Louisa Meets Bear (18 page)

Richard sits down on what had been Brianna's cot. He leans against the wall and rests the cup of gelato on his stomach.

In the end, with Guy's brain riddled with cancer, his body so weak that three shifts of nurses were needed to tend him, his voice gone after a bout of pneumonia left laryngitis in its wake, Lena and Frankie had agreed on one thing: Guy should be allowed to die at home. It was late February and an early warm spell had tricked some of the forsythia into bloom. Lena was in Guy and Frankie's yard cutting yellow branches to bring in for Guy, and Brianna and Caitlin were in the kitchen helping Frankie make sandwiches when Guy motioned to Richard. Slowly, laboriously, Guy wrote on a pad. At first Richard couldn't make out the word, Guy's formerly bold script now shaky and broken. Then it came to him:
Isobel
. Richard looked up. Guy moved his thin wrist up to his chest and made little knocking sounds with his knuckles on his breastbone.

“Bring my mother to the house, with Frankie and Caitlin here?” Lena said in amazement when Richard told her.

“Well,” Richard said, “I hardly think he can go out.” So, after lunch, Lena took Frankie and the girls to a movie and Richard drove across town to get Isobel, who, Lena reported, had not seemed surprised when Lena had called to tell her Guy's request. For nearly an hour Richard sat in the kitchen drinking coffee with the private nurse while Isobel visited with Guy. Then, worried that the others would return with Isobel still there, he went upstairs.

The door to Guy's room was closed. Standing in the hallway, Richard felt timid, something akin to the shyness he had felt as a child on Sunday mornings, the one day of the week when his parents, not up at five to open the dry-cleaning store by seven, would keep the door to their bedroom locked. He knocked gently and then entered. Isobel was sitting on the edge of Guy's bed, her head resting on Guy's shrunken chest, her swollen legs barely reaching the floor. Guy was petting her thin hair and whispering, really more like a rasp, something that sounded like Italian.

Richard dips the spoon into the remaining gelato. Spoonful after spoonful, he lets the sweet strawberry cream bathe the insides of his mouth and the top of his tongue. In the distance, bells are chiming. He counts the rings.
Eleven
. In the morning, they'll take the vaporetto to the train, and then the train to Florence. In the afternoon, Richard will meet with the Swiss lawyers, who would have arrived midday with the loan proposals for the Kenyan electric plant in tow. Either Lena will wheedle Brianna into going to the Uffizi or Brianna will wheedle Lena into shopping for the ankle boots.

When all that is left is a pink pool at the bottom of the cup, Richard raises the plastic to his lips and drinks. He places the cup on the floor and switches off the last light. In the dark, he listens to the familiar breathing of his wife and daughter—Brianna's slow and rumbling like a boat departing, Lena's shallow and staccato with a little hiss like a teakettle coming to a boil.

 

Priest Pond

As far as Charlotte MacPherson, née Callahan, can remember, she's only told two lies in her forty-four years—the first, twenty-six years ago, when she told her mother she was going with Rachel Bigsby to visit Rachel's aunt in Loveland, when really she was going with Wen to the Cincinnati City Hall and from there to Niagara Falls, where in the morning they sent her parents a telegram to announce their marriage; the second, fourteen years later, when she told Wen there was forty-five thousand dollars left in her parents' estate with another twenty thousand put in trust for Eric's college, when really, with her brother Bill's share gifted to her, there was ninety and it was she who'd arranged for the trust—so she is surprised to find herself in the next five minutes telling in rapid succession another two.

“Is Dr. Rendell expecting you?” the epauletted doorman asks, and Charlotte is so taken aback by the
doctor
and by the marble counter behind which he is scanning four miniature screens, that she says, “Yes, yes, she is.”

The doorman murmurs her name into a telephone receiver while Charlotte's mouth goes dry, and then waves, gold buttons flashing, toward the farthest elevator. “Ninth floor, south side.”

“The apartment number?” Charlotte asks, her voice low, almost a whisper, and cracking—surely he will not let her pass.

But there is no censuring arm, only the doorman's thin eyebrows arching in tandem with his epaulets. “No numbers. You take the one on the right.”

