Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

Then they were gone. The hinges squeaked and I saw the back of a flowered dress and a hat exiting the kitchen. It was a wide-brimmed straw hat with a ringlet of faux red cherries around it. The screen door slammed behind them.

  First things first: I drank several glasses of water and wondered if they'd tested their well lately. I drank several more.

  Ezra still slept. Piled next to the sofa were copies of Down East predating the Civil War, just a little swollen with dampness. I read two articles about gardening along the coast. The articles were separated by almost a decade, but both extolled the merits of foxgloves and ferns. Ezra slept on, and I decided to let him stay there while I went in search of sustenance. I am like the mother bear going out foraging, I thought. I am fulfilling some atavistic impulse.

  Outside, the caterers had set up the buffet under the tent. Suited men and hatted ladies, unsteadily clutching their champagne flutes, drifted toward food. Waldo and I found each other.

  "How's Ezra?" he said.

  "Asleep," I said. "Where's Henry?"

  "With Mr. Cicero. I fear the worst."

  We finally ate. No, I was not an expert, but it seemed to me that the Sweets could have served less champagne and, with the money they would have saved, improved on the food quality. Waldo claimed that I never went to an event where I did not wish to rewrite the menu.

  Somewhere on the lawn, people danced, cast shadows, fell wearily into folding chairs, and then got up and danced some more. The music rose and fell, like the waves.

  Chilly air rolled off from the dark blue sea. It was time for Dick to get himself off on his honeymoon.

  "Your bride's anxious to be alone with you." Waldo found Dick shifting awkwardly inside his tux.

  "She is? Did she tell you?"

  "I'm sure of it. Why shouldn't she be? She's lucky enough to have snagged the most eligible fellow in Maine."

  "Don't tell her that," Dick said.

  Waldo said, "Your secret is safe with me." He glanced over my way. "And Alice. Alice is the soul of discretion."

  I nodded.

  Dick said, "We will be alone quite soon. Once Sydney changes her clothes. She doesn't want to go to the inn in her wedding gown. That is not done. I should have known that." Dick rubbed his temples in his characteristic way, as if he were trying to massage bits of information into his brain. He continued, "So, once attired according to her druthers, it's twenty minutes by boat to the yacht club pier, and then five minutes for rice throwing or activities of that nature, and then it's a forty-minute drive up the coast to our inn. Sydney says no one should know exactly which inn we are staying at, but I can tell you, because you are my only brother and Sydney has informed all her sisters as well as some cousins: it's the Frog Hollow in South Tree Harbor. And so we should be alone in an hour and ten minutes."

  "If I follow, you are assuming that Sydney will change out of her bridal finery in five minutes. I think we need to have a discussion."

  Dick looked genuinely perplexed. "But Sydney gets undressed in a flash. I've timed it at twenty-eight seconds, and that includes folding her pants, or at least hanging them over the back of the chair. That was her best time, but it signifies."

  Then it was Waldo's turn to be addled. "You've seen Sydney get undressed? Already?"

  "Of course I have, Walds. What do you think? That I wouldn't have sex before embarking on a venture of this magnitude? That would be highly unscientific."

  Waldo nodded sagely. "Good thinking, Dickie. Brilliant. You have laid all my fears to rest."

  His relief on discovering that Dick was not a virgin was palpable. Only as he relaxed into his tuxedo did I figure out how tense he had been all that day. I hadn't realized. I should have realized that my husband was worried about his brother's impending introduction to sex. Which was a thing of the past. Had I worried about my sisters' deflowerings? I had not. A wave of love for Waldo washed over me, a man who took rituals seriously and then debunked them in rhyme. With the next wave came uncertainty: was it really love, or simply lust and longing?

  Meanwhile, Henry was getting to that hyper-chatty stage that preceded a complete meltdown, and Ezra just needed more rest, period. So we three took the next boat from Slow Island, the Mary-Q. Her skipper, Rufus Bouchard, was a man of very few words. Actually none, but I assumed they could be produced when absolutely necessary. About fifteen other guests were onboard, and we all agreed that Sydney had been a beautiful bride.

  "I have never seen a more beautiful bride," Henry said, with the air of a connoisseur. "I think white is so becoming on some women."

