Nora and Liz (6 page)

Nora turned from buttoning her raincoat, startled; Parker was her mother’s maiden name.

“Is this your house, dear?” Corinne asked Sarah.

“Sweetheart,” Ralph said, leaning toward her, “you’re Corinne
Tillot
now.”

“No, Mrs.
Tillot
, it’s your house.” Sarah listened through the stethoscope for a moment while Nora, now worried, watched; Louise put a stubby, protective hand on Nora’s arm. Absently, Nora noticed a chip in the dark red polish on Louise’s thumbnail.

“Pressure’s a bit low,” Sarah murmured to Nora and Ralph. “But I think she’ll be okay. Has she been disoriented all day?”

“Not like this.” Nora knelt beside her mother. “Mama?” she said. “Hi. How do you feel?”

Corinne blinked again. “Why, I feel fine, dear. How are you? Hello, Sarah, Louise. What a rainy day, isn’t it?”

Ralph smiled and Louise said, “My goodness, yes. Nice weather for ducks.”

Nora laughed with relief and hugged her mother. “I’m just going out with Mrs. Brice to do the shopping. Okay?”

“Of course, dear. Have a nice time. Buy yourself a treat. You deserve one, doesn’t she, Louise?”

“She certainly does.”

“Your mother might have had a tiny TIA,” Sarah said
sotto voce
to Nora, following her and Louise into the front hall. “But I think she’s come out of it fine. I’ll keep a close eye on her, don’t worry, and I’ll call Dr. Cantor from my car phone after I’ve observed her a bit longer. It’s possible he’ll want to see her or prescribe something, but I think her regular medication should still be okay. She’s been having it regularly, yes?”

“Yes,” Nora said. “But I wish Father would let us take her to the hospital when she has these spells,” she added wistfully.

“So do I,” Sarah said. “But”—she patted Nora’s arm—“we know he won’t, and that’s that. Besides, I really do think she’ll be fine.”

“When you girls have finished your tea party,” Ralph bellowed from the kitchen, “maybe one of you would deign to get me my pills. My heart’s been racing; I didn’t sleep a wink last night.”

Sarah grinned at Nora. “He’s in top form,” she said. “Off with you. Don’t drown!”

Rain pelted against the windows and wind made
catspaws
on the lake, but still Liz lay in bed, though it was well into morning. She’d bought some groceries the night before after turning on the water in the cabin, and then cooked herself a quick supper of bacon, eggs, and toast. She’d stripped the newspapers off her parents’ bed, made it, swept the floor, and, trying not to think, crawled under the covers. But she’d gotten up several times, sleepless, to make cocoa, to read, to look for suddenly remembered books, games, puzzles. She wasn’t sure but what she’d finally slept a little; certainly she’d heard the rain start. And now it was coming down harder than when last she’d noticed.

I’ve got to do something, she thought, getting out of bed stiffly and stretching. I’ve got to decide.

She struggled into jeans and a turtleneck, then went downstairs into the gray morning, thinking, all my childhood is here, all my roots, my beginnings. She ran her fingers over the surface of the table in front of the sofa, over the sofa’s corduroy cover, over its worn wooden arms, remembering lying there for most of one summer after she’d had her appendix out, lying there reading, watching television, watching the sunlight on the lake and longing to be outside.

But it had been good then, too, she remembered, with Jeff running in every few hours to tell her what he’d been doing and what he’d discovered in the woods, bringing her rocks, flowers, worms, once a blinking toad they’d named
Hortense
and decided was a witch—a good witch—in disguise. Mom and Dad had read to her, played games with her; Mom tried to teach her to knit. Liz almost laughed, remembering her crooked edges and Mom’s kind laughter when she said, “Well, Lizzie, maybe you haven’t found your true calling.” That was when Dad had given her an X-
acto
knife and a hunk of balsa wood; then, when she felt stronger, a gouge and a flat piece of pine. Mom had laughed again, sweeping up shavings and crumbs of wood, and saying, “Well, Lizzie, I guess maybe now you
have
found your calling!”

