Folly (7 page)

There is nothing to fear here
, she told herself;
it’s a raccoon; it’s not going to attack me; everything is normal.
She said it aloud: “There are no attackers here. There are no Watchers in the woods.”

Over and over she repeated the words, and she might have made it, might have convinced herself and gone nervously to bed, but before her pulse could return to normal, a third noise came, the sound she dreaded most in all the world, reaching out to plunge her into abject terror: a boisterous young male voice shouting over the roar of a motor. A boat, clearing the next island as a couple of her neighbors headed home, but all Rae heard was Young Male. Her nose was suddenly filled with the stench of young sweat, a ghostly hand insinuated itself through the front of her shirt, and thought fled; Rae broke and ran, straight into the arms of Pan.

Or, straight into one of the panic god’s trees. Agony jolted through her as a branch snapped back against the exquisitely sensitive scar tissue on the
left side of her body. The pain rattled her from teeth to toes, and she folded up, to lie curled tightly around herself on the cold, damp, soft ground beneath the tree, hugging her pain until it died away and the sounds she made shifted from sharp, urgent gasps to moans, deep and despairing.

Oh, what was she doing here, what the
hell
was she doing here, when a couple of kids in a passing boat could send her off the edge by a shouted phrase? How could she possibly think she could do this? Just take the damn gun and put an end to it, Rae. Oh God, she groaned. Oh shit. Oh hell.

The thing about madness was, it just took so damn much energy, and it was so thoroughly tedious in the meantime.

Perhaps she would just lie here, in the nice, quiet shelter under the fragrant, drooping branches. She would lie still, hidden from sight, feeling the moss grow up over her, pulling itself up one gentle spiky tendril at a time, until it covered her like a blanket and turned her into a soft, green, passive, Rae-shaped mound. What a lovely idea.

The idea was lovely, but the ground was hard beneath the decaying leaves, and her middle-aged bones too stiff to put up with the position. Reluctantly, ruefully, she got to her feet and pushed her way out of the low branches, grateful to find that the only damage resulting from her flirtation with Pan were a lot of bruises and a bash on her face that had missed putting out her eye by inches. Shaken and aching, she picked her geriatric way over the uneven ground toward the calm and disinterested glow of the tent. She did not even pause to check that the male voices were gone.

She crawled into her sleeping bag and lay curled there, slowly warming and feeling, if not safe, then at least not actively under threat for the first time since she’d stepped off the
Orca Queen.
She studied the leisurely drift of the moonlight across her roof, and imperceptibly slipped away into sleep.

Dawn had not come yet when she woke, but it was not far away. The ceiling of the tent was a gray presence overhead, the TICK… TICK of the small travel alarm on its bedside crate the only fissure in the stillness. Her bleary gaze rested on the clock’s face, its luminous hands faintly visible in the growing light, and then she frowned and worked one hand out of the warm cocoon of her sleeping bag (wincing at the awakening aches) to
bring the clock up to her face. Seven hours? She hadn’t slept a seven-hour stretch in years, even with drugs.

She put the clock down and drew her arm back inside, and lay in her snug sack while the tent’s furnishings slowly took shape around her. A dark blob indicated the kerosene lamp hanging from the ridgepole; a monolithic square represented the stack of plastic storage chests that functioned as a combination bedroom closet, toolshed, and pantry, with the smaller shapes beside it of her locked trunk, the big metal toolbox, and the wooden box that held her fine woodworking tools. The top of the desk seemed to float off the ground, the slats of her wooden chair becoming visible against it. Soon, she could make out the drape of her carpenter’s belt, slung from the back of the chair as if a gunslinger had dropped it there. The head of the hammer began to gleam dully; her bladder decided it was time to get up.

The inside of the canvas was beaded with condensation, her boots were as cold and rigid as ice cubes, and she was very glad she had gone to bed more or less fully clothed. She worked a fleece pullover past the layers of polypropylene and cotton flannel she already wore and tugged the knit cap Petra had given her over her short hair. Her fingerless gloves were in the pockets of her heavy jacket, somewhat protected from the cold, and she put them on before reaching for her old friend the carpenter’s belt, solitary companion on this mad quest.

