Up Island (47 page)

Dennis’s yard. I got out and went softly up the steps; he would undoubtedly still be working in his bedroom, and I did not want to talk to him this night. I would just open the front door and whistle for Lazarus.

But Dennis was sitting on his sofa before a leaping fire, sipping Scotch and listening to
Nabucco,
and Lazarus was lying on the sofa beside him with his head in Dennis’s lap.

I stared at them, suddenly wanting to strangle both my traitorous dog and the man who had lured him away from me. Dennis and Lazarus stared back at me.

Dennis had recently shaved, something he seldom did in the evenings. His thin face had a shine to it, of fresh-shaven skin, and just the tiniest wash of color—or perhaps it was only stained by the fire. Whatever it was, he looked better than I had seen him for a long while. He wore the red jacquard sweater that I liked, and khaki corduroy pants which, if they were too large, did not look it because of the enveloping sweater.

“You look like you’re going out on the town,” I said, purely for something to say. “What’s the occasion?”

“I don’t know,” he said, still looking hard at me. “All of a sudden I realized I hadn’t shaved in two days, and hadn’t bathed in more than that. It struck me that cabin fever had set in. I don’t think I’ve looked up from that manuscript for a week.”

“Is it going well?”

He jerked his head impatiently.

“I really don’t know, or care much, right now. It hit me suddenly that what the world really needs now is a pompous treatise on boys from a man who only UP ISLAND / 407

knows about them because he’s afraid of girls. I guess it’s been my night for epiphanies.”

“How you know about them doesn’t matter, only that you do,” I said. “I thought it was a wonderful idea. You can’t mean you’re going to stop—”

He held up his hand and I fell silent. One unwritten rule we had was that I did not ask him about his work.

“Right now I’m more interested in you. It’s like I haven’t really seen you for weeks. What in hell is the matter with you? You look like you’ve been whupped through hell with a buzzard gut, to quote a housekeeper from Mississippi my wife once hired.”

My eyes flooded with tears, and a great, cold salt lump came into my throat. I turned away, afraid I was going to cry in front of Dennis Ponder and loathing the idea.

“Molly, turn around here,” he said, and I did.

“How long has it been since you’ve had any sleep?” he said slowly. “What’s going on over there? What’s happening to you?”

I shook my head mutely, and he reached over and got the Scotch bottle and poured some into his empty glass and handed it to me. He gestured for me to sit down. I sat as if I had been a child bidden to do so. Laz lifted his head, thumped his tail, and went back to sleep.

I took a gulp of the Scotch.

“I didn’t mean to just walk in on you,” I said. “I was on my way back from the farmhouse and I remembered Laz was still here. I was just going to whistle for him. I can’t have him just living over here.”

“You didn’t disturb me. I thought you might come by. I was ready for some conversation, I guess. But it
408 / Anne Rivers Siddons

looks more like you’re ready for some sleep. Is it Tim? Are you worried about Tim? I knew he hadn’t been by, but I thought he was letting me work, like you’ve been doing.”

The Scotch burned in my stomach. It felt wonderful.

Something loosened just a hitch.

“I am worried about him,” I said. “He’s not sleeping…”

And I went on to tell him about my father’s deepening depression since Charles and Di were no longer on the pond, and about his terrible nighttime sleeplessness and his days spent in exhausted slumber, and the conviction he had that my mother would come to him in his dreams if only he could sleep at night.

“He’s even moved her hat upstairs to his room. He sits and stares at it,” I said. “He’s nobody I know, Dennis. And the old ladies…”

I fell silent. We weren’t to talk about his mother and Luz, either, unless he initiated the conversation. That was another rule.

“Tell me,” he said, and so I did. I finished with the quarrel and my stalking out of the house without reading to them, and how ashamed I felt about that, and how worried I was about both of them. He said nothing, only stared at me.

“There’s more, isn’t there? You’re not sleeping. Why not?”

So I told him about the nightly dreams in which my mother raged and stormed at me from her subterranean barred cave, and about the terrible feeling I had that she wanted something from me, but I could not understand what it was.

