Folly (22 page)

Rae wavered. Put her off, or get it over with? Interest in seeing the full extent of the island overcame her hermit’s reticence. “Tomorrow would be fine. Thanks. I’d enjoy that.” “Enjoy” was pushing it a bit, but manners never hurt. And then she remembered something else she could ask a park ranger. “Oh, and Nikki? If you have a bird book you could let me borrow, I’d appreciate it. I’d kind of like to know what all these birds are that I’m living with.”

Nikki said she had just the thing, and they settled on the late morning, to give the fog a chance to burn off but to miss the afternoon’s low tide, then Rae walked the trio down to the dock, where she waited while Nikki cast off their lines. The launch moved into the sunlit bay, and as it turned, the sun’s rays caught both red heads. They were, Rae saw, not actually identical: Nikki’s was the rich, full color of a ripe apricot, whereas her son’s gleamed the precise shade of fresh copper. The child’s pale face watched Rae’s receding figure, and then a small chocolaty hand lifted over the side of the boat and waved, energetically. Rae’s hand twitched up in response, her fingers outspread, then slowly curling shut as the boat’s motor deepened and the water behind it began to churn.

When the boat had left, Rae went to see what Nikki might have been looking for, but the box contained only such treasures as corkscrew, vegetable peeler, and shish kabob skewers. The zip of the tent was more or less where she remembered leaving it, and the things inside looked undisturbed.

It was unlikely that the ranger would have conducted an illegal search for drugs or firearms with her young son sitting right in front of her, Rae decided. The young wood nymph was just curious about Folly’s owner. That was all.

Letters from Rae to
Her Granddaughter
and Daughter

April 18

Dear Petra
,

Thank you for your letter, which Ed De la Torre brought me last week along with groceries, a gallon of linseed oil for my workbench, and a report from the lab saying that the water in my stream tests “within acceptable limits” on about eighty different things (thank goodness for that). There was also a stern letter from the Parks Department saying that yes, they suppose I do have the right to fix up this “derelict residence,” despite the island’s being a wildlife refuge, but that I have to agree to go along with this, that, and the other limitation. Of course, I don’t have to do any such thing; I know it and they know it. Your great-great-grandfather William built a legal agreement every bit as solid as his factories and office blocks, and he was ferocious about preserving his family’s right to do anything they pleased with their possessions. They’re just trying to bluff me into agreeing to it. (Has anyone taught you to play poker yet, my dear? If not, remind me the next time I see you.) Actually, I’m not even bound by the original agreement, since the grant’s original fifty years expired a long time ago, but to tell you the truth, I’m happy for them to continue using the island as a wildlife sanctuary. I’m all in favor of sanctuaries (which is, you will remember, the real name of this island). Plus, it means that the summer tourists have no right to set foot on it, and this way the government has to enforce the ban rather than
me having to do it myself. But anyway, that was my battle for the week.

The message being, I suppose: Always make sure you have a good lawyer at your side.

All of which is by way of an answer to your letter, which I will take in two sections: your school project and your proposal of a visit.

The project sounds very interesting, much more so than the sorts of boring history papers we had to do “in my day” (said in a quavery old-lady voice). Certainly a history of this 145-acre rock covers everything from Native Americans through English explorers (Cook sailed past, and Vancouver and all the rest), the Civil War period (one of the first islands of the San Juans to be colonized, other than by the various Native Americans [who didn’t actually live here year-round, just fished and gathered food], was settled by a group of ex-slaves who bought their freedom in the 1850s and came here, a good long way from the South), and the late nineteenth century (when people on the islands smuggled everything from Chinese workers to whiskey), to the early twentieth century (Desmond Newborn, for example) and WWII (those “pillbox” bunkers watching for enemy subs), to the beginning of a new century (yours truly).

It sounds to me like you could have a lot of fun with this project. If it would help, I’d be happy to take photographs, or make you a map, whatever you need. Between your search engines and Internet and libraries and my actually being here, between us we could write a small book. In fact, that’s not a bad idea. If you type it up all pretty on your computer, I could have a friend of mine bind it for you, in leather. Shall we put your name in gold?

By a funny coincidence, when Ed brought your letter I was digging out the foundation, after days of cutting my way through the brush like some explorer in a jungle movie, and almost immediately I began to find things in the soil—an old canning jar, a bunch of silver forks, the mostly rotted covers of half a dozen books, various lumps of metal. All of them your great-great-uncle’s possessions—I feel like an archaeologist. I cleaned them off and have set them aside for you to look at.

And that brings me to the second part of your letter. Petra—of course I would love to have you come here for a couple of weeks in June or July, but it’s not as easy as what either of us want. What do
your parents say about it? When you talk to them (your letter didn’t say if you had yet or not) please let your mother read this letter so she knows my reaction. And I am also including a letter for you to give her.

