Off Season (32 page)
I drifted up the stairs behind her, feeling as though the diving helmet were still in place and I was moving through water. But it was warm, serene water, and I knew that just outside the helmet such a tsunami of happiness waited for me that I could not face it yet.
“Do you love him?” I asked, watching her flip through my mother’s closet, which also smelled of Vetiver.
“There are so many things more important than love, Lilly,” she said, her voice muffled in fabric. “You can’t possibly know that now, but you will. One day you will.”
“No, I won’t,” I said, but she did not hear me.
By her fiat, I did not see Cam for the rest of the day until four.
“Bad luck,” she said. “We’ll spend the day on you.”
And after I had bathed with my mother’s bath salts and oil, she found lacy underwear among the sachets and offered it to me, and smiled when it fit beautifully. I did, too. I had never worn anything remotely like it in my life.
No wonder every man my mother knew was after her,
I thought. And then wondered how many of them had seen her in it, and blushed.
“Aunt Tatty,” I said. “How is he, really? Daddy? I can’t believe everything has been so easy. It would break my heart if he was covering up, but he seems okay about it.”
“To tell you the truth, Lilly, I think he’s a little relieved. It’s terribly hard work, fighting so hard and so long what will be, in the end, a losing battle. Now it’s over and he knows you’ll be taken care of, and so will he. Relax and be happy.”
At four o’clock, dressed in a long white pleated silk skirt of my mother’s and a white silk tank top of my own, with a circlet of field daisies in my newly washed and Tatty-styled hair and an armful of Mrs. Davenport’s late pink roses, I walked out of the house on my father’s arm and stood for a moment on the porch, looking. Simply looking. The angle of the light was lower now, in September, and at this hour the bay glittered like an ocean of diamonds from midbay out to Owls Head Island. The pointed firs and pines arched against the still-blue sky. Across the way, the promontory where I had once thought a boy could fly was catching the late-slanting sun. I felt a stab of pain looking at it, and the soporific warmth of the house stole back and I merely smiled. The air was sweet with salt and pine and flowers, and I looked up at my father, and he smiled at me, and said, “Here we go.”
Overhead a lone osprey wheeled and cried. “Thank you,” I whispered to it.
And we went across the porch and down to the terrace, and there, at the beginning of the long dock out to the Friendship’s mooring, I saw Cam and Canon Davenport standing, smiling, waiting for me. Canon Davenport had put on his full Episcopal regalia for the occasion, looking like the Lord Canon of somewhere in eighteenth-century England.
Cam wore a kilt.
It was a full kilt: the McCall tartan, I had no doubt; the heathery short tweed jacket over the dark red and blue and green plaid, and knee socks on his strong brown legs, and the bag called, I thought, the sporran dangling from his belt; and also in his belt a small, sharp knife that I knew had a name, but I could not think of it.
He should have looked ridiculous. Instead, he looked magnificent, splendid and near barbaric, both regal and feral. His long red hair and beard were fire in the slanting sun, and his smile was broad and white and only slightly manic. I could see the flash of his blue eyes from where my father and I stood. I could only think of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce and Culloden and bone-chilling war whoops. For an instant I was almost afraid.
“He brought it with him,” Aunt Tatty whispered as she fell in before me to walk down to the dock. “It’s what he had in the big bag. I’m glad we’re doing it here. Can you imagine that in the National Cathedral?”
I began to laugh. I laughed until tears ran down my face, no doubt streaking Aunt Tatty’s carefully applied mascara. I tried not to laugh aloud, and bit my lip and held my breath. I did not want Cam to think I was laughing at him. I loved this half-wild laird who was waiting for me by the sea. I was just laughing at everything.
I straightened my face as we reached the canon, and my father stepped back as Cam and I moved to stand side by side before him. Behind them I could see the Friendship, shimmering like a boat in a fairy tale, roses tied to her bow, bobbing gently in the freshening afternoon breeze. I looked at Cam and took a deep breath—and could not get it.
It became the most important thing in the world to me, not to let anyone see I could not breathe, was choking to death at my own wedding. I stared straight ahead as the canon intoned the service, holding my face still by sheer will, waiting for the moment when I would simply sink to the dock and die. “Poor Cam,” they would all say. “Just before she said ‘I do.’ Can you imagine?”
My eyes began to fail; darkness seeped in at the edges of my sight. I felt myself sway.
