Up Island (28 page)

I could not say, No, it’s not, I have it, so I just nodded and said, politely, “Oh? Who?”

“Your father,” she said. “This hat is for your father. Can you find him for me?”

“I don’t know where he is,” I said in the dream, but my eyes flicked to my father of their own volition, and I saw her see him, and start toward him in a little rush of joy. She took the hat off and her hair flew free around her pretty head, and she held it out and called, “Darling! Come and get your hat!”

I turned, and behind me my father had seen her, and was starting toward her, his whole heart and soul in his eyes. He reached out for her hand and the black hat.

In that instant I knew that if he touched the hat he would be dead, too, and gone with her, and after that I would see them both in the terrible window, waiting for whatever it is the dead wait for.

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“NOOOO!” I screamed, and woke myself up.

It was a full five minutes before I could stop shaking, stop the cold sweat that ran down my face and neck. My heart pounded for long after that. I looked at my watch and saw that I had slept for nearly two hours. Outside the drawn curtains, the sun would be setting. Blackness would be coming across the water from Nantucket.

I went to the phone and called Kevin’s house in Washington. Kevin answered; he sounded as he did on the air. I wondered if he put his coat and tie on when he answered his telephone; he sounded as if he did.

“How is Daddy?” I said without preamble.

“Daddy’s awful,” Kevin said, and my galloping heart raced faster.

“What?”

“Depression,” Kevin said. “Full-blown clinical depression.

No doubt about it. We did a special on it a couple of months ago. It’s all there, the lethargy, the sleeping, the lack of interest in everything, the loss of appetite, even the sloppy personal habits. It’s a delayed reaction to Mother, I know.

He’s been in denial ever since she died, and now it’s caught up with him.”

“Have you had him to a doctor?” I said, pain for my father all but drowning me.

“He won’t go, but I’ve talked with a shrink friend of ours, and he says there’s no doubt of the diagnosis. He gave us a prescription for Prozac, but I don’t think Dad’s taking it.

Sally doesn’t want to monitor him, and I can’t stay home and see that he does. Listen, Molly, I’m glad you called. I’ve been meaning to call you. You’re just going to have to take over now. He’s

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making no plans to go back to the condo, and we’ve decided that he ought to move in with you. It’s the obvious solution, and it could be a help to you, too. But I know he’d take it better if the suggestion came from you.”

I told him then about Tee and Sheri and the house in Ansley Park, and why Missy thought I should not live in it, and about the money, and then about the camp on the pond and the plans I had made.

“Well, if that’s not the most harebrained, selfish thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Kevin exploded. “And the most typical.

Get it all worked out for little Molly and let everybody else go hang. I guess it doesn’t matter to you that Sally cries herself to sleep at night, and Mandy can’t have any of her friends over anymore. Dad just sits there. He just sits there in the living room with the TV set on, not watching, not talking, just sitting there…”

I took a deep breath. It shook as I exhaled.

“Kevin, you know that never once in my life have I worked things out for myself and let everybody else go hang. You know that. That was unfair and untrue. If anybody in this family works things out for themselves and lets everybody else…”

I let it trail off. I did not want to fight with him. I never won.

“Okay, okay, I know,” my brother said, and let his breath out on a long sigh. “That was below the belt. But we’re all near to cracking. Look, if you can’t go back to your house, and I think your lawyer is wrong, by the way, maybe you could go live with Dad, in the condo. He’s not even trying to sell it anymore. It would solve all your problems, and he’d have somebody with him. I think he has to have that. Maybe you

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could get him to go for some help; we sure can’t. I don’t know but what he’s not suicidal.”

“Kevin!
Daddy?”

“You haven’t seen him, Molly.”

“Let me talk to him.”

After a bit my father came on the line. I listened very carefully, but to me he sounded just as he always had; the slow, mild voice was the father’s that I knew and none other.

“Hey, baby, they lynched you yet?” he asked, and I laughed. It was an old joke of ours, that I tanned as darkly as an African-American in the sun.

