Dr. Diamante looked down at Cam, lying unmoving in the bed.
“It won’t be long now,” he said to Hy on the way out. For a moment she felt a trill of hope. Then his words and eyes came into focus—sad cow eyes. Cam is dying. Soon Parker would have to make a decision about what would happen to his daughter. If he’d been asked, in his despair he might have told them to pull the plug. Hy began to pray again—not for life, but death, thinking of the killers who had put Cam here.
Let them die on the wind.
She began the mantra again.
When he finished writing, Parker went upstairs. From the armoire he pulled out a red leather case. He opened it and put his hand on the ivory handle of a woman’s gun patterned after the “tiny little gun” made famous by Nancy Reagan. His grandmother followed the First Lady in fashion, including accessories, and had commissioned this gun to be custom-made. There was only one silver bullet remaining. The others had landed up in the wall of her bedroom when his grandfather had come home late one night. She’d said she’d thought he was an intruder. In a way, he was. They’d rarely shared a bed. The bullets had made sure they never did again, as surely as if they’d hit their target.
Parker loaded the single remaining bullet. Downstairs, Jasmine started shrieking. She’d been stuck under the cover since the night before. The wind had been howling around the house and she had taken up its sound—moaning and flapping her wings, biting at her cage, squawking: “Help! Help!” To quiet her, Parker uncovered and unlocked the cage and she flapped past him, frenzied, flying around and around the room. It was lucky he was saving the last bullet for himself, or he might have shot her.
The Zodiac had lodged on the sandspit overnight. Bill and Wendell had sheltered under a tarp that kept flapping in the wind and letting the rain in. They were soaking, limp with lack of strength, unable, when the crashing surf loosened the boat from its perch, to prevent it from being sucked out to sea. It rounded the end of the spit—in full view of The Crustacean, but was swept along on a current that carried it well offshore as the peak of the storm hit.
It did so with a fury few had experienced before. Harold MacLean had predicted it.
“’Spect it’ll rain hard,” he said when he’d looked out of his window that morning. For once, he was right. It rained and rained.
“The heavens have opened,” said Gus, looking out later on the black day. The wind and the rain reached a pitch, in perfect harmony, producing what would forever after be known as the May Gale, the term generally reserved for nasty storms in August.
Gus took to her purple chair, handbag and coat at the ready as the gale blasted the tiny island. The houses creaked and swayed. The surf swept across the causeway. The waves whipped halfway up the cape and the cathedral windows of Parker’s house were soon coated in salt spray. On the shore, the sand scoured the beach and rolled up in a cloud of stinging particles, the rain slicing sideways.
Furiously, the wind beat around The A. It sounded like a train thundering through the house, or a 747 landing on the roof. The cathedral windows rattled and it would not take much imagination to see them shatter at the next big blast. The earth groaned in agony beneath Parker.
“O sole mio…”
Pavarotti’s voice, emanating at peak volume from Parker’s Bang and Olufson stereo system, dueled with the forces of nature, rose above the wind, then dipped down below it, and then rose again with such power it was, at times, difficult to tell which was the storm and which was the tenor.
Hawthorne Parker was dancing. Something he had only ever done with a partner, the odd sedate waltz. Never this kind of dancing. His wide grin looked crazed on a face that rarely smiled. The gleam in his eyes spoke, not of joy, but of despair. It was molting season—and he had shed his carapace—all his raw emotions and regrets drove him to dance, all his desire riding on the mounting music.
He whirled around in circles until he was dizzy. He faltered, fell back, and dashed the Ming dynasty porcelain cat off its pedestal. It smashed in hundreds of tiny pieces, skittering across the floor. Feeling only a small stab of pain at the loss of this most precious artifact, Parker stepped on a piece and crushed it. He kept on dancing, as if he’d accidentally smashed an ashtray.
“O sole mio…”
There was a deafening creak, like someone taking a giant crowbar to the roof. He looked up at the beams that didn’t quite fit. Let it go, he thought. Bring it down. Let it collapse and crush me, and everything in it. There was nothing precious here.
