Up Island (43 page)

“I wish I could have, too.”

“There’s something of her in you. Something of her like she was then, I mean. I told you that the first day, didn’t I?

Physically, I mean. There’s no similarity in any other way.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“I know.”

His eyes drifted shut again, and I took Lazarus and went back to the little camp. I felt heavy and thick, freighted with a hopeless sadness, but under it was the beginning of elation.

He had let me come close tonight. For just a moment, he had opened a door….

“Looks like it’s going to be a pretty night,” my father said when I came into the kitchen. “Why don’t UP ISLAND / 371

we go out for dinner? There’s a spot I keep hearing about.

We ought to try it out before another blizzard hits.”

The Red Cat Restaurant sat in the brilliant snow beside the state road in West Tisbury. After the empty, moon-washed snowscape we had traveled through, it looked like the conflu-ence of all the lights and warmth and human companionship in the world. Cars and trucks and all-terrain vehicles were parked around it, and I could hear a little surf of rock music, thumping and cheerful, when I opened the door of the truck.

All of a sudden I could hardly wait to get inside, to be part of a community again, even one unknown to me. I felt like a child going to a party, shy and awkward, but with a small fountain of secret glee in my stomach.

“I had no idea I’d missed this so much,” I said to my father.

“Missed what?”

“Lights. People. Just going out to dinner.”

“It ain’t Buckhead.”

I laughed.

“Right now it looks better to me than the Ritz.”

We went in to the low, rambling, warm-lit building and were ushered to a table in a corner. On the way to it my father nodded to a couple of tables where men and women sat, and they smiled and nodded back. One of the men was pouring something from a paper sack, and he lifted the sack and said, “Evening, Tim.”

“Ready for a game sometime soon?” another said.

“Any time,” my father said.

It struck me that the men and women looked much as we did, or vice versa: ranging from young middle age to the sturdy elderly, bundled into parkas and scarves and caps or dressed in sweaters and

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turtlenecks and wool pants. Most wore boots. All looked healthy and weathered and simply glad, like us, to be out at the Red Cat on a snowy night.

“We could almost pass, couldn’t we?” I said to my father as we sat down.

“Wouldn’t miss it far,” he said. He pulled a paper sack from the pocket of his jacket and put it on the table.

“Would madame like a cocktail before dinner?”

We sat and sipped the Macallan and I took a long, fussily elaborate time choosing from the menu. I loved this place and this night. I wanted to prolong it as much as possible. I finally decided on lamb shanks in red wine and sat back and drank some more of the Macallan.

“You could get drunk just from the sheer excitement of being with people, couldn’t you?” I said.

“You could get drunk quicker on that stuff,” he said mildly.

“Don’t you go getting cabin fever on me, and turning into a deep-woods lush. I can’t have you dancing on tables here.”

We talked lightly of things that did not seem to matter much, just for the sensation of doing such a wonderfully ordinary thing as making small talk in a restaurant. But finally we fell silent.

“I think Dennis may be thinking about killing himself,” I heard myself say and gasped aloud. I had not known I thought that.

“Why do you say that?” my father asked. He did not seem shocked.

“I don’t know, exactly. He’s not going back to the hospital for any more surgery, you know. And he won’t know for a while if this chemo is working. I don’t know what the chances are of that, and he isn’t about to tell me. I know a recurrence isn’t good. But

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he said he had painkillers and sleeping pills, and that he would make up his mind how to use them if he needed them.

Those were almost his words. It just now struck me that that’s what he might have been talking about.”

“Does it shock you? Scare you?” my father asked.

I thought about that.

“It doesn’t shock me, I don’t guess. But I hate the idea. I just hate it, Daddy. A man as young as he is, with such gifts, with so much to live for…”

“Maybe he doesn’t think he’s got so much to live for,” my father said. “He’s lost his wife and his daughter and his job and his leg. He’s estranged from all his people. He’s had a good bit of pain and there may be more coming. You can sort of see his point—”

“Daddy! I can’t believe you’re saying this about Dennis!