With all the clothes she wore, buckling the belt took some attention, and it rode nearly at her waistline instead of down around her hips. Still, the accustomed weight, the rattles and creaks of tools and leather, the pat of the hammer against the outside of her right thigh and the press of the three-quarter-inch tape measure against the small of her back all made her feel more herself than anything in the world.

The hammer at her right hip was one of the few things that connected the Rae who stood on the island with the Rae she had once been, thirty-two years before, when Rae had discovered in herself an unexpected taste for the physical act of building. A pregnant twenty-year-old, married to a man who hid his own manual incompetence behind a scornful derision of those he referred to as “rude mechanicals” (Shakespeare never having changed the oil in a car), and faced with a set of shelves that needed putting up, Rae had marched (or rather, by that point in her pregnancy, waddled) down the street to the hardware store and asked the salesman what she needed for the job. The cheap drill and screwdriver that she had
bought that day had long since been given over to landfill, but a month later, looking at a slightly more ambitious project involving a piece of furniture in the baby’s room, and with a husband even more vocal about people who do-it-themselves instead of leaving it to the experts (all of whom seemed to be on long jobs or on vacation), Rae found herself defiantly buying the most expensive hammer in the shop.

It was a framing hammer, its short, strong claws nearly flat compared with a standard claw hammer’s long curves, twenty-one ounces of drop-forged steel that was “too much hammer for a woman,” according to the store owner. Rae, however, was a big woman, tall and broad-shouldered. Besides which, she liked the way the hickory handle fit her hand, liked the way the exploratory swings woke up the muscles all along her right side, from fingertip to jaw and down to her hip. By now, the hammer, like its owner, had seen hard use. Ten thousand nails had worn down the face and left a fine network of scratches over the head, but it still gave her strength, this tool that had stayed with her longer than anything, or anyone, else in her life. Husbands left or husbands died, daughters married avaricious jerks or daughters died, one’s very mind wandered in and out of control, but two handles later the twenty-one-ounce hammer still fit her hand, still nestled reassuringly along the line of her pelvis. She smoothed her thumb along its icy steel head, pulled on her jacket, and let herself out of the tent.

She stretched and yawned and scrubbed at her face, waking up and taking in her surroundings. This would be the view that greeted her, every morning she lived in the tent: close at hand, her kitchen (fire pit, storage boxes, camp stove) and living room (canvas-sling chair and two tree sections that could function as dining tables, footstools, or chopping blocks), the fallen cedar on her right that kept the wilderness at bay and drew a line down to the promontory; the clearing to her left, a rough oblong too scruffy to be called a meadow, its borders defined by the cove before her, the old madrone tree some forty yards from her left shoulder, the burnt-out, overgrown foundations uphill from it, and, behind the back wall of the tent, a barren, sharply rising rock slope. Beyond those, water all around.

This morning the sky was a depthless expanse, high mist or low clouds. No birds sang, no wind moved; the strait beyond the promontory was the undulating gray of antique window glass. Rae’s breath was loud in her nose; when she moved, the scrape of the fabric jarred the air. As if in response, a quick scuffling noise came from behind the tent. Rae slapped her hand onto the holstered hammer, then stopped, forcing
herself to listen attentively to the actual sound rather than her body’s reaction to it. A scuffle. Not footsteps. A bird? She edged around the front of the tent to peer at the shrubs, and an explosion of brown wings shot out from under the fallen cedar, followed instantly by a scrap of angry red fur scrambling up the nearby tree to the safety of height, where the squirrel sat scolding her furiously. Rae closed her eyes and took a calming breath. This so-called solitary life was going to take a lot of getting used to.

The angry squirrel continued its imprecations, and Rae was aware of its eyes on her as she picked up the kettle from the fire pit and filled it under the tap on her water jug before putting it on the burner of the propane cookstove. She then used the enticement of coffee to get through the brutal cold of a trip to the privy, and was relieved to find the treetop scold gone when she came out. By the time she had dressed all over again, buttoning, zipping, and fastening clothes and tool belt, a geyser of steam was shooting from the kettle’s spout into the frigid air. The stove was a luxury here; its tanks bulky and in need of frequent replacement compared with the old pump-style stoves of her childhood, but it was fast, and a great improvement over having to build a fire just for a cup of coffee.

