Off Season (33 page)

“I told you you smelled strange. Nice strange, but not like anybody else,” I told Cam.

“How many other necks have you smelled?”

“Well, Silas smells it, too.”

“Then I must smell like Kitty Rations seafood dinner,” he said, naming Silas’s favored brand of sustenance, which stank so horribly I could barely feed him sometimes.

“I wouldn’t even be in the same house with you if you did,” I said, sniffing his neck, pushing Silas’s big face away and putting my face into Cam’s neck.

“Move your fat face
,
”
Silas growled.

“I’m bigger than you,” I replied.

Last night I knew I should have cajoled and comforted him. But I could not seem to do anything about it. This morning, he stared at me and wriggled as though he could not get comfortable, and looked into the hall and back at me.

“He’s gone, Silas. He can’t come back. But I’m here.”

“Well, I know that. Do you think I don’t know that?”

But he still seemed uneasy and a little truculent, kneading the bedclothes fussily with his big hooked claws.

“We can’t sleep in that bed anymore because he died there, just a little over a week ago,” I said to him. “Or at least I can’t. You can sleep wherever you want, but I hope it will be with me. I need you, you mangy old tub of lard.”

Silas sat up and stared at me greenly.

“What do you mean he died there? What was he doing up here? It wasn’t time for us to come up here yet
.
”

“I don’t know. I think he was working on a surprise for me. But that’s the thing I need to find out. Can you hang with me, do you think?”

“Oh, I guess so
.
”

Cam’s death at Edgewater was a world-blasting thing for all of us. The death would have been enough; to lose him so suddenly on a silky June night when the Tidewater lay at the bottom of a globe of stars was pain enough to shatter lives and heave them in bizarre directions, like an earthquake. But to lose him when he was all alone in a place where he was not supposed to be, or at least one that was not his avowed destination, was anguished lunacy, madness making.

“
Why?
” we wept over and over. “
Why?
” I can still hear my daughters’ voices spiraling up into the razor-edged panic of childhood. “I don’t care if he didn’t tell you! Why didn’t you
know
where he was?”

Sick and stunned myself, I could only answer, “I thought he was in Green Bay. It’s where he said he was going, to work on that Unitarian church up there. He always uses his cell phone, so I do too; I talked to him only a few hours before, and I thought he was in Green Bay . . .”

Cam’s reputation as an architect had grown to the point that he could choose his projects, and they took him literally all over the globe. So on the rare times I was not with him, we simply used our cell phones. He could be anywhere at any time I talked to him, I realized, but why would he bother to mislead us? I could think of no other reason but another woman, and that notion was simply too ludicrous to entertain. I went with him on the majority of his trips after the girls were old enough. He had always been adamant about that, and since I did not like being without him either, I went whenever it was possible. Indeed, the first and only time I chose not to go was the occasion of the biggest and most rending, searing fight we had ever had. I didn’t make that choice again.

“The only thing I know about it is that it was very sudden, an aneurysm, the doctor thinks, and he had just enough warning to call 911,” I told my daughters. “He was lying on our bed when he called, and they found him there. He died before the EMTs could get him to the hospital in Blue Hill, and the doctor there was about to call me when Toby Halliday came running into the emergency room. One of the EMTs knew that Toby and Laurie kept the place up for us, so he’d called Toby. It was Toby who called me. I’ll always be grateful for that.”

“Why?” Betsy shrieked, struggling out of her husband’s arms to come and stand before me, fists balled. “Dead is dead! Why the hell should you care who called you?”

Kitty Howard came up and put her arm around Betsy’s shoulder and led her, none too gently, back to her husband.

“Because when you lose somebody you love it helps a great deal to be told by someone who loved them too,” she said to Betsy. “I hope you won’t ever have to find out that way, but if you do maybe you’ll see what I mean.”

Kitty was right. I think the clipped downeast accent of a young doctor I did not know bearing the news of Cam’s death would have been like drowning in icy water. Toby, who loved Cam, had both pain and iron in his voice. It was right.

“Lilly,” he’d said, “it’s Toby Halliday, up to the cove. I have some real bad news for you, honey, and I want you to sit down. Is there anybody with you?”