  Several ladies looked sideways at Henry. They were thinking how interesting this child was, and when he grew up he would be perfect for a daughter or granddaughter.

  "They loved the cairn," Ezra said.

  A woman in a flowered dress and black Chinese slippers separated herself from the flock and clutched her hat in her hand. She had been looking intensely at Ezra all this time and finally, pointing to his cut, said, "What happened to his face? Poor thing."

  "I sleepwalked into a mechanical harvester," Ezra said. "You should have seen it. I left it in at least a dozen pieces."

  I said, "It wasn't like a farm harvester. It was miniature. He was indoors."

  The woman said, "How intriguing." Her face animated with interest. "I used to sleepwalk. I would go downstairs and sit in my father's favorite chair and balance teacups on my knees. I can still do it too. Balance teacups. It's harder than you think."

  The woman's voice was familiar. Us with the fish, her in the kitchen.

  "I could show you," she continued. "But not on a boat. Even if I had teacups here."

  "Really?" I said.

  "We had a dog then. But he never barked when I sleepwalked. He was a schnauzer named Hansi and he followed me wherever I went. Of course, it all ended with puberty," she said, with genuine sadness. "As so much pleasure in life does."

  Above the deep-throated grind of the diesel it was hard to be sure I was hearing what I thought I was hearing. "Are you saying you enjoyed sleepwalking?"

  "Absolutely. Afterward I couldn't remember anything—except my remarkable ability to balance teacups on my knees—but I somehow knew I had this other life, a parallel or alternative life, and it was very satisfying to know that."

  "Ezra wouldn't say that." Ezra folded his arms over his chest and slid closer to his brother. "Or maybe he would," I said, suddenly aware of how little I knew. There was so much to ask. With each passing night, slept and dreamed, Ezra was distancing himself from his childhood and inching up on the years when he would hold his secrets close to his manly chest and when his inclination to tell his mother, to blurt things to his mother, would dwindle into a vanishing dust mote. I sat next to him on the Mary-Q and envisioned that timeline, like the horizon we would always approach but never reach.

  While no one could have called the sea rough, the waves were inexorably moving up and down, as waves do, and the boat rode upon them, up and down.

  Henry said, "Sydney and Dick loved the cairn. They said it was their favorite wedding present."

  "When did you present the cairn?" I said. "How did it go?"

  "Excellent," Ezra said. "Mr. Cicero made a little speech." His expression was opaque and his color gray. I thought I saw his chest receding in that tiny motion that accompanies nausea and precedes retching. Or did I imagine it? This too was feeling ominously like a Bad Mother Moment.

  "He said stuff about how each rock was like a member of their families, and when they all get together they create this thing greater than all the little rocks, and more stuff about marriage. Honestly, Mom, I thought it was sappy," Henry said.

  "But nice? You thought it was nice too, right?"

  "Sort of," he said.

  "I think I'm seasick," Ezra said.

  "Put your head between your knees," I said. "Unless you want to throw up, in which case, lean overboard." We rode up and down the swells.

  Ezra put his head down. He garbled, "I really hate being seasic
k."

  "Next time I'll give you Dramamine. But it's too late now, and we'll be on land soon."

  Henry put something in Ezra's hand. "You can hold my rock," he said. Ezra kept his head down, and closed his fingers over the rock.

  "Wendy's overboard!" someone shouted. Then several people all said at once, "Wendy's overboard! Where's Wendy? She's overboard. Starboard! Starboard! No, port."

  We were sitting toward the bow, and all this commotion was in the stern. Someone yelled at Rufus Bouchard, who pointed to the lifesaver, which was then thrown into the water. He turned the boat around. I couldn't see Wendy anywhere. I didn't know who Wendy was, but I assumed she could swim. I couldn't imagine a Sweet guest who couldn't swim. People were leaning over the stern, waving their hands in the air and shouting. Then I saw Sydney's Cousin Harold, the Secret Service man. He removed his shoes and jacket and pulled his tie roughly through his collar, then dove off the stern into the dark blue swells. The water temperature was probably in the forties or low fifties. I shivered and held Ezra closer to me. Henry ran toward the stern.

