Beggar of Love (31 page)

She nodded in response. “It was my fault, Ginger.”

Neither of them could say more. They went back to watching television, an old William Bendix movie neither had seen before.

Mr. and Mrs. Quinn drove up one Saturday—the two brothers and their wives, the stay-at-home brother, and Ginger’s parents—with the five nieces and nephews, all somehow stuffed into Joseph’s old Suburban, the whole big Irish family. Ginger rallied and instructed Jefferson in roasting chickens and mashing potatoes. The frozen vegetables went into the microwave, and dessert was ice cream with fudge and marshmallow sauces out of jars. It had actually been fun, but Ginger got too tired. After that, Jefferson couldn’t imagine Ginger dancing again and knew Ginger wouldn’t want to live without dance.

The third Friday of August, they went outside after Ginger’s afternoon nap. The pines shaded them while the sun scattered silver sequins atop the wind-chopped lake waters. She led Ginger to the bench and stood behind her, hands on her shoulders. Ginger was getting a gray streak off to one side of her hair. When Jefferson commented on this, Ginger raised one hand, slowly, and laid it on Jefferson’s. It was four o’clock. They were in the long, sad decline of the day. Afterward, Jefferson wondered if Ginger had been practicing saying good-bye with that brief, cat’s paw of a touch. When Ginger moved her hand away she asked Jefferson for a little water. Jefferson had learned to keep a six-pack cooler iced on the porch and stepped inside the screen door to get a bottle.

She moved around the bench to place the straw at Ginger’s mouth. A red bubble was growing between Ginger’s lips.

“Ginger?”

Ginger was staring toward the lake.

“Ginger,” she insisted. “Oh, God.”

Ginger gave a gurgling sort of cough and blood leapt from her mouth, down her chin, onto her lap.

Quickly, without thinking, Jefferson grabbed Ginger under the arms and laid her on the grass, turning her head sideways to keep her from choking on the blood. She touched Ginger’s cheek and asked, “Ginger, are you still with me?” There was no response. Her other hand had already pulled out her cell phone and, despite all her practice out of Ginger’s sight, she fumbled and dialed 999, then 411, and finally 911 and heard herself yell for assistance at her address.

“Hold, please. Stay on the line.”

The pause seemed so long she was about to hang up and call back.

“Is that the Jeffersons’ place?” the operator asked when she returned.

“You know it?”

The operator gave instructions to the ambulance, then answered, “I’ve been to parties there.”

Oh, great, she thought. Who knows what went on. “Can you get me some help? We’re around back.”

“What’s happening?” the woman asked.

“Ginger—she’s recovering from surgery for an aneurysm. She vomited blood. Her abdomen is really swollen. I think she’s going.”

“Passed on?”

Without me, she realized. She’s sending me away and bowing out without me. Jefferson knew she deserved nothing better, but hadn’t she made up for some of the grief she’d caused Ginger? Ginger had left her again. She was gone for good.

She stopped herself. This was not about her. Ginger was dying here, or was she really already—

Her voice was dry, rasping. “She’s bluish and cool to the touch.”

The operator wanted to know if Ginger was breathing. “But don’t do CPR.”

She couldn’t, with the blood continuing to run out of Ginger’s poor soft mouth. “I can’t find her pulse.”

“Do you have a blanket? She’ll be in shock.”

It was so hard to look into Ginger’s eyes and think she probably saw nothing now. “A lap throw. I’ve got her lying on it on the ground. Wait, I’m lifting her legs up to the bench. She’s so cold and clammy.”

“The medics are on their way, hon.”

She felt as alone as she’d ever felt. “Ginger? You’re the love of my life. You fill my world. You—” Why hadn’t she found these things before? “You’ll always be with me,” she whispered. “It’s okay to go now. What if you couldn’t dance?” So fast she almost didn’t know she’d thought it, she considered all the time and energy Ginger would have to give her if she couldn’t dance, but said, “I’ll love you wherever you are.”

