Sea Glass Summer

by Dorothy Cannell

  ‘I love you a trillion billion,’ he whispered. ‘You’re the best grandpa there ever was in the entire universe, even if there are little green ones on Mars.’ The last part was the sort of joke he and Grandpa would laugh at; it had never taken much to make them laugh.

  Twyla was beckoning to him. She picked up one of the chairs and crossed with it to the bed. Oliver tiptoed forward with the other one. They sat without talking for about five minutes and then began a quiet conversation about nothing in particular – how nice the new red comforter looked, wondering if the other residents were enjoying the visiting dog, how kind Kev had sounded. Grandpa slept on. The light from the window showed up the bruises on his arms and hands. They were the result of the blood thinners he took, nothing to do with the Parkinson’s. They were called something that sounded like a spice, one that Mandy Armitage, Brian’s mother, put in her chili. Cumin, that was the name – of the spice, not the medicine. Oliver retrieved the name that floated toward him, first in big letters, then smaller ones that grew smudgy before disappearing into a mist. Somewhere inside it were himself and Grandpa walking hand in hand across a bridge. He couldn’t see, but he knew. Along with this awareness came the certainty that his parents and Grandma Olive were waiting on the other side in place of rainbow clouds and that soon he, Oliver, must turn and walk back on his own toward Sea Glass.

  His eyelids grew heavy. He hadn’t slept well the past two nights at the Cully Mansion or, for that matter, the past week. In the middle of last night he’d shot up in bed with his heart hammering. For a moment he had wondered where he was. The furniture stared back at him as if wondering what he was doing there and wishing he would go away. Alien shadows slithered and stretched, but it was the ones that crouched unseen in corners that bothered him the most. The fear gripped him that they were thinking slyly how much fun it would be to pop up for the purpose of making him yell out. The tall one alongside the open-curtained window, with the broad seat beneath, could have come from the high dresser, but it had a person-like look to it. What if those thin poky bits weren’t reflected tree branches, but transparent fingers itching to touch him? His breath had frozen at the thought that it could be the ghost of old Emily Cully and he’d huddled back under the musty-smelling covers, willing himself back to sleep. It was all right for Brian to say what fun it would be but what if the talk around Sea Glass wasn’t just hopeful made-up stuff, and she really and truly did haunt the Cully Mansion? Brian didn’t have to live, let alone sleep here.

  Voices woke him and he sat up to find himself in the chair in Grandpa’s room at Pleasant Meadows. What he heard was Twyla and Grandpa talking, but they stopped now and looked toward him.

  ‘Good snooze?’ Grandpa asked quite clearly. There were times when his voice came out better than others. The skull-like look was gone and his face even had some normal color.

  Oliver beamed back at him. ‘Was I asleep long?’

  ‘About an hour.’ Twyla smiled at him. It was a relaxed smile. The lines that showed around her eyes when she was tired or particularly worried weren’t there anymore.

  ‘You should’ve woken me up.’

  ‘Your grandpa wouldn’t let me; you know how he can be when he gets deciding to be boss.’

  ‘Right!’ Oliver laughed. ‘You’re both scared piddle pants of me, aren’t you?’

  ‘None of that language!’ Grandpa tried to pull a fierce face. ‘I thought if I’d slept the day away you could have a catnap.’ The words continued to come without obvious difficulty. ‘Twyla’s been telling me about this new job of hers. Sounds great. That mother and son will be blessed to have her.’

  The three of them continued on this topic for a while. On hearing that Sonny Norris had taught music, Grandpa brought up the fact that Clare had learned to play by ear on a friend’s piano, but had never asked for lessons and said afterwards that it had been only a passing interest. Whenever Oliver listened to Grandpa talking about Mom, it felt as though she was reaching out her hand for his. This time sense of contact was especially strong because he had so often wished he could take piano lessons, but was sure they cost a lot. Holding his mother’s hand was something quite different from being touched by a ghost. Twyla brought the topic round to Grandma Olive’s wonderful recipe for soda bread, but quickly cut off what she had been about to say next. The fidgety movements under the bedcovering told them Grandpa needed the bathroom quick. Instantly Oliver remembered the piddle-pants joke and could have kicked himself. Grandpa had been wearing those grown-up diapers for over a year now, but still fought against having an accident. Twyla was in the room one moment and gone the next. She now returned with an aid pushing a wheelchair. This one wore glasses and a tie-died smock.

