A Perfect Life (16 page)

It ought to have made me happy to be lying there with Laurel, reminiscing about our mother. But that seemed another grudge she held against me, that I had known our mother longer than she had.

“One of the only things I remember is the night she told us she was going to college,” Laurel said. “I said—you remember this? I said, ‘Why would you want to do that? Your life is over.'” I could feel my sister flinch. “It had nothing to do with Valentine's. It was because she seemed so old. But she wasn't that much older than we are now. Maybe I just wanted to be cruel.”

I drew my hand across Laurel's cheek. “Every kid wants her mother to herself.”

“That's what's so horrible about someone dying. You don't want to remember the good times, because they're too painful, and you can't help but remember the awful things you said when the person was alive.”

I pressed my face to her hair.

“After I'm gone, don't think about all the awful crap I did to you, okay? Jane, promise me. After I'm dead, you'll only remember the times like this, when I was nice.”

The trip to Spinsters Island had to be delayed. I tried to hurry Miriam, but preparations were slowed because the island wasn't connected to the mainland by phone. When she and Paul took the mail boat over to set up the bloodletting party, the fishermen claimed they couldn't talk. “Too busy.” “Don't know nothing about that Valentine's thing.” The only islander who was willing to help was Eveline Barter, who owned the island's gas station and, according to Miriam, would have given Paul whatever he asked. “Throw a dance,” Eve told Miriam, who conveyed this suggestion to me. If we brought “refreshments” from the mainland and paid the town's musicians to hammer out some tunes, then sat beside the door and collected the islanders' blood as admission, Eve guaranteed they would come.

The only site large enough to hold such a function was the Spinsters Island schoolhouse, whose roof had blown off in a hurricane. While it was being rebuilt, Eve had agreed to post signs in her garage and pass the news to her customers. If they heard we were providing free beer, the only
ones who wouldn't show up were the ones too debilitated by the illness to crawl there.

And so, on the last Friday of September, I found myself standing in the cabin of the mail boat halfway between New Jerusalem and Spinsters Island. The pilot, a square, squint-eyed man named Charles Stacks, was telling me that the winters here were so cold the open sea froze. No boats could get through, and the ice was too treacherous to be covered on foot. Whole months might go by in which no communication with the outside world was possible except by shortwave radio and the occasional plane.

One night, Stacks said, a man by the name of Calvary Ross vanished from the island. “Good-looking fella. Brainy. Only one in his family lucky enough he didn't get the disease. Leastwise, it looked like he didn't get it. He was in his fifties by then, still hale. Then one night he opens the door, everybody's still asleep, and off he goes. They found his tracks next day, down to the beach. But couldn't find no sign of him. Not on the ice, nor nowhere else.” Stacks had been staring out the windshield, as if the story might be projected on the fog up ahead. Then he turned to me, and his eyes still seemed focused on something far off. He had cataracts, I realized. The lenses of his eyes were as filmy as the boat's salt-encrusted glass.

Peering through that windshield, one hand on the steering wheel and the other on a thermos of coffee, Stacks recounted the suffering “that chorea thing” had caused. There had been Matthias Few, who kept his job at the cannery past the point where he could hold his carving knife
steady. And Toddy Van, who lost his balance hauling traps and drowned. Dottie Birch and Blair Martingale were left alone with young kids when their husbands passed on. And then there had been Bird Ransom, who owned the garage on the island before Eve Barter moved out and bought it. Apparently, this Ransom fellow had raped or otherwise impregnated half a dozen girls, most of them younger than fifteen, before the islanders ran him off. Sure, Stacks said, everyone figured the Valentine's sexed him up. But no one else ran around raping little girls, now did they. The SOB was lucky they didn't do worse than run him off. On and on Stacks went; I had the sense he was telling me these stories not to prove what a blessing it might be if we cured this disease, but the futility of even trying.

I stood beside him in the pilothouse, smelling the bitter scent of his coffee and straining to make out whatever he was seeing through the fog. The air was heavy and warm, but I sensed the next storm might bring an autumn chill. Ahead, the land thickened. A wave pitched the boat skyward. A moment later, as we dropped, I couldn't distinguish my excitement from fear. I am not a superstitious person. I knew other people's lives weren't being scripted to play a role in my own. But some power in the universe was trying to control my fate. First, we had lost Vic. Dianne had started spotting, and the obstetrician advised her to stay in bed so she wouldn't lose the pregnancy. Then Maureen heard a rumor that a team of French scientists had stumbled on a family in which everyone with Valentine's had a visible notch in chromosome three. The French scientists were due
to fly to California for a gene-mapping conference, and Vic dispatched Yosef to L.A. to find out if the rumor was true. “Don't worry,” Yosef told me. “I take these French guys to dinner, buy them a couple bottles of fancy California wine. If they really know something, I get them to spill the beans. We start looking on their chromosome with the bloods we got from Maine, beat them to the shoot-out with their own ammunition.”

