Folly (8 page)

Rae had never seen a kingfisher before. They were magical creatures, she had heard, and now understood why. She climbed to her feet, rubbing the dregs of tension from her neck, and concentrated on a series of long and deliberate breaths of the fragrant sea air.

Birds were waking, a thin invisible warble coming from the shore; farther along the bank perched a black bony hunter of a bird she thought might be a cormorant. Ask Ed to get you a bird book, she suggested to herself; that’ll give you something to do other than imagine ghosts. She turned and went on to the end of the promontory.

On the outer side of her rocky protector, small waves teased at the boulders. In the distance, the rising fog revealed a low dark shape in the water, a freighter heading up Haro Strait toward Vancouver or Juneau. An engine around to the northwest whined and cut off, sounding close, a reminder of how readily noises traveled on the water. From the offshore rocks west of where Rae stood, unseen harbor seals coughed and grumbled at each other, and the air seemed to gather itself in preparation for the day. The sun rose through the vapor on one side, the ghostly moon retreated on the other. The mist solidified for a moment, and Rae felt a faint, thin frond pushing to uncurl inside her: hope, perhaps, or even life.

Then the morning mists bowed to defeat and the first direct rays of the sun hit the water, transforming it into a shimmering expanse of light, a visual hymn of rejoicing, a paean to the intimate magnificence of the San Juans.

Rae Newborn’s first morning on Folly.

Letter from Rae to
Her Granddaughter

April 5

My dearest Petra
,

Well, as you can see, I made it through my first days on Folly without freezing to death or falling into the sea and getting eaten by an orca or being abducted by ransom-seeking kidnappers or coming down with ptomaine poisoning or any of your mother’s other ghastly scenarios. The only thing that happened to me was I walked into a tree on my first night, giving myself a nice purple bruise and a cut I didn’t notice until the next day. Thank goodness I don’t have visitors—they would have taken one look at my filthy hands, wild hair (from that super hat you gave me—warm, but it does leave your hair a bit mussed), and the great smear of dried blood down the side of my face, and had me locked up again before the sun set.

Daily life here is settling down into uncomfortable, but not impossible. I never seem to get really warm, since there’s no safe way to heat a tent and a campfire only warms one side of you at a time, but if I keep busy enough, I don’t notice being cold. Much. One nice thing is that I can eat huge meals and know I won’t gain an ounce—between work and keeping warm, I burn it all off.

As for the house, I’m still on the ground-clearing stage, which will take me another week before I uncover the foundation completely and begin to get a sense of the place. Very little of the walls survived, and those hunks are completely buried in nettles and blackberry vines. (I
don’t think I showed you my blackberry gloves—they’re called gauntlets, because they come to the elbow, and they’re so thick I believe you could drive nails with them!) There are saplings growing in the foundations too, of course, some of them pretty close to being trees, like the eight-inch-thick maple growing smack in the middle of where my living room is going to be, and although I agree it would make an interesting centerpiece, it’d be hard to keep the rain out. Down it comes!

One thing I can tell you already, even with a lot of the blackberries still in place, and that is, Desmond Newborn had a real knack for stonework. The two towers haven’t so much as a loose stone, as far as I can see, even with all the plants growing around them, and his foundation is nearly as secure as it was seventy-five years ago when it had a house on it. This is a great relief to me, as you can imagine—I was definitely
not
looking forward to digging and pouring a new footing for my house. (It also means, of course, that I could actually have taken you on a proper tour when you were here, but at the time your mother was right, the stones could have been dangerous. And by the way, I hope your trip home went smoothly.)

Well, shall I tell you about the house-to-be? I don’t know if you’re the least bit interested in the details, so please let me know if you aren’t and I’ll write instead about the island and its wildlife.

Perhaps I ought to begin with the name itself. You may know this already, but “folly” is a name given to objects or acts marked by extravagance and irrationality. It is used in scorn, but also in awe, at the sheer, preposterous exuberance of a thing (“Seward’s Folly” was the name given to the purchase of that vast and “useless” tract of land we now call Alaska). Folly indicates the very opposite of sober restraint, and has come to mean in architectural terms a useless building stuck out in the landscape for no good reason but that someone thought it would look nice there. Foolish, but fun. I may discover why it applies to this island as my building progresses. However, the island is also known as Sanctuary, and I believe it was given that name before there was a bird refuge on the north end.

You saw where the house used to stand—and will again stand, God willing. It’s a boxy shape sort of tucked into a steep patch of hillside as if it had its back to the wall, with one stone tower at the right-hand corner of the rear wall (looking from the font) and another on the left-hand corner of the font. The two towers, with a dark chimney behind them at the back (which will be hidden by the roof, are tied together
visually by the height of the stone foundation. It should look odd—I suppose it does look odd, or else why would the people here call it a folly?— but going by the picture I have of it, it won’t look as unbalanced as it sounds. The house itself, even without the towers (which aren’t much taller than the roof, actually, and sadly enough aren’t big enough for rooms at their tops, only windows), is high enough up on the hillside and angled so that it has a view which, while not exactly breathtaking, is definitely satisfying. The clearing where you helped me put up the tent and the rocky point that wraps around to form the cove just seem to open out when you’re above them, and draw the eye out, out into the strait and the islands (and—when the mist clears off, which it does occasionally—the northern coast of the Olympic peninsula). In other words, people passing by might not notice the house, but from the house you feel that you can see the world. I like this combination very much.

