by Tom Savage
No, she told herself, I will not go mad. I will handle this—whatever it is, whatever it turns out to be—as I have handled everything that fate has thrown my way. I am that self-possessed, at least. I can do it.
The Expressway was, mercifully, less crowded than she’d expected it to be on the first day of the holiday weekend. She looked at her watch: yes, she’d be there by two o’clock. She could even stop for lunch in Bellport or Brookhaven and perhaps get some flowers or a box of candy. Some such prop, the better to pass any inspection there might be by the authorities at the rest home. She had already decided to announce herself as what she was: the mother, legally speaking, of a friend. She could only hope that Carson Fleming would accept that and agree to see her. If not, she would simply return to Glen Cove, and no harm done. An afternoon’s drive, nothing more. A small price to pay for a chance, slim as it was, to satisfy her curiosity.
Carson Fleming, Carson Fleming. . . .
She searched her mind again, as she had done constantly for the past four days. The name was vaguely familiar. Somewhere in the past she had seen it or heard it, but where? He was seventy-seven, and he’d suffered a massive stroke.
He may not be there at all, she reminded herself. He may very well be dead.
No. He was alive: she was sure of it. If not, there would have been something among the girl’s papers to indicate his passing. If her niece had paid for the convalescence, she would almost certainly have paid for the funeral.
Of course, there was another, realistic possibility. Carson Fleming, whoever he was, could be comatose or, at the very least, physically and/or mentally disabled.
She reached over and switched on the car’s air conditioner. She was wearing her lightest summery flower-print dress and sandals, but she could feel the beads of perspiration gathering. It wasn’t particularly hot today, and yet—
Oh, stop it, she commanded as the green, white-lettered sign sailed by on her right: “You Are Now Entering Suffolk County.” Just go there and do what you can.
Resigned, she gripped the wheel tightly in her moist hands and pressed her foot more firmly on the accelerator.
The young woman couldn’t feel anything. No, that wasn’t the truth: actually, she was feeling so many different things all at once that she was unable to come to grips with any of it. Everything seemed to be pressing in on her, restricting her breathing and her circulation. It was a massive, oppressive weight.
She’d awakened this morning as if from a drugged sleep, forced herself to go downstairs to the kitchen for coffee, and brought the cup back here, to her room. She hadn’t eaten anything: the thought of eating made her feel queasy, and it would require energy she was not certain she possessed. Now she sat at the foot of her bed, staring listlessly out past the balcony at the bright blue, glistening, hyperactive Caribbean. The gulls swooped and soared, circling the sailboats and motor craft, leaping upward into the sun and dropping back to skim the surface for food. Their piercing cries of hunger and victory and frustration reached her where she sat, enervating her, forming around her a shell of dull inertia.
This, she supposed, is shock.
The beach the other night had been the beginning of it, but it was by no means the biggest surprise she’d experienced. In fact, when she thought about it, it wasn’t a surprise at all. She’d gotten over the first, reflexive horror almost immediately. The long run up the hill to this room had knocked it from her body as it had winded her. By the time she made her way to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face, the feeling had passed. No, the boathouse was the least of it.
She shook her head, dismissing the beach. I must concentrate on the real problem, she thought. I must figure out what to do. If not, Adam will be lost to me. Forever.
The real problem: the one that had struck her like a blow to the stomach the night before as she prepared for bed.
They’d gone to the airport yesterday to put Adam and Lisa on their plane. She’d taken charge of the tickets and the bags, leaving the others to say their good-byes in private. There had been much hugging and kissing between Kay and her family: she’d been relieved to have something to do, busywork, while that was going on. When boarding time arrived, she’d briefly embraced the child and shaken Adam’s hand, careful to avoid eye contact with him. At last the plane had taken off, and she and Kay had driven into town for some shopping and a huge lunch in Kay’s favorite restaurant. The afternoon and evening had passed uneventfully.
