Western Wind

by Paula Fox

  “Elizabeth and I’ll go now,” Gran said.

  “How can we ever thank you?” Mr. Herkimer said, and his voice was genuinely puzzled.

  Mrs. Herkimer, her pearls restored, grabbed them up with one hand. “We would have found him by daylight—or the Coast Guard would have,” Mrs. Herkimer said.

  “Mother!” exclaimed Deirdre.

  “I’m a realist,” said Mrs. Herkimer. “I’m simply saying he would have been safe inside the cove. Of course, Elizabeth’s finding him saved us a great deal of worry.”

  “Let’s go home, Elizabeth,” Gran said very quietly.

  “Cora, you’re worn out,” Mr. Herkimer said. “I’ll walk with you to the cottage.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Gran said. Then she added urgently, “I want to go home.”

  They started toward the door. “Elizabeth!” called Aaron.

  She turned. Brother and sister were gazing after her. She saw how much alike they were—the same deep-set eyes and straight, dark eyebrows. Deirdre’s expression was mild, even pensive. Aaron’s mouth widened in a slow smile. At that moment, his face emitted a kind of radiance. Then he closed his eyes, and the light went out of his face.

  The fog was entirely gone. The sky was cloudless. The moon in the pale dawn sky painted a path across the water, which was already fading away even as Elizabeth looked at it. Beside the Herkimer dock, the sailboat, returned by the Coast Guard, rocked gently.

  “When Mrs. Herkimer thought Aaron was in danger, she was almost nice,” Elizabeth said.

  “She’s regained her usual self,” Gran said. “Back to a dose of self-congratulation every twenty minutes.”

  When they entered the cottage, Gran walked to the round table, where she sat down heavily and lowered her head to rest on her hands.

  “Gran?”

  She sat up with effort. “It was wonderful that you found him,” she said. “Even if he was safe in the cove, he was out of his head with fear.” Grace came to her and stood up with her paws resting on Gran’s knees. “Not now, Grace,” she said, and clumsily pushed the cat away. “I miss plumbing at times like these.…” Her voice faltered.

  Elizabeth went to her quickly and touched her hair.

  “Are you sick? What can I do?”

  “Help me upstairs. There’s a chamber pot beneath my bed. Take it out. You’ll have to go back to the Herkimers. Tell John to reach Jake.…” She said something indistinct. For a moment, her voice rose. “If he can’t, he must call the Coast Guard again. I have to get to the hospital. I’m sorry, sorry.…”

  Elizabeth’s stomach seemed to sink, to fall out of her body. Her hands tingled and broke into a sweat as she helped Gran up. She kept her arm around her waist as they slowly ascended the stairs. In the small, bare room, she lowered Gran onto her bed.

  “Blessed bed,” she murmured.

  Elizabeth stood irresolutely, afraid to leave, afraid to stay.

  “Go now. Fast as you can.” Gran’s breathing was so uneven, Elizabeth had to guess at most of what she was saying. “I’ll be all right.…” The last words were barely audible.

  The dinosaur spine of the ridge flamed with the rays of the rising sun. The sky above was liquid with the rose light of morning.

  She knocked only once on the door before John Herkimer, still dressed, looking exhausted, opened it to her.

  “Gran,” she uttered. A sob rose in her throat. “She’s sick. She wants Jake to come and take her to the hospital.”

  Mr. Herkimer took her arm and drew her into the dining room. “It’s too early to reach Jake. Anyhow, she’ll need the Coast Guard. I’ll radio them. You go and drink the tea I was about to have.” He led her to the dining table, and she was grateful to be told what to do, where to go. He left her at once, running into the kitchen where he kept the radio.

  “They’re sending out a motor lifeboat,” he told her when he returned a few minutes later. “They have some medical equipment, oxygen … she’ll need that. And they’re going to call the hospital in Ellsworth. She’s got an emergency doctor there. Blystone.”

  Why would he know the doctor’s name? Why hadn’t he been surprised when she’d come to his door with such news?

