The Dawning of the Day (47 page)

“I don't know where to begin,” she said. “Yet it all comes crowding when I see you sleeping, and I wonder how I can endure lying beside you every night if I feel like this now.”

He smiled. “It'll be different then. Don't you know?”

His body was warm against hers; they were locked together in drowsy sweetness. She did not answer.

“It's a long time till February,” he said. “That's half of it. I go home at night when the two of us are beside ourselves with wanting to stay together.” His eyebrow moved questioningly. “There's one way around it, Philippa.”

“There's no way around it,” she said. She put her hands on his shoulders and gripped tight. “We've waited all this time for each other. Can't we wait two months more?”

“I don't know,” Steve said. She was not strong enough after all to hold him back; her braced wrists gave way, her arms went around his neck. He kissed her mouth, easily at first and then hard; he thrust at her chin with his, to turn and tilt her head, and kissed her throat. Close by her ear, he said in a low voice, “I'm not going to die between now and February either in my bed or in my boat. So stop working up nightmares for yourself.” He laughed, and whispered the last word. “Chowderhead.”

She said defiantly, “What I was thinking about didn't have anything to do with waiting until February. But I suppose you think there's only one cure for a woman's megrims.” The fear was gone; there'd been no room for it in the brief but vigorous struggle between them. Perhaps he was right after all. She pushed a lock of black hair off his forehead, and he kissed her again, looking marvelously young; there was a fine flush across his cheekbones.

“I think I'd better get up,” she said.

“Why?” He didn't move his shoulders; they walled her from the rest of the room. She laughed but she was uneasy; she felt as if they were reaching a point of no return. Then she heard feet stamping downstairs, and she cried, “Listen! Company coming.”

He kept her pinned down, but he turned his head, listening. The door at the foot of the stairs was flung violently open. Steve was up like a cat, pulling her after him. She stood somewhat unsteadily, running her fingers through her hair because there was no time to reach for a comb. Steve propped one foot on the stove hearth and took out his cigarettes.

There were heavy steps on the stairs. When they reached the top, Philippa opened the door. Mark Bennett stood there, his clothing whitened with snow, snow melting on his thick eyebrows. He stared by her at Steve, and his face was unexpectedly gaunt.

“Randall Percy just came down to the store,” he said in a flat voice. “They found a note in Fort's room. He left to join the Navy. I called Brigport. They never touched there. They must've talked Gregg into taking them to the mainland.” Steve had a match halfway to his cigarette. It burned forgotten in mid-air while he gazed at his brother. Terror began in Philippa while she watched his eyes and waited for his lips to move. When he spoke, the words came with an effort, as if he too were borne down by the sheer weight of fear.

“There isn't any chance they could have reached the mainland before it started to snow? They could have fetched up somewhere in the Mussel Ridges.”

Philippa knew the words had no conviction behind them; more than her personal thoughts of death had violated the warm shell. What the men believed was as clear to her as a shout.

“They left about an hour before it started to snow,” Mark said. “You know what Gregg's boat can do. They couldn't have been any more than out of sight by the southern end of Brigport before the weather shut down thick.”

“Called the Coast Guard?”

Mark nodded. “I'm on my way up to see Jo now.”

“Wait a minute.” Steve reached for his boots. His face had become worn and aged in a matter of moments. Philippa clasped her hands lightly behind her back to keep from touching him.

“Come inside and wait,” she said to Mark.

He said unsmilingly, “This is all right. I don't want to mess up your floor.”

As if that matters, she cried at him silently, when you think Charles is dead . . . ! and then the meaning of the words burst on her like a monstrous light, and she could have cried aloud, Oh, No! I can't believe anything's happened to them! It can't! They're too much
alive
.

But she had cried the same thing about Justin, and all the time the telegram was telling her the truth. Steve turned back after Mark had started, and kissed her cheek. She found herself stroking his arm in a futile gesture of reassurance—for him or for herself, she didn't know which. He did not seem to feel it but turned and followed Mark down the stairs.