The two of them had sat up late together in the living room, lounging on the couches and sipping cold drinks, Jumbi asleep on the floor between them, Kay in a fuzzy pink bathrobe, smoking cigarettes, her face slick and shiny with cold cream. A slumber party: that was what Kay had laughingly called it. They’d talked about Trish in the hospital, and the apparent crime wave, and clothes and jewelry and cosmetics and scents. Then, as with every slumber party in history, they’d eventually gotten around to discussing sex. Well, Kay had, at any rate.
She’d sat back on her couch across from Kay Prescott, watching her, smiling and nodding and making all the proper noises to orchestrate what was, essentially, a monologue. Yes, she’d murmured, it’s terrible about Trish: thank God she’s all right. . No, she didn’t like hats, either, had never felt comfortable wearing them. . . . Yes, too much eyeliner did make most women look like hookers.
On and on, until suddenly Kay was launched on a new tack, about Adam and her late husband and some boy in high school back in Connecticut. College men: Yale versus Harvard versus . . . Athletes. Football, hockey, lacrosse: the three sports to avoid when considering boyfriends in college. Date-rapists, every one of them. . . . Drama majors: the bestlooking men on campus, always, and safe dates. Of course, half of them were gay, but . . .
She’d flinched when Kay made that last observation, but she said nothing. It was amusing, really, to see this forty-five-year-old woman gushing and giggling and carrying on as if she’d been magically transported back to Vassar. She was just beginning to notice the dramatic change in Kay’s demeanor in the twelve hours since Adam had left the island. Much more relaxed, much less—she studied the woman’s face, searching for a word—guarded. That was it. She could almost like this woman under other circumstances. They might have become friends. Thinking of the amethyst brooch, she blinked and turned her gaze away.
Then, inevitably, the topic had rolled around to Bob Taylor. Kay had somehow changed horses in midstream. One moment she’d been evaluating swimming teams and lifeguards; the next, she was recalling the accident on the boat and Bob’s heroics in the water. He hadn’t hesitated for a moment, Kay remembered, but plunged into the water and fought his way through the waves.
She had closed her eyes as Kay spoke, thinking back on the incident. She could remember clearly now the panic she’d felt when she awakened in the ocean, and the intense look on Bob’s face as he swam toward her, reaching for her, shouting to her—
“I think he’s in love with you,” Kay had said.
She opened her eyes then, staring. “What?”
“In love,” Kay had repeated. “Bob Taylor. With you, Diana. Don’t you think so?”
She’d had to think about it. She didn’t care about Bob Taylor one way or the other, she privately insisted, and her civility toward Adam’s wife—toward this woman she actually liked—was beginning to wear thin. Time to go upstairs, she’d decided. To be alone, to relax, to think. Enough of this “slumber party.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she’d murmured, rising. “I’m not very good at knowing when men are in love with me—or when they’re not, for that matter. It’s late, Kay. I must be getting to bed.”
“Of course,” Kay had said, watching her as she walked over to the stairs. “I didn’t realize the time. I’m going to visit Trish tomorrow afternoon. Would you like to come?”
“Sure,” she’d called back as she ascended.
Then, just as she’d reached the top of the stairs, the other woman’s voice had stopped her. “Oh, and, Lis
a—”
She’d turned around on the balcony and looked down. Kay stood looking up at her, blushing, grinning feebly through her expression of distracted surprise.
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” Kay had cried. “I just called you Lisa! I meant to say Diana. Diana, Nola will be off Sunday and Monday this week. Labor Day. If you want her to get you anything special from the supermarket tomorrow, leave a note for her in the kitchen. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait till after the holiday.”
She’d nodded, said good night to Kay, and made her way down the hall to her bedroom. She’d gone to the vanity table and sat down, reaching automatically for the brush to begin her nightly hundred-stroke ritual, and looked up at her face in the mirror.
That was when it had happened.
