Beggar of Love (41 page)

They were at the cash register, Shannon behind the counter, Jefferson in front, paying for a pack of gum. Shannon was watching more schoolkids, who were eyeing the cigarettes and Shannon in turn.

“There was this butchy senior in a high school where I taught,” she told Shannon, “one of those posh uptown schools high-income parents all want their kids to get into. It was the week before graduation. The kid was eighteen, age of consent in New York is seventeen. Not that I would have taken her to bed. A student and not my type. But that’s what she wanted. I figured, show her some places, let her meet gay kids. That’s what I did—after she graduated.

“Turns out the parents—overprotective? Never saw anything like it. I mean, one look at the two of us, you know we’re not into each other, chasing skirts together. Kid picks another butch. Mom catches her with said look-alike. Dumb kids. In the graduate’s bedroom, playing at sleepover. Of course the mother wants to know. Kid tells all, dad calls the school. I have to meet with the parents and admin. Mom calls me another one of those masculine women. I get fired, like it was me in bed with darling daughter. Nothing good ever comes of mixing butches.”

She’d been interrupted a few times while Shannon rang the register, but they were alone for her point.

Shannon shrugged, but didn’t look at her. As she locked the register and walked into an aisle she asked, “What are you going to do about a girlfriend up here?”

“Again, I’m retired from all that. I’ve had enough,” she proclaimed, knowing this was no longer quite true. A great sadness came at her like a hurricane of tears yet to be shed. She felt a deep pang for intimacy and for the place she and Ginger were supposed to be sharing, the place that was to have been their togetherness.

Shannon started cutting a box open. It was a case of huge cans of Hawaiian Punch. Shannon lifted the big blue cans one at a time and slid them along the wooden shelf, stopping off and on to massage the small of her back. “Pretty slim pickings around here.” Her eyes were narrow as she studied Jefferson.

“We could start a lesbian inn, bring up the touro-dykes.”

Shannon moved the dolly to another aisle and slid it out from under two cases of soup, then sat on them, studying Jefferson silently.

“What?” asked Jefferson, who was ready to leave.

“What? What? Didn’t you hear your brilliant idea? An inn. A lesbian B-and-B.” Shannon’s arms waved as she spoke. Her eyes had come alive with enthusiasm. Jefferson didn’t see how a femme could resist her. “Build it and they will come, right?”

Shannon held the sharp edge of the box cutter against her thumb. With the forefinger of her other hand, she was tracing the veins in her wrist. Jefferson looked at her watch. She had to get going.

“You’re the realtor,” Shannon said, slipping the cutter into a back pocket. “Find us one of those old farmhouses gone to rack and ruin. I’ll get my dad to help us fix it up—” Shannon slumped again. “I’m not running anything from Iraq, am I?”

“I’ll be on the lookout, Shannon, for when you can. You’re a natural for the manager. Can you cook breakfast trout?” she asked with a smile. Macy Gray sang on.

“Cook breakfast?” Shannon reached out two hands toward her and Jefferson slapped them. “I am the waffle whiz, the superb scrambler, the bagel boiler. I can cook bacon, omelets, flapjacks, and home fries that would leave you begging for more if you weren’t already stuffed to the gills. Trout is a specialty of mine. Start looking, Jefferson. Start now, okay? Give me something in my damn life to look forward to.”

“I actually have a place in mind, come to think of it.”

She watched the life drain from Shannon’s eyes. Shannon turned away to the Hawaiian Punch. “Nothing ever works out for me. Never mind.”

“I’ve got to go to work,” Jefferson said, remembering when she’d felt that down. “I might stop by that house I’m thinking of, which is conveniently empty.” Getting Shannon’s mind off Dawn would be a good thing.

It was a little chilly to be hanging out half inside, half outside of Dawn’s garage. These Saturday gatherings had become an institution for Jefferson, though, and she always at least stopped by between showings. Today she’d only had one retired couple to squire around, obviously in town for the fall foliage, and they had narrowed their sights to two pieces. She’d gone home after that and put on her jeans and brown leather jacket, which was keeping her warm on this damp day, but was, after half a lifetime of wearing it and working to keep the leather supple, getting snug on her. She needed to lose weight, pronto. When the rain came down they all moved inside the garage, but kept the door open.

Yolanda Whale was working on a six-pack; Rayanne was laying borders around the photos in a scrapbook she was doing of the group and trying to get them to come up with something they could call themselves.