A
lone, she felt as if someone had slapped her repeatedly until her head was ringing. Then she went through the terrible process of imagining; she saw Gregg and Fort and Charles in the little boat, peering out by the spray hood and seeing not the faintest spark of light through the dark and the snow. The gusts of wind blowing past her window were intensified to a roar until she wanted to clap her hands over her ears, and she was very cold, as if the brutal chill of the night out there on the water were creeping into her room. Huddling over the stove, she gazed around the room that had seemed so warmly radiant and saw Steve's face, changing in an instant from the face of love to that of anguish. Then she saw the Percy family; Randall standing by while Mark called Brigport and the Coast Guard, perhaps with Fort's note in his hand, his face shriveling; young Ralph gone stolid and pasty white with his efforts to be a man when he wanted so much to cry. And what of Joanna? Just about now her two brothers were coming into the kitchen.

Whichever way her thoughts turned, there was a reason to escape them. She snatched at Steve's remark that they might have reached the Mussel Ridges. She tried to see them making a brush shelter on a scrap of wooded island. She heard Gregg swearing, and Fort and Charles laughing at him, jibing cruelly to keep him angry and active. And then she felt guilty that she hadn't thought of Gregg before, as if he didn't matter because he was not a boy like the others but simply a drunken derelict. Yes, he would be swearing and snarling, wanting a drink to warm his sagging old body. Then the sound of Fort's laughter was so clear in her ears that it rocked her with sickness. He had sat by her table, his cheek laid to his fiddle and his eyes closed as he played. Charles had stopped halfway down the stairs, shouting,
A man's friend means more to him than a woman
.

So he had gone with his friend. She looked wildly around the room. She would not believe they were dead. If only the picture of them in the woods would come clear and bright, she could seize it as an omen and shut her mind to its deceit.

Steve did not come again that night. When she went to bed, she looked out of her window and saw no lights; the snow was too thick. It swirled out of the dark toward her lamp. The sense of the bay lost in storm and night was like a sense of the edge of the world.

She awoke at daylight. Without stopping to revive her fire, she went downstairs, just as she was, in heavy robe and thick slippers. She opened the outside door to the cold and smothered silence, like the death stillness over a deserted city. She went back upstairs and lit her lamp; she drank coffee and did schoolwork with a painful concentration until the east began to brighten with color.

Then she saw Nils, Steve, and Mark tramping a path through the deep snow from the Sorensen house to the fishhouse and wharf. Across the harbor the Campions were moving around. When the first sound of engines broke the unnatural stillness, she dressed to go out and followed somebody's tracks around the shore to Mark Bennett's wharf. The sun was rising fair and clear; the windless air had a dry bite in the throat and nostrils. Between the long blue shadows of the buildings, the powdery snow glittered; trees and terrain had changed their shape under the unique sculpture of the drifts.

All the boats that were fit to go would join the search, fanning over the bay while the Coast Guard worked from the mainland. Their planes were out already, Kathie told Philippa. She had come out of the store when Philippa passed by, and joined her at the end of the wharf. Rob, awed into silence, lurked behind Kathie, never letting himself get very far from her.

Kathie herself was shadowy-eyed, as if she had cried a great deal in the night. “Fort and Charles came into the store yesterday morning,” she said huskily. “Charles started plaguing me. You know the way he does—
did
.” She bit her lip. “And I wouldn't laugh, I was awful snotty tohim. I wish it was yesterday again. I'd do anything to make it yesterday again.”

The sounds of the engines warming up were loud. “We're all wishing things, Kathie,” Philippa said. “That's the way it always is. It's part of this.” She moved her head toward the boats. Some were leaving. Steve stood on the bow of Nils' boat, casting off the mooring. He was a lean silhouette in the sun glare. She thought, If I hadn't come here, the trouble wouldn't have started. Randall Percy wouldn't have cut Steve's traps. Fort wouldn't have fought with his father, wouldn't have gone off to join the Navy and taken Charles with him. They'd still be alive. The words sprang up, bristling with unexpectedness:
They would still be alive
.

