Shining Sea (26 page)

A strange sensation, like she's hurtling through life itself, comes over her. She sees herself at about Kenny's age back in Southern California many years ago, Michael alive and well by her side, all the kids asleep in their beds. Everything on earth just as it should be. She could never have imagined life would go so off course, become so complicated. Why can't life just run like minnows through one's fingers, moving fast but bright and tickling? Why does it have to be so full of darkness and shadows?

She shakes the thought away.

When she gets home, she will step up to take over the volunteer program at the library, just as she said she would. She'll introduce some new events, too. Book groups—maybe two, one for adults and one for children. She could find a teenager, someone fun, for the kids and find someone lively for the older group also. She's not suddenly going to pretend she herself is much of a reader. Luke was the reader in the family, and Sissy is. Patty Ann, when circumstances have allowed it. Michael liked to read, too, especially poetry. That's how they met, after all—she offered him reading material. And Ronnie! He just tore through magazines:
National Geographic,
Scientific American
.
Life,
when they still published it. Both
Time
and
Newsweek.
She still gets some of the magazines, with his name on the labels. Every two years, she finds herself writing a check to renew the subscriptions.

“Next stop,” Kenny mouths over the roar of the subway.

“Already?”

A cookbook book group, though—that's something she could do. That would be fun, even. She could choose a different cookbook each month and, at the meeting, members of the group would all bring in something they'd made from it. It wouldn't have to be just women, either. Lots of men like to cook. They'd probably think it a good way to meet the ladies. But would it be okay to have food in the library? She'd have to—

“Grandma.”
Kenny is reaching for her hand.

The subway has stopped. She jumps to her feet. Up the stairs they go, into the sunshine.

“I should have bought a hat off that stand!” she says.

This next ceremony is in the garden of the medical center. It's cooler here, shaded and quiet. They take their seats, and a soft feeling of peace comes over her, and a new string of images from years earlier appears in her thoughts, of Kenny and Ronnie, of Kenny and Sissy. There was a fierceness in the way Sissy took Kenny into the fold back then, a determination almost greater than her own to protect him. It's a shame Sissy couldn't be here today. Africa! What a place for a girl who couldn't step into the Arizona sun without acquiring a dozen new freckles.

When she gets back to Scottsdale, she's also going to invest in a home computer. Kenny says he and Sissy communicate through “e-mails.” She's going to find out what those are. Why shouldn't she and Sissy communicate through e-mails also?

On the podium, a kindly-looking man with square gold-rimmed glasses is being introduced by the dean of the medical school. She's been so busy daydreaming she completely lost track of the proceedings.

“Who is he?” she asks Jennifer.

“Dr. Lonnie Bristow, president of the AMA. He used to be a spokesman on the AIDS crisis for them.”

She thinks for a minute. “Do you think Kenny is making the right decision, Jennifer? Going into research?”

“He'll be great,” Jennifer answers firmly.

She folds her hands in her lap. A year after Kenny came to live with them, about when Patty Ann took up with Glenn, Kenny started wetting his bed. No matter how much she scolded or teased or pleaded, he couldn't stop it.
Look, Barbara,
Ronnie finally said.
I know you're the one with the experience raising kids. But let's have Kenny sleep in our bed. I'm willing to bet he'll never again have an accident
. For the following week, Kenny slept in the big bed with her while Ronnie slept on the sofa. Never once did she wake up to wet sheets. At the end of the week, Kenny went back to his own bed, dry as the desert around them.

She was what? A grandma? A mother? A grandma-mother? She never thought of Kenny as one of her children. He was always Patty Ann's son. But she loved him as though he were her own child. And Ronnie loved him like a father would have.

All her life, she's wanted to believe in the truth of order. But life is more like a crazy juggernaut of possibilities, like one of those incomprehensible charts of the nervous system Kenny brought home over the holidays to study, synapses shooting in every direction. How can there be order? Somehow she met a nice man from church who was willing to throw in his lot with hers, even though hers was weighted with five kids and a mountain of bills and his was so light. It was wrong of her to think earlier of Michael at Kenny's graduation; it is Ronnie who should be here, with all that gentle pride he carried silently around with him, helping little Kenny earn his Boy Scout badges, learn to do the crawl down at the community pool. To combat his bed-wetting problems.