Inside the elevator, Charlotte glances at herself in the enormous gilded mirror that forms the top panel of the back wall. How simple and naive and maybe even poor she must have seemed to the doorman: the mousy hair still cropped into the pageboy she's worn since shearing her girlhood braids, the green parka with the hood that zips bulkily into the collar, the corduroy jumper the color of stewed prunes, the white cotton turtleneck, nappy from a hundred washes, the rubber-soled walking shoes ordered from a catalogue. She lost vanity so many years back, it is hard to remember when. Only about her eyes, still a large china blue, has she retained pride. Pride that they haven't sunk into her face like Wen's had, faded from wind and sand and sun and, she's always thought, from the years of humiliations—the feeling of defeat when his back wouldn't heal and he had to give up ice hockey and all his Icarus hopes; when, these last five years, the fishing gone bust, the fishermen having taken out more of the cod and mackerel and hake than the bay could reproduce so they'd gone from each boat bringing in upward of two thousand kilos a day to the whole fleet hardly hauling in that much, he'd had to take road work and then unemployment to make ends meet.

On the ninth floor, the elevator opens onto a foyer with a high-backed chair to the left and a pedestal table with a glass orb filled with white tulips to the right. In front, there is a door with a brass nameplate on which
DR. MARGARET RENDELL
is engraved in small script letters. As Charlotte steps out of the elevator, a chime rings and then a young woman—redheaded, ponytailed, crisply aproned—opens the door.

“Oh…” A hand, so freckled the white skin beneath is nearly hidden, flies up to cover her mouth. “Excuse me, only I thought he'd said
Mr.
MacPherson. Is … did Dr. Rendell know you were coming?”

“Yes,” Charlotte says, this time the lie rolling smoothly, without pause, off her tongue.

“Oh, dear. She just left, not even ten minutes ago. Said she'd be out for about an hour.” The girl seems flustered, which has the effect of calming Charlotte. “Would you like to wait?”

“Please.” Charlotte follows the maid down a long corridor lined with sepia-tinted photographs of elegantly dressed black people, and then through a set of French doors into a large room with a blond oak floor and a rose Oriental rug covered in a pattern of blue-gray vines. She motions Charlotte toward a creamy couch with a fan of pillows against the back and a mohair blanket, also light, like the inside of an oyster shell, laid over one arm.

Charlotte runs her fingers over the blanket and inhales: the sweet decaying scent of gardenias. Across from her, a wall of tall windows looks out over Central Park. There are no real curtains, just a sheer voile, left loose on one side so a shadow falls over the black grand piano, but pulled back with a braided cord on the other so the late afternoon light forms a gold pool on the floor. A ficus tree with shiny leaves brushes the ceiling, and on the walls there are pastel canvases, one of silvery cubes floating like bubbles, the other of what looks like a nude female. Folding her chapped country hands, she thinks of her own living room with its centerpiece of Wen's television and recliner. When they built the house, a prefab ordered from a company in Ontario, they'd economized, putting in wall-to-wall carpet instead of finished wood floors, but what with Wen and Eric always coming in damp and muddy, the carpets had mildewed and Charlotte finally had the rugs ripped up, resigning herself to the linoleum underneath, which at least she could keep clean.

The maid returns bearing a lacquered tray she lowers carefully onto a glass table. On the tray is a whimsical teapot, shaped like a Pierrot doll with an arm for the spout and a matching sugar bowl, creamer, and mug. To the side sit two oval plates: one with an array of sliced fruits—strawberries, oranges, pineapple rings; the other with a sampler of tiny bakery cookies—iced rounds, chocolate-filled straws, flowers with red jam centers.

“Milk or lemon, ma'am?”

“Lemon, please.”

The maid pours the tea and lifts a lemon wedge with a pair of silver tongs. She points to a small bell on the tray—“If you need anything…”—and then disappears, closing the French doors behind her.

*   *   *

Three days before, on the morning she left Priest Pond, Charlotte woke thinking of her father. She hadn't seen her father in twelve years, and then he'd been in his coffin, the remaining strands of his jet-black hair plastered to his head, his thick arms straining even in death against the suit he'd worn only to church and other funerals, the scar he'd brought home from the war hidden beneath. Charlotte's mother, who would die less than four months later, had insisted that the wake be held at home, her father's coffin placed in the room her mother had called the parlor. Charlotte had stood next to her brother, Bill, a year out of Princeton and in his first banking job. She'd been struck by how fitting it seemed, how the room, which her father had always hated, seeing it as her mother's attempt at pretending that she wasn't a plumber's wife, had always felt like a funeral parlor, dark and heavy and stiff with the promise of chastisements.