  "Come back, Henry," I said. He couldn't hear me. "We can't help. Stay with me."

  Everyone was shouting instructions to Harold.

  Then, as shocking as a gunshot in the theater, there was Henry's still sweet, still little-boy's voice saying, "I see a hat."

  Off the port side floated an ivory-colored straw hat with red cherries circling the brim. The hat rode the swells up and down. In the troughs it disappeared. As everyone looked and pointed, the Mary-Q heeled to port. Harold started diving. While he was wholly beneath the water, a silence came over the boat, and for the first time we heard the cackling of the radio, Captain Bouchard having alerted the Coast Guard. Then Harold surfaced, and the shouted instructions recommenced. He dove again, and again the voices abruptly halted while Harold was unseen below the dark sea. But this time we also heard a woman's gasping sobs, a woman in a flowered dress that was loosely covered by an oversize trench coat. Harold dove again and again as the hat innocently floated.

  Henry was in the thick of the onlookers, the peerers, the watchers, the gazers, and the leaners to the port side. I didn't want to leave Ezra, who occasionally put his head up to see what was happening, and then replaced it between his knees.

  Ezra lifted his head slightly now and said, "Did someone drown?"

  "I'm sure he'll find her," I said. "We just can't see her now."

  "I bet she was seasick too," he said.

  "No, honey, nothing like that. You don't drown just because you get seasick."

  "I know that, Mom," he said. "She just wanted to get off the boat, is what I meant."

  Harold was still swimming about and still diving. The buzz of voices on deck diminished. The roar of the diesel seemed greater now that people were holding their collective breath. Faces changed. The forces of gravity and horror had, in equal measure, altered cheekbones and jaws, as it set in that Wendy was lost, that Wendy could not be anywhere other than beneath the dark water's surface, unseen and drowned.

  And who was Wendy? One of the two women in the kitchen, but which one? I looked toward the stern. I could not see the lady who sleepwalked and balanced teacups on her knees.

  Had Hubert been with us, there off the coast of Maine, there on the ungentle waters, he might have invoked Saint Adjutor, who protects against drowning.

  Or Hubert might have called upon Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, the thirteenth-century Italian preacher who resuscitated a drowned man and caused a cooked cockentrice to fly out the window.

  Given the straw hat riding the waves, Hubert might prayed to Saint Francis of Paola to intervene. Saint Francis was barely older than Ezra when he became a monk. But that wasn't enough hardship for him, so he moved to a solitary cave on the seashore. Francis never wore shoes, never washed, and never changed his clothes all his life long. The most miraculous thing about him may be that people were forever commenting on his "heavenly odor." In 1464, stranded in Sicily and unable to find a willing boatman to ferry him back to the mainland, Francis tossed his cloak (unwashed, unchanged) into the Strait of Messina and rode it back to Calabria.

  Relic-happy Hubert would probably also have invoked Saint Josse, another patron saint of sailors, who likely never set foot in the water. His relics consisted of nail and hair clippings, lots of nail and hair clippings, because for a long time after his death Josse's hair and beard and nails continued to grow, and his followers continued clipping.

  But Hubert was not there, and I was alone muttering the names of saints I did not know.

  It was darkening. The Coast Guard cutter arrived with its spotlight and crackling radio. It pulled alongside the Mary-Q and the crew spoke with Rufus Bouchard. Someone hung a ladder off the side, and a shivering and wintry-white Harold Sweet climbed aboard the Coast Guard boat. Someone wrapped him in a blanket, and he huddled in conversation with a small man in a large life preserver.

  Henry came back to Ezra and me, and sat very still, unusually still.

  Maybe I should have just pleaded with Saint Elmo for aid, because Saint Elmo was the patron saint of those suffering from seasickness.

  Hubert would have known which saint to address, but he wasn't there. He was at the Hagiographers Club, shuffling his holy cards. And Waldo, who'd won all the swimming ribbons at the yacht club when he was a boy, and who had once swum across the Hudson River to raise money for some disease, wasn't there either. He was surely with Dick and Sydney, and I wondered if it was remotely possible that they could have left on their honeymoon without knowing about the lost Wendy. If Sydney was on schedule, then they would be long gone. Or else today was just the first day in Dick's long future life of things refusing to go according to the best-laid plans of men and monkeys.

