by Luanne Rice
“Oh, I’m so comfy,” Lily said, folding her hands over her belly.
“I insist you come,” Margo said. She walked to Lily and looked down. “I really insist.”
“We must insist,” I said, standing beside Margo. After the last scene in New York, I wanted Margo to do the pushing. I wanted to stay cool. Lily looked as though she thought we might be crazy. The snow had stopped falling, but perhaps some of the roads had not been plowed. She was about to give birth, Margo was about to be a bride. There was so much to lose.
“If we go, we have to leave a note,” she said, hopping off the couch with admirable speed. “We should say we have to get something important at the store. Something very convincing.”
“How about a garter for Margo?” I asked.
“No, say we have to get tampons,” Lily said. “No man can quibble with tampons.”
“Lily, no one is going to believe you need tampons,” Margo said, laughing.
“No, but you might. Don’t worry. It’ll do.” She began adjusting the line of buttons down the front of her coral velour dress. Margo and I did not look at each other. It was too sad that Lily had to write Henk a convincing note. We headed for the closets and put on our coats.
“It’s going to feel weird, getting married without Dad here,” Margo said, slipping on her snow boots. They were rubber with battered leather uppers.
“Maybe Una has an inside track—think he’ll make an appearance?” Lily asked, touching my shoulder.
“It’s possible.”
“Okay, I’ll get the car,” Margo said, running across the yard to the rusty Land Rover.
I wrote a hasty message: “Be right back—need tampons.” We left it on the foyer table. I held Lily’s elbow as we made our way across the wide porch. Snow had drifted under the glider and railings; a film of dry snow covered the slatted gray floor. The waves roared down the beach. Margo wheeled the Rover close to the steps, and I climbed inside, straddling the gearshift. Lily climbed in beside me. Margo had already lit up, and smoke filled the vehicle. We were six breasts abreast, but a tighter fit than usual.
“Something is wrong here,” Lily said. “I should be driving.”
“No!” Margo and I said at once. Margo started to shift into reverse, but Lily reached across me to grab her wrist.
“Don’t tell me you can drive a standard,” Lily said.
“I can.”
“Give me the honor,” Lily said, opening her door and coming around to the driver’s side. Margo shrugged and got out. She climbed in beside me. “Don’t worry—” Lily said, ramming the stick through the gears. “Pregnancy doesn’t keep you from driving. How do you engage the four-wheel drive?”
“It’s engaged,” Margo said.
Lily revved the engine. Through the inn’s door I could see that Matt, Sam, Henk, and my mother had returned to the living room. They were standing in a semicircle around the fireplace. Henk had his back to the door; he had noticed our absence, but he must have thought we had gone upstairs, to look at Margo’s dress or something. His head swiveled from side to side. I saw Sam looking at us, wishing us Godspeed. I remembered kissing him for the first time.
“Tonight we fly!” Lily said. She threw out the clutch.
The Rover shot down the drive, kicking back snow, an overloaded broomstick trying to take off. The Cavan coven. We tore around the bend. There we were, free on the shore road, dumbstruck. Our half-open mouths wore expressions of people who have just wakened or defied danger. We stared out the windshield, our heads snapping in perfect unison whenever the dark Atlantic appeared in the spaces between the big summer houses. Suddenly we were on a sea cruise, and how had we gotten there? We were playing it over in our minds, the way Margo and I had set up the dare, the way Lily had accepted it without giving herself too much time to think. Even now Lily’s green eyes flicked to the side of the road, perhaps looking for a way to turn around.
She did not turn around. A mile from the inn she switched on the radio and found a raucous rock station.
“I’m so sick of the Christmas spirit,” she said, scoffing in the manner of her husband. “A station like this won’t have Bingo singing ‘White Christmas’ every ten minutes.”
“Have you heard Dino singing ‘Rudy the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ yet this year?” Margo asked.
“Spare me,” Lily said. She drove us past the deserted summer cottages on the road toward Point Judith. Snow covered every surface except for rocks rising out of the land. Wind had cleared those. In spite of the loud synthesizer band on the radio, all three of us were humming “White Christmas.” When the streetlights went on and we all knew we had gone far enough, Lily pulled into a driveway. Backing out, she pointed the vehicle toward the family inn.
