The Diviner's Tale (21 page)

"Don't be angry with me, Cass. It's just that I'm worried sick."

"I know what you're really worried about," I said, spontaneous as a slap.

Rosalie made no reply. How could she have responded, anyway? We were the only two people who understood what unsaid words lay behind what we had just broached. We two and, I now began to fear, perhaps the man who wrote this obscene and absurd postcard, although his presence in my life made less sense to me than the hanged girl, the found girl, less sense than anything. Surely Roy Skoler could have nothing to do with this. I hadn't laid eyes on him for almost thirty years and had heard nothing about his doings.

"You're not right about that," she countered, unconvincingly. She removed her hat, gathered her hair back behind her ears, and replaced it. A familiar tic. "After hearing what happened and watching you these past couple of weeks I wonder if you aren't headed into a really bad patch again."

"Who's to say I'm not already there?"

Covey was meant to have been our haven, but here was the confrontation we had been sidestepping for years. If we were ever to have a bond after Nep—our mediator, our family's glue—left us, we needed to brave these troubled waters. Ignoring the issue of Christopher seemed to be what both of us wanted, had always wanted, but I had to wonder if this recent confluence of events was going to make forestalling impossible. What would I have given to lie down on a tuft of beach grass here in the sun and take a nap that would last all summer.

"You really think that?"

"No, I don't know. Besides, I'm not a kid like I was then. I have more resources to work with."

"That's good to hear. Because unless you're keeping a whole world of secrets from me—"

I shook my head, though of course I had been.

"—you're not even close to being where you were those years after Christopher passed, up into your teens. I doubt you even have a clear recollection of what it was like when you ran away that time. You were gone three nights, four full days. We thought we might have lost our other baby, too."

"I was just hiding from the world."

"Near the same woods where they found Laura. Don't you remember how terrified your father and I were?"

"That was a long time ago. It's more a dream now than anything and I wouldn't mind leaving it that way."

"I wonder if you don't do a little too much wakeful dreaming for your own good."

That caught me off-guard. "We all do our best," I murmured.

"Look, Cass. I don't want anything except for you to know I'm concerned. And that you should feel free to talk to me about anything anytime. Come to me first. Open up if you need to. I'm here for you, you know."

"Thanks," I said, having no better idea how to respond to this. "I'll give what you're saying some thought."

"But I haven't really said yet what I'm saying."

"So what you're saying is—"

"Don't you think it would be a good idea for you to get some counseling while the boys are away at camp?"

"Niles made sure I saw his therapist person, and we pretty much got nowhere. Let me be frank with you. I have no intention of going to another psychiatrist, another therapist, another legalized drug merchant. There's nothing more they have to give me."

She remained quiet.

"I'm perfectly fine," I said, hoping that would end it. I knew Rosalie had come up here to be with me, and within the parameters of her own sense of motherdom she was doing the right thing—which reminded me of a saying of Nep's,
Do right because it is right,
a beautiful phrase Rosalie attributed to the Bible but really comes from Kant. I did appreciate what was unselfish in her words even as I disdained what else I knew she was subtly trying to negotiate with me.

We had stopped walking. Had made it nearly halfway around. The two houses on the other side of the island were pitched on the widest of the many sheltered coves that gave Covey its name. They were in view now, framed by tall droopy spruces. From where we stood there still seemed to be no signs of life in either. Shingled with traditional unpainted cedar and streaked dark brown from years of heavy weather, they had a crepuscular look, like two petrified dinosaurs. A humble jetty reached into the lapping water where some buoys bobbed, those of lobstermen willing to come out this far. I saw that the cormorant's skiff hadn't risen with the tide. Gulls squawked overhead, birds I always thought of as malicious, their yellow beaks stained with that red spot like blood. Seagulls were supposedly the souls of dead mariners, and today I believed it.

"You know that's not true," my mother said. "You're not fine."

"I'm clearheaded enough to know I don't need more tedious therapy sessions and designer antidepressants."

"It's good advice you're ignoring."

"Besides, I don't have time for such self-indulgence. It doesn't look like the boys are going to be away at camp after all. They said in no uncertain terms they didn't want to go."

