As they walked back over the island an erratic breeze shadowed them, danced just off the path in whorls, stirred the branches overhead, tipping the wet leaves so that they spilled their loads in false showers, the drops bright with sunlight. Wet pine needles and moss soaked their shoes. Isobel stopped, shivering in her wet blouse, and pulled Victor to her. Rainwater from his mustache met her parted lips.
When she sold the island after he died, she found it penciled in over the old name on the legal deed. Victor’s handwriting.
Isobel Island.
~ ~ ~
The sun had shifted. Thomas had changed clothes. Her mouth tasted sour. Another night passed? “You didn’t open it?”
Thomas’s whisper was in her ear.
His voice held no surprise as he pushed the envelope across the bedside table, the thinness of the manila under his fingers, its nearly weightless contents. Two recent single-column clippings, one from the Cypress newspaper, reprinted in the Chicago Tribune, describing the grim catch of a vacationing fisherman — the bones of a man and a woman, a gold four-leaf clover pin, shards of silk. Speculation. Jack’s and Cathryn’s names posed as questions.
“No. Perhaps today.”
Her voice had taken on a strange echo, as if she were speaking through the bellows of a split throat, as if her lungs were working independently of each other. She tried to motion for him to sit. He scanned the floor. “I’ve called Robert. He’s arranging for the girls and their kids to come in tomorrow.”
“Call them back. Tell them to stay home.”
Thomas looked into her eyes. Her gaze was resolute. They sat this way, nothing between them but the rhythms of breath, until a car horn outside lifted the silence.
“You’ve been a wonderful son to me.”
“Mother,… ”
“It’s glorious outside, isn’t it? I can’t see much today, some sort of eye-fog. But I can feel the sun. It must be strong.”
Thomas looked out. It was overcast and smoggy. “It is.
It’s a beautiful day, Mother. High clouds moving on a breeze, coming from the north, I think.”
“Feels lovely.”
“Maybe you’d like to go outside? I bet we could get an orderly or a nurse to help wheel your bed out onto the terrace. I saw other beds out there yesterday. They must roll them out through the conservatory doors.”
“Outside?”
She closed her eyes to storm-washed skies, a lake rippled gold in a breeze.
On the shores of lakes she fell in love with Victor. Twice. He broke her heart only once: the time he’d not been joking. The slump of his shoulders, the string of orange saliva connecting his lip to his sleeve. The sudden lead of her intestines as she forced herself toward his worktable. There had been a bubble in his spit, a tiny bubble of all that remained of his last breath. She watched as it made its way to his sleeve with a slow deliberateness Victor seldom had in life.
Had he time to think of what his life had meant, its impact, its triumphs, the gifts he’d imparted? Or was his going as fast as the shutting of a door? When the bubble met the starched cotton, it laid itself open, was lost, absorbed.
Later, there were terrible moments when she was glad he’d died. Driving to the depot in Duluth to meet the railcar carrying Henry’s coffin.
Sitting in the cold cab of the sheriff’s pickup and listening to the chime of pickaxes breaking the ice to get at Louisa’s car.
When she was sixty and looked at her body in a mirror and realized it was no longer desirable. She was glad then too, even in her vanity and selfishness.
Other times she couldn’t help wondering what life might have held for them together, what it might have been like to grow old with him, to have had his side to lean into.
She wondered if she would see him.
Any belief in God, any notion of heaven or religion had unraveled over the years. Threads that must be gathered up now into some semblance of faith. She had no idea where to begin this chore. More than anything else, this urgency made her so tired she had to press the idea of it away.
“Once, as a joke, your father told me he was made by angels.”
Her voice jarred Thomas upright. “Did he?”
“You are just like him. You know that, don’t you?”
“Dad?”
He reached up to his thinning hair and grinned.
“Yeah, same shiny dome.”
“No, not that. You’re kind, like he was. Made of fine stuff.”
Thomas opened his mouth to speak, but some slight and sudden shift in her face dissolved his words. Something. He leaned closer, perhaps a trick of the light. The furrows between her brow had softened, the hollows under her eyes and cheeks were not so chiseled as they’d been only that morning.
The angle of light, surely. Thomas felt the coolness of her hand and peered again at her languid face. Flesh giving up its century-old grip on bones.
Isobel remembered the evening he returned from his first summer on the island. An angular brown boy, his voice whistling through the void where his front teeth had been. Isobel had walked into her house and Thomas had been the first to reach her, jumping up and wrapping thin legs around her waist, planting damp kisses on her chin. Victor behind him, circling them both in a squeeze.
She laboured to take in breaths, made herself slow until her lungs relaxed, each shallow inhalation slowing the spin a little. A little boy’s face. The hand around hers a warm tether.
Faith. Walking along the St. Paul waterfront where the railroad tracks snaked along the river, she turned inland to find herself in an unfamiliar block of warehouses. A rare fog had risen from the Mississippi to obscure landmarks, and she made several wrong turns before considering she might be lost. She contemplated her plight while picking her way along the broken sidewalks, nudging along scraps and bits of glass with the toe of her old woman’s shoe. She didn’t feel fingers of panic tighten around her, did not tense against her own insides as she might have expected, but she did feel a vague inner displacement as her mental compass shut down. She didn’t care, really. The surroundings had taken over her will; nothing to do but give way to the strange geography deeming every step aimless. After a few blocks of walking with no destination, no real purpose, she began to enjoy the idea of being nowhere she could name.
