The Diviner's Tale (20 page)

I looked behind me up at this imposing lighthouse of ours. So white there in its tapering maleness. Imagining my mother seeing it from the boat as she gazed our way, I felt a mild twinge of daughterly anxiety. It had been some time since we lived under the same roof, and I could easily divine what her response might be if I shared all I had seen, all that had been happening to me. Nep's less active presence in my life only redoubled my sense of vulnerability.

Was I intimidated by Rosalie? Perhaps the religion she so comfortably wore was off-putting, dismaying somehow, and daunting in its certitudes, at least to one who saw the world as a place in which the lack of certitudes was the only thing to be sure about. Not that she was ever overly pushy about her Methodism. She wasn't some pious pedagogue with a cross in one hand and a strop in the other. My mother was far more subtle than that. And, never to forget, she had lived for more than three and a half decades with a man who was as secular as the gadgets he repaired and the earth he walked with his fragile diviner's twig. No, I wasn't afraid of her as such. Just aware of the warp and weave and tangle that was our relationship.

Nep looked years younger when he stepped down the seesawing plank, his cheeks wildly aglow from wind and sun. Mr. McEachern helped him off after Rosalie had come ashore, and the boys hoisted their bags from the boat.

Whether because of the fresh soft air or because his mind was calmed by arriving at the island, Nep looked to be having one of his good days. His eyes were quick and clear. In profile he appeared as distinguished as a sea hawk, sharp-featured and worldly. His illness weathered him, but less in a diminishing than in an ennobling way. An ivory cable-knit sweater was draped over his shoulders, tied loosely by the sleeves at his neck. His mane of white hair streamed back over his finely boned head. He was wearing a pair of faded blue dungarees, a beige linen shirt, and some old docksiders, sockless as a schoolboy. I snapped a photograph of him for my permanent album. This was one of those moments I knew I would need to remember.

"How was the trip? You must be exhausted," I said, as Jonah and Morgan accepted their grandmother's embraces and shook Nep's hand, all very manly and dignified.

"Flew by like a breeze," my father replied.

"A breeze for him, maybe," Rosalie said, "but that drive isn't getting any shorter."

She thanked Mr. McEachern, whom she had known since her childhood days up here, with a kiss on each cheek. He, in turn, thanked her for the chocolates she'd brought for his wife.

"Tell her I'm sorry they're a little melted from being on the road all day," she added. Nep reached for his wallet to pay for the ride out, but Mr. McEachern would hear none of it, boarded his boat, and powered off back toward the main island.

We sat on large smooth blue rocks that had served many a generation as natural seats down here near the water while Nep and Rosalie rested, found their land legs after the choppy transit, and had something to eat before venturing up to the cottage. To everyone's delight, Morgan made a grand display of his casting techniques and Jonah got his kite back into the sky. For that brief hour it was as if time had turned backward and I was allowed, against all rules, the chance for a peaceful scene in my Cassandra Productions film to be crafted precisely as I wished it. Contented children playing under the admiring eyes of their mother and grandparents; calm solicitude among the tribal elders; the weightlessness of easy banter among people who were used to one another. A respite.

Eventually, we made our way up the hill in fits and starts. The boys took the lead, lugging the bags. With stops to rest and admire the flowers and the shimmering islands in the distance, my parents and I followed behind. Furtive, hoping Rosalie didn't notice, I scanned either side of the path for the neon girl and her dog, her silent smiling black dog that looked, it dawned on me, just like the one that used to traipse around behind Christopher's gang. How they loved that beaming mutt, Roy Skoler's hunting dog. Though the world was crawling with black dogs, I knew there was no point in inquiring at Mrs. Milgate's whether any children were visiting her. My heart sank at the recognition.

Doing my best to set my worries aside, I threw myself into the reunion that night in the cottage, and for the next few days that followed. We sailed the boat one afternoon to Otter Cliffs and Thunder Hole, where the sea spouted straight up into the sky. We sailed to our favorite unpeopled island and musseled the shallows of Lamb's Bay, whose sea wrack Nep called "wrack of lamb." We stargazed together from the flats above the cottage, the lighthouse blocking out the lower constellations that went wheeling into the black sea. We puttered, weeded the perennial garden, played board games.

