Off Season (40 page)

I told her about the year of two moons, and what Laurie had said, and also about her theory that all off-season Maine hauntings had their provenance in whiskey.

“How much wine did you drink last night?” I laughed at her.

“I wasn’t the one hugging a cognac bottle,” she said tartly. “No kidding, do you hear them often?”

“Almost every day.”

“Does it scare you?”

“How could the cries of ospreys scare anyone? It’s like a gift from Maine to me, whether or not I can see them.”

“I see what you mean. But, Lilly . . .”

She did not go on.

“What?”

“This place right now, it’s like your feet never quite touch the earth. I felt it the minute I got up here. Don’t stay too long, Lil. You need the earth.”
“I’ve had the earth all my life. Right now midair is okay by me.” I smiled. “And besides, we’re coming home as soon after tonight as I can get some quotes from an antiquarian book dealer over in Ellsworth. I took a lot of Daddy’s books over there a while ago, and he said he thought some of them might be valuable.”

“Would you sell them?”

“No, but they’re part of the estate. I need an estimate on them. Not much else in the cottage is worth anything.”

“Will you keep it, do you think?”

“Of course I’ll keep it. It’s my favorite place on earth; it was Cam’s too. It’s the only place I feel him . . . near.”

Her face was troubled, but she said nothing for a moment. Then, “But you’re definitely coming home after that.”

“Of course. I can’t stay up here much longer. We’re not win-terized.”

“I’m glad.”

The gold-shot mist was swirling around us now. I knew it was breaking up.

“I used to think people could fly,” I told her, smiling. “That we all could once, and a few of us still could. The last summer we were here when I was a child I was up here just about this time of morning and the mist was doing the very same thing, and I met someone who . . . who—I thought he had flown here.”

All of a sudden my breath left me and I could not go on. I bent over from the waist, gasping, and felt tears running down my face. My blinded eyes saw a carved golden face and very blue eyes and white-blond hair like living flame, and felt smooth tanned skin and callused palms from tennis, and smelled the damp, salty, smoky smell of an old sweater.

“Did you fly?” my eleven-year-old voice said through the roaring in my ears.

“Not the way I think you mean,” his twelve-year-old voice, deep for his age, replied.

Jon
.

I felt Kitty’s arms around me from behind, easing me down to the dry grass on the cliff top. I felt her hands shaking my shoulders, and heard her voice, very far away.

“Lilly! Lilly! What is it? Lilly,
breathe
!”

From the air I heard a whisper, “Breathe, Lilly. Find the sea and breathe with it.”

And slowly I did. I sat gasping, my heart racing, the tears drying on my face. When my breath steadied I looked up at Kitty’s worried face.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I get this asthma . . .”

She looked at me levelly, then shook her head.

“That wasn’t asthma, Lilly. I’ve seen your asthma. Who was he?”

“Who was who?”

“Oh, shit, Lilly, the person you met up here in the mist, and you thought he’d flown here—”

“How do you know it was a he— Oh, God, Kitty. His name was Jon. Jon Lowell. He had just come out for the summer; none of us had ever met him before.”

“And you loved him.”

“Yes, I did.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died,” I said, beginning to cry again. “He died right out there in the bay. He took our Beetle Cat out in a fog and . . . nobody ever found him. They found the boat, but not him.”

She drew me closely into her arms and let me cry wearily on her shoulder.

“And that’s why you . . . lived the way you did. All shut up in your father’s house or else at the bottom of a swimming pool, so nothing could get to you again.”

“I guess so. Don’t analyze it, Kitty. I was not quite twelve years old. He was not quite thirteen. It couldn’t have lasted even if he hadn’t died.”

“Why not?”

“Because that sort of thing, at that age, never does! How can it?” I said angrily. I was breathing well and my tears were dry again. I wanted no more of this.

“Did Cam know?”

“He knew . . . most of it.”

“But not the love part.”

“Kitty!”

“Okay, baby. Let’s go back, in case June Bug has decided to try and nick his toothbrush or something. I just—”

“Just what?”

“I just think it must be hard, losing both of them to the bay.”

“I never even thought of that, Kitty. I never think about him. It was just today, and the mist and all. Look, don’t feel sorry for me. I had my great love. I had it for a long time. I still have it.”

