These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

  “I never made another hat after you’d gone. I closed the shop, couldn’t leave Cypress fast enough. The building still stands in town. I’m told there is a bakery there now, again. Funny how things circle back.

  “When you went out east to school, I thought I’d never see you again. Really, I didn’t. And that year you studied in Paris? When all the other girls went to the countryside or Italy or wherever for the summer, you came home.… I didn’t know how to thank you. You helped me keep that business afloat. You could have worked anywhere, but you came back, you chose Cypress. Those were good years, remember? You went on that buying trip and came home with sixteen bolts of raw silk and Robert. I remember Thomas walking you down the aisle, so very handsome… giving you away to the New Yorker. Everyone called him that, even after you died.

  “Thomas should be here. He’d love to see you. He’s still the same, too smart and tough as nails, doesn’t need anybody. He’s been a good uncle to your girls, sees them more than I ever did. I couldn’t bear to somehow. They’re middleaged now! One of them made me a great-grandmother the day I turned eighty. I have great-grandchildren in college. I suppose that makes you a grandmother… imagine that!”

  She could taste the tears. “Oh, my my… it’s good to see you.”

  She turned in the dim light to see her daughter’s serene face give way to a stranger’s. Plump, with an indifferent chin, the lapel of Louisa’s fine suit folding itself over into a nurse’s collar pinned with a red enamel cross.

  Isobel eased her hand from the nurse’s and reached up to drag the oxygen mask away, her voice hollow even to herself. “Tell Dr. Hertz he can have this thing, and tell him I won’t have any tubes up my nose either.”

  She drifted along familiar passages; her grade school with its mold-green halls, the narrow, many-doored second story of her house in Cypress, hospital corridors throbbing with light, the stacks at the library smelling of wax and the dry pages of thousands of books, the twisting channels of the Maze. As she moved, small images caught her eye; a seed-eyed grackle atop her lunch pail, a door opening onto a child’s empty room, her own face peering up from a gurney, books falling to crack their spines on marble floors, an eye-shaped leaf that seemed to stare at her from shore. Though she drifted easily, she couldn’t seem to reach her own bed. She couldn’t get to it.

  Light shifted. The voice was happy. “Look at you! What on earth do you have on your finger there? You look properly silly, trussed up to all these machines.”

  She looked up to see Cathryn halfway through the door, a fistful of flowers under her nose. As she slipped in, her voice was a conspiracy. “Don’t look so worried, no one saw me. Look, Izzy, tulips. What a morning I’ve had. Do you know how difficult it is to find tulips in summer? I practically had to go to Holland! Now don’t go saying ‘you shouldn’t have.’ You’d do the very same for me and you know it.”

  She looked very beautiful. Wearing the same summery outfit as the day she first came into the shop, her face flushed as if she’d run.

  The flowers were bound. Isobel touched the familiar ribbon.

  “You’ve got to recognize that! It’s from those matching tams you made for me and Louisa. I was going through some old box or other and found mine. Moths had at the tam” — she let the ribbon flow over her hand — “but this survived.”

  Isobel moved her dry lips.

  “Now don’t say anything, Izzy. I know exactly what you’re going to ask.”

  She was no older or younger. She settled on the bed with a fine weight, and her smooth hand lit on the covers. “Before we get to all that, I want to show you something.”

  She offered her wrists for Isobel to examine, and then raked her skirt high to show her thighs. She pointed to her neck. “Notice anything?”

  After a beat her face grew impatient. “The scars, Izzy! My scars are gone.”

  There was movement outside the window. “Don’t look. Don’t look away. It’s just the old street, dusty as ever. Lord, did you ever know such a summer? Remember when we went down to that abandoned quarry to get out of the heat? You saw that itty bitty snake. I never in my life saw anyone move so quickly to get away from something so small.”

  Her laughter ushered a silvery echo. “Whoosh, you scooped up Louisa so fast she didn’t know what hit her. A garter snake! It might even have been a baby garter snake, hardly bigger than a worm! Didn’t you know, Izzy? Didn’t you know nothing would harm you?”

