Louisa Meets Bear (19 page)

Before, before
, Charlotte thought, gazing up at the white October sky, empty of clouds or color, and then out at the horizon, where she could see a tanker headed toward Newfoundland. That useless before.

*   *   *

On the ferry to Cape Tormentine, Charlotte sat in the second-deck cafeteria drinking tea from a Styrofoam cup. It was a forty-five-minute crossing over the Northumberland Strait, a trip Charlotte had made a half dozen times with Wen to shop in Saint John. A young couple sat at an adjacent table. The girl had long dark hair, stiff with hair spray, and athletic calves that peeked out between the bottoms of her Lycra pants and the tops of her slouchy socks. The boy, man really, had brought back a tray of food from the cafeteria line: two cups of coffee, a muffin for the girl, and, for himself, eggs, potatoes, bacon, and toast. The girl teased him, ignoring her muffin and instead taking nibbles from the crispest pieces of his bacon and the edges of his toast. He gave her hand a play whack and pushed the plate out of her reach. She giggled and lifted herself onto her knees, leaning over the table toward him, her sweatshirt falling forward so the tops of her large soft breasts were exposed.

Charlotte tried to remember if she'd ever felt that way, proud and in full possession of her body. It had been a different time. Her mother's brother had died in Honfleur, the first year of her own marriage. Her mother's hair had turned white within the year, her grief draining the color from everything it touched. Her mother's grief had not abated, it seemed to Charlotte, until Bill, her uncle's namesake and nine years her junior, had been born, so that Charlotte would always think that she and her brother had grown up not only in different eras but in different households with different mothers. She'd been eighteen and in her last year of high school when she'd met Wen. Wen had mistaken her heart-shaped face, blue eyes, and slender shape for angelic temperament; she'd mistaken his tight muscular arms, his rust hair, always falling forward into his eyes, and his laugh, boisterous and from the gut, for the outward signs of a deep pulsing vital force. The next day, watching him play, his flat butt almost parallel with the ice, his eyes fixed on a spot far ahead, Charlotte had thought of an animal, a leopard or a lion, a creature with natural grace. A week later, they had eloped.

The girl got up from her chair. Giggling, she walked around the table and plopped herself on the boy's lap. Her thighs spread over his and he reached his hands around her and moved them under her zippered sweatshirt. Fascinated and then embarrassed, Charlotte averted her eyes.

With Wen too, she'd been embarrassed at first, intimidated by his experience: the many girls he'd gone to bed with on the road. After Eric was born, when he'd hardly wanted her, she'd wondered if the girls had continued, but he'd slept peacefully wrapped around her, hardly like a man racked with guilt. Later, she'd wondered if it was his back, the injury when Eric was five. Over the years, though, she's come to understand that it was none of these things—that it was simpler, sadder. Wen experienced himself as living on scarce resources. It took all he had to leave the house eight months a year at 4:00 a.m., to put on the damp yellow oilskins and head for his boat redolent with fish guts. After that, he could either love her or want her, and she supposes that if she'd been able to choose between his face pressed every night into her shoulder and something more like she'd imagined that first time watching him play ice hockey, she would have chosen what she'd had.

*   *   *

She must have dozed off, because she starts when she hears the chime ring in the hall, the fruit dish still balanced on her lap, the maid's high voice saying there is a Mrs. MacPherson here,
she said she was expected
, and Charlotte tastes her mouth, a bitter metallic from sleep, and for an instant thinks how foolish to have said this, certainly there will now be a scene. But if Margaret, Dr. Margaret Rendell, responds to the maid it is very quietly, because Charlotte hears no disclaimers, only the maid coming in to clear the tea tray, the red wisps tucked back into her ponytail.

A moment later, the rapid click-click of pumps announces Margaret Rendell's entrance. She is tall and large-boned, clad in a red-and-black houndstooth suit with a jacket that buttons on a diagonal up the front, just glancing her ample hips, and a short straight skirt. Her gazelle's neck is accentuated by her hair, slicked back from her face and secured in a chignon at the nape. What leaves Charlotte with her mouth ajar is Margaret's skin, a deep mahogany so beautifully cared for it looks almost polished, and the tortoiseshell glasses, large and round with the lenses so entirely opaque Charlotte can only see her own reflection in their face.