“Yosef,” I said, “we are not shooting anybody. Just ask about their data. If they've got something solid on this family, they'll share the information.”

He imitated my voice:
“‘Ask
, Yosef.
Share
.' Just because you never have any fun, you got to spoil mine?”

“All right,” I said, then went out to the drugstore and bought him a rubber dagger and a pair of mirror-lens glasses. “Here,” I said. “Enjoy yourself. But if you're captured, we'll say that no one named Yosef Horowitz ever worked in this lab.”

He saluted with the dagger. “Don't worry. If I get captured by the enemy, I fall on my sword, tear out my own kishkes. Is Jewish version of seppuku.” And so, instead of flying north to Bar Harbor, Yosef, in a flowered shirt and dark glasses, flew west to L.A.

Worst of all, Rita had been forced to stay home. Her older son, Dennis, a brilliant boy who, in seventh grade, had scored nearly 700 on the math SATs, had been on a field trip to the battleground in Lexington. He and his classmates were walking beside the road when a man tossed a brick from a passing car. It struck Dennis on the head and he had yet to regain consciousness. The police were looking for the
driver, but the teacher hadn't made a note of the license and the cops weren't convinced the brick had been thrown with malicious intent. “You tell me,” Rita said. “Only one black child in that class. What's the chance a big old brick accidentally just
slipped
out of that white man's hand?”

I felt terrible. How could any grown-up throw anything at a child, let alone a brick? Even if Dennis were to come through without any significant brain damage, he would never again feel safe. But for my sake, I wished Rita had been able to come with us. She possessed the same gift as Miriam, the ability to convey that she understood her patients' suffering and would give them credit for it, but only if they agreed to bear their pain with grace and do as they were told.

When the three of us—Sumner, Willie, and I—had arrived in New Jerusalem the evening before, we had found Miriam in such a foul mood that the most innocent question—how could we be sure the donors would show up at this dance we were throwing?—was met by an impatient growl. “They show up, they show up. They don't, they don't. If you think I'm about to beg those ornery sons of bitches to give us what's in their own best interest to give, you got another think coming.” There was no sign of Barbara Lewis—no dinner, no Monopoly game, no opening and shutting of doors in the night.

“Your lady friend,” Sumner asked. “The veterinarian? She seems a very knowledgeable woman. Do you think she would object if I paid a call?”

“You can do whatever you damn well please,” Miriam informed him, which Sumner was used to doing anyway,
and did on this occasion, only to learn that Barbara Lewis wasn't home, unless she had declined to open her door to him.

Now, on Stacks's boat, Miriam sat scowling beside the anchor. Sumner was holding back his tie, leaning over the prow, and trying not to throw up. The only passenger who seemed happy was Willie. He stood with his hair whipping in the wind, as excited as a boy who has dreamed his whole life of going to sea.

But when we reached the open water, the waves grew too violent even for him. He ducked his head and came in the cabin. His elbow knocked Stacks's thermos and splashed coffee on his map. Stacks set the thermos upright and resumed staring out the windshield. I waited for Willie to apologize. Maybe Buddhists didn't believe in apologies. He certainly hadn't shown any signs of remorse for bribing my father to let him come on this trip.

“How do you know where the shoals are?” he asked. The boat wove this way and that to avoid the jagged rocks that barely broke the surface. “They look like a herd of whales.”

Stacks brushed his hand above the chart, which was stained by rings of coffee as well as the splash from the thermos. Half a hard-boiled egg hid the mainland from view. “Maps,” he said. “Try using a map to find your way in and you'll see where you end up.” He told us about the poor misguided tourists who had made this trip without him, hapless men with keen eyes, fancy equipment, and elaborate charts who had gored their boats on rocks or lost themselves in the fog.

“Nothing more dangerous than a map,” Willie agreed. “A map only fools you into thinking you know where you are.”

