The Distinguished Guest (29 page)

Lily woke to the wind, its song calm in her limbs. She lay still and watched its long, sustained swing in the branches outside her window. In answer to it, it seemed, she was
changed, her body felt transformed, magically—heavy and powerful. She had a sense of responsive muscle and sinew that she would have said she didn’t remember, but now that it had been
returned to her, was as deeply familiar as her sense of her own weight. The rain had stopped in the night, but the sky was a pearly gray-yellow, a beautiful, dangerous color. The wind was slow and
deep, and Lily understood that she was held in it, as through it were a boat on a slowly rocking ocean, that its dragging rhythm was what had brought her body peace.

She held her hands up, veiny and knobbed and steady, the only ornamentation a ring of her grandmother’s. There was nothing in their splayed, still strength that even hinted of her disease.
This miracle had happened to her a few times before, sometimes in response to music, more often to weather. Once sailing on a boat in Lake Michigan. The child of an old friend had taken her and his
parents out, and the singing rhythm of the water coursing through her body had steadied her. They had laughed about it, about her
cure
, but of course, as soon as she was walking on land
again, the Parkinson’s had reasserted itself, and her gait back up the wooden dock was trembling and festinate.

With the next long exhalation of wind, she swung her arms suddenly out and then together again and up, a conductor signaling the music to start. She laughed out loud.

She could hear noises in the kitchen. Alan, she assumed. She pushed the blanket off her legs and lowered them slowly to the floor. She put her weight down and felt her legs muscularly receiving
it.

She’d surprise him, she thought, he who considered her so helpless. And as she moved around the guest room and bathroom, getting ready for what the day would bring, she imagined Alan, his
startled face when he found her dressed—how he would look, how she would look, what she would say. Then she thought of how he had looked yesterday, talking to Linnett and that Marcella
person.

So much like Paul!

She had mistaken him for Paul actually, she realized now, and she stopped, dumbfounded, a hairpin in her hand, her jaw gone slack.

She had actually thought—it was unbelievable!—that it was Paul coming in from the rain, and she’d thought—here’s what it was, she remembered in
amazement—she’d thought for a moment he would take her part, explain it to them, how it had been, the excitement of that world. The moment Alan spoke to her, she had known him, of
course, and she’d come quickly back into the world where Paul was dead and their time together was years in her past. And she’d utterly forgotten her mistake, she’d somehow pushed
any awareness of it from her mind.

Until now. She looked at her old, old face in the mirror. Was this the kind of thing she would descend into more and more?

She saw her father suddenly, wearing a soiled tablecloth like a cloak around him, turning in fear from her approach, his gaze milky and unknowing. It wasn’t bearable. She stuck a pin
savagely into her hair, then another, and another. She stared at herself coldly, the tears rising in her eyes from the streaks of pain on her scalp.

She filled the basin and viciously washed her face, then patted it dry. Carefully she applied powder and her lipstick.

There was a sharp knocking on the bedroom door, and Lily padded to it, opened it.

Gaby stood there, holding a tray. Lily saw coffee and her oatmeal. Gaby’s face opened in astonishment at the sight of Lily, dressed and tidied up. “Lily!” she cried.

Lily made a slight curtsying motion. “Yes, if you’d waited a few minutes more, you could have had the full effect. Shoes were next.”

“But I’m amazed. How did you do this?” She crossed the room and set the tray down on Lily’s table. She turned and looked Lily up and down as the old woman moved smoothly
too, after her.

“Every now and then the Lord gives me such a day.” Lily gestured to the windows. “I think today it has to do with the weather. The wind.”

“Well, I’m delighted for you. Though I’m sorry the Lord had to give the rest of us a hurricane for you to have a good day.”

Lily looked dubiously outside to where the trees’ tossing had picked up. “This is a hurricane?”

“This will be one a bit later on.” Gaby shrugged. “This is what the weatherman tells us, so it must be true. And I have a great deal to do, as you may have guessed, so it is
good luck, in a way, that you can do more for yourself today.” She gestured to Lily’s chair, and Lily moved to it and sat down. Gaby slid the table in toward her.

Lily had just begun to eat when the thought occurred to her: “But where’s Alan?”