Margaret lowers herself into a white leather swivel chair. She crosses her long legs, and spins the chair in quarter turns with a tiny rotation of her ankle. “Would you mind,” she says, “closing your eyes for a moment? I'd like to take a look at you but I don't let anyone see me without the glasses.”

Confused but obedient, that obedient impulse she learned from the nuns at Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Charlotte closes her eyes. The chair creaks as Margaret stands, walking away from the couch and onto the bare floor by the windows. Charlotte hears the snap of glasses folding, and then what feels like Margaret's eyes running over her, that old tingly sensation from morning services when she believed she could tell if one of the sour-breathed nuns was passing her eyes over Charlotte's back, particularly Sister George, with her lashless lids and blue-veined temples, whose gaze would spark an electrical current that would spread across Charlotte's shoulder blades before racing down her spine.

Margaret laughs. It is a friendly laugh, but with a sharp edge to it. “You didn't know, did you?”

“Excuse me?” Charlotte's voice sounds small and weak and suddenly she feels panicky, an impulse to open her eyes and dash out of the room.

“That I'm blind. Well, ninety-five percent. I can make out large shapes.”

With her eyes closed, the street sounds that before seemed muffled and almost soothing, a gurgle of human life so unlike the unpeopled silence that blankets the Priest Pond house, now seem amplified, what Eric would call a cacophony of horns and gunning engines.

“You're an ectomorph like Eric. All skin and bones, with cold hands and cold feet.”

Charlotte can hear her own breath, short and hollow. Since Wen's death, now nearly a month ago, there's been a hard tight feeling in her chest, as if a piece of ice has broken off from a frozen mass inside her, drifting up toward her heart so that she has to breathe around it. She's been mortified to realize that this feeling is not grief for Wen—who'd been gone, really, for years, no, decades already—but the awareness of Eric's absence, Eric whom she'd thought of as only temporarily estranged from them, not so unusual for a boy in college, but who, when Wen went into the hospital, she'd not known how to even contact. It came as a shock, that old ache of longing for Eric, followed by a sudden and terrible sense of shame that they, she, had let so much time pass, three years now that he's been out of college, years in which their calls to Eric dwindled from once a month to birthdays and Christmas, his cards and letters growing less and less frequent so that the week after Wen's first heart attack, she was taken aback looking through the shoe box where she kept Eric's letters to see that the last she'd heard from him was six months earlier, a Christmas card in which he'd written only his name. With Wen's second heart attack and the ensuing days when she tried to locate Eric, his phone disconnected, the school where he'd written that he worked unable to tell her any more than that he is on leave until January, abroad, they believed, the curtain of pretense lifted, and she had to acknowledge that it has been five years, more than a fifth of Eric's life and all of Wen's final years, of only polite gesturing between them.

“And you didn't know that I'm black.”

When Charlotte hears Margaret sit back down, she opens her eyes. Margaret has put the dark glasses on again. Her head is tilted in Charlotte's direction.

“I'm afraid I've intruded upon you. I…” She doesn't know the end of the sentence. “I'm afraid I don't know myself why I came.”

Margaret nods slightly. In the center of the opaque lenses, where her eyes should be, two circles, reflections from the crystal lamp on the table between them, glow a buttery yellow.

“I know Eric's out of the country. The principal at his school told me. That was in August, right after Eric's father went back into the hospital.” She can't not look at Margaret's face, but when she looks, she's distracted by not seeing her listener's eyes. “He said he'd ask around if anyone knew Eric's itinerary or how to reach him. I got a letter from him saying one of the teachers had given your name as someone who might know.”

The maid pushes open the French doors, her face flushed, a gray spot near the hem of her uniform suggesting a mishap in some distant room. Charlotte feels guilty, seeing something about Margaret's maid that Margaret is unable to apprehend. The girl sets a round teak tray on the table between them: a carafe of pale wine, a green bottle of sparkling water, a glass bowl filled with large crescent cashews.