I told him about the camp, and about the old ladies and Dennis Ponder, though I softened that considerably, saying only that Dennis was recuperating from leg surgery, and I tried to make the plight of the old ladies merely funny and crochety. I said nothing about my reasons for not coming home or about my severely curtailed financial circumstances; no reason to burden him with that. But I dwelt at length on Charles and Diana, and was rewarded with his old, rich chuckle.

“That must be a sight to see,” he said. “I’m going to read up on swans. Maybe I can find some arcane tidbit of swan psychology that will help you with the old man. Well, babe, good for you and all your plans. Sounds to me that you’ve gone from the frying pan into the fire, though; from looking after one family to looking after another, with an ornery feathered family thrown in.”

I had not thought of it that way, and was not sure I liked the implications.

“Well, they’re not my family,” I said lightly. “That’s why I can do it, I think. There’s really not much
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to it, and I’m not emotionally involved with anybody. That’s the killer. That’s not going to happen again.”

He laughed again, but comfortably.

“So you say.”

I asked about Thanksgiving and he said yes, he had indeed committed to Sally’s parents.

“Would you come for Christmas?” I said hesitantly. All of a sudden it was very important to me that he say yes.

“Well, that would be fun, wouldn’t it? Snow and swans and all that? Sure, if you’re still up there,” my father said.

I got Kevin back on the line.

“He sounds okay to me,” I said.

“He’s trying to spare you,” Kevin said. I could tell by his voice that he was angry again.

“I don’t think so…”

“Shit, Molly, it’s what he’s always done. You were always his baby.”

And you were always Mother’s, and now you’re not anybody’s, and that’s what all this is about, I did not say. I waited. There was a silence. Then he said, “Molly, you go on home and take care of him. Enough is enough. You’re the only one who can do anything with him.”

“I can’t do that,” I said.

“What is it, you want to kill him, too?” Kevin said, and I hung up on him, shaking. But I was not surprised. I knew that he would always feel that I had killed our mother.

Whether or not he was right, he had the power of his cherished conviction about that. It would always be his best weapon against me.

I got up from the desk and poured myself a small glass of the lovely, thick, tawny port that Livvy had UP ISLAND / 243

brought over from Boston; Portuguese port from the Duoro River region, she had told me. It tasted like smoke and honey going down. I brought the glass back to the desk and sipped at it as I dialed Missy Carmichael.

Missy hooted at the idea of me in the cabin on the pond all winter, with my ill and eccentric entourage, but she favored the idea all the same.

“It’ll sound divine to a jury,” she purred. “You living in a freezing hovel far away because you can’t afford to come home, especially at Christmas. I can make hell’s own amount of hay with that.”

The trial. How could I have forgotten about the trial? It did not seem real at all.

“Any idea when that will be?” I said. The whole notion made me more tired than I thought possible. I slumped in my chair.

“Well, it’s funny,” Missy said. “Tee’s beating around the bush about the trial. He’s missed the last two meetings with us; she’s always there, breathing fire and brimstone, but he just…hasn’t shown. I don’t know why, and I don’t think she does, either. It sounds to me as if she doesn’t know where he is a good bit of the time. He sure ain’t taking my calls. I finally called the Eel Woman at the office to try to get some answers. She blew me right out of the water. Meaner than fresh cat shit these days, no doubt about that. But it doesn’t look like she can do anything with him any more than we can. I can’t help but wonder if he’s having second thoughts.

If I were him, I’d be afraid to tell that woman I had any doubts, either; hand you your balls back, she would. So the answer to your question is, I don’t know. You’ll eventually have to come home, but not for a while at this rate.

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You’ll stay with me when you do, of course. Oh, and that little geisha at your bank called and Tee’s first payment to your new account has come in. She didn’t know how to call you, so she asked me to let you know. You can draw on it whenever you want to. You probably ought to open yourself an account up there, if you’re serious about staying. It would show good intent if you did.”

