Colony (12 page)

“I know,” Amy said, settling down on the blanket she’d brought for us and tossing her sketch pad aside. “There’s precious little to laugh at in Retreat if you’re young and female and you don’t happen to adore counting out the grape shears once a week. You have to make your own things that tickle you. But now you’re here, I don’t have to go around pretending I know what all the old women look like naked dancing the Charleston. We can laugh with each other. I have a feeling we’re going to do a hell of a lot of sketching.”

“Suits me,” I said, grinning at the image of my rock-corseted mother-in-law doing a wild naked dance. “I’m awful at sketching, anyway.”

“Me too,” Amy said. “It just gets me out of the house regularly. I always pretend I’ve got an important work in progress so I don’t have to show anybody what I’ve been doing. I think Parker’s poor mother thinks I’m getting ready for a one-woman show. She keeps talking about ‘dear Amy’s art.’ ”

“What will you do when she thinks the time has come for that?” I said.

“Lie again. Tell her I’ve decided I’m really not far enough along with it and need another year, at least. She won’t know the difference. She’s got too much on her hands with Mamadear and Parker’s father.”

“Is he ill?”

“Nope. Drinks like a fish. Mother Potter has to collect him off the lawn and haul him up to bed at least twice a week, and she lives in terror of what he’ll do at cocktail parties. He got bounced out of the Maidstone Club for peeing in the punch bowl.”

I rolled over onto my side, limp with laughter. I simply could not help it. This gentle, biddable girl, with her cloud of fine, dark hair and her piquant dimple, had a rebel heart the twin of my own and had found a way to live here on her own terms. In that instant I loved her like the sister I had never had. Then I wondered if she knew about her own Parker’s drinking and stopped laughing. I thought, on the main, that she did not. She could not have been so cavalier about his father’s, if she had.

“I wonder how long it’s going to take me before I can handle all this as well as you,” I said. “I’m never really going to be an insider here. I’m never going to be part of the young-wife-lovely-girl-happy-caretaker thing. At least you were born to that.”

“Yes,” she said, “but it doesn’t mean I’m good at it. I can’t play tennis either. I don’t give a diddly squat if Parker wins the Chowder Race or not. I couldn’t care less if the silver tea service down at the clubhouse turns black as basalt. Imagine, a silver service in a one-room clapboard shack in the wilds of Maine.”

She turned to me, and her face was serious.

“Two things, Maude, that you need to do. I’m not kidding, now. They’ll be the saving of you here, until you’re finally old enough to sit on the porch at the yacht club and boss everybody else around. Develop a chronic condition of some sort. Mine is migraines; at least once a month, and oftener if I need to, I get a migraine and go to bed and shut the door and read for three days. It’s wonderful. And who’s know I don’t have them? You can’t see a migraine. I read up on the symptoms at the library after my first summer here. Now all I need to do is say something about an aura, and everyone packs me off to bed and leaves me strictly alone until I come out. I don’t think you could get away with migraine, and I know Lolly Knox has dibs on cramps. I’ve been thinking, though; allergies might do for you. There’s a girl at home who has them so badly to lots of things that she has to go to bed for days. You could suddenly become allergic to firs or shellfish or something.”

“You mean other girls up here do that? Fake an illness to get away? Lie?”

“That’s the other thing you need to learn,” Amy said. “To lie like a bandit. Lie like a rug. Otherwise they’ll eat you alive.”

She wasn’t kidding; I looked closely to see.

“I don’t have any problem with that,” I said finally. “Except that I can’t lie to Peter, of course.”

She looked at me for a moment and then looked away to the horizon. Her light brown eyes were the color of sherry, fringed with long, thick, gold-tipped lashes. She really was lovely.

“Your husband is the most important person you’ll ever learn to lie to,” she said.

I said nothing. I was not shocked, particularly, but I felt a heavy sadness, a kind of weariness of soul. I wished with all my heart that this ardent, generous girl did not have a husband to whom it was necessary to lie. But then, I thought, if you were married to Parker you’d undoubtedly find yourself lying without meaning to. Hadn’t I already lied to protect him, on the very first day I had known him? Thank God I would never lie to Peter; I would never need to.

