Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  Slowly, though, as these routines became established, restlessness crept in. There wasn’t enough to keep my mind from Mother, the scene I’d found in the bathroom, the endless calculations of by how much or how little time I’d failed to save her.

  Susan’s comment about Castle Hill popped into my mind two days later when, out in search of a fish market Bonnie had mentioned, I passed a sign that pointed to its location. On impulse I swung the steering wheel to the right. An old converted barn, with several additions sprawling to one side and behind, sat in a secluded area in the Truro hills. Without allowing myself to think it over, I parked and walked around the building in search of a door. By the time I was back to the Rambler, I’d signed to join an ongoing workshop in basic pottery. “Sure, we do that all the time because there are so many temporary residents in the summer,” the wild-haired woman who bustled out to greet me wiping paint-stained hands on a rag had said. “That’s Marcy’s workshop. You’ll love her. Basically, for your fee you get studio space, equipment and materials, and an artist who’s working on his or her own pieces to give you guidance and answer questions. It’s not an actual class, it’s a studio situation. There’s a one-week minimum, but you can do as many or as few weeks as you want.”

  “Perfect,” I answered, and with only a twinge of guilt, paid in cash for the next week from the stash Evan had pressed on me.

  A WEEK LATER, I WALKED down the beach after an early supper to the same pay phone to call Evan again. We had much the same conversation as each time I’d called him, his voice husky around his pleading, and mine distant with involuntary refusals. As I made my way back (slow going because the tide was high and the beach still exposed above the highwater mark was extra soft), an unusual number of fishermen dotted the sand. “Catch anything?” I asked one.

  “Yes, ma’am! The blues are running!”

  Indeed, I thought, the words seeming clairvoyant even the second moment, when I got it: he was referring to fish.

  “Whoa!” he yelled then, reeling hard. “And here’s one now! You must be luck.” But I looked at his bucket and saw it was nearly full. Just a couple of dozen feet separated him from another fisherman, and so on. Farther up the beach, I saw Bonnie and Susan with a man and woman I recognized as renters in one of their cottages.

  “Sorry, but I have to go spread the luck around.” I smiled, gesturing that I was going to duck under his line.

  “Whoa!” he yelled again. “Don’t walk under the line, go behind me. If the fish runs with my line, it may drop hard and tight, slit your neck just as you walk into it.” Feeling foolish, not knowing if he was serious, I stopped short and made to go around him. He must have seen my skepticism. “It’s a thing can kill you, missy. You never know.”

  “Thanks.” Lately I’d been paying attention to warnings, afraid to ignore anything that might be a sign of impending disaster. Nothing was safe. Nothing.

  When I reached Bonnie and Susan, they immediately pulled me in to their circle. “Watch the line,” Bonnie cautioned. “Dangerous. Look, my God, they’re practically jumping out of the water into the bucket without waiting for the hook. Aren’t you ashamed, George? This is way too easy. You’re running out of bait. Do you want me to get you more? I’ve got some up at the house.”

  “Nah,” the middle-aged man replied, patting his paunch. “Got too many as it is. You girls want some?”

  “Seriously,” his wife added, her red jacket a striking splotch of color that echoed the last sun on the evening-muted beach. “Even if we could get them all cleaned tonight, we’ll have to freeze them to get them home.”

  “Sure. We’ll take a few. Ruth will help us clean them, won’t you, Ruth?”

  “Oh, there’s nothing I’d love better,” I picked up the banter, “except that I have a formal dinner dance to attend and I’ve got to do my nails immediately. So sorry.”

  “Well, cancel your date, honey, because you’ve now got other plans. George, give us a couple extra, so we can teach this here landlubber to clean fish.”

  “Take all you can use, girls, all you can use.”

  “Please,” his wife tacked on, and laughed. “For my sake.”

  The mood was playful and animated on the beach as we walked past my cottage up to Bonnie and Susan’s house, each of our six hands dangling a fish by the tail, Nellie bounding ahead and circling back as if we were her charges. In the kitchen, darkness overcame the blue dusk that had followed the lowering of the huge red circle sun, degree by degree below the horizon. Susan switched on lights as Bonnie brought out a collection of special knives and set to work in the kitchen.

