Every Last Cuckoo (25 page)

Leila welcomed them into the big kitchen of the house where Addie had grown up and offered them drinks. Adelaide was at the counter, wielding a chopping knife so fast it was a silver blur above falling slices of cremini mushrooms. She was an adventuresome cook who kept learning new cuisines and then crossing or mingling them freely—committing culinary miscegenation, she called it.

Now she was making a reduction of red wine, pomegranate jelly, shallots, and butter to adorn filets mignons. The mushroom slices, nearly paper thin, were the final ingredient, to be added at the last minute. “Everything's all but ready,” she said, turning away from her work to hug Sarah and the others. “Let's go sit.” She led the way to the screened porch that looked out over an expansive lawn and a pond bordered with gardens. The blackflies were long since gone, many of them eaten by dragon-flies. Deerflies and mosquitoes were still a nuisance, and it was a pleasure to be screened away from them, watching the bees nuzzle the monarda while the phlox swayed in a light breeze.

The five women reminisced. Addie and Leila once again told the story of their move from New York City to Vermont after Adelaide's mother had died and deeded the house to them, in both their names. That was eighteen years ago, but their amazement had never faded. “We've never been able to figure out if she knew we were lesbians or just thought we were friends for life,” Leila said. “And she first made that will in the midsixties, when nobody was thinking about gay rights except gay people, and even gay people didn't think they'd ever get any.”

“She knew perfectly well what she was doing,” Sarah chimed
in. “Your sharp-eyed mother. And she'd love it that you've spent all these years guessing about her.”

“Well,” Addie countered, “why did
you
think I lived all those years in New York, when I missed Vermont and my mother so much?”

Sarah gave them a wry smile. “What was I going to do in those days—confront you, once I figured things out? I assumed you stayed because you were happy in the publishing world, you and Leila both. You could have lived here. You couldn't expect people to approve, but you could expect them to keep their noses out of your business.”

“She's right,” Vivi said. “But I don't blame you for wanting to live a little more openly than that.”

“All I can say is, you're lucky, you two.” Molly scowled at them. “Once upon a time, I'd have given most anything to find the right person. Male or female, didn't matter. But I'm probably better off on my own. Never could stand anybody fussing at me.”

“You mean you're
bi
?” Leila squealed. “You've had, you know, both men and women?”

“Back when,” Molly confirmed. “That stuff hasn't interested me in about fifty years now. Too damn complicated.”

The other four exchanged wide-eyed glances and shrieked with laughter. Sarah suddenly wanted more than anything to share this juicy news with Charles. “Molly,” she said, leaning over to stroke the back of her spotted hand, “you are a treasure. Too bad nobody had the good luck to share your life with you.”

“Too bad for them,” Molly agreed.

They went in to dinner then, and the others presented Sarah with gifts and cards after dessert. Sarah felt buoyant, mellow
in the evening shadows and slanting rays of the day's last light. Suddenly she sat up straight in her chair. “I just remembered something!” she cried.

“What?” the others chorused.

“It's been bugging me for months.” She told them about the night she was sick, way back before Thanksgiving, when she had tried to reclaim her sleep from nausea. She told them about trying to remember a bend in a road, a small cottage next to it, a causeway ahead, her sense that it all had meaning for her. “Maybe it was a premonition,” she said slowly. “I drove that road with my mother just after my father died. She wanted to see a friend who lived on an island off the coast of Maine. So we went together while Charles and Charlotte stayed home. I was pregnant with Stephie, but only just.”

Sarah looked around the table. “The woman we visited was my mother's best friend since childhood. Nell. She was a widow, too. And Nell's daughter was a very young widow, younger than I was. She lived in that little cottage tucked into the trees. The daughter, I can't remember her name, she had no children. She had lost her husband only a year before. And I was so worried that all that would push my mother over the edge. Seeing her friend and the daughter . . . They had all lost their husbands. I was the only one who hadn't.” She looked around the table at her friends. “Now, I'm the only one who has.”

