That Old Cape Magic (22 page)

“Justin!” his mother barked, taking him by the shoulders and spinning him around to face her. “What did Mommy say about hitting people there? Didn’t she tell you it’s
not nice?”
Whereupon he punched her in the same place.
It had been Griffin’s intention to say a quick goodbye to Joy and Laura, but they were now at the center of the commotion on the lawn, and he decided against it. The entrance to the wheelchair ramp was close at hand, and with everyone distracted he’d be able to slip away unnoticed, using the yew hedge for cover all the way to the parking lot. Even as he planned this, something tugged at his short-term memory like a continuity problem in a movie (hadn’t the main character’s shirt been unbuttoned in the previous frame?), though only when he started down the incline and saw the splintered railing right where the ramp made a ninety-degree turn did he realize what it was: that just a few moments ago an impatient Harve had been sitting here.
When Griffin got close, he could hear him groaning. The railing was rotten—he could see that much—and had snapped on impact. Due to the severe slope of the lawn, the porch was at this point a good ten feet above it, the top of the hedge a couple feet below. The yew was still quivering when he peered over the side. “Harve?” Griffin said. “You okay?”
The voice that answered sounded more like a child’s than a grown man’s. “Won’t…
go,”
it said.
It wasn’t difficult to piece together what must have happened. His father-in-law, abandoned by his daughter when the brat got clobbered, and too impatient to wait for assistance, had tried to navigate the ramp on his own and lost control of his chair. He was now planted headfirst in the hedge, his chair on top of him, its wheels up and still spinning. Actually, no, that last part couldn’t be right. The wheels were turning, all right, but that was because Harve, invisible beneath the chair but apparently still in the saddle, was pushing on them like mad, trying to power himself out of this predicament, apparently unaware that he was capsized in the yew’s branches, suspended eight feet in the air.
Griffin kneeled, leaned over and reached down as far as he could; the nearest spinning wheel was just beyond his fingertips. From somewhere behind and above there came a shriek, and he didn’t have to turn to know that Dot had returned, no doubt expecting to find her husband where she’d left him. For a woman her age, she had a hell of a set of pipes on her.
“Nooo!
” she wailed. “Is he
deaaad
?
”
“Harve,” he told his father-in-law, “stop spinning the damn wheels.” Poised as precariously as he was—a large man, with the additional weight of the chair on top of him—he easily could snap one of the branches, Griffin feared, and impale himself on it.
“
Won’t… go, goddammit,”
the unseen Harve grunted, still fully committed to his impossible exit strategy.
Now, in addition to Dot’s wailing, Griffin heard the thunder of feet pounding up the porch steps and then down the narrow ramp.
“Daddy!”
screamed a frantic voice that he first identified as Joy’s, then realized, no, it must be one of her sisters’.
He reluctantly rose to his feet. The chair, alas, was out of his reach, and it probably wasn’t a great idea to grab on to the wheels anyway. The thing to do—he should’ve realized this from the start—was to extract him from below. But the urge to peer over the side into the palsied hedge was irresistible, as the crowd now gathered at the busted railing attested.
Jared was among the first to arrive and immediately dropped to his knees and leaned forward to grab hold, though the chair was just beyond his reach as well.
“That’s not going to work,” Griffin said, placing a hand on his brother-in-law’s shoulder. “Maybe you and Jason and I can pull him out from below.”
For a moment Jared appeared to consider this suggestion. But then, getting to his feet, he seemed to really take in who’d just spoken to him, and his expression instantly morphed from thoughtfulness to rage. That would have been perplexing enough, even if Jason hadn’t been standing right next to him with the same identical fucking look on his face.
Honestly
, Griffin’s mother said.
Would you
look
at these two morons?
It was as if they could hear her.
“You son of a bitch,” Jared said, that worm wriggling again beneath his temple, and before Griffin could object, a fist (Jared’s or Jason’s?), foreshortened, suddenly caught him flush on the cheekbone, and he felt himself lift off the ramp, his body describing a parabola in the air above the hedge. He could sense the ground coming up to meet him, but before it did he heard, or thought he heard, a loud splintering sound and a chorus of screams.
What the… ?
he managed to think, but that was as far as he got.
Say good night
, his mother advised, just as the screen went black.