"And you let them make that decision for themselves?"

"I'm not going to shoehorn them into going somewhere they don't want, in the name of making them have fun."

Rosalie walked along beside me for a time, dispirited. "I only wish you were more religious. Having faith, believing, would help you more than any human therapies."

Not wanting to tread into this subject, I did say, "I have faith. It's my own kind of faith. But I don't
not
believe. You ought to know that."

She said nothing.

Hoping to keep the peace, I finished, "Listen, I know you're worried for good reason. When we go back down I'll look into it. No promises, hear, except to give it serious thought and maybe have a conversation with somebody."

"Fair enough." She brightened a little. Of course she saw through my attempt to mollify her but knew when enough was enough.

We were about to pass by Mrs. Milgate's house, the smallest on the island.

"She's away, seems," said Rosalie, noting the closed curtains. "That's unusual for Angela. Bless her, I hope she's all right. She's the last person on the island who knew your uncle Henry from the old days."

I wanted to tell my mother about that burned-syrupy smell of baked beans but thought the better of it, not wanting to wander back into the quicksand of her concerns, saying instead, "Should we go knock?"

"You know how much she covets her privacy. I don't think dropping in unannounced would sit too well with her," answered Rosalie as we hiked toward the farther cottage, whose sunned linen curtains were also drawn. I wondered, Had they been drawn before? I couldn't remember. It occurred to me, the sometime outsider, what a dangerous choice it was to be a hermit. Your trade-off for privacy was to thwart the company of others who might help when you most needed it.

"Are you sure we shouldn't go back and check on Mrs. Milgate?"

"When Angela wants us to come by, she always gets in touch, lets us know through Mr. McEachern," which put an end to it.

Before our exchange about my suspect mental health, I was tempted to broach with Rosalie my curious encounter with the little girl and her grinning dog. Now I knew I had to keep that to myself as well, if for no other reason than not wanting to be accused of further delusion. I consoled myself with a new theory that the girl might have been part of a boating party that put to shore. Perhaps she had meandered away, went scouting while her parents slept off their lunch on the beach back by one of the hive of small inlets where they'd moored. Smoked a cigarette or two. Yes, that was it. This made such sense I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it before. No phantom, she was just a girl given to taciturnity, shy, like I had been when I was her age.

When we rounded a cliffed corner that would take us along the western edge of Covey and back toward home, we saw a colorful flotilla of sailboats, some with orange sails, others red, turquoise, bright lime-green. Must have been a race. They were all going in the same direction, half a mile out. A lustrous mirage flying across the wide water. They were every bit as bright and blurry as the girl had been, I assured myself.

Rosalie said, "I have one more thing I want to talk about before we get back."

"That sounds serious, too," smiling in a vain attempt to lighten things a little.

"I'm afraid it is. Niles's wife came by to visit me the other day."

I didn't like the way this was headed any more than the previous business. I waited for Rosalie to continue.

"She's worried about you and Niles."

"Poor woman," I said, wondering for just a passing instant whether she would have been capable of writing the warning on the postcard. Unlike Niles and myself, but very much like my mother, Melanie was a regular churchgoer, a devout believer. The card did have religious imagery on it. But then I pictured Melanie Hubert, whose faults were no more serious than being overly sweet, a little too convinced of her own goodness. Still, in her darkest hour, she wouldn't have been capable of sending such an ugly threat, would she? "You know Lucretius's saying
Fear begets gods—
"

"I know it because you've told me a hundred times. You also know I couldn't disagree with him more strongly."

"Melanie's a case of fear begetting devils. I'd set her straight if she wanted to ask."

"You'd already left for Maine when she came over."

"All the more reason for her to stay calm. Niles will always be one of my best friends, and neither she nor anybody else is going to change that. But Melanie has no need to be worrying about me and Niles."

We walked most of the rest of the way home in silence. No doubt I was deluding myself to think Rosalie was satisfied. But despite the conversation's downward turns, I hoped the air was cleared between us, at least on a few thorny subjects, so we could now continue our time together without outside distraction.

