull joined the first. “Best guess?”

  “Yes.” I held my breath.

  “He won't last through summer.”

  The words sat in my heart hard as a polished stone. My earlier good mood deflated as quickly as it had come.

  seven

  ASHLEY PHONED LATER that night, just as I was getting ready for bed.

  “We missed you today,” she said.

  “I missed you, too.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Faye asked me over for dinner.”

  “That was nice of her,” Ashley said, almost concealing the edge in her voice. Earlier in the winter, she had asked me why I didn't find a friend closer to my own age. I thought she was absurdly suspicious of Faye's motives in nurturing our friendship, in arranging for me to volunteer. Ashley thought that my work with hospice was a mistake, that it would be too depressing for me, given my own experience. “Does she want to adopt you or what?” she once asked.

  “How was your Easter?” I said. “Was it weird not to be at Mama's?”

  “You talked with her?”

  “Yesterday. She made it sound like all those years of Easter brunch were pure torture.”

  “Yeah, that's what she said to me, too.” Ashley's sigh traveled over the wire. “I thought the boys would miss the egg hunt, but the truth is, I think I missed it more than they did.”

  “So do you think this sailing thing is actually going to happen?”

  “You mean across the Atlantic?”

  “Yes.”

  “I doubt it. I think it is just a fantasy that will pass.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  Ashley laughed. “Remember the one time Daddy talked her into going camping?”

  “God,” I said, remembering how Lily had left the campsite in the middle of the night and checked into a hotel. If it doesn't have hot running water and a king-size bed, I don't want to be there, she'd said when she returned home the next day.

  “I rest my case,” Ashley said.

  “I wish I shared your confidence in the matter.”

  “Can we put this conversation on hold for a minute?” she said. “I've got two nephews here who want to wish their favorite aunt happy Easter.”

  “At this hour? Aren't they in bed?”

  “I'll be lucky if they fall asleep by midnight. Total sugar high, both of them.”

  Jeffrey got on the phone first. “Hey, Auntie Jess. Guess what?”

  “What?” I closed my eyes, pictured his face. The last time I'd seen him, he was just beginning to lose his baby fat.

  “Our dad took us to a
farm this afternoon. There were baby lambs.”

  “Baby lambs?”

  There was a commotion on his end of the wire. “It is so my turn,” Jeffrey yelled. “Mom said I could go first.”

  Another commotion, and then John was on the phone. “Hi, Auntie Jess.” In the background, Jeffrey wailed.

  “Hi, John.”You weren't supposed to have favorites, but John held a special spot in my heart, partly because I'd been present at his birth, but also because I'd felt protective of him after his brother was born. Ashley babied Jeffrey. She expected more from John because he was older.

  “I wanted to tell you about the lambs.”

  “Well, you can tell me, too.”

  Eventually, after he'd delivered a blow-by-blow account of the day—from every kind of candy in his Easter basket to what they'd seen on the farm—he handed the phone over to Ashley.

  “Still want to get married and have kids?” she asked. She sounded exhausted.

  “I'd be content to start with the marriage part.”

  “So what's the score on that?”

  I could see Ashley settling in for a long conversation. “Hold on,” I said. “Let me get a drink before we get into this.”

  “So have you been dating?”Ashley asked when I returned, fortified with a glass of pinot.

  “Not recently.”

  “You're kidding.”

  “Sadly, I'm not,” I said, and took a drink.

  “What? Aren't there any men up there?”

  “Not if you eliminate the retirees and the ones already taken.”

  Ashley laughed.

  “I'm not joking.”

  “This doesn't sound like you at all,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know you, Jess. In town by seven and in love by eleven.”

  “Yeah, well, not this time around.”

  “You know what you should do?”

  “What's that?” I swear, I thought, one word out of her mouth about how I should get myself a computer and sign up for an online dating service and I'm hanging up.

  “Move to Anchorage,” Ashley said.

  “Anchorage? As in Alaska?”

  “Is there any other?”

  “I'm not dating and that's your solution? Alaska. Thanks.”

  “Think about it.” Ashley was using her let's-get-down-to-business voice.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You're joking, right?”

  “I'm absolutely serious.”

  “Okay, so it's a little slim on the dating scene, but somehow I don't think relocating to Alaska is the answer.”

  “Did you know men outnumber women four to one there? I heard it on Oprah.”

  “I'll keep it in mind.”

  “Seriously,” Ashley said, “four to one.”

  “Yeah, well I don't think ratio is the problem.”

  “What is?”

  I didn't want to get into this, especially with my older sister, Miss Happily Married with Two Kids and All the Answers. “Forget it.”

  “No,” Ashley said. “I want to know. Really, Jess.”

  I recognized the tone in Ashley's voice. She wasn't about to be put off. “I don't know. Maybe I'm not good at it. Look at Steve,” I said. “Would you be happier if I'd stayed with him?”

  “Honestly?”

  By all means, let's be honest.

  “I don't think you gave him a chance,” Ashley continued.

  “A chance? You're kidding. I mean there was a relationship that overstayed its natural life. It shouldn't have lasted longer than a moan.”

  “He was good to you.”

  “You mean he was the only man in Richmond who wasn't freaked out of his skull because I'd had the big C.”

  Ashley sighed. “I liked him.”

  “You always like the men I break up with.”

