by Deb Davies
“I’m still sorting through things.” Claire sounded defensive.
“Homey,” Laurel said. She sat down on the nubby beige carpet. “Let’s just hang out for a while.” She was trying to absorb the atmosphere of the room, in part familiar but also somehow foreign. Brown and blue weren’t colors she associated with Claire. Aqua, maybe. Gold. Caribbean colors. What had it felt like, for Claire to walk into this room by herself, when so much in it reminded her of loss? When friends had crowded it barely an hour ago—laughing and eating, joking and drinking—the tone and conversation had felt casual, with many references to “up north,” which in Michigan, meant anything north of the town of Clare. Now, Black Pearl, who had swaggered in after them and sprawled on the carpet, was the only spontaneous touch of life in the room.
“Claire, help me out,” she said. “I can’t remember all your friends. This wine is a lot better than anything I’m used to, and I’ve drunk a liter of it.”
Claire plonked down in the recliner, looking pleased. “Prepare for a quiz,” she said. “Ann Campbell.”
“I know her,” Laurel answered. “She brought New York-style cheesecake! She looked like the cheesecake—medium height, plump, gold-brown hair the color of cheesecake crust.”
“Patsy Cluny.”
“Wasn’t that a big band singer?”
“No, numb nuts. You’re thinking of Rosemary Clooney and Patsy Cline. My Patsy is Ann’s friend, older than Ann. She has dyed, walnut-colored puffy hair and superpowers.”
“Numb nuts is not gender appropriate. And Patsy can’t have superpowers.”
“Why not?” Claire frowned.
“Too old,” Laurel said.
“You haven’t been keeping up on super women,” Claire said. “Patsy’s stronger than you’d think. She and Ann haul heavy crates around a store. You’ll see.”
“The woman with the white Mohawk? Does she have superpowers?”
“Ah. That’s Zoe Weathers.” Claire shook her head. “Don’t let the designer blue jeans and motorcycle jacket fool you. She’s a retired doctor who inherited money and has a loud voice and a soft heart. Though, if she sees someone hurt an animal, she turns into Boadicea.”
“No rings. Diamond stud earring, left ear. Is she gay? Divorced?”
“No. Zoe doesn’t believe in marriage, but she does have a lover—my veterinarian. Sanjay Kaufmann. You’ll know him when you see him. He’s about five feet, eight inches tall, with curly black hair, a curly black beard, and muscles like a weight lifter. He couldn’t be here tonight because he’s delivering a foal.
“I hadn’t thought about it before, but George and I attracted friends who are animal lovers. The guests who were wearing jeans and World Wildlife sweatshirts, Bill and Barbara Marsh, have a farm and take in animals that need care most people wouldn’t provide. Or just animals that need care. I’m not sure about the donkeys, but they have expensive animals, mostly, like a llama with ingrown eyelashes. It went to a llama farm, once it had recovered. Ann and Patsy help with spare kittens. Maybe people here look after me because I’m some kind of stray.”
“Didn’t any of your Grand Rapids friends visit when you moved here?”
“Oh, sure. Some would come and stay for the weekend, sort of like in Downton Abbey, only not much illicit sex. That’s part of the reason we did some modest remodeling.”
“This door wall is new?”
“That was the most important change for me. Can you imagine this house, but without living room windows that faced the river? I guess a lot of farmhouses were built facing the road. The old door is still facing the front, but we don’t use it. In fact, it’s stuck shut. We redid plumbing and added a bedroom and bathroom on the northeast corner of the house. We replaced all the clapboard siding. Upstairs, we took down a wall between two of the small bedrooms, leaving a ‘master,’ which is an awful name for any room.
“Then George started sleeping more, even when friends came to visit. He lost some coordination in his right arm. He thought it might be Parkinson’s, which would have been hard enough, but as you know, it was brain cancer. He didn’t have pain, but more and more often, he couldn’t think of a word or remember someone’s name.”
“I should have come,” Laurel said for the tenth time.
“I don’t think so.” Claire patted Pearl and shook her head. “His private side, which did surface when he was stressed, took him over. It was hard to get him to even let me know what he was thinking, let alone what he was feeling. He wasn’t a vain man, but people have boundaries. He wouldn’t have thanked you or me, Laurel. Overnight guests were too much for him.”