10
Pistolary

The splintering sound Griffin heard as he went airborne was the wheelchair ramp collapsing under the weight of fifty well-fed celebrants. Those closest to the broken railing went into the yew, several landing on top of Harve and driving him deeper into its dark interior, where he bellowed piteously When Joy fell, the middle finger of her right hand got caught in the spokes of her father’s chair, the digit snapping like a twig. She should have been among the first to be rushed to the emergency room—most of the other injuries were only cuts and abrasions—but she refused to leave with her father still trapped in the hedge. The remaining guests gathered in a semicircle to watch Jason and Jared try to shake him loose. The hedge was far too thick, however, and its branches seemed naturally designed to funnel human victims straight down into its dark, dense center. Though they were slow to realize it, the twins’ efforts actually made matters worse by snapping some of the interior branches that were supporting their father, their fresh, sharp ends probing his soft flesh and making him howl in pain until he grew hoarse and then, finally, silent. The hotel manager urged patience while they looked for the head groundskeeper, who apparently had the only key to the locked shed where the chain saw was kept.
For a time nobody noticed Griffin, who lay unconscious beneath the hedge, with only his feet sticking out, or else they concluded he was conversing with Harve in the yew above. He came to in stages, as if from a long, luxurious nap, his senses returning one at a time, beginning with smell. He lay on his back, on soil that smelled richly of fertilizer, recently applied. His eyes were open, but there was nothing to see. Wait, that wasn’t quite true. What he was looking at, when he squinted, resembled a pen-and-ink drawing, except that its intricate lines wouldn’t stay still and were encased, at the edges, in dense fog. Wellfleet, he thought. Somehow he’d been transported back to the fog capital of the world, where no doubt he’d be expected to scatter his father’s ashes and this time do it right. But he didn’t have the ashes, Joy did, and had promised to give them back, though here he was in Wellfleet without them. Then, finally, there was a sound track, played through a crackling, blown speaker, nearby voices, lots of them, all talking and shouting at once. Why couldn’t he see who they belonged to? He was trying to sort out these complexities when he felt someone grab him by the ankles and pull him back into the world.
And what a world! For the next ten minutes he stood (swayed, actually) by himself, trying to make sense of it by going over in his mind what he believed to be true, allowing what he hoped were hard facts to surface, like gaseous bubbles through mud, into his wobbly consciousness. He wasn’t in Wellfleet, he was in Maine. He’d come here with a woman not his wife to attend his daughter’s wedding. To this same wedding his wife had also come, accompanied by a man who was not Griffin. His left eye was swollen tightly shut as a result of his being sucker punched (why?) by one of his brothers-in-law (which?). His father-in-law had, like a character in a fairy tale, got trapped in a tree. Highly improbable—all of it—and yet evidently true. It wasn’t someone’s opinion; no alternative theory had been advanced. He would have liked to talk it over with someone, but even his mother seemed to have abandoned him.
But hold on, he’d spoken to somebody after being yanked from under the hedge, hadn’t he? Who, though? And what had they talked about? It couldn’t have happened more than five minutes ago, but the memory was gone. He thought about joining the others over at the hedge where Harve was still imprisoned. Joy and Laura were over there, but so were Andy and Ringo, which made him super… what was the word? Unnecessary. The twins were there, too, and if he joined them without invitation, they might punch him again. He doubted this would actually happen, but couldn’t be sure. He still didn’t understand why they punched him the first time, and whatever their reason, it might still pertain. Super…?
Gradually, the dense Wellfleet fog in his brain began to lift, and then he noticed a woman sitting all by herself on a bench facing the ocean. Her scowl, together with how defiantly her arms were crossed over her chest, suggested that neither the hedge nor the crowd fixated on it was of the slightest interest to her. Griffin was aware he should know who this woman was, so he concentrated on her identity until it finally revealed itself. She was Dot, Harve’s second wife. Pleased with himself for recognizing her and anxious to test the coherence of his speech, he decided to join her. When he sat down, though, she said, “Go away,” without even glancing in his direction to see who it was.
