The End of the Point (39 page)
He ducks into the crawl space underneath the cabin and rummages until he finds two spades, and a pair of men’s work gloves stiff with mud and age. He gives Rachel the gloves and a yellow-handled spade, keeping the other shovel, bigger and more pointed, for himself. The grass in the clearing is parched, its roots enmeshed. As he digs, he swats at bugs occasionally but mostly concentrates, enjoying the digging down, but also the smells, the sun on his back, the way, even now, before he finds what he’s looking for, he feels closer to imagining it, the bones a vessel for a life once lived. He has loved bones for as long as he can remember—for their delicacy, their architecture, for how they carry traces of the animals they once served as containers for—a brain, a set of eyes, all senses flaring in the underbrush or underwater. At first, as they dig, Deegan sniffs around their hands, but when Charlie tells him to lie down, he settles a few feet away. “Slow down, you losers!” someone shouts from the road as the noise of a truck expands, recedes. Even on Labor Day weekend, the gardeners are busy at the Uh-Ohs’. On the west-side beaches, the oil-spill cleanup crew works overtime, scrubbing and spraying in their plastic suits as they move from stone to stone.
Rachel drops the spade. “This feels like bad luck.”
Charlie keeps digging. “It’s good luck. The Wampanoag used to chew on porpoise bones for increased fertility.”
“
Don’t
.” She rocks back and drops the shovel. “Why are we doing this? Do you even know?”
“Sure. For fun.”
“No, but why now? Why today?”
“I told you—I’ve been meaning to dig it up for ages.”
“I don’t buy it. Listen, sweetie, I can’t get pregnant and your mother has bone cancer, and we haven’t even seen her yet. We’re kind of sneaking around, and we barely finish having sex, and suddenly you’re vaulting out of bed, compelled to dig for
bones
—”
“It’s not bone cancer.”
“What?” For a moment she looks hopeful.
“It’s breast metastasized to bone.”
She swipes at her face, leaving a smudge of dirt. “What? Did you ever tell me that? How could I not have known that?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.” He begins to dig again. His family does not talk about his mother’s health.
“So it doesn’t change anything—in the diagnosis or treatment,” she asks softly, “that it’s metastasized?”
“Not that I know of.”
Though the thought is oddly inconceivable to him, his mother is in fact dying. In the next year or two in fact, sometime in the undistant future (though knowing her, she’ll beat the odds, out of sheer stubbornness), she will do it: go and die.
Rachel takes the gloves off, drops them to the ground. “I wish you’d told me. I have a perpetual feeling of never quite knowing what’s going on with you.”
He shrugs. “Me too.”
“With who?”
“With myself. You.” He digs. “With humanity.”
“Are you sure you want a baby?” she asks abruptly.
Charlie nods.
“With me?”
“No, with the porpoise.”
“I
knew
you’d say that. Please just answer me.”
Why must she push him to put words to everything, when they could be here, inside the moment? Here. His previous long-term girlfriend (she had wanted to marry him; it had not—mostly his fault—worked out) used to complain that he was already married, to Ashaunt. Is he wider now, at least a little? Can he come and go more easily? He was, for a long time, opposed to traveling, convinced that if he looked hard enough, he could—like Dorothy in Kansas—find all that was important in his own backyard. Slowly, things changed. He’s been to Bolivia. He’s been to Patagonia, Tanzania, Baffin Island, Russia, Bhutan. He and Rachel hiked, last June, in Iceland, where the earth spilled steam and horses ran through a night where the sun never set. The prisoners he represents sometimes give him little handmade gifts: an origami dinosaur made from a newspaper, a bracelet woven from hair, something from almost nothing. Last year, he and Rachel had Thanksgiving with her parents, Christmas with his parents. They had a small December wedding, decorating the carriage house they rented with bittersweet and pine boughs, wooden skis, cyclamen in pots, a chuppah made from her grandmother’s tablecloth. They put a bandanna on Major Deegan. Charlie wore a flannel shirt and red suspenders, his eyes leaking tears, Rachel a brown velvet dress.
