The End of the Point (41 page)

“The problem”—Helen scratches the nape of her neck; her wig itches—“is one of expensive, drawn-out busywork driven by bureaucracy and litigation, and maybe of ex-convicts wandering around while children play unsupervised. The spill itself was an unfortunate mistake. Mistakes happen. You can’t control everything; sometimes you just have to move on. It’s been six months.”

“Four,” Charlie says. “But the shoreline is still pretty devastated.”

“
Devastated?
” she says. “This shoreline has seen hurricanes, tornadoes, explosions, erosion. No one has ever made this much of a fuss. It’s because of how litigious our culture has become. Toothbrushes on the rocks! Really, it’s a travesty.”

Charlie shakes his head. “There’s no way to get oil off the rocks except the way they’re doing it. And they’re still finding birds whose wings are covered in oil. I thought you loved seabirds, Mom. If you read the paper—”

“Oh, I read the paper! Seventeen thousand people dead from an earthquake in Turkey. The gap between the rich and poor has doubled since 1997. I read the paper every day. That’s why I know how to put things in proportion.”

“Actually this spill was covered in the
New York Times
,
”
Holly says.

“Months ago,” says Helen.

Charlie is pacing now. “That’s not the point. The west-side rocks are still black with oil, and Barney’s is still closed, and the creek at Garrisons is stopped up by a barrier. A hurricane isn’t the wreckage of human stupidity. If the government had only required the barges to have double hulls. Have you really not seen any of it, Mom? Maybe you find it”—he hesitates, then meets her eye—“hard to take it in.”

“Don’t patronize me, Charlie.”

“Then go look. If you saw the damage—”

“I’m not the gazelle I used to be. And unlike you, I’m not drawn to scenes of suffering.”

“I’m not drawn to this. It’s
here
,” he says fiercely. “It hurts me to see it.”

He sinks back down onto the hearth, looks right at her. His shirt is torn, he needs to shave, his eyes are still so blue. Her hand itches to reach out to slap him, soothe him, but she takes hold of her other wrist instead.

Holly stands. “My girls need dinner. I’d better go.” She smiles wryly, waves. “Have fun!”

“Don’t leave, Hol—” Helen begins, but Holly lets the screen door bang shut and then is gone.

“So,” André says into the silence. “Are you putting together your tenure case, Rachel?”

“Not this weekend. She’s on vacation, Dad,” Charlie says.

“I’m getting close.” Rachel unfolds her knees from under her. “I keep having to go back to Staples and get different binders and tabs. It’s ridiculous, but the presentation is almost the hardest part.”

“When do you find out if they give you tenure?” André asks.

“Not until late spring.”

“I hope it works out,” André says.

“Of course it will work out,” Helen tells him. Rachel isn’t teaching at Harvard, after all, but at Framingham State College, and her book is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. Helen is quite sure that, in another set of circumstances, she and Rachel could have been friends. If they’d met studying abroad or been the same age, surely they’d have hit it off, for Rachel is lively with a sense of humor, and speaks French, and is a woman unafraid of being smart. As is, Helen’s encounters with her daughter-in-law, as with her son, often feel distant or fraught, and she has the disquieting sense that Rachel is judging her, watching her too hard or—worse—pitying her. “What more could they possibly want from you?” she tells Rachel. “You’re brilliant, hardworking and well adjusted.”

“Ha!” Rachel says.

Charlie laughs too, and Helen stiffens, unsure if they are making fun of her or of themselves. “Well, I hope you get a good raise with tenure,” she says. “You’ll need it. Public interest lawyers are so underpaid, and this place is a real sinkhole financially. But you must know that by now.”

“We might get some money from the oil spill,” Charlie says. “I’ve agreed to be a lead plaintiff.”

She turns her head so fast it hurts. “Lead plaintiff for what?”

“The class action lawsuit, on behalf of property owners whose land was damaged by the oil.”

“You’re not a property owner.
I’m
the property owner, am I not? Excuse me? André? Am I not?”

“So am I,” Charlie says evenly. “I own six acres at the end, with Will, Caroline and Percy. From Gaga. Remember?”

She sits up straighter and feels the pillow propped behind her slip. “You need my permission to involve our family in something like this.”

