Off Season (41 page)

“And you stayed.”

I was grateful to her, and vaguely angry with everyone else. Cam deserved better than this.

“I stayed. Just long enough to pack you up and get you out of here
this
morning. You can’t stay here anymore, Lilly.”

“I can’t go until I’ve picked up Daddy’s books and packed up the silver and china,” I said, my brow furrowed. “I told you that. The plan is to pick up the books today, and Toby and Laurie will come over in the morning and help pack us up and we’ll leave right after. Depending on the time, we might drive straight on in. Or stop in New Haven or somewhere. You knew all that, Kitty. What’s wrong with you? Did you sleep out here last night?”

“I did. I got up about three and drug all the blankets I could find and built up the fire and conked out on the sofa. Silas joined me.”

“Was it cold? Did I snore or something?”

“No, Lilly, you didn’t snore. You talked all night to Cam, practically without stopping.”

“I told you I talk to him sometimes. And I dream about him a lot.”

“You didn’t tell me he talked back to you.”

I stared at her.

“Oh, yes. Mostly you were telling him about pitching him off the sloop, and how beautiful everything was, and how he shone brighter than the stars, and you said you were sorry about that awful poem Toby read, but you knew he loved Toby and wouldn’t mind.

“And he laughed, Lilly. As clearly as I hear you, I heard him laugh. Or somebody. And then he whispered, ‘It was the right thing to do. Thank you.’”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know then what. I got out of there before I saw him. Lilly, nobody loved Cam McCall any more than I did, except you, but this is not right. It’s not healthy. You can’t stay in a house where . . . your dead husband is. It’s like saying no to any more life at all. How can you go ahead with the rest of yours when you know he’s—stuck here?”

“He’s not stuck here, Kitty,” I said, tears of relief and joy that at last I could talk to her about it filling my eyes. “He’s here because I’m here. He’s my true north, Kitty. Wherever I am, he is. He . . . takes care of me. I know that.”

“Oh, God, Lil. Do you think he’s coming back to Virginia with you? That he’ll be all around McCall’s Point now?”

“Yes. That’s just what I think. He’s always been with me. He always will be.”

Kitty’s face reddened and her mouth straightened into a tight line.

“He was never a saint, Lilly. Don’t make him into one now. Dead or alive, saints will screw you every time.”

“Cam never screwed me, as you put it! What are you
talking
about?”

“Nothing I’m going to get into until you’re out of this iceberg of a house and home by your own fireplace, where you ought to be.”

“If you know something about Cam that isn’t—right, you’d better tell me now.”

“Would you believe me?”

“No. And I want you to go on home now, Kitty. We’ll be right behind you tomorrow or the next day. I don’t think, even with the space heaters and the fire, I can keep the house warm any longer than that. I’ll call you from the road and you can have supper waiting for me and Silas.”

“And Cam?”

“I don’t know if he eats or not. I’ll ask him.”

“You do that,” Kitty said in despair, and got up to leave. When her suitcase was stowed into the back of her neat old 1998 BMW and she was firmly in the driver’s seat, she looked at me. She was not smiling.

“I’m calling you tonight,” she said. “If you don’t answer I’m calling nine-one-one, the police, and Laurie and Toby—in that order. Don’t think I’m not.”

“I’d never think that,” I said, and reached in and kissed her cheek.

“I love you, Kitty,” I said.

She started to cry again.

“Oh, shit, Lilly, I love you too. Please,
please
take care of yourself.”

“We all will,” I said, and she backed the car out of the pitted driveway, turned around, and roared up the gravel road to the highway, tires spurting gravel. She did not look back.

Back in the house, I took a swift survey. The cold had crept into every room and bleached it frost gray. In the kitchen there was a pot of beef stew from Laurie and a note that said
Call us when you get back from Ellsworth. The radio says there’s a nor’easter coming in day after tomorrow. We want you long gone out of here before that.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I muttered, and began gathering up space heaters and moving them into the living room, where I arranged them strategically around the room. I moved all my and Silas’s bedding onto the couch before the fireplace and added a pile of perpetually damp, salt-smelling blankets to pull over if needed. I carried in the last of the wood Toby had brought me and added a couple of logs to the fire, and put the others in the old bin beside it. I moved Silas’s food and water into the living room and put them by the fire, and brought in apples and a chunk of rat cheese and some cold blueberry muffins and set the plate on the table in front of the sofa.