Her head is down; she’s turned her back; she might begin to cry. He feels no sympathy, only irritation. Doesn’t she know by now that he wants a child, and with her? Before he met her, he’d been exploring having a baby with his friend Bess, a lesbian. For a while, a decade earlier, he was a Big Brother to Marco, a boy from the projects in West Cambridge; they’d rotated video arcade outings with fishing trips until Marco’s family moved south and the boy dropped out of sight. For years, he has romped and adventured with his nephews. He loves the on-the-groundness of spending time with children, their branching curiosity, to amuse them with his own still childish high jinks. Being a father himself would be different, harder, but might he not (if generations have told themselves the lie, then so can he) do it just a little better than his parents, pass on his best self, discard the rest, or at the very least, do his best by doing his best?
Rachel turns to meet his gaze. Her skin is flushed from heat, anger or unhappiness. The sunlight finds the copper in her hair.
Say it.
“I want to have a baby with you,” he says.
TOGETHER THEY DIG, THEN, THE
sun on their backs, Ashaunt quiet except for the sound of the breeze in the trees and a few birds calling, and it is in the middle of this motion that they look up and lock eyes, and for a long moment they might be glimpsing, as if through a double-ended kaleidoscope, their future, still unconceived child, who will inherit his blue eyes, the darkness of her lashes and improbable length of his, something of his soulful gaze and the quick intensity of hers. Both of their long faces. I see Gaga in her, Jane will remark of their daughter. She looks just like Rachel did, Rachel’s mother will say. She’s
herself
, both Charlie and Rachel will protest, even as they’ll know it’s not entirely true—not of any of them, so much chaining backward and forward, flip and coil, glitch and gift of DNA, no matter how far from the source you might land. Their second daughter, born a few years later, will have Frida Kahlo eyebrows that come from nobody they know and the broad face of a Russian nesting doll. She will be left-handed like her mother and sister, blue-eyed like her father and sister, a lover of plants and flowers, a worrier with perfect pitch.
That their daughters are dark-haired will give Rachel pleasure, especially at the great-grandchildren photos when, despite a handful of half Jewish or half Chinese or Guatemalan cousins, the palette will remain distinctly blond. A newspaper article on the disappearing blond gene will cite a study predicting that the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland in 2202. That’s sad, Charlie will say, partly to provoke her but partly because he means it (the ivory-billed woodpecker is extinct. The passenger pigeon, the great auk, the wooly mammoth, the heath hen, last seen on Martha’s Vineyard in 1932. Jerry Silva is dead, though his signs still mark his woods where Charlie goes to walk, entering the long way to avoid the golf course). What of Rapunzel, let down your golden hair? What of the photographs of his mother and her sisters as little girls with sausage ringlets—flaxen beauties; you can tell, even in black and white. In truth, he will never stop finding his daughters’ coloring—dark blue eyes and chestnut hair—beautiful. The blond gene study will turn out to be a hoax.
They go at it from opposite sides, using muscle, digging down. The ground is clumpy at first, then softer, sandy, then clayey. Several times their spades touch and the metal clinks. Rachel finds a disc from the creature’s back, the size of a quarter but thicker, and hands it to him. He brushes it off. It is light and hollow, gray and ridged with a complex circular pattern that reminds him of a thumbprint; is each one unique? She takes it back, sets it aside. Deegan sniffs at it, too eager, and Charlie gets a bucket for the bones. They find more discs, and small bones that she says look like the pelvises of miniature women (they are vertebrae). He sets one on his palm and slides a pebble through it. She smiles and pockets the pebble, digs some more. First there are a few bones, then handfuls, pirate’s booty. They reach in, come out full.
Charlie finds a bit of plastic from a discharged shotgun shell. Rachel locates something hard, the size of a baseball, which turns out to be a rock. Together they sweat, dig, not speaking until Rachel breaks the silence with nonsense words:
Ashimalongi tallanamanka camunikinga blachh.
Charlie answers:
Tallamoo
. They do this sometimes, speak a nonlanguage language, get into arguments, question, coo, curse.
Kalakali
, she says now and Charlie echoes back
kalakali
, and so they go on, periodically, as they sift and dig. They find more bones—long ones, short ones, thin and fatter, ribs and vertebrae. A few are broken; others are crumbled and decayed. He has waited too long. He won’t be able to piece them back together. Still, he is not disappointed, or not very. Finally—they seem to be nearing the end—she surprises him by lifting a bone to her mouth and licking it. For increased fertility, she says. He licks one too. It tastes like soil, and after that like nothing much, the spoon that stirs the soup.