It seemed like the sweet ordinariness I longed for had settled over me like fairy dust, except for a brief moment when I could have sworn I smelled cigarette smoke through my open window before turning off the bedside lamp to sleep. I sat stunned in the dark. There was nothing to do, was there. Having discovered the fresh butts at the cottage and in the dilapidated house, I should have asked Jonah and Morgan if the stranger had been smoking. Too late now, though. By asking, I would only provoke more questions from everyone, Nep included, and I didn't want to do that. Best to just let matters unfold as they would, bide my time until I could clearly see if there was fire behind that smoke.

N
EXT DAY, MY MOTHER
and I set out as we always did for our trek around Covey's shores. This usually took us several hours, less because of the hike's length than the sheer ruggedness of the shingle that edged land and sea, not to mention our habit of lingering over every little treasure we found. A clump of beach peas, a spider web woven in a rummage of rocks, some pineweed whose flowers were tiny as diamonds. The sky was calm and the face of the water was flat as a fallow field. A few clouds shaped like white mushrooms edged the eastern horizon; otherwise we walked beneath an inverted bowl of paling indigo. Nep and the boys stayed behind to do their thing. They had made noises about fixing one of the propane pilots on the stove and maybe doing some fishing.

We talked about Nep first. She floored me by saying, right off, that he had gone missing not long before they were to drive up here.

"Why didn't you tell me when I called?"

"Because he'd been found by then and I didn't think there was much point in worrying you."

"Where was he?"

"They picked him up walking along Mendes Road. Seemed like he was headed to your house, is what Niles said."

"But why would he—that's quite a ways."

"We have no idea and he doesn't seem to remember."

"Wouldn't he have a hard time knowing the way even?"

Rosalie's response surprised me. "Once a diviner, always a diviner, I guess. Not only that but I swear I saw mischief in his eyes. I think he was having a good time of it, if you want to know the truth."

My dear wayward father would one day finally wander right over the edge of the earth, I realized while hiking there along the beach littered with the rubble of sea scree. How horrified he would be if he knew I'd been reading some books on medical dowsing, on how to use pendulums and aurometers to identify detrimental energies and to eradicate negative thought-forms, in the hope of finding a cure. I knew better than even to bring it up. As a fellow diviner mentored by the man, I was to be abandoned by the one person I knew who truly fathomed the mysterious nature of the act. And as his only child—the only one he raised into adulthood—I knew the coming separation was going to leave a titanic emptiness in my life.

Rosalie told me that aside from his capricious, willful, unannounced march toward Mendes Road that day, he seemed to have entered a plateau phase. His aphasia, still relatively mild, was at times less depressing to him than a source of gentle laughter. When he referred to his shoe as a
hard sock,
or called a plate of scrambled eggs
yellow gravy,
he would catch himself and marvel at what a slippery slope his neuro-pathways had become. The doctors deemed this promising. He'd always been an apperceptive man and this served him in good stead. His sporadic lack of focus and tendency to misinterpret what someone had said was "often episodic rather than strictly progressive," Rosalie told me, and I couldn't help but notice her lingo had been affected by visits to the clinic.

"I know I've been pretty distracted these past weeks and haven't been as much of a help to you as usual," I confessed. "But I must say he seemed almost his old self at dinner last night. A slower Nep, for sure, but Nep."

"He has his good days and bad days. I'm hopeful he'll have only good days up here."