Sarah's memory at last released vivid details about that long-ago road trip, the cottage, the causeway. She recalled the hum of tires on the metal grid that spanned the water. She saw, as if on film, the weathered house stacked up among others on the steep little island, the view of water, and the scattering of other rocky islands. She heard again Nell's soothing words to Louisa, Sarah's
mother. “I promise, you will survive this,” she had said. “Not only that, you will be glad to survive. You will love him forever, but you will learn things you could never have learned when you shared your life with him. You will become yourself.”

Sarah turned to Molly. “Do you think you might have been a different person if you'd lived with someone all this time?” She hesitated. “Do you think I'm different since Charles died?”

“No,” said Leila and Addie.

“Yes,” said Vivi.

Molly said, “You're probably just more of a good thing.”

“No, really,” Sarah insisted. “My house is a mess unless the kids or Sandy clean it up, and just the fact that I'm
living
with the kids and Sandy . . . well, that's totally unlike me. Or so I would have thought. I read until one or two in the morning, and I sleep later than I ever have in my life. I don't want to take care of people, but I love tending the garden and the dogs and my cats. Did you know I have cats? I'm snippy when people cross me, and I have no patience with ditherers. Yet I dither all the time in my own mind. I don't know whether I'm becoming the real me or slipping into senility. I must walk miles every day, and I'm obsessed with photographing the ugliest stuff I can find in nature, except that I don't think it's ugly, I think it's all beautiful and important. The thing is,” she said, pausing for breath, “I'm happy. I miss Charles all the time and I'd give all this up for one more hour with him, but it doesn't hurt so much anymore. Not in the same way.”

Molly applauded almost silently, and the others joined in, smiling fuzzily from the pot and the wine, the food and their fondness for Sarah. They sang “Happy Birthday” to her, softly,
in harmony, almost like a chant, ending with, “Hope you live to be a hundred, a hundred years or more.”

L
ATE THAT NIGHT A
violent thunderstorm woke Sarah. Rain pooled on the floor beside her bed, and the covers on Charles's side were damp. She closed the sash, picked up Neo and Retro, and went across the room to the window seat and wrapped herself up in the quilt. She opened the casement, safe from the rain on this side of the house, and lay back to watch the brilliant streaks in the sky, to hear the roar of wind and water. The wild weather both thrilled and unsettled her. When she was small and afraid of storms, her father would tell her jokes and stories, distracting her, making her feel safe inside the circumference of heat from his body. She would wonder how his voice, quiet and deep, could outtalk the thunder and wind. Sometimes he made up stories on the spot, just for her. The stories had sunk far down in her memory, beyond retrieval, but Sarah's body remembered everything else. How one ear against her father's chest could hear his voice rising from some cavernous space inside, while in her other ear the sound registered normally. How his beard could scratch, and how he smelled of soap and pencils. In her throat, still, she could feel the laughter that rose as he told her tales about herself, Sarah at age three swinging like a monkey, tree to tree, until she reached California—that one she suddenly remembered whole.

Then Charles was there, as real in Sarah's memory as her father, as tender and masculine and warm. His clean, earthy smell, the snaky veins on the backs of his hands, the shiny pale shrapnel scars on his back and shoulder, markers on his path into
medicine. Charles with Charlotte and Stephie, and lately with Hannah, was just as Sarah's father had been with her. The two edges of life, age and infancy, came together again and again, making a smooth seam, weaving sense out of everything. The seam had almost broken the day Hannah had fallen into the pond, but Charles had stitched it back together. Now it was torn beyond mending, but this time the appropriate edge, his edge, had pulled away, the one that was already faded and fraying, ready to go. Or almost.

T
HE THIRD
S
ATURDAY IN
August was sultry, the air alive with the rise and fall of a cicada chorus. At nine in the morning it was nearly one hundred degrees on the screened deck of the cabin. Mordechai and Sarah sat in silence, he on his padded stool, Sarah on a low bench. Rivulets ran freely down their faces and necks. For a while, Sarah sank beneath her discomfort into a stillness that separated her from her thoughts and self. She was in, but not of, her skin and surroundings. She noticed everything—the raised grain in the wood of the deck, the mirrored surface of the pond and the haze above it, the shrill of the insects, and the scent of grass mingling with her own scents, female, human, old. Yet she partook of nothing. She was just a thing, like a sound or a scent.

