Off Season (39 page)

“You look like . . . a very little girl. Are you eating at all?”

I had not really thought about my appearance until Kitty, the first to arrive, looked at me and said, “My God! You’re wasting away to nothing! I’m taking you back home with me.”

When I went upstairs to bathe and change before the others arrived, I had studied myself in my mother’s full-length mirror. Except when I washed my face and brushed my teeth, I don’t think I had noticed my appearance all summer. I was thin, though it didn’t seem to me to be a sickly thin; I remembered I had looked so when I
was
a child, rangy as a yearling deer. My face was innocent of makeup and freckled, and I was deeply tanned from hours in the sun. My hair had gotten troublesomely long, and so I had begun simply to plait it into pigtails. I had on a T-shirt and cutoff shorts from the wardrobe in my room, and remembered for the first time that these clothes had been mine as a child. I had been wearing them all summer. There was a large Band-Aid on a cut on my knee, and calluses on my palms from kayaking. I winced. I didn’t look like a grief-stricken anorectic; I looked like a child who had been sent up to wash before dinner.

I took a quick shower and slathered on lotion from my mother’s bathroom. Her clothes were too big for me now, as were the ones I had brought with me, but I found a pretty, old flowered caftan in her closet, a one-size-fits-all thing, and in it and her gold ballet flats and chunky gold jewelry, I began to see myself emerge in the mirror again. I made my face up carefully, with lipstick and blush and mascara from her dressing table, and unbraided my hair and brushed it until it stood out like a vermeil cloud around my shoulders. A slosh of her Vetiver completed the transformation. I was much prettier, but apparently it did not fool anyone. I had still gotten cries of dismay from my daughters, and now from Tatty.

“I’m eating like a horse,” I said to her, as I had to the others. “Just ask Laurie Halliday. It’s just that I’ve been riding my bicycle all over the place, and swimming, and doing a lot of kayaking. I feel terrific.”

Everyone looked at me strangely when I said this, and so I added, “Physically, anyway. I find it helps to keep moving.”

That morning Laurie and I had swept and polished and made beds fresh, and hauled out and washed the best china and crystal, not that there was much of that at Edgewater. She had made a huge tureen of clam chowder from the clams she had dug the previous evening, and little buttermilk biscuits ready to go into the oven, and she had baked a blueberry pie. I ran and bought wine from the general store—they had a few decent bottles for the summer people—and fresh goat cheese and crackers. At the vegetable lady’s house I bought dahlias and some of the last sunflowers, and small bunches of chrysanthemums to put on bedside tables. With the fire lit and candles glowing, Edgewater would look, if not glamorous, then festive and welcoming. I hoped that in the dimness—the sun set by five now—no one would notice the holes in the carpet where Silas had sharpened his claws or the mantling of cat hair over everything. I had polished Cam’s urn, and it seemed to gather all the light into itself; it blazed out in the dusk like an amulet.

“Show-off,” I said, coming back downstairs to where Kitty sat drinking scotch.

“Who are you talking to?” she said. “You look better, by the way. Sort of like a little girl dressed in her mother’s clothes.”

I did not tell her they were my mother’s clothes.

“I was talking to Cam,” I said. “He’s shining like new money on a bear’s behind,” as Seth used to say.

She followed my eyes to the urn, and then looked back at me.

“You talk to Cam?”

“Oh, Kitty, of course I do. You know I talk to everybody and everything; I’ve been talking to Silas for years.”

“Yeah, I know,” she admitted. “Well, just so he doesn’t talk back.”

I started to answer her, but then did not. It was not the time. Perhaps the time would never come, though I longed to share the simple, joyous fact of Cam’s presence with someone. With Kitty.

Silas came up to me and wound himself around my ankle.

“
Dinnertime
,” he said.

“Yeah, let’s get it over with,” I said. “Otherwise we’ll stink up the whole house.”

“Shit happens
,
”
he said, and marched out of the room, tail high.

“What did he say?” Kitty said curiously.

“He said it was dinnertime,” I said.

“Well, it is,” Kitty said. “What have you got to nibble on until everybody else gets here?”

I brought in the goat cheese and crackers and the scotch bottle. We poured our drinks and she lifted hers to the mantel and I followed.