  “Our actual role here is to keep her company,” Susan explained, pulling out two chairs for us. “She’s such a damn expert at this, she could never tolerate our shoddy work anyway. Personally, I’m not much for fishing, but she loves it.”

  “Well, I’ll admit a certain relief at that,” I said. “Although I would have done it. If you held a loaded gun to my head, that is. And cocked the trigger.”

  “Don’t think I don’t have one,” Bonnie chuckled. She was at the sink and had the water running already.

  Susan made a pot of tea, and brought out a box of cookies. The three of us talked easily, though the focus was pottery. “I took classes with Marcy, too,” Susan said, “quite a while ago, before I focused in on painting.”

  “Before her paintings began to sell,” Bonnie added. “Did you know that some have gone to museums?” She’d turned from the counter to tell me this, swiveling from her hips, and waving the knife as if it were merely an extension of her hand.

  “Stop it,” Susan said. “I’ve been lucky. There are so many wonderful, gifted artists around.”

  “She’s excessively modest.” Bonnie turned again to direct the comment to me while she looked at Susan, pride spreading its own light across her face.

  “Anyway, you like working with Marcy? She’s been at Castle Hill for years. She says she likes having beginners around, it keeps her fresh.”

  “Very much, though I look at how she pulls something up out of that lump she starts with and it’s magical. Like making a flower bloom in her hands. Very intimidating. And when I ask her what she’s going to make half the time she says she doesn’t know yet. I can’t seem to get decent curves. I stretch it too far or too fast and it collapses,” I said. “I was trying to make a bowl with a rim, but the edge got way too thin. When I tried again, and kept it slow, it was so thick the whole thing looked like a bomb that hadn’t been detonated yet.”

  “Maybe the clay doesn’t want to be a bowl. Sounds silly, I know, but that’s what I was telling you last time, what she told me. Have you noticed how she feels the clay for a long time? It looks like she is just playing with it on the wheel, but she’s very quiet and that’s when she doesn’t want to be interrupted, right?” Susan had a lively, expressive face, and her brows were like moving punctuation marks.

  “Yes.” I had noticed that.

  “She said she feels what it wants to be, lets it speak to her about what beautiful expression of itself the lump is hiding and to let that come out. Very metaphysical, but I’m telling you it’s true. If you stay around long enough and she thinks you really care, you watch, she’ll explain it to you. The real magic is in feeling out the soul of something and helping it to reveal itself. I find it in my painting, though that’s a little different, of course, and if you ask me, it’s true of people, too.”

  “I can see I’m in trouble. Two of you,” Bonnie interrupted. “How about some attention to the true artistry going on right here?” She gestured, and I obligingly got up and stepped to the sink to examine what she pointed at with her knife.

  Suddenly I was dizzy and overcome with heat and nausea. Pale, watery blood was pooled all over the Formica counter, severed fish heads in a clear glass bowl, their former iridescence utterly gone, dull eyes open in a stare of accusation. The faucet under which Bonnie was rinsing the decapitated bodies was still open, running freely into the filling sink
like an open wound, that sound. A roar of blackness began to shutter the lights and I felt myself begin the great fall.

  I CAME TO SLOWLY, THE roaring only slightly subsided, fighting toward consciousness and memory as though from far below the surface of water. I was on the couch in Bonnie and Susan’s living room, Bonnie sponging my face with a cool washcloth. Her voice barely penetrating. “It’s all right, you’re all right,” she said soothingly. “Don’t try to move yet. Just lie still.” She threw her voice over her shoulder into the kitchen, then. “No, don’t call. She’s coming around.”

  Susan appeared above Bonnie, who was squatting on one knee beside me. “Ruth, are you all right? Ruth…come on, honey. You’re here with us, you’ll be okay.”

