Folly (12 page)

Rae wondered if Desmond Newborn had also kept a gun in his knapsack, just in case his nerves got too frayed to bear.

Whatever it was, she was so very tired of carrying the loathsome burden around with her. It was not depression, it was not delusion, it was just the bone-weary sense of the futility of living. Who the hell cared if Folly got rebuilt? Who cared if Rae pulled herself together yet again, or if she swam off into the horizon? A lot of people would be relieved, in fact. Dr. Hunt would feel a pang of guilt—and, to be honest, Tamara would as well. But Rae’s only true mourner would be Petra.

Petra whom she craved, Petra whom she was not allowed to embrace for fear the grandmother’s madness would prove either dangerous or contagious.

Petra.

Rae was sick of the burden. Sick and tired of the past constantly getting in the way of whatever future she might make, sick unto death of creeping around and jumping out of her skin at every little sound, filled to the brim with revulsion at her own timidity.

She’d had enough, by God.

Before she could pause to reconsider, she was on her feet, storming around her workbench, stumbling into the bright area around the tent,
and when she was standing square in the shaft of light that fell from its open flap, she raised her arms and yelled at the dark wall of trees, “All right—here I am! Take a good look, damn you! I’m. Not. Going. To. Hide. Any. More!” And to emphasize the vow, she bent to snatch up a length of firewood, then hurled it into the trees with all her strength. It hit, anticlimactically, on a branch barely ten feet away and dropped straight down, tumbling and ripping through the greenery. The thud of its landing was followed by a thin squeal and a brief, tiny scuffle in the leaf mold, after which a terrified silence fell over the clearing.

Rae stood there panting, running that frightened squeak through her mind. What poor little creature had she just scared half to death? Innocently going its furry nocturnal way when this monstrous noisemaker leaps up out of nowhere and the sky comes crashing down.

And if there really had been someone watching from the shadows, what on earth would he (not she, surely) have made of her actions? What if Alan, for example …?

She began, reluctantly at first, to laugh. Alan
knew his
wife was nuts, even in ways not covered by mental illness; he had more than once said that was why he married her in the first place, but this would have taken even that much-forgiving man aback. Picturing his expression, the curious raised eyebrow above those gorgeous yellow-brown eyes, made her laughter come harder, until she plunked down into the canvas chair and bellowed aloud—startling the island wildlife still more, she had no doubt. Rage and despair and grief and manic humor all welled up together, and she raised her face to the moon, that source of all lunacy, and howled and laughed and wept until the tears were gone.

Then she rose up again, drew a great breath, and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Alan, I miss you like hell, you fucking bastard, Alan! Why the
fuck
couldn’t you have been more careful, you murdering shithead, oh Alan, oh, God damn it.” Her voice trailed off to a mumble, and then she closed her eyes and stood swaying gently, feeling empty, utterly, weightlessly empty. Even so, when the crackle repeated itself from the hillside, farther up this time, she flinched: only a twitch, but still a reaction.

Even that was too much. “Oh, God,” she moaned aloud, although she could not have said if it was a curse or a prayer. In either case, the reaction was the same. She yanked her sweatshirt off over her head and bent to unlace and step out of her boots, and then she turned and walked downhill, away from the light, bruising her stockinged feet and wrenching her ankle as she picked her painful way to the water.

One step, and two into the bone-chilling water, then to her knees. When the level reached her thighs, she began to have trouble catching her breath; at waist level she thought she would be forced to retreat. The water was black against the black land—creepy to venture into, and impossible to see the sandy patches in—and her rapidly numbed feet came down on rocks slick with eelgrass and no doubt a variety of squiggling creatures, but she struggled on until the icy swell of water reached her chest. She remained upright a moment longer, quailing, and then she dropped, surrendering to the frigid benediction of the night sea …

… To come up moments later with a whoop, spluttering and coughing and shouting incredulous curses at the temperature of the water and at the sharp and exhilarating wash of fear when the weight of her sodden clothing threatened to pull her down. She splashed madly for shore and sprinted clumsily for the comparative warmth of the tent, where she stripped off and toweled dry, her teeth chattering uncontrollably. She dressed in many layers of warm things, dove into her bed, and pulled the sleeping bag up over her wet hair.

