Moon Over Edisto

by Beth Webb Hart

  They rode the cramped elevator up to the top floor of the small, narrow building together. Julia turned her face away from the antiseptic smell coming from Marney. Like she’d just come from the doctor’s office or a medical supply store. Marney wrung her dry, weathered hands, and Julia noticed that she still wore her wedding band. She wouldn’t have put it past Marney to remarry right away, to have someone waiting in the wings, but it was the same one from before, the simple gold band with the fig vine engraving. Marney’s husband was dead. Deep in the grave. Why did she still feel the need to wear it?

  The elevator opened right into Julia’s apartment. There was the tightly made bed in the far right corner, the studio in the far left beside a panel of windows, and around a curve in the wall there was a galley kitchen, which opened up onto the deck where Julia had recently planted tomatoes and lemons in several large terra-cotta pots along the far right edge where the sunlight was best.

  The moon was nearly full and the sky was clear. Julia had an eerie feeling. As if the moon were winking at her. Told you, it might have said. She nodded to the little sitting area, two chairs and a small table, in the center of the apartment. “Okay,” she said. “Have a seat. I’ll put on some tea. Then you can tell me how you are going to ruin my life today.”

  “I’d rather have water.” The woman’s voice was faint and groggy. She took out a yellowed men’s handkerchief and blew her nose.

  “Sure.”

  Julia poured two glasses of water from the tap. As she carried the glasses toward Marney, she thought of an old Bible verse Aunt Dot used to read to her. Something about loving your enemies. Feeding them a big meal. Maybe something about offering a cup of water. Oh, she’d fallen out of the habit of going to church sometime during college, but that stuff still stuck. It surfaced unexpectedly like a porpoise fin rising out of the dark water.

  Julia handed Marney the glass and took the seat opposite her. “How are the kids?”

  “Surviving, I guess.” The woman cleared her throat. “I have a son now.”

  Julia nodded in as civil a manner as she could muster. She remembered how big Marney had been the day of Julia’s father’s funeral.

  Julia’s father was buried in the Bennett family plot at Magnolia Cemetery outside of Charleston on a sweltering hot day in late August, and Aunt Dot was worried Marney might go into labor right there at the graveside service. She’d been having contractions. Her feet and hands were swelling. Her blood pressure was all over the map.

  Marney always seemed to be the center of attention. Just by existing. Even at a funeral. Her husband had been well one morning, catching and cleaning trout for a late breakfast, and dead by dinnertime. He’d keeled over in a plastic chair on the dock next to his acrylic tubes and easel, the canvas showing the beginnings of an egret hunting at low tide on the far marsh bank of Store Creek. And wouldn’t it have taken the cake for Marney to deliver the dead man’s fifth child, his first son—Julia’s half and only brother—on the day that he was being lowered into the ground?

  But Marney didn’t deliver the baby that day. No, Charlie Foster Bennett III was not birthed at the funeral of Charlie Jr., age sixty-six. Julia was on a plane back to New York late that afternoon, and to this day she had no idea how or when the baby actually arrived. It was her own mother who called to invite her home for Thanksgiving, who mentioned the baby’s birth some weeks later. And then she’d received a birth announcement with Aunt Dot’s handwriting and a photograph of the infant in a bouncy seat flanked by his two older sisters on the old Edisto porch of Julia’s childhood summers. Aunt Dot, trying to patch the family together. Trying to be the glue of Julia’s father’s mistakes. Always the big sister, Julia supposed.

  Marney was picking at a string on her raincoat. She had picked at things in college too. Julia had been paired up with her for a roommate her freshman year at the University of Georgia, though she had requested a room of her own. It was a cruel twist of fate brought about by the UGA computer system (or whatever demon inhabited it), but Julia didn’t realize it at the time.