  Bonnie kept sponging my face. Nellie nosed in and put her chin on my thigh while Susan disappeared and returned with a glass of water. Bonnie propped my head up for a sip, and then I struggled to a sitting position, and reached for the glass. I held its coolness against my cheek and closed my eyes. Mother appeared, lying on the bathroom floor in the flesh and water and blood scene that had seared itself into every cell of my being.

  Bonnie sat on the portion of the couch my head had just vacated and gently pulled me back down on the uneven pillow of her lap. A cold sweat beaded my face and neck as I tried to fight down Mother’s image. Bonnie lifted my heavy hair—left down that evening in the dry crispness of early Indian summer—off my neck and gathered it up into her hand. Susan fanned me with a magazine. “Better?” she asked. Bonnie stroked the bangs off my forehead.

  “I think I understand,” she said. “I’m so sorry. It was my fault. I never thought…did she use a knife?” With those words, spoken in a tone gentle and motherly and foreign to my experience, I began to heave and shake in silent, dry sobs until the sobs turned wet as the running water, wet as dissolving rock, before they subsided into a swollen, shuddering exhaustion.

  Time passed in the looping, muted shadow of a wall-mounted lamp. Bonnie’s heart beat against my ear, rhythmic and benign as the bay washing the sand, taking away what refuse it can from other seasons. Perhaps I slept a moment or two. Perhaps I dreamed. “Let it go,” I heard a voice neither male nor female say. Bonnie I thought, then another part of my mind argued, no, it’s Evan. “Let it go, love. You’re allowed to save yourself. It’s not your dying that lets others live, it’s your living. Live now. Live.” Mysterious, merciful fingers made themselves into a tender comb, undoing my unruly damp tangle of hair, redoing and holding it, like a fastening in place.

  31

  I HAVE NO IDEA HOW LONG I lay like that in Bonnie’s arms. Susan sat on the floor beside me and held one of my hands in hers. Nellie stopped her anxious checking and splayed out next to Susan. Much later, I felt my head on a bed pillow and a blanket being settled over me. I gave myself over to the comfort and did not try to open my eyes.

  The morning light was dreary, thick with impending rain when I woke. Not too long after, I heard Bonnie and Susan speaking to one another in an upstairs room and got up to go to the bathroom. When I came out, Bonnie appeared in on the stairway in a blue nightshirt.

  “How’re you doing this morning?” she said gently, hardly a question to it at all.

  “Better,” I said. “I’m so sorry, I—”

  “Now you’d better turn that off right now,” she interrupted, sounding more like the tough Bonnie I knew best. “No one understands better than I,” she said into my ear as she gave me a brisk hug. “Not even Susan. Maybe it’s the same with your husband? Susan was involved, I mean, in everything.” I nodded.

  She pulled back and looked at me intently from a distance of inches, one hand on the side of my neck, and caressing the line of my chin with her thumb. She kept her voice low, and I realized she didn’t want Susan to hear. “I know what I’m talking about on this one, I’ve been there. I hope you’re listening. I’d put money on this much—you did everything you could and still hold on to your own sanity. There’s no good in it to do more. People have to live the lives they’re given to live. And that includes you,” she said, then stepped back, smiled and raised her voice to a normal level. “How about some coffee? I make a mean omelet, just ask Susan.”

  “I’d love some coffee. Maybe I should run on home, though, and get out of these clothes.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Run upstairs and shower if you want. There’s plenty of towels right in the bathroom closet up there. Susan’s not much bigger than you. She’ll give you a clean shirt. Stay here for a while.” She wasn’t asking, she was almost ordering, and it was easy enough just to do what she said.

  I came downstairs, my head wrapped in a towel and in yesterday’s clothes, but feeling much better. Susan was downstairs, already dressed in her painting jeans and a black turtleneck, waiting with a heathered sweatshirt for me. “It’s a little chilly. Pull this on, why don’t you?”

  Bonnie was standing at the stove, a metal spatula in her hand. The whole mess from last night had been cleaned up from the counter. When had they done that?