I wondered what he would have said if I had confided my dream that within our own lifetimes, if we lived normal lives, the entire human genome would be mapped.
Would you know yourself any better than you know yourself now?
The day before, in New Jerusalem, while I had gone to draw blood from a family I had missed on our earlier trip, Willie had explored the ruins of the Shaker village. In some half-hidden cupboard he had found a stack of hymnals and a sheaf of Shaker chants. The lyrics struck me as childish, rhyming “virgin” with “sin,” “God above” with “pure love.” The melodies, which he had plucked out on Miriam's ancient upright, sounded like nervous variations on “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” They were recorded not with notes but the letters of the alphabet:
c c g b d
. . . . “It's like that genetic code you showed me,” Willie said. “The only difference is, this code has seven letters instead of four.”

I might have found this statement remarkable, if I hadn't felt the need to stay mad.

“Don't you get it?” He pulled off those dime-store glasses, and I thought he was giving them to me, so I could see what he saw, but he laid them on the keyboard. “Do, fa, fa, mi, do. You can sing a person's chromosomes. Your genetic code is the music that describes who you are.”

“Land ho!” Sumner cried.

Stacks cut the motor and sidled toward the dock. He leaned overboard and tossed a noose, which tightened
around a post. When he slung down the mail sack, its thud against the pier led me to wonder if the letters held bad news. One by one, we stepped down: Willie's red All-Stars; Miriam's rubber-soled oxfords; Sumner's tasseled loafers; and the hiking boots I had ordered the week before from L.L. Bean. The dock swayed beneath our feet. But then, so did the island. The ground shuddered like an animal shaking off flies.

“Thunder Beach,” Stacks explained. “Southeast coast ain't so protected as this one. Those waves, they pick up these giant boulders, and bang, they smack them against the cliffs. You can feel it all the way to here.” He dragged the mail sack along the dock. “If I was you, I'd stop out there.”

“Jesus,” Willie said. “Would you take a look at that guy?” I thought he meant Stacks. Then I saw a skinny man stagger down the street, listing left, right, left, right. No sooner had the man disappeared around a corner than a middle-aged woman tottered across her yard with a huge metal washtub. She hung a shirt on the clothesline. But when she lifted another shirt, she froze, as if she had accidentally pinned her hands to the rope.

“Everyone here's got it,” Willie said. “It's as common as the flu.”

I forgave him everything then, relieved that he, too, had assumed on some level that getting the disease required some special talent. The truth was, you didn't need to be famous, as Willie's father had been. You didn't need to be beautiful, or tragic, or smart. You got Valentine's because your parents had given you the gene. You got it because you
had been born on an island where one in ten people carried the disease.

I looked around and realized I had spent most of my life searching for this island and yet trying to avoid it. As a child, I had overheard my parents' furtive discussions about my mother's older brothers, and I had conflated their illness with a name I kept hearing on the news.
Valentine's Korea
was a dangerous place, I thought. My uncles were soldiers who had been sent there and died. Although what this fighting had to do with love I couldn't say. I wouldn't have been surprised to see my uncles here now, in this strange and isolated world where nothing seemed familiar yet everything did. I imagined Max and Jake lurching along the main thoroughfare of Spinsters Island. My mother, I thought, might be waiting around the next curve.

Six shabby houses stood farther up the hill, their yards strewn with mangled bikes, toilet seats, and clothes wringers. How could anyone live in such a place? Laurel had said she didn't care what she left behind as long as she lived widely while she had the chance. But that seemed impossible here. How could anyone live widely on an island that measured five miles across?

Sumner stooped to disentangle a cradle from a wreath of rusted bedsprings.

“Would you leave that be!” Miriam snapped, and Sumner looked around, puzzled, as if he only now understood that the island was inhabited. Since coming ashore, we had seen only that staggering mute and frozen woman. But I sensed the others watching, like natives who suspect that
the invaders bearing gifts have plans to subdue them. Even the deer seemed suspicious, lifting their heads from the geraniums as we passed. (The deer were the size of dogs. Paul Minot had told me that wealthy sportsmen from New York had imported game to Spinsters Island in the late 1800s. With no predators, the deer had overrun the place. They didn't get much food, but even the smallest could survive.)

People here made do with what they had. In Eveline Barter's yard we saw a red Texaco gas pump with a yellow Shell head
.
We saw the chassis of a thirties Buick with the powder blue hood of what must have been a Cadillac. In the back of a Chevy pickup with a crude wooden bed sat three sacks of groceries. A deer stood on its hind legs, licking a bag of Cheetos.