  He was looking at her closely, and he seemed to sense her confusion. “Your grandmother didn’t want to tell me but she had to, especially with you being here. I should have insisted she not search for Aaron with the rest of us. But when I found the sailboat was missing, everything flew out of my head. I couldn’t think about anyone but Aaron.”

  “She didn’t want to tell you what?”

  “She’s very sick,” he said. “In the spring, she was in the hospital several weeks—”

  “No one told me!” she cried.

  He looked up at the ceiling nervously. They must all be asleep upstairs. For a second, she didn’t care if she woke the whole household.

  “I thought you ought to be told,” John Herkimer said. “But she was fierce about that. She made me promise not even to tell Helen.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “About her sickness. She has heart disease. She thought she could manage this month with you. She had to, she told me. She wanted you here.”

  Elizabeth got up from the table and ran from the room, Mr. Herkimer’s words following her. “They’ll be along soon—not more than forty-five minutes.…”

  Grace was standing by the open door of the cottage, meowing for breakfast. Elizabeth went to the stairs and listened. There was no sound. Her heartbeats were loud in her ears. She quickly filled a bowl with dry food for the cat and went up to Gran’s room.

  She was asleep. Elizabeth looked down at her for what seemed a long time. Deep lines radiated from her mouth. Her hair looked dry, like doll’s hair. Her breathing was labored, uneven.

  She imagined Gran at the sink, smiling over her shoulder, her square, small hands in the soapy water washing a dish.

  A framed picture Elizabeth had not seen before stood on the bedside table. It was of a very young man, his hair falling in curves along his cheeks, bound in the back with some kind of thong. He was smiling, looking down at something out of the picture. She recognized her young father.

  She woke Gran.

  “The Coast Guard is coming very soon,” she said softly.

  “I’ll be ready.” Gran’s voice was somewhat stronger than earlier. “Help me downstairs.”

  There were fifteen steps. They paused on each one. Elizabeth took her to a chair and eased her into it.

  “John told you?” she asked Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth nodded.

  “We—your parents and I—didn’t know what to do. We talked for weeks. We wrote letters … whether to tell you or not. We’d be certain one day, then at sea the next. Somehow time passed. My doctor thought I’d be able to manage for a few weeks. And after all that talking and argument, life carried us along as it seems to do no matter what we choose. Last night’s wandering around pushed me over the line. It was my own fault. I should have stayed here while the rest of you looked for Aaron. You found him anyhow.”

  Elizabeth heard the scrape of a bough against a window. The room suddenly brightened as light entered it like a spirit.

  “Someone should have told me,” she said. Was that right? Would she have wanted to know? Wasn’t it awful enough to know now? This minute? She put her hand across her eyes.

  “Take your hand away, Elizabeth,” Gran said. “You would have been watching me every second, the way the Herkimers watch Aaron, waiting for me to fall over. You would have been scared the livelong day. Maybe we were all wrong. But the way it has turned out—didn’t we have good times?”

  “You’re going to die,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes,” Gran said. Her mouth twitched with the ghost of a grin. “Most people do,” she said.

  Elizabeth knelt beside her and covered her hands with her own.

  “You must do something for me,” Gran whispered. “You must tell the Herkimers to take Grace. I wouldn’t want her abandon
ed again.”

  Two young men in Coast Guard uniforms carried Gran on a stretcher to the Herkimer dock, where a sleek boat of forty or so feet was anchored.

  Elizabeth followed, carrying her things, which she’d stuffed hastily into her suitcase and backpack. She had found the little metal giraffe Aaron had given her and, after a moment’s hesitation, left it on a windowsill where it was possible to imagine it would look out across the bay all winter.

  Mr. Herkimer had come to the cottage a little earlier to get Grace, and to press Gran’s hand wordlessly as she lay on the stretcher.

  A medical officer waited on the dock. “We’ll make her comfortable,” he told Elizabeth. “Then you can come aboard. There’ll be an ambulance waiting in Molytown to take you to the hospital in Ellsworth.”

  She stood alone on the dock. The day was brightening around her. She recalled the first time she had seen Pring. It had seemed to her as flat as an old-fashioned postcard.

  The officer called to her. “She’s perked up a bit,” he said. “You go and sit beside her.”

