Off Season (36 page)
“No,” I said, pulling away from him and sitting up on the side of the bed. “I don’t even remember what it was about.”
“Okay,” he said after a moment, and turned over on his side and burrowed back into sleep. I dug myself deep under the comforter and buried my head in my down pillows, but I didn’t sleep. I knew I wouldn’t.
Dawn was well on its way when I finally got up and went to make coffee.
Always, until tonight, there were two secrets between us,
I thought drearily.
And then there were none. And now there’s another, and I made it. I guess the second time is easier.
I
got up off the old couch at Edgewater, feeling all of a sudden new and shriven and young, like a forgiven child. I wanted to dance, to sing, to be everywhere at once in my most-loved world, to touch and experience everything Edgewater had meant to me. At first I did not know where the impulse came from; it would have made far more sense to revisit the places that Cam and I came to love and make our own, after we were married. After all, I had come here to celebrate him and find a permanent place in my mind and heart for him, a place I could live in when I had to go home. Home: how strange. This was home. It always had been. Funny that I had never seen that before.
And then I realized that what I wanted to do was show Cam my childhood world—all of it, not just the pieces of it sullied by Peaches Davenport.
I did the first crazy thing of many I would do that summer, or so anyone who saw me would have said. I found a small, heavy ivory envelope that I recognized as one of my mother’s embossed Crane informals, and opened the urn, and very carefully shook a little cloud of Cam into it, and sealed it, and put it in the pocket of Jeebs’s old shirt.
“You know your Edgewater like the back of your hand,” I said, “but you don’t know all
my
Edgewater. We’re going to take the Grand Tour.” I started up the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
Silas said.
“I’m going to show Cam Edgewater like it was when I was a little girl,” I said. “You want to come?”
“You’re crazy as bat shit,”
Silas grumbled, but he unwound himself from the sweater and stumped after me, muttering grumpily.
We started with the rooms on the second floor.
“When I was little this was the guest room,” I said to Cam, indicating the light-flooded front room facing the sea that Cam had made into his studio. “I remember there were always people in it, or nearly always, but I don’t remember who they were. Well, Aunt Tatty was one. Daddy hated it when she visited. He always used this bathroom and she left powder all over the sink and hung wet stockings on the shower-curtain rail. He had to share the bathroom that went with his and Mother’s bedroom, and that was just as bad. Mother had a lot of stuff to put on her face lying around.
“This was Jeebs’s room, when he was in it. But he stayed gone a lot, visiting his pre-Grotty friends. Clara sometimes used it for an ironing room.
“This was my room—well, you know that. I’m staying there again. Silas and I simply can’t sleep in the bed where you died. It’s just too sad. Maybe in a week or two—my beds are awfully small, and Silas has the biggest, knobbiest feet I ever saw on a cat.”
Silas bit my ankle.
We reached the back room, where Mother had had her painting studio. I pushed the door open; during our marriage we had used it as one of the children’s rooms, with pretty twin beds and my grandmother’s old lace curtains, limp and yellowed now. Both Betsy and Alice had loved it, chiefly because it was so far away from ours, and it was mostly where they slept. There was a faint scent of bath powder and sweaty little girl in it, as well as a later smell of flowery cologne and stale face powder. Under it all, there was a strong note of my mother’s Vetiver and the acrid sweetness of old oil paint.
“This was Mother’s studio,” I told Cam. “I know you know the story, but this is where I walked in on her one day with her top open and that awful old man with his hands crawling all over her boobs. I always did think he gave her cancer. She was looking at him and smiling. I can still see it.”
“I’ve done the same to you,” I thought Cam might have said, with a leer on his face.
“And I’ve seen you naked so many times I can’t count
,
”
Silas said indifferently.
“Women’s boobs are no big deal to me, I can tell you
.
”
“That’s the last time you watch me undress, you old satyr,” I told Silas.
“Big deal. Now if you had six of ’em, it might be a different story.”