“I know,” she said, and we went down the cliff path and back across the beach to Edgewater.

“Weather breeder, sure enough,” Toby Halliday said that night on the dock at Edgewater.

It was the most beautiful night I had ever seen. At sunset the last of the low sun had struck my headland to gold-vermillion; against the darkening purple sky it was almost frightening, eerie. I had the fleeting thought that it looked like the last day of the world. Well, in a way it was.

The dark fell quickly. We all bundled up in whatever we could find in the cottage and trundled down to the end of the dock, where the Friendship bobbed at anchor, scrubbed and fresh painted, her brightwork giving off sparks in the dark. Looking as far as I could see on both sides, I could make out no pinprick of light at all on the shore. I had never seen night like that here. This was what Laurie meant by the long dark.

The wind was still and the chill grew. I thought there would be ice tonight, inland, probably. I had lit the old summer flambeaus on the lawn, and set lanterns down the path to the dock, but beyond that the only light was that of the great, swollen stars hanging suspended like grape clusters in the velvet sky. Reflected in the still, black water, they gave ample light to see by. Down at the end of the dock, where the pilings sank into the rocks and then the bottom of the sea, phosphorescence winked and danced. I had never seen it so except on the hottest nights of summer.
Everything is conspiring to shine for Cam tonight,
I thought, hugging the urn close under Jeebs’s old down parka. Instead of making me sad, the thought filled me with exultation.

“Watch closely. This is your big night,” I whispered to him, both in the urn and in the small gold mesh pouch, once my mother’s summer evening bag, that hung around my neck under my sweater. There was more of him there than there had been in the envelope. I had taken care of that days earlier.

I thought about the slacks and sweater, though. When I had gotten ready to dress for tonight, I remember wondering what one wore to fling one’s husband into the Atlantic Ocean. And when I opened the closet in my room, there they hung: white linen trousers and a heavy navy blue cabled sweater. I had not seen them, I thought, in years. I certainly had not seen them hanging in my closet. And yet there they were, and I took them off the hangers and slipped them on. They fit perfectly. I looked in my mirror and saw a memory: a young girl dressing up for one of the first times in her life, with her hair piled up and her mother’s blush and lipstick on her face. And a bit later, the voice of Peaches Davenport, saying snidely, “Isn’t that a winter sweater? Gosh, you must be burning up.”

“Okay,” I said aloud. “All right. You want me to wear ’em, I’ll wear ’em.”

A small, warm breath brushed my cheek.

“Thanks.”

Everyone was on the dock except Betsy, who was sobbing in her bedroom.

“I can’t, Mama,” she had hiccupped. “I just can’t.”

I hugged her.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said against her hot cheek. “You’re not losing him. You’ll see. He’ll be with you always, right here.” I tapped her chest, which would soon swell with food for her unborn child. Death and life . . .

“Really?”

“Really. I’ve had him with me every minute since he’s been gone. He’s not going to leave his girls alone. And he wouldn’t want you to cry for him, either. You know that.”

“I know.” She blew her nose. “But still, I can’t go.”

So the rest of us stood quietly in the beginning of the long dark and waited. Presently we saw the first silver arc of a star falling far out over the islands. And then another, and another.

“Ready, Lilly?” Toby asked.

“Ready, Captain,” I said, and he took my hand and swung me aboard the Friendship, as Cam had done a thousand times, and my father before him.

By the time we ghosted out of the bay, the stars were blooming in the sky like winter snow, like comets with their sweet silver tails intact. Around the bow of the boat the phosphorescence danced. Toby had his running lights on, but we really did not need them. All the world was silver tonight.

We reached the spot where the wind usually picked you up if you were sailing, just outside the last great boulder on our cove’s beach.

“Reckon this would do?” Toby said, his voice thick. “Cam always liked this spot. Called it Land’s End.”

“Then Land’s End it will be,” I said. I was calm with a serenity I had never felt before. Everything felt slowed up, underwater, but absolutely and incontrovertibly right. I smiled in the darkness.

Toby dropped the line and the mainsail fell still. The sloop rocked sweetly, outlined in phosphorescence. The sky rained stars, snowed stars. It was so beautiful that I felt as if I had been caught up in some great, godlike moment out of antiquity, a ceremony for a fallen warrior, perhaps, or the birth of a great king.