Speaking of breathtaking, I don’t know if I told you (and it was too foggy for you to see) but I have my very own mountain. Well, a tall hill, really, on the northeastern corner of the island, but it has an almost completely bald top, and from there a person can see the world. When I came here before, with your stepgranddad and auntie, we hiked to the top. You probably know that Washington State has a whole string of (we hope) dormant volcanoes, in addition to the not-so-dormant Mt. St. Helens? Well, you can see both Baker and Rainier from my hilltop, as well as the line of snowcapped peaks of the Olympic range. Plus Haro and Juan de Fuca Straits and Vancouver Island to the west and a lot of islands to the north. Somebody once put a little building on the bald hilltop, to see the view. It could even have been the government—I know that during the Second World War the army (navy? air force??) had hidden lookouts all up and down the Pacific coast, watching for the Japanese invasion that never came.

The next clear day I have, I’m going to climb up there with my camera and have a look. It won’t be a holiday, really, because I do need to trace the water supply before too long. Might as well do both, wouldn’t you agree?

Well, my sweet Petra, I need to end this, because my hands are tired and cold and I need to sleep. Boatman Ed will be here tomorrow, to bring me milk and bread and to pick up my laundry and a sample of water to be tested, so I’ll give him this to mail.

Give my greetings to your parents. Tell them I’m well.

Love, Gran

Rae looked at the sealed envelope, stamped and addressed to Petra Collins, and scratched vigorously at her hair with both hands, as if the gesture might relieve the unending twitchiness and tiredness that seemed to crawl into her scalp at the end of the day. The letter was too cheerful to be believed. If she’d written those same words to, say, Dr. Hunt, all kinds of alarm bells would have gone off. But the truth of the matter was, a person simply couldn’t write the sort of brutally honest letter Rae felt like writing and send it to a beloved thirteen-year-old grandchild, no matter how mature, intelligent, and just plain wise the child might be. Rae wanted to complain about how sore her back was from all the bending, and how the pain shot up and down her left arm and shoulder, and how her fingers ached so that even moving a pen was a trial, how alarmingly little mental and physical strength she had and how frightening it was to contemplate the specter of age looming on the horizon. She craved the relief of confession—of the unending jumpiness that rode her every waking minute and many of her sleeping minutes as well, of how she spent half her working time glancing sharply over her shoulders at nonexistent Watchers, looking up from her labors among the stone towers, certain she would see a strange man striding up the promontory or stepping out from behind a tree. Of how the night before she had been jolted from a dream about being washed out to sea, saved only by a boulder on the promontory, and had woken to find her arms around her pillow and Petra’s face fading from the dream rock. And of how the island
silence, long desired, was proving so oppressive that she had dug out Petra’s tape player and let it spin its tinny Oldies into her ears (and of how she had laughed herself to hysterical tears at the first song, which, through some peculiar twist of fate, was Martha and the Vandellas singing “Nowhere to Run”). Rae seemed to cry all the time, in fact, from nervous reaction or from loneliness and fear—fear of strangers, fear of voices, fear of weakness or illness or injury, fear of fear itself. This afternoon she had found herself sobbing with infantile rage when she could not move a fallen stone, kicking the mossy boulder like a three-year-old and screeching at the heavens until her knees gave out and she sat hunched over, weeping in self-pity until her head ached.

She could write none of this, not only because of Petra’s age, but because if Petra’s mother found such a letter (and knowing Tamara, she was unlikely to allow her daughter so dangerous a privacy as a personal correspondence with Rae), she could not miss seeing what lay at the base of such pure honesty: a deep and straightforward affection such as Rae had never given her own daughter, a hunger for companionship that Tamara could not satisfy—or that Rae would not permit her to satisfy.

Rae’s relationship with her elder daughter had been doomed from the beginning. After Tamara’s birth, postpartum depression had slid, slowly but inexorably, into a full-scale breakdown, Rae’s first. When Rae came out of the hospital, three months later, she had neither husband nor child. It took her four years to regain access to Tamara, four years to prove that she was not about to slit her wrists one day while Tamara was playing in the next room (a vivid suggestion made in court by David’s lawyer). By that time, Tamara was well and truly indoctrinated against her. The child screamed when David walked out the door of Rae’s apartment, leaving his ex-wife and daughter to their first weekend alone. Tamara screamed all weekend.

For the next five years, Rae and David shared custody—or rather, David’s mother shared it grudgingly with Rae, since it was to his parents’ house that David took the child. Then, a month short of Tamara’s tenth birthday, Rae’s second break occurred. Much of that winter was lost to Rae, but clear images lingered, seared into her visual memory by the same mechanism that had carved Bella’s happy cry of
Mommy!
into her hearing: the sight of Tamara frozen in the doorway of the living room, her blond hair hanging lank and unwashed in the week she’d spent in her mother’s care, staring openmouthed as Rae stripped naked, earnestly lecturing her
daughter on the need for doing so—although that reason, rooted in the logic of dreams and madness, was lost in the mists; the image of Tamara being driven away by David’s enraged mother, the way her white Cadillac skidded to one side before its tires regained the road; the pattern of the blood, spreading out in the bathwater, delicate scarlet blooms curling against the white enamel. That she remembered, although nothing of the ensuing noise and tumult of David’s entrance or the paramedics. Nothing of either hospital. Nothing but muttering darkness, punctuated only by her father’s face, looking as much lost as it did angry, telling her that her grandfather William had died at the age of ninety-four, enraged to the last. Rae still believed that her second breakdown had led to William’s fatal stroke. Her father had tried to reassure her, but she knew better: The knowledge that his only granddaughter was a mental patient had killed William.