Folly (3 page)

“These should be the last of the receipts,” she told her mother. “Anything else that arrives I’ll just readdress to your lawyer. And we sent her a notarized letter to say that we were no longer responsible for paying your bills. Here’s your checkbook. You’re sure you don’t want me to hang on to it for you, in case?”

Tamara could not have caught the brief, cynical question that passed through her mother’s mind as Rae took the checkbook, speculating about how Don would lay hands on the family monies without it. Then she corrected herself: Outright theft was not Don’s way. Whatever was missing, a careful adding up of numbers would not reveal it.

“I’ll leave you as a signatory on the account, but I don’t think you’ll need to do anything. I really appreciate all you’ve done, Tamara. I know it’s been a pain.”

“We were happy to do it.” It was always “we” with Tamara. She began to slide the papers back into the envelope. “Was the drive up okay?”

“Long, but good. It’s beautiful countryside.”

“You should have flown.”

“I had too much stuff,” Rae told her, giving the ready excuse.
Too much stuff, too many phobias, too great a need for a firearm …
“How is Don?” she asked dutifully.

“He’s fine. There’s a new health club opened up that he joined, he says he’s getting out of shape.” The thin horsewoman picked up her diet Coke and took a swallow.

Rae would have been just as happy were Don to be struck down by a massive coronary, but again she took care not to show the thought. Before she could dredge up another topic of conversation, however, Tamara went on, looking over the top of the can at the shivering figure leaning on the boat’s rail outside the window.

“I think it’s Petra driving up his blood pressure, myself.”

“Are they having problems?”

“Oh, you know. Teenagers. Don was talking the other day about a special school, one of those highly structured environments. I told him this was a temporary thing—her best friend just moved away and she’s upset. Petra will settle down.”

Rae chose her words with care. “My father was sent off to military
school when he was eight. For some boys it may have worked fine, but he never really got over it. Those schools have a way of making things worse. You might find you’ve alienated her completely.” Then, before Tamara could react to the unasked-for advice, Rae continued, “What about another round of therapy? She might just need someone outside the picture to talk to.”

“I was thinking about that,” Tamara said—an enormous admission, considering her loathing of anything connected with the taint of mental illness. “The problem is, we’re going through a tight spot, and the insurance is—”

“Let me cover it.” Rae flipped open the checkbook and took out a pen, adding enough zeros to the sum to shut up Don’s talk about private schools (which they couldn’t afford anyway, by the sound of it). She tore the check out and put it down in front of Tamara, thinking,
Well, that answers my question about how Don will manage without my checkbook.
Petra tapped on the ferry’s salt-smeared window then, gesturing to Rae about the passing scenery, and Rae had folded the oversized envelope into a jacket pocket and gone to join her granddaughter on the windblown deck.

But she remembered Tamara’s face as she’d reached for the check. It bore the same expression, that of defiance glued thickly over a vestige of shame, that Rae knew it must have borne as the
Orca Queen
rounded the island to the open strait. The same expression Rae had seen for the first time six months before Petra’s birth, when she had gone to visit the newlyweds, and set off an explosion.

She could no longer reconstruct what the original disagreement had been about, what precise words had passed between her and Tamara. What she did remember, vividly, were two things. The first was an emotion, the despair of realizing that Tamara was truly lost to her, that all hope of a mature restoration of some mother-daughter openness had vanished. The second memory was visual: Don standing in the doorway of the decrepit apartment with his arm around Tamara’s shoulder, holding his new wife close to his side. Tamara looked terrible, her hair limp and unwashed, blotches of pregnancy-generated acne accentuating the flush of the recent argument, and a gauntness to her that testified to living on saltine crackers and herbal tea. Don, on the other hand, was bursting with health, and his gaze held Rae’s in an unequivocal challenge, as if he had said aloud, “She’s mine now; you’ll only have her if I let you.”

And so it had proven over the years, with Tamara and, even more so, with Petra. Tamara had never given Rae an opening; that relationship was apparently beyond recovery. Petra, however … Within weeks of her birth, Petra became the battleground for a grim and completely unacknowledged struggle between an amused Don and a desperate Rae. Tamara, to give her credit, stayed out of it, but Don had mastered the art of using Rae’s love for the child to keep his mother-in-law in her place.

Tamara’s rigid spine and Petra’s waving arm on board the
Orca Queen
said it all. And for that wave, Rae would give everything.

The new resident of Folly looked down and realized that she had continued picking up garbage unawares, and that her glove was currently gripping a flaccid, mud-caked condom. With an exclamation of disgust she flicked it into the bag, then stripped off the glove and threw it in after. With fastidious fingers she tied shut the top of the bag, dropping it in the lee of the lumber pile, and went back to the fire to scrub her hands with a lot of soap. Then she returned to her interrupted meal.

The chili was scorched into the bottom of the pan.