“Actually, I don’t, though I didn’t think you’d mind. For one thing, it’s money, which you tend to worry about. Potentially, quite a lot. And it’s for a good cause—”

“I thought you were above caring about money.”

“I wish,” he says. “But the main thing is that the companies need to take responsibility for the damage. The government can’t do it—the oil lobby is too strong. It’s important, and not just for here. Sometimes it takes a lawsuit to force change.”

“You will not litigate Ashaunt, Charlie. Leave it be. It’s not a laboratory or . . . or one of your prisons where you go to save the wretched of the earth. Leave”—she cannot say why she is so terribly upset, so thrown, so
overthrown
—“it be.”

“I can’t do that,” he says evenly.

“
Ça suffit.
” André leans in to put the pillow back behind her. “Dinner is ready. Rachel, I’m sorry for this little drama. Charlie, come help me serve the plates.”

They all exit the room, then, André followed by Rachel and Charlie, the dog padding after them, leaving her alone. She turns toward the picture window, fixes her gaze outside, the light at dusk so blurry that the margins of everything—land, sky, water, porch furniture—are viscous, blurry and unclear. She did not tell Charlie that she has had dreams about the oil spill, more than once. In one dream, she was a girl skating with her brother on the black, glassy surface, cutting figure eights. In another, she was caught inside the spill, the tarry, clotted pull of it blocking her nostrils like bad blood. She did not tell him that the men in yellow plastic jumpsuits remind her of the soldiers who used to live here on the base, and everyone acted, back then, like the worst was about to happen, any second,
right here
, but then—surprise!—nothing happened here; it happened elsewhere, unspeakably, unthinkably (she has no memory of even hearing the words
Jew
or
gassed
until the war was nearly over, just as she has no memory of an officer arriving in Grace Park bearing news that her brother was dead, though apparently she answered the door). Time stands still here. Clocks break. So do telephones. Postage stamps lose their stick. At times, she has found the isolation of the place oppressive, even dangerous. Other times—when she was young, when her children were babies—she welcomed it.

Now, somehow, her life depends on it. She raises her hands to her face to make a frame, looks through, then lowers her hands and keeps her eye trained on the horizon. Such beauty. How to leave a place like this? How to leave? When she turns around, she finds Charlie standing in the doorway.

“Dinner’s on the table,” he says. “Salmon and corn. Let me help you get up.”

She shakes her head. “I’m not hungry.”

“I’m sorry.” He steps closer. “I know you’re not feeling well, and that . . . I’m sorry. I just—I wish you knew how much I care about this place, and that I’ll—”

Take it over when you’re dead and gone
, she thinks.

“—fight to protect it,” he finishes.

“You can only do so much.” She feels tears rising.

“I know.”

“Look,” she whispers, and he moves closer to the window, kneels beside her, and together they look out at the sea darkening, at the light meeting it.

“When are you leaving?” she asks.

“Tomorrow.”

“So are we. I have chemo. If I were you, I’d stay longer. To be here when it’s gloriously emptied out.”

“I’d love to, but Rachel’s classes start on Tuesday, and I have to work.”

“How practical you’ve become.”

“My work means a lot to me.”

She nods. “So many people waste their time on things they hate, don’t they? Or things that bore them. Oh, I nearly forgot—I clipped an article for you.” She pulls it from her pocket, gives it to him.

“Thanks.”

“Charlie, I—I can’t bear to leave,” she tells him in a rush. “It’s like I’m—bewitched or something. It makes me angry. Furious. Not at anyone . . . at”—she shakes her head—“myself.”

“Come back next weekend,” he says. “Or the weekend after. We’ll come too.”

She wants to say, Yes, of course she’ll come, to thank him for getting her a bird feeder and keeping it filled, for coming to dinner, for
trying
, but a wave of tiredness has overcome her; her eyes keep closing, almost pleasantly.

“Come,
chérie
. You need to rest. You can have dinner later. Put your arm around my shoulder,” says André, who has reappeared, and so she does, and Charlie kneels on the other side of her and she drapes her other arm around his shoulder. I love birds, she says dreamily into her son’s ear, or maybe she just thinks it, she the one who taught him to name and spot the rare ones—the bar-tailed godwit, the whimbrel and Blackburnian warbler—just as her father had taught her, first from the fields and beach, then from inside, his wheelchair by the window,
Petersons
and binoculars in his lap, and she’d bike to the salt creek or climb to the top of Teal Rock and sit there waiting, then ride back and drop her bike on the grass and go inside, to where the names flew from her mouth into her father’s ears, a gift for both of them.