Ronnie wasn't Michael.
He was
Ronnie
.

“I'm sure Kenny will be, too,” she tells Jennifer.

The ceremony ends, and they find their way into the reception. Kenny guides her through the crowd, introducing her to friends and professors, always using the same words: “And here is my grandma, Barbara McCloskey. Without her, I wouldn't be here.”

And each time she thinks:
And without you, I wouldn't be here, either
.

Because every relationship, from the most intimate to the most fleeting, has the power to change the course of life until, after a while, life becomes a Tinkertoy accumulation of connections: her long-dead father-in-law back in Massachusetts—the broken World War I vet she only once met but whose nonetheless uncrushable belief in humanity and sense of duty triggered Michael's decision to enlist during World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor; the day she volunteered to come through the ward where Michael was convalescing, peddling books and magazines she herself had no interest in reading; the night Patty Ann allowed a good-for-nothing greasy boy to drive her home, then sat in his car kissing him until she, with Sissy on her hip, came out and banged on its window; the ex-marine who shot Kennedy, making LBJ president, who then ended new draft exemptions for married men, which compelled Patty to marry that useless boy, and then to have a baby with him, and then to hand that baby over to her to raise…

And there he is standing in front of her, a full-fledged doctor.

She squeezes Kenny's arm and nods toward Jennifer, chatting with two young men in robes. She can hear them teasing and coaxing her to continue, with Kenny, to a party after the reception is over. “Jennifer seems like a sweet girl. When are you going to get hitched?”

Kenny laughs. “One celebration at a time, Grandma!”

She pats his arm. “You know what? I think I'm done here now. I'm going to go back to my hotel and leave the two of you with your friends.”

“But, Grandma, our dinner reservation—”

She looks at her hand, veined now but still slim and delicate, on his arm. “You have dinner with your young woman. Really. We had lunch together. And we'll have lunch and dinner together tomorrow. I think you should get to do both—celebrate with your family and with your friends. And frankly, I don't want to celebrate with your friends.” She gestures at the crowd of young women and men in their cocktail dresses and sober dark suits and smiles. “They look kind of boring.”

Kenny laughs again. “Oh, Grandma. Are you sure?”

“Kenny, am I ever not sure of what I want?”

They make up a paper-bag dinner for her in a little Spanish grocery store—Jennifer's idea, but she doesn't protest. She doesn't argue either when Kenny hails her a taxi. She slides into the back, placing the paper bag on her lap and her handbag neatly next to it. The taxi heads down to the highway, racing along the Hudson River, thick and gray-blue in the late afternoon sunshine. Cars bob in and out of the lanes; on the other side of the highway, heading uptown and out of the city, the traffic is almost at a standstill. The taxi exits the highway and heads back onto the streets of New York. People of all ages emerge from subways, doorways, newspaper-and-tobacco shops, on their way home from school or work. Somehow, trees with pale green leaves manage to grow through the cement of the sidewalks. Garbage piles out of trash containers that should be emptied. Squirrels hop on top of them, vying with sparrows for the spoils. The taxi pulls up across the street from the hotel, pauses, and throws itself into a U-turn.

“My,” she says, extracting her wallet to pay the driver. “Do you charge extra for the thrill element?”

The driver laughs. “For you, young lady, it's on the house.”

Barely has her foot hit the ground when a couple comes up to claim the taxi. The streets are alive. Nannies walk with their young charges, returning from ballet class or tennis lessons. Women trip along wearing business suits with sneakers, like Molly was—probably those same kids' mothers. There are men on the street, too, but at this moment the females seem to dominate.

Down on the corner, the woman missing a tooth is still begging. She walks over to her. “Here,” she says, holding out the paper bag with her dinner. “Have this.”

The woman opens the bag, examines the oversize club sandwich, banana, and bottle of apple juice. “I don't drink juice with my food. I'm allergic. I drink soda.”

She shrugs. “Take it or leave it.”