  In fact, she had adored Marney, who smelled like cloves and was both older and street-savvy, yet very fragile. Marney’s father had left her when she was just a young girl, and her mother had a prescription drug addiction that had landed her in and out of rehab over the course of Marney’s childhood. Marney had seemed so alone. So on her own. Like a compelling protagonist in a young adult novel. Like the character about whom you think, How or why does she go on? And yet you can’t look away because you want her to survive. You want her to thrive. She’d managed to get a scholarship to the university, and she was studying biology. She’d wanted to be a veterinarian.

  So Julia had been compelled, compelled to bring Marney home during their college summers because she had no place to go. Each year they’d head to Edisto and wait tables at Dockside and spend the days lounging on the beach or taking the johnboat out into the tidal creeks and waterways. Marney had grown up in a concrete suburb of Atlanta, and Julia showed her porpoises, alligators, foxes, bobcats, and even a copperhead slinking across the orange and dusty dirt road. She taught her to fillet her first fish with a rusty boat knife and how to peel the heads off of a cooler full of shrimp too. Julia’s mama, who was an amazing gardener and cook, would prepare big meals for them. Fresh-caught shrimp with plenty of butter for dunking, fried flounder and trout, tomato pies, okra soup, sweet corn on the cob, fresh-baked biscuits, and lots of creamy grits to go with everything. Julia’s younger sister, Meg, was always there with a friend or two from town, and so was Julia’s father, who took nearly all of the summer off from his law practice to do what he loved best—paint.

  The last summer between their junior and senior year, Julia had been invited by her art professor to spend eight weeks touring the art museums of Italy and France. She jumped at the chance. Her parents invited Marney to spend the summer at Edisto, as usual, if she’d like. And she did. At the same time, Julia’s maternal grandfather had a massive stroke, and her mother moved back to Charleston to care for him. Meg went back too. She was seventeen, and she had a crush on a South of Broad boy who taught sailing at the Carolina Yacht Club, so she spent the summer taking lessons from him. She would marry him seven years later.

  By the time Julia returned to Edisto from Europe mid-August of that summer, she noticed some strange things: Marney taking a sip of her father’s late-afternoon gin and tonic and setting it down beside him, Marney folding her father’s clothes and delivering him a cup of coffee on the dock every morning as he painted, and once, when they must have thought Julia was still asleep, Marney putting her arm around Julia’s father, and him doing the same, pulling her close for whole seconds as they stared out at Store Creek at the rising tide, wide arcs pushing toward the inmost part of their little salt marsh nook.

  NOW MARNEY CLEARED HER THROAT AND JULIA WOKE back up from the memory. “I have cancer in my left lung, but my oncologist thinks they’ve caught it early enough.” Marney pulled the beige string out of the lining of her jacket and let it fall onto Julia’s hardwood floor. “I need to have surgery next month to remove it.”

  Julia exhaled slowly. She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.” Sorry Marney had torn her family apart, crushed her mother’s heart, exhausted her father with an entirely new second family, and now was battling a wicked disease. Messiness heaped upon messiness. Julia did not like messiness. What she really wanted to say was, So what does this have to do with me?

  As if Marney could read her mind, she straightened up, met Julia’s gaze, and said, “I need you to come home in May and take care of the kids. The recovery will take a month or two.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Mary Ellen

  Duvall Bennett

  CHARLESTON

  Dressed only in her nightgown, Mary Ellen poked her head out of her piazza, bent down, and made a quick reach for the newspapers on her stoop just beyond the little wrought-iron gate that led to the street. The Charleston Post and Courier and the New York T
imes. She scooped them up in their little plastic baggies and ducked back into the house and then out through the kitchen to her little backyard garden where her coffee was steeping in the mini French press. She smiled at her china bowl of cereal topped with slivered blackberries and pecans glistening in the morning sunlight. It was already warm on this mid-March morning in downtown Charleston. The thick smell of roses from her neighbor’s garden made her inhale deeply. Her own garden blossomed with azaleas, wisteria plumes, and pale green hydrangeas, each a perfectly rounded bouquet unto itself. But the roses seemed to trump them all with their rich, syrupy sweetness.

  It must have been at least seventy-five degrees already, and she could almost feel her hair frizzing. She patted it down as she watched the mourning doves flitting back and forth between the palmetto trees and the cable wires before letting out their five long melancholy notes.

