The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  He realized then that the feeling he had was of missing his daughter. He missed the parts of her he didn’t know.

  7.

  THE FOLLOWING EVENING, when Dary was out having dinner with Colin Donnelly, Gene went into her room. He didn’t intend to imitate her eulogy or borrow from it in any way, he just wanted to see how she had gone about it.

  A pale grayish light from the street fell across the desk, illuminating a piece of paper. He went toward it.

  “Looking for something?”

  His hand flew to his chest.

  Dary clicked on a small lamp by the bed, where she lay on top of the covers wearing the clothes she had gone out in.

  He frowned. “I thought you were out.”

  “I was. I’m back.”

  “Did you and Colin get a chance to catch up?”

  She raised herself up on her elbows. “You know, it’s not really fair, the things we already know about each other. It’s like I have institutional memory for a person. I can remember how when he was eleven or twelve he thought his private parts were really something special, a unique set, and he would completely freak out if someone accidentally opened the bathroom door while he was taking a piss. It’s hard to catch up with someone like that, when I already have the feeling of knowing too much. We mostly talked about his brothers. Michael had a surgery to make his chin more defined.”

  “That’s none of my business,” Gene said.

  He noticed a bottle of gin, still mostly full but with the cap off, on the floor by the bed, and Dary asked him if he wanted a drink. She swung her legs around the side of the bed and sat up, then looked around her feet. “You seen my glass?”

  There was no glass. “The glasses are downstairs,” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. She picked up the bottle and drank from it. “Tastes the same.”

  “Hold on, hold on.” He went to the bathroom and returned with his rinsing glass, which he handed to her.

  “You’re not gonna have one?” she said. She poured gin into the glass.

  “I’ve got work to do. The eulogy.”

  “Still?”

  He turned to leave.

  “Hey, wait.” With surprising quickness she downed the gin and set the empty glass beside her feet. “Why don’t you try it out on me?” she said. “Whatever you’re thinking?”

  He demurred.

  “Oh, c’mon—you can try, can’t you?” She leaned down and poured herself another drink. “You don’t want one?”

  “We don’t usually drink upstairs.”

  “You want me to go downstairs?”

  He sighed, relented, and held out his hand for the glass, which she filled.

  “What do you think they’re doing right now?” she said, falling back on the bed.

  “Who?”

  “The campers. Annie. Ed and Gayle. Colin’s kids.”

  “I think they’re asleep. I think their feet hurt and they’re snoring.”

  “I think they’re having fun,” she said. She hummed something to herself, a tune he didn’t recognize. Then her head popped up and she looked at him with fresh interest. “Hey. How come we never went camping? When I was little?”

  He took a small, tidy sip of the gin. “I didn’t realize you were interested in camping.”

  “Well, how was I supposed to know if I didn’t know what camping was? Isn’t that, like, the job of a parent? To show their kid everything…everything interesting there is to do?”

  The implication of her question—that in some way he had failed to do his job as a parent—irked him, though he tried to cover it by drinking more of the gin. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “I didn’t spend much time camping as a kid myself. Plenty of time in the outdoors, sure, but not camping. That takes a lot of gear.”

  “You didn’t take me camping because of…gear?”

  “I didn’t know you wanted to go.”

  She was quiet but he could sense her wakefulness, the collision of subjects in her mind.

  “What are you thinking about?” he said.

  “Oh, just Hoolie. We’ve never been away from him this long.”

  Then she lapsed into silence again, and he found himself wanting to say, Now what are you thinking? Now what are you thinking? Now what? But he didn’t say anything.

  “I’m really grateful for Hoolie,” she said. “Dogs are so amazing. It’s like they can sense everything you’re thinking one second before you walk into the room, and then they know whether now’s the time to play or just lie at your feet. It’s so—so unhuman. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to meet a human that was like a dog.”

  “Do you ever meet any humans?” he said, hoping to pose the question in a neutral sort of way. “Out in your neck of the woods?”

  “I meet people all the time.”

  “Oh, I’m glad. I’m glad you’re—trying.”

  She made a face of displeasure. “It’s not like a transcendent way of being, you know, always making an effort.”

  “Is that what I said?”

  “I’m just pointing out that sometimes there’s a value to giving up.”

  He wanted to ask her what she had already given up. Love? The hope of companionship? Some other dream? Or if he was especially daring, he would ask her about sex—whether she’d experienced the satisfaction of it within the context of a loving relationship. But he still had to write the eulogy—and besides, he didn’t know if he was prepared to hear her answers. He felt he would be content to skip over the talking part if there was another way to learn this information. These were not the sorts of topics he himself had ever talked about with a parent or grown-up, and he couldn’t imagine how it would be anything but uncomfortable for both parties. He said only: “I hope you’re not giving up.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” she said.