  ‘I’ll get you to the bathroom, Mr Anderson,’ she said kindly. Oliver was glad she hadn’t called Grandpa Frank. She didn’t know him well enough yet, and when you have to be taken to the toilet you’ve the right to hang onto your pride with both hands. Twyla had explained about that, saying often worse than pain was the loss of dignity. She had called Grandpa Mr Anderson after she came to look after him. With her help the aid now got Grandpa into the wheelchair.

  ‘I can manage from here,’ she offered, ‘if you’ve something else that needs doing. I was Mr Andrews’ nurse.’

  The young woman looked relived. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t mind? Mrs Middleton – Lucy – has worked herself into a state over the man she thinks is under her bed; says he has a knife. When she gets like that she can lose control and it usually takes two of us to calm her down.’

  ‘You go along.’

  ‘Thanks.’ The aid vanished into the hall and Twyla wheeled Grandpa into the bathroom, closing the door behind them.

  The chairs had been pushed back and Oliver now returned them to their corners. He guessed Twyla would suggest they leave as soon as Grandpa was settled back into bed. Being lifted out and returned always took such a lot out of him. Oliver heard voices coming closer down the hall and he turned round to see a man and a woman come through the door. The man was the older of the two. He was quite short and had the brownish-yellow face of a shriveled-up gnome; he even pranced like one, but in an unsteady sort of way. He still had a lot of hair; it curled up around the pointy ears, adding height the rest of him lacked.

  ‘Sit yourself down on your bed, Father, and stop acting the fool. You’ll fall over yourself one of these days, bust yourself inside out and that’ll be the end of you.’ She gave him a glare and muttered, only half under her breath: ‘And good riddance to bad rubbish.’ Catching Oliver’s eye, she shrugged.

  ‘He’ll be the death of me first. I’ll have a mouthful to say to the man at the pearly gates when I get there. There won’t be no shuttling me about being stuck for the past fifty-some years with Willie Watkins for a father.’ She jerked a giant thumb toward the bed. She was an extremely large woman, up, down and around, with a rough-skinned face and thick, coarse hair with a lot of gray in it hanging in a bulky braid over her shoulder almost to her waist, which was – as Oliver had already noted – a very long way down. Unable to come up with anything to say he watched lips form the gravelly words. ‘His brain’s turned to mush and they tell me his liver’s shot, but the old goat will see me out, just like he did my poor mother. Didn’t live to see seventy, she didn’t. I used to tell her to push him in front of a truck. Didn’t have it in her. Too soft for her own good.’

  The man cupped a hand around a pointy ear. ‘What’s that you saying, Robin?’

  ‘Just saying what an old dear you are, Dad.’ The woman rolled her eyes at Oliver. Robin! The name didn’t fit at all! It was like calling the giant at the top of the beanstalk Petey! What she’d said was terrible. How could he want to laugh? ‘So who’re you, skulking around in here?’ she demanded as if about to pull a baseball bat out of the enormous front pocket of her faded blue jean jumper.

  ‘Oliver Cully, Frank Anderson’s grandson. He’s your father’s new roommate.’

  ‘Oh!’ She pretended to loo
k startled. The braid shook as if preceding a rattle of iron links. ‘I took you for a doctor come round in a hurry without your white coat.’ A broad grin accompanied the joke. ‘Good thing for you I was mistaken. I don’t like doctors. Talk over your head like they think you’ve got a brain the size of a flea. Didn’t do my mother any good or my husband, neither. Some big shot told me Earl had cancer. Could see by my face I didn’t buy it. Nobody in Earl’s family ever had cancer. Said he’d show me the X-rays. Like that’d prove anything! He points a finger and I say, “Oh, yare! I see it, that place that looks no different to me from all the rest!”’