On the way back we were silent, thinking about what could happen when we returned. I imagined Henk with their luggage and a taxi waiting, ready to push Lily into the back seat and take her straight to New York to await suitable punishment. I thought of Sam, pleased with his part in our escape. Wedged between Lily and Margo, my left arm rested against the baby in Lily’s belly. I gave it a nudge. Lily smiled.
“Tell me about marriage,” Margo said.
“It has its ups and downs,” Lily said. “But one thing for sure is, you always have someone to carry your bags.”
Margo and I both looked at her when she said that, I because it proved that she and I had obviously been thinking the exact same thing about Henk—waiting with the luggage.
“Is that a joke or what?” Margo asked. “I’m getting married in a matter of days, and I wouldn’t say nay to a little reassurance.”
“Okay, it’s great, but it does take some getting used to. Like anything major.”
“It’s very major,” I agreed.
“No kidding—if you could just see our bill for the greenery for this fête,” Margo said.
When we started up the hill to the inn, we again became silent. The Rover slowed down. Matt had turned on the floodlights. They illuminated the drive and the inn’s snowy lawn.
“Do or die,” Margo said, and Lily shot her a sharp look.
We stood together on the sidewalk. Margo, Lily, and I linked arms, with Lily in the middle, forming a cortege according to age and height. It has always seemed appropriate that I, the oldest, am also the tallest. We marched through the snow. Henk stood at the door. The light shined on his back; his face was shadowed. I painted it with anger. The door opened and Henk, coatless, stepped out.
“Liebchen,” he said sternly, “we have been waiting to decorate the tree.” I felt shocked to see his eyes look so sad.
Margo and I both started to take the blame, to explain all about tampons, when suddenly Sam in his ski jacket rushed around Henk. He grabbed me by the arm. We ran into the yard, past the floodlights, gathering speed, down the narrow path between the leafless gorse bushes. Briars snagged our trousers. The inn behind us glowed, but the path was black. We knew we had hit the beach when we felt soft sand yield beneath our snow boots. Taking a sharp right, we ran until we reached the tidal pools, dizzy with lungs full of winter air. Shapes flew through the sky. They were patches of cloud, spots before our reeling eyes, ghosts of our loved ones, the aurora borealis. Sam’s eyes were smiling, golden. He wrapped his arms around me, put his lips on mine. We were breathless from running. He held me so close. The shapes kept moving.
Chapter 21
The next day was brilliantly sunny and frigid. Static tingled through my hair and along the fibers of my wool sweater, making me itch and shake my head. Sam and Matt went outside, to shovel all paths on the inn’s property. I reclined on a couch in the living room, changing position constantly and wishing I had something good to read. Lily and Margo played checkers on a low wicker table; Lily, unable to bend, directed Margo which of her checkers she wished moved when it couldn’t be easily reached. Henk pretended to read a medical journal while watching Lily. My mother dozed in the armchair beside me, a blanket across her legs, a mystery open on her lap.
As if the static were invading my body, I felt anxious, though I couldn’t think why. All of my loved ones were near. I could hear Sam’s shovel scraping the pavement outside. Since Lily’s decision to follow her instincts and take the sea cruise with us last night, I could even, by a generous stretch of the imagination, feel benevolent toward Henk. Right now he was regarding Lily with an expression of pained adoration.
My mother wakened suddenly, startled but smiling. “What a dream!” she said to me.
I smiled, encouraging her to tell it.
“It was about the tower in this inn—where you and Sam sleep. Only in the dream it was a library, and your father was there, dressed in his Glen plaid suit—you know, the one from the Collins Shop—waiting for you to return your overdue books.”
“How odd!” I said, but it was only four minutes before I found the opportunity to excuse myself and fly up the ladder-stairs.
The turret room was empty, ice-cold in spite of the sun streaming through the windows. My heart crashed. I had been positive my father would be here; ever since last summer I had thought he would appear to me in the turret. Shivering, I stood in a patch of sun. Down below I could see Matt, foreshortened by his thick clothes and my angle of vision, rolling a ball of snow, building it into a snowman. Sam was nowhere in sight. Pressing my face to the cold pane, I strained for a glimpse of him.