And then she’d gotten much better and had been allowed to go outside; no swimming or rowing yet, but she could walk in the woods and sit outside when the mosquitoes weren’t too bad, and later she was allowed to fish from the dock as long as Jeff agreed to land anything she caught.

Liz walked through the cabin room by room, memories crowding her; she saved her room for last. Once there, she rolled the mouse droppings up in the newspaper and lay down on her bare mattress, remembering lying there with Megan when they’d first been lovers. They’d come to Piney Haven alone early one spring and it had rained as it was raining now. Liz closed her eyes, hearing the drops’ insistent pounding on the cabin roof, remembering Megan’s softness, Megan’s hands on her body, hers on Megan’s. And yet there’d always been a barrier; she’d felt something closing up in her when Megan touched her, though it was pleasurable and comforting, and though it aroused her to touch Megan. “You have to give
yourself
in love,” Jeff had said once, “you have to
be
there, Lizzie"—and she, who had always been considered generous and compassionate, knew he was right about her; he was the only person who could see through her, who seemed to know her secret better than she did. He’d recognized it before she had, anyway.

“It scared me,
Meggie
,” Liz whispered. “It scares me still.”

She sat up, rubbing her eyes; she hadn’t realized she’d nearly wept.

The rain had slowed to a steady patter, and the room was cold. She should build a fire, make coffee, eat something, start cleaning.

She glanced at her watch; it was nearly ten. No wonder my stomach’s grumbling, she thought, and made herself pancakes from a mix, and coffee. She’d forgotten syrup, but there was a half-full box of cinnamon, and she’d bought sugar, so, thinking again of Jeff, she slathered the pancakes with butter and when it had melted, sprinkled on cinnamon-sugar. Biting into the crunchiness, she thought, I could call Jeff. In a couple of hours, I could call Jeff.

Energetic now, Liz finished her coffee, rinsed her dishes, and scrubbed and polished the kitchen till noon, when, suddenly finding the heavy kettle in which her mother had made jam from the blueberries she and Jeff and their father had picked, her eyes filled with tears and she stood, paralyzed, sobbing, by the sink.

Jeff, she thought again, when the paroxysm had passed. It would be nine o’clock in California; she’d have to call him at work and go through his secretary. But that was all right; he’d never minded that.

He answered himself.

“Secretary goofing off?” Liz said, closing her eyes in unexpected relief at hearing his voice. She could almost pretend he was with her, that their parents were in the next room or outside, or shopping and due home any minute.

“Hey, Lizzie,” Jeff said jovially. “Yeah, she’s not in yet. There’s a lot of traffic, some tie-up on the freeway, as usual. What’s up? Have you been to the cabin?”

“I’m there now.” Her voice caught in her throat.

“Oh, wow! You okay?”

“Yes.” She hesitated. “Well, not quite. It’s weird,
Jeffie
. It’s like—I don’t know. It’s like it’s the shell of me, of us; you know? And Mom and Dad are all around me, Mom especially.”

There was a pause. Then: “Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. And you can’t sell it, babe, right?”

“Right. At least not yet,” she said relieved again and understanding that was what had gnawed at her last night, keeping her from sleeping, and had enervated her this morning till she’d started cleaning. “I guess I feel I’d be violating it somehow, if I let other people have it. The real estate agent was here when I arrived, snooping. It was awful seeing her looking the place over like a cat waiting to pounce.” Liz felt herself shiver. “It’s like we’d be selling Mom and Dad, Jeff. And us as kids. Me and Megan, too, a little, our beginning, anyway.”

“So no sale at all, huh?”

“Not now. If it’s okay with you. Maybe in a year or so. Unless you really need the money.”

“Don’t worry about that. It’s okay.”

“Are you sure you and Susan don’t need it? With Gus and all?”

“No, we’re fine.”