Nils' mooring buoy splashed into the water, and the boat cut free toward the harbor mouth. This is what it is to feel old, she thought, this is when you hate life, when you have to ask yourself questions. For instance, are the Webster children worth the lives of Fort and Charles?

Rue and Edwin were coming down through the shed, their wan faces framed in the peaked hoods of their new red parkas. For these children she had begun a chain of circumstances that had broken, horribly, somewhere in the bay during the night. For the moment she could not look at them objectively, and she stared out at the other boats as they circled the harbor and went out, dancing, across the tide rip.

Rue and Kathie talked in awed tones behind her. “Look, Randall's with Terence,” Kathie said. “They're coming over for gas.”

“Ralph was splitting kindling in the back yard this morning,” said Rue. “He looks awful.” Her voice was thin and hoarse.

Terence's boat came swiftly across the water toward the wharf, and Mark went down the ladder to the car with the gas hose. Randall stood beside Terence at the wheel, his chubby face almost unrecognizable in its strain. Philippa turned quickly toward the children. “Let's go up to the store,” she said. “The Coast Guard might have called.”

Their eyes became wide with hope; they turned and ran across the snowy planks. It was cruel to arouse them like this, but even more cruel for them to stare at Randall as if his grief were a wound visible to the eye. She was walking behind them up through the shed when Terence caught up with her.

“I need cigarettes,” he said. “Funny how you can't do anything without cigarettes; they get so darn important even if you're walking to the electric chair. How's the Bennetts?''

“I suppose they're like everybody else. Pretending there's hope when they know there isn't. How's Randall?”

“Numb. His wife's wound up like a talking machine. I don't know which is worse. He's so stunned you could bawl for him, and she's keeping up a front for the kids and working so hard at it she makes you ache.” His eyes had the pale, old look again, and there was a twitching in one lid. “Fort was getting out because he couldn't stand it. It came to me last night that I didn't have half his guts. Maybe I can say he was a fool, setting out with Gregg in that leaky little tub with a storm coming, but calling him a fool doesn't change anything. The fact is, he wasn't scared to start out. Neither was Charles. He wanted to stick with Fort. They had courage.” They stopped at the end of the shed nearest the store. Terence kept on talking as if he couldn't stop. “Maybe if I'd done a little more before this, they'd still be here.”

“What could you have done?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. I just got the feeling there was a lot everybody could've done.” He looked down at the snow around his boots. “I'm getting off this island. If I don't get a chance to talk to you again—” He looked at her directly. “I guess I owe you some thanks for being a friend to me.”

“I haven't done anything,” she protested.

His mouth twitched. “You listened. I dunno as anybody ever listened so much to me in my whole life as you did at one stretch. So, thank you.” He went into the store.

She stood for a few minutes by the bench, looking at the harbor. The climbing sun was a blessing on her face. Charles will not feel the sun on his face again, she thought incredulously and remembered when it first had struck her that Justin would never again see the Atlantic break against its coast.

Philippa walked back to the Binnacle slowly; she met no one else.

W
hen the fire and sun had warmed her rooms thoroughly, a compelling drowsiness crept through her. The shock, the disbelief, and now the beginning of acceptance left her stranded as if by a neap tide of emotion. She lay down on her bed and watched the sunlight move along the wall until she fell asleep.

Sleep was no cure; one escaped the truth in sleep but awoke to instant awareness of it. She arose lightheaded and slightly ill, so tired of disaster that she could not even weep. She put more coal on the fire and set the teakettle on a front cover. The rooms were dim, and she could tell by the long shadows that it was late afternoon. Her first thought was that the boats had all come back. She ran down the stairs and opened the outer door. The pure icy sweetness of the still air washed around her. No one moved as far as she could see, though smoke wavered thinly upward from several chimneys. The world was perfect in its stillness and brilliance; it was also empty. The harbor, dark blue in the shadow cast by Mark Bennett's point, held only the skiffs at the moorings and the few boats whose owners had gone with someone else.