“Well, I’m here now. I can fetch, tote, help you sort through George’s clothes. But if I’m crowding you, Claire, kick me out.”
“I run out of energy for some things. I could use some help sorting the rest of George’s clothes. He didn’t bring much in the way of old clothes here, but I’ve been putting piles of brand-new T-shirts and shorts and wool socks on the bed in the small upstairs bedroom. I thought I’d send them to assisted living homes. Barbara Marsh took his coats to the homeless shelter. I keep opening drawers and finding handkerchiefs, tie clips, and receipts. But Laurel, I want you here to help me do something more important. I had done some of my grieving before George died. I’m trying to find my new normal. I need to blend who I’ve been and who I am now.” She slid her wedding ring—a plain gold band—up and down on her finger. “I didn’t wear this ring much when I was home. I was afraid I’d scratch it or lose it down the drain. If I don’t wear it now, will people think I want to forget George?”
“Good friends wouldn’t think that,” Laurel said. “Got another example?”
“I remember I don’t have to put the seat down before I sit on the toilet, for fear I’ll get my fanny stuck because George left the seat up, but I still lie in bed some mornings thinking he’ll bring me coffee.”
Laurel stifled the thought that Claire could not, since her teens, have gotten her behind stuck in a toilet.
“Do I lock doors, now that I’m alone? We never used to.”
“You could get an alarm system.”
“I should,” Claire decided. “That’s a good thought. You’re making me feel better already. It’ll be just us women, so no toilet seats will be up, and some mornings I’ll wake you up and bring you coffee. I want to talk and laugh and enjoy seeing you and Jen. I love it that your daughter calls me ‘Aunt Claire.’ She just finished her dissertation in anthro-linguistic something or other, isn’t that right?”
Laurel felt troubled. “Mostly right. Turns out what I told her is true. There aren’t a lot of full-time jobs in linguistic anthropology. She’s thinking about doing the program at Parsons School of Design. Sorry, but about the toilet seats? She texted me this afternoon. She might bring a guy, if that’s all right with you. Someone she met on a plane. I hated to text back ‘no’ just when I’ve sold the house where she grew up.”
“My new normal is flexible,” Claire said. “I can lower toilet seats. By the way, I mostly sleep in the recliner or on the couch. Or I travel from one to another, clutching pillows and a quilt. I don’t use the bedroom upstairs. Too many memories. And the mattresses on the beds upstairs are hard, the way George liked them. But Jen and her friend should be able to deal with that, right?”
“Good memories?” Laurel asked cautiously. “That’s not where George died, is it?”
“Absolutely not. He died in a leather camp chair on the patio, looking out at trees on the other side of the river. I went to get him ice chips, and when I came back, he had stopped breathing. The emergency responders called his doctor, who told them not to try to bring him back.
“I have extremely nice memories,” Claire continued. “Some of the best are of him reading before he went to sleep at night, with his socks still on, his legs crossed, and his gold-rim bifocals down on his nose. Though there were activities that meant taking off the glasses and digging them out of bedclothes in the morning.”
&n
bsp; She got up, stretched, and beckoned Laurel to follow her down a small hall. “Right this way—I’m putting you in the bedroom just around the corner, where we added a bath. This is the room I took charge of, and I like the way it turned out.”
The room they entered could have been as old as the rest of the house. There was no bedspread on the bed, but the white wool blanket had been turned back to show yellow-flowered sheets that matched the pillowcases. There was an old-fashioned cut lace scarf on the green-painted chest of drawers. An antique globed lamp, the interior of the globe painted with daisies, sat squarely in the middle of the scarf. The room smelled slightly of potpourri sachet. Cut lace curtains had been pulled back to show a sliver of a moon.
“Nice,” Laurel said, dropping her gym bag on the bed.
Claire pushed open the door to a small bathroom that displayed a fiberglass, reproduction clawfoot tub, topped by a wooden rack that would hold candles or a drink, and keep a book upright.