“To you, Cameron McCall the Third,” she said. “We miss you.”

“And to you,” came back clearly and silently. “I miss you, too, Kitty Howard.”

I quickly looked at her, but she had heard nothing.

“Ah, God, it seems a long road without him,” she said, her voice trembling.

“The longest,” I said.

We did not speak again until my girls arrived and the clamoring over how atrocious I looked began again. I thought it was going to be a very long night.

But as it turned out, it wasn’t. I suppose there are few things so tiring as gathering to toss one’s father’s and husband’s ashes to the wind and water, and airline travel was impossible now, and many of us had driven long miles. Even my peripatetic Betsy had powered down to the point where she ate Laurie’s glorious chowder in groggy silence, and then was taken off to bed, nodding, by her husband, who gave Silas a long look of hatred as he passed. I saw rather than heard Silas growl at him—at least his tattered throat vibrated slightly and I knew it was not a purr.

“Don’t even think about it,” I hissed at him.

“Yeah, well, you never know what a cat is thinking, do you?”

“I know what you’re thinking, fur ball. I always do,” I said.

“You wish.”

I was sure no one had heard that exchange, but Kitty raised an eyebrow at me.

“He was going to pee on Gary,” I said. “I told him not to.”

Kitty stared from Silas to me and back to Silas. I saw her struggle with credulity, and then give up.

“Pity,” she said, and we both laughed.

Shortly after the coffee and blueberry pie yawns ruled, and most of the rest of us trailed off to bed. I went into the kitchen to hug and thank Laurie, and came back into the living room with a cognac bottle and glasses. I was suddenly overflowing with what this summer had given me, and longed to spill it out to the one person who, at least, would hear me out. But Kitty was fast asleep on the sofa before the dying fire, with Silas jammed into her hip, so I woke her and took her off to the other little iron twin bed in my old room, where, I think, she was asleep before her head hit the pillow. I undressed and crawled into my bed, disappointed, but Silas burrowed into my ribs and began snoring and all of a sudden I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

“You did well,” I thought I heard as I slid into sleep, but was not sure.

The next morning we all slept late. It was almost eleven o’clock by the time we had eaten scones and sausage and drunk pots of walloping coffee and assembled on the front porch steps.

It was a day out of the morning of the world, I thought. There had been fog in the night, but it was burning off and the islands and sea were emerging as if from developing fluid. The autumn colors smote the heart. We in the south got nothing like this, even in the lush forests of the Tidewater. The sky overhead was a dome of the strongest, purest cobalt I had ever seen, and the sun climbing through the woods made paths of dappled gold and laid down rays in which motes of gold danced. To walk up our driveway to the road was to enter a world of flaming stained glass, to mainline light. I remembered the rich, mellow light of Maine in August, but now, in this untimely full autumn, it was simply supernatural. Everything was outlined in blue. The small outer islands seemed to float above the sea. I would not look at Sunderson’s.

Numinous,
I thought, and smiled.

Even the eight of us sprawled on the old wooden steps were blessed with light, outlined in it as if a miniaturist had traced us with his richest gold leaf. Betsy’s beautiful head caught its fire. My quiet younger daughter, Alice, had her long legs stretched out to the sun, though the day was chilly and sweaters and even blankets had been brought out. So like Cam, I thought, looking at her long rangy legs and arms, with the small hairs turned to piratical flame in the light. I saw Cam’s arms and legs, too, as I had seen them a thousand times before on these old steps, all knobby angles and blazing pelt. My eyes filled and I closed them. Behind them, suddenly, there were other arms and legs, brown knobby, smooth-skinned, with the hairs on them turned to white-gold wire by the sun. I opened my eyes and shook my head violently.

“What’s up for today?” I asked the crowd at large. Nobody seemed to be contemplating moving from the steps.

“I just want to sleep,” Betsy muttered. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

I remembered that she was pregnant, and thought of my own sleep-stunned early months carrying her and Alice.

“There’s a hammock on the other side of the porch, in the sun and out of the wind,” I said. “Go crawl in. I’ll bring you a blanket.”

She smiled gratefully at me.

“Thanks, Mom. Ahhh, what time is the—you know, the thing tonight?”