  He held out his glass, and she refilled it. Since she’d arrived, it was the closest they’d come to a moment of tenderness.

  When he came downstairs in the morning, the back door was wide open. Dary was outside, drinking coffee at the glass table in the backyard. He had one moment of pure discomfort when he thought she might have discovered her mother’s ashes. But then he remembered that his daughter didn’t drink instant coffee, only the freshly ground kind.

  He found his slippers and went out to join her. It was silly, but he tended to forget about the backyard unless someone reminded him it was there. Neither he nor Maida had been particularly diligent gardeners. The climbing hydrangea was slowly pulling the fence to the ground. Once a year the redbud tree exploded in pink flowers that seemed to float on the air rather than be attached to the tree itself. Then the flowers disappeared and the leaves turned green and scraggly, and he and Maida would find themselves wondering if it made sense to keep such an ugly tree alive. But it was all talk. They never did anything without input from Gayle, because Gayle knew about green things and seemed to care about theirs in spite of their neglect. She was still coming by once a week to cut back the hydrangeas, giant lacy blooms that snowed their petals everywhere.

  Dary was wearing a long shirt that left her legs bare; he supposed she had slept in it. There was something about her appearance—the bare legs, the way her hand trembled when she raised her cup to her lips—that made her appear a more fragile version of herself.

  “Is your offer still good?” he said, sitting down. He explained he could use some help with the eulogy after all.

  She shaded her eyes with her hands. “You want me to write it for you?”

  “Just help me get started.”

  She frowned as if he was asking for both too much and too little. “No birds,” she said. “No butterflies. No winged aspect of nature of any kind. None of those supposedly uplifting symbols of nature’s renewal, okay?”

  “Have those been retired?”

  “Have you been to a funeral lately?”

  “But your mother loved nature,” he said. “She had great respect for nature.”

>   “If you believe what people say,” Dary said, “every woman who ever lived has had a tender and overwhelming respect for something. Better yet, for some vulnerable and helpless thing.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” he said. “For goodness’ sake, your mother spent her life taking care of kids.”

  “I just wonder why she wasted so much time on other people’s lives.”

  He bristled. “She never saw it like that.”

  “But at the end of the day, when it was all over, what did she have for herself?”

  He couldn’t recall his daughter speaking to him so directly before, and it made him wonder whether she had been more in the habit of speaking this way with her mother. Maybe Dary’s habitual reserve with him had not been the direct result of the relationship between the two of them, but rather of the way the relationship had been governed by the presence of a third body, like a moon. “I can’t say I understand what you’re asking,” he said.

  Dary gripped her cup with both hands. “I’m saying, what did she get in return for—for everything she did? What came back to her? Was it all just heartfelt thank-yous and nice Christmas cards at the end of the year?”

  “Now you’re just making everything sound small.”

  “Then explain to me how it isn’t.”

  A pair of nuthatches dove into the redbud and the leaves quivered with their invisible play. Then the birds shot out again, disturbances in the air.

  “There was dignity in her work,” he said. “Self-respect. Knowing she had done her part.” He paused. “History depends on people like that.”

  “That’s so corny, Dad! That’s like saying the man who invented the lightbulb and the maid who brought him his dinner accomplished the same thing.”

  “Well, how are we to know?” he said. “Maybe it was a good meal that inspired him.” As soon as he said it, he sensed the weakness in the argument, but still he hoped it would get past Dary.

  “We know,” Dary said, “because we have the name of the man who invented the lightbulb, and we don’t know anything about the maid. She’s not interesting to us.”

  “Being interesting wasn’t high on your mother’s priorities. It wasn’t important to her.”

  Dary shivered. “I don’t know why that crushes me,” she said. “But it does.”

  “She was happy,” he said. “That’s enough. Happiness justifies itself.”

  “What did she have to be so happy about? There was nothing she could point to and say, ‘I’ve made this, built this, envisioned this.’ She didn’t have anything.”

  “Or maybe,” he said, “she had everything that matters: family, love, security. You may not believe it, but not all happiness has to begin as struggle and misery to become genuine. It doesn’t always have to be earned. Sometimes it just happens.”

  8.

  IT WAS DARK by the time he arrived at the Sandpiper Inn but he wanted to see the water anyway. The boardwalk behind the main building was illuminated sporadically by lights sunk in the brush, and he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. Many of the boards were no longer in their proper place, some having settled beneath the level surface and some having risen up, warped and twisted. He was wary of tripping or falling. But after a minute or two, he realized that his eyes were not going to adjust any more than they had. The fact was, he no longer saw well in the dark.

  He walked past several cottages, their curtains drawn. After the last cottage, there were no more lights, and the night seemed to drop in around him more fully, penetrating everything except the moon itself. The dark opened his other senses. A strong fishy smell permeated everywhere, probably a fish with its insides torn open and discarded by a gull. His nose picked up the pungent, coastal plant that smelled strongly of semen, though he didn’t know which plant it was. In the dark every sprouted thing seemed to exhale a slightly sour, tangy smell.