  There was a window of temperate weather in Charleston where you could enjoy the outdoors nearly all day long. It was the time between the winter chill and the sweltering summer heat that brought with it enormous mosquitoes, aptly nicknamed the state bird, and the potential threat of hurricanes flung off of the west coast of Africa like enormous, razor-studded Frisbees. When that window opened, somewhere between February and early June, Mary Ellen liked to take as many meals as she could in her little back garden. Fresh air and sunshine did her soul good. And it lifted her spirits.

  She poured herself a cup of well-steeped coffee, took a sip, and then pulled her Times out of the plastic sleeve and flipped right to the Arts section. Soho’s Kent Risen Gallery was featuring five young New York artists in its latest exhibit, and there on page two in section B was an article about the show with a decent-size photo of the artists on a slick leather sofa in the center of the large warehouse-style room. Mary Ellen’s eldest daughter, Julia, was on the far right side of the sofa. She was the only native-born American and the only Caucasian. “I’m the token white girl, Mama,” she told Mary Ellen over the phone just yesterday. “Nonsense, sweetheart,” Mary Ellen had scoffed. She had never been comfortable with her daughters beating themselves down—she had dreaded seeing them fail or knowing their hearts were wounded.

  Tonight was the opening of Julia’s exhibit, and tomorrow there would likely be a review in the Arts section. Mary Ellen’s stomach did a little flip just thinking about it. Her child was far away, and had been for years, but she still felt deeply connected to her. To both of her daughters.

  Julia’s art—the one she had seemed to settle on after graduate school—wasn’t something Mary Ellen fully understood or appreciated. Julia painted shapes—simple shapes—in neon colors, and had done so for nearly the last twenty years. Mary Ellen ran her fingertips across her daughter’s face on the printed page. She could still picture her with the easel set up right here on the Savage Street sidewalk or out at their little family vacation home on Edisto Island—beneath the oak-lined dirt road that led to the salt marsh creek, beside the rows of sunflowers and tomatoes, and, of course, on the dock as the tide and the sky and the waterfowl and sea life altered the canvas moment by moment. More often than not, Charles was painting right alongside her.

  NOW MARY ELLEN COULD HEAR A LITTLE RUSTLING IN the pittosporum bushes just behind her. Her nightmare neighbor, Nate Gallagher, had more activity over there than usual. Jane Anne Thornton, who kept everyone on the street well informed on all matters, reported a few days ago in passing at Burbage’s that Nate’s grandson from New Jersey was staying with him for the week.

  Of course, hardly anyone on all of Savage Street was speaking to Nate Gallagher. He hadn’t exactly assimilated into the South of Broad culture gently, what with his rantings at the downtown neighborhood association meetings, his frequent calls to the city to request the towing of neighbors’ cars who parked an inch over the line in the space in front of his house, or his enormous beast of a dog that he walked in the early morning—without a leash—and allowed to run down the driveways of the neighbors’ houses where he left shockingly large and smelly surprises in many a back garden. Mary Ellen’s son-in-law, Preston, was an attorney. She’d had him threaten Nate with a lawsuit after he’d repeatedly blocked the sidewalk in front of her house instead of his own with the debris from his backyard trimmings. He’d yet to look her in the eye after she slid the letter in his mail slot one night last year.

  Mary Ellen put her linen napkin in her lap and leaned in for a bite of her cereal when something bright orange and rubbery plopped right into her china bowl, splashing Grape-Nuts flakes and bits of blackberries and pecans all over her face and her hair and the front of her pink seersucker robe.

  She grabbed her linen napkin and gently patted the milk off of her nose and eyebrows. Then she turned back to see a full-cheeked, freckled face staring back at her from a little hole in the bushes. A boy, maybe eight or nine, with a scrunched-up nose. He cocked his head rigidly. “Can I have my ball?”

  She wiped the ball off with the bottom corner of her robe and tossed it back over the thick wall of green to him. Then she stood, refastened her belt, and walked back to the house to clean herself off and get a fresh bowl of cereal.