“About eight. It’ll have been full dark for a long time, and the paper said the first of the meteors might begin around then. There’ll be plenty of light, though. I’ll light the flambeaus down on the dock, and you can watch from there or from here on the porch, if you’d rather. It’s going to be cold.”

“Why you had to pick off season for this . . .” she grumbled, the old Betsy back again.

“Your dad always said he wanted to be up here off season,” I said. “And I see what he means now. It’s enchanted. A different world from summer. On moonlit nights all sorts of wild things come out: foxes, porcupines, a bear or two, once even a moose. I’d be surprised if you didn’t see my foxes dance. I’d like to stay forever.”

Heads turned toward me, annoying me greatly, and so I got up and said to Kitty, “Want to take a little hike with me? I’ll show you my special hideaway from when I was little. It’s sort of a climb, but it’s worth it.”

“Sure,” she said, getting up.

Junie Sternhagen turned her crocodile smile toward me. It was outlined in vermillion lipstick this morning, and she wore a fuzzy sweat suit to match it.

“Off-season Maine is lovely, isn’t it? I’m so glad Cam got up here then as often as he did. He always had something new to tell me about when he got back.”

I was silent.

She said, “I thought he might not have told you about the times he came up here, Lilly. I’m sure he didn’t want you to worry about something being wrong with the house, or something. It wasn’t all
that
many times. I made his reservations, so I think I’ve got a record of his trips somewhere, if you’d like to have them.”

“No, thanks, Junie.” I grinned back fiercely. “I usually knew where he was. I know something I’m absolutely sure he never told you.”

“Well, I knew an awful lot about him.” She bridled. “He always called me his office wife.”

Everyone’s head turned toward her in startled distaste. I heard Kitty draw in a great breath, and I laid my hand on her arm.

“But I bet you never knew what he wore under his kilt,” I said, and the porch exploded in laughter, and Kitty and I walked off across the beach toward the beetling promontory, the illicit cliff we children climbed without a thought for the
ANYONE SWIMMING ON THESE ROCKS WILL BE PROSECUTED
sign posted at its base. It still reared its great head over the pebbly beach, shadowing it, and I still felt the faint, wicked thrill I always had when I approached it for the first time each summer.

“What a bitch,” Kitty said, looking back at the crowd on the porch, still laughing. “You got her good, Lil. There’s nothing she’d rather know than what Cam wore under his kilt.”

“I didn’t know about all those trips, Kitty,” I said in a low voice.

“I’ll bet you a year’s worth of fancy lunches that she made three-fourths of that up. Don’t give her the pleasure of knowing you think about it. By the way, what
did
—”

“Kitty!”

“Right.”

We reached the top of the cliff. I took a deep breath and felt my breathing ease into the breathing of the bay. I had not had the awful chest constriction up here this year, except that first night, but still I breathed deepest and most fully with the sound of the sea.

“It’s awesome,” Kitty said quietly, almost in a whisper. “It looks like the dawn of time, doesn’t it?”

We were surrounded by the same light-struck mist that I remembered hung here on many mornings. Through it, far away, the dark shapes of the pointed firs pricked the fog, and below it the sea, now a pewter glitter in the low light, unrolled itself out past Great Spruce Head and ended itself in a gunmetal line on the horizon. We stood, cloaked in bright, swirling mist. I heard the unmistakable sweet-shrill cries of hunting ospreys. I did not comment on them. I didn’t want to get into this with Kitty.

She heard them, though, Tidewater girl that she was.

“Ospreys. Where are they? Is there a nest somewhere around here?”

Kitty loved ospreys. She had put up several nesting poles along her stretch of creek, and the ospreys always came.

“No,” I said, as casually as I could. “There used to be over there on Sunderson’s Island, but some people cut their trees down. I heard they have a nest over on Deer Isle.”

“Then where do these come from?”

“I don’t know. I never see them, only hear them. I’d think I was nuts, but Laurie hears them too, and now you. It’s a great comfort.”

She raised an eyebrow at me.

“Ghost ospreys?”

“Would you rather have ghost skunks? There are about a million of them around, too. They’re what make those little holes in the lawn, in which I devoutly hope Junie baby steps and breaks her wedgie. They dig for grubs.”

“No kidding. Where are they, if they’re close enough to hear so plainly?”