The woman closes the bag and sticks her hand out. “You got some money so I can bring something home to my kids?”

She reaches into her purse and takes out a twenty-dollar bill. The money will probably go into the woman's veins. But just for this moment in time she wants to believe it will buy a couple of cans of Campbell's soup, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of milk for some hungry children. She wants to think all kids everywhere have the possibility of a second chance.

She turns back toward her hotel, walking slowly, taking in the dawning of the evening. In a little while, she may venture out on her own, try one of the many restaurants lining Columbus Avenue. Right now, though, it's beautiful here, with the lights turned on against the white stone of the museum.

T
HE KNOB ON THE
sugarhouse door feels cold and damp to his bare hand as he pulls it shut. He took his gloves off when the last of the sap had turned to syrup, the filtering was finished, the golden liquid poured, and the season was over for the year. He'll come back to finish cleaning up in the morning.

Outside, a silver-dollar moon spills light over the melting snow and patches of frozen mud. His breath smokes away from his mouth. He'll turn sixty-three this year. His back hurts like hell, and one of his wrists sports an oozing slick gash where he managed to burn it on the evaporator. He and Georgina can't afford more than one hired hand during sugaring season now, and they can't allow Mia to keep coming home to help. He used to feel jubilant at the end of the last day of sugaring for the year. Now he just wants to crawl into bed, drag the quilt up over his head, and sleep for a week. The only thing harder to imagine than not entering that sugarhouse again next early spring is the thought of entering it again.

Still, at least this year won't have been the worst. Last year, a big seed year with erratic weather, was. Or 2012, with that sudden heat wave. The snowfall here in New England this year has been pitiless, but on the good side, nights stayed cold long enough for them to gather 6,500 gallons, up more than five hundred from last year. The day his profit goes under $7,500 is the day he's sworn he's going to give the whole thing up. They should get at least $1,000 more than that this year. Which means he'll be at it again come next March or, if the winters return to getting shorter, next February.

He runs a hand through his hair. There was a time when he didn't own a bank account. Now he has an accounting firm in his head.

It must be 2:00 a.m.

When he and Georgina first took up sugaring, money was still pouring in from his music. Slowly that torrent thinned to a stream, then to an occasional dribble. It was okay, though—they had the interest from Georgina's trust. For that matter, they still had Georgina's trust; soul-sucking 2008 hadn't happened. For all those years, sugaring was mostly a diversion: they'd risen above Georgina's past, they'd risen above his past, they'd ridden the wave of his sudden success to create a new life for themselves and the baby they had coming on a big old farm in the hills between Massachusetts and Vermont, and they had to do something with it both for tax purposes and their sanity. Waiting for that perfect early spring combination of frozen night and thawing day, tapping the maples, collecting the sap, boiling it down, dividing it between the containers, and then bringing it around to stores and fairs to be sold gave a sense of order to their life. Everything else on Iona Farm was pinned to the sugaring: the strawberry fields they put in a few years later, the apple orchard they eventually bought next to the property.

And Georgina loved it. She thought it was hilarious.
Who would ever have pictured me doing this?
she would say each time sugaring season came around, tossing one of his too-big-for-her heavy wool plaid shirts over her leather pants and cashmere sweater. For those six or seven weeks during sugaring, she'd stay clean as a whistle, rolling up her sleeves to pitch in like anyone else. It wasn't even a struggle. They'd throw a whopping backyard party when it was over, inviting the whole township, little Mia running through everyone's legs in oversize boots, a maple-walnut sticky bun in her hand and sugar parentheses in the corners of her mouth, the sound of the creek rising in the background. Those were good times.

It's been a while since they held one of those parties. Now they're lucky if sugaring season lasts five weeks. The winters aren't cold enough or they're too cold, and the thaw comes too suddenly. The rhythm is off, and in protest, the maples aren't giving up sap as they once did. Mia says the problem comes not only from the weather but also from acid rain and chemicals in the groundwater. She flirted with environmental science before deciding to study law like her Aunt Molly. She also, somewhere along the line, stopped running between everyone else's boots and slipped into helping with the sugaring.