He’s your friend; you act almost like he’s a son sometimes…”

“I won’t wish bad pain on any man, Molly,” he said. “I know about that. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, and I certainly am not going to wish it on Dennis. You’re right; he is my friend. Only he knows what his limit is. If he reaches it, I hope I can be there with him, but I’m not going to stop him.”

“You knew he had this in his mind…”

“I knew it was an option with him, yes. There are others, some that I don’t think he can see yet. I hope I can help him do that. If I can’t…”

“If you can’t, then you’ll help him die. Is that it?”

He looked away and shook his head.

“Molly, there are just some things you don’t know about.

You haven’t lived long enough to get to them yet. Not enough has happened to you. Let’s drop this. It’s Dennis’s business.”

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“Oh, Daddy…hasn’t there been enough death?” I said.

“When you get to be my age, it seems like there’s never enough death,” he said bleakly. “There’s always more in the trough, just waiting. You can’t stop it. The best you can do is try to deal with it decently.”

“And helping a man commit suicide is decent? Oh, Lord, I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m spoiling this night for you,” I said guiltily. “I promise to shut up about things I can’t change. I love being here with you. I’d rather be here right now than anywhere in the world I can think of.”

“You’re some kind of daughter, Molly,” he said. “Some kind of woman, come to that. Don’t ever stop talking to me about what’s on your mind.”

“Sometimes I think we ought to just go on and jump in and talk about Mother,” I said. “And I start to bring it up, and then I just can’t. Are you waiting for me to do it?”

“No. I thought I’d be able to do it up here, in a place she wasn’t part of, but so far I can’t. It’s like she’s
too
far away.

I can’t feel her. Maybe I’ll have to go back home to do that.

I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time for that…”

“No, don’t. Not yet,” I said. “Please stay. Stay until spring.

Until we know about Dennis. I don’t think I could go through…and what about the swans? You can’t leave the swans…”

He smiled at me, an amused smile like the ones he had sometimes given me when I was a child.

“Molly, I have to go home sometime. You do, too, as far as that goes.”

“Why? I can’t see one reason on earth why either one of us should go back to Atlanta right now. Not one.”

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“Because it’s home,” he said. “Because it’s what we have.

Because it’s what we are as well as where. It’s where all our context is. It’s where everything we have left is.”

“There’s nothing left there for me,” I said. “Tee’s gone.

Caroline is gone. Teddy’s as good as gone. You’re talking about finding a place out in the country. What’s left there for me?”

“Oh, Molly,” he sighed, and put his hand over mine. It was weather-chapped from his ice-breaking, and callused from the carpentry jobs around the camp. It felt as warm as a hot-water bottle. I squeezed it.

“Don’t you know you’re more than the sum of other people?” he said. “If you don’t know that by now, what’s it going to take?”

“All my life that’s what I’ve been,” I said. “I can’t just change now.”

“I think you can and you’d better,” my father said.

We were finishing our dinner—the lamb shanks were rich and melting, cooked with tomatoes and wine and caramelized onions—when a woman came over to our table and stopped.

She had fair hair and was small and stocky, dressed in a Fair Isle pullover and gray stretch pants, and her face was tanned and pleasant. Her eyes were clear and pale; there was something about them…

“Excuse me, but aren’t you Mrs. Redwine?” she said.

I nodded.

“I’m Patricia Norton,” she said. “I’m Dennis Ponder’s second cousin once removed, or something, and Bella is my some kind of aunt. I just wanted to say that we all appreciate so much what you’re doing for Denny and Aunt Bella and Luzia. We’ve been terribly

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concerned about them, but we haven’t been able to do much for them. I guess you know by now that we don’t see them, or vice versa. It makes it hard to know what to do.”

“Please sit down,” my father said. “I’m Tim Bell, Molly’s father. I could have told you were some kin to Dennis. You’ve got the eyes.”

I saw that she did, those ice-gray eyes that startled.

She laughed. “The Ponder eyes. We all look like we can see through solid rock. Straight through the dirt down to hell, my grandmother Ponder used to say. That was Dennis’s grandmother, too, his father’s mother. A grim old Gorgon if ever there was one born. She hated seeing those eyes in that wild little Portuguese face of Denny’s, when he was little.