Early afternoon. The tide going out. Some sandpipers were mincing in the shallows ahead of us. We rambled past a dead horseshoe crab, which Rosalie taught me during one of our walks around Covey years ago is not a crab at all. More akin to a spider, she'd said. An arthropod, not a crustacean. And while the Lord's given them three hundred and fifty million years to learn better, they still swim upside down, clumsy as sots, truffling for sea worms and bottom grubs. For all their primeval armor and a sharp tail like a fencer's foil, horseshoes were about as threatening as a clump of seaweed. Nep hadn't been the only one to try to teach me about the teeming world. I needed to remember that.

Interrupting both our reveries, I said, "Thanks for talking with me, Rosalie. I know it's not easy, and I know you care. It means a lot."

"You're my daughter," she said, simply.

It went unsaid that the pact about Chris, that old concealment so many years silted under that I sometimes doubted its ultimate veracity, need not enter into the dialogue. Neither of us wanted to look at it, think about it. Christopher needed, in his way, to stay dead in order for us to stay sane.

The keeper's cottage was in sight now. Smoke rose from the fire pit, wafting our way. Bracken air hovered above the beds of beached kelp left exposed to the sun, their blanket of protective sea pulled back by the fingers of the tide. Three figures, our men, were making their way down from the house to the fire they had built. One waved to us, then all of them did and we waved back.

T
HIS PACT ABOUT
Christopher's past wasn't one I pondered often. A year might go by and only the quickest disquieting flicker of it flew through my head, like one of those shooting stars that drew their ephemeral lines down the black sky the night he died. It was as if my secret with Rosalie were shut inside a metal safebox, padlocked, then left out in the rain so long that it had rusted solid. There was no reason to harp on it just now, whether or not Rosalie fretted that my monster might unhinge it, as it were, and crack the box open for all to see. Nothing and no one had opened it in times past. For all the doubts I had about some of my mother's convictions, I was loyal to her.

Toward Christopher, too, I still felt an abiding fidelity. He and I shared so many good times together, and I needed to tend to these most, like heirloom roses in the front bed of a memorial garden. It was Christopher who taught me to tie my shoes. Chris who helped me memorize my multiplication tables. Chris was the one who showed me where birds' nests were secreted away in trees and the right way to climb up high to see them. When I had chicken pox, Christopher read to me from my children's books for hours on end and cooled my forehead with a wet washcloth, fearless about getting sick himself.

Nor had Rosalie misremembered my having been in the woods above Henderson's before. But she barely knew the half of it. Once, she and Nep left me in Christopher's care when they had to spend a whole day and late into the night in the city attending—hard to imagine—a funeral in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. The reception was to run late, so they instructed Chris not to leave me unattended. There was plenty of food and soda in the refrigerator, and he already knew how to light the oven to heat up the casserole she had prepared for our dinner. He needed to make sure I had enough to eat and got to bed by ten.

— I'm not a baby, I protested.

— I'm not a babysitter, he agreed.

— Don't you two wander too far from home, she admonished him. —And I don't want your friends in the house while we're out, understood?

We understood the second rule, but the minute they left, Christopher began stuffing his pack with food and told me to get my boots on because we were going to spend the day being Indians in the cliffs. A whole day with my brother to myself? I was thrilled. The cliffs were sacred terrain to him, which made it all the more special.

This was the year before four-wheelers became the sole means of transportation, so we hiked for a couple of hours off the beaten track so as not to be spotted by any of our parents' acquaintances, making our way along a hogback thick with pines until we were finally close to the cliffs. Everyone Chris ever brought here, including me that day, had to go through quite a ritual of induction. Adults were never to know about this secret hideout. To make sure they didn't, all visitors—there weren't but a few—were blindfolded and led by a rope tied around their waists up and down some rugged, trippy land. It wasn't a short hike, especially blindfolded. Once visitors were out of sight of any recognizable landmarks, they were unmasked in woods that looked just like other forested acreage in our area, except for the caved cliffs, purported by my brother to be old Indian dwellings. The idea was that only Christopher would know the hideout's precise location.