Then a raven called hoarsely from the woods. A sudden ache thrummed between her shoulder blades, and Sarah's concentration shattered. She rose too fast to the surface of her mind, like a diver with the bends, and the heat was suddenly unbearable. Moving stealthily to avoid disturbing Mordechai, she took off
her T-shirt and used it to dry the sweat under her breasts and on her neck. Her nakedness felt natural and sensible. She barely thought about it. She dropped her shirt into her lap, rested her hands palm up on top of it, and lowered her eyelids. Slowly she made her way back down to the quiet, imagining herself sinking into the pond without a ripple, settling along the bottom like the porous ash that had been Charles's bones. Cool water moved in her mind and lowered the temperature of her skin.

In her trance a story entered her mind, one that Mordechai had told her about cornering a Palestinian boy no older than fifteen. Mordechai was an Israeli soldier. The boy was cut off from his taunting, rock-throwing friends, and he cowered before Mordechai's Uzi, pleading and stuttering in Arabic. Mordechai did not understand the language, only the message, which was terror.

“If I did not shoot him—this
child,
Sarah—he would one day shoot me, or another Israeli. I
meant
to shoot him. I aimed my gun at his chest. And then I heard in my mind the wailing of women, and I knew this boy was someone's son. I remembered Baruch, whom I would never know, and I lowered my gun and shooed the boy away.”

Mordechai and Sarah had sat on her back deck while he told her this. “That day I realized I could no longer kill. I began to weep instead, for my wife and child, for myself, even for my enemies, I had no idea why. I only knew, when I could
stop
weeping for whole moments at a time, that I was exactly like those I hated, who hated me.” Here Mordechai paused, and Sarah saw the memory of his grief well up in his eyes. “We were all afraid,” he went on. “We were ruled by terror, and yet we inflicted terror on others in the name of love—love for our people, our causes,
our country. This was a revelation. I saw in one flash that the most courageous thing a person can do is to love without being afraid.”

Other stories entered Sarah's meditations. Floating on the rough wake of Mordechai's were her father's tales, Angelo's itchy dragon, the Nana Who Ruled the Sun, and Papa the Moose Papoose. Sarah's life was all story, all memory, edited and incomplete, yet whole between the lines.
Perhaps,
she thought,
our minds know what they're doing when they deliver up a piece of memory here, an exaggerated anecdote there. Perhaps they edit with a purpose—to challenge, illuminate, soothe.

Something in Sarah gave way, finally, and she saw herself from a place outside her skin. There she was, only one person, one old woman unwilling to buckle. She could tend only to her family, her friends, her cats, dogs, and garden. In the time she had left, that would have to suffice. The very thought drew her further into peace and light.

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER
, Sarah was again jerked back into the rush of time and waves of heat, this time by someone opening the screen door to the deck. Before she could cover her nudity, there was Charlotte, gaping at her.

“Good morning, dear,” said Sarah, pushing her head and arms into her shirt. She tugged at the hem, pulling it down over the folds in her belly.

Charlotte managed to splutter, “
Mother!
What on earth are you doing?”

“Meditating. Until I was so rudely interrupted.”

“In the
nude
?”

“Yes, dear, it's hot. Nude is more comfortable.”

“And where's Mordechai? Is
he
nude,
too
?” Charlotte sounded very much like Lottie.

“I'm right here,” Mordechai answered from the cabin door, “and fully covered, as you can see. Would you like some iced tea?”

“No!” Charlotte cried. “No thank you. I'd like to know what's going on.”

“I told you, Charlotte,” Sarah answered, holding fast to the edge of her patience. “You can think what you like, but if you would kindly remember everything you've ever known about me, you will see that you're being ridiculous in the extreme.” Now there was a prissy sentence, she thought, nearly giggling.