Gaby was reaching over Lily’s bed, flipping the sheet and blanket back. “Alan has gone to the house he’s building, to see what can be done to protect it.” Vigorously she
smoothed the bottom sheet out. She looked over at Lily for a moment, watched her lift a spoonful of the oatmeal to her mouth and tilt her head slightly back to begin the process of swallowing.
Gaby’s lips tightened, and she turned and finished making the bed, her strong arms pulling everything smooth. She plumped the pillows and set them in place.

“Now,” she said. “I’ll be back in a bit. I’m going to take some coffee to Linnett.”

“Linnett is here?” Lily stopped, her spoon halfway to her mouth. Everything was topsy-turvy.

“Yes. She spent the night last night.”

“Was this on account of the hurricane too?” Lily asked.

“No, no, no. She simply had too much to drink.” Gaby smiled grimly, remembering. Then she frowned. “Well, perhaps it was actually a little on account of the hurricane, because
the rain was so heavy then that we didn’t wish to drive her home through it. Anyway. She spent the night here, in Thomas and Etienne’s room.” She watched Lily take another slow
spoonful. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

Lily could hear her in the kitchen, though she worked more quietly than Noreen. She strained her throat to close, then sipped gratefully at the coffee, which went down so much more smoothly. She
stopped to rest. The pine branches on the tree outside bowed slowly, ceremoniously, and then slowly lifted.

Lily cried out faintly at their beauty, and closed her eyes momentarily in prayer, in her own slow sweep of gratitude for her cleared sense of her body, of herself.
Help me, God. Help me make
use of your gift to me today
, she prayed.

And suddenly she understood what she had to do, what she felt now she’d been struggling not to understand for days, what she’d known was waiting for her, but doubted she’d have
the strength to accomplish. How could she have doubted? How could she not have guessed she would be given the means, the power, when she most needed it? Her heart welled in sorrowful gratitude.
When she opened her eyes, tears stood in them, and Gaby was in front of her.

She was frowning. “Lily, I am afraid I shall have to ask you to, really, to hurry a bit. I’m going to take you to Noreen’s for the day—you’ll be safest
there—and I need to get over to help Alan. So you see, I am waiting for you.”

Lily didn’t have to think, the words were there. “Surely you don’t need to wait. Why can’t Linnett take me? You can see perfectly well I don’t need much help
today.”

The idea startled Gaby, Lily could see this, but now the younger woman began to think it through. Lily took another mouthful of the cereal and lifted her chin so Gaby could see her slow effort,
would take it into account—how long she would be if she had to wait for Lily to finish.

“Do you really think you could get to her car by yourself?” Gaby asked after a moment.

Lily swallowed once, then again. Dramatically she lifted her hand to her throat for a moment. Then she said, “Look at what I’ve already accomplished. A person who dresses herself.
Who puts on her own lipstick. What is there that I can’t do?” she asked. “Except eat quickly, apparently. But everything else is possible with the Lord.”

Gaby sat down on the foot of Lily’s bed and stared out the window, weighing the idea.

“I feel very bad keeping you from Alan,” Lily said.

“It isn’t your fault, Lily.”

Lily took another spoonful, again exaggerating her own slowness. When she’d swallowed, she said, “You could draw Linnett a map.”

“I will ask her,” Gaby said, rising abruptly.

She came back beaming and brusque. “She said she will. I told her you’d be a little while, but that is fine with her. She’ll shower and the like. And I have a few things
I’m doing—I’ve started to draw a tub of water, in case the electricity goes off and the pump won’t work. And I want to pack some lunch for Alan, and then I’ll be
going.”

“I’m glad, dear,” Lily said.

Gaby paused. “You are sure you can manage.”

“If you’d like, I’ll get up and do the cha-cha-cha for you.”

Gaby smiled, and then looked around the room. “Are there things you’d like with you at Noreen’s for the day?”

“I think not. Watching the hurricane will surely be amusement enough for the likes of me.”

“Well, then.” Gaby stepped forward and quickly bent to kiss Lily’s cheek. “I’ll see you this evening.”

“Yes,” Lily said. “Be careful.”

As she made her way through several more spoonfuls of oatmeal, she could hear Gaby going in and out, the bang of the screen door three or four times. And then her car started. Lily could see it
moving across the yard and disappearing into the driveway under the bending, swaying branches.

After a while she realized that she was hearing the water singing in the pipes behind her bathroom wall: Linnett, showering. She waited until it stopped, and then about five minutes more, and
then she pushed her table away, got up, and—as she felt it—floated smoothly out of her room and down the hall to her grandsons’ room. She knocked.