And then Cam whispered in my ear, “Listen to the bay, Lilly. Breathe with the bay. Breathe, Lilly.”
And suddenly I could—could feel my breath sigh in and out with the water of the bay—and my vision cleared, and strength flooded back into my arms and legs.
“Lilly?” Cam said into the silence.
“Yes,” I said, smiling at him with gratitude and all the love I had in my heart.
“You’re supposed to say, ‘I do,’” he whispered.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, I do!”
Everyone laughed, even the canon, and Cam kissed me, and I looked down to see that he had slipped a ring on my finger, a very beautiful old ruby and diamond ring, set in chased gold. I looked up at him.
“Grandma’s,” he said. “Come on, Mrs. McCall,” and he turned and grabbed my hand, and we ran, both skirts swirling in the wind, down to the sloop, and he swung me aboard. Bags and boxes and the wonderful smell of something in a hamper curled up into the salt of the ocean wind.
“Thank you,” I whispered to Cam.
“What, for marrying you?” he said, as my father moved onto the dock to cast us off.
“No. For telling me to breathe with the water. I really thought I was dying.”
He gave me a hard, deep kiss, and then said, “Did I say that? I don’t remember.” And then, “Look out, Lilly, we’re off. Let’s get this sail up before we lose the wind.”
And we scrambled for the line, white-silked and kilted and ridiculous, and the luffing mainsail filled and snapped, and the Friendship headed into the wind.
And so we were married.
M
any times when I traveled with Cam, in the pre- and post-small-child stages of our marriage, I woke not knowing where I was; indeed, even what we were doing there. Was it the Marriott in Shreveport, where Cam was working on the Grace house? The small inn on Point Reyes, where he was just starting construction on the beautiful earthquake-tracking facility for the U.S. Geological Survey? The Ritz in Boston, where he was deciding if he could ethically design a condominium on a wild stretch of shore near Marblehead? He couldn’t.
“I’d have to blow it up when it was done,” he said.
“You and Howard Roark,” I said, hugging him under the Ritz’s sea foam of white down comforter. I was glad. I’d hated the idea of him being responsible for a condominium on that empty, gull-haunted beach.
It would, however, have put both the girls through college, as he pointed out.
“Time they got scholarships and found jobs,” I replied, only half teasing. The girls were showing the first warning signs of approaching Princesshood. At fifteen, Betsy was lobbying for a strapless black satin dress for her prom, and Alice, two years younger, refused to go to dancing school until her father bought her a designer dress.
“And I don’t mean Laura Ashley, either.” She sniffed.
“You have a point,” Cam said, rolling over and reaching for me. “Man, there’s nothing like a Ritz fuck, is there?”
“It’s all this goose down.” I grinned. “Cushions all your sharp angles.”
The sixteen years that had passed since we’d lurched off into our married life on the Friendship sloop at Edgewater, Cam had, if not changed, then evolved. The Viking-red beard and long hair were gone, though his hair still flopped over his forehead and curled on his neck rather more than I would have liked. But he still had the riverboat-gambler mustache, and the coppery sun-baked and freckled hide, and the blue eyes were still as keen and sometimes dangerous as when I had first met him.
He had not slipped into early middle age with anything like a paunch, any slackness at all in his long muscles. Cam dressed or partly dressed was still breathtaking. Cam naked looked to me, as he always had, like a marionette being manipulated by a manic puppeteer. His long limbs were sharp-knobbed and loose, and he moved with unconscious lopes and jerks that, when I had first seen him without clothes, reduced me to convulsive laughter. Now he had his marionette act down perfectly, and it still made me laugh. Thank God, I often told him, that I was the only one person apt to see it.
“You wouldn't have many clients,” I told him.
“That's what you think.” He grinned.
But on this morning, my first alone at Edgewater, so early that the sky over the bay was still pearled and the crows were only just waking up, I knew beyond certainty, even not quite out of sleep yet, that I was in my old room, in my small iron bed, and the house held me warm inside it, and that endless summer days stretched out ahead of me like a July field sweeping toward the sea. I stretched greatly, and felt a warm, knobby lump in the middle of my back, and murmured sleepily to Cam, “Get your elbow out of my back.”
“
It’s my foot, not my arm
,” Silas said in a sleepy snarl. “
Cats don’t have arms
.”