Hy was cocooned from the weather in the shelter of the modern hospital, her attention focused on Cam. As Parker danced his dance of death, Cam fought for her life. Hy had become better at lying. When a new overnight security guard—Tom his badge read—had questioned Hy’s right to be there, she’d said with conviction: “She’s my sister.” That’s what it felt like. When Tom didn’t budge, she stared him down. “She’s dying.” The word caught in her throat, but it made Tom back off. Another lie, she told herself.
Please, let it be a lie.
The hospital lights had dimmed along with the daytime bustle and the halls outside the room had that peculiar hushed sound, layered by artificial hospital silence, the buzz of fluorescent lights, accompanied by various machines punctuating the night with their life-sustaining beeps and hisses. She fell asleep sitting in the chair, still holding onto Cam’s hand as the storm raged outside and Cam waged her battle inside.
Parker launched an attack on his treasures. It started with small things—the crystal glasses in the cabinet Harold MacLean had made out of vintage doors and new pine wood. One by one by one, he picked them up and smashed them to the floor in rhythm with the music, their shattering lost on the rising crescendo.
He danced around the couch, slapped the penis-shaped sculpture to the floor.
Nothing.
Picked up an Aztec water jug and smashed it to the ground.
Nothing.
He swept three primitive hand-built African bowls off the shelf.
Nothing.
They meant nothing to him.
It was over.
She was gone and had never been his.
He was gone—the worst mistake of his life.
“O sole…o sole mio…”
He became someone else. I’m the conductor. He commanded the music with bold strokes of his arms, small flicking gestures of his hands and fingers. He became Pavarotti. He sang out loud with his thin, reedy, untrained voice, as insignificant as the shattering glasses. It could not be heard, even in his own ears, above the crashing sound coming from the speakers and the thundering storm.
Jasmine, thrilled by the sounds, but unable to compete, had flown up to the very peak of the A-frame, where rain was coming through the fault in the beams.
He became the storm. As wild as it was, so was he. With each streak of lightning, his arms raised to heaven; with each crash of thunder they came down, down, slicing through the air; he glided on the whistle of the wind, around and around the room.
Free. He was free—for the first and last time.
He smacked an Indonesian fertility god off its pedestal.
Then a Sevres porcelain plate.
A Limoges jardiniere.
A Faberge egg.
Venus.
She broke in two, head and torso split, when she hit the floor.
Hy was down in the dream again. The child, bobbing on the water, the dark, the flashing light—the images were all the same, but the fear was gone. No longer sizzling through her, vibrating her awake into paralyzing terror. She was floating over the fear, sheltered in a warm, safe place that allowed her to come softly awake.
Saved.
The word was on her mind as she came up out of the dream.
Saved.
She had, after all, been saved. Twice now. Saved.
She woke, not to terror, bu
t to aching bones, joints and muscles. She hurt everywhere. Every part of her body was stiff or cramped or hot with the pain of sleeping in a hard hospital chair. She let go of Cam’s hand and stood up like an old lady, unfolding herself slowly. She heard a low moan. She thought it came from herself, but she had made no sound. It had come from the bed. She buzzed for the nurse, and grabbed Cam’s hand again.
He was heedless of the movement of the earth below him, the shifting of the house. The first sounds were lost in the fury of the storm. One creak was concealed in the crash of lightning—another, hidden by the thunder. As the sounds of the earth and the house breaking apart built up, so, too, did the storm, until one was no longer distinguishable from the other, until it was all a whole: the storm, the lightning and the thunder, the howling wind and the rain slapping on the shuddering glass of the great windows; the creaking of the house, the moaning of the earth; the full, deep, rich, resonant voice of Pavarotti hitting the crescendo, then descending. In the final lingering strains of the ballad, Parker, too, was twirling and descending, slowing down, fading with the song.