Rae took out the glossy brown bag of coffee grounds and spooned some into the ridiculously fragile glass French-press coffeemaker— another luxury, one she would no doubt regret when it cracked and left her straining coffee grounds through her socks, but she had justified it in her mind by contemplating the wasteful alternative of all the paper filters she would have either to bury or to compost. The deciding factor, however, had been the vision of that sleek and gleaming symbol of modern sophisticates perched incongruously on a stump in front of a dusty canvas tent. Humor was a rare commodity in her current life, to be seized and hoarded whenever it ventured within her grasp.

She poured the water over the grounds, stuck the plunger in place, and carried the sculptural object over to the fallen cedar trunk, where she balanced it carefully before taking a few steps back, narrow-eyed as a critic at an art show: delicate glass suspended in a silver frame; soft, dull bark heavily worn by time and foraging woodpeckers; three small hemlocks, two cedars, a fir, and an assortment of bushes whose names she did not know as a backdrop; ugly folding aluminum cook table with plastic water jug to set it off; big, high-walled tent to one side evoking a family campout in the Fifties.

Yes, she decided approvingly, nodding at the arrangement; some things are worth the trouble.

This morning she even had milk, half frozen in the cooler box. Later in the year she would be lucky to have the fresh stuff once a week, following the visits of Ed the boatman, since the island lacked electricity and she had not yet decided if she wanted refrigeration and lights badly enough for the interminable bother of solar panels or generator. The idea of living in a primitive dependence on the sun was, temporarily at least, appealing. Either that, or the back of her mind had recognized the futility of making those decisions when it was far from certain that she would still be here to lay the power in.

Today, however, she would enjoy her coffee with milk.

She poured and sipped and stretched her spine and looked down at the mist that lay across the glassy water of the cove, a study in morning gray. She felt remarkably well, as was often the case after an attack like that of the night before. Her mind seemed to switch in and out of the panic mode cleanly, almost as if she had a short somewhere in the wiring of her brain: When connections were normal, everything worked at full strength; when the connection crackled and fizzed, under extra burden or just the vagaries of biology, she was gone.

In part it was the simple fact that nights were bad and things invariably looked better in the morning. Under that pearly dawn light, the texture of the island’s hush was benevolent, alive with promise instead of crawling with threat. She was eager to begin work, but put it off to walk out along the promontory to greet the day. She braced herself as she approached the place where the harbor seals had been lying, but there were no splashes; they were already up and away. Instead, she startled, and was startled by, a gray heron brooding over the shallow cove waters. The flaps of its wings cracked the air as it took off, the underside of its body mirrored perfectly in the smooth surface below.

Rae continued out to the end of the floating boat dock and sat down cautiously on the splintery boards, where she sipped from her steaming mug. When the ripples of her passing had calmed, she bent slowly forward to peer down at the water. A woman looked back at her, thin of face, brown of eye, with a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair (mostly salt, now) sticking out from under the garish knit cap and a dark smear down the left temple. She frowned and pulled off the hat to see the mark, then reached down to brush her fingertips in the water and wipe at the trickle of dried blood. When the ripples cleared, she was looking down at a face far more self-assured than it had any right to be. It looked strong and competent and not in the least fragile, its eyes calm, with no trace of
wariness, not a nightmare in sight. I have Grandfather to thank for the construction of that façade, she thought bitterly: impervious-looking but frail as lace. God, how looks deceived.

A ghostly hand brushed across her hair and Rae whirled, but it was just the breeze, rising with the sun and ruffling the water along with her hair, stirring the branches in the corner of her eye. The touch woke the thought of Watchers, invisible in the woods, and she was searching for them, staring deep into the bushes, when her eye caught on a flicker of movement up high. She waited, and when it moved again she saw it, a speck of shining beauty even on this dull morning: a kingfisher. The tiny bird with the vivid plumage bobbed on the twig, watching not Rae, but the water. In an instant, it dropped, swooped, and sliced the water, rising with a flash of silver in its strong beak. It dashed down the length of the cove, dipped around the opposite bank, and was gone.