Then, digging farther toward the ocean (he buried the porpoise facing the sea), he hits the jackpot, the skull. Together they dig around it, under it. He lifts it out, brushes it off. How long its snout is, the bone split down the middle. The skull is not broken, or only a little, here. He doesn’t actually know it’s a female, but he wants it to be. Female and a mother, old, died of natural causes. And somewhere in the sea, her young, no longer young. Their young.
He gets a pillowcase from the cabin, wraps the skull in it and sets it by the bucket of bones, all that is left of a taut bright skin, a muscular blue life. Later he’ll soak the bones in bleach, clean and scrub them, bring them inside the cabin, where they’ll join other relics—fox and snapping turtle skulls, dried fish, snakeskins—that he’s found over the years. Rachel will take one disc for herself. He will hang the skull under the eaves of the cabin, where each year a bird, a chickadee or wren, will enter through the dark, round hole of the spinal column socket to build a nest. The rest of the bones, too disintegrated to assemble, will sit for years muddled in the bucket under the cabin, first dry, then soaked in rainwater, then stewing in rancid sitting water (rusty ice in winter), until one day, Charlie, needing the bucket to go crab-catching with the girls, will dump the remnants out.
T
HEY REMEMBER THE
words, most of them do, though they cannot remember—Callum sometimes cannot—how to button a button or even, for the ones furthest gone, lift spoon to mouth. Still,
“Happy birthday to you.”
Nearly everyone is singing it; even ancient, toothless Mrs. McLaren mouths a word or two. Bea almost missed the singing—the bus was late, and when she looked in her purse for her entitlement card, it wasn’t there, but the driver knows her and let her ride for free, and now she’s here to celebrate her baby brother turning eighty-eight. She makes her way to Callum’s table, hangs her purse over the chair, sets her cane beside it, her hat on her lap. Sings.
“Happy birthday, Callum,” she says when the singing is through, and he turns, eyes milky, and smiles, then folds over his own big belly, going for the cake.
“No, dearie,” she says, reaching with mind but not her hands. There is, lately, a delay between her thoughts and limbs, along with the tremor in her right hand. Mostly she can keep it still, but when she’s tired, it shivers in a way that has, more than once, caused hot tea to spill onto her lap. The server gives Callum his cake. “Fork,” Bea reminds her brother, and he picks it up. They’ve laid fresh linens on all the tables and set out a vase of yellow roses on his. They’ve made a sheet cake, precut into slices, with Callum’s name in blue above an “88.” They’ve tied a blue balloon to his chair. You get what you pay for, and Bea believes that even for the ones whose minds are gone, the details make a difference. At the ex-servicemen’s care home where he was before, it was all men and flags, grimy lino tables, amputees (which he is too, but she doesn’t think of him that way). Here, it’s mostly ladies, which makes for a better atmosphere. They show old film reels and have a memory board of photographs in each resident’s bedroom, and volunteers bring dogs and cats to visit. Callum enjoys it, especially the animals and desserts. He remembers Bea’s name, still. Some days he seems entirely normal, if a bit more childlike than before, though he does address his wife Kate (dead eight years) a good deal and confuses Bea for her in ways that would make her blush if she were not among people, both staff and residents, who blush at little and admire her for her independence, and how she went to America and returned a woman of means and started her own craft shop, which for a time did rather well.
You’re our model, Miss Grubb, the nurses have told her, exclaiming over her age and good health; she will turn ninety-four in a few weeks. What do you eat? What’s your secret? I’m in God’s hands, she says, for she has found religion in her dotage, returned to her old church, St. Margaret’s, first for the people, a place to go, especially after Agnes died, but then for something else—a blossoming, steadying faith. She prays to God but talks to Jesus and finds in both good company. Until a few years ago, she helped in the Children’s Crèche, and she still participates in Flower Club, which has yet to run out of the ribbon, Styrofoam and wreath forms that she donated when she sold the shop. The church sends a van round for her on Sundays, and the church ladies have her on their rota twice a week. She is—for all this and because she can afford to be—generous with her Freewill offerings and a member of Friends of the Church.