“Then if it’s okay with you, I’d like to call off the real estate creep and clean the place up and—and maybe spend the summer here alone,” she added, surprising herself, realizing she could actually do that, there would be nothing to stop her. She could sublet her apartment, buy a car with the money she’d been saving for she was never sure what, and spend a quiet summer figuring things out, recovering from leaving Megan and trying to understand the flaw that had made her run from her; she could try to put herself back together again.

She heard Jeff’s voice, muffled, saying something away from the phone.

“Hey, babe,” he said into it a moment later. “I’ve got to go. My secretary’s here now and I’ve got some stupid meeting. Go ahead and do what you want, though. It’s okay.”

“You’re really, truly sure? About the money?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. And you know what? I’m kind of glad the old
place’ll
still be in the family. Maybe we’ll come for a visit, me and Sue and the kid, this summer. How about that? Maybe Gus could get to like the old place, too, who knows? It’s so great for kids.” His voice softened. “I remember, too.”

“That’d be fine,” Liz said, smiling. “That’d be fine. Only maybe toward the end of the summer? Give me a little time?”

“Sure, sis. End of summer. Hey, we’ll talk later, okay?”

“Okay. ’Bye,
Jeffie
. And thanks. You’re a prince.”

“Yeah, right. Tell that to my clients! Love you!”

“Love you, too,” Liz whispered after he’d hung up.

I wonder if you’re the only person I’ll ever really love, she mused as she replaced the receiver.

The rain had stopped by the next morning, and the lake was still, with no ripples breaking its surface. Liz made herself coffee and took a mug of it down to the dock, where she sat, an old flannel shirt over the long t-shirt in which she’d slept; she dangled her legs over the edge of the dock, drinking her coffee and watching the lake steam as the sun climbed higher. As it rose, a gentle breeze sent tiny
catspaws
scudding over the water; a fish jumped, two darning needles danced—courting, Liz thought—among the lily pads, and a hawk flew low overhead, then turned abruptly and dropped aggressively into the reeds to her left. Bird voices—wrens, thrushes, some kind of warbler—trilled and called. There was one in particular that Liz couldn’t identify, whose notes cascaded up and down and across its non-human scales; it made Liz smile. She’d forgotten what it was like to wake up with “the lake folk” as Dad had called them whenever he’d joined her.

She could almost feel him with her now, sitting quietly beside her as he so often had, and for a while she was able to bask in good memories of him instead of guilt at his having died alone and horror at imagining what he must have gone through when his heart had given out. The loss still ached, but less sharply than before, here in the place they had both loved above all others. She felt less rootless, too, less abandoned here than in the city where the shock of his death, so soon after Megan had moved out, had made her feel insubstantial, adrift in a world that had lost its meaning.

Piney Haven had already begun to anchor her again, and she stretched, congratulating herself for her decision. She could heal, she felt sure, if she woke here every summer morning to long, quiet days with nothing to do but read, swim, row, fish, repair the cabin, and perhaps even try to restore the gardens Mom had made at the edge of the woods. Mom would like that, she thought. There’d been a perennial garden, a cutting garden, and a vegetable garden with a small herb bed. The weedy, overgrown perennial garden might be the place to start. She’d have to do some reading; for all her knowledge of biology, Liz was weak in botany, and by the time gardening had begun to interest her, she was already living in the city.

Piney Haven is so empty now, she thought, the garden bringing back an unexpected wave of sadness. She stood to shake it off, and stretched. So empty.

***

Later, after washing windows and making a list of which ones needed repairing, she made herself a lunch of
tunafish
salad on an English muffin. Afterward, she took inventory in the tumbledown toolshed at the edge of the cabin’s clearing, and then, as she set off in the car to buy putty and glazing points, she remembered the jack. But after her stop at the hardware store, she found herself driving back roads, retracing childhood Sunday rides instead of going to the
Tillots
’ farm. When she passed her parents’ favorite vegetable stand, she spotted a plump late middle-aged woman and recognized Clara Davis, who owned and ran it with her husband, Harry. Clara was applying a fresh coat of white paint to the stand’s neat clapboard walls.