She caught sight of the mail boat on its way into the harbor. Ginger’s eyes stared toward it. They’d always talked about taking a ride on the bigger mail boat over on Winnipesaukee, but never had, and here was the little Saturday Lake mail boat, a reminder of everyday life going on and on without Ginger, without time to be together the way they could have been and no one on the boat aware that Jefferson’s world was shredding.

A siren wailed, coming along the curve of the lake.

“Any sign of life?” the operator was asking.

“No!” she yelled toward the phone, which lay on the pine needles next to Ginger. “Sorry, Ginger. I have to see what’s going on inside your mouth again.” It sounded silly as she said it, as she heard a vehicle approach. It was that she wanted, wanted, wanted her girl. She mopped more blood out and set her lips to Ginger’s, tasting her dear lips tinged with metallic blood, thinking that this was the last kiss, their death kiss.

Two medics rushed to Ginger. “Is there someone who can be with you?” one of them asked, after confirming that Ginger was gone.

She only wanted to be with Ginger. “No.”

She lingered over this task, crying as she worked, cleaning Ginger up as best she could after the medics had taken her inside and laid her on the red-and-black checkered bedspread. They told Jefferson to call Webbers.

This was going too fast, she thought. “Can’t I keep her tonight?” But she knew that was senseless. In the silent vacuum of the emergency vehicle’s departure, nothing was left but Ginger’s paisley flip-flops, splayed on the ground where they had fallen.

What would be good about now would be a drink, but she’d lost her taste for drinking altogether. Her drinking had killed Ginger, hadn’t it? She wondered if Ginger had found out who she really was: a creature of Jefferson’s definition or some new butterfly never before captured and too fragile to survive.

Jefferson called Joseph. He would go over and tell the rest of the Quinns. She set out Ginger’s new dance outfit, the black leotard and sparkly blue gossamer wrap, before she called Webbers. She and Ginger had picked it up on one of their trips to the city, an unspoken understanding between them of its purpose.

That night she called Lily Ann and asked her to tell their friends. She had the wild thought of calling Angela, back in Dutchess, but didn’t, of course. She didn’t want to tell Emmy and Jarvy. Not tonight. What she wanted was to tell Ginger. To have Ginger say, “There, there, there,” and hold her, rock her, make love with her until sleep melded them together with the contentment only warm, sated bodies and glad hearts can know. Wasn’t that all she’d ever wanted?

Jefferson wouldn’t let her friends help her finish her move north.

“Wait till I get settled in and then come to visit,” she insisted.

She drove up on a Monday. Wet fallen leaves, gold and brown, green and red, lay everywhere on the parkways. Ginger’s belongings were still in the guest room at the apartment. A small moving truck was bringing what she would need. She preferred the simple camp furniture at the lake to most of the pieces she and Ginger had collected, but her computer, iPod docking station, clothing, photos, sports gear, and books, her bicycle—she could not live without them. Whew, she kept saying to herself as she little by little decided what she’d need and what she could let go. She’d wondered if dying was something like this, letting it all go, offloading the heavy accumulations of the years and drifting away.

Retiring at forty-eight was the craziest thing she’d ever done sober, but she knew she was right to get out of Dodge. Ever since she’d stopped drinking and started on the depression medication, the same old same old wasn’t doing it for her. She’d probably partly bored Ginger into leaving. No more impulsive excursions out to the bars, no more disappearing all night, no more skulking around the apartment hungover and cranky.

Before Ginger left with Mitchell, their lives had become serene and routine. They had gone to Café Femmes together, but with only a bottle of sparkling water in her hands, she’d felt left out. All those dykes downing alcohol, content to yell at one another over the music, to dance dirty in front of the whole world—had she lived like that? As the women got more and more drunk, they seemed to become different people: the loud ones got louder, the quiet ones more withdrawn. And young! Had she and her friends ever looked this young? There was something ugly about the sight of these children playing at adult activities. Ugliest of all was the sight of a young lesbian blitzed out of her mind. She’d thought of herself as suave, urbane; au contraire, she realized, she’d been a bleary-eyed, stumbling drunk, slack-smiled, and, like these tipsy butches, boring beyond belief. Some nights when they bestirred themselves to go downtown and see their friends, she started to yawn before she left the house. More and more often she and Ginger veered into the video store on the way to the subway and returned home with a chick flick, made popcorn, and fell asleep thirty minutes before the end of the movie. Was she still Jefferson without Irish whiskey?

