Skinny Dipping (33 page)

May

Birgie stepped out into the chill, blinked into the morning light glaring off of Fowl Lake, and stretched, yawning hugely. She was still tired. Truth be told, she never got a great night’s sleep at the Chez; the mattresses were too thin and she was too fat. Still, something about this place perked her up. She’d been feeling a little old down there on the Florida links these last few weeks.

She turned and looked up at the peeling facade of the house and wondered whether Chez Ducky would sell immediately or there would be time for a last summer visit. She turned back to the bright lake and wondered whether she’d ever go skinny-dipping again. She turned toward the long narrow strip of grass-tufted beach and wondered whether that kid with the splotchball realized she’d been practicing with her own sling-shot, pinging plastic golfballs at the crocs on the fairways. She turned and—stumbled over a flat FedEx envelope propped against the outside of Chez Ducky’s front door.

“Shit!”

She stooped, grunting, and picked it up. It was addressed to Mimi, so she carried it into the house and tossed it onto the dining hall table next to Mimi’s backpack. Overhead she could hear the sound of people stirring. Birgie and the heirs-apparently-not to Chez Ducky had arrived last night in anticipation of their meeting with the lawyers tomorrow. Birgie had expected to find Mimi, but she’d been nowhere in sight, just this packed backpack, like Mimi was expecting to be leaving here fast.

All that had sorta been explained a while later when Mimi arrived. The backpack, she’d told them, was for when Mimi’s half sister Sarah went into labor. This news occasioned the gape-mouthed puzzlement you’d expect. Mimi’s half sister, whom no one had ever met, was
here
? No member from Mimi’s mother’s family had been up to Chez Ducky since…well, Solange herself, and that had been the year John disappeared and Solange had come to collect Mimi. Why Mimi’s apparently very pregnant half sister had decided to carry out her confinement at a stranger’s house in the northernmost part of the state only added to the mystery.

It had been even more of a shock to discover that Mimi had been over in the enemy camp (aka Prescott’s Erection) making nice with the enemy—and the enemy’s dogs. Oddest of all, Mimi had acted as if her playing den mother to such a household was normal. Mimi hated being depended on for anything. It gave her the jim-jams, just like her great-aunt Birgie. That’s just the way they were. Or at least that’s the way Birgie was…Maybe Mimi hadn’t ever really been that way, only circumstances had made it seem so.

There were other changes in Mimi she’d noticed, too. Mimi, the most carefree woman Birgie knew, worried about her sister, fretted about those hounds, and dutifully fussed about Prescott. Poor Mimi, it appeared that something had woken her to all the worries and cares that assailed other people. But the burdens that had been dumped on poor Mimi didn’t seem to depress her as they would have Birgie. In fact, she seemed energized. All bouncy and full of beans.

Birgie frowned, shoving up the lakeside window to let in a little fresh air. It smelled unusually sweet for early May, carrying none of the dank spring mold smell that came with ordinarily wet, dank northern Minnesota springs. She wished it did. It would have been easier to think of this as the last May she’d spend at Chez Ducky if it were a crappy May. But the unusually warm and dry weeks had made the lake look and smell damnably lovely.

She turned back into the room, where Naomi, dressed in a dirndl skirt and buckskin shirt, was sitting on the floor in a semi-lotus position, eyes closed, humming softly.

“Getting anything?” Birgie asked.

Naomi opened her eyes. “No.” She sounded deflated. “I’m afraid Mimi is the only one with the gift.”

“You sure you want to sign those papers?” she asked Naomi.

“No,” she said. “But Bill wants me to, and they’ve got those two boys to send to college, and believe me, neither of them is going to be getting any scholarships.”

“I guess,” Birgie said. “Do you think Gerald and Vida are thinking the same thing?”

“Yup. Plus there’s Gerry’s brothers. He’ll split his share with them. When she drew up her will, I don’t think Ardis ever imagined that she was deeding over anything besides the right to speak at the end of the summer powwow. I’m sure she never thought the people she named as her heirs were going to sell the place.”

“Then she ought to have thought harder,” Birgie grumbled. “Ardis was just like Mimi, thinking everything will go along the way it always has. Don’t suppose I can blame her. I kinda thought so, too.”

“How many grandkids does Johanna have now?” Naomi asked. “Eight? Ten?”

Birgie shrugged, deflated. She got the point. There was no way the Olsons and their offspring could allow this little gold vein to go unmined.