As Rae scraped the edible portions onto a plate, her awareness of how alone she was continued to grow. She began to feel like a pea on a platter. As she turned to carry her dinner over to the chair, the corner of her eye caught on a motion and she jerked upright—but it was only the wavelets on her beach, no cause for her heart to race so wildly. She sat with her back close to the tent wall and picked at the scorched red mess, feeling invisible eyes crawling up and down the back of her neck like some many-legged creature. Or like a man’s fingers. She put her head down, forced her hand to lift the fork, forced her attention to remain on the food, demanded that her mouth eat it and her stomach receive it. Most of it. She was scraping the uneaten remnants into the flames when the dish slipped from her nerveless fingers into the coals; in snatching it up, Rae brushed her hand against the searing metal grill.

With a sob of fury she hurled the plate into the bushes and cradled her hand to her chest, eyes tight shut. The drugs in her knapsack called to her, but she had other plans for them. Instead, she rummaged furiously through the boxes of equipment piled near the tent until she came to the heavy leather brush-clearing gloves. With her blistered thumb in her mouth and the gloves in the undamaged hand, Rae stalked up the hill to her foundation.

Desmond Newborn’s
Journal

June 27, 1921

There are times, rare and precious times, when we lowly creatures are vouchsafed a glimpse of Providence at work, the sure knowledge that there is a machinery connecting the disparate fragments of our lives, binding ugly to lovely, despair to rejoicing

How else to explain the train of events that brought me here? Overheard snatches of conversation in a bleak railway yard, my very presence there traced directly back through the events in Boston to the hell of the Western Front, and before that the strange urges that drove me to uniform in the first place: all linked, all the decisions, foolish, well intentioned, and wicked alike, all the accidents, both the sweet and the bitter, leading me in a most circuitous pathway to this place.

I stood today with my boots planted on the rocky entrance to a piece of land rising from an amiable sea, and I began to feel a most peculiar sensation, as if I were waking following a long and terrible dream. Or it may be that I am, in truth, sinking into a midsummer night’s dream on an enchanted isle.

If that be so, I pray God I may never wake.

The house that had once stood on these stones was built by Rae’s great-uncle in the 1920s. Desmond Newborn, younger son of a wealthy Boston family, had read the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, embraced their romantic idealism of protecting England from the Kaiser, and sailed off to London in the summer of 1915 to enlist in the British Army. He even went as a common foot soldier, without the officer’s rank his education and privilege would have bought him. He survived nearly three years of the carnage to be shipped home, alive but profoundly damaged, at the age of twenty-seven years. He was by then far, far older in spirit.

Rae was nine when she discovered that Grandfather William had once possessed a younger brother.

Had somebody merely told her, she would have laughed aloud at the very idea—a person might as well suggest that God had an auntie. Instead, Rae had compiled the unavoidable evidence on her own, beginning one morning when she was, as Cook called it, moping around the house. As often on days when she was left to her own devices, this spindly girl with sleeping problems and a habit of silence, she was drawn to Grandfather’s study. The warm, busy life of the house, particularly for a solitary child, might lie in the kitchen, but the true center of power was Grandfather’s study. If Rae were to be caught there, she knew the punishment would be severe, but it was worth the risk to stand in possession of that room, with its smell of cigars and strong drink and William himself.

It was not that there was much to do or see in the study. The books on the shelves were too thick to be of interest, the papers on the big desk incomprehensible, the two paintings dull. But climbing into Grandfather’s leather-upholstered desk chair was so daring it sent her heart racing, and a glimpse of the world from his side of the desk made her see herself differently.

Usually, she just touched his pen (careful never to move it), dandled her feet for a minute, tugged automatically at the locked drawers without expecting them to open, and crept away again.

Only this day, one of the drawers was open. Not much, just enough that the desk’s central latch had not caught it. Rae shot a glance at the door, then dropped to her knees to ease it all the way out.

More papers. How disappointing—but wait. Underneath the files was a lump, and lifting the edge of a slim ledger she saw a wood-handled revolver and a flat leather box. The gun she left in place, but the box was too intriguing to ignore. She took it out to lay it on the carpet, fiddled with the latch, and swung back the hinged top.

The box held a piece of metal with some faded ribbon attached, the sort of thing she’d seen Grandfather’s friends wear on their uniformed chests in the Veterans Day parade. And folded small, a piece of paper, some kind of official form, with spidery writing and the word “Enlistment” at the top. None of the words meant much to her other than “Boston, Massachusetts,” but she was greatly puzzled by the name it bore: Desmond Newborn.

There was nobody by that name in the Newborn family.

Studying the paper gave no further clues, so after a minute she folded it away, closed the drawer as it had been, and slipped out of the room.

Through judicious questioning, she found out from Cook what Enlistment meant, but there was only one way to learn who Desmond Newborn was. Years later it occurred to Rae that, given a more normal home life, she would have asked her parent; at the time, she never even thought of approaching anyone but Grandfather; William Newborn was, after all, the source of all power, every decision, all authority. And if the question was as important as she felt it might be, everyone else would consult William before answering her anyway.

She knew the risks, or thought she did. It was never an easy matter to approach Grandfather, no knowing if he would respond with his standard brusque but dutiful paternalism or something darker or more violent.

In this case, his reaction was violent indeed; in fact, she had never seen him react as he did to her innocent question. No sooner had she pronounced the strange name than William rose to his terrible height and stormed around the desk to roar down into her face, lashing her with a fury of words more terrifying than any blow from his hand.