South of Superior (3 page)

She sipped at the coffee, intending to visit, but the bone-deep warmth of the kitchen, the smell of the wood heat (it was something like ironing, and Emmy had ironed when Madeline was small, and the smell swept her back to that long-past time), the sisters' voices washing over her, was so soothing that she nodded off almost to sleep and took in their conversation only hazily.

“Cold today,” Arbutus said.

“Down around twenty last night, I expect,” Gladys answered.

“. . . that low, you think?”

“. . . call on Emil to get Us some more wood in.”

“Yes.”

It
was
like a fairy tale: the cold air and icy rain, the pounding lake, the acres of forest that had closed in behind her, the aged sisters in their kitchen, the boiled coffee and cook woodstove, her deep sleepiness.

“You may as well go along to bed for a nap,” Gladys said from far away at some point. Madeline began to apologize.

“Don't be silly, you've driven all night,” Gladys said, frowning.

“You're tired, dear. Go on and rest.” Arbutus beamed, and Madeline could not help but smile back. She was so very weary. It was as if years of tiredness had caught Up with her all at once. She let Gladys steer her Up narrow stairs to a small bedroom with faded wallpaper where there was an iron-framed bed with scratchy wool blankets and soft flannel sheets. She dropped into it and slept with abandon.

She woke Up in time to eat dinner, feeling guilty and apologetic throughout, but nearly dozed off again in her chair afterward. Gladys refused her help with the dishes and sent her back Upstairs to bed. Madeline considered protesting, but she didn't have it in her. The drive had done her in.

She woke Up once to find the room black and the house deeply quiet. She felt her way to the stairs, made her way to the bathroom, peered at her wristwatch—three a.m.—and when she was finished made a detour to the parlor window. The rain was still streaming down, her car sat out front like a faithful dog, the dark street was empty, and she could still hear, faintly, the pounding surf of Lake Superior. Out of nowhere the gleeful feeling shot through her again. She was
here
.

In the morning she found Gladys and Arbutus—and Marley—in the kitchen again. The cookstove was shoveling out heat and the coffee was boiling. “We opened the stair door hoping you'd smell the coffee and get Up,” Gladys said, and Madeline heard criticism in her voice.

“I'm sorry I slept so long. Tell me what you need me to do, I'll get started.”

“Nonsense,” Gladys said, her frown deepening. “You've just woken Up.”

“Sit.” Arbutus patted at a chair. “Have coffee.”

“And toast. There's blueberry jam I made.”

“
Wild
blueberry,” Arbutus confirmed.

 

 

Each day began
in more or less the same way except that Madeline never let Arbutus beat her out of bed again. She'd open her eyes from a deep sleep, fish around on the covers for Marley (never to find him, he'd adopted the space beside the kitchen range as his own), smell a whiff of coffee, and climb down the stairs. She'd join Gladys in the kitchen and visit—thin, stilted conversations that touched on nothing of much consequence—until they heard Arbutus stirring (it turned out Gladys was the true early riser of the two; Arbutus had just been excited that first morning). Then she'd help Arbutus get Up and around and situated, and try to find enough to do to fill her days.

That was a problem she hadn't foreseen. Gladys relinquished no control of anything except the most basic aspects of helping Arbutus. She wanted no interference in her routine, allowed little help with the cooking or cleaning or dishes, had no big projects to tackle that might have filled some of Madeline's hours. That hadn't occurred to her as a potential issue, back in Chicago. She'd just latched on to the decision and ran with it.

Why?
she had to wonder now. But there had been genuine kindness in Gladys's letter and Madeline had grasped at that. At last, someone who Understood. Where had
that
woman gone, the one who wrote,
I expect you are at sea still without her—a year is not really long in the scheme of things. I won't say it was for the best or any of that
.
It can never feel right to lose someone so dear.
More than a year after Emmy's death Madeline was absolutely not all right, and no one seemed to see that. She was supposed to be over it, moving on, reshaping her life, which after all had been put on hold to take care of a dying woman. But that wasn't how Madeline felt. Her life had not been on hold, for one thing, and it certainly wasn't racing forward now.