It was difficult now, the next morning, to remember exactly what had triggered it, whether it had been the talk of Bob Taylor, or her memory of being in the water, or Kay looking up at her and calling her Lisa. Or had it been the sight of her own image, the dark eyes and alien hair, before her? All of these things, probably. The combination, the sudden juxtaposition. She didn’t know for sure now. She only remembered the horrible, wrenching surprise. It arrived in a huge, violent rush, blinding her, washing over her skin and piercing her nerve endings. She sat there gasping as her eyes adjusted and the image in the mirror came slowly back into focus.
He knows.
The words had entered her consciousness as she sat staring at her reflection
Bob Taylor knows.
Her dark hair had hung down limply to her shoulders, and the creases had deepened at the corners of her eyes as her pupils began, ever so slowly, to dilate.
Bob Taylor knows who I am.
Then, in that awful moment last night, she’d done what seemed to most natural thing. She’d picked up the brush and begun the hundred strokes.
And only one person can have told him.
When she was finished with her hair, she’d turned off the light and fallen across the bed. She had lain there in the darkness for several hours, assessing it, going over it all in her mind. What he knew; what he might know; what he could not possibly know.
He? No, not he. Not merely he.
They.
It had been nearly five o’clock when sleep, the exhaustion of frustration, overtook her. She’d awakened hours later to find that she was still lying on top of the covers, fully clothed.
Now, in the brilliant light of morning, it seemed to her that there was only one recourse, only one solution. It was eleven o’clock, and soon Kay would be ready to go to the hospital. She must act quickly, before she changed her mind.
She rose from the foot of the bed and left the room. At the bottom of the stairs she turned, went over to the telephone in the corner of the living room, and slowly raised the receiver.
It was a large, imposing old Long Island mansion, set back from the main road on a flat headland next to the bay just outside the village. The pillared, white wood structure of the original three-story residence had been augmented on both sides by long, low, more modern-looking wings with louvered windows and flat roofs, which were in rather violent contrast to the gingerbread and latticework—not to mention the eponymous gables—at the center. But it was the huge, yellow-lined parking lot off to the left that, more than anything else, announced to the world that this once-gracious home was now an institution.
Arriving shortly before two o’clock, Margaret followed the metal signs and luminous arrows around the drive to a space in the lot marked “Visitor” and crossed the neatly mown lawn to the front entrance. She walked quickly, purposefully, hoping that her own momentum would keep her from faltering. She was a friend, she insistently reminded herself as she entered South Bay Gables; she had every right to be here.
Her trepidation was short-lived. The moment she walked across the small, empty lobby and confronted the pretty girl in the starched white uniform and nurse’s cap behind the desk, she knew everything was going to be all right. No stern doctors or sinister matrons or security people: merely a little blond girl, barely out of her teens. This she could handle. She took a swift inventory of the girl’s visible attributes, singled out the most remarkable one, and plunged.
“Good afternoon,” she gushed, grinning across at the girl and holding up her brightly wrapped candy box. “I’m here to see Carson Fleming, I’m an old friend, I’m in a bit of a hurry, can’t stay long, you know how it is—my, what beautiful earrings! Where on earth did you get them?”
The young woman blinked, processing all the information she’d just been given and obviously wondering which statement required a response. To Margaret’s infinite relief, she chose the last.
“Why, thank you!” she giggled, raising a nervous hand to the garish chandelier dangling precariously from her tiny right earlobe. “They were a gift from my fiancé He’s an intern over at Nassau Medical. We’re getting married in November.”
Margaret, following the ancient ritual of female etiquette, dropped her gaze to the fourth finger of the girl’s left hand. “My dear! Hang on to him!”
The nurse looked down at her minuscule diamond and laughed with proprietorial glee.
“I intend to,” she purred. “Of course, Gus—that’s his name, Gus—wanted to wait until his internship was—oh! I’m sorry. You said you were in a hurry, didn’t you? Calvin!”
This last was called over her shoulder to a large black man in a green orderly’s uniform, who sat on a couch in the station behind her, idly watching a tiny television set. He jumped to his feet and came over to them.