  “You don't break up with guys, Jessie. You leave town. Mama thinks that—”

  It infuriated me to think Ashley and Lily had been discussing me. “Listen,” I said. “It's possible to be perfectly happy without being tethered to a mate. Did you ever think that maybe some people aren't meant to be married?”

  “Okay. Forget I said anything.”

  “I just don't like being defined by what's missing.”

  The sound of mayhem rose on the other end of the wire. “Listen,” my sister said, “I gotta run. The boys are at each other's throats.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I love you, sweetie. You know that. I only want what's best for you.”

  “Me, too,” I said, although I knew we'd never stop wanting different things. I hung up and finished the wine, then—thinking what the hell, it's cheaper than a move to Alaska—I poured another glass.

  LATER THAN night, while brushing my teeth, I stared at myself in the mirror, trying to see myself through the eyes of a man. Specifically, I wondered what Luke had thought when he looked at me. As Nona had apparently told Rich, my posture was fine, thanks to constant nagging on my mama's part during my teen years. And my hair was an asset. It was a deep shade of copper that most people believed was tinted. Once I compared it to a swatch in a drugstore hair-coloring display. Standing there, I'd been mesmerized by the infinite number and rich lexicon of shades. Honey, platinum, ash, straw, champagne, linen, almond—and these were just the blonds. The closest I'd found to my own was a shade called gingerbread.

  I had never been tempted to alter my hair color. I knew the damage the processing could do. I'd read somewhere that Jean Harlow bleached her hair with a mixture of peroxide, household bleach, soap flakes, and ammonia until it fell out. In Renaissance Venice, they used to use horse urine to bleach hair. In ancient Rome, they used pigeon dung. No thank you to any of it.

  So, posture and hair: a plus.

  I continued the scrutiny of my face. Unless you were looking for it or I was fatigued, you couldn't detect the asymmetry around my eyes, how when I was overtired, my left eye drooped a bit. My complexion was good—if you didn't mind freckles—but faint lines fanned out from the corners of my eyes. Already. At thirty-two. All those years of mindless tanning before we knew better. Still, feature by feature, there was nothing exactly wrong. I wasn't plain, but I wasn't beautiful either. When I was at the Art Institute, a French exchange student I'd dated briefly told me I looked American. When I'd asked him what that meant, he'd said, “Good teeth.” I'd felt like a horse.

  I changed into pajamas and climbed into bed, wondering what kind of woman Luke liked. Tall and built, judging by the photo of the brunette in the bikini. I found myself again wondering why he had gotten divorced. I wondered what his favorite food was. Wondered if he had been an imaginative lover. Had been. Past tense. I wondered if he was afraid of dying. I remembered when I'd first begun radiation, one of the other patients I'd gotten to know asked me if I was afraid of death. No, I'd said. It wasn't death I feared but the process of dying. The deterioration of mind and body. That was why, when I was sick, I couldn't stand to watch a plant wither and die. I still couldn't. If I got flowers, I tried to throw them out right before they started wilting.

  It was late, but I couldn't drop off. My mind was restless, ruminating on Lily and then Ashley and then Luke. Lately my insomnia had returned, and I wondered if I needed to get back on Xanax. It had seen me through some rough times in the past five years. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of a quicksilver fish fighting its way upstream to spawn. In the dream, even knowing it was forbidden, I lifted the fish in my hands and carried it over the steps of the ladder to the millpond, where I released it and watched it disappear into the depths.

  eight

  IN ANOTHER ERA, hair workers were called spiders because they wove and crocheted and spun human hair into things of beauty. I never found this term demeaning. Sometimes, bent over my table, twisting and weaving human strands, I felt akin to the solitary arachnids whose filament webs were strung in corners of my cottage.

  Working with hair brought me to a nearly altered state. It was calming
, the way using your hands could be, and settled me. Better than the meditation my doctor had prescribed. When I sat at the braiding table and wove the strands into their intricate pattern, a deep serenity often settled over me. I knew I was part of a history and craft that spanned continents and centuries.

  Hair jewelry can be traced back not just to the Victorian age but even further, to the Middle Ages and as early as the Egyptians and in ninth-century Japan. I had read that, in the early 1800s, a town in Sweden had been famous for the hairwork done there. During years when the crops failed and there was a famine, whole families would leave the village and travel to other towns with their craft, thus sustaining all the residents of the town. Another curious fact I'd turned up in my research was that, in the 1853 Crystal Palace Exposition in London, there was a full tea set made entirely of hair. (I could only imagine what Lily would think of that.) I'd heard of an artist in Chicago who chopped hair into fine pieces and mixed it with pigment with which she painted.

  With the permanence, I liked the resiliency and surprising strength of hair. One single strand could support a three-ounce weight without breaking. Because it is nearly invisible and lasts a long time, conservators use it to mend textile art. Beyond these properties, I found hair wonderfully articulate, both uncivilized and raw, of a charged nature, and vital and connected to life. Once I'd examined a hair shaft under a microscope; it looked like the bark of an ancient tropical tree.

  TO BEGIN a piece, I sorted the hairs into equal lengths and tied the ends with packthread, which I then soaked in a solution of water and baking soda and boiled for about fifteen minutes. When it was dry, I divided the hair into strands of twenty or thirty each, knotted the strands, and fastened a lead weight to each. On the opposite end, I tied a sailor's knot using packthread and gummed with cement comprised of yellow wax and shellac. After these preparations, I was ready to begin.