The Girls of August (4 page)

The sun was high overhead, bleaching the world of color, and I again felt sick to
my stomach.

Mac pressed the back of his hand to my cheek. “Are you OK?”

I touched his hand and an odd urge to weep welled up inside me. I suddenly had no
idea how I could spend two weeks without him. I flung my arms around his neck. “I
love you so much, Mac.”

“I love you too, sweet pea,” he said. He held me by the shoulders and looked at me
sternly. “You need anything, I mean anything, head over to the village. Ask for Mama
Bonaparte. I don’t know if she’s still alive, but if so…” He trailed off. “It doesn’t
matter. The Gullahs will help out if you girls get in a jam.”

He kissed me good-bye and whispered he would miss me. I heard the diesel engine blaze
to life and one of the girls—I think it was Barbara—said, “Will you look at those
lovebirds!”

Before I succumbed to a full-out faint thanks to the heat and the stickiness of the
salt air, I pulled away. Mac helped me aboard
Miss Lucky Eyes
and we all waved at him as if we were about to embark upon a transatlantic journey.

“
Bon voyage
,” Baby hollered, jumping up and down.

Mac stood on the dock, hands on hips, watching our departure. As the boat headed
east, toward Tiger Island and away from the mainland, I gripped the rail, fighting
seasickness in the moderate chop. For a while I kept my gaze pinned to the dock as
Mac appeared to grow smaller and smaller, but finally I shifted it to the whitecapped
sea because I didn’t wish to see him disappear altogether.

Over the throaty backbeat of the diesel engine, with Bull Island off to our north,
Fossey Pearson yelled, “We’re coming up on her, girls. Tiger Island! Named for the
tiger sharks that once swarmed thick as thieves in these shallows. Guess my granddaddy
took his fair share of the fuc—um…monsters. I’ve been known to take a few myself.”

“They won’t really hurt you,” Baby said. “Not unless you go swimming with a bucket
of chum.”

Fossey Pearson started laughing, pointed at her as if he were pulling a trigger.
She smiled back at him and actually batted her eyes.

“What do you know about chum, Baby?” Rachel asked.

Baby didn’t answer. She seemed slightly afraid, as if there were a trip wire in the
air.

“Don’t underestimate Baby Gaillard,” Fossey Pearson said. “Her people have been out
here almost as long as mine.”

Before Rachel could come back with something suitably acidic, Baby yelled, “Look!”
She pointed off the back of the boat. “They’re surfing!”

I turned and was delighted to see a small pod of dolphin—seven to be exact—surfing
the boat’s wake. “How fabulous!”

“Doesn’t that beat all,” Rachel said, making her way to the rear. Barbara, Baby, and
I quickly followed.

“Aren’t they beautiful!” Barbara said.

“Stare at ’em long enough,” Fossey Pearson said, “and an ol’ salt might think they’re
mermaids.” He throttled down and took a more southerly route. “Right over there,
that’s where we’re heading.”

A dock, more rickety than the last, snaggled its way into a protected bay. I turned
a full circle, taking in my new surroundings. The mainland was long gone. There
were only sea, sky, and the approaching island. We had certainly gotten what we’d
always said was one of our criteria for these August getaways: isolation. Only this
time it was absolute. We could not pile into a car and go buy groceries. We could
not nip over to a liquor store. We could not call up our husbands or kids and check
in. Fossey Pearson, with his one eye and his chugalug boat, was our sole means of
conveyance to an island that offered nothing but whatever nature supplied.

Nevertheless, as Tiger Island came more clearly into focus, it reeled me in. Even
from this distance, I was taken with its primeval beauty. White sands, clear water,
coastal scrub leading into some sort of hardwood jungle hummock.

“How did your people ever find this place?” I asked Baby.

“My great-granddaddy made a lot of money in the stock market. Coca-Cola, mainly.
And my granddaddy, he had a thing for the sea. So he, with Great-Granddaddy’s help,
built himself a house right in the middle of it.” Baby gazed at the island that wavered
in this bright sunlight, and I saw a calm come over her, as if Rachel’s ditching
her phone no longer mattered.

Fossey Pearson idled us up, slow and close, to the dock. He seemed fully in his element,
as if the smell of diesel gas and the confusion created by too much sea salt and
sunlight made him the happiest man on the planet.

“Now listen here,” he said. “Baby knows this, but I don’t think she’s ever been out
here with just a bunch of
women
.” His inflection suggested that we were little more than helpless, dumb creatures
who were perpetually in need of masculine wisdom.