  ‘Hold on!’ The gnome on the bed held up a knobby finger. ‘Did the boy say he’s a Cully?’

  ‘You stay out of my private conversations, Dad.’

  ‘And you think on who you’re talking to my girl, or I’ll put you across my knee and paddle your behind. Wouldn’t be hard to find in the dark, big as it is.’ His small eyes, still bright against the yellowed skin, slid toward Oliver. ‘I was in your house.’

  ‘Shut your mouth and lay down.’ His daughter shot him a furious look.

  ‘I’m not telling no lies, Robin, girl.’ A whine crept into the voice. ‘I’d a right to be there. It was wickedly cold outside.’

  ‘You lay off talking about the Cully Mansion.’ The daughter’s face had turned red as beet. She stood silent for several moments, then squared her massive shoulders and looked Oliver in the eyes. ‘I used to clean three days a week for Miss Emily. She didn’t pay well – tight as a tick, but she was good to me in her way. Never minded when I brought Dad in for a bowl of soup. That makes what he did all the worse, creeping in after the place was empty and holing up in the cellar until the police found him. The shame of it put me low for months. I could just imagine the talk – Robin Polly shouldn’t have let the old drunk out of her sight.’

  ‘Mr Watkins hiding there sounds OK to me.’ Oliver wondered if Gerard and Elizabeth knew about this. If Brian had heard through Aunt Nellie he hadn’t said anything.

  The heavy braid swung over Robin Polly’s enormous chest as she shook her head. Oliver was sure he heard a clank. ‘I hear your aunt and uncle have moved into the Cully Mansion and you’re staying there with them.’

  ‘I saw bones floating in the soup,’ her father chirped in from the bed.

  ‘Yes,’ she rasped, ‘I was just talking about how you were glad of a bowl on the days I worked at Miss Emily’s.’ She raised her thick brows on looking at Oliver. ‘Always two steps and a hop behind in every conversation. But I’m glad to say the old lady was very fond of my split pea and ham soup.’ Before Oliver could ask if she thought Emily would rather hang around and haunt her old home than go up to heaven, Twyla came out of the bathroom with Grandpa in the wheelchair, and the aid with the glasses and tie-died smock rejoined them.

  After a nod of greeting, Mrs Polly ordered her father to lie down and shut his eyes and mouth. With that she was gone and very quickly afterward Twyla kissed Grandpa on the forehead and promised to come back soon. Oliver, blocking tears, kissed his cheek. ‘Love you forever, Grandpa,’ and followed her down the hall. A male aid told them the security code numbers to press on the small black panel by the door that opened into the entryway.

  Oliver told Twyla about the conversation that had taken place while she was in the bathroom, but only in a general sort of way. He left out the parts where Mrs Polly had spoken angrily to, or about, her father. To have done so would have sounded like tattling, and Twyla would have been the first to say telling on someone was wrong, unless there was a sound reason. Mrs Polly might already be sorry and wishing she could take all the nasty parts back.

  Afterwards they talked about Grandpa and how much better he had looked and sounded when he woke up. By that time Twyla was drawing up alongside the Cully Mansion. She hadn’t come in to get him when she picked him up because he had been watching for her at the long window next to the double front doors and had walked out to meet her. She said that perhaps it would be best if she just stayed to watch him go inside, in case Elizabeth still wasn’t feeling well. ‘I wouldn’t want her to feel she had to come and talk to me.’

  ‘Right. You’ll let me know how you get on tomorrow about the job?’

  ‘I’ll call you, lamb baby,’ she kissed his cheek, ‘as soon as you’ve had time to get back from school.’