“Thank you, Janie,” Margaret says as the girl, ponytail flapping, hastens off.

“Eric's traveling in Indonesia.” Margaret's hands rest quietly on her lap. “I think you have about as much chance of locating him there as finding a needle in a haystack.”

“Wen, Eric's father, passed away a few days after I spoke to the principal. I'd already buried him before I got the letter.”

A silence falls during which Charlotte feels relieved that Margaret doesn't say any of the expected things like how sorry she is—why should Margaret be sorry?—that would require Charlotte to evade or explain. Instead, Margaret laces her fingers together and extends them upward, making a steeple with the tips. A moment passes during which Charlotte wonders if Margaret is silently intoning a prayer. Then Margaret leans forward. She wraps a hand around the carafe.

“Shall I?” Charlotte asks.

“I can do it. Wine, bottled water, or a spritzer?”

Wen stopped drinking after his heart began acting up, and Charlotte had stopped with him. At the reception after the funeral, she'd longed for a drink, but her sisters-in-law had served coffee and turkey and cheese sandwiches and pound cake they'd made themselves. “Wine,” she says.

With one hand on the wine glass and the other circling the carafe, Margaret rests the lip of the carafe on the rim of the glass and pours. She angles an ear toward the glass, pouring, it seems, by sound.

“He, Wen, Eric's father, was sick for a long time,” Charlotte says, surprised by her own words, since Wen died four days after his second heart attack. They are, though, in a certain way, true: Wen had never really recovered from the back injury nearly two decades before.

“Eric sublet his apartment, but didn't want to leave his electronic keyboard and his other instruments there. They're in my guest room.”

Charlotte feels her heart pounding, knocking hard—her son's things here, just a few rooms away.

Margaret hands Charlotte the glass of wine and then pours herself half a glass, topping it off with the bottled water.
That must be a spritzer
, Charlotte thinks, her hand tremulous as she moves her own glass to her lips. “How do you know Eric?”

Margaret swivels toward Charlotte, and for a moment Charlotte is overcome with the suspicion that Margaret is tricking her, that she really can see. Her face grows hot, the awful red splotches of embarrassment that have plagued her since childhood, when they'd streak her neck and burn across her cheekbones toward her ears, as she wonders if Margaret is Eric's lover. With the glasses hiding her eyes, it is hard to tell how old Margaret might be—certainly past forty. But Eric will be twenty-five in the spring.

“He saved my life. Brought me back from the dead.”

Charlotte presses a damp palm over her heart. Perhaps, like her mother, she will quickly follow her husband to the grave. “What do you mean?”

“I was one angry son of a bitch after I lost my sight. It was six months or so later that I met Eric. I was supposed to be going through a rehabilitation program and I was giving them hell.” There's a lilt to Margaret's voice, as though she is talking about a naughty child. “I couldn't imagine what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I'd spent eleven years training to become a surgeon—four years of medical school, four years of residency, a three-year fellowship in microvascular surgery—then two more years establishing my practice and
boom
, in an instant, it was gone.

“At this rehab place, they were trying to teach me what they called functional skills: how to navigate without sight, how to cut your food, how to fix your hair. There was an idiot psychiatrist there, blind himself—but from birth, that's different—who kept talking about letting go of the false expectation that life is fair. One of the other patients, a kid who was never going to walk again after a motorcycle accident, told me that the nurses rolled their eyes whenever this idiot opened his mouth.”

Margaret reaches for a cashew, tracing the perimeter of the tray until she finds the bowl. The salt glistens on her lips. “One day, after I'd been there a good while, making no progress towards what they called my therapeutic goals, I had a temper tantrum over something and shoved my food tray across the cafeteria table. It flew off the table, landing with this enormous bang on the floor. The sound shocked me so badly I started to cry. I just sat there with my hands over the eye patches. This nurse peeled back my fingers—bloody around the nails, they'd told me, from chewing the cuticles. She held my hands in hers and said, Sugar, there's got to be something you can do with these hands other than make trouble, and that's how she came up with the idea of introducing me to Eric.”