Having only just arrived and feeling woozy from his journey, he was unwilling to depart quite yet, not until he’d discovered what she was doing all by herself, glowering at the unoffending ocean, when her husband had just been swallowed by a tree. An idea occurred to him that might explain it, so he said, “They can be tough …” He meant to go on but didn’t, his voice sounding remote in the echo chamber of his head.
She did turn to regard him now, her eyes narrowing. She seemed to be trying to decide if his sympathy was something she wanted, or if her misery was company enough.
“That,”
she said, pointing at his eye with her index finger, its tip sculpted to a frighteningly lethal point, “is what I feel like when I’m around those people. Like I’m being …pummeled. Bludgeoned. Battered. Cudgeled.”
That seemed to Griffin a tad overstated, but he knew what she meant, and having just struggled to construct a four-word sentence fragment, he envied her ability to summon so many impressive, violent synonyms. Clearly nobody’d punched
her
lights out recently. Together they swiveled on the bench to afford themselves a better view of what was transpiring at the hedge. People seemed to be taking turns talking to it. Had the bush been burning, the whole thing would have been biblical.
“All he ever talks about is that woman,” Dot said, as if she were able to see Harve at the center of the yew. “I want to scream,
‘She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead’
.” When she said this, the volume in Griffin’s head went down, back up, back down again, a wire loose somewhere.
“They were married a long time,” he ventured, benignly, he thought.
But she turned quickly and glared at him. “Then why marry
me
?” she demanded.
For the life of him Griffin couldn’t think of a reason for Harve or anyone else to marry her, and she must have seen this register on his face, because she was suddenly standing over him with her fists clenched. Good Lord, he thought, was she going to punch him, too? He barely knew her. “Superfluous,” he said, the word he’d needed earlier suddenly coming to him.
“Why don’t you just …”
When she paused, Griffin’s mind raced ahead, supplying the words
fuck off
, though of course women in their late sixties didn’t say that.
“… fuck off,” she concluded, and strode away in the general direction of the parking lot.
He watched her go, then glanced at the spot where she’d been sitting, trying to decide if the woman had really been there, if the conversation had actually taken place. A couple minutes later his daughter, looking exhausted and despondent, sank down next to him on the bench and rested her head on his shoulder. Which was nice. “Where’s Andy?” he said, hoping that wherever he was he’d stay there for a while.
“He’s gone to get the car,” she told him, or at least that’s what he thought she said. She was sitting right next to him, but he could barely hear her. “You ready to go?”
“Where?”
She lifted her head to regard him. “The hospital?”
“Shouldn’t we wait until they extra … extratake …”
“Extricate?”
“… Harve from the hedge?”
“Dad,” she said, her mother’s sternness creeping into her voice, “we’ve already had this conversation.”
“When?”
“Ten minutes ago. You were supposed to wait for me by the tree.”
He was?
“Look at me,” she said, taking him by the chin. The sensation wasn’t nearly as pleasurable as having her rest her head on his shoulder. “Your eyes are dilated. Did you land on your head?”
He had no memory of landing at all, but the last thing he wanted was for her to be worried about him. “I’m fine,” he assured her. “People need to quit punching me and telling me to fuck off, but otherwise …” Unable to complete the sentence, he considered the word count impressive, nonetheless.
Behind them a chain saw roared to life, and its sheer volume reconnected something in Griffin’s cranial circuitry. The world’s many varied sounds were again playing at their normal volume. Also, the earlier conversation with his daughter, the one in which he’d promised to wait by the tree, was suddenly there in its entirety. It was she and Andy who’d pulled him from beneath the hedge, he now recalled.
“I must be allergic to yew,” Laura said, scratching at her forearms.
“To me?”
She stopped scratching and looked at him.
“Oh.
Yew
. Gotcha.” Now that he looked at them, her arms were grotesquely swollen.
“You’re definitely coming to the hospital,” she said. “You’re concussed.”
“They’ll have Benadryl,” he assured her, still a beat behind but catching up fast.
“Yeah, right,” she said with a sweeping gesture that took in the whole resort. “Benadryl’s going to make all this fine.”
“Hey, it could’ve been worse,” he said.
She waited patiently for him to explain how, which took a minute. Then another. Among the crowd at the hedge was a pregnant young woman. He knew her, just not her name. Then suddenly that was there, too. “Kelsey could have fallen in with the others,” he said, pleased with himself for saying something that might, if closely examined, actually be valid. “The shock could’ve sent her into labor.”