  “So when is your studio time?” Susan asked. Without thinking, I glanced at my wrist, then realized my watch was up in the bathroom.

  “Ten,” I answered. “I have no idea what time it is.”

  “Barely eight,” Bonnie said. “Good, you’ve got plenty of time to eat.”

  “She can’t stand for anyone to give any of her cooking short shrift,” Susan said, pouring a mug of coffee and handing it to me.

  “That smells wonderful,” I said, and took a sip before I set it on the table. “Before I forget, I’m going to run up to get my watch. I left it on the bathroom sink. And I hate to ask this, but do either of you have a brush I could use? I can wait to brush my teeth, but if my hair dries into knots like this, I’m in trouble.”

  “Turn to the left at the top of the stairs, first room,” Bonnie said. “There’s one out on my dresser.”

  Upstairs, I retrieved my watch, then went past the stairs to the left of them as she’d said, and entered a large bedroom with white curtains framing two windows that looked right over my cottage to a wide oceanview. The floor was polished hardwood largely covered by two oriental area rugs that put me in mind of Evan right away. An unmade four-poster double bed was set against the wall opposite the windows. Above it hung a large painting I was sure was Susan’s, so subtly had the nude women been rendered in tones to echo those of the rugs. I stood a moment looking at the painting and at the bed, slowly coming to grasp the choices we’re required to make even when no choice can be wholly seen. I picked up Bonnie’s brush and used her mirror to fix myself.

  “I SURE HOPE YOU MEANT it when you said I could stay on as long as I want,” I said to Bonnie a week later. I’d stopped in at their house as I was on the way back to mine after a trip into Provincetown. Through the window behind her, I could see the bay all smooth, relaxed in waning light. “Because I got a job today.”

  “You’re kidding.” Her brows went up, but so did the sides of her mouth.

  “No kidding. I’m running low on money and I don’t feel right about asking Evan for it.”

  “Look, if you need…I mean, don’t worry about the rent.”

  “Thanks, Bonnie. That’s so good of you, but I’m okay. I’m waitressing at Front Street in P-town. All their summer help is gone and I’ve had a disgusting amount of waitressing experience from my high school days. They had a little sign out, and on impulse I just walked in and applied.”

  “What about…I mean, does Evan…?”

  “I know. This isn’t about Evan, though. I just need to stay here now. Besides, did you see that last pot I fired? It might hold water! I’m going to call Evan tonight. I think I’m ready to see him, and I hope that’ll mean something to him. You know, that all his patience isn’t a waste.”

  “Good,” she said without hesitation. “I’d like to meet him. Susan would, too, I’m sure.”

  Bonnie and Susan reminded me of Evan. So did Ben and Marilyn. Good people with goodwill to s
pare, a storehouse of it. Was there enough, though? In them, especially in him, in the world…could any amount be enough to accept me if they really knew all of it?

  “Well, I’d like for him to meet you,” I said. “And Ben and Marilyn…and maybe he can come to the studio with me, too. And he can come to the restaurant with me, maybe. They said it’s really slow early evenings.”

  “You want to show him your life, don’t you?” she said quietly in that way she had of asking a question that was really a statement.

  “I guess I do.”

  “Are you planning to invite him into it?”

  “I don’t know yet. But this is the first one I’ve had of my own, and I can’t give it up just now.”

  “Understood,” she said. “Understood.”

  I WASN’T PREPARED FOR THE well of emotions that threatened to break loose when Evan stepped off the last step of the little plane that had brought him from LaGuardia to the Hyannis airport and engulfed me in his embrace as soon as he was inside the little terminal building. How could I have forgotten how tall he was, the strength of his embrace? When I pulled back to look at him, his eyes were filled with tears. Then mine did, and we hugged again. He took off his glasses, the way he did when he wanted to really see something, up close, and we absorbed each other’s faces. His dark blond hair had just been cut, I saw, and his shave was fresh. He must have gone home after working during the morning to shave again before he came. Such care he’d taken to impress me again. I’d forgotten the exact hazel of his eyes, a rare gold color.