Rachel’s eyes flashed. I saw her coil up, ready to pounce, but I waved her down.

“Choose your battles,” I whispered.

Barbara seemed unfazed by Fossey Pearson’s banter. Radiant, she took in our surroundings
as though paradise truly were healing, as if nothing the one-eyed old salt could
say—no matter how insulting or inappropriate—could pierce her armor.

“There ain’t a damned thing out here,” he said, gently nudging the boat against the
dock. “I mean nothing. No place to get your hair done. No place to spend your husband’s
money.”

“What about my money?” Rachel snapped.

Fossey Pearson laughed. “Nope. No place for that either.”

Without being asked, Baby helped him tie up
Miss Lucky Eyes
, her butt cheeks bared to all who would look every time she bent over. The rest
of us began gathering our provisions. I think we all felt the same need: Get off
the boat; get on with this vacation. I had a sense that some of us were already thinking
it couldn’t end soon enough. And I hoped that as soon as we settled in, people’s
frayed nerves would ease.

“There’s no phone. Ain’t no cell service either,” Fossey said, at which Baby had the
gall, or perhaps courage, to giggle.

He helped us unload the coolers. “No computers. No TVs.”

Fossey Pearson was enjoying this, I could tell by the righteous gait of his words.

“No coffee shops. No shopping malls. No place to get your nails painted. Hell, they
ain’t even a Laundromat out here.”

The four of us stood on the dock, watching him unload the final bag full of all
manner of items we had decided we simply couldn’t live without, and quiet washed over
us as it sank in that we were about to be totally on our own.

“One more thing,” Fossey Pearson said, disappearing briefly into the wheelhouse and
then emerging with a pail filled with what, at first glance, appeared to be fireworks.

“Here you go,” he said, handing the pail to Barbara.

“What
are
these?” she asked.

“Railroad flares,” he said, and he winked at her again before returning to the wheelhouse,
and it occurred to me that it actually might be impossible for a one-eyed man to
wink. Perhaps it was just an exaggerated, slow, and sultry blink.

The idling boat engine thumped more quickly. “If you need me this week,” he shouted,
pulling away from the dock, “light a flare on the beach. I’ll be here shortly. After
that, light a flare and hope for the best because I’ll be in New York City.”

New York City? “What do we do while you’re gone?” I hollered, hating the sick rise
in my stomach that recognized abandonment.

“Don’t worry,” he yelled. “There’s bound to be somebody on the pier over to the
shore. Or a boat out in the bay will spy the flare. You ladies ain’t got nothing
to worry about. And oh yeah, be careful of the storms. We’ve been having some nighttime
doozies!”

Those were his last words, which we barely heard over the engine noise and the breeze
that seemed intent on blowing his instructions to smithereens.

“Where do we go now?” Rachel asked, hoisting a duffel bag higher on her shoulder,
squinting at the sun, her face drawn and piqued.

“This way,” Baby said, and it dawned on me that a power shift had just occurred. This
was
her
place. She knew its mysteries…what could kill us, what could delight us. Holy crap.
Baby Gaillard was in charge.

She sauntered off the dock, overnight case in hand. When she hit the beach, she
kicked off her flip-flops and turned toward us. “Just leave all that luggage be.
We’ll get it in as time allows. Not like there are any pirates out here.” And she
giggled.

“Sounds like a plan,” Barbara muttered, “but I’ll bring the wine.”

We trundled south along the beach, in the heat and the mosquitoes, and just when
all of us, save Baby, thought this was some sort of horrible joke, the house—the
beautiful, beautiful white-shingled house—came into view.

Splendid, it was absolutely splendid, nestled among the trees, sea oats and beach
rosemary and red rugosa roses spilling wildly all about.

“Wow!” Barbara breathed.

“Amen,” Rachel said.

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered. The photo had not done the house justice and, for
a moment, I was seized with envy, wishing this stately, if weatherworn, two-story
Cape with its big ocean-facing windows and wide wraparound porches belonged to Mac
and me.

This was a house, I decided, that echoed the ages: stories, laughter, tears, storms,
ghosts. Its crowning achievement? A widow’s walk complete with an antique lightning
rod in which was embedded a cobalt globe that seemed to pulse in the late summer
sun. If the Kennedys had been Southerners, this would have been their Hyannis Port,
I thought.