And that's the other problem. With this winter's relentless snowfall, so deep not even the hardy snowdrops could make their way through the drifts, so persistent the earth has remained blanketed with white when it should be dusted with dusk-blue hepatica, Mia is helping later than expected—too close to her final exams. He shouldn't have let her. No amount of maple syrup is worth it.

On the other hand, if she's going to need funds now for law school, how to help her without that little extra bit from sugaring?

Money.

The light is on in the old barn. The first couple of years they lived here, a local farmer rented their west pasture and old barn for his herd of specialty cows. But Georgina hated those cows; she said watching them lumber around, their mouths endlessly chewing, made her feel more existentialist than Sartre and Camus put together.
It's enough to drive a person to drink,
she said. When Georgina says things like that, it's a good idea to listen. As soon as the farmer's lease ran out, he had the cows removed and converted the pasture to a strawberry field. The barn has since been used to store extra sugaring equipment and hay for packing around the berries.

Mia is inside, sitting cross-legged next to the electric heater with a weathered leather-bound diary in her hands.

“It's your grandfather's medical log. Nothing private,” she says quickly.

He scratches his arm, confused as to what she could be doing still in here. They've been working like dogs since morning. “Aren't you tired?”

She shrugs, her slight shoulders poking out of her down vest. Her face is pure Gannon—the same sharp cheekbones, heavily lashed blue eyes, straight brow—but she's inherited Georgina's delicate frame and unpredictable sense of humor. A few years ago, a cub reporter working a “where are they now” story appeared at the farm.
What do you consider your greatest creation?
the reporter asked, expecting no doubt a doleful nod to a song written almost three decades earlier.

What a silly question.

“For every patient he saw,” Mia says, “he noted down the date, time, name, address, complaint, diagnosis, treatment recommended, and payment. All by hand, in the most perfect cursive.”

“That would have been your great-grandmother,” he says, dropping onto a hay bale. They'll have to wait for all the snow finally to be gone to start planting this year's strawberry crop and lay this hay, which means when the time comes it will need to be done fast. “She handled all the patient interfacing for your great-grandfather's medical cabinet. She even drove him to see his patients.”

“That's so cute. He visited patients in their own homes?”

His grandmother died of polio the year he was born, and his grandfather died shortly after. He never met them. His father had one picture of them, a tall and somber couple.
Cute
is one of the last words he would have used to describe them.

“Hmm.”

“Look at this: March first, 1933. Ten a.m. Elizabeth Creedy. Oak Tree Hill. Bleeding. Miscarriage. Cod liver oil. Basket of seven beets.”

“Where did you get that?”

Mia shuts the diary. She pulls her knees in to her chest.

The diary must have been in one of Aunt Jeanne's boxes, stuck behind the old evaporator he still hasn't managed to sell. A few weeks after her funeral, Molly lugged them all up here in the back of her station wagon.
Hang on to them, will you? Until I have time to go through them?
That was about twenty years ago. They never seem to get around to it when Molly brings her family to visit.

Behind the old evaporator is also where Georgina stows her empty bottles.

“You find anything else interesting?” he asks carefully. Georgina has done pretty well since Mia was born, but she slipped up this winter. And then Mia was home before he could get the bottles over to one of the farther-away townships to recycle. At twenty-one, Mia is too old now not to notice when her mom hasn't been sober; she must have gone looking for the evidence.

She stares at her knees. “Hidden, not interesting.”

What is there to say? It's an endless battle, Georgina's lifelong battle. His battle for her. They couldn't hide it forever from their daughter.

“You did find the diary, though. That's interesting.”

“Yeah, it is. It's like this perfect little historical capsule. The illnesses, the payments, the tiny villages. It's funny how you ended up back here. Almost exactly where they lived.”

Are we looking for your father?
Georgina said in that laserlike way of hers when they started hunting for property in the area, all those years ago. He hadn't realized it until she said it, but of course that was exactly what he was doing.

“Your mother and I thought New England would be a good compromise between England and California—we'd both get a little something familiar.”

“I'm glad you bought right here.”

“You wouldn't want to have grown up a California girl?”