  He passed the hulking shape of a dumpster and knew he had to be close. The boardwalk made a sharp turn and what he thought was the fence, a humped black mound dividing the soft gray beach grass from the sky, rose up before him. It seemed taller than he remembered it. He drew closer and saw that his impression wasn’t wrong; brambles now buried it. He remembered there being a latched gate somewhere, but when he stuck his hands into the brambles to find it, the briars snagged his clothing and dug scratches along his arms. He scanned up and down the barricade for where the gate might be, a place where the briars had been cut back, but in the dark the overgrown mound stretched on without end.

  It seemed a long time before he reached the lit section of the boardwalk again. The smell of the ravaged fish was still putrid in his mouth. At last he saw the cottages, their angled roofs pitched against the stars. A slight breeze rustled the sea grass, a sound like the swish of a woman’s dress. There was a low murmur of voices: a woman’s laugh, a man’s reply.

  No light came from the Pelican’s Nest and when he tried the door it was unlocked. The switch above the sink clicked with precision but didn’t illuminate the bulb. He turned on the faucet and drank the water from his cupped hands. It was cold and felt good against his skin, raw from the briars. There was a towel wrapped around the pipe beneath the sink and he removed it and soaked it in cold water in the basin. Then he plunged his nicked hands inside the cold towel and wore it like a mitten.

  He lay across the bed on top of the bedspread. Moon shadows of trees outside fell against the pine-board walls. The bedspread was tinged a bluish white, its pattern of roses transformed to a lunar landscape. He had forgotten about the particular luster of a seaward moon. How when a moon hung over the ocean they were not separate entities, but a third element fused from their continuous correspondence. The planks of the cottage walls appeared fastened together by this faint glow.

  Forty-nine years ago he had come here with his new wife, and in three days he was to give a eulogy for her because she had died.

  What could he say about this? He could say he loved her, but others believed they felt the same. He could say she had spoiled him with her care, but that was dwarfed by all that had passed between them. He could say that his life would never be the same, but even this felt wrong, because his life didn’t feel like a circumstance that belonged to him anymore.

  He thought of the last time they had been here together, during their second year of marriage. Maida had suggested it, a weekend alone together after two difficult weeks at White Pine Camp when they had been woken up each night by a fussing Brian Donnelly. Gene was initially against going back; he was afraid the sweet memories of their honeymoon would get mixed up with ordinary life. But Maida called ahead anyway, and when she learned the Pelican’s Nest was available, this decided it for her.

  The trip didn’t start out auspiciously. Thunderstorms buckled the sky the afternoon they arrived. The sound in the frail little cabin was as if the sky above them was made of glass and someone was kicking it in. In the brief moments of quiet the glass would be replaced—only to be savagely kicked in once more. The heat was terrible. It layered in around them, a fog they couldn’t see but could taste with their skin. Maida said she could feel a rash coming on, the tiny hot pinpricks hammering within her cells. He tried to get her to eat something but she wasn’t interested in food. Sleep was all she cared for—sleep if he could just find a way to keep her pillow cool. He brought her washcloths drenched in cold water and switched them out whenever they warmed to the temperature of the air. His fingers pruned down to ridgy buds that lost their feeling. Once he returned from the bathroom with a fresh washcloth to discover her asleep. He lay down beside her, half-expecting her to wake up at any moment and at least say good night.

  She slept straight through to the morning.

  When she woke up, she was scratching herself in bleary fatigue. He had barely slept at all and was on the verge of proposing they go home when Maida stretched her arms above her head and announced she was hungry. He took her to a diner where she ordered a double stack of banana pancakes with two eggs and a side order o
f bacon and proceeded to eat through the food with methodical urgency. The more she recovered, the freer he felt to be annoyed with her. Why had she brought him on vacation only to treat him like she might have been happier alone? He thought it, but couldn’t bring himself to say it. Illness trapped you that way, dissolving your valid claims against the sick one. This was why he hated sickness in everyone but himself.

  In the end it turned out for the best that he hadn’t said anything. Because when there was nothing more to eat, Maida began to talk. There was a digressive and confusing preamble, but gradually her thoughts organized themselves in a single, clear, unambivalent declaration: she wanted him to make her a baby.

  “When?” he said.

  “Now.”

  Sometimes she had a way of looking at him that left him feeling at once giddy and insecure. It was the impression at times that her interest in him was a guise for something else. But if his wife demanded that he ravish her, what else could he do?

  He smiled now, thinking of it after so many years. He’d done just what she asked. He took her back to the Pelican’s Nest and loved her until she told him to stop.