“Jygrs,” Dawn said. “There must be way to use our initials. Ryj—”

“The Old Crows,” Jefferson suggested at the sight of two crows on a swaying electrical line.

“Sounds like a whiskey,” Yolanda commented.

“It would to you,” Rayanne shot back.

“Well,” Dawn said with a sigh, “the initials I’m coming up with sound like an Icelandic city.”

“Maybe Shannon will think of something,” Rayanne said. “Where is she?”

Yolanda said, “The Goonies.”

“She went to the movies without us?” protested Dawn.

Rayanne said, “That’s our name: The Goonies. I loved that film.”

“Oh, gross,” said Dawn.

“She could be at the movies, though. Or someplace.”

“Good thinking, Yo,” said Rayanne. “I’d have to agree that she’s someplace.”

Jefferson remembered the day Shannon helped her work on the boat, how impossible her dilemma was. Iraq was no fit place for a New Hampshire dyke. The service was no fit place for someone who was used to being out or who had a back as sore as Shannon’s appeared to be. “Hey, what about loons? They’re all over the place now.”

Yolanda laughed. “The Loonies! We can be The Loonies.”

“You are the loony,” said Rayanne.

Jefferson was always amazed that Rayanne was a successful financial wiz, with her lousy people skills, but Dawn said she made money hand over fist for herself and her clients. Drew and Ryan raved about her. Jefferson was surprised to learn that Buck and Serena put what they called their spare change in her hands, whatever they didn’t have committed to property. She wondered, if she’d been fifteen years younger, when women were entering fields like finance in greater numbers, if she might have been good at something like that. Real-estate sales seemed to suit her. She used to laugh at the feminists, but they’d really opened up the world for the women who followed them. Still—Rayanne, goonies, financial savvy—it did not compute, as Rayanne herself might say. “Goonies definitely has a fun-loving feel to it,” Jefferson said, laughing, “but then, so does the one Shannon came up with last week: The Bean-Supper Gang.”

Dawn looked at her watch, then at Jefferson. “This isn’t like Shannon. She usually lets one of us know if she isn’t going to be here.”

“Try her cell,” Yolanda suggested.

Dawn said, “I did. And I left her two messages.”

“Then her battery must be dead because the day Shannon Wiley doesn’t respond to Dawn Northway—”

They all looked at one another. Jefferson was the first to say, “I think Shannon’s got a lot on her mind.”

The floodgates opened and everyone spoke at once.

Yolanda set her beer down on a sawhorse, hard. “She came to every one of us for help. Who helped her? I know I couldn’t.”

There was a general shaking of heads.

“And now she’s what,” Dawn asked, “sitting alone somewhere contemplating—”

“No,” said Rayanne. “Not that.”

“I didn’t mean suicide. Maybe she’s just sad.”

“Shannon doesn’t sit around and think about things, women. She acts. That’s how she got into the Guard in the first place,” Yolanda told them. “She thought her life was going nowhere so she signed on.”

“And now,” Jefferson said, “she’s stuck again.”

“Only this time, the Guard is definitely not the answer,” Rayanne told them.

Dawn dialed again, then put the phone down. “I’m driving over to her place.”

Jefferson was up and had her keys out. She reached for Dawn and pulled her toward her car. The Avalon’s lights blinked as she unlocked the doors while the others grabbed what they needed and followed. Dawn sat in front with her. Rayanne and Yolanda got in back.

She imagined, as she drove, that Shannon was a lesbian, like herself, with ghosts. Would Shannon grow out of her ghosts or would she, Jefferson, someday be as down as Shannon? She could see herself, alone, thrashing in her bed to a nightmare. All the women she’d abandoned would drift through the mist to terrorize her. She’d feel haunted and vulnerable as giant trees dripped loudly around her. Shannon needed to face her ghosts, yell back at their taunts, prod the empty shadows with the sharpened stick of her future, or become another Donna Quixote, a victim of her own too prolific loving—or longing.

Pipsborough was small; the drive over the slick streets was quick except for the mad gray squirrels dashing across streets in search of richer foraging grounds. Shannon’s cabin was one of a half dozen that had once been part of a motor court, probably built in the thirties and now in much too bad shape to attract vacationers. A knee-high, once-painted picket fence, snaggle-toothed, sagged backward. She could imagine the old cars parked along the horseshoe driveway, kids in overall shorts and fathers in captain’s hats, the mothers wearing wide-legged rayon playsuits. Ginger would like this place. Would have liked.