“I love birds.” She says it again, or maybe for the first time.

“I know,” Charlie says.

“One two three lift, old boy,” says André.

And so they lift, and so they carry her to bed.

V

M
ID-MOTION IS HOW
he will remember it later, hoisting his bike onto the rack on the back of the car, one arm under the frame, the wheel spinning. Something has happened. The voice of Margie Childs, calm, clear. An accident.

The day is cloudy, wind ruffling the bushes. In front of him, Rachel is opening the car door to put in a grocery bag full of leftovers and a half-finished milk carton, its spout taped shut. Charlie lowers the bike and leans it against the car’s rear bumper. Your mother, says Margie Childs. He watches Rachel put the bag and milk in the car, shut the door, turn around. Swimming, says Margie. Swallowed water. And then again: Accident. Choppy. Resuscitate. Breathing. Charlie registers the imprint of a bike chain greased on his calf, and below that, late summer grass, parched and rough. Rachel takes a few steps toward him, stops, then reaches for his hand. She should not have shut the groceries in the hot car, he thinks irrelevantly. The milk will sour.

“I’d have come sooner,” says Margie, “but we’d thought you
’
d already gone home. Just about everyone has. Did you hear the sirens? Your father followed the ambulance.”

“We better go,” Charlie says. The colors of the day have deepened, as if a yellow scrim has slipped over the world. “Can you shut Deegan in the cabin?” he asks Margie. “He’ll chase the car.”

“Of course. And I’ll walk him later.”

Suddenly, his jaw is trembling, though his mind is flat. He had been planning to say a quick good-bye to his parents before taking off. Now, what?

Get in the car, turn on the ignition, shift into reverse. Back up. He fishes the keys from the floor of the car. Rachel puts a hand on his arm. “I can drive,” she says, but Charlie tells her no, he knows the way.

AT THE HOSPITAL, THEY ARE
led through the ER waiting room, past people on stretchers and a nurses’ station to where André, Jane and Paul sit alone in a small, windowless room. His father, Charlie sees with a start, is crying soundlessly. Dad, Charlie says, and his father looks up, and Charlie leans to hug him and feels his father grip the fabric of his shirt. He goes to Jane next, hugs her; she too is crying. Paul reaches out to squeeze his arm. On the car ride, he’d entered into a sort of suspended state—the outcome could be almost anything; they could arrive to find his mother sitting up, chatting about her good luck, her close call, describing with a kind of wonder what it felt like to go down, come up, brush so close to one’s mortality. Now, a darker place. Rachel sits down next to his father, who wipes his face with the corner of the beach towel he has folded on his lap. Charlie stands.

“Mummy drowned,” his father says, and before the words can fully register, Jane says, “No, no, she didn’t drown, André—she’s alive!”

André nods. “I said ‘near-drowned.’ It’s a medical term.”

“Did he say that?” Jane asks.

Charlie shakes his head slightly.

“She’s alive,” says his father. “Breathing, with oxygen to help her. We don’t know yet if she’ll pull through.”

“Can I—is it okay for me to see her?” Charlie asks.

“
Nurse!
” His father barks the word in the direction of the doorway, then looks abashed. A nurse appears almost immediately. “He’d like to see his mother,” André says. “Our oldest son.”

Charlie follows the nurse next door to a curtained room, where his mother lies on a gurney, her neck in a brace, her mouth covered with an oxygen mask, her body hidden under blankets. Her eyes are shut, her head bald (she looks, oddly, quite beautiful like this). The EMT is still there and shakes Charlie’s hand. We did everything we could, he says, in a tone that implies
Don’t blame me
but also makes Charlie realize that “everything” might well not be enough.
Mom
, he says, moving closer to his mother. Can she hear me, he asks the nurse, who says probably not, she’s unconscious, but we encourage family to talk, it can be helpful.
It’s Charlie
, Charlie says.
You’re in the hospital
—
Dad and I are here with you
.