“Yes,” I said. “My friend Kitty Howard is here; you remember her, don’t you? She helped you and Cam haul that branch off the roof after that storm—”

I was chattering. Worse than chattering. I could hear my own voice chipping out the words, knowing that Toby’s voice held more than regret for a damaged roof or a break-in.
“I know.” He cut me off. “Listen, baby, there ain’t no better way to tell you. Cam was up here in the bedroom at Edgewater and he . . . he felt bad and called the EMTs, far as we can tell, and they lost him before they could get to the hospital.”

“Lost him? How could they
lose
him?” I was screaming. I could hear it. Kitty got up from her chair and came swiftly and put her arms around me.

“He died, honey. The doctors say there wasn’t anything more they could have done. Aneurysm in his brain; could have been there since he was born. They don’t think he suffered. Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I’m going to bring him home.”

“Bring him home . . .”

“Come on the plane with him. You can meet us when we get in and tell us what you . . . want us to do. But I’m not letting him come by himself.”

I had started to cry.

“Why was he up there, Toby? He was supposed to be in Wisconsin.”

“Well, don’t know. Nobody seems to have seen him or talked to him. But the EMTs found a rolled-up drawing on the bed beside him, and some specs. They were labeled ‘a sculptor’s studio on the coast of Maine.’ Real pretty, looked to me. Looked right out over the bay toward Sunderson’s Island, where the ospreys nest. Figured it was for you. Looks like it was a surprise, don’t it.”

“Yes,” I sobbed, sagging against Kitty. “It was a surprise. I’ve always wanted one. I just never thought it would kill him . . .”

“Hush, deah,” he said. “This thing could have happened anywhere, anytime. I’m glad I was here to be with ’im.”

“Oh, Toby, so am I.” I wept, and was still weeping drunkenly, monotonously, leaning still on Kitty, when the early morning plane from Bangor touched down at Dulles with my husband and our friend on it.

I must have drifted back into sleep on this first Maine morning without Cam, because when I woke for good and all the midmorning sun was pouring into the open window of my childhood room, riding on a piney, kelpy little breeze, I could hear the clanging of the sail lines from the Friendship, and somewhere far off a lawn mower sang its summer song. I was out of bed in an instant, finding in my drawer an oversized faded T-shirt of Jeebs’s that read
GROTTIES RULE
. I pulled it on over the jeans I had left in a heap on the floor the night before. I padded barefoot out into the hall and down the front stairs, the seagrass carpeting just as spongy and malodorous as it had always been. I began to trot, Silas grumbling at my heels. I could smell coffee and blueberry muffins from the kitchen, as I had every summer morning I could remember, and there was laughter. They were all there, my crowd of summer henchmen, and I was late.

Just before I reached the door I stopped. I had not really heard laughter; I knew that, but it shivered in the air as laughter sometimes does when it is over, leaving little surges of warm motion and particles of itself, like sparkle dust. I had always known when someone had been laughing at Edgewater.

I stood still and silent, listening, remembering. I was not ten or eleven and no one waited for me to lead a forbidden adventure. My small summer cadre had scattered long ago, and I stood alone in the big house on the morning after I had brought my husband’s ashes here. The reality of it washed over me like cold water, but even though I tightened my muscles against it, no pain came. I felt a huge, warm, diffuse protection around me, the kind a child feels on a summer morning when nothing seems wrong and all things seem possible. I had felt it last night, too. Something in this house, perhaps the house itself, knew I was here; was looking after me. I had thought being alone here would be the hardest thing; I had never been alone anywhere. But I was not alone. I knew that as certainly as I knew the smell of coffee and blueberries from the kitchen was real.

“
Open the damned door! Did you bring me all this way to starve me?
”

“It’s a thought,” I told Silas, and pushed the kitchen door open and went in. I would consider the source of my well-being later. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Wasn’t it gift enough, when I had thought to have only pain and loneliness?

The coffeepot was plugged in and perking, and there was a plate of blueberry scones on the kitchen table. It was Laurie Halliday, I knew right away; since she and Toby had taken over for Clara and Seth, early in our marriage, we had had scones and not muffins.