Suddenly a cloud covered the sun. I peered at it, a cumulous cloud, impossibly high and fluffy, alone in the sky. It was a summer cloud; it had no place in the December weather pattern. I stared at it, silhouetted against the sun. A bird perched on its edge. A seagull, perhaps, flapping its wings. Or a wisp of vapor, breaking free. Or a figure gesturing wildly. I squinted, then tore downstairs for the binoculars.
Fortunately they stood on a bookshelf at the foot of the stairs. I avoided everyone. Tearing back to the turret room, I had the glasses pressed against my eyes even before I reached the window. There, on the cloud’s rim, stood my father in his Glen plaid suit, waving. Throwing open a window, I waved like a maniac. My breath came in gasps. For so long, since my transatlantic flight, I had saved up things to tell him, questions to ask. Trying to shout, I croaked instead. The glasses wavered, then found him again. He was pointing deliberately at his mouth, as if he wanted me to read his lips. Panic boiled inside me. What could this mean? Did he actually expect me to lip-read? This visit, like the last, was celestial. Had he become permanently skybound?
I stared through the binoculars. He held a navy blue wool coat with a raccoon collar, a far cry from his usual Chesterfield, over one arm. He gestured at his watch, then pointed again to his mouth.
“Get down here, goddamn it!” I yelled.
“I can’t,” my father said quite clearly.
How bizarre! I thought, watching his lips and hearing his voice. “Can you hear me?” I mouthed.
“Speak up, sweetheart—I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
I spoke in a loud voice, leaning out the window. “Dad, are you coming to Margo’s wedding? Is that what you want to tell me?”
“No, I’m not. I’m not able. This is my cloud. What I want to say—”
“Your cloud?” I choked. “Dad, you’re not stuck on that cloud alone—forever, are you?”
He grinned and shook his head. I heard him chuckle and felt glad to see he had had his teeth fixed. “Now listen, because we don’t have long. It’s getting harder to reach you, my angel. I must leave; I know you’re happy.”
“Oh, I am. I love Sam, Dad.”
“I know that. And Margo loves Matt, although I never thought she’d fall for a guy with a beard. I’m glad he shaved it.”
“What about Lily? Is she happy?”
“Well, she’s getting happier. Finding her way, just as we all do.” He chuckled again, reaching up to touch the rim of his left ear, the way he always did. I chuckled along with him. “Henk is okay, Una. A real horse’s ass, but he means well. He’s insecure.”
Then I did scream. “If I hear that once more…” I shouted.
“But you will hear it. Because he is, and he needs your patience. Your love, in fact, Una,” he said sternly. “Make him part of the family. All right? Will you?”
“All right,” I said sullenly, thinking my father had a hell of a nerve ordering me to like a man he had never even met. We’ll see, I promised myself.
“It will be easier than you think,” he said, reading my mind.
Watching him grin on his cloud, though, made me smile back. “Dad, you seem happier,” I said finally.
“Well, I am.”
“Did you come into Mom’s dream? Is that how you reached me this time?”
He hesitated. “Yes, and it wasn’t fair.” He shook his head, as if trying to dispel a painful thought. “It wasn’t right. She still…loves me too much. The way I love her. Troubled, unfinished business, Una. I can’t get her hopes up. I’m not coming back.”
“Never?”
“Not for a long time. But I’ll always know. What you’re doing, whether you’re happy.”
“I love you, Dad!” I called out the open window.
“I love you, sweetheart!” he called. “Now look away, before I drift out of sight. Make yourself busy, so you don’t see me go.”
I studied his face through the binoculars. Oddly, it was getting younger. The skinny cheeks, the curly hair (now browner than it had been before he died), the lively eyes. It bore a striking resemblance to the Air Force photos of young James Cavan. His grin was wide, steady. “Remember!” he called.
“What?” I asked.
“Everything! Now go get busy.”
I waved without seeing, closed the window, and walked to the door. Sam was rushing up the stairs. We hugged tightly, and although he had just come in from outdoors, I was colder than he.