  As she sliced more blackberries, she watched the boy out of the window. He was tossing the ball against the back side of Nate’s house. Thud. Thud. Thud. He had a shock of orange hair and a ruddy complexion, and he was sporting black jeans, black high-tops with orange trim, and a black T-shirt that said “Kick Buttowski” on the back. He caught the ball nearly every time. As she watched him she was struck with a longing to see her three grandchildren, so she called her daughter Meg.

  “Hi, Mom.” Meg always sounded breathless on the phone. As if she’d just run a mile in an all-out sprint.

  “Hi, darling,” Mary Ellen said. “Would you all like to come over for dinner tonight? I’ve got the day off. I can make shrimp creole and maybe a strawberry cobbler.”

  Meg sighed and then muffled the phone to gently scold one of the children. Mary Ellen wondered which one it was. Probably Cooper. He was her favorite, but he knew how to send Meg into a tailspin.

  “Can’t,” she said. “We’ve got a basketball game this afternoon, then we’ve got midweek church.”

  Mary Ellen’s heart sank and she was surprised by the sudden sting in the corners of her eyes. “Oh.”

  She could hear her daughter exhale. “We need a good week’s notice, Mom, okay?”

  Mary Ellen swallowed hard. Meg had told her this once before. “All right, Meg. I forgot.”

  “Margaret,” the exasperated voice on the other end said back to her.

  “Yes, of course,” Mary Ellen said. “Margaret.” She wanted to say, I miss you. I miss the children. Please let me see you. Please invite me over if you can’t come over here. But she did not.

  There was a squeal and then a large clatter in the background at Meg’s. “Gotta go, Mom. Check the Facebook page for info on the game if you want to come.”

  Facebook, Meg had told her mother, was the best way to keep up with their goings-on. It was a one-stop spot to connect with them. They didn’t have time to call or e-mail the extended family. But the more Mary Ellen checked their page, the more distant she felt from them. It was as if their lives existed on an entirely different plane, and she was only allowed momentary glimpses via a camera lens and some sort of smart or sassy quip.

  “Yes, I’ll do that.” Mary Ellen started to say good-bye, but Meg had already hung up.

  WHEN CHARLES LEFT MARY ELLEN, EVERYONE SHE LOVED seemed to scatter: Julia, Meg, and many long-term friends to whom she was connected through Charles, the native Charlestonian. She was an outsider, born and bred in Savannah to a shy but loving mama and a bighearted father who was a third-generation Episcopal priest. She lost Charles, of course. And that had broken her heart. But in a sense, she lost them all. Julia was off in Rhode Island obtaining her master’s, Meg was off at her freshman year at Wofford College, and Charles—the man to whom she’d been married for more than half of her life—was start
ing a new life at their vacation house on Edisto with a woman half his age. One moment she had been busy taking care of everyone. The next there was no one around. One summer she was tending to her dear father on his deathbed, and by autumn she was alone in the big house on Savage Street with only the cat and Jane Anne Thornton to keep her company. She became deeply depressed those first years, so much so that she hardly remembered portions of them. She let her garden go. She stopped cooking. She crawled up in the bed and slept and slept for weeks on end.

  Oh, it was a cliché. An old story told time and time again, one that fit right under the opening verses of Ecclesiastes. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” But somehow Mary Ellen never imagined it would be her story. She had thought she and Charles had a happy marriage, that they could count on one another in spite of the undulations of life. She was wrong.

  The second spring she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and finally said, “You have to start all over again.” It was the only way she could survive—by building a new life under the roof where she’d loved her husband and raised her daughters. She was taken in by a group of divorcées and widows about town. They jokingly called themselves Collateral Damage, and they sipped wine every Saturday night and took day trips to try lunch or tea in a new setting. Every now and then they ventured to the mountains or to New York City, and once they invited her to a tour of Austria and Germany, but she’d had to decline. She couldn’t bear the thought of an overseas flight. Some fears she just wasn’t yet willing to face.