Folly (26 page)

She threw back her head, held her bare arms out from her sides, and closed her eyes, feeling the reflected energy that washed over the sea and the land, the beach and the figure that stood there. The night air stirred around her, bathing her face and body, caressing her exposed skin. The night smelled richly of seaweed and sweat, the rocks beneath Rae’s feet were hard and round, the branches above her head still and watchful. The warm moist hair under her arms and between her legs shrank at the unaccustomed touch of air, and she shivered, and then for the second time she walked slowly forward into the gently undulating water of the island’s cove.

When the freezing water of the cove was lapping at her upper thighs, Rae halted. Eyes still tightly shut, she lifted her hands to her face, and the hard, sensitive skin of her fingertips began to probe and explore. Like a blind woman getting to know a new person, Rae felt herself: the shaggy, wiry tendrils on her head
(I need a haircut)
and the broad stretch of forehead, the bristle of the eyebrows in an arch over the soft hollows of her eyes, lids twitching as if she were dreaming. The warm breath from her nostrils, the dry elastic of lips, strong jaw and vulnerable throat, a full, round breast in her right hand and the poor damaged object bisected by scar tissue in the left, and down.

Oh, Alan, she breathed soundlessly. Oh, oh, Alan.

Rae’s Journal

May 2

I don’t remember my dreams being so strange, before. No dreaming at all for a whole drugged year may have something to do with it—like mental chemotherapy, chemical psychotherapy makes a persons dreams fall out. My unconscious has to grow again and catch up, pushing fantasies to the surface, some funny, some frightening, others just odd.

A while ago I had a vivid dream, just before waking, that I was pregnant, huge of belly and full of breast, being told by a doctor (who looked remarkably like Nikki Walls in drag, come to think of it) that it was a healthy baby dolphin. On waking, my first thought was how I was going to adapt the cradle I made for Bella so it would hold water.

Then I dreamed of men marching to war, grim, gray, muddy men with gaiters and greatcoats and rifles slung over their shoulders, marching in unison through a blighted landscape, past smoking tree stumps on which vultures perched, tramping blindly down the road in mechanical precision and straight off the edge of a high cliff, one row at a time, tumbling without a sound. At the bottom their bodies lay piled, like the news photos of mass graves, human beings turned to cordwood. Brrr. I did not sleep much after that one.

But the most convoluted dream yet was last night’s, going on and on with a cast of thousands, or dozens anyway—everyone I’ve ever known
or even met seemed to flit through at some point. I forgot most of the dreams details long before I woke up, but one scene lingered.

I was in a cedar longhouse, a dim and smoky space, but cold even with the fire going. Everyone inside the place except me was a man, all the men in my life aside from Grandfather. I’ve never dreamed about Grandfather directly, although he often seems to lurk in the edges of my vision. But my father was there, and my uncle Gavin (looking even more like my mother than he actually did) and my first husband David and a couple of cousins. Vivian was there in the background, with Alan standing next to him.

They were all dressed in Native American costume, robes and a few bark rain cloaks, and they all wore wooden masks. Most of the masks looked like the person—Alan looked like himself, down to wood-rimmed glasses—except for two figures in the middle of the enormous room.

Their backs were to me. I went forward to see what they were looking at, and found them bent over the cherry cot I made for Bella. There was a baby in the cot, a girl baby awake and looking up at the two men. I couldn’t tell who she was—it could have been Bella, or Petra, or even Tamara for that matter, although they looked nothing alike even when they were tiny. The baby was a girl, that was all I could tell.

I went around to the other side of the cot and looked at the two men, but these masks were different. You couldn’t tell who they were, because the wood had been carved as traditional Northwest masks, a raven and a bear. When they looked across the cot at me, I was frightened by the glitter of their eyes, and I wanted to grab up the baby and protect her, but then I thought that might only make things worse, that what I needed to do was draw their attention away from her.

So I put on a sort of mask of my own, and started acting abrasive and confrontational, asking them what the hell they wanted and who the hell were they, anyway?

They stood looking at me, and then one of them held out his right hand with Bella’s antique silver rattle in it, and the other held out his left hand holding Desmond’s rusty hammerhead that I found under the house. I knew in an instant that I had to get that hammer away from the baby.

“Who are you?” I shouted again. So they reached up with their free hands and lifted off their masks, and they now wore wooden faces with the features of my son-in-law Don and my stepson Rory. And then they reached up again to take those off, and Rory turned into Don and Don to Rory. Then they did it again, and again.

I grew frantic, not being able to tell which of the figures was Don. If he was the one holding the rattle, I didn’t think I had too much to worry about, but Don with a hammer in his hand was another thing entirely.

They kept shedding faces and I kept trying to locate Don beneath the masks, and then all of a sudden the baby started to cry, and I looked down to see that the heap of discarded masks had filled the cherry cot to the top, and the child was completely buried.

I woke up then, as frightened as if I’d dreamed a monster.

Dreams tell us truths, but it’s often a slim fragment of truth under a load of rubbish. Don is the key to this one, but what fragment of Don? Threat or thief? And if he is a threat, who is he threatening? His daughter? His wife? Bella is beyond his reach—or is it my poor infantile feminine side lying there in that cot, the last of the family at his mercy?