  Oliver went down the paved path with weeds and grass sprouting through the cracks and up the wide steps, determined not to let his feet drag because Twyla was waiting in the car to see him inside. He pushed on the handle of the right-side door and turned to wave goodbye before plodding into the overwhelmingly large, darkly paneled foyer. Gerard had called it the hall. The ceiling was a long way up, almost lost in shadows thickened by cobwebs. There was a good deal of heavy furniture which Oliver hadn’t yet sorted out in his mind beyond a few chairs, their fabric seats thick with dust. When he arrived on Saturday he’d been vaguely aware of oil portraits with greenish black backgrounds and hadn’t taken a close look at them since. He hadn’t wanted to discover that he resembled anyone in the group, however long ago they had lived. The only color in the hall came from the red, green and yellow floor tiles that formed a pattern somewhere between floral and geometric. Oliver hadn’t sized it up that way; he’d merely thought it was ugly and couldn’t have been washed in fifty years. His overall impression had been one of stepping into a creepy movie. One where skeletons fell out of closets, bats hung from the chandelier, and when you accidentally pressed the paneling at the wrong place it spun you around into a room from which there was no escape. The wide treads of the towering staircase should have been a friendly touch; instead they suggested the wisdom of going up them only in pairs.

  Now the thought came that oppressive (he had looked that word up in the dictionary recently) as the hall was, it was somehow better than Grandpa’s room at Pleasant Meadows. Creepy as the Cully Mansion might be, there was no getting away from the fact that it having been home to generations it had stories to tell if someone was prepared to open his heart and listen. Oliver wasn’t sure that he wanted to be that person as he continued down the hall. The living room was every bit as hideous as he had described to Twyla. Most monstrous of all was the four-poster bed at the far end with its pillows and covers still in place. But what stood out for him was the empty dome-shaped birdcage hanging from a tarnished brass stand. Oliver didn’t like caged birds; he couldn’t imagine them being happy, and the thought of one escaping to swirl around the ceiling and darting back and forth in a frantic flutter of wings scared him to squeaking fear. The thought of them brushing his face or arms was beyond chilling. Suddenly the notion of Aunt Emily coming back as a ghost didn’t seem nearly as bad compared to coming down in the night to a cobwebbed, feathered form swinging on that perch. He continued on speeded-up legs to the kitchen, where he found Gerard seated at the weary-looking old table with his head in his hands. He had made up his mind to ask if he could have a dog or, if not, a cat. But this wasn’t the moment. He didn’t like Gerard. That wasn’t going to change, but neither did he like seeing anyone looking miserable. The eyes that met his on looking up were brimming with it. Oliver saw the half-filled bottle and empty glass at his uncle’s elbow.

  ‘Hi!’ he said. ‘Where’s Elizabeth?’

  ‘Still in bed with her headache.’ Gerard tried to get to his feet and sank back down. ‘I guess we should be thinking about something to eat. Or is it that late?’ He appeared to search for a clock without finding one.

  ‘I could make us some soup.’

  Gerard rallied to help search cupboards and they found two cans of chicken noodle and a jar of peanut butter. Bread for sandwiches turned up behind a box of cereal on the counter. Had Oliver been getting supper with Grandpa or Twyla it would have been fun, but he kept worrying that Gerard, although not actually unsteady, would trip on the buckled vinyl floor, or collide with the refrigerator that had to be two hundred years old and came too far out in the room. The next search was
for a saucepan.

  Having said he wasn’t hungry, Gerard took a bowl of soup and half a peanut sandwich up to Elizabeth. Oliver finished his meal and waited for his uncle, but he didn’t return. After an hour he went to his bedroom on the second floor – a few doors down from theirs. It was a continuation of everything he hated about the house. Gloomy, even with lights on, and musty smelling. He flopped down on the bed, which was a smaller version of Emily Cully’s in the living room. But at least he didn’t have to look at a birdcage. Might as well have a nap, was his thought.

  He must have slept for hours because when he opened his eyes and sat up there was moonlight coming in through the window. On the bench beneath it were deep shadows that shifted as he stared at them into the shape of a boy of about his own age. He appeared to be reading a book. It was all rather fuzzy until suddenly he looked up. Then Oliver could see the thick, sandy hair and the rounded face so very much like his own. His eyes were friendly, if mildly puzzled. This was startling, but not frightening as it had been to think he saw Gerard standing over him with unseeing eyes.