It was not our bedroom, Cam’s and mine, the big one that had been my mother’s and then ours for all our summers in Maine. And Cam was not in bed with me. My mind scrambled frantically, and found him in the urn on the mantel over the living room fireplace, where I had put him last night.
I fell precipitously into darkness.
Anyone who has lost a love to death can tell you about that fall. You wake from a hard-won sleep and lie there warm and groggy and consider engaging the day. And then you remember. Half of you is not there, and never will be again. The person who focused all the disparate parts of you into a whole is gone. The agony is too much; you almost welcome the great slide ahead of you. But there is no oblivion in it. Only blackness and an endless well of red pain.
At the very first, the effort to haul yourself out of the pit hand over hand seems impossible, and, indeed, unnecessary. What is there up top for you? But somehow you begin; I know few people who have truly surrendered to the blackness, even at the beginning, when a leftover life seems to hold nothing to give you light. Many of us have other lives, other beings, that wait for us to minister to them, and on their shoulders we toil, finally far enough up to begin to stumble forward. I do not know what happens to people who have no family, close friends, or animals. Perhaps they simply do not come back up. Or perhaps they are steelier souls than ever I could be.
Ridiculously, the first handhold I found was Silas, now grumping at me in the narrow little bed, needing breakfast. I thought of a line from a poem I had read once, Edna St. Vincent Millay, maybe.
Listen, children, your father is dead.
From his old coats
I’ll make you little jackets; . . .
Life must go on;
I forget just why.
The sucking needs of others will pull you out eventually. Then I thought of the girls, back home in New York, stabbed through their hearts with grief, for they had adored Cam. True, they had husbands and one had children, but they had, now, only half a set of parents. I had become to them, instantly, a troublesome woman to whom they could not run because they considered me quite mad, not Mother-who-belongs-in-the set-with-Daddy, who together anchored the world for them. I knew they were very angry about that. I didn’t blame them.
“Somebody else is going to have to look after them for a while,” I said to Silas. “I don’t know if I’ve got enough left even to take care of you.”
“Hop to it. How much gumption does it take to open a can?”
I pulled myself out of the great hole and waited for the blinding naked agony of daylight and ordinariness to twist my guts, but it did not. Oh, there was pain. Terrible, near-mortal pain. But the house put its arms around me and the pain became like pain perceived through a haze of opiate, still raging, but behind glass.
I looked out the window. The sun was gilding the world. Wonderfully, miraculously, a pair of ospreys swept in from the bay and dived, coming up empty-footed and sweeping away again, jeering.
“Your ospreys are back,” I said to Cam, downstairs in his urn. “I don’t know where the nest is, but I’ll find it and let you know.”
Talking to Cam was a great help. If it meant I was delusional, so be it. I didn’t think it did; I had always talked aloud to myself at times. But it terrified my children, so I would have to remember not to do it when they were around.
“What’s with you?” I said to Silas, turning over to look at him. His narrowed yellow eyes were only inches from my face, and the white scar that cut, Harry Potter–like, across his forehead looked disreputable, lower class.
“Any old port in a storm, is it?”
Last night, when I had finally stumbled, foggy and bone weary, upstairs to bed, I had found Silas curled in the middle of the big bed where Cam and I had always slept. He raised his bullet head and glared at me.
“I’m not sleeping there,” I said to him. “Not ever again. If you want company you can damn well come into my room with me.”
“Like that’s going to happen
.
”
“Suit yourself,” I said, feeling my heart wrenching because I knew why he was there. It was where Cam had always been. Silas was Cam’s cat to the marrow of his shambling bones, and had been, ever since Cam found him shivering at a construction site as a kitten and brought him home in his pocket. His first act, after he had come out from under the refrigerator and decided we might work out as a family, was to toil his way up the length of Cam’s body, stretched out watching the Senators play, and shove his nose into Cam’s neck. He sniffed, great, rattling sniffs, his spiky tail stuck straight out and quivering, and then curled up in the hollow of Cam’s neck and went to sleep. It was where he had slept for many of his nights, whenever we were home or at Edgewater, even after he had become a large and cumbersome cat with a great mass of abdomen and sharp small feet. Cam finally gave up pushing him away. Silas always sneaked back in the night, and would wake both of us in the morning, his face buried in Cam’s neck, his startling, vacuum-cleaner grumble loud in our ears.