  Her eyes flickered toward the door, then back to Isobel, her voice urgent. “I’d better go, sweetie. I just wanted to see how you were getting on.”

  She took a step away but suddenly turned, her smile broad. “I was so dramatic, wasn’t I? Nobody ever took themselves as seriously as I did back then. I could be such a complete ass… remember that harangue about being an island?”

  She cleared her throat to recite.

  “Sky and clouds shifting above, tides stirring at our hems. Do we ever touch? Or is it merely the air and water we touch that shifts over to others; the ebbing ripples that reach them, diluted and wafting-weak. All our essence intended, but so little of our true selves divulged… blah blah.”

  She laughed. “Horse hockey. Truth is, it all balances out in the end. I found that out. You do get to touch those you’re meant to, after all.”

  The kiss to her brow was warm. “Enough divulged, Izzy. Enough.”

  Her sleep was dreamless, black. When she woke she was encased in an oxygen tent and propped with pillows into a sitting position. She stared through the plastic for a long time; its crinkled surface warped light and shifted contours. She had imagined it a thousand times. Dying underwater. She raised her stronger hand to touch the plastic.

  The IV tube caught stippled light so that it might have been the silk ribbon from the tams she’d made for Cathryn and Louisa. They’d posed for her. While she fiddled with the camera, their heads bent together, and with pointed forefingers sunk in their cheeks, they winked Poo-poo-peedoo.

  “Louisa.” Isobel’s voice echoed around her in the confines of the tent. She closed her eyes.

  It had been so cold, the kind of winter night Isobel found eerie for the dry, cloudless skies, silent save the distant reverberations of a world freezing: boughs snapping, stones fissuring, the unearthly gong of lake-ice cracking.

  The trilling of car tires skidding on ice.

  The lake had opened up, had taken her in. Ice formed quickly again over the car, so that by the time the rescuers reached the lake the next day, they’d had to take axes to the sheet, a jagged oval framing the top of Louisa’s green Chrysler. A jade trinket in glass.

  She’d died with her eyes open. Looking straight ahead, calmly touching the windshield, as if pointing to something interesting. A chunk of slowly sinking ice. A wavering beige stalk left from summer, its colour sapped away. The ice above was already thickening into a shroud, a wretched weaving of water and cold.

  The definition of cold, Isobel read once, was so simple as to seem utterly benign: the absence of heat.

  Isobel clearly remembered the pattern of the tie the sheriff wore when he came to tell her. Blue with yellow diamonds. She despised him for being out of uniform. His ski jacket was casually unzipped to reveal the polyester tie, a poor choice over his grey work shirt. He looked like his father, who had been the sheriff more than thirty-five years before, the man who hounded her about Jack and Cathryn, and had later come to tell her about Liam Malley.

  She’d stood numbly in the doorway, a pair of scissors dangling from one hand, the other fluttering through the cloud of her breath. The sheriff shuffled in place, stamping his feet on the icy stoop.

  Louisa? Not possible. It was a mistake. She had been born with a caul. Everyone knew that was lucky, everyone knew that kept a person safe from drowning. Isobel dropped the scissors.

  The young sheriff’s hat hung at his side, pinched between two fingers of his glove. He swung it back and forth by its brim. A casual, stupid gesture. “Mrs. Howard, I’m real sor
ry. I went to school with Louisa, you know.”

  Isobel stared at him. “So, then, I guess I’ll go tell the New Yorker.”

  “His name is Robert.”

  The sheriff looked down at the scissors, wondering if he should pick them up. “Right. Sorry. I s’pose with their girls away at school he’ll be wanting them to come home. Well, I’ll just go on up to the house and tell him now.”

  Her sudden fierce clamp on his arm made him wince. She was over seventy if she was a day.

  “No you will not.”

  Isobel reached to the peg near the door and grabbed her coat. She stepped outside. “You take me to that lake. Do you hear? You take me out there, then you bring me home. I’ll tell Robert.”