That night, Rae dreamed. In one episode, something huge and amorphous but not unfriendly heaved itself up out of the cove to talk with her about Chinese cooking. In the next, a lovely green twinkle that she somehow knew was an elf floated above the rock top of the island, telling Rae that he was with the U.S. Coast Guard and wanted Rae’s permission to set up a spy satellite tower here to watch for Japanese submarines. Another time, Rae reached down to pull her hammer out of its loop and came up with one of Dr. Hunt’s elegant glasses in her hand, to her annoyance. And then a final dream, just before her true wakening, more fully remembered if no more fully understood:

The house called Folly stood completed on its foundation, graced with the two towers, quirky and delightful and perfect in its proportions and its location between rock and water. It was nighttime and the house glowed with light, warm yellow illumination pouring from its windows, casting a path down the hill from its open door and streaming out of the high narrow windows at the tops of the towers, turning them into lighthouses, twin beacons of guidance and comfort shining out in the wilderness.

As Rae drew nearer, she could see and hear that a party was going on inside, an elegant formal dance with a string quartet and a thousand candles in a ballroom far larger than any fifteen-by-twenty-four-foot cabin
had a right to be. Beautiful young women in sparkling gowns whirled and dipped, tall young men in the stark dignity of black and white accompanied and gazed with appreciation, glasses of champagne quenched thirsty throats, and the party was being judged a success. Then the picture seemed to tremble, and the brightly gowned women began, one after another, to stretch their arms up over their heads, sway, and suddenly transform into flame. The ballroom cheerfully caught fire and began to burn.

Rae woke in the cool gray light of dawn with those rich yellow flames in her mind’s eye.

Hardly surprising, she thought over her first, meditative cup of coffee. (The squirrel sat on a branch directly overhead, calling down curses; Rae did not wince.) The burning of Folly was very much in her thoughts these days.

Before the construction of the workbench had sidetracked her into four days of messing around, Rae had made the first forays into the jungle around the foundations. It was a little like Sleeping Beauty’s overgrown castle—assuming the castle had burned to the ground while the inhabitants slept.

Rae could not remember when she had first heard that Desmond’s house had burned. Certainly she knew before she, Alan, and Bella came for their visit, because the bare, scorched stones of the towers and chimney had not surprised her. As soon as she’d reached the stone steps and seen the charred and crumbling threads of sill plate atop the foundation stones, she knew the fire must have been thorough. What it had not consumed in the first white heat, it had weakened, to fall and smolder gradually into ash— other than the door, which had fallen outside the burn zone.

So the dream contained a trace of history—though just a trace, Rae reflected as she rinsed off her cereal bowl and went to collect her tools: She did not expect to find a silver chandelier and dozens of champagne bottles as she cleared ground.

For seven decades the healthy vegetation of the Pacific Northwest had done its best to obliterate Desmond Newborn’s labors. Vine maple, red alder, huckleberry, and madrone had found footholds in the rich humus that resulted from the return of a wooden building’s component parts to nature; nettle, blackberry, thistle, and wild rose wrapped affectionately around the towers and tore at Rae’s skin and clothes; half a dozen kinds of fern had rooted between the stones; a veritable garden of wildflowers sprang up between the woodier plants—delicate white poison
camas and yellow desert parsley were already in bloom, interspersed with blue larkspur and purple clover. Rae had brought a brush hook to the island, thinking the machete-like tool might come in useful; she had never thought that she would be swinging it for days on end.

She was ruthless, hacking beauty and pest alike—with a few exceptions, such as the delicate shooting star that was just opening up among the skeletal remains of some floorboards. That, and a few like it, she dug carefully out and relocated farther along the hillside. Most of them would curl up and die, she knew, but they would have more of a chance than if they remained in the places they had chosen for themselves.

