Island Girl (58 page)

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Authors: Lynda Simmons

BOOK: Island Girl
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Wind drove the rain against the window. “She can’t be canoeing in this,” I said.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you.”
I grabbed my mother’s raincoat. “At least she took a life jacket.”
He glanced over. “Correction. She took
my
life jacket.”
He snatched Grace’s binoculars off the shelf. Went down the stairs and through the gate. Heading for the beach and moving faster than I would have imagined possible.
By the time I caught up, he was knee deep in the water, binoculars to his eyes, waves pounding his legs while he scanned the lake. “There.” He thrust out a hand. “She’s there.”
It was hard to see through the rain, and I could barely make out a tiny red dot far out in the water. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said, and came back to the beach. Handed me the binoculars while he wiped the water from his face. Then he took out his BlackBerry and punched in three numbers.
I stared at the dot. Lost it. Spotted it. Lost it for long seconds. Released my breath when I spotted it again.
“Goddamn useless cell phone!” he shouted, and walked back to the water with the phone. “Ruby, you bitch!” he bellowed. “Don’t do this to me. Please, don’t do this.”
I grabbed his arm. “Mark, what is she doing? What’s going on?”
He shook me off, nearly knocked me over. “She’s taking herself out, just like I told you she would. She’s getting on the goddamn Ice Floe.”
I walked to the edge of the lake. I couldn’t believe this was happening. That she’d been serious all along. The red dot was there. And gone. There. And gone. “He’s right, Mom,” I whispered. “Don’t do this. Not now. Not yet.”
His phone must have connected at last because I heard him say, “Yes, this is an emergency.” And then he went quiet. Came back to the water with the phone pressed to his ear and stared out at that tiny red dot. “My mistake. Everything’s fine. I’m sorry.”
He pressed End.
“What are you doing?” I shouted. “There’s still time. They could save her!” I tried to wrestle the phone from his hand. “Call them back, for chrissakes! Call them back!”
“No!” he roared, easily pushing me way, holding me at arm’s length. “This is her choice, Liz. It’s what she wants. I won’t take that away from her.”
He put the phone in his pocket, started back up the beach.
I launched myself at him, nearly knocking him over, landing myself hard in the sand. “You can’t do this! You can’t leave her out there. You’re killing her as surely as she’s trying to kill herself!”
“Do you think I want this? I love your mother. I want nothing more than to be here for her, to take care of her, but that’s not what
she
wants, Liz. She wants this.” He turned and raised a hand to the lake. “She wants this. As you said yourself a while ago, who am I to tell her she’s wrong?”
He let his arm drop and looked back at me, his eyes full of tears, his face crumbling. “If I’m killing her, if that’s murder, then so be it. Whatever I do, I’ll have to live with guilt. But I’d rather live with the guilt of letting her choose, than the guilt of deciding for her.”
I saw the agony, the weight of the decision he was making, the love he was showing my mother. True love. Not self-serving or self-righteous. Just love for the woman she was and her right to fight the battle in her own way, as she had always done. Without judgment, without censure. Only with love.
I put my arms around him, holding this giant of a man close, feeling him brought low by this, my mother’s final protest. We stood that way for a moment, then he drew in a long breath and straightened. We must not have been the only ones who spotted her out there because a marine rescue boat was on the way anyway. Slowly but relentlessly covering the distance between the shore and the place where the red dot had been.
We turned away. Walked back to the house in the pouring rain. Put on the kettle. Changed into dry clothes. My mother’s track pants were too long for me, the sleeves of the jacket the same. Ruby had always been tall while I was more like my dad. A man she had loved but who had found her too difficult, leaving room in our lives for Mark. How lucky for us.
Mark pulled the ladder out of the window. Packed it away. Replaced the screen. An accident. The whole thing would be an accident. Nothing else for the Island drums to report. Her laptop was open and still turned on. Pictures of the wedding coming up on the screen, fading away, making room for another. Like the frame on the dresser, surrounding us with pictures of my mother and the people who loved her.
I touched the space bar and the pictures gave way to a document. “Show Me the Ice Floe” by Ruby Donaldson. Nothing else. Just that.
“It’s her note to me,” Mark said. “Letting me know we did the right thing.”
He hit Exit.
Save?
He hit No. The file disappeared.
We went downstairs to make tea and wait.
An hour later, someone knocked on the door. An officer from the marine unit.
“Does Ruby Donaldson live here?” he asked. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
GRACE
 
