The Edge of the Gulf (27 page)
Read The Edge of the Gulf Online
Authors: Hadley Hury
He had only three days, not enough time to use sixteen hours of it driving.
Camilla and Libby were to meet his plane. He looked through the glass panel of the long walkway that steered the Labor Day weekend passengers from the gangway into the small waiting area.
He saw neither of them. Perhaps they were late.
He came to the end of the glassed walkway and stood to one side. As he resituated his shoulder bag and searched the atrium crowded with holiday travelers, he heard through the clutter a soft voice from somewhere behind him.
“Hudson.”
It was Charlie, sitting on a short bench. He had put on a few more pounds in the past month. His color had continued to improve and the smile was almost back at full tilt. But he still looked frail, shrunken.
“Well, what are
you
doing here?” said Hudson. He gripped the outstretched hand and leaned down for the only sort of hug the recent wound could tolerate. “Did Nurse Ratched give her permission?”
“Nurse Ratched and Camilla are waiting for us out front.” As they slowly negotiated the swarm he said, “I just wanted to meet you myself, under my own sail. To prove I could.” He grinned. “That’s what I do these days, you know. Eat fatty foods four times a day and try to prove things to myself.”
***
The three of them, together, had told Charlie what had happened to him.
They’d had to get it over with only days after he regained consciousness. They delayed as long as they could, fearful of a relapse, but finally they’d had to group themselves around his bed and tell him. They trusted Rogers and Fields to keep their final questions to a minimum and to be as gentle as possible, but there was no gentle way to tell Charlie that his only living relative and his bride had conspired with one of his employees to encourage an unbalanced fanatic to kill him.
***
Libby had insisted on being the day nurse since Charlie had come home after three weeks.
“He’s not going back into that house alone or with just a hired nurse,” she said. “We can’t have him getting depressed.”
They had moved Charlie into the downstairs bedroom. Before Hudson had to leave for Memphis in early August, to get back for a week of settling in before school, he and Brad had taken turns spelling her for a few hours every day, and Camilla came when she could. Fentry and Victor checked in regularly, and a night nurse, carefully vetted against Libby’s burgeoning set of criteria, came on from eight to six.
They also took charge of the new, seven-week-old chocolate Lab puppy—whom Charlie dubbed Ruth and who slept nightly on his bed without once interfering with his bandages—exhorting Charlie, as they dealt with the rigors of housebreaking and tripped over chew toys on a regular basis, to hurry up and get strong enough to assume more of his appropriate paternal functions.
Libby became infuriated, as no one had ever seen her, to find, one morning, a crudely scrawled note about
getting rid of faggots
on the front walk. The police were later able to reassure them that, ironically, it was the wholly unconnected, fairly generic work of a Seagrove boy who’d been up to other similar mischief in the neighborhood for a couple of months, including a particularly obscene bit of graffiti mailed to a nearby Methodist minister’s wife. The reminder that such virulent hatred could have been bred and was already seething in an eleven-year-old was an especially bleak sort of reassurance.
They kept Charlie engaged with reading and television and movies and music, with trying to eat, with the physical therapist’s first assignments. And to keep his disbelief and sorrow from swallowing him back into a mute darkness, they talked with him about
it.
A little here, a little there, letting him take the lead but trying not to let him brood hopelessly on the nightmare he had wakened to. They kept him on task. Getting stronger. Getting well. They were all they could be to him. The people who had always been there. The ones who loved him and wanted him back.
They themselves had learned, in grisly pieces, the full scope of the outrage soon after that night in the hospital, and they took encouragement from the mercifully quick closure. Cold solace that it was, at least it was something, and they hoped they might somehow pass that solace on, a positive current of energy, to Charlie.
Sydney had apparently been prepared to fight despite the damning videotape and eyewitnesses, but she gave up after Chaz shakily emitted a lengthy, detailed confession and Terry Main was intercepted at the Puerto Vallarta airport carrying a fake ID and twenty-eight thousand in cash.
***
By the time Hudson had to go, there was some abatement in Charlie’s physical pain. And, characteristically, as the only gift of gratitude he could offer them, he was working hard at doing what he could about his emotional pain.