But to tell you the truth, my dear, you might think long and hard about whether a trip to the island is really what you want right now. It’s not a summer camp here, you realize. I sleep on a hard cot, eat dull food, work long hours of dirty, hard labor. You saw my privy— I still don’t have a flush toilet or a proper shower. I have to heat water on the stove, so I don’t even try to stay clean. There are mice and insects everywhere (and more, come June). I don’t have a boat, so you’re stuck here. I’d like to say I could take a week off and spend it going on hikes and picnics and swims with you, but I know I’m not going to be able to, and considering the wildness of the island, I can’t even say that you’d be fee to take off and wander as you like. And, you wouldn’t be able to bring Bounce, because, this being a nature preserve, the authorities frown on dogs running around and worrying the nesting boobies or whatever.

Maybe we should think about next summer, when the house is finished and my only work is hoeing some tomato plants? I’d even have a boat then, I’m sure. Or maybe Christmas vacation, which would allow you to use the trip for the eighth-grade segment of the project. Still, it’s your decision. Think about it, talk to your parents, give them these letters, and let me know.

Love,
Gran

P.S. I’m sticking in two rolls of film that I’ve taken here on the island, to see if any of the shots might be useful for the project. Why don’t you have two sets of prints made, and keep one for yourself.

April 18

Dear Tamara
,

I’ve asked Petra to give you the letter I wrote her, so I don’t have to copy it over again. As you can see, I’ve tried to discourage her with realism—life here is no holiday, and Petra is not used to roughing it.

Not that I wouldn’t love to have her here, but I don’t imagine the idea pleases you too greatly.

If the deciding factor is emergency communication, I could find out if cell phones will work here, and would agree to allow her to bring one—if she agrees that it is only for emergency use. If you have other specific objections, ones we could work out, let me know. If your objections are more general, well, I suppose I could understand that. Perhaps in the future we could talk about it again.

I have spent many quiet hours here, thinking about you and all the ways I have failed you as a mother. I hope it is not too late for us to begin again. Yet again.

I love you, Tamara.

Mom

Rae folded the two letters away, leaving the bulky envelope unsealed. She was not at all sure about the wording, but she was too tired to think about it any more tonight. Tomorrow she would read them both again, before giving the packet to Ed on Tuesday.

An unsettling day. The feeling of having one foot in the waters of sleep had persisted, as had the memory of looking down the beach to see the man, woman, and child materializing from the fog. She had not quite managed to finish the excavation work, because first the wheel had come off the barrow and it took a while to dig up a replacement nut, and then the ramp had fallen apart and she had to remake it. Mostly, though, she’d just been a weird combination of lethargic and jumpy, a sensation that bore a worrying similarity to the beginnings of one of her downward cycles, yet not the same. There were no voices, for one thing.

Yet.

However, even if she was sure that she was slipping, there was little she could do about it. All she could do was wait, and in the meantime, work.

Tomorrow she ought to reach the back wall.

So why had she agreed to spend the middle of the day being ferried around by that young woman?

Rae sat back in her wooden chair and dropped her hands away from her face, and as she did so, her eyes lit on her journal. She pulled it over in front of her and reluctantly opened it to the last entry, a scrawl of mad
words disturbingly like the scattered lists that had filled her house and her mind in the weeks following the funeral service. Hundreds of them, there had been. Tamara, taking on the job of clearing the house while Rae was hospitalized, had not known what to do with them; in the end she put them all into a couple of big grocery bags, to be saved or dumped as Rae chose.

Those scribbled sheets of paper, deep on every surface in the house by the time Sheriff Escobar came for her, were as clear a sign of trouble as blown leaves were of a windstorm, a last-ditch attempt to impose order onto her decomposing mental process, as if the definitions of words and the relationship between objects and events might restore meaning to her life.

She might have thought that stability was restoring itself, here in the tranquility of Folly, but she was in truth only a narrow step from quivering mutely in the corner: Last night’s journal entry was evidence of that. She reached out to tear the offending pages from the book, and stayed her hand. Psychiatric honesty, she had said, was the journal’s purpose, and honesty could not be had through censorship. She looked at the list of words, then ripped the two pages out.

And folded them in half to stick in the back of the journal.

A good hour before dawn, Rae was up and brewing coffee, impatient to finish the clearing. She had slept fitfully, but felt rested, or at any rate felt ready to begin.

However, there was no point in digging and sorting debris that she couldn’t see. When the coffee was made, she took it out to the promontory to try and hurry the sunrise.

She’d done this so often, it was becoming a ritual, its varied elements assembling themselves out of the crepuscular light like the individual instruments in a tuning orchestra.

The waves were first. Rae had spent enough hours with them to tell, by hearing alone, which way the tide was moving. This morning the water was crisply nibbling its way up dry rock, so the tide was coming in. Then would come the foghorns—although this morning the sky was clear, with no mist to obscure the warning beacons or the stars, which were fading until only the brightest persisted. The air seemed to change, gathering itself to greet the day; the first birds stirred in the branches,
and the early-rising humans. She was coming to know the various engines of her neighborhood: the rough-sounding motor chugging its Roche Harbor–bound owner to work and home again; a small, shy outboard heard only at low tide; a floatplane that passed over regularly; the big commuter ferry to Sidney. She heard the
Orca Queen
plying the nearby waters from time to time, usually at a distance, and although she couldn’t have said what was distinctive about its engines, her ears twitched whenever her daughter’s paid spy, genial as he might be, passed by Folly.