“Ready for the siege of Edgewater,” I said to Silas, who eyed me yellowy and then curled up in his basket lined with Cam’s old sweater. I turned on a couple of space heaters and added another small log to the fire, and these, with the old lamps burning brightly in the gloom, gave the living room an inviting, snug-harbor sort of look. In truth, I did not much want to go out into the rising wind, but my father’s books were the last task I had left, and then I could burrow in with the fire and blankets and food and Silas and Cam. The prospect was, suddenly, magical.

I got as far as the deserted Blue Hill Fair Grounds, slowing up because I had heard several times that a young bear crossed the road there almost every day. I looked both ways, noticing only then that the stands of hickory and maples that wove through the pine and fir woods here were almost bare of leaves, and that more were whirling down in the wind. Surely there had never been such an early winter; surely this was not a typical off season.

It happened then. I felt a pressure against my chest and throat as if someone had physically pressed me back against the seat, and a gust of warm wind—or was it breath?—curled against my cheek, and was gone. I felt hollowed out, all vitals gone, weak and wounded and breathless. I had a quick thought—
Heart attack?
—and tried to breathe but couldn’t.

In my ear, quite clearly, I heard Cam: “I’m sorry, Lilly. I just couldn’t be alone. But I always loved you.”

There was nothing after that. I knew he was gone. All the combined grief and terror and shock I had not felt at his death, I felt now. It doubled me over the steering wheel and blinded my eyes. I could not see. I could not breathe.

But then there was a whisper, “Breathe, Lilly. Imagine the bay breathing, and breathe with it. Breathe, Lilly. . . . Lilly, come home.”

And gradually I did, and could at least force breath into my body. Was he not gone after all? What was he telling me? Was he saying he had to go back to the house? What? I could not feel or hear him, but I could breathe and drive, after a fashion.

It seemed to take forever to drive the fifteen or so miles back to the turnoff into Edgewater. Behind the forest that shielded the houses of the bay from the road, swollen purplish clouds were piling in, and small spots of something wet spattered on the windshield. It could not, could
not,
be snow, not in late September. But nevertheless it bit and stung me as I lurched from the car into the house, slammed the door, and stood leaning against it, bent over and gasping for breath.

Heavy, smoky warmth reached out and wrapped me close, and the fire crackled and popped happily. Space heaters whirred and lamps glowed. Silas raised his head to look at me, nearly cross-eyed with sleep.

“Is he here, Silas?” I whispered. “Did he come back here? I thought he had gone; he said—”

“Nobody gone as far as I can tell,”
Silas said thickly.
“But as you no doubt see, I have been asleep.”

“Oh go back to sleep, scussfuzz,” I said angrily. “Why I depend on you . . .”

“Why, indeed,”
he muttered from between his paws.

Suddenly I was so tired I could hardly lock my knees to keep myself erect. I stumbled over to the sofa, threw myself down on it, wound Jeebs’s fleece jacket and two or three blankets around me, and fell into sleep as deep as any I have ever known.

It was a long sleep, perhaps an enchanted one, certainly not a normal one. In it I heard voices: my mother’s calling us in to supper; my father’s reading some bit of folklore from Frazer to me in front of a different fire; Wilma’s jangling chain and loving, witless woof; my own voice saying, “I’ll never do that and nobody can make me”; the cloying voice of Peaches Davenport, honeyed with ersatz sorrow, saying, “I lost them both, you know.”

Jon’s voice, saying as he pressed my face into his sweater, “Don’t look, Lilly. Don’t look . . .”

I jerked myself awake about sunset, or at what would have been sunset if the great purple clouds had not thickened and lowered.

“Where’s my box? I have to pee,”
Silas was complaining.

“So do I,” I snapped, and dashed into the freezing black kitchen and pulled his litter box into the living room. I used the toilet in the alcove under the stairs that we had always called the guest bathroom, freezing my buttocks in the process, and dived for the sofa again. The sleep had been sweet and succoring; in it I had felt care and love and safety. I desperately wanted it again.