On the day Hudson left for Memphis he had come by just as Libby was helping Charlie negotiate his fork over a mashed-up baked potato. Still ashen and wraith thin, he was propped in the winged armchair near his bed.
Suddenly he noticed his reflection in the full-length mirror inside the closet door which Libby must have left open. He gestured feebly with his fork, and when he was sure they were looking, he smiled.
“Guess she was wrong,” he rasped.
“Who was wrong?” Hudson asked.
“Duchess of Windsor. You
can
be too rich and too thin.”
***
Charlie proved something else that night. With Hudson on one side, Libby on the other, and Brad just behind, he walked very slowly but steadily not only into the 26-A but up the stairs, even more slowly, one at a time, to his regular table overlooking the main room.
Camilla finished up a few things and then joined them, carrying a bouquet of native hawthorn and early chrysanthemums that had just arrived with a note from Susie, now on staff with a magazine in New Orleans. They had two bottles of Chateau de Mareuil sur Ay. Victor served the meal. The soup was of chilled pumpkin, shallots and nutmeg, followed by a salad of romaine hearts in a light vinaigrette with kalamata olives, mint, tomatoes, and feta, followed by a terrine of fresh corn, peas, crab, and peppers in tarragon aspic, followed by Gulf red snapper grilled with a tapenade of garlic chutney, and apple tart with cream for dessert.
They were well aware that he rankled under having been the center of attention for too long. He was back in his element now, deflecting that attention, enlivened by his connection to others, to the world. He listened with a kind of boyish elation to Hudson’s first anecdotes of the school year, and asked about the book, and Brad’s golf game, and Camilla’s son who had been with her for two weeks before going back to school.
They talked and laughed and ate and made toasts and drank. They watched the diners below. They repeatedly told Charlie not to tire himself but were elated at seeing him very nearly back to being Charlie.
He proposed the final toast. He looked very deliberately around the table at each of them in turn and lifted his glass.
“Thank you.”
In all the sum total of their years of knowing him, and through all the unimaginable horrors of the past ten weeks, they had never seen Charlie cry. For a moment they thought their mutual history was about to transform itself once more.
But he swallowed hard, smiled, and tried again, testing each word like a man on a high wire.
“
You
are the finest family I could ever have imagined. Or ever been blessed to have.”
***
On Sunday afternoon, Hudson and Camilla walked the beach to Seaside and back. They had told him the night before that August had gone out like a roaring furnace, but this day had dawned in a cool drizzle.
There was no particular destination, no particular reason for going to Seaside. They walked barefoot, along the surf, with lightweight ponchos over their shorts and shirts, enjoying the wet freshness and the light whipping wind.
In the village, they passed some indeterminate period of time browsing through books at the Sundog, had a salad at Bud & Alley’s, sat for awhile with hot chocolate on the wide steps of the market, and drifted aimlessly through the shops and galleries.
“I thought you weren’t a shopper,” she said as he scrutinized an awful piece of pottery.
“I’m not,” Hudson said. “Loathe it. This isn’t shopping. This is wandering. It’s good for the soul, I hear. Particularly the souls of teachers for whom the year has just begun like a huge boulder rolling down a steep hill.”
“Do you remember what we talked about that night in the cottage, the night just before…”
“The part about ‘keeping a place cleared’?”
“That part.”
“Yes,” he said.
***
When they headed back, the skies had cleared for an unimaginably spectacular sunset. They tried just to let it happen, managing silence for minutes at a time, but it was too much to bear. Like children, they burst with exclamations, they oohed and aahed and pointed, so overpowered as they walked toward the west that they occasionally wheeled in little circles or fell into a silly skip.
By the time they approached Laurel they had forgotten themselves.
The summer.
Time.
They moved silently now, slowly, a part of the land and the seascape, as the saturated colors glowed, then vibrated, and finally muted to a jagged wash of infinite pastels seeping into the Gulf.
They waded through the shallow breach of the lagoon where it meandered across the beach and suddenly felt the wind from the northwest pick up against their faces.
They stopped for a moment and turned to look through the gathering twilight for the roof of Charlie’s house, for the end of the upper porch, discernible from only one particular perspective over the high dunes and the tangle of scrub oaks.
They reached out for one another’s hands.
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