She was lost and enraged and she wasn't even completely sure why. People died, that was a fact of life. Inescapable. Madeline was not ordinarily someone who kicked against the inescapable. And there had been years and years to get Used to the idea while they battled the cancer, lived with it, rejoiced at the remissions, got knocked down again by the renewed onslaughts. So she should have been ready for the end when it finally came. But she hadn't been of course and now she couldn't seem to get back on track. Her despair was like a virus that had infected her entire system, destroyed her at the core.

She'd come north partly because Gladys Hansen maybe Understood that. And partly to be with Arbutus, who was not like Emmy in age or background or interests, but seemed exactly like her in spirit. Good. Merry. Wise. There was no right word for it that Madeline could find except one she'd forgotten. A Jewish friend had Used it to describe Emmy at her funeral. One of the pillars of the world that God put on earth to live among Us and help Us cope and see the point of things, was what it meant. Madeline had Understood it was a singular compliment and wanted to remember the word always. She'd even asked her friend to write it down, but was in such a haze of grief that she misplaced the scrap of paper almost immediately. So she'd lost the word but not the idea, and she thought it fit Arbutus too, the moment she met her.

She'd gone across town to meet Gladys Hansen and her sister after the letter came because it seemed ridiculously churlish not to, had gone filled with dread and curiosity and not one shred of interest in doing what Gladys asked. But then she met Arbutus and everything changed. It was as if Arbutus was a beloved grandmother she'd known all her life and would do anything for. There was a deep sweetness about her, an ineffable specialness, a rareness of character you'd be a fool not to latch on to.

Madeline had arrived at Nathan's apartment to find the door Unlocked (in Chicago!) and Arbutus in the bathroom, struggling to get herself into a fresh pair of Depends. It turned out that Gladys had gone to the corner market and was later than she meant to be getting back.

“I'm sure this isn't what you expected,” Arbutus said once Madeline made her tentative way down the hall. She had a rueful smile on her face—so pretty still—and despite the embarrassing situation her eyes were bright behind her gold-rimmed glasses.

“I didn't expect anything,” Madeline said, all the defensive prickliness she had at the ready dissolved.

“Well, that's the best way, isn't it? Really it's the only way.”

Right then Madeline decided: she would go north with them, to the end of the earth, to stay for an Undetermined length of time and almost no money. It wasn't a decision, even—it was just inevitable. And besides, what else was there to do? Life had trudged on since Emmy died but there was no meaning in it. She had to do something different, maybe
any
thing different. On her own she had not been able to figure out how to go on. How could she ignore it when it seemed as if maybe she'd met another of those rare people, a pillar of the world? And of course she couldn't completely ignore the suggestion that it was time to see where Joe and Jackie Stone had come from.

So she'd come, but she hadn't penciled
boring
into her idea of how it would be. There were simply no distractions. No shopping, no movies, no museums, no events, no nothing. There was barely even any TV because Gladys was too cheap—or more likely too poor, Madeline corrected herself with chagrin—to hook Up to cable or buy a satellite dish, and only two stations came in, usually fuzzily, with the antenna.

Madeline had never thought of herself as someone who required entertainment. It wasn't like she'd been out on the town all those years when she was taking care of Emmy, so what was the difference, really? Maybe most of all it was a lack of possibility. She had only the diversions she could manufacture herself, and no hope of any others. She couldn't even watch
other
people being entertained.