For a moment we stood there, taking it all in. Us. The great house. The mighty and
beautiful Atlantic. The wide beach and deep jungle. I looked behind me. Our footprints
in the sand signaled, to any critter that cared, our presence.

“They look like the only footsteps this beach has seen for a hundred years,” Barbara
said.

“Oh, no,” Baby trilled, hefting her case into her other hand. “Mine and Teddy’s
were all over this place just last week, getting the house set up for us.” She spun
around, surveying her queendom. Her confidence and cheekiness had returned in full
bloom. “Seems like everywhere you look, you see Teddy, doesn’t it? There. There.
There. And there.” She pointed to the trees and the footprints, the ocean and the
house. The child behaved and sounded like a lovesick virgin. She patted her heart
to drive home the point that Teddy was all hers.

For reasons that had to do with old love affairs and icy Kentucky roads and the fact
that we’d never again share sweet, sweet moments with dear Melinda, I felt my Irish
rise.

“No,” I said, a tangled knot of stubbornness stealing my good manners. “Everywhere
I look, I see Mac. Just Mac.”

Barbara uncharacteristically snorted.

And Rachel? She actually saved the moment. “Come on, Baby Big Boobs. Show us our new
digs.”

P
erhaps it was the sun, the heat, the boat ride, all that sand, the stunning house—I
don’t know—but as the others ascended the steps that would take them into the cool
sanctuary of Tiger’s Eye, for that is how the neatly hand-painted sign in yellow
and turquoise identified the place, I was suddenly caught up in a confluence of things
past, memories from long ago that felt urgent and new.

I was a girl again, twentysomething, a newly minted Pink Lady. My memory was clear
and unflinching: I had volunteered to be a Pink Lady because I had decided that
the last thing I should do as a single woman was go straight home from teaching third-graders,
where I would, as recent history had taught me, sit in front of the TV with a pint
of Chunky Monkey, adding poundage to my loneliness.

A coworker at Harrowbrook Elementary—Mrs. Blakely, a fifth-grade teacher and a woman
known to look down her nose at just about anything that breathed—accused me in the
teachers’ lounge of volunteering for the sole purpose of meeting a doctor. “That’s
a poor way for a woman these days to behave,” she had admonished me as she grabbed
a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut and nibbled at its tender edge.

I didn’t respond to the old crow. I didn’t have to because she was 100 percent wrong
and I didn’t feel like wasting a single brain cell on her. I was not trying to meet
a man, much less one who would become a doctor. I’d been a serious student. Teaching
was for me not just a job. For the few years I did it prior to opening my catering
business, teaching was my avocation, a dream realized. Perhaps it had been my unconscious
mind’s way of telling me I wasn’t going to have any kids of my own so I’d best bask
in the glow of other people’s children. And volunteering as a Pink Lady really was
a favored alternative to spending nights alone. I felt that, in a very small way,
I was doing something meaningful, helping out people who were facing some pretty
steep battles.

I was nervous that first evening on the job. And my nerves manifested in my inability
to do anything right. My first assigned task was that of greeter. What could go
wrong? Just sit at the info desk, be pleasant, and hand out maps to folks in need
of directions.

The first person to approach was an aged man who walked with a pronounced limp and
whose face appeared paralyzed in a permanent wince. His left arm was crooked at a
crazy angle, and I feared that he’d dislocated it. Perhaps he’d fallen off a ladder.
Or maybe a chair had gone out from under him as he attempted to change a lightbulb
or reach for something on a top shelf. I was all about answers and alarmed that a
sick person who was obviously in need of treatment had come in through the wrong
entrance. By the looks of him, he was lucky to be alive.

“Sir, let me help you,” I said. “I’ll get someone right away to wheel you over to
emergency.” I reached for the phone, but then saw an orderly loping down the hall.
“Orderly!” I called, sounding more desperate than I meant to, but I knew no one’s
name.

The old man looked at the young man in white who was heading our way and then snapped
his head toward me. “Orderly! Orderly! Listen, lady, I don’t need no orderly, and
I didn’t walk in here to get insulted by the likes of you.”

The orderly, whose name I would learn later was Larry, held up his hands and walked
backward, laughing, as though entertained by the old man’s grumpiness.

“Sir,” I stammered. “I’m so sorry. I thought you were hurt.”

“Why? Because I’m old? Let me tell you something. I KNOW where the hell I’m going.
Yes, sir, I do.” He began to limp down the hall that led to the bank of elevators.
“Gonna see my son. Emergency room! I’ll emergency room you, you stupid, know-nothing
broad.”