“Put on a jacket,” he said. “We’ll take a walk.”
When we stepped outside the sky was sparkling, and I felt sad to see that it was cloudless.
Walking east toward the promontory, we watched glistening black cormorants drying their wings on the rocks. The sun had melted all snow from the beach, though it clung to the hillside and lawns along the bluff. Sam wore a heavy winter sweater and leather ski mittens. His windburned face gleamed. I brushed his red cheek with the back of my hand. Removing one mitten, he clasped my hand and put both our hands into the pocket of my ski jacket.
“Matt is excited. He considers this his high point as an innkeeper—entertaining at his own wedding,” Sam said, squinting into the sun. “This sky—it reminds me of summer.”
“Yes, it does. Me too.”
“We’re on the same wavelength.” He squeezed my hand. Glare ice frosted the promontory’s rocks and seaweed. The tide was low.
“I’d fall for sure today,” I said, gesturing toward the tidal pool where I had slipped last September.
Sam stopped abruptly, then walked away from the water, toward the brush bordering the sand, pulling me along. From a bayberry bush, wind-whipped and denuded of leaves, he pulled two rolled blankets.
“I took a break from shoveling and hid these here,” he said. “Somehow I thought we’d need a break from the others. Though the visit is going very smoothly.”
We shook out one blanket, laid it quickly on the sand, then stretched out together and pulled the second blanket around us.
“You’re fabulous to think of this,” I said, my teeth chattering as my body, warm from the brisk walk, became as one with the frozen beach. But presently, pressing against me, Sam’s body heat permeated our myriad layers of cotton, wool, and feathers. He gave me a long, warm kiss.
“Now you can tell me,” he said.
“Tell you what?” My jaw was growing rigid again with the effort of not chattering.
“Why you were yelling out the window of our room. I could hear you all the way down the beach—I ran back to the inn, and that’s when I met you on the stairs.”
How could I tell him that I had been having a conversation, my
last for a long time, with my father, long dead? For that matter, why didn’t I feel sadder about that fact? Subdued, perhaps, but content; he had promised to watch over me forever, and perhaps no daughter could ask for more than that. I studied the bright flecks in Sam’s eyes and thought of gold dust swirling in a green torrent. His eyes were smiling, waiting.
“I was talking to my father,” I said.
“But your father is—”
“Dead.” Oh, how I hated the word! His body was dead, but now he was an angel. I wanted to explain it to Sam. “Can you understand that I talked to him? That I looked out the window and saw him in the sky?”
Sam hesitated, then laughed. “Maybe I can. If my parents died I might look for them in the sky. Did you really see him?”
“I swear it, Sam. And it wasn’t the first time, either.”
Sam laughed loudly. He pulled me so close my lips were against his neck. His dark hair contrasted startlingly with his creamy white sweater. Our legs entwined, and Sam still laughed.
“I believe you, Una,” he said, and we laughed together for a while, lying under the blanket. Looking past his shoulder, I watched the tide rising, waves licking the rocks. I saw the black zone of shore glistening under ice, like onyx, like moonlight shining on a bottomless black lake.
“You love your father too much to let him go,” he said finally.
“That’s one way of explaining it. Would you still believe me if I told you that it’s more complicated than that?”
“You’ve come to the right man—I’ve made a career out of studying seaweed. Do most people consider seaweed complicated? We scientists keep very open minds.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“My love,” he said before kissing me. His lips tasted warm and salty and made me think of last September. We lay on a winter beach beneath a summer sky. Nestled together, we were perfectly warm now. We went on and on, and the seasons whirled.
“This is it,” Sam said. When I opened my eyes, his were open, watching me. The sky was dazzling, cloudless.
This is it: I knew what he meant. This moment, lying together on the sand, was a moment of truth. Years later we would remember it absolutely. Clear and fair, like the first line in an architect’s design, this moment would serve as a cornerstone. I recognized it for what it was because I had known others before. They have perfect clarity. Nothing occurs to mark the passage of time; I looked around and saw no ships trailing smoke across the horizon, no clouds skidding through the sky, nothing growing closer or more distant to show the seconds ticking by. The day held still. I knew what I had to do.