“You know, I never thought of that,” his daughter said in a golly-gee voice.
“Or
a disgruntled hotel employee could’ve laced our dinners with arsenic, in which case we’d all be dead instead of just hideously maimed.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I was trying to cheer you up.”
Staring at her Popeye forearms, he finally realized she was weeping.
“Dad,” she said, “tomorrow’s my wedding day, and I’m going to be ugly.”
Over at the hedge, the chain saw sputtered and died. Taking advantage of the silence, he quietly said, “No, you’re going to be beautiful. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Andy pulled up then, and they climbed in, Laura next to her fiancé, Griffin into the back. The car was identical to his rental, right down to the color and features. It even had a copy of the same literary magazine on the dash. He patted his pants pocket, but felt no keys. Unless that was them dangling in the ignition. “So this is my car?” he asked, and they both turned around to stare at him.
“Yes, Dad. This is your car. You gave Andy the keys. You’re scaring me.”
Before driving off, they were treated to one last bizarre sight: Jared and Jason, shaking what remained of the mutilated hedge like madmen, until finally it surrendered from its dark center an elderly man in a wheelchair. Out Harve tumbled, somehow landing wheels down on the lawn, to wild cheers.
“He’s out,” Andy said, taking his bride’s hand. “See? Everything’s going to be fine.”
And she smiled, believing him, Griffin could tell. He’d just told her the same thing, but of course he was no longer the person from whom his daughter needed such reassurances. Which meant there was nothing to do but relax in the backseat, which was where you put people you don’t have to listen to, even when it’s
their
car.
The tiny regional hospital was really more of a clinic, and its usually sleepy, preseason emergency room had been overwhelmed by the first wave of injured wedding guests, not all of whom had been seen to by the time Laura, Andy and Griffin arrived, moments ahead of the ambulance bearing Joy and her father, which in turn was closely followed by a small flotilla of cars. Harve, finally pried loose from his chair, was wheeled in on a gurney Griffin caught a glimpse of him as he rolled by surrounded by EMTs. His cheeks were a grid of angry scratches, and a nasty-looking abrasion ran from his neck down his shoulder. Otherwise, he looked to be in reasonably good condition. He’d been wearing a baseball cap, and its bill had protected his eyes. Jane and June, on opposite sides of the gurney, having reluctantly given their father over to the professionals, now provided narration as they sped past the front desk: “See, Daddy? We’re at the hospital already. Look at all the nurses. You
like
nurses, remember? They’ll fix
all
your scratches …”
Harve was able to sum up his circumstance in a single, hoarse croak. “Hurt,” he said.
Curious to see how bad his own injuries were, Griffin located a men’s room off the main corridor. What he saw in the wall-length mirror shocked him. His swollen eye looked hideous, as if the eyeball had been removed from its socket, a tennis ball inserted in its place and the skin stretched over it and sewn shut. There was also a trail of dried blood beneath his left nostril, a deep scratch on his forehead and bits of hedge in his hair. Dear God, was he really going to walk his daughter down the aisle tomorrow looking like this? Would sunglasses, assuming he could find a pair, even fit over something that size? He could feel other urgent questions forming in his still-addled brain, but before he was able to resolve any of them the door to the men’s room swung open and one of the twins walked in. The stubbled one. Which was …
Unzipping, whichever twin it was stepped in front of the single wall urinal. “Okay,” he said, studying Griffin in the mirror, his urine hitting the porcelain with enough force to make Griffin envious. “Settle an argument. Jared says our family’s fucked up. I say no.”
Griffin, making a mental note that unless he was speaking of himself in the third person this was Jason, pointed to his grotesque, swollen eye.
“You shouldn’t have called us morons,” he said.
“I didn’t.” Hadn’t his mother offered that observation, in the privacy of his own brain?
“We both heard you. We were standing right there.”
“Huh,” Griffin said, reluctantly entertaining the possibility that a dead woman had, albeit briefly, taken control of his larynx.
“Also, we thought you’d pushed our father into the hedge.”
“Why would I do that, Jason?” Griffin said.
“You’ve never liked any of us,” he said, as if stating a well-known fact. “Plus you were the only one who