  Why hadn’t she insisted Louisa learn to swim when she was young? Why hadn’t she begged Victor to teach her? Isobel’s own father had tried to teach her to swim, but she’d been too young. She ignored his coaxing, and when he lost patience, he hoisted her up against his wet stomach and carried her to the public dock. His flesh was soft, and Isobel found herself pulling away from the clammy suction of his vast chest. A line of boys were launching themselves cannonball fashion from the end of the dock. Her father bounced her up higher on the shelf of his paunch. “See how much fun those boys are having? That’s the way. Just jump. Shall we try that?”

  She unglued herself from his shoulder to look. The boys’ feet pounded the dock, stork knees pumping to meet bony elbows. When they reached the end of the dock, their bodies hurled outward to sail through the air for an untethered moment.

  Isobel bit her hand. “Okay.”

  Before she had a chance to change her mind he started forward. “Just plug your nose when we jump. I promise I won’t let go.”

  But he had. As he trotted down the dock, her father’s weight set the boards rumbling, his torso not quite in sync with his stride. As he came down on the last two boards, there was a sharp wooden crack, and his foot wedged into jagged raw space.

  Isobel flew from his arms, a projectile. Arching backward over the water she saw the reflection of her father’s wobbling form, a blunt body with arms windmilling comically. She laughed to see his great mustache twitching, his mouth stretched and contorted.

  And then she met the water.

  Hadn’t she just been laughing and flying? As suddenly she was sinking into blackness. Her arms, so limber in the air, made lazy wingbeats as she descended. Water flooded her nostrils. Instinctively, she kept her eyes open.

  She sank to the bottom. The way out. Way out. Where?

  The wooden pilings of the dock were cloaked in viscous algae, lime-green tatters waving in the current; the pilings were slick phantoms as she grabbed at them. Toward shore, the legs of wading bathers made a shimmering pale fence.

  The instinct to inhale broke her, and as she took in water white pain hammered her chest, her breath a betrayal. As her toes found the bottom she knew she would have to find purchase in the muck and walk against her pain in the direction of the bathers. She knew at the same time she would never make it. Feeling an abrupt and piercing sadness, she thought of her room back home, her bed with its oft-washed sheets, the soft cotton of her eyelet duvet. Her doll, Amanda, propped ladylike and waiting against the matching pillow. The angle of sun coming through the shutters to wake her on Sunday mornings, her favorite time to be in bed. Cinnamon toast. Now sand in her throat like sugar that wouldn’t dissolve. Burning sand.

  Leaving. She closed her eyes against the wavering world. Sadness backing away now, just as a fierce comet exploded into the water and her eyes opened against her will. A ball of boy unfurled himself before her, scrawny limbs the colour of shells, hair wagging like the algae, streams of bubbles trailing upward from each corner of his mouth like a sea horse’s bridle of pearls. He reached for her, fingers digging deep into her armpits. He tried to pull her to the surface. She fought him, making herself solid and willing herself to sink. Leave me be. I’m on my way.

  Other arms joined his and she closed her eyes to deny them, feeling her feet leaving their slippers of mud.

  Coughing and vomiting on the shore, she would never forget her father’s breach of faith, or her own brief flight over water.

  She knew exactly what it had been like for Louisa, could reconstruct a drowning to the finest detail, if she chose.

  If she could take back just one moment it would have been to spare her daughter. Maybe teaching her to swim would have been fruitless. Even if she’d made it out of the car alive, she probably would have frozen to death.

  Twenty-five years. Isobel still wanted that night back. Just long enough to walk the long road out of Cypress and lay her body down between the skidding car and lake ice.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ~ ~ ~

  When Thomas walked in, her face was turned to the window and she was reciting something. Her voice was muffled by the plastic tent. He stepped closer.

  As she turned, her voice became more clear. “And woodthrush calling through the fog / My daughter.”

  Her eyes were hooded; even through the barrier he could see the sharp bones of her skull.

  “That’s Eliot, Thomas. You must’ve read some Eliot in school?”

  As she dozed and woke she felt she was opening her eyes as she would open doors. Each door opened to someone waiting. Sometimes it was the nurse she mistook for Louisa. Other times it was Thomas, the real Thomas, expectant and rigid in the chair.

  In these waking moments she could see that her son wanted to communicate somehow, and she was glad for the oxygen tent between them. She had a vague sense of a child troubled, and while she wanted to comfort him, she had nothing to offer; the best she could do was lift her hand and let it drop.