Ironic, considering all the men who have dominated my life, that both my children and my only grandchild have been girls. And that both surviving members are in fact lying there, with me on one side and Don Collins on the other.

Hanging pipes under the joists took the better part of a day: water pipes and a waste outlet for the shower and sink. She had approval to mount a shed at the side of the cabin for a composting toilet, a complicated mechanism that nonetheless simplified the other septic demands considerably.

Framing and building the access door for the crawl space took a morning. Then she was ready for her first inspection, after which she could begin to lay the subfloor.

The county building inspector came on Monday morning, in accordance with the letter she had sent with Ed the week before. There was something infinitely comforting about a man with a clipboard, the threat he carried both tangible and universal, and therefore welcome. Rae quite looked forward to doing battle with him, and was disconcerted when he proved a jovial balding man on the edge of retirement, who was just terribly interested in everything but in too much of a hurry to do more than a quick run-through today, maybe coffee next time, Ms. Newborn. Even his clipboard was unthreatening, a bright blue plastic affair with a butterfly sticker on the back (his small daughter’s addition, he told Rae without embarrassment). Vaguely disappointed, she held her signed permit and watched his boat pull away. Then she went back to her officially sanctioned foundation and let herself down between the floor joists to check on the two carved figures of herself and Great-uncle Desmond. She blew gently to free them of a light drift of sawdust, then pulled herself back up to staple fiberglass batting over their heads.

More boards to haul, this time 1×8s with shiplap edges for the subfloor. They were also mostly warped and knotty, which offended the precise woodworker in Rae even though she knew full well that using clean, close-fitting, kiln-dried boards for the purpose would be a waste both of money and of resources.

Still, her boards would be true, whether they started out warped or not. It pained her to use even a cheap screwdriver as a brute lever to force the boards into alignment before hammering them into place, but she did it, and her floorboards were tight enough to qualify as a finished floor, though they were rough and fastened with common box nails.

Rae drove the last nail in on Tuesday morning, and was trimming the overhang when the familiar cadence of Ed’s boat engine reached her ears. As he was easing up to her dock, she sawed through the last few feet, and then she walked across the fresh new floor of her house and stood where her front door would be, taking in the change of perspective that the combined elevations of foundation and floor provided.

The view was good.

Ed threw his rope around the stanchion and looked around for her. She waved broadly to catch his attention, and was amused to see the energy of his return wave. She trotted down her front steps and across the clearing to help him unload.

“Hey, there,” he called when she was within earshot. “You got yourself a floor!”

“That I do, Ed. Want to see it?”

He all but ran up the hill, his stocky figure bowling along, mustaches flying. Rae tucked the canvas-back camp chair under her arm and followed. When she joined him on the platform, she set the chair down in front of the fireplace and gestured to it with a ceremonial flourish.

“Please have a seat, Mr. De la Torre. You’re my first visitor.”

“I am honored, Mizz Newborn.” He lowered his backside with an air of ceremony, and tugged at his mustaches in pleasure.

“Call me Rae,” she told him, as she’d told him on each of his four previous visits. He merely looked out over the scenery and beamed, as proud as if he’d done it himself.

She was pleased to have him here, an actual visitor without a clipboard, someone with whom she could share her achievement. Ed was growing on her, this genial aging hippie boatman who smelled of marijuana and engine oil, who acted like a resident of Margaritaville, yet in
whom she suspected a number of dark corners. She wasn’t at all sure how she’d feel if he arrived on the island in the dead of night, but during the daylight hours, he was a welcome if perplexing visitor.

“You oughta have a porch out front,” he told her. “With a rocker on it.”

“Granny Newborn,” she remarked. Ed’s suntanned features twisted up and he hastened to assure her that he didn’t mean it that way, that he’d never thought of her as— She laughed. “Never mind, Ed. I am a grandmother, after all. And you’re right, it does need a viewing point. The only problem is, the original didn’t have a porch, and I’m supposed to be restoring a—Hey, wait a minute.” Rae squatted down on the front steps to take a closer look at the troublesome lip. As it stood, it was an oddity that threatened the house’s fabric, but with Ed’s words in mind, she began to smile and shake her head admiringly. “Desmond was going to put a porch on; he just never got around to it,” she said. The lip that threatened to direct rain to the sill would be a perfect ledge on which to rest a porch. And—damn! That also explained why the door was hinged as it had been: Standing on a porch, a door opening outward would not be awkward.

She realized that Ed had said something to her.

“Sorry?”

“Who’s Desmond?” he repeated.

“Oh. Desmond Newborn, my great-uncle, who built the place in the Twenties. None of the family knows much about him, but I keep finding out things, like this. The only reason to make a foundation this way is if you want to add a porch in the future.” Another thought suddenly struck her, and she turned to look at the empty space to the left of the fireplace. Her grin widened. The peculiar framing she had uncovered there would be no accident, either. For whatever reason, Desmond had built a narrow door smack against the stones of the fireplace. Or a window, but why build a window that looked directly into a rock wall? She couldn’t wait to tell Petra, her partner in—what? forensic anthropology? analytical architecture?