So today, with the bench complete, Rae would return first to the ground clearing and then to her excavation of the foundations. Ancient cities, the archaeologists had found, were often slapped down on the remains of previous generations of buildings, but Rae intended to begin at bedrock. Grimly, she pulled on her thorn-proof gauntlets and reentered the fray.

It was slow, sweaty work, hazardous underfoot because there was no way of knowing what the vegetation concealed, whether it was packed soil or a thinly covered scrap of rotted wall held together by air. She inched her boots ahead in cautiously tested increments until she had firm ground to stand on, tugging and unwrapping the vines and shrubs, spending most of her time dragging vast heaps of dying plant life over to the site of her future garden. She felt alone while she was working, but having a focus helped. Sometimes her body forgot to wince at sudden noises; occasionally she would go as long as an hour without a sudden conviction that someone was watching her.

It took another two days to strip the ground bare, long, brutal hours of needle-sharp thorns and burning nettles, a wrenched knee from a piece of solid ground that wasn’t, and one terrifying close call when the heavy blade, which she had been too tired to notice was growing dull, bounced off a woody branch and sliced through the air half an inch from her hand.

Two further days to remove the vegetation and reveal the thick decomposed layer of floorboards, siding, shingles, furniture, and whatever else Desmond had in his house when it burned.

Two days of hacking, and now her real work could begin.

Desmond Newborn’s
Journal

November 11, 1918

They tell me today that the Great War is over.

The church bells rang out, the streets filled with shiny, upturned faces, and I had to walk and walk to find a place where I could stand beneath a tree and scream and scream and scream.

Was I laughing? Was I weeping? I do not know.

But I do know that the war will never be over. Never.

November 28, 1918

Thanksgiving Day. Why?

I left the house and found my screaming tree again, but it seemed to me the rivulet at its feet was too shallow to drown a man.

December 3, 1918

I arrived home one year ago today, and I still feel less than half a man, my arm baby-weak. And my mind.

The influenza is in the city. My brothers wife Lacy goes out to nurse the sick, pleading with me to stay inside and dry, lest all her nursing of a torn-up soldier be for naught.

I expect tomorrow’s newspaper will report a sighting of the Beast of Babylon, or at the very least a rain of frogs.

December 11, 1918

William, of all people, has come down with the influenza. How does it dare? Curiously, I find I do care, and would prefer that my brother not die. Would that a dose of mortality might humble him, at least in his treatment of his wife. Lacy is at his side at all hours. I fear she will be next, although in truth, she is nowhere near as delicate as the name she bears.

December 25, 1918

The anniversary of Our Savior’s birth, although what that carpenter’s son did to deserve the title I do not know. Surely, there is little evidence of salvation in the world today.

William has turned the corner and will recover. Lacy is wan and gray, but as yet not ill.

Two Christmases ago I crouched in a flooded trench, pinned down by a sniper who entertained himself pinging rounds through our peepholes and picking off all periscopes raised above our bags. Like a duck-shoot at a fair, except that it meant two of us didn’t make it home. Mrs. Banner received a good if belated Christmas present, though, her sergeant husband with his blighty. True, we sent him to her minus an eye, but even His Majesty’s Army has to admit that a one-eyed sergeant may be excused from further service. The rest of us might well have traded in an eye for the chance of missing the remainder of the fighting. We might well have done so for the opportunity of missing the remainder of that day, frozen rain drooling down our necks, icy mud to our knees, made all the more bitter for knowing that the Germans were snug and dry a bare two hundred yards away—we’d briefly held their magnificent, strong, deep trenches some weeks before. Just before the afternoon stand-to (as if the enemy was about to spend his holiday coming across that mud and wire plain at us!) I caught the odor of goose roasting. The captain swore I was imagining it, and he was no doubt right, but it was sore cruel, that whiff of sage and crisp fat skin teasing its way among the thick stench of unburied bodies and eternal mud and flooded privies. Two years ago today.