  Gran was lying on a cot that was firmly anchored to the floor by metal bars, in a cabin that resembled a hospital room. Two tubes led from Gran’s nostrils to a cylinder of oxygen.

  It was hard for Elizabeth to look at those tubes, and hard not to. Because of them, she guessed, two faint thumbprints of color touched Gran’s cheeks. She seemed some other person, an old stranger drowsing.

  Elizabeth sat down on a stool next to the cot and Gran opened her eyes. She reached out her hand. It faltered in midair and fell back on the coverlet. “So sorry …” she murmured.

  “Don’t be sorry anymore,” Elizabeth whispered.

  “You can call your father from the hospital,” Gran said.

  She was still taking care of things.

  An engine rumbled. There was a sudden thrust forward as the boat moved away from the dock. “I’ll be right back,” Elizabeth told her.

  From the deck, she gazed at Pring. Mr. Herkimer stood at the end of the dock, holding Grace. He saw Elizabeth and waved slowly. She lifted her hand once in farewell, and went back to the cabin. Gran had fallen asleep.

  Because it was so early and a Saturday morning, the roads the ambulance followed to Ellsworth were nearly empty. Gran seemed restless. She muttered, and constantly turned her head from side to side. Elizabeth felt she was losing her to a dim world where sentences were never finished, and where sleep came and went abruptly.

  Dr. Blystone was waiting in the emergency room at the hospital. “We’ll be putting her into intensive care,” he said. “She’ll need some tests.”

  A nurse directed Elizabeth to a small office near the reception area, where she found a telephone on a desk covered with framed photographs of someone’s family. She looked at them as she dialed home. They all smiled at the camera; even the infant carried in the young woman’s arms was smiling.

  What were they really like? What were they smiling about?

  Her father answered on the third ring. A radio was playing in the background. They must be in the kitchen getting breakfast. She heard a chuckle, a high, delighted laugh.

  “Elizabeth! How marvelous to hear your voice! Listen—Stephen’s talking to you.”

  “Daddy, I’m in the hospital in Ellsworth,” she said.

  There was silence at the other end of the line. She heard Daddy say, “Take him,” and her mother cry anxiously, “What’s the matter? Is there something—”

  Daddy’s voice came back on. “What happened?” he asked.

  “Gran,” Elizabeth said. “She’s very sick. The Coast Guard had to come and get us. We’re in the hospital in Ellsworth. They’re going to take her to intensive care.”

  “I’ll get the first plane to Bangor,” her father said. “I’ll rent a car at the airport. Oh, Elizabeth! We so hoped—”

  Elizabeth interrupted him. “Please get here as fast as you can,” she said. They both hung up.

  She had heard the sounds of her home from which, after all, she had not been sent away like an unwanted package. She had had it all wrong, and Gran’s assurances hadn’t really changed what she had felt.

  But she understood now. Maybe they should have told her, warned her about what could happen, what, in fact, had happened. The knowledge of Gran’s illness would have altered the nature of those weeks in a way she could barely imagine.

  But would that knowledge have lessened her shock at realizing Gran’s weakness? Seeing those hard plastic tubes that brought her the life-sustaining oxygen? Perhaps she would have simply refused to go to the island if she had known. But then she would have missed everything. She was no more sure of what the right thing to have done was than Mom or Daddy or Gran had been.

  Dr. Blystone came into the room. “You won’t be able to visit your grandmother for a while,” he said in a kindly way. “She’s had a stroke, not the worst kind, but serious enough.”

  “My father’s coming,” she said.

  “Good. You must be hungry. Go downstairs to the staff cafeteria and get yourself some breakfast. You couldn’t have had much time for that.”

  She found the cafeteria, ordered toast and, for the first time in her life, a large container of coffee. Sitting down at a table with her tray, she recollected how she and Nancy had tried to stay up a whole night through but never managed it. She had now.

  Mr. Benedict arrived just after noon. Elizabeth, by then, had spent five minutes visiting Gran. Her face was still. Elizabeth had bent close to her to hear her breathing. She’d spent the rest of the time in a waiting room, looking at tattered magazines without actually seeing anything in them.