Mia smiles. She gets up, brushing hay from her jeans. “I did find one other thing.” She disappears behind the old evaporator and then reappears with a big bundle in plastic, lugging it between her two arms. “What's this? It looks like there's a guitar inside.”

His rosewood guitar, still carefully wrapped against the sea.

Thirty years, and he hasn't touched it.

“Yeah,” he says. “There's a guitar inside.”

She pulls a corner of the plastic open and wrinkles her nose. “It stinks.”

The smell of the brine returns to him; it swells in his heart as the waves once did around him. He's an old man now. Such a different man. And still that scent drags him back.

“So what is it?” Mia says.

“Like you said. An old guitar.”

“Broken?”

“I don't think so.”

“So why don't you use it?”

“Just don't.”

“But you've kept it.”

People lead these lives and then pray their kids don't end up living anything like them. So they pretend their lives have been clean until either the lies catch up with them or the kids see through the lies. He doesn't hide his past from Mia; he's told her what seemed right for her to know. In a way, his past is her past, too, or at least her heritage. His father was a World War II prisoner of war who managed to survive hell in the Pacific, then died anyway when he was a boy, and his mother remarried and moved to Arizona. She is still going strong, but her second husband died from AIDS years ago. That's why Mia's much older cousin went into AIDS research and why her grandmother became such an important fund-raiser for AIDS research in her state when not overseeing the volunteer programs at her local library. His older sister stayed behind in Los Angeles and is still there running a renowned—and expensive—artist's retreat on Venice Beach with her third husband. His younger sister works and mostly lives in Africa, but he's not sure exactly where—he left, and when he got back, she was gone. He never really got to know her as an adult. He had two brothers who went to Vietnam. One came back and worked as an army doctor until retiring a couple of years ago in Texas. The other didn't.

After college, he split for Europe and spent some time bumming around, which is when he met her mother. And he met a man there with whom he rowed from Scotland to Ireland. They encountered a terrible storm, and the man died, and he wrote an album about it, with a song that became very successful.

That has always seemed like enough for Mia to know. Because, on the other hand, his life is his and no one else's. There was no reason to tell her what he was doing when he met her mother on a dance floor on the Spanish island of Mallorca. Or about
why
he left for Europe—about how he had a friend growing up he spent all his time with who also went to Vietnam and came back alive but still didn't survive. All these years later, it's still hard to think about.

“Can I look inside?” she says.

“If you want.”

She hunts around for a pair of gardening shears and slits through the bundle. His old guitar case, faded but still pristine, emerges from the multiple folds of stiffened, yellowed plastic. She lays it on its back and opens the clasps.

The warm rosewood glow has dimmed, and there's a hint of rot around the sound hole. Diminished and, yet, still beautiful. The hours he spent crouched over this guitar, so many years ago. In their house in California and then in the one Ronnie bought in Arizona. On countless squares and train platforms all over Europe, busking. On the beach in Scotland where he met Rufus.

Mia looks at him, waiting. He picks it up and plucks a string. The sound is awful. He plucks again. The brittle string snaps.

“Is this the guitar you wrote the song on?” Mia says.

He shakes his head. “This is the guitar I wrote the song about.”

“You'll have to change the strings. Maybe there's one…” She turns back to the case, flipping open the pick box. “Hey, what's this?”

She pries with her finger and slowly pulls out a small faded photo.

With the door shut, the air in the barn is still, timeless. He could be anywhere, anytime, back fifty years ago jumping off a pier in Santa Monica alongside his best friend. Or flipping burgers, grease spattering onto their arms. Or swimming in a muddy lake while Joan Baez sings in the distance.

“That's you! Carrying the palm leaf. Look, you are all there.”

He takes the photo into his calloused hands. So many years lie between the Palm Sunday when Eugene snapped it and this day, here. His father was still alive. But then some were lost. And some more were born.

“Not all. Your aunt Sissy wasn't even born yet.”

“Oh, yes, she is there, too. Look at Grandma.”

There's his mother, so young, her lips painted red, her hair prettily curled, her stomach round and hard in the last weeks of pregnancy. Sissy was born barely more than a week after this.