“The dreams happen in the very middle of the night, so that when I do get back to sleep, it’s dawn and I have to get right up again,” I said. The warmth of UP ISLAND / 409

the Scotch was loosening my limbs pleasantly, and my head felt sinuously furry. “And by the time I go up to read to the old women and get their suppers and clean up, I can hardly move.”

He frowned.

“Tim was doing that, wasn’t he?”

“He hasn’t been, for two or three weeks. Almost since Di was killed and Charles left. He sleeps in the daytime, Dennis.

I can’t bear to bother him about the old ladies.”

“So you just go ahead and do it. Christ, Molly. How long do you think you can keep that shit up?”

“I don’t know. I guess until something changes, one way or the other.”

I flushed. I did not want him to think I meant until he took a turn for the worse, or died, or until one of the old women did. He grinned briefly.

“Well, we’ve got to get you some help. What would help most?”

“I think…being able to sleep through the night. Just that.

Oh, Dennis…
What on earth does she want from me?”

It was literally a cry, torn out of a part of me that I did not know was so close to the surface. I was shocked at my own vehemence.

Dennis considered for a long time. And then he said,

“Maybe she just wants her hat back.”

We looked at each other for a long moment, and then I spit a mouthful of Scotch into the fire-warm air and began to laugh. In a moment he did, too. In the blink of an eye we were laughing so hard that neither of us could get our breaths, and long, wheezing gasps punctuated the insane laughter in the living room. And still we laughed.

410 / Anne Rivers Siddons

Just as suddenly something inside me burst and I began to cry. I cried and cried. I sobbed and strangled and howled aloud like a woman at the Wailing Wall; sounds came out of me that I did not know a woman could make. I gagged and retched and wept some more, and struggled for breath, only to begin to cry again. He sat watching me for a moment, then he moved over on the sofa and put his arms around me and held me while I cried. He did not pat me, or whisper that it would be all right, or offer me a handkerchief. He just held me.

It was a long time before the awful, primitive sounds stopped long enough for me to gasp out, “I hate her! I hate her with all my heart! And I hate him! First she left me—she did that a long time ago, before she finally did it for good, and I hate her for all those times—and then he left me, too!

I knew she would do it eventually, and I finally got used to the fact that Tee did it, but Daddy…he was never supposed to leave me! He was never supposed to do that!”

“Oh, Molly,” he said finally. “He hasn’t left you. He’s just…out of touch right now.”

“You haven’t seen him,” I wept. “You don’t know…”

“I know what depression is like. I know that. I went that route right after the first surgery, when I knew that I would have to leave the school and come home to my mama because I didn’t have a penny left to my name. No family, no job, no money, no leg, and no future…I was a mess. I slept all day and stared at the television all night. I was afraid to live and afraid that I was going to die. I was afraid to go to sleep. I was paralyzed in more ways than one. I literally couldn’t move. It’s a terrible thing. There isn’t anything worse. I know that. I’ll look in on Tim tomorrow. See what I can do.”

UP ISLAND / 411

“You don’t feel that way now, though,” I said, heaving myself up out of his arms and mopping my face. I felt as hollowed out and as light as a balloon, a dummy of a woman.

“No. It’s funny. Now I seem to be able to function only right in the moment, like a small child. Just in the day I’m in. I guess it’s the not knowing…what’s going to happen. If I knew one way or the other, I think I’d be depressed, or terrified, or angry, or whatever. It’s why I’ve refused to go back to the doctor, I think. But lately I’ve just been sort of…focused inside myself. Time to come out now though, I think. Past time.”

He reached over and pushed the damp hair off my hot face. I could not even imagine how terrible I must look. But he smiled.

“Nobody’s being good to you, are they?” he said. “Not for a long time, if they ever were. Nobody’s taking care of you.

It’s all the other way around.”

“It’s okay. I don’t usually mind—”

“I mind. We’re going to do something now just for you.

Something absolutely wacko and off-the-wall. Oh, hell, it’s for me, too, of course. You up to an adventure?”

“What?”

“I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to show you. You’ll have to do some of it. First, I want you to go out to the shed and get the sled. You remember? Will you do that?”

“Dennis…we aren’t going sledding in the middle of the night!”

“Go get the sled. Are you a total wimp?”

“No,” I said, suddenly filled with gaiety that bordered on giddiness. The iron fatigue had lifted. I was floating on Scotch and release.