That first official night after she moved into the cottage, she made a fire. Grandfather Jefferson had built the fireplace with the help of a local stonemason, using small slabs of granite, a couple with embedded smoky quartz, garnet, and crystal gathered from nearby fields when the cottage was built back in the 1930s, others brought from her grandparents’ Dutchess land. When people started building around them, the accessible rocks had mostly been used, so Grandfather had put up a four-rail fence with bracing, low enough for the deer and moose to get in and out, open enough for the bunnies and other little guys to pass under.

The great-room walls were the original tongue-and-groove wood paneling, stained and shellacked to a shine, and the floors were made of wide wood planks with big, old-fashioned blue braided rugs. When they replaced the outhouse with a bathroom, they made it large enough for a toilet and shower. Originally they used the antiquated, red hand pump out front. An enamel sink hung on the wall outside the bathroom, supported by metal poles and skirted with old oilcloth-enclosed storage.

Only the kitchen had been updated. The pine open shelving and single wooden counter, patches worn in its varnish from use, hadn’t changed, but in the 1950s, the icebox had been moved out back to store tools and garden implements. Her grandparents had put in a stark white Frigidaire Kelvinator, which whined now. The repair guy from Mailboat Harbor, though long retired, still came out to work on it and the Tappan range they’d bought at the same time. Only the clock at the top of the stove was not working. It stuck with a click every time it passed 3:18. She’d see if she could get that fixed and find someone to blow insulation into the walls.

There were two bedrooms off the great room, with knotty-pine three-quarter walls and, over them, an open loft where she’d slept as a kid. The climb up the vertical wooden ladder to the mattress under the attic window had been a highlight of her childhood. From the foot of her bed she could see the rafters over the living room and glimpse the grown-ups talking, smoking, and drinking on the deep screened front porch, its floor painted blue. Now the big bedroom downstairs was hers. The red-and-black checked bedspread and matching curtains at the screened windows must be at least as old as she was. There were no doors on the closets in the house, just rods and blue muslin shower curtains. The cottage, dotted with floor lamps, had always felt more like home than her parents’ big, dark, ungainly house in Dutchess.

Her things weren’t due until the next day, so she had little to keep her busy. She’d brought their blue-and-purple-striped comforter and wrapped it around herself on the old overstuffed couch. How many times had they made love on this very couch when they were first together? How many times sat touching shoulders, hips, feet, with their legs resting on the cherrywood-slab coffee table, watching logs burn in the fireplace? The mantel was made from a piece of the same cherry. They’d talked about work, their friends, their plans, growing old together, foolish bits from the local papers, their favorite TV shows, the old framed nature watercolors hung on the walls. It seemed they could talk about anything for hours, for days, for whole vacations. The more history they had together, the more there was to talk about. The silence got to her now, but she couldn’t bear to cover up the quiet with music or TV. It was their silence, the vacuum in her life Ginger had filled, that she hung on to. All she had left was the very present absence of Ginger, which at least affirmed that there had been a Ginger, had been love, and she hugged the shadow of who they had been as tight as she could.

After a week of unpacking and setting up, Jefferson thought it would be good to be face-to-face with people someplace other than the grocery, hardware store, and post office. There was a bean supper at the Methodist church in Gramble, twenty minutes north and east along the lake. She’d always wanted to go to that bean supper as a kid, but that would have interrupted her parents’ established cocktail hour, and the church didn’t serve liquor. Ginger, brought up Catholic and turned off by the priests’ child abuse, had made a face and exclaimed, “A church?” Now Jefferson was a free agent, like it or not, and no one could stop her.

Truth be told, aside from feeling like a length of herself had been severed, she kind of liked kicking around trying to figure out her own agenda with nobody else’s itinerary or baggage tripping her up. Life, pain and all, had become an adventure again, and she, the real sober McCoy, was the greatest source of surprises.