Naomi leaned forward and rolled to her knees, propping herself up on the couch and lumbering to her feet. “What are we going to do for dinner? I could drive in to town and get meatballs from Smelka’s. How many are there going to be?”

Birgie mentally tallied up their number. There were her and Naomi, plus Johanna and Charlie, who, having finally come clean about their decades-long affair, were shacking up in Cabin Six. Then there were Vida and Gerry, and Naomi’s son, Bill, and Debbie, who, even though they weren’t heirs per se, insisted on tagging along to “support” Naomi. Ha. Like Naomi needed support. They were here to make sure she didn’t change her vote at the last minute. That made eight. Then there was Mimi and the people she’d adopted into the system, her sister Sarah and the kid, Prescott. She supposed she should see whether they wanted to be included, since Mimi had already included them.

She was still thinking about this when Mimi appeared.

“Hi, Mimi,” Naomi said. “How’s Sarah?”

“Fine, I guess.” Mimi sounded testy. “I took her to Fawn Creek yesterday and Dr. Youngstrum said if she didn’t return to Minneapolis soon to have this baby, she wasn’t going to be leaving at all.”

“So, is she leaving?” Naomi asked.

“She says not yet. I swear to God that pregnancy has interfered with her hearing because she is not tracking what either me or the doctor tells her.”

Since when did Mimi tell anyone what to do? Birgie wondered.

The bang of the front door preceded Vida’s arrival. “Well, if it isn’t the resident ghost lisperer,” she said, smiling at Mimi.

“Only Capote has managed to lisp from the Other Side,” Mimi replied. “Besides, I’ve retired.”

Naomi, Vida, and Birgie exchanged startled looks. “What? When? Why?”

“Forced out by my employer’s unreasonable demand that I actually work more days than I take off.”

“Really?” Vida asked.

“Really. Besides, I can’t hear them anymore what with all the noise around here. When Prescott and Sarah aren’t screaming at each other about who builds the better dedicated graphic accelerator, they’re arguing about baby names—Prescott’s current favorite being Galadriel for a girl and Faramir if it’s a boy, Aragorn apparently being an impossible name to live up to.”

Mimi must have misread Birgie’s expression of confusion—what was she babbling about?—because she nodded.

“I know,” Mimi said. “And Sarah hasn’t even read
The Lord of the Rings.
She’s leaning toward Beth or John, thereby proving my theory that every bit of her creativity has gone into the making of this kid. And before you ask, I have already gently pointed out that any naming rights get to go to the custodial parents of this kid, because Sarah still hasn’t decided if she’s going to give the baby up for adoption.”

“Who can’t you hear?” Birgie asked. She’d never been all that interested in kids, let alone kids’ names.

The shift in subject caught Mimi off guard. “What?”

“You said you can’t hear them anymore because of the noise.”

“I told you. The ghosts. They’ve been shouted down by the living. Those two bicker like siblings. To top it off, Sarah has been teaching Bill to ‘sing.’”

“Bill?” Vida asked, looking just as nonplussed as Birgie felt. Only Naomi seemed sanguine. She wore that all-knowing smirk of the cosmically connected.

“The mean little sausagelike dog with brown curly hair. The one we ‘rescued’ last summer? Sarah’s actually got the little bastard to howl on command. Of course, the rest of them, not about to be shoved out of the spotlight, have started howling every time they hear Bill’s reedy little wolf-speak.”

“Does it make you mad?” Birgie asked, unable to leave Mimi’s abandonment by the ghosts alone.

“Mad? No. I just leave. That’s the beauty of being the neighbor.”

“I meant about the ghosts.”

“Nah. To everything there is a season.”

What?
Birgie thought in amazement. Who
was
this woman? Up here at Chez Ducky, regardless of the month or the weather, there was only one season due to the fact that nothing changed here. Things stayed the same. People might come and go, but the place was…timeless. If Mimi had said this once, she’d said it a thousand times.

Gerald came stomping in just then, his face glum. “Oh. Hi, Mimi. How come you look so happy? Oh, yeah. You’re always happy. Does anything ever touch a nerve?”

“Nope,” Mimi said. “Totally nerveless.” But she
blushed.
“Why the long face, Ger?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Gerald,” Vida said warningly, putting her hand on his sleeve.

“Probably not,” Mimi replied. “But what the hell, let me have a shot at it.”