“They’re good, but they’re not a patch on Clara’s muffins,” I’d told Cam. “I grew up on those muffins. Every kid in the cove did. My gang always got here early so they could get them while they were hot. One way or another, we fed every kid in Carter’s Cove all those summers.”

“I wish I’d known you then,” he’d said, buttering another scone. “From what your father says, you were all wild as woods colts and you were the leader of the pack. I’d love to have met your partners in crime.”

“I wish you had,” I said then.

Now I said, to myself, “But of course, in a way you have,” and poured a cup of coffee and opened the tin of Silas’s food. The smell knocked me back a step or two.

“How
can
you?” I said to him from across the room.

“Well, since it’s all you ever give me . . .”

“Don’t start with me,” I said to him. “We’ve bought you every kind of cat food on the market. You turned your nose up at everything but this. Remember the time when your daddy offered you filet mignon in wine sauce and you ran like a scalded—whatever? And the time I gave you vitello tonnato and you took one bite and threw it up all over the kitchen? And
that
had tuna in it.”

“
I recall nothing of the sort,
” he growled with his mouth full of stinking seafood cuts.

I found a note on the table, propped against a small glass vase full of lupine. My mother had always loved lupine.

Call us if you need anything at all,
Laurie had written.
I’ll check with you later today. We are heartbroken.

And I thought they really were. They were as good friends as we had in Carter’s Cove, and certainly up the road in the colony, where people seldom sailed or went junking or shared dinner with their housekeepers and handymen. I knew people talked about us, but then, they always had, first about my mother and now about my family. Cam’s affection for Toby ran deep; he would have loved knowing that Toby had brought him home to me and got right back on the plane and went all the way back to Bangor. I’d begged him to stay, but he only said, “You’ll be wanting your family around you now. I’ve already said my good-byes. And I hope we’ll see you-all this summer. Ain’t gon’ be right without Cam, but it’d be a thousand times worse without you and the girls, and without your daddy and his wife, too.”
I’d never told the Hallidays that Tatty was not my father’s wife, though she lived with him in a pretty stone retirement community north of Reston and took, probably, better care of him than my mother ever had. They were inseparable, and few people knew they were not married. Not that it would have mattered much, though Tatty never ceased to press for legitimacy.
To this my father, who was drifting as comfortably into Alzheimer’s as he might have into a sweet calm on the Friendship, said only, “We are married, dear. Don’t you remember that awful affair at the church in Georgetown? I can’t recall the name now, but Lilly will know—must have been a hundred degrees in the shade.”
Whether or not he thought Tatty was my mother at times we never knew, but he was affectionate and serene with her, and we blessed her feverently. I suppose she worried about inheriting; I don’t think the general left her much money, but Jeebs and I had decided to leave her our share of my father’s estate when the time came. My father had given the house on Kalorama Circle to Jeebs, and there he lived quietly and absentmindedly, doing work for the government so esoteric that we could not have comprehended it had he told us about it, with his wife, a pale, nervous, hair-twiddling, distracted woman named Virginia whom he met at MIT and whose IQ was, if anything, higher than Jeebs’s. She did a great deal of consulting work, but she had always stayed home with their three boys, all thin, bespectacled replicas of Jeebs at that age, who bade fair to grow up and follow their father and mother into inner—or outer—space. All of them were, of course, Grotties. Since Virginia was apparently incapable of getting a meal together, we did not see a lot of them except when I lured them out to our house on the James, where they twitched and fiddled until it was time to go back into their cave on Kalorama. My girls couldn’t abide Jeebs’s boys, and the girls terrified them, so it was with relief that we finally all decided to observe holidays and such with only a few kin and friends. We had the girls, of course, and their friends, and my father and Tatty and Christmas and birthday fetes, and Jeebs and Virginia had a small covey of pale geniuses who sometimes looked around the table in surprise, having forgotten it was Christmas.

It was I who most loved the holidays in our beautiful old James River house. The furniture and silver and crystal gleamed with the efforts of the small, quiet cadre of help who had, apparently, come with the house. We moved into it when Cam’s grandmother died, about three years after our marriage. Cam’s mother and father took all their vast holdings and shinnied off to a townhouse in Georgetown so storied and beautiful that tour bus after tour bus slowed down passing it, and there was always a cluster of ladies with notebooks and pens in front of it.