The mockingbirds hatched just after the wedding. These last few weeks, my mom and I would sit in the yard whenever I wasn’t working at Lori’s, and listen to the babies calling
ce-ce-ce
, demanding food all the time it seemed like. Now the babies have feathers, and I was out in the garden this morning, trimming the roses, making sure everything was perfect for the burial, when one of them landed on the ground, plop, right at the bottom of Great-Grandma Lucy’s lilac.
He sat there, blinking his big round eyes and looking around like he couldn’t figure out what just happened. Then one of his parents came down and fed him something and tried to get the baby to fly, just like the robin’s parents had done. Only this baby wasn’t ready to work that hard yet and he kept hopping around on the grass, waiting for more food to be delivered.
I was finished with the roses when another baby poked her head out of the branches and fluttered down to join her brother. And then another and another and another until there were five of them down there, all hopping on the grass and looking around, wondering what they’d gotten themselves into.
The mockingbirds let me get close enough to take pictures of their babies and I ran back inside to show them to Liz and Mark and Jocelyn. My mom would have said, “Better watch for the cats,” when she saw the pictures. And she wouldn’t have been at all happy to know that once those babies were out of the nest for good, the male would start singing all over again to show the lady how much he loved her, and could they lay some more eggs, please?
But I think she would have liked watching the babies learn to fly. And I think it would have made her laugh when the first guests started to come through the gate, and the mockingbirds went at them right away.
It’s been four days since the accident. Neighbors have been coming by the house nonstop ever since, bringing condolences and casseroles and more cakes than we could fit into our freezer and Mary Anne’s. Which turned out okay because we served them at the memorial in the clubhouse yesterday.
The same piper who had been at the wedding was there again to play for my mom. There was no tulle and no white lights, but we put pictures around and Mary Anne made a speech about my mom and her growing up together on the Island and being best friends for life. Then Mark got up and talked about the Ruby he knew and loved, who was different in a lot of ways from the one I knew. Then we took the lids off all those casseroles and cut up all that cake. Set out an urn of coffee and pots of tea. Tapped a keg of beer and uncorked bottles of wine. And then we ate and we talked and we laughed.
And when people asked us quietly how the Swan Affair was going, Liz would say, “Grace and Jocelyn are in the clear. How that swan got there is destined to be another unsolved Island mystery.” And they’d laugh again and say, “Glad to hear it, glad to hear it.”
Islanders sticking together. It’s what we do.
A few hours later, when people were gathering up their casserole dishes and their cake plates, we all agreed that the wake for Ruby Donaldson had been almost as much fun as her wedding. But today, standing here in the garden with Joe, waiting for our guests to arrive, I still can’t believe it’s real. That she went out for a paddle and never came back.
The officers from the rescue unit said it happens all too often. People go out on the lake thinking the weatherman is wrong. That they’ll come right back in if the storm does come. But once the wind is up and the waves start rolling, a little canoe can get swept out too far, too fast and getting back isn’t so easy anymore.
They said she had a life jacket. Mark’s life jacket. She took it by mistake. They look identical and they said that happens all too often too. People take the wrong life jacket, and if the waves are strong and the water rough, sometimes it comes off. Just comes right off, and you’re left out there on your own.
I know what that feels like. To be out on the water on your own, afraid, exhausted, ready to give up. Only there was no one swimming with my mom that day. No one to hold on to her and keep her head above the water and stay with her until her feet touched the sand. Help did come but too late for my mom. An accident, they said. A tragic accident. But I know the truth.
Liz and Mark told us when Jocelyn and I arrived back at the house that day. As soon as I saw Liz and Mark and Mary Anne at the kitchen table, I knew something was wrong.
“Oh, Grace,” Mary Anne had said, and started to cry.
Liz got up and put an arm around me, then she reached for Jocelyn. “Come and sit down. We need to talk.”
Mark sat there, staring at the empty cup in front of him. His eyes were swollen and he looked real tired, like he just wanted to climb the stairs and sleep for a year. But he took a deep breath, lifted his head, and looked at me. “You know as well as I do that your mother was never the kind to let anyone or anything decide the course of her life. She always knew what she wanted and where she was going, and nothing was going to change that. Not even Alzheimer’s.”
People had been curious after the wedding, wondering why she didn’t come out much. Liz told Benny that my mom was just tired, and I heard him at the tennis court after that, repeating what Liz told him whenever people asked how my mom was doing. “She was tired after the wedding,” he said. “Needed to spend a little extra time in bed.”
Then he’d wink and they’d laugh and I figured that was exactly the way my mom would want it. Ruby Donaldson, shocking at any age.
We’d all worked hard over the last few weeks to keep Big Al a secret because during those times when she talked to me like my mom again, she’d say things like “I will not be an object of pity,” and “I will not end up in a home being bathed by strangers who call me dear and wash my hair with the same stuff they use on my body. It’s positively barbaric.”
I told her I’d bathe her at home and use good shampoo, and she said, “Even worse, Grace. Even worse.”
The day it happened, Liz set mugs of tea in front of Jocelyn and me and pushed the milk and sugar toward us. “We all know Mom had been having a bad time these last few weeks,” she said as she sat down. “But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been because we also knew the truth. We knew what was going on so we could help her, and help each other. And I believe we need to keep it that way. We need to be honest about everything that goes on in this family. That’s why you both need to know what really happened to her.”
I pulled the mug toward me, wrapped my fingers around it, suddenly cold and needing the warmth.
“Mom was good with a canoe,” Liz continued. “She knew exactly what she was doing when she took a life jacket that was too big. And exactly what she was doing when she headed out onto water that was already too rough.”
“The police don’t know that, of course,” Mark added. “They don’t know she headed out after the storm started because she knew there would be no one on the break wall to see her. No one to call in an alert about a little red canoe.”
“Everyone thinks she was already on the lake before the storm hit,” Liz went on. “And no one in this house is ever going to say anything differently. We are Donaldsons after all. We are honest with each other, but our business is our own.”
“So she did it on purpose,” Jocelyn said quietly, her eyes on the tea in front of her.
Mark sighed. “It’s important you understand that Ruby died the same way she lived. In her own time and in her own way. While I am brokenhearted and will miss her forever, I understand why she did it and the courage it took to go out on that water alone. And I hope you can understand too.”
Four days later, I understood, and I was happy for her. But I was still sad for me.
“Is everything ready?” Mary Anne asked, coming through the hole in the hedge the way she always has, carrying two small boxes and wearing an outfit my mom would have loved and hated at the same time—silky black pants, a black floaty blouse that fluttered when she walked, and of course, a wide-brimmed black hat. She set the boxes on the patio table beside me. “Wait till you see what I have. Ruby will love it.”

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