I couldn’t help it. Horrified, humiliated, and hurt all in one great moment, I began
to cry. Before I could reach for the tissues, a tall, sandy-haired resident, whose
lopsided horn-rimmed glasses were downright charming, leaned across the desk and
handed me a handkerchief.

“Don’t let Mr. Phillips get to you,” he said in a deep South Carolina drawl. “He’s
mean to everybody. It’s what keeps him alive.”

I accepted the handkerchief and dabbed my eyes. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I’m
crying.”

“Probably because that guy is an asshole and assholes make all good people weep.”
He smiled, broad and unassuming. He pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his
nose, but they remained askew.

I laughed and the jangle of nerves at the base of my skull unknotted.

“So you’re the new Pink Lady,” he said.

“I didn’t know news of my arrival had preceded me,” I said, handing him back the handkerchief.

“Usually it’s not big news. But we haven’t had a new Pink Lady as pretty or as young
as you since Vandy Medical Center opened its doors all those many years ago.” He
slipped the tearstained hanky into his lab coat’s breast pocket, an ingratiating,
gallant move in my book. And I couldn’t help myself: I liked the dimples. He stifled
a yawn—those legendary hours residents kept were no doubt taking a toll—but his blue
eyes remained full of mischief. “I’m Mac McCauley. Resident. Family practice.”

“Madison Nash,” I said, fully aware that the good doctor was flirting. But I decided
as his pager went off that with his earnest sweetness he was the sort of guy who
made a better best friend than boyfriend. After all, boyfriends were supposed to
be slightly dangerous, always on the brink of leaving. That way they kept you wanting
more. It was messed up but true.

Dr. McCauley checked his pager. “Gotta run,” he said. “Catch you later, Madison Nash.”

I found myself rather breathless in his wake.

The rest of my three-hour shift, thankfully, proceeded without incident. I handed
out maps and restocked the candy bowl and even managed to make my way to the cafeteria
for a cup of coffee.

My timing was perfect. In the back, under an array of bright fluorescent lights,
Mac sat with a pretty young woman also cloaked in a lab coat, probably a fellow
resident, and I could see that they were engaged in animated conversation. I decided
I had been wrong. He hadn’t been flirting with me after all. He was just friendly.
A guy like him wouldn’t go for the likes of me anyway. He wanted someone who studied
brain cells, not lesson plans. And then, I admonished myself, I was not here to find
a man. I was here to help people.

“Remember that,” I said under my breath as I headed for the coffee station.

It didn’t take me long to figure out where I felt I belonged, where I felt I might
be able to do some real good: the children’s cancer ward. That’s probably because,
of all the people I dealt with at the Vandy Medical Center, the children who were
facing death were the bravest souls I would ever come across.

The CCW is where I met Tiffany Hodges. It’s also where I met Teddy Patterson.

Beautiful and terminally ill Tiffany Hodges. Twelve years old. Childhood leukemia.
Acute lymphocytic leukemia, to be exact. Acute because it was moving fast, racing
through her body like a winged demon, turning the lymphocytes in her bone marrow
into death cells. She didn’t stand a chance. But still, we—because humans are basically
positive creatures who believe that fundamentally the world is a fair and just place—hoped
for a cure, a remission, a full-blown saint-sanctioned miracle.

I met her in late spring, when the dogwoods were still in bloom. She was sitting
by a window in the CCW’s sun-room, a drawing pad on her lap, a tin of watercolors
on the table beside her. She was bald and thin, her pale skin tinged with the lightest
lavender possible. As I approached, she looked up and smiled. Radiant, her eyes sparkling,
she said, “You’re new here.”

“Yes, I am.”

She held up the drawing pad. “What do you think?”

She’d painted a giant yellow bird with bright-green eyes and purple lips stretched
into a wide grin. The bird was perched atop the largest of the blooms in what appeared
to be a field of giant sunflowers.

“You’re quite an artist,” I said, and I meant it.

She blushed. “I just do it for fun.”

“Well, you’re awfully good,” I said, admiring the drawing. “Mind if I join you?”

She studied the painting for a moment, dabbing off a bit of brown paint from the
center of the big flower. Then she looked at me, direct and unafraid. “Why?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Is it because I have cancer and you feel sorry for me?”

“No. It’s just…I’ve been on my feet all day and you’re here all alone. Maybe you want
some company.”