“Wait a minute! I’m starving!”
howled Silas indignantly. I opened a can of his malodorous dinner and dumped it into his bowl and vanished up to my chin in blankets.

He must have come back here,
I thought.
I still feel him, even if I can’t hear him. He’s keeping watch; all is well.

The long-reported nor’easter came screaming in two days early. It must have been well past midnight when it hit; I could not tell because all the lights and the space heaters were out, and only the glowing embers of the fire lit the room. I was cold to the bone, so cold I did not think I could move. Huddled against me, Silas actually shivered. Outside I heard wind howling as I had never heard it before on this ocean, and the crashing of surf against rocks, and ominous creakings from the huge trees that leaned over Edgewater. I could see nothing outside but swirling white. Snow. My God, it was snowing, and we had no power. I was sure of that; the power on our cove went out if someone blew out a match, my father used to say. Wait a minute, weren’t there oil lanterns? And oil? Somewhere in the kitchen or pantry . . .

I got up, threw the last big log on the fire, lit one of my mother’s white tapers in a bronze candlestick, and stumbled into the kitchen. It took me only a second to realize that if the lamps and oil were there, I would freeze to death before I found them. I grabbed for the telephone; it was out. I had no idea where my cell phone was. There was nothing to do but wait it out until daylight, when surely Laurie and Toby would come in their Jeep with the snowplow and all would be well. We could last until then. Of course we could; anybody could.

The fire had flared up again and threw out a little warmth. Silas and I rolled ourselves Indian fashion into all the blankets we had brought, and lay down as close to the fire as was possible. It was still cold, but gradually warmth spread over us like hot water and I felt my muscles and those of the big cat soften and relax, and we slid back into sleep.

Sometime before dawn I felt the heavy weight of another blanket being spread over me, and did not wake except enough to murmur, “Thank you.”

Shortly after that, there was a small thud on the coffee table and I opened one eye and saw two of the kerosene lanterns sitting there, filled and primed.

I smiled as I fell back to sleep.

“I never should have doubted you,” I whispered.

“No. You never should.”

Two or three times during the rest of the dark, I almost saw him. I would feel the displacement of air as someone moved past me and look up, and perhaps see a shadow, or a door closing. Once I thought someone was sitting in the old bentwood rocker, looking down on me.

Just at dawn came a loud, rending crack and then a crash, and I knew a great tree had gone down just outside. It was probably the patriarch fir that had shaded the driveway since before I was born. I held my breath but did not hear it grind into the roof. I did, however, see a tall, slender silhouette against the window onto the porch, looking out toward the tree.

I smiled again, and slept once more. True north. I would be cared for. We would be cared for.

Dawn had broken when there came a great rapping on the front door. I struggled to my feet: Laurie and Toby, surely. Hobbling to the door, I could see, through the windows, that Edgewater and its forests looked as if they had been caught in a war. Huge trees were down, their splits raw yellow in the winter darkness. Branches were everywhere. The flagpole was down, and the Adirondack chairs that always stood on the edge of our cliff were simply gone. The wind howled, moaned, screamed. White foam from the bay blew against the windows.

I jerked the door open. Not Laurie or Toby, but a boy, or a young man, rather, stood there in a yellow oil slicker holding a load of wood.

“Mrs. McCall?” he said politely. I stared.

“My mother saw your lights last night and thought you might be needing some wood. I’m David Surrey, but she said you’d know her as Peaches Davenport.”

Still I stared. It was Cam. Cam as he had been when we first met, back in an Italian restaurant in Georgetown those many years past; he had a fiery red beard and mustache and eyebrows, wet now with melting snow, and Cam’s piratical blue eyes, and crooked smile. Cam.

“C— Thanks!”

Cam.

“Thanks! David.”

Cam.

“Mrs. McCall?” the boy said again.

Still I stared.

“I’ll just put this over by the fireplace, shall I?” the boy said. “And I’ll make your fire up again while I’m at it. Pretty cold in here . . .”

Still I stared, and then whirled and ran past him, into the darkness and still of the kitchen. Ran, stumbling and crying.

“Where are you, you son of a bitch?” I screamed.