Hearing the concern behind her words, I looked over at Rosalie and for the first time noticed the ways she'd changed since Nep began his decline. Some people get stronger as their mate fades, as if the body knows by instinct it must compensate, keep the balance, lest it too begin to slide into the abyss of illness, while others grow weaker alongside them. My mother, for her part, looked robust, her hair recently dyed toward its original auburn to beat back the encroaching silver. She carried her compact, lithe body with a kind of stylish confidence unique, in my experience, to true believers and their counterparts, the self-assured atheists. No agnostic tentativeness infected her posture or stride. Her chinos and white blouse, her white running shoes and sensible straw hat, her handsome rose bandanna, all gave her the air of a mother and wife who was very comfortable being Rosalie Metcalf Brooks. But her jet-dark eyes were mildly sunken, the fragile skin beneath them white as vellum. Worry lines that had always given her forehead and cheeks distinction, making her look wise and serious beyond her years back when she was younger, now trenched themselves deeper into her flesh and extended their reach.

We walked a ways in silence, watching the gulls wheel and play. Far off, creeping along the line where the blue of air met the water's deeper green-blue, a huge tanker drifted northward, no larger than a millipede from my vantage. Casually, as if it were a part of my routine, I peered up past the rocky, eroded banks toward the woods' edge but saw neither a girl nor a smoking man.

After a minute Rosalie spoke again, breaking the thoughtful quiet.

"I've been meaning to give you this." She pulled from her back pocket a postcard and handed it to me, adding, "I kept it aside from the rest of the mail I brought up for you from Mendes because I wanted to wait until we had a chance to be alone."

The card, unsigned and without a return address, bore the image of a fresco in the basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. It depicted a group of women weeping over the dead and haloed saint while in the background a strange and incongruous figure in white, its back turned to the viewer, climbed a golden tree toward a heaven of green clouds.
Il pianto delle Clarisse,
read the printed title on the card,
The Poor Clare
Sisters weep over the death of St. Francis.
On the reverse, in simple childish block letters clearly meant to disguise the writer's identity, the penciled note read,
Leave me alone, little girl. I'm giving you fair warning.

Just as the sender intended, I was horror-struck.

"What does it mean?" Rosalie asked.

"I don't know what it means," standing still in my tracks.

"Any idea who—"

"I don't know who."

"Have you been in an argument with anybody?"

"Not a soul," I said, knowing my minor unpleasantness with Bledsoe would never trigger anything this harsh.

"You think it has anything to do with that man who spoke to the boys the other day?"

"Mom, I honestly have no idea what this is about," I answered, hearing that unfamiliar appellation strike a formal note between us with the same startled impact she must have heard. I asked myself aloud, "How are you supposed to leave somebody alone if you don't know who they are?"

"Cass. I need to ask you something, mother to daughter."

I looked at her, wishing I could buy time to catch my breath. Not that by catching it I would have been able to divine where that pretty postcard or its blunt directive came from. "Sounds serious."

"I spoke with Niles about what really happened down on Henderson's land that day."

"You must have pressured him," I said, and slipped the postcard into my jacket pocket before stooping to pick up a spindly gray spike of driftwood that was perfect for a walking stick. The death of St. Francis, patron saint of birds, that was the scene depicted on the card. Quite a prescient choice of imagery, I thought.

"A little. But he knows how concerned I am, and there were so many different versions of the story I heard—"

"I could have told you myself, if you'd asked."

"Well, I didn't want to put you through it."

Under our feet the beach rocks clacked hollowly, scraping and chattering against each other. A petty argument among stones.

"Cassandra, do you have any idea who that girl was?"

"Laura Bryant? I would have thought Niles told you all about her."

"Not her, the girl you thought you saw before."

"No. I did think at the time she seemed familiar, but I don't know why."

"Was she a composite of sorts?"

"You mean like in a dream when we combine people we know into new ones?"

"Something like that."

"No, Ros. She was her own person. I swear I didn't make her up."

That gave her pause, but only for a moment. "Did she look at all like Emily?"

A jolt of recognition vaulted through me. The hanged girl, I now realized, did look like Emily Schaefer, my brother's classmate who died the year before he did. With my walking stick I knocked down a small stack of flat stones someone had piled meticulously, from largest to smallest, there in the middle of the path. Someone? Morgan or Jonah, must have been. I didn't want to think otherwise.

"I already told you. Maybe you should have asked Niles to read the transcript of my deposition, if you were so concerned about putting me through it again."