A smashing bolt of lightning, a blinding white explosion, the house illuminated in one burst of sight and sound, and then—
Darkness.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Ed hustled Hy out of the room and called Doctor Diamante. He came quickly. Hy tried to follow him back into the room, but Ed stopped her with a firm hand on her shoulder—and good news.
“She’s awake.”
“Out of the coma?”
Ed nodded, once. “Awake,” he repeated, “but not out of the woods. We don’t know what she’ll be like. We don’t know if—”
Doctor Diamante came out, beaming. “A miracle,” he pronounced, crossing himself.
“Can I—?”
He shook his head. “Give her time. She’s weak, very weak. She needs to sleep.”
Wasn’t that what she’d been doing all this time?
Gus had sat through the storm in the big purple chair. She would later say she hadn’t slept a wink, but she had slept through most of the night, only waking to see if Abel had come into the kitchen to join her. He had not, and she had no idea where he was now. She woke up feeling stiff, hardly able to move. She looked out of the window. The sky was clearing, the wind pushing out the last gloomy clouds, threads of wispy grey reluctance trailing behind them, the sun laying delicate fingers of light on the day. The provincial flag flapped crisply on the pole outside the Hall, showing tatters already and up only a month. She looked at the clock.
My Godfrey! It was gone eight. She had slept in—in this awful chair.
The phone rang. It was Estelle, crowing. “Have you looked out your back window, Gus?”
To her chagrin, Gus had not.
When she did look, she was shocked, not so much by what she saw, as what she didn’t see. Hawthorne Parker’s A-Frame had disappeared. Gone. With the wind, she couldn’t help thinking. A stream of cars was bumping up the corduroy road to the cape. The villagers were stopping their cars well back from the newly carved edge, nodding “I told you so,” as they looked alternately at each other and down at the damage. The v-shaped piece of land had separated from the rest of the cape and Parker’s house had gone sliding down into the yawning hole created by its collapse. It lay, pulverized—a scene of devastation everyone had long expected, but that was even more spectacular than they could have imagined.
One whole section of the roof seemed to be clinging to the raw exposed cape, the bottom of it buckled into the debris of the house below it. The other major section of the roof was propped up, in part, by the frame of the once majestic cathedral windows, their glass shattered and jagged, thrusting up into the sky out of the skeleton of the house, a jumble of smashed drywall, broken pieces of plywood, beams and joists full of nails, the ugly underpinnings of what had once been a thing of beauty.
A ruin.
Like all ruins, it contained treasures—cracked, broken and buried, some of them soon unearthed, others hidden for years, even centuries, under the shattered dreams—Parker’s dreams. The dreams of the people who’d built the house in this precarious place, on land that had never been lucky for anyone—not the settlers who had brutalized their bodies to clear it nor the unsuccessful farmers who followed. All built on sand where Harold MacLean, he of few words, said: “A rabbit would have starved.”
The toilet, couch and coffee table had been tossed out onto the beach, where they made an unusual three-piece suite, all three having landed completely upright, as if carefully placed there. The king-size box spring had been tossed out of the collapsing house as well and came down, upended, leaning on part of the roof. Underneath the tent-like shelter was Jasmine’s cage. She was in it. She had flown through the aperture at the peak of the house, just as it had shattered in two. She’d found her cage when the debris settled, squeezed into it and stayed there, her head tucked into a wing, hiding.
“Bound to happen.” She’d heard it said so many times she began to memorize its cadence, and to mentally mimic the sombre tone in which it was stated. The villagers would have been gleeful if it hadn’t been tragic. Few doubted that Hawthorne Parker would be found alive under the rubble.
A search and rescue team was just setting out. Jane Jamieson was off-duty but preparing to return to The Shores. She felt a kind of ownership of the sequence of events there. She told herself her interest was strictly professional.
“You can see why I thought it was her, why I assumed they were married.” Hy was pointing at the black and white photo, the honeymoon picture of Parker and Cam’s mother that Ian held in his hands.