“Tell me about this beach,” I said. “Whose house is that way up there on the point, which you can barely see through the trees? What’s that little island out there called?”

“The house belongs to the Fowlers,” she said. “From somewhere in Vermont, I think. It’s called the Aerie. I don’t know anything at all about them; they never go to any cocktail parties or anywhere else, and I don’t think I’ve ever even seen her. She’s got some kind of chronic illness for real, but I don’t know what. It all sounds very mysterious and romantic. He’s very protective of her; stays by her side literally all the time. They’ve been coming here for years and years, Parker says, and almost nobody knows them. They don’t have any children, and apparently he does nothing but clip stock coupons and tend to her. I’d love to see that house; it faces its own little cove around the point that’s supposed to have the best view on Cape Rosier. But I don’t guess I ever will. Their property starts at the edge of our beach down there, and he’s adamant about anyone setting foot on it, much less coming up to the house. Has it posted, even. He called the town South Brooksville police once when a gang of colony kids sneaked halfway up his hill.”

“Are they old?” I said.

“I suppose so,” she said. “At least, he looks kind of old.

Thin and stooped and always a little sad. I see him sometimes at the general store, or at the market in Castine when I take Mother Potter there.”

“I don’t know but what I envy them,” I said. “Her, especially. I’ll bet she never has to count the damned damask if she doesn’t want to. What about that island down there?

The little one?”

She turned to follow my pointing finger, and said, “That’s Osprey Head. There’s been at least one osprey’s nest there ever since Parker was little. He took me over and showed me, the first summer after we were married. It’s right there above that—oh, God. There’s a dog down there in the water.”

“Oh…where?”

“There, just below the ledge right down below us. Oh, Lord, Maude, it’s trapped in a crack and can’t get out of the water, it’s…no, it’s a fawn! Oh, my God, poor little thing!

Look, I think its leg is caught, it’s struggling so.”

I was on my feet and at the lip of the ledge in an instant.

There, in the foaming white surf where the bay swept up into a narrow cleft in the lowest ledge, a small fawn struggled in the water, desperately trying to keep its drenched head out of the eddy. I could tell, from the way it was positioned, that a tiny foreleg was wedged into the rock. I did not think at all. I jumped up and stepped out of my shoes and was down the rock face and onto the lowest ledge before Amy could even scramble to her feet.

“Maude,” she screamed, “come back! You’ll fall; the under-tow is awful there! Please come back; I’ll go get somebody….”

I flung myself down onto my stomach and reached as far down as I could toward the little shape. Spray stung my face and soaked my head and shoulders. It was incredibly cold, like being whipped with tiny iced lashes. I could not reach the fawn. For an instant its head came up and it looked straight into my eyes.

There was no fear in its huge brown eyes, only a kind of terrible, intense, focused innerness. It was the will to survive as naked and pure as I have ever seen it. I saw the place where the miniature leg vanished in the cleft of the rock; there was no way it could free itself. I saw, too, that beneath it a pale shelf of rock lay flat, like a platform, just beneath the transparent green surface. If it could only stand on that…or if I could….

“Amy,” I shouted, “go get help. Go get somebody with a rope or something. I’m going in after it. There’s a rock I can stand on—”

“No!” she shrieked. “Don’t go in there! People drown in that cold before they even know it!”

“Go!” I screamed, and went over the ledge and into the sea.

At first it was like plunging into fire. My skin burned with it. And then the cold hit, and breath left me, and I clung there rib deep, thinking I would never get another breath, would die of suffocation before drowning was even possible. And then the fawn gave a tiny, despairing bleat and I clung to the ledge and reached out my hand for it and touched it. It scrambled and thrashed in terror at my touch, so tiny that I could feel each birdlike rib, and the little triphammer beating of its heart. It must be incredibly tired…. I edged farther along the ledge toward it, and finally found secure footholds against the dragging tide and reached out and put my hand beneath its belly, so that it was borne up on my palm. Instantly, with a kind of shuddering sigh, it stopped its struggling and slumped against my hand. Its breathing was ragged and deep, almost a pant. It could not possibly have kept afloat much longer.