The fog was lovely, a mantle settling over her to round her sharp shoulders. As she grew less rigid, her mind pleasantly dulled. She could feel Victor at her side. Could hear his voice through the lush air. Izzy, there is nothing you know here. Nothing to fear.
He’d been lost. Often. What had it been like for him. She thought of the vulnerability, of being at the mercy of the next stranger met, not knowing if the next corner might offer a familiar landmark or a darker, more sinister alley. She wondered at the vast trust he must have had in life.
Just as she wished she could reach forward through the damp veil to touch him, by some theater trick, he was standing behind her. When she began to fall she fell backward into his arms. Let herself fall. Perhaps that was faith?
Fall backward into arms, into scenes and lives so far in the past as to be trimmed in fine mists.
One cold February morning when the children were very young, the boiler had broken down. They had all three crawled into her bed, wearing the woolen jackets Victor had tailored. While he went out to find a wrench they played rhyming games with Isobel, reciting every riddle and tongue twister they knew. They sang nonsense songs and watched the thick snow plaster the windows in great swatches. Passing that morning in the simple necessity of keeping her children warm and entertained gave Isobel an awareness of that endowment she alone possessed, the ability to care for these children and keep them safe. Love them as no one else could.
Eventually Victor had banged into the house with a tool he’d found in the garage. The children spilled away from the bed, a plaid caterpillar snaking out the door. A soft avalanche of stocking feet thudding down the stairs to spiral to the basement.
She stayed in
bed, running her hands over the nubby bedspread, listening to the clanging pipes and young voices cheering as Victor worked a father’s magic.
She heard distant whoops and a throaty rumble as the furnace came to. Fifteen minutes later Victor stomped up the stairs to their bedroom with a steaming cup of tea in his hands. He wiped his oil-smeared fingers on his shirt and grinned, kicking the door shut behind him.
She sat up and took the tea. The house had gone quiet. “Where are they?”
Victor suddenly stooped in a hunchback’s posture and dangled one arm to his knee, undoing the buttons of his shirt with his free hand. His voice took on an expansive lisp. “The children? Why, locked in the coal-thellar, my thweet.”
He jumped up on the bed in one agile motion, shifty-eyed and rocking in a menacing crouch. “Not to worry, though, I’ve left them thome water and thtale bithcuits… the thtub of a candle.”
She giggled and screamed as he crabbed over her, wobbling the mattress. Tea sloshed over the bedspread.
A stained bedspread. Tea spoking across chenille. Other fabrics passed through, over, under her fingers; the textures and hefts of years. The dress of a doll whose name she’d long forgotten, its blue gingham as distinct to Isobel as if she were holding it now. Amelia? Anna?
The hem of a nightgown she had used to wipe an infant’s mouth ringed with bluish milk from her breast. She could recall the detail of the scalloped edge of the nightgown, could see the baby’s mouth. Which of her babies had that been?
The linen tea towel she had used to soak up spills of coffee during the endless afternoon of Victor’s funeral. Innumerable handkerchiefs damp with blotted tears, handkerchiefs bloody from scrapes, purple with jelly lifted from a soft cheek. Harsh corduroy of boys’ trousers worn at the knees, the satin lining of her favorite winter coat, thin cotton dresses covering the aching vulnerability of a child’s shoulder blades.
The rigid trifold of the American flag on Henry’s coffin. The perfect, perfect laying of lapels on Victor’s suits. The impossible smoothness of ivory velvet trailing Louisa’s wedding gown. As she remembered, her hand twitched a little and clutched softly at the hospital blanket.
“Mother?”
He was closer now, and she could make out the deep lines in his face. She reached out to touch his jaw, his ear. Behind him the envelope slid to the floor. Neither took notice. Isobel brushed back her son’s hair.
Filament woven into a summer that began as a boat moved away, watching her husband’s face dissolve behind sun-riddled smoke.
“Mother? Would you like to go outside?”
By this grace dissolved in place.
Cupping her son’s chin in her palm.
The boat stopped in the water. The engine reversed itself and the stern backed itself out of a yellow fog.
Isobel raised her other hand from the blanket in a gentle gesture. She waved the air in front of her face, the motion in her arm suddenly fluid, its dead weight rising. What she had been trying to remember for weeks came to her without hesitation; the lines had been with her all along. How could she have forgotten? Words rising to greet her, uttered softly as if from the mouth of a lover, a sweet child, a benevolent father. Lines she had balanced in her memory and conserved for others like consecrations turned slowly to make themselves heard and precious to her, whispering for her.
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
…this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm less strong and stronger —
Given or lent? More distant than stars and nearer than the eye
“Outside? No thank you, Thomas. Too much fuss.”
… what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog…
Her fingers trailed away from her son’s face. “I believe I’ll stay inside. Stay put.”
My daughter.
She turned to a brilliance throbbing through the glass. “But do something for me before you leave, please. Open that window. As high as it will go.”
The End
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
These Granite Islands Page 28