It was early, the morning light filtering through the white bedroom curtains Charlotte had sewn herself. She lay still for longer than usual, knowing there was nothing to do. The car was packed, her neighbor set to pick the fall garden crop. (
Take it
, Charlotte had urged when she'd shown her neighbor the kitchen garden—the beans, the acorn squash, the onions, beets, kohlrabi, red cabbage—unable, now, to even imagine why she'd planted all of this or how, in years past, she'd spent weeks at canning, at preparing the root cellar.) Arrangements made to spend the two nights she'd stay in New York with her brother and his wife, their apartment, Bill had explained, not far from where she was going, just a short cab ride across the park, Charlotte too embarrassed to tell him that she would be driving the pickup to New York.

Twisting backward, she reached the window over the bed and pushed it open. Outside, the air was balmy, the island's secret, God's kiss, she used to tell Eric, the Gulf Stream that came from Florida warming the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the water warmer than anywhere north of the Carolinas, like the Caribbean, she'd heard tourists say, as though there should be palm trees and coconuts instead of fields of barley and stands of pine and spruce tumbling into the sea.

She dressed quickly in her jumper and tights, made tea and a slice of toast from a loaf of bread one of her sisters-in-law had brought two days before. When she finished eating, she rinsed the cup, checked the stove, locked the kitchen door, and stuck her handbag on the front seat of the pickup.

Charlotte walked down the clay road lined with wild blueberry bushes, the outer bunches shriveled and dry, but inside, where she reached her long fingers, filled with the tiny tart budlets. Although their ten acres ran from the road out to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Wen had insisted they build away from the water, where in the winter cold gusts of wind blew in from the north Atlantic, so as to save on heating costs. Then, Eric had been in his fourth year of ear infections, and Charlotte, tired out from her fights with Wen that the boy would never get well if Wen refused to let her keep the trailer a decent temperature and scared too that Eric's keen sense of sound might be damaged, had gone along. Today, there was a warm breeze from the east and the field of hay that stretched west from the house made rustling sounds. On the dunes, the sea grasses would be blowing, soft, all in one direction, a lime-green animal's hide. This year, with Wen sick, they'd left the tract behind the house unplanted and wildflowers had grown, defiant, like children spinning wildly through a room where they know they should be still: yellow goldenrod, purple Michaelmas daisy, a spiky fireweed with leggy stalks and fluffed cabernet-colored flowers Wen's sisters called rosebay willowherb.

When she'd first come to the island, Charlotte had been amazed at the way the fields ran right to the edges of the bluffs, the land dropping off like those ancient drawings of the earth as flat. Before her, red clay cliffs abutted the gulf, this morning a sapphire blue stretching out toward a pale horizon, the water velvety with only the thinnest slivers of whitecaps toward the shore. Green lichen streaked the cliffs and, below, pools of water formed between the rocks. Floating in one, there was a wooden slat from a lobster trap, smooth, Charlotte knew from years of scrambling with Eric over these rocks—Eric, whose translucent skin she'd had to cover from head to toe with suntan lotion, the peaked white brow dotted with a tiny bluish star, the residue of a little piece of lead lodged under the skin after another boy had poked him with a pencil, eerily, in the exact spot where the mystics place the third eye. Eric leaning to examine each object that washed ashore: a starfish, a bottle embossed with Japanese characters, pieces of rope, once a braided gold chain he'd laid cold and wet against her then-still-young neck.

A quarter of a century before, sitting on the porch of her parents' two-family house, when Wen, a roguish boy she'd met at a street fair—Wen and the other Canadian ice hockey players loud and bold from German beer and a winning streak that had left money in their pockets—had told her about the island, she'd imagined it as something between Pocahontas and
Little House on the Prairie
. Wen had talked about first-growth forest: red spruce, white spruce, black spruce. Pine, cherry, maple, birch. He'd talked of beef chickens and lane chickens and how his father had sheared their own sheep and his grandmother and great-aunts had spun a coarse white wool his mother and aunts had dyed and knit into bulky sweaters. There'd been a double outhouse—frosted over or bee-infested depending on the season—and an orchard with apples, peaches, and pears. He and his brother had trapped beaver, mink, and rabbit for pocket money. They'd walked four miles each way to a one-room schoolhouse by a river, where, after school, the boys would saw a hole in the ice and then lower a torch to attract salmon, six man's hands long, they'd spear with a long spontoon. Winter nights, they'd drag his uncle's combine down to the river to generate electricity for lights so they could play ice hockey.