412 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“I’m no more wimp than you are! I’ll show you who’s a wimp!”

I raced out of the cottage and around back to the shed where the sled still lay, silent and grimy beneath the tarpaulin.

Overhead the moon rode high like a white schooner, and the earth leaped and blazed with light from it, and the stars, and the reflection off the deep-creamed snow. My boots scrunched as I hauled the sled around the side of the cottage, and snow flew in little silvery puffs from the laden branches of the evergreens when I knocked against them. The air was cold and so dry that it felt like ginger ale in my lungs. It smelled of cold salt and pine and the peculiar, wet-blue smell of snow at night. I drew in great gulps of it, as if I could never get enough. By the time I reached the porch, I was giggling.

He was dressed and waiting for me. He wore his parka and a scarf and gloves and a dark watch cap like the scallop fishermen who went out of Menemsha wore, and his teeth and the whites of his eyes flashed in the shadow of the porch.

He had one crutch and he was leaning on Lazarus with his other hand. I moved up to help him, but he motioned me away.

“I can do it,” he said. “We’ve been practicing.”

And he put his hand on Lazarus’s back, then together they inched down the steps, Dennis holding on and hopping, Laz carefully taking his weight, waiting until he felt it full before going down another step. They managed the steps and stood beside me in quite a short time. I felt tears prickle again.

“He’s a good dog,” Dennis said. “I’d forgotten what it was like to have a good dog.”

I don’t remember precisely how we made it down the path to the dock and up the hill beyond it, but we UP ISLAND / 413

did, slipping and sliding and laughing. Sometimes Dennis leaned on me and sometimes on Laz, and sometimes he was able to manage with just the crutch. By the time we gained the crest of the long, smooth, snowy hill, we were both panting. I felt my cheeks flaming with exertion and laughter, and I saw the flags of color in his. We stood together silently for a time, looking down the long swoop of white gleaming under the moon, out over the blue and white and black pond and the glittering Sound beyond it, wrapped in the quilted silence that a snowfall gives to the world. I don’t think I have ever seen anything lovelier than that night of late snow and moonlight up island. It still burns silver and black sometimes, when I close my eyes.

“Okay,” he said presently. “This is how we’ll have to do it.

I don’t think it’ll be too hard on you. We’ll get the sled right there on the very edge of the slope, and I’ll lie down on it, and you run along behind, pushing, and then, when it takes the crest, you just belly-flop down on top of me.”

“Dennis, I’ll mash you to a pulp! I must outweigh you by twenty pounds.”

“Not anymore,” he said. “Come on, Molly. That’s the way everybody does it when they want to go two on a sled. You won’t hurt me. I’ve got a ton of clothes on.”

And that’s what we did. We maneuvered the sled to the lip of the hill that ran steeply down to the verge of the pond, and he lay down on it on his stomach, with Lazarus dancing and barking beside him in the snow. I took a deep breath, and reached down and put my hands on the back of the sled and gave a tentative push. Nothing happened.

414 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“Give it everything you’ve got,” he shouted, and I pushed with all my might, and the sled shot forward, creaking on the snow, and I bounded after it, and half-leaped, half-fell on top of him as it shot off down the hill.

Somewhere halfway down, in the cold rush of the wind and the flying, stinging spume of snow, I became aware that I was laughing and crying at the same time. My ears were full of the
whushhh
of the sled’s runners and Dennis’s laughter and Lazarus’s manic barking as he capered and floundered and slid after us. As soon as the tears left my lower lids, they froze on my cheeks and hot, new ones took their place. I did not care. I was not crying for grief, but for joy. This was what it was, then, to be airborne. This was what it was to be free.

The sled flew down the last sharp segment of the hill and shot out on to level ground and down to the edge of the pond, and hit the ruff of reeds where Charles and Di used to lurk, snow-mounded now, and turned over, toppling us both off into deep, soft snow. I fetched up, lying directly atop him, struggling for breath, hair in my eyes, laughing, laughing.

His face was directly beneath mine, but I did not realize it until I felt his breath warm on it and realized that he was laughing, too. He reached around me and pushed the hair out of my eyes, and I lay looking down at him.