I went out into the hall and climbed the musty stairs to the attic. I walked more slowly, because I was suddenly afraid that the attic would have changed, my special lair dwindled and cramped and banal. I didn’t think I could bear that. My retreat and I were too closely connected; if it had shriveled, so would I have, in the deepest part of me. I stood outside the attic door for a long moment, and then pushed the door open.
There it was, at the far end of the long, dark room, under the big circular window, glowing as if a fire were lit somewhere near. The cool morning sunlight spilled over my old easy chair and the bookcases my father had built for me, crammed still with disorderly books. The rickety little table beside the chair was still piled with old legal pads and stubs of pencils and a kerosene lantern that I remember I had used on rainy days. On the floor, still, lay the dusty, once beautiful old rug where Cam and I had first made love.
“You can’t have forgotten this room,” I said to him. “It’s where we first did the dirty deed, as I believe it was called in our youth.”
The air was plangent with silent laughter.
“Yuck,”
said Silas.
I turned around and around in the patch of sunlight, feeling the dust of childhood sink into my pores, breathing in the dander of discovery and delight. Suddenly I wanted to sit cross-legged in the sunlight surrounded by piles of my old books, leafing through this one, dipping into that.
“Oh,” I said, spying a book high on a shelf. “I want you to see this. It’s where I first came across the Green Man. If you think Frazer’s is scary, you should see this guy.”
I wedged the book out of the shelf.
“Drop that book!”
It was more of a hiss than a whisper, almost silent. But I heard, and dropped the book to the floor. A huge brown spider came scuttling out of the spilled pages and made for the molding in the corner. I didn’t even have time to squeal before it was gone. I have always feared and hated spiders.
Silas sprang after it, then stopped and sat down.
“Do your duty, O mighty hunter,” I said to him.
“I draw the line at brown recluses. If it bit you you’d lose a chunk of yourself and probably worse. Their bites almost never heal. You want that one out of here, call Orkin
.
”
Sweat sprang out at my hairline.
“I don’t suppose that was you, was it?” I said to him weakly, but he had fled down the stairs, leaving me alone with living spiders and ethereal protectors.
“Thanks,” I said to Cam in my pocket. “You really know how to look out after a girl, don’t you?”
The air smiled silently.
I went out onto the porch and looked at the dazzle of the bay, summer-blue and still. The wind, I knew, would come up with the changing afternoon tide. I heard its tranquil breathing and felt my spider-pounding heart slow and my lungs fall into its rhythm, just as I had last night, when I had thought I was choking and the soft, clear voice told me to get up and go out, that the fog had lifted and I could hear the water breathe once more. I smiled into all the swimming blue and sunlight. Home. Home to Edgewater. Just as it had felt every summer when I had first come here as a child. My blood bubbled and a small giggle, pure joy, caught in my throat.
“You know the first thing I used to do when we got here? I used to just take off down these steps and run all the way across the lawn and down to the end of the dock and back again. If Jeebs or anybody was with me, they never beat me. I always won. I’ll show you.”
And I catapulted off the sagging bottom step and raced down the path the sunlight made across the big lawn—I had always thought of it as the Yellow Brick Road when I was small—and out to the end of the dock, and turned and pounded back again.
I heard the jingle of a chain behind me and yelled back, “Wilma is a pussycat!” and heard the scrabbling paws drawing nearer until I bounded up the step again and slapped the back screen door.
“Last one’s a rotten egg!” I called.
I leaned against the door, head down, gasping for breath, happy in my skin under the sun.
“Lilly?”
I lifted my head and looked into the kitchen. Laurie Halliday stood there behind the big wooden table, her hands busy with dough, looking at me in alarm.
In a breath it all dissolved. I was nearly sixty, not eleven. Wilma slept under the ferns and azaleas a thousand miles to the south. And my husband was in my pocket.
I felt my face whiten and tears sting my eyes.
“Are you all right, baby?” Laurie said, coming to me and drawing me into the kitchen, one arm around my shoulders.
“I heard you running and yelling, sort of, and I didn’t know what on earth— Look at you! You’re dripping sweat. Sit down and let me wash your face off, and tell me about it.”