“Where’s her bike?” asked Rayanne.

“Inside?” Yolanda suggested.

Dawn opened the creaky screen door and knocked. “Shannon?” she called. Shannon’s cat came streaking out of the cabin and made for the woods in back.

When there was no answer, Jefferson, Rayanne, and Yolanda went to the windows. The cabin consisted of a small combined living room and kitchen and a sleeping loft. The bathroom had a high frosted-glass window. Light flooded inside when Dawn opened the front door. She watched Yolanda enter behind Dawn and knew she’d been watching too many episodes of
Law & Order
when she wondered why their guns weren’t drawn.

She felt light-headed and an acrid taste came into her mouth. She slumped against the cabin, nauseous. What was up with her? She’d handled plenty of situations in classes, on playing fields. Was it the thought of another death? She wanted to go lumbering into the woods like a wounded old moose to lie down and die in peace.

“Jefferson!” Dawn called from inside, and she felt the shame that had always come when she realized her clothes were dirty once again from playing in the woods. Emmy’s mute disappointment had felt like an elevator at Lord and Taylor’s crashing to the ground. That had been a recurrent nightmare in her childhood, the elevator falling with her in it, Emmy many floors above. It plunged; she stood frozen and silent with fear.

Breakfast erupted. They were calling, sounding frantic. She wiped her face with the hem of her shirt. To quell more nausea, she pictured herself at the end of the day, alone in her big soft chair by the fire. Then she wove her way to the car and started it while they put Shannon, limp, on the backseat. Dawn sat with Shannon’s head on her lap, Rayanne leapt into the front seat, while Yolanda lifted Shannon’s legs and rested them on her own. Even as she started the Avalon, she gagged again at the smell of vomit.

“Shannon’s sick?” She searched Dawn’s worried face in the rearview mirror.

“She swallowed pills,” Dawn was shaking her head, “but she threw up so much, I don’t know if they got into her system.”

Jefferson reached the street and gunned the car toward the hospital in Laconia. “Let’s hope she tossed the pills before they reached her liver.”

“What would happen to her?”

Rayanne was dialing on her cell phone, stabbing numbers, cursing, stabbing them again.

“Call nine-one-one,” Jefferson advised as she rounded a curve too fast.

“Nothing’s happening! Wait—Yeah,” Rayanne said into the phone. “We’re coming in with a suicide. Me? I’m Rayanne Vishengrad. Is she breathing? I don’t know—Dawn?”

“She is, but really slowly. And she’s sweating bullets. Jefferson, where—”

“About fifteen minutes out.”

“Fifteen minutes.” Rayanne pushed the phone toward Dawn. “She’s going to walk you through CPR.”

“I know CPR,” Dawn said. “I’ll start again now.”

“Geeze, we should have thought of that.” Yolanda grabbed the phone.

“I did, on the bathroom floor,” Dawn said as she positioned Shannon’s jaw. “Tell her we have the bottle. It’s ibuprofen.”

Yolanda repeated instructions to Dawn. Jefferson focused on the road, passing cars as she never had before, no matter how drunk.

“Jef, the dispatcher is telling the police we’re on our way. She said they’d meet us with an ambulance, but it wouldn’t save time at this point. The ER is waiting for us.”

She pressed the pedal down harder. Ahead a police cruiser, lights rotating, was waving her on, holding her hand up to stop intersection traffic. What a different world, she thought, from the scene in
The Well of Loneliness,
the first gay book she had ever read, where a character, another young lesbian, hanged herself. Not different enough, she thought. All those years she’d spent drinking and chasing women, she thought, she hadn’t noticed that she was doing what the straight world wanted her to do. She was killing herself like Shannon, only slower. Killing us—why hadn’t she thought enough of her relationship to do right by Ginger? She’d been a mirror for a whole society that thinks gays aren’t worth much. Who knew if Ginger’s aneurysm wasn’t from the whole gay-straight thing eating up her gut? Ginger had never told the Quinn family any more than she had told the Jeffersons. Neither of them was out at work. Y
OUR
S
ILENCE
W
ILL
N
OT
P
ROTECT
Y
OU
—she’d seen that bumper sticker at the Lake Front Shop. Protect us? It’s killing us.