“Towel racks are on the door, and there’s this little closet for towels and toiletries. The door locks, if you want privacy.”
“Where’d you find the old wood doors? This one must have been cut down.”
“You know, I never asked the guys who put this in. I told them I wanted this room to blend in, and they went out of their way to please me,” Claire said. “I don’t think they charged me extra, and I never thanked them for it.”
They sat side by side on the edge of the bed, the old box spring protesting. Claire’s sundress hiked up, revealing ladders of purple, swollen flesh from her ankles to her knees.
“All right.” Laurel frowned. “No more procrastinating. Tell me what happened to your legs. Were you in an accident?”
“This,” Claire said ruefully, “is from the help I got, cleaning. It’s actually a funny story, but ouch! It hurts a lot. Patsy Cluny, the friend of Ann Campbell, lives with Ann and in return, helps out in Ann’s store and cleans for her sometimes. After George died, Ann sent her over to do some cleaning before the funeral luncheon. Patsy was empowered. She used this soap and vinegar concoction to get every vestige of grease off appliances and cupboard doors and trays that would hold the goodies Ann sent. We didn’t have a lot of people here, just the people you met tonight, Sanjay, and Ann’s daughter Tansy. The minister was a nice Episcopalian woman who said all the right things, even though George hadn’t been to church in years. I ended up crying, which probably helped.”
“Yes,” Laurel agreed. “But your knees.”
“I told Patsy not to use the vinegar and soap mix on the floors, because it’s amazingly slippery—as slippery as oil. She said she wouldn’t. But, she did. Patsy has this funny turn of phrase: ‘And yet…’ She’ll say, ‘It wasn’t supposed to rain today, and yet…’ Ann wasn’t going to buy any more citrus soap, because it isn’t really made in Michigan, and yet…’”
“Knees. Shins. Ankles.”
“After I slid through the pool of soap and vinegar right in front of the basement stairs—that’s where that door goes,” she pointed— “I nearly fell straight down to the concrete floor below. I was so startled, I didn’t even scream. I almost jerked my arm out of the socket grabbing the stair rail, and I somehow ended up flipped around, face-down, with my legs stuck through two different steps, and then I couldn’t pull either leg out. I thought for a while I’d have to stay there forever. Patsy had gone off to clean a bathroom and didn’t hear me yelling like a stuck pig. Well, I was stuck, you see.”
“And yet?”
“And yet I didn’t want to be found there in the morning by the funeral lunch bunch, so I wriggled my legs out inch by inch, working my way by walking down the stairs on my hands. And guess what Patsy said when I reminded her that I’d asked her to leave the dirty wax around the cellar door, rather than risk sending a guest careening to hell? ‘And yet the floor was really dirty there, and it cleaned up good.’”
“And yet,” Laurel said, “your legs look like kidney pudding.”
“And yet,” Claire observed, “my whole house is clean, for the first time since George became ill. You don’t need to baby me too much, Laurel. I’m still physically tough. But I can use you as a touchstone, because sometimes I’m scared. I hate it when I can’t see into the future!” she said, half laughing at herself.
“You? Claire, you’re the strongest person I know.”
“When I’m with people, I feel good. But sometimes, when I’m by myself, I feel exhausted. I don’t want to get out of bed. I want to sleep, and sleep, and sleep.”
“I’ll make you take me exploring,” Laurel promised. But at Claire mentioning sleep, she yawned, stretched, and then startled as the door creaked open and Pearl slipped into the room, looking stonily at them both.
“Do you remember that first time you were going to sleep over at my house?” Claire asked.
“Of course I do. The crucifixes scared the crap out of me, and I ran back home.”
“Protestant wimp. And you’re Italian,” Claire said. “There aren’t any crucifixes here. People say once a Catholic, always a Catholic at heart. The problem, for me, is the brain, saying ‘endorse birth control, you bastards.’”
“The heart, though, makes sense to me. You have all that was left of the goddess. We Protestants got rid of Mary, along with the Lady’s shrines. Some monks, you know, used to place statues of Mary next to those Lady shrines, which were often in a little hollow that offered running water, a beehive or two, and berry bushes, because those symbolized purity, healing, and fertility. As fewer of the old pagan places were kept up, they became symbols of the Virgin Mary. But I used to envy the statue in your backyard. She looked so serene, so forgiving, with her hands held out. I used to pray to her, ‘make my mom and dad stop fighting.’”