“I’m pretty happy no matter what,” she said. She closed the lid on her paints. “Most
do-gooders stop coming here after a while. They can’t cut it.”

“Maybe I’m not a do-gooder. Maybe I’m just hanging out.” I appreciated her directness
even though it was unnerving.

“So, what’s your name?” She gazed at her painting as though sizing it up.

I tapped my tag. “Maddy.”

“It says, ‘Madison.’”

“Well,” I said, sitting in the chair opposite her, “my friends call me Maddy.”

“So, Madison”—she ran her hand over the smooth surface of her head and then looked
at me with an intensity usually reserved for cross-examinations—“what’s your favorite
color?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“My mood.”

“Hmmm…me too.” She blew on the drawing, I suppose to dry the paint, and said, “Today
my favorite color is yellow.”

“Why’s that?”

Even without hair, she was such a pretty little girl. And her face betrayed no pain,
no fear.

She set her painting on the table and looked out the window, which perfectly framed
a sprawling old oak tree. In its near branches, a female cardinal offered a seed
of some sort to her male partner. “Because you can walk through it. Yellow doesn’t
end. It just goes on and on and on.”

I didn’t know what to say. I suddenly found that I was in way over my head with Tiffany
Hodges. Was she seeing her own death? Was she quietly refusing it? Or was she simply
talking about her favorite color?

“Would you like one of these?” I asked stupidly. I reached into my pocket and withdrew
some hard candies. She chose two—butterscotch and cherry.

“Thanks,” she said and then again turned away from me, staring out the window into
a distance I could not determine. “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to sit here
for a spell.”

“No. I don’t mind at all. I’ll catch up with you later,” I said, standing.

Twilight shadows were beginning to gather. The light glowed warm and golden on her
face, and she looked beatific, or at least at peace with whatever might or might
not come next.

I turned, ready to sprint down the hall, feeling that I had somehow fallen short
in my job as a Pink Lady, fearing that those damned tears were imminent. Wasn’t I
supposed to offer confident cheer and support? Why did I feel Tiffany was onto me,
knew that I didn’t have a clue about what she faced and, indeed, had already faced?
How did she know that though I had worked hard to carve out a career for myself—however
inglorious, given that many of my students’ parents did not seem to value teachers,
indeed, perceived us as the enemy—I didn’t know squat about the human heart?

I made a hard left, my intent being to leave the ward at the speed of light. But
instead I found myself frozen in place, stunned to be returning the gaze of a man
who was, despite a small scar along the cleft of his chin, bone-chillingly handsome.
He looked like the kind of man who knows that the world is truly his oyster, that
it speaks to him more kindly than it speaks to others. In short, he looked dangerous,
as if no woman would ever keep him. And as I stared at him—his dark, wavy hair was
combed directly back with every strand in place—I realized that it wasn’t his looks
that I found so compelling. It was his confidence. A surety smoldered in his steady
gaze, which was too sophisticated to betray his thoughts. How could he seem mysterious
yet guileless at the same time? He was a wonder, this one. There I stood, in defiance
of my own advice, smitten at first sight.

“So, she got to you, did she?” he asked, nodding his head in Tiffany’s direction.

“You could say that,” I stammered.

“She has a way about her…I don’t know. It’s like she unlocks your secrets and shakes
them in your face, but without malice.”

He looked at me with what I interpreted as frank earnestness, offered me his hand,
and said, “I’m Teddy Patterson. I don’t believe we’ve met before.”

Oh yeah. This guy was way more dangerous than Mac McCauley. As I slid my palm into
his—a seal sliding into water—I felt myself fall into something that resembled ladylike
lust.

Teddy seemed to take in the totality of me—my intellect and passion, my mind and
heart—with those aquamarine eyes, and my whole body, against my will, blushed. His
hand was much larger than mine, and that fact alone made me feel wanted, less alone.
I must not have possessed much self-esteem to let the size of the man’s hand turn
me into jelly. In retrospect, I believe I was experiencing nothing more than a small
but persistent hormonal storm. However, no one could have convinced me of that as
we stood gazing at each other in the antiseptic glow of the CCW.

For a time it was glorious. He worked long hours as a resident, and he was singularly
focused on his soon-to-be career as a pediatric surgeon, a career that I felt dovetailed
beautifully with my desire to have four children. But despite that clear-eyed commitment
to our careers, we managed to spend plenty of time together. Coffee breaks at the
hospital. Dinners when we both had evenings off. Long late-night walks along neon-lit
city streets. Then there were the movies and random parties.