I leaned back gratefully against the kitchen chair and felt the benison of the cool washcloth on my forehead. I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t even want to talk. But of course I had to. Otherwise she would think I was mad as a hatter and call the girls.
“I’m sorry, Laurie,” I said. “I was walking around the house showing Cam how it was when I was a little girl, and then I remembered this thing we always did first when we got here . . . and I kind of got carried away.”
She was silent for a while, mopping my face and staring at me.
“You were showing Cam?”
“Well, of course, not Cam really,” I said. “It’s just that I feel him so strongly here at Edgewater—it’s the place he loved best, you know. It’s like I still have him with me.”
She sat down opposite me.
“Lilly, do you think it’s a good idea for you to be here by yourself right now? I could come spend the nights with you. Or you know one of the girls would come.”
I reached over and hugged her.
“I have him here, Laurie,” I said, patting my heart and my shirt pocket both. “I don’t mean he’s sneaking around the corners or rattling chains or anything. I know better than anybody that he’s gone. It’s just that somehow it’s better here. I love being here alone; I’ve never been anywhere alone in my life. I wouldn’t dream of pulling you out of your bed at night. And as far as the girls go, that’s the main reason I came up here, to grieve on my own. And I’ve got a million things to do; I want to inventory all Daddy’s books, and go through all the old chests and trunks, and maybe get a little work done on the house and just—do the things I’ve always loved. Riding my bicycle and swimming and kayaking, and reading all night if I want to . . .”
She smiled.
“You’ve got it coming, I guess,” she said. “It’s just, well you know, you hear things.”
“What things?”
“Idiocy, mostly. You know how some people will talk about a house where someone has recently died. Don’t have enough to do, I always say.”
“Laurie.”
“Oh, well, just little things. Consider the source, I tell everybody. Lorna Harris’s no-good boy Curtis got drunk—again—the other night and she’d locked him out of the trailer, so he jimmied a windowsill and crawled into your house and passed out on the sofa. Not before he’d built him a good fire, though. Long about dawn he came banging on his mother’s door hollering that he waked up and saw water falling on the fire just like somebody had thrown it out of a bucket, and the fire went out, and Curtis went with it, tail between his legs. Didn’t stop him from blabbing all over the village that your house is haunted, though.”
“And he was drinking what?” I said, smiling.
“I know.” She smiled back. “Nobody believes anything Curtis Harris says. But you know, the other day, before you got here, I came over here to start putting things in order, and when I left I went out the back door and locked it, and forgot and left the front one open. Then came a hard thunderstorm, and I ran back over here to close it, and it was already closed. And locked.”
“Laurie . . .” I didn’t know what to say. “Don’t you think you could have closed and locked it yourself, you know, just absentmindedly?”
“It was locked from the inside,” she said.
“And then I sent the two girls who help me when I’m opening cottages, you know, Carlene and Dorothy, not a brain between them, over to straighten up your bedroom and change the sheets and all after—you know—after Cam left. And they came running and squalling back and said they hadn’t got half through before they heard someone say, clear as day, ‘Sloppy.’ Quit on the spot, not that it’s a great loss to me. So of course I went back and did it right, and I don’t know, Lilly. I could swear I heard somebody kind of laugh and say, ‘Thank you.’”
“Well, whoever or whatever it was, it sure wasn’t Cam,” I said. “He never in his life made a bed, or cared if anybody else did. Laurie, you don’t really think my house is haunted, do you?”
“No,” she said, after a while, smiling at me. “I think it’s a very happy house and sometimes that—happiness—just sort of overflows.”
“Bless you,” I said, hugging her. “Now quit worrying about me and tell all those blabbermouths that they’re welcome to come and spend a night on my couch anytime.”
“I will. But you keep in touch with me, Lilly. It’s not a time to be too much alone. Come to supper tomorrow night with us; Toby’s hauling his traps in the morning. I’ll cook us some lobsters.”
“I’d love it,” I said. “And I love you.”
“We love you, too,” she said. “You know that. And we loved Cam . . .”
“I know. Everybody did.”
Presently she went home, leaving me fresh bread and a blueberry pie. She sat in her old Chevrolet a long time looking at the house before she left.