“This lady is here to see Mr. Fleming. He should be out on the lawn now, in his usual chair.” Turning back to Margaret, she said, “He’ll love the candy, I’m sure, but don’t expect him to—well, you know. . . .
Margaret, who did not know, nodded as if she did and followed Calvin from the lobby.
They made their way down a short corridor and across a rather crowded day room. The patients—“residents”—looked up with varying degrees of interest as she passed. The majority of them were elderly, she noticed, and obviously infirm. They sat on couches, in rockers, in wheelchairs, some watching television, others playing cards. Most of them, it seemed to her, were doing nothing in particular—just sitting by themselves, unattended, gazing vacantly ahead of them. A few had visitors today: young, well-dressed relatives with gifts of food and flowers. Restless children, in Sunday clothes they hated, sat uncomfortably still on uncomfortable couches, being fondled and fussed over by frighteningly old grandparents. This is it, she realized. The place I fear most, filled with the sort of people I most despair of becoming.
Her anxiety came creeping back, despite her triumph at the front desk. Why am I here? she wondered, staring around her with ill-concealed horror. What am I about to find? What connection could my niece possibly have to anyone in this place?
Carson Fleming, Carson Fleming. . . .
She followed Calvin out to the patio at the back of the complex. More chairs and couches outside; more patients, basking in the sun, attended by friendly nurses and silent orderlies. A huge lawn rolled away from the buildings, down to Great South Bay, which lay, majestically blue, a hundred yards before them.
The sun bore down on her as they crossed the sloping green lawn toward the water’s edge. There was an enormous willow tree here, its wide limbs dropping leafy tendrils nearly to the ground, providing a carpet of shade. In this cool, dark haven several old-fashioned, white wooden lawn chairs had been placed, facing the bay, for the comfort and enjoyment of the inmates.
Calvin pulled aside the curtain of leaves and motioned for her to enter. She walked past him into shady darkness and stopped, looking around. There were four chairs under the tree, but only one was occupied. An old man sat with his back to them, apparently looking out over the water. Margaret could see the back of his white head and the bony, withered hand resting on the arm of the chair, clutching the corner of the blanket spread across his knees. As she watched, the orde
rly went around and knelt in front of the figure.
“You have a visitor,” he said, “and she’s brought you something. You just have a nice visit with her, and I’ll be back later so’s we can get you on in to dinner.”
If the old man understood or even heard what was said to him, he gave no indication. With a nod to Margaret, Calvin left the arbor and walked away across the lawn. She was alone now, alone with the man in the chair.
She stood there behind him, looking down. So, she thought, this is he: this is Carson Fleming. This man in this chair is one of the most important people in my niece’s life.
There was no going back. The thought entered her mind at that moment, as she looked away from the back of his snowy head and out through the leaves at the blue water and the white sailboats and Fire Island, hazy in the distance. She heard the faint buzzing of grasshoppers and the muffled sound of faraway voices, laughter from the patio.
Then she walked around the chair and turned to face him.
He sat hunched over, the blanket tucked around his shrunken form, staring down at her feet. Then he slowly raised his head and looked up at her face.
Margaret stared. She clutched the candy box tightly to her chest as she looked down into the clouded, uncomprehending eyes, remembering them, feeling the rush of the years crowding in on her and the stab of stark, long-ago pain. Her lips began to move, seemingly of their own accord. She made a bad attempt at speaking, but nothing would come, so great, so profound was her distress. When at last she found her voice, it emerged as a single hiss of cracked sound, half word, half whisper:
“You.”
As she watched him, breathless with surprise, she saw—or imagined she saw—the faintest flicker of recognition on his face. His eyes widened almost imperceptibly, and his tongue moved slowly across his parched lower lip. His right hand came up slightly, and the trembling fingers uncurled, seeming to point themselves directly at her. Looking at him, she fancied she saw a brief mirror of her own fear. For one odd, frozen moment, she thought he was going to speak.