“She looks exactly like Cam,” he said.
“Exactly. Just the eyes, a bit different in the eyes.” A different colour? With black and white, it was hard to tell.
He handed the photo back to her. “Her name was Claire.”
“How did you find out about her? About Cam? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Various genealogical sites. I was just poking around when, there it was. Camilla was registered as Parker’s daughter. I never got a chance to tell you. You were out on the water.”
Ian had returned to the hospital with Cam’s things late the previous evening and had been stranded there by the storm. The ferry was off its run.
Hy had not been allowed to see Cam after she had showed signs of life, but medical personnel had been in and out of the room all night. She didn’t know whether that was good or bad. Someone from admissions—a Moira Toombs look-alike, scrawny, tight-faced and impeccably groomed, had just been to ask for Cam’s Medicare card. Hy had stalled her, saying she needed to look through her belongings, and had begun to root around, guilt-free, in Cam’s knapsack. She’d pulled out the photo and showed it to Ian. She found a key to the vanity and opened it. A pile of DVDs, laptop battery and a wallet containing a social security card, driver’s license and credit cards—issued to Camilla Golightly. Another name.
And a birth certificate. Mother: Claire Golightly. Father: Hawthorne Parker.
“There you go.” Hy passed it to Ian.
Near the bottom of the case was a brown manila envelope. Inside were several pieces of paper, folded together—two letters. One, a typewritten carbon, the old ink smudged by fingerprints, from Cam’s mother, Claire, to Parker:
This is to let you know that your daughter was born today. Since you haven’t answered any of my letters to you, I guess you no longer want to speak to me or see me. I bet Guillaume is behind that. I hope you will acknowledge Camilla as your daughter for her sake. You will know why I chose the name.” It was signed: “Love, Claire.”
The other letter was a response, from Parker to Claire.
I do not believe that anything that happened between us could possibly have created a child. I cannot believe she is mine. Not wishing to get into a long protracted argument on this point, I will, however, supply you w
ith more than adequate funds for your child’s support, in addition to what you already receive from me. Please do not—either of you—communicate with me in future.” It was signed, “Parker.”
“What a prick,” said Hy, handing the letter to Ian.
“Apparently not.” Ian raised his eyebrows. “He claims they didn’t really do it, or rather he tried but couldn’t go all the way.”
“Then how’d Cam happen?”
“Leakage, I guess. It only takes one plucky sperm.”
Hy looked across the corridor to Cam’s room.
“Well, she’s sure a plucky one.”
She pulled the last item out of the case. A diary. She flipped it open. The first entry read: Haight Ashbury May 3, 1967. Astral gave birth to a baby girl today. We named her Claire, for the clarity of the moon and the stars and the sun….
Hy kept her nose stuck in the journal for the next hour and Ian read along with her, living through the Summer of Love and the hippy lives of Camilla’s maternal grandparents, Astral and Luther—a California beach babe turned mother earth and sky goddess and a white farm boy from Illinois, who’d renamed himself after his hero, Martin Luther King. They’d taken the surname of Golightly to signify their tread, softly, on the earth. Both Astral and Luther had written in the journal, including a litany of hallucinogenic drug experiences that stopped as suddenly as the Summer of Love, with a terse entry—“the Light of our Lives” had been taken from them by “The Man.” Another document showed that it had been a woman from Child Protection who took baby Claire from their litter-filled home. Astral may have been an earth mother and sky goddess, but neither she nor Luther were homemakers. Their wall-to-wall floor covering was pizza boxes.
Slipped into the diary was a yellowed newspaper clipping from December 1967. Astral, Luther and two of their friends had died on a drugged-out road trip on a California freeway. Luther was the driver. The one survivor of the crash, a pleasant long-haired fellow called Speedboy, claimed Luther’s last words were either: “Beam me up, Scotty,” or “Pass me that smoothie.” He wasn’t quite sure which, explaining he’d been “a bit out of it” at the time.
Revenge of the Lobster Page 26