They were the only thing about him that said Ponder, but they said it loud and clear. She couldn’t pretend he wasn’t at least half hers.”

“Please sit,” I said. “It’s such a relief to meet some of Dennis and Bella’s people. We’ve been wondering who to contact about them. Things aren’t very good with any of them. So far we can handle it, but I don’t know how long we’ll be able to, and we don’t have the authority to get any sort of official help for them…”

She sat, and ran her hands through her short hair in a gesture of annoyance and frustration; I think women everywhere on the planet do it. My own thatch often stood up in spikes from a similar gesture.

“You shouldn’t have to. We’re all embarrassed that two nice strangers are having to deal with our own. I was going to come down and talk to you about them when the weather cleared, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. I should have done it before.

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Tell me about them. I can tell the others. We’ll think of something.”

I told her what I knew of Dennis Ponder’s plight, and of Bella and Luzia’s. Her face softened with real grief. She was, I thought, a pretty woman, though you didn’t see that at first.

There was something about her of Livvy, something strong, something that would endure. I thought I would like to have her for a friend. If I had been going to stay up island, that is.

“Oh, it’s such a mess,” she said. “It all started with Grandma Serena. I don’t know where all that spite and bile and hate came from, but it corroded the whole family. There wasn’t anybody in it that she didn’t spill it over. Grandpa Ethan just plain went to sea and never came back because of it; she didn’t know for a year or two whether he was dead, or just gone. When she found out he was dead, she didn’t miss a step. She had little Ethan, after all. Denny’s father. By the time he got away from her and over to America, to Harvard, he was just like her, colder than a dead mackerel and meaner than cat manure. I think he married Bella just to spite his mother. If there was anything Grandma Serena hated worse than the Portuguese, I don’t know what it was. And none of us ever knew why; she would just say that they were shiftless and sly and lazy and low class, and would steal you blind if you didn’t watch it. Most of us think the only stealing any Portuguese ever did to Grandma was Grandpa Ethan.

He spent an awful lot of time around the Azores. Well, anyway, at the end of his junior year here comes Ethan home with this tall, beautiful creature with Portuguese written all over her, and a waitress in a restaurant at that. Grandma started in on Bella the day she got off the ferry. It
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didn’t take Ethan but two or three years to get tired of his little joke and cut out for who knows where, but by that time there was Denny, and I guess Bella just couldn’t think how to get him out from under Grandma’s hate any other way than to send him off island to her people. That finished him with Grandma. She wrote him out of her will the day Bella shipped him off. None of the famous Ponder land was going to end up with any Portuguese, no sir. Of course, it did anyway, in the end. But it went to Bella, not Denny. I think Grandma’s probably still spinning over that. By that time Bella had turned into…what she is now. She wanted none of us and nothing from us. I can’t say I really blame her, considering how Grandma and Big Ethan treated her and Denny. But the rest of us would have liked to make amends, only she wouldn’t let any of us near her. I can’t imagine why she’s stayed all these years, just her and poor little old Luzia.

I was hoping to get to know Denny a little, though, only from what you say there may not be time…oh, what a mess it all is! Nobody can hurt each other like family, can they?”

“No,” I said past the knot in my throat. Poor old woman, ossified into her bitterness like a corroding statue. Poor Dennis, dying of a coldness next to the bone…

“It was you who plowed us out, wasn’t it? And left the soup and the apples?” my father said, smiling at Patricia Norton. “And plowed out Bella and Luz?”

She grinned back, and nodded.

“I’ve got a little plow on my Cherokee. I’ve been plowing the ladies out every winter since I married Tom Norton and his Jeep. She thinks the county does it, or I think she’d pile the snow back over the road. I

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know she doesn’t eat the food I leave, but I keep hoping Luz sneaks some of it. Now that I’ve met you, though, maybe we can figure out some way to get them all some help, and get some of the burden off you. I’ll call a war council of the others over the weekend.”

“Let’s wait a while,” my father said. “All of them are pretty weak, and it’s just so damned cold. I don’t want to stir things up just yet. Let’s try to go on like we are until early spring.