Pearl turned his back on them and stepped away, tail held straight up, signaling disdain. He might’ve liked Laurel during the day, but as evening settled about the house, guests were unwanted, and might, before the appointed three days, begin to stink like fish.
Laurel took a bath with apple-scented bubbles and fell asleep reading a Louise Penny mystery.
Claire dozed, as she had predicted, in the pillowy recliner. In the middle of the night, she woke with a dislocated, eerie feeling. Not as though she was being watched. Not as though she had heard something strange, though that certainly might have been true. She still wasn’t used to owls, or whip-poor-wills, for that matter. She got up feeling as though she had awoken in the middle of a dream and could not quite recall it. Though she thought the dream had shown her a face peering through the west windows. Maybe she’d heard something inside the house. Maybe Laurel was awake.
She’d been sleeping in underpants and one of George’s T-shirts, but pulled a long sweatshirt on over them before tiptoeing in to look at Laurel, who was sound asleep with the light on, her book and glasses next to her face. Claire made sure Laurel was covered, moved the book and glasses to the dresser, and turned off the light. Back in the living room, she opened the doors, determined to face down her unease. Fresh air flooded in, smelling of cedar and surprisingly cold. A single shooting star streaked above tree branches. The river’s murmur was reassuring and hypnotic. She closed the doors reluctantly, found a blanket, and thought about getting one more drink, but then Pearl was swirling like silk about her ankles, herding her back into the recliner. She slid in over the armrest, and as the cat cuddled closer, Claire let herself be lulled asleep.
The next day dawned with a yellow-streaked sky. Laurel slept until 9:00 a.m., then wandered out to the kitchen to find Claire sitting at the table, adjusting reading glasses with purple frames while she looked through a stack of unopened envelopes. For breakfast, they dipped crisp ginger cookies into coffee swirled with clotted cream.
“Want some help with the paperwork?”
“Nope.” Claire stretched and shoved correspondence into a folder. “We need to beat the shopping rush. A good selection of food disappears fast, and I want to treat you to good things. I’ve le
arned a lot about this area, if you have questions.”
George’s driving around car was a 1969 silver Bentley, which was more like a living room than a car. Claire sat up straight to drive, but Laurel, after admiring the burgundy leather seats, leaned back and luxuriated. Obviously, it had been a while since the seats had been conditioned, but Laurel could have sworn a new-car-leather scent vied with the outdoors.
Noon was glorious, scented with sweet fern. They left the car windows down, so gusts of wind swirled around them, hinting at rain later in the afternoon. As they headed toward Grayling, they drove through plantation red pines and jack pines, with an occasional clear cut area that looked stripped bare but was greening with poplar and shrubs.
They also passed Camp Grayling, a National Guard and Army Reserve base with fewer than its usual number of trainees, according to Claire. The base and the area around it, she explained, was being investigated for PFAS, chemicals the Air National Guard had used for years which are connected to liver and kidney damage.
“There’s still so much open land here, people aren’t always protective of what they’ve got,” Claire said. “I’m a bleeding heart for every environmental cause, and most of my friends are, but caring is easier when you have money and time. People keep inventing new chemicals, and the next thing we know, we’ve got toxic paint stripper to take off lead paint.”
“This area looks like it’s struggling to find its new normal,” Laurel noted.
“It’s been doing just that since the end of the white pine era a hundred years ago. Someday this week, I’ll taking you cruising near the Main Branch of the Au Sable, where there are a few remaining older homes and new homes designed by architects. In Grayling, though, you’ll see some subsidized housing, which is fair enough. People need affordable places to live.”
“What’s that?” Laurel asked, as they passed impressive “KEEP OUT” signs. The river could just barely be seen, the water shining in flat, sheet-like panels.
“Closed trout farm,” Claire said. “Closed for now, while the long range impact is studied. It used to be a tourist’s hangout. Somewhere people took kids.”