“Just a sec,” Linnett’s voice called back.

And in a minute or so the door opened. Linnett stood with her crutches tucked under her arms, her hair hanging in long damp ringlets, her blouse dotted with water, her face clean-scrubbed. She
looked older and tired without the makeup. “Lily!” she said.

“No canes, even,” Lily said, raising her empty hands.

“Are you ready to go now? I’ll be a few more minutes.” She waved her hand vaguely behind her, back into the room.

“No, no. That’s the point. That was Noreen on the phone.”

“Oh! I didn’t hear it.”

“Well, maybe because you were in the shower. Anyway, she’s coming for me.”

“But Gaby wanted me to take you.”

“Well, it turns out Noreen has to go out and get some things, candles and batteries and the like,” said Lily, thinking quickly. “And she said she’d just as soon swing by
at the end of all that, since she’s not sure how long it will take, you know, they may be out of them at various stores and she may have to drive around a bit . . . ” A part of Lily was
admiring her own improvisational skills. “So she’ll just get me whenever. And in all honesty, though I didn’t want to say so to Gaby since she was in such a hurry to get
going”—she made her voice sound slightly irritated—“I think I could make use of the able-bodied Noreen. No insult intended, of course.”

Linnett was frowning. “Maybe I should just call Noreen back and confirm all this.”

“I told you, dear, she was going out,” Lily said impatiently. “And I should think you’d be grateful. You probably have things you should get too. And you should hurry
home and draw some water.”

“Water?”

“Yes. If the electricity goes, you’ll have no pump, and you’ll need water to flush and wash up with. That kind of thing.”

“Ah,” Linnett said. She still looked dubious.

Either it would work or it wouldn’t, Lily thought. She turned. “I’ve got to get back to my oatmeal,” she said. “I need to try to finish up by the time Noreen gets
here.”

She was aware of Linnett’s watching her as she made her way back down the hallway. After she’d sat down again, she was even more intensely aware of listening for Linnett, for her
noises in the house and what they might indicate, but the wind had picked up now and was audible as a steady low sound through which Lily could hear nothing else. She was startled then, when
Linnett appeared in her doorway. She’d put on makeup, and—Lily’s heart leaped!—she had her backpack on.

“I’m off, Lily,” she said. “Off to fight the storm at my house.”

“Well, good,” Lily said. “And if we all survive, I shall see you tomorrow.”

“Maybe,” Linnett said. “Actually, I was thinking I might just stay home and start writing. Unless you need me, of course. I mean, I don’t really have any more questions
for you.”

“Oh no,” Lily said. “I’ll have no need. And I’m glad you feel ready to move ahead. That’s very good, very nice.” She paused, and then smiled slyly.
“You imagine you have plumbed all my mysteries then.”

“I’d never claim that,” Linnett said. “Never.” She was grinning back. “But I do think I’m in good enough shape for an article for
The New Yorker
anyhow.”

“Well, good. Good for you.”

“You sure you don’t want me to stay until Noreen gets here?”

“My dear, the truth is, I’d relish the time alone. I literally can’t remember when I was last alone, you’ve all been such conscientious baby-sitters. So run
along.”

“Hump along, anyway.”

“I’d never say it.”

“See you soon, Lily.”

“Yes,” Lily said. She listened carefully again as Linnett left. But she could hear nothing, and couldn’t tell whether she was truly alone until she saw Linnett in the yard
tilted into the wind on her crutches, making her way laboriously to her car. She was aware of her heart, suddenly, pounding heavily in slow excitement.

It took Lily another half an hour to finish the oatmeal, and in that time the wind’s clamor picked up and the telephone rang twice.
Noreen
, she thought, and hoped it wouldn’t
occur to the girl to get in her car and come see why Lily hadn’t been delivered to her.

A few branches lay in the yard now, Lily noted as she stood up, and the trees’ bending was more extreme, more violent. Surely they would all break, forced this far? There was rain blowing
now too, spattering the windows. The noise of the storm agitated her curiously, she noticed she was a little breathless. But as she lifted the bed jacket from its hook in her closet, she had the
comforting sense of another self, a consoling self accompanying her, and she spoke out loud, as though to a frightened child. “It’s perfectly all right now. It will be fine.”