I did not know how I felt about Tee’s wishy-washiness. I found that I could not fit any possible change of heart on his part into any scenario for the future I could imagine, so I dealt with it by simply not thinking about it. I buried it deep, along with all the other flotsam and jetsam of this awful summer. I would take it out and look at it later, when it might make more sense. I asked Missy to send some of my winter clothes, and hung up, feeling more rootless and suspended than ever. I took an apple and went over and walked on South Beach, thinking the sunset and the fresh wind might dispel some of the murk in my head. But the sun had slipped behind a great bank of silver-shot gray clouds in the southwest to die, and the sea had turned a terrible, beautiful, flashing pewter, all motion and coldness. When the lone family left on the beach packed up their things and disappeared over the dunes to their car, I fairly flew to the Jeep and drove back to Livvy’s. Aloneness had turned into a great, personal thing that stalked me like a panther.

The phone was ringing as I came into the kitchen, and I grabbed it up as if it were a lifeline thrown into black water.

Any voice, any voice at all…

It was Livvy. Caleb was working late and she wanted to talk. I could tell that she had had one and perhaps more of her sundown glasses of wine. I

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poured myself more of her port and settled in to listen. Her voice warmed me, like the liquor going down. In all the strangeness around me, Livvy seemed as palpable as if she sat in the room. She told me the news of our set, which made no more sense to me than if she spoke of a group of abori-gines she had read about, and then said that Caleb had told her that the gossip around the office was that Sheri Scroggins was living in my house in Ansley Park. Tee, she said, was almost never in town anymore, but she supposed that he had installed her there.

“Even she wouldn’t dare, unless he had,” Livvy said. “You’ll probably have to pry her off your rug like a tick. I wonder if they plan on just letting you find her there when you come home? Speaking of which, have you made any plans yet? I don’t care how long you stay up there, but the pipes will freeze eventually, and people are asking me. Carrie Davies, that chalice of all that is fine and fair in Southern woman-hood—oh, all right, I know she was your sainted roommate—called me last night wanting to know. She hemmed and hawed and finally let drop that poor old Lazarus is driving her crazy. Says he has a certain doggy odor, and I gather he licks his balls—not that Carrie would say so, of course. I’d take him but I’m going with Caleb to Chicago for a youth brands conference, and then we thought we might go up to Mackinac Island for a week or ten days. Kind of a second honeymoon.”

She giggled, and I smiled into the empty room. I was glad things were still good with Livvy and Caleb. My poison hadn’t found its mark, then.

It was only after I hung up that I realized I had not told her of my decision to stay here. I could not think why I had not.

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I called Carrie Davies. Listening to her piping treble chiming through its scale, I wondered why I had never noticed what a shrill voice she had. Livvy had once said Carrie sounded like a hedgehog looked like it ought to sound, “all tiggywinklish.” I had defended Carrie, but now I saw what Livvy had meant. Carrie and Atlanta seemed as far away as the dark side of Uranus.

“It might be a while before I can get back,” I said to her finally, when she had run down. I had no intention of telling her my plans yet. “I know Lazarus can be a little much. Could you or Charlie take him to the Ansley Animal Clinic until Dad or I get home? Dr. Newman knows him. He’s boarded him before.”

“Well, of course,” Carrie said, the alacrity of deliverance clear in her voice. “Maybe that would be better. He’s really pining for you, I think. He howls a lot. Oh, here he comes; listen, Lazarus, here’s your mommy. Say something, Molly…”

“Hey, big dog,” I said into the telephone, feeling foolish, and was rewarded with a long, mournful howl.

My heart literally cramped with pain and homesickness for him. Here at last was reality.

“Carrie, do you think Charlie could possibly put him on a plane up here for me?” I said, wondering why I had not thought of it until now. Of course, that was what the camp and the glade called out for: Lazarus. Big, goofy, clumsy, loving Lazarus. The swans would just have to work it out.

“I guess so,” she said doubtfully, seeing her imminent deliverance seeping away. “Ah…when would you want him?”

“Can you give me a week?”

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There was a silence, and then she said, warmly, “Sure.

What’s a week between me and this old guy? You know, it’s Tee who really ought to be taking care of him, but the way he’s acting, I wouldn’t let him take care of an iguana. Did anybody tell you that he’s moved that little hussy into your house? I guess I shouldn’t tell you, but I think you’ve got the right to know…”