She loved to read, but there were limits. Plus she'd already run through half of one of the boxes of books she'd brought with her, which gave her an Uneasy feeling. She had the impulse to hoard what was left. There was no library, no bookstore, no borrowing from a friend. Gladys's shelves held only the Bible and half a dozen Reader's Digest Condensed Books from the 1960s, and Arbutus read only romances. These were brought to her by friends from the library in Crosscut, and Madeline didn't see herself getting
there
on any regular basis. She'd already figured out that the round-trip would cost at least ten dollars in gas, which was not nothing, now that she had no real income, just the tiny wage from Gladys and a small savings account from Emmy's insurance policy set aside for emergencies. Besides which, it was obvious the Buick only had so many miles left in it. So, no frivolous driving.

McAllaster did have a small antique store that was closed in the winter; when she peered in the window she could make out a shelf of paperbacks toward the back. It was obvious even from the street that they were worn-out old mysteries and romances and celebrity bios and true crime thrillers, but still she longed to get at them, just so she wouldn't feel so deprived.

She loved to walk, but there were limits to that, too. Besides which, the weather was dismal, day after day of sleet and scattered snow showers and drizzling rain and endless wind. Chicago wasn't exactly balmy, but it was a playground compared to this. She kept going out doggedly, marching Up and down the same few streets of town or slogging along the beach, willing to be amazed by the lake no matter what, but if she didn't get pneumonia pretty soon it was going to be a miracle.

She rarely saw anyone else on the beach, and hardly anyone in town, Unless they were in their cars or popping in and out of the handful of businesses. There were practically as many dogs as people out and about. They wandered freely, trotting with great purpose to wherever their dog business took them, and Madeline was beginning to wish they'd invite her along. She was getting to know them: a mischievous-looking spaniel, a lumbering chocolate Lab, a beagle, a retriever, a couple of Unclassifiable mutts.

There were a few hints that she hadn't somehow wandered back in time to 1950—mainly the huge new homes lining the beach and the ridge above town, summer places undoubtedly—but not many. She had never been out of the United States, never even out of the Midwest, but McAllaster seemed to her like a small Cornish, or perhaps Welsh, village on the sea. There was more loneliness and less charm to this than she would have imagined from the novels she'd read.

Her only job was taking care of Arbutus, and that had turned out to be an understudy position. So what else was left? She had an edgy, dissatisfied sense of waiting. But what did she expect to happen? What
could
happen? It was a town of eight hundred or so, and half—more than half?—of these people were over the age of sixty. Arbutus had told her that the grade school only had forty children in it. The high schoolers were bussed to Crosscut. The parents of these few kids had to be busy working and raising their families. So who, exactly, was she expecting to run into, and what exactly was likely to happen?

Occasionally she recalled her sense of being on the brink of adventure, Up on the hill that first day. Richard had been right. She had been—naïve.

M
adeline was forever reading a book or taking a walk. Gladys supposed she couldn't blame her. What else was there to do for a person accustomed to the city? Arbutus didn't need watching every second and Madeline did finish her chores first. She was a good worker and that didn't surprise Gladys. Madeline might've been Jackie's daughter, but she was Joe's granddaughter, too. Still, she would've liked Madeline to be there when she got back from the market. It would've been nice to have someone to grouch to. Arbutus was napping, and Gladys didn't like to bother her with worrisome things anyway.

Gladys hauled in the last of her groceries and sat down at the table with a plunk. Everything of course was just the same as ever. The floor in its pattern of squares, the table she and Frank had bought new a million years ago, the kerosene lamp that had been her grandmother's, the salt and pepper set she'd been so proud of way back when. It had all been more or less this way for ages, and what was wrong with that?

But something did seem wrong with it lately. Gladys blew out a dissatisfied puff of air. Brooding was no good. She began stowing the groceries away but the more she thought about what her friend Mabel had told her, the madder she got, and before long she was flinging things around.
Bang!
went a can of baked beans,
Crash!
a box of oatmeal.

“What's wrong?”

Madeline, back at last. “Do you know what those people have done?” Gladys demanded.

“What people?”

Gladys slammed a box of bran flakes down on the counter. “I don't know what things are coming to. These new people come here and think they can just change things, just do whatever it is they want, it's terrible!”