  When her father appeared at the entrance to the waiting room, she looked up at him. The magazines slid from her lap to the floor. For the first time since Gran had sent her to Mr. Herkimer to radio for help, she cried. Her father held her for a long time.

  10

  Elizabeth’s grandmother died at the end of the third week in September.

  On a Thursday afternoon, after dropping her schoolbag on the kitchen floor, Elizabeth lifted Stephen Lindsay from her mother’s arms, sat down on a rocking chair, and held him upright on her lap. He regarded her seriously. She made a loud popping noise with her mouth. His lips trembled, widened into a smile. Then his voice rose in a cry of hilarity.

  “I love to break him up,” Elizabeth said to her mother, who was looking through a heap of catalogs that had arrived in the morning mail.

  “I have no character,” Mom said. “I hate these things, but I always look at them.”

  The wall telephone rang. Her mother went to answer it. “Charlie,” she said. She listened. Elizabeth saw tears start from her eyes. Elizabeth clutched her brother to her, his breath on her neck.

  After a while, her mother hung up the phone. She turned her wet face to Elizabeth.

  “Gran is dead,” Elizabeth said.

  Stephen Lindsay let out a wail, and her mother took him. They stayed in the kitchen. Weeping, Mom poured a glass of milk for Elizabeth, put some cookies on a plate, warmed a bottle for the baby. There didn’t seem to be anything to do but sit there thinking about Gran. Elizabeth wiped her eyes on a kitchen towel. She ate a cookie but tasted nothing.

  After a while, Mom whispered, “I’ll put Stephen in his crib now. I think he’ll sleep.”

  On Sunday, the three of them flew to Bangor for Gran’s funeral.

  The service was held in a Congregational church that had been built in 1853. The squeaking, high-backed pews that smelled of old varnish were nearly filled with people who had known Mrs. Benedict. On his father’s lap, Stephen Lindsay fought sleep. The young minister who led the service tended to smile at odd moments, as though his thoughts and his mouth weren’t quite in agreement. Perhaps, reflected Elizabeth, he was unsettled by her brother’s occasionally loud chirps, which echoed high above the congregation like the sound of a trapped bird.

  Yet, though he hadn’t known Gran, the minister spoke of her in a tender way, the little smile
coming and going, as though the simple fact that she had been born and had lived was reason enough for reverence.

  Only a few people drove north to the Blue Hill peninsula for the burial where Gran had arranged, some years earlier, for a plot in a small, old cemetery on a hill.

  The Benedicts made the trip in a rented car. Keeping steady speed in front of them was the hearse.

  It was the first time they had all been together except for their hushed ride from Bangor, where Mr. Benedict had met Elizabeth, her mother, and the baby. He had spent most of the month in Ellsworth, with side trips to Camden and Pring Island when he could get away from the hospital. There had been many things to take care of, he told them, the accumulation of a lifetime, papers, paintings, other artwork of hers, furniture, and clothes, to be given away or stored. The cottage had been much easier than the Camden apartment.

  “Did Gran talk a lot to you?” Elizabeth asked, feeling a certain shyness. Her voice sounded unnatural to her own ears. Was it because she was speaking of one so recently gone from life? Gran was now a word for a mysterious space. Yet in the part of her mind that flashed with ever-changing images, Gran moved among them, animated or at rest, sharp or kindly, as the mood took her. Elizabeth was, she realized, memorizing her.

  “She hardly spoke,” her father was saying. “She asked one time to see a picture of your brother. By the time I got it out of my wallet, she was drowsing.”

  Elizabeth glanced at Stephen Lindsay, asleep at last in his car seat beside her.

  “That’s all?” she asked.

  He was silent for a few miles, his hands gripping the steering wheel.

  “She worried so about a couple of envelopes she’d left in the cottage,” he said at last. “One is for someone named Jake Holborn. The other is for you. They’re back in that canvas bag on the floor. Even when I brought them to the hospital and showed them to her, she was so confused … didn’t recognize them. It was terrible. She cried.”

  “Jake Holborn was the old man who brought supplies to us in his boat,” Elizabeth said.