Toby cleared his throat. “There’s something I always liked that I thought I might read, if you don’t mind,” he said.

“Of course not.”

He took a small, tattered book out of his pocket and raised it close to his face. He cleared his throat and began, “‘Sunset and evening star, / And one clear call for me! / And may there be no moaning of the bar, / When I put out to sea . . .’”

As he read the rest of Tennyson, I laughed silently, and then cried. Cam hated the poem, but he loved Toby.

When he was done, I walked to the rail of the Friendship and hugged the urn to me for a moment and then held it aloft and let Cam’s ashes spill out and into the little night wind. The wind took them and whirled them, and the crowding stars lit them and the flickering phosphorescence in the water received them. For a moment the ashes glowed on the surface of the bay like silver dust, and then were whirled away on the water. I watched them for a long time. When they faded from sight, they were still glowing.

I turned my face to Toby’s and saw that tears streaked his cheeks like silver snail’s tracks. I reached my fingers up and wiped them away.

“Don’t,” I said. “He’s still with us. We’ll always have him.”

“I know, baby girl,” he said. “I was just thinking about your wedding day, when Seth brought the Friendship around for him, and there he was with those hairy red legs sticking out of that silly little skirt, falling all over you to catch the mainsail line before she foundered, and you with your pretty silk skirt hiked up over your head. I was watching from the dock; Seth let me come with him that day. I remember I was so impressed with that—what was it? That little knife? I know there’s a Gaelic name for it—sticking out of his sock.”
“It’s called a Sgian Dubh,” I said, beginning to laugh, too. “But he forgot his, and so he had to use a steak knife.”

We were still laughing, though with tears falling freely, when he brought the Friendship back in. It was so cold that everyone on the dock had retreated to the house, but I stood outside for a long time, in a snow globe of swirling stars, and thought about my husband, with love, but not with loss. That came later.

CHAPTER 19

I
woke the next morning to low, heavy gray light, but an ineffable sense of late morning hung in the silent air. So did aloneness. Sometime during the long, dreamless night and early morning, everyone had gone. Not even the lump that was Silas was under my tangled covers. I swung my feet out of bed and onto an icy floor, and scrambled for Jeebs’s tatty old flannel robe, which I had appropriated. It was colder than cold, arctic. I had never felt such cold before. Part of it was the emptiness. Why had they all gone and left me alone?

I groped in my mind for Cam, but I could not find him. By the time I stumbled into the living room I was in a frigid sweat of panic. But Kitty was there, curled up under several mothy old Hudson’s Bay blankets, drinking coffee and watching the fire sputter. A bony head, looking for all the world like a desiccated jack-o’-lantern, rose from the folds near her hip.

“Will you please tell this woman where the can opener is?”
he grumped.
“She’s been trying to hack into a can with a fork.”

I stared at Kitty. She had dark rings around her eyes and her hair was wild. She was wearing a heavy sweat suit and old Uggs, a brand of boots that I so detested but whose woolly warmth I would have cut her throat for this morning, and her packed bag stood beside the door.

“Kitty, where is everybody? Why didn’t somebody wake me up? There are space heaters all over the place, and dry firewood on the porch.”

She knuckled her eyes and looked at me.

“Please feed this goddamned cat and then we’ll talk. He’s about to go for my throat.”

I fed an ungrateful Silas, poured myself a cup of coffee, and ran back into the living room. My bare feet were numb; I thrust them under Kitty’s blankets.

“Now. What?”

“When you came in from the dock last night we called out for you to come join us—it was a fine wake, Lilly. Cam would have loved it. But you just gave us this rhapsodic look—Joan of Arc comes to mind—and drifted on up the stairs, so we figured you needed to be alone and sleep. The girls and their husbands decided to get up very early and see if they could get an early plane out of Bangor that would get them to Boston, and then take the shuttle to New York. Everybody had critical projects lying on their desks, and they said they’d call you when they got in. I personally think they were all dying of the lack of little willowy guys in black bringing in their Kona coffee, and the sound of rarefied snits going on out in the hall. Junie lit out of here soon after; I don’t think she wanted to spend another night in Cam’s house with only you and no Cam. Tatty went with her, fretting about where they were going to stop for lunch. I’m not sure Tatty knew where she was all weekend. Everyone gave you their deepest love.”