I tried to find the point where its leg entered the crevice, but my other hand was so numb with cold that I could feel nothing at all. Then I realized I could not feel my feet, either.

And it was becoming hard to

breathe. How long had I heard that a person could live in extremely cold water? Not long…it suddenly occurred to me that I truly might die if I did not get out of that water. And that I could not get out unless I let go of the fawn. And then, that perhaps I could not get out even if I did. With all feeling gone, I did not know where my toe and handholds were. I had no recourse but to cling to the ledge and the fawn and pray that Amy brought help fast. I could no longer hear her retreating cries.

Oddly, I do not remember being frightened. Not nearly so frightened, at any rate, as I had been earlier that week, on Parker’s boat. I can remember whispering Peter’s name, over and over, and saying to the fawn once or twice, “I’m here.

I’m not going to let you go,” and seeing it look back and up at me before its head dropped again. I remember thinking that I had always rather thought somehow that I would lie one day beside my mother in Saint Michael’s churchyard, and that if I drowned off this lonely cape they might never find me at all. And a little later, I remember thinking that I was not cold at all any more, and that since I wasn’t, this wasn’t so bad and I could hang on indefinitely.

“We’re going to be fine,” I whispered to the fawn. It was probably the last thing I would have said to anyone.

I was very nearly unconscious when I felt hard, strong arms under my arms from above and heard a deep, nasal voice that was not Peter’s saying, “Just a minute now. Hang on, dear. Just a minute more.”

“Take the fawn,” I whispered through numb lips. “Take the fawn….”

“I’ve got it,” the voice said, and the weight lifted off my hand, and in a moment more the arms pulled me straight up out of that killing cold and onto the top of the rock ledge. A heavy blanket went around

me, though I could not feel warmth or anything else. Blackness flickered at the edges of my closed eyelids, and I knew it was going to take me down. I felt myself being swung up into someone’s arms and held hard against a wide chest.

Whoever held me set off with me at a run.

“Get the fawn,” I whispered, trying to pound my fists against the chest. “Go back and get the fawn.”

“I’ll come back for it,” he said. “It’s all right; I’ve covered it up. I know what to do for it.”

“Thank you,” I managed, and let go, and the blackness took me under. From far above, as if on the surface of dark water, I could hear Amy Potter crying.

When I woke up for good and all, it was a day and a half later, and I was lying in the big bed in Peter’s parents’ room, weighted down with quilts and blankets, a hot water bottle at my feet. Peter stood at the foot of the bed, his face tired and white, his gray eyes puffed with fatigue. My mother-in-law sat by the fire that roared on the hearth, despite the thick heat in the room. Her spine was straight as a birch tree, and her face was white and set. Her lips were a thin sunless line of disapproval.

Peter hugged me and kissed me and said he was going down to bring the hot broth Christina had made up to me.

“Dr. Lincoln said for you to have it once every three hours,”

he said, trying to smile. “And he said a little shot of whiskey in it wouldn’t hurt, either. For you
and
me.”

He went out of the room. His mother and I looked at each other.

“Did I have the doctor?” I said weakly. My chest ached as if I had been hit there, hard. My voice was rasping and frail.

“Four times,” she said levelly. “Including the middle of the night. Not to mention the minister, and every woman in the colony over the age of ten, with flowers and food and notes of sympathy. And Peter, who has not slept at all. And Amy Potter, who has slept only a little more. And, of course, myself.”

“I’m—I’m sorry….”

“You should be, Maude. You should be quite, quite sorry.

You have caused everyone no end of worry, and of course you were very nearly killed. I wonder what it is going to take to keep you away from that sea.”

“I won’t go near it again.”

“We all hope that is true. For our sakes as well as your own. Not to mention that of Micah Willis, who could easily have lost his own life trying to save yours.”

“Micah Willis,” I mumbled stupidly.

“Christina’s husband. He’d just come in from the boathouse when he heard Amy screaming. You would be dead now if he had not. We owe him more than we can ever repay, of course.”

I lay there, as miserable as I have ever been, will ever be again. She was right. Of course, she was right. There was nothing for me in that cold sea. That sea was nothing to me but the author of grief.

“Oh,” I said. “The fawn…what about the fawn?”