“Okay,” he said gruffly defiant, “I’m going to miss this place. There. You have it. I’m getting all mawkish over a pricey length of swampy lakeshore. But, dammit, so many good parts of our lives have been spent here. Why, Carl was created right down on that beach—”

“Ger!” Vida yelped.

“I did
not
need to know that,” said Birgie.

“I thought so,” Naomi intoned.

“Anyways,” Gerry picked up where he’d left off, “it makes me feel sort of blue. Knowing Chez Ducky won’t be in the family anymore.” He squared his shoulders. “Of course, selling it is the sensible thing to do.”

Vida smiled at her husband and tucked her arm through his. “Come on, Ger. Let’s take a walk on the beach.”

“It’s going to storm,” he protested, still morose. “The clouds have been building up on the horizon all day, and they’re starting to move in.”

“Oh, they’ve been doing that all spring,” Mimi said. “Like a teenage boy with a condom, all show, no go. We haven’t had rain in weeks. You may have noticed the lack of green?”

“See?” Vida batted her eyelashes at Gerry. “Maybe we could check out the vacant cottages on our way down to the beach….” She snagged her sweater on the way out the door, Gerry lumbering after her like a suddenly eager Saint Bernard puppy.

They passed Johanna and Charlie on their way into the dining hall. “Well, look who’s come down from the tower. Princess Mimi,” Charlie said. He stopped by the table and the boxes of photographs Mimi had been sorting. “Hey. Look, Jo. Mimi’s found the old photographs. What happened to the albums?”

They flanked Mimi, picking up and looking over the photographs she hadn’t put away yet.

“They were falling apart so I started reorganizing them,” Mimi said.

“Ha! Look, Jo. Here’s you and the kids. And me. Gosh. I forgot about that tree house.” He shook his head. “It’s a wonder no one died in that thing.”

“You know,” he continued, looking up at Mimi, “this is a pretty clever way of organizing these things. You’ve got it sorted by family groupings rather than dates.”

“This is just a start. Wait’ll you see what I’m going to do with them,” Mimi said. “Prescott and Sarah and I have been working on a digital search program. It uses a touch screen interface, and all you’ll have to do to find more pictures of the same person is touch their face on the screen.”

Mimi sounded surprisingly fired up at the prospect.
Why couldn’t she have gotten all fired up about saving Chez Ducky?
Birgie wondered glumly. Birgie had set it all up. Sent Mimi up here with that bogus text message about wanting her to close the place up; left the albums in a convenient, but not too obvious, spot; gotten Vida to relay all sorts of provocative information, all in the hopes that it would get Mimi worked up enough,
passionate
enough, that she’d do something. Or at least try.

Johanna was shaking her head. “Inputting all that information will be a huge pain.”

“Not if we have a face-recognition program associated with it.”

“Come on. That’s FBI stuff,” Charlie scoffed.

“Interpol,” Mimi said. “At least that’s what Prescott claims. He says he helped develop it.”

Suddenly, they heard the front door slam open and then the sound of barking dogs, nails clattering, and feet pounding, approaching the parlor. Prescott materialized in the doorway, doubled over, sucking wind and pointing over his shoulder. Dogs leapt around him.

“What? What is it?” Mimi demanded.

“Sarah…” Prescott gulped. His chest heaved. “Come…quick!”

Led by a panting Prescott, Mimi trotted up the footpath through the woods, followed doggedly behind by the rest in single file, even Debbie and Half-Uncle Bill, who’d spotted the commotion from their second-floor bedroom. All thoughts of Chez Ducky and lawyers and photographs and everything else she’d count as important faded in significance. Sarah was having the baby. “Why…didn’t you…call the hospital?” she asked.

“I tried,” Prescott gasped. “No…cell.” He had been freshly delivered from his last walking cast ten days ago, and Mimi worried he was putting too much stress on his leg. “You…should stop.”

He sucked wind. “Why?”

“Leg,” she gasped.

He understood. “Fine,” he gasped back.

They broke from the woods, chugged up to the lodge, shoved through the front door, and piled into the kitchen. Sarah was leaning against the granite island, one hip jacked up on a stool, calmly peeling a banana. On the floor by the refrigerator was a pool of fluid.

“Her water broke!” Johanna announced, looking back over her shoulder at the group jostling behind. This information was passed back through the group.

“…her water broke.”

“…her water broke.”

“…her water broke.”

“Who’re they?” Sarah asked, her banana arrested halfway to her mouth.

“The Olsons,” Mimi said, leaning forward with her hands on her knees and puffing.