  The crinkled plastic fractured every movement beyond, turned every visit into a brief cubist film. Shards of colours stacked, broke apart, stacked again. Figures federated, coalesced into humans only in moments of stillness. The television in the high corner of her room displayed moving jigsaws of Toyota commercials and sitcoms jerking to canned laughter. The evening news tumbled over itself in a somber kaleidoscope. Tom Brokaw’s features shifted, blurring to match his drunkard’s voice.

  Nurses hovered, dipping like great shattered cranes.

  ~ ~ ~

  The sky remained steadfastly empty. No wind, no bugs, no birds, no sounds.

  Isobel tugged at the straps of her swimsuit and sat up to watch Louisa and Cathryn from her lawn chair. They had made their way over the hot slope of granite shelf to the shallows, and were stepping along the slippery bottom, arms outstretched like rope walkers’. Louisa only ventured in up to her knees, but Cathryn pleaded, promised safety, and pointed to her shoulders, bending so her hair nearly touched the water while the girl climbed up on her back.

  Cathryn spun, suddenly furrowing through the water in a gallop. She sang an old tune, jouncing it breathlessly out along with her pegging motion.

  “Pony boy, pony boy. Won’t you be my pony boy?”

  Louisa giggled. “Auntie Cathryn, I’m a girl!”

  Cathryn stopped abruptly. “Oops. So you are. Okay, then.”

  She pivoted in the other direction and galloped faster.

  “Pony girl, pony girl. Won’t you be my pony girl? Carry me, carry me, right across the sea… Ooooh!”

  A plowing of water, and they disappeared under their own wave.

  Isobel’s heart skipped. She stood.

  Louisa rose first, coughing water and blinking. Cathryn’s head popped up, her hair pasted to her forehead. She screamed with laughter. “It’s so coooold!”

  Cathryn called to the shore. “Izzy, how can the water be so cold with this heat?”

  Louisa dunked down again to her shoulders. “Cold!”

  She shot up into the air. “Hot!”

  Cathryn struggled up and joined the girl. They rose and fell out of sync, holding hands, red and yellow swimsuits like pistons in the water, “Hot! Cold! Hot! Cold! Hot cold hotcoldhotcoldhotcold!”

  ~ ~ ~r />
  Underneath his coat he wore the plaid shirt again. “Jack, what did you do with her?”

  He bent low. “Isobel, did you say something?”

  She peered through the tent, tried to piece together the shifting view. Hot. I’m hot. The doctor cocked his head. She looked at him. Hadn’t she spoken? Thomas suddenly stepped out from behind the doctor.

  Or was he next to him? His face was creased in concern, and as he leaned down she could see his features waver beyond the membrane of the tent. She licked her lips and this time could hear her own voice whispering, “Cathryn came to see me.”

  Thomas shook his head.

  She nodded; at least she meant to nod. Her muscles did her bidding less and less often. “Louisa too. She was here.”

  “Mother.”

  The doctor was patting Thomas on the shoulder. Then he moved away, a white-coated mannequin rattling his limbs out the door.

  Thomas lifted the corner of the tent so he could slip his hand under. He cleared his throat. “I came yesterday, but you were asleep all day.”

  Her mouth tasted milk-stale. “What’s the temperature?”

  He lifted his glasses and glanced at the monitor connecting the thimble to her finger. “A hundred flat. Much better.”

  “Not mine. Outside. What’s it like outside?”

  Thomas shrugged. “Ninety. Too hot for September. Maybe ninety-two. Dripping.”

  Isobel squinted at the fractured sunlight. “That’s right. It was so warm we went wading, at least Louisa and Cathryn did. I only watched from the shore.”

  “Rest, Momma.”

  With an effort she turned her head. “All I do is rest. May I have some water?”

  The air in the tent smelled of foul breath and eucalyptus. Thomas grimaced as he handed her the glass.

  Getting the water down required a swallow that burned the back of her neck. She imagined gulping ground glass, she imagined her spine drying, the disks turning to chalk. She managed to twist her face into a smile for Thomas.