  None of them was aboard the Mary-Q; I was, with Ezra and Henry, and I could do nothing but watch and hover. The ocean between Slow Island and the mainland became stiller than still.

  22

  Land Legs

  TIME ALSO WAS STILL. Waldo already knew all about Wendy, all about Harold Sweet's dives; he knew more than I did. He knew who Wendy was.

  "Ezra looks terrible," he said.

  "He was seasick," I said. "Did you know her? What was her last name?"

  "She was some distant cousin of Sydney's. They used to be close when they were young, and then they weren't. I heard about Sydney from Wendy."

  "So what's her name? I am pretty sure she was the one talking to Ez and me about her sleepwalking."

  "She sleepwalked? I never knew that."

  "She said it stopped when she hit puberty. Does your knowledge of her predate her puberty? And what's her name?"

  Waldo looked over my head, toward the harbor, and said, "Wendy Dilly."

  "Dilly?" I was physically incapable of shutting my mouth. That's what it felt like.

  "Don't get excited, Al." He pointed at Henry and Ez, trudging ahead of us.

  "Who said I was excited? You should have told me. That's the least you could have done."

  "It's a distant relation. I don't even know what it is. Practically everyone up here is related. You know that."

  "So now your brother's new wife is related to your ex-mistress," I said. "I think I'm going to throw up."

  "She wasn't my mistress, Al, and calm down."

  "Then what would you call it? Paramour? Fuck buddy? Home wrecker? How about home wrecker?"

  "Al! Henry can hear a mosquito farting in the next state."

  "Good for him."

  "I know this is hard. Just don't get so excited."

  "If I were excited, which I am not," I said, "I would see absolutely no good reason to calm down."

  "You're making a much bigger deal of this than it is. I haven't seen Edith in years and years. And I probably never will again. She moved abroad. It's not as if she came to the wedding."

  "I think that after almost destroying our marriage, her appearance at your brother's wedding would have been an act of over-the-top chutzpah."


  "We're still married, aren't we? She didn't destroy anything."

  "Not for lack of trying."

  Almost from the very beginning, from the very first time I'd heard of Edith Dilly and the part she was playing in my life, I'd blamed her. Susie—and others too—pointed out the irrational, biblical, antediluvian, misogynistic draconianness of blaming the woman. Also the delusional aspect of it. Letting Waldo off the hook. I saw all that and I couldn't help myself. I wanted to keep Waldo, and so, without considering the implications, I clung to him and blamed her. But I didn't let Waldo off the hook. I kept him there. I hung on.

  And here we still were. Making rhymes, soups, and love.

  Henry and Ez were at Posey's front door, already deep in conversation with Posey and Mr. Cicero.

  Posey wasted no time. "Did she jump or was she pushed?"

  Henry said, "I think she was pushed. I think her evil twin pushed her." Then he added, with obvious pleasure, "Her doppelganger."

  "Geez, Henry, you can't go around saying stuff like that."

  "Don't worry, Dad," Henry said. "I'm eight years old. No one will believe me."

  Posey said, "What is this child talking about?"

  "I don't know," I said. "It's clear to me that I don't know very much at all. I think Ezra needs to lie down. I'll see you all later."

  I didn't see anyone later. I fell asleep next to Ezra and neither of us woke up until morning. And I woke with relief, because of course it had all been a dream: the Mary-Q, the hat, Wendy Dilly.

  "Pompey's coming over," Posey said. She was making French toast for Henry. Henry preferred his grandmother's white-bread French toast to the kind I made at home, the healthy kind with whole-wheat or thirty-nine-grain bread.

  Ezra and Waldo wandered into the kitchen.

  "Where's Mr. Cicero?" Ezra said.

  "Taking his walk. He walks out to see the cows every morning at this time."

  "Why couldn't we go with him?" Henry said.

  "Because you weren't awake yet," Posey said. "You needed your beauty sleep. Especially Ezra."

  I said, "Don't you think the cut looks much better this morning? The redness is down."