“You’re the Olsons?
Mimi’s
Olsons?” Sarah asked, clearly delighted. “Cool. Hi.”

“We’ve heard so much about you.”

“Solange’s youngest, imagine that.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Here’s my card.” This last from Debbie, who’d handed Sarah her realtor’s card.

“Yeah, yeah,” Mimi said, her breath returning. “We can make with the nice later. For right now, Prescott says you—”

“Prescott freaked out,” Sarah said flatly. “I told him it was perfectly natural. I told him I wasn’t even in labor yet. I just think he didn’t want to clean it up,” she finished with a quelling gaze at the red-faced Prescott. She took a bite of banana.

“Would you?” Prescott asked. His black T-shirt had damp rings under the arms from his race to Chez Ducky, and his baggy black jeans looked like they were about to fall off his ass.

“You
gotta
get new jeans,” Mimi said, eyeing him critically. “You’re falling out of those.”

“This young woman needs to go to the hospital,” Johanna declared.

“I do not,” Sarah said.

“We’re half an hour away from Fawn Creek and we don’t have any way to get hold of your doctor. Bad cell reception, remember? You need to go to the hospital. Now,” Mimi said.

“I think I’m good for a while yet,” Sarah said. She had that obstinate look on. “I appreciate the concern, really, and as soon as I feel a twinge, I promise I’ll have Prescott take me—”

“You could go into labor at any minute,” Vida said sternly. “You should go now.”

Johanna and Naomi nodded in vigorous agreement. Even Debbie murmured, “She’s right, you know.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” Mimi asked, beginning to be seriously pissed off at Sarah. She’d spent the months deferring to Sarah’s increasingly suspect judgment, decrees, whims, demands, etcetera, all under the auspices that this was Sarah’s life and her decision and not really Mimi’s business. Well, screw that. This was also that baby’s life and
someone
needed to act responsibly. “Sarah Charbonneau Werner, if you don’t—”

“Hell!” Half-Uncle Bill suddenly yelped from the living room. A growl followed. They all looked around to see Bill emerge from beneath a pile of lap rugs on the sofa, Half-Uncle Bill, standing in front of him, rubbing his bum.

“That dog bit me,” Half-Uncle Bill said, seating himself gingerly on the end of the sofa as far from the blankets as he could. “It’s a damn kennel around here.”

“Yeah!” Sarah said, in the tone of one finding inspiration. “We can’t go, because who’ll watch the dogs?”

This was so stupid that for a second Mimi could only stare at her sister. Finally, Johanna spoke. “Honey, the dogs’ll be fine,” she said gently. “You need to get to the hospital. Staying here isn’t going to keep the baby from coming.”

Sarah looked like she might argue, but then her face crumpled. “She can’t! I don’t know what I’m going to do with her yet!”

She dropped the partially eaten banana to the floor, laid her head down on her arms, and sobbed. As one, the women in the kitchen surrounded her, clucking and shushing and making soft, reassuring noises. Mimi stroked the back of her head, Vida rubbed her back, Debbie picked up the fallen banana, Johanna got her a glass of water, and Naomi started an Indian birthing chant.

“Mimi?” Sarah’s muffled voice sounded painfully young and uncertain.

“You’ll figure it out, Sarah. Promise.”

“I don’t think I can.”

Mimi’s heart flopped over and melted. “Then
we
will, Sarah. We’ll figure it out, I promise, but first you have to have her,” Mimi said, brushing the hair away from her face. “Come on, Sarah. You don’t really want Prescott to deliver your baby, do you?”

“Prescott is not delivering any babies!” Prescott said loudly.

In all the commotion, Prescott had disappeared. Now he emerged from the stairwell leading to the tower, his cell phone in one hand and his ultracompact notebook in the other. He held them up in the air as if to display their worthlessness. “I thought I might be able to get a connection if I was high enough, but I’m not getting satellite or microwave.”

Good old Prescott. While the other men—and Birgie—were sitting on their butts doing nothing, at least he’d been
trying
to do something. “Thanks, Prescott,” Mimi said.

His cheeks turned pink and he looked over at Sarah, all swollen of face and form, and said, “Okay, Sarah. You’ve had your Big Moment. Now get your ass off the stool and go to the hospital and have the baby.”

Amazingly, she did. Without further protest, Sarah got off the stool, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and began lumbering down the front hall. The Olson women fell in behind her, like nursery insects attending a queen termite.