The End of the Point (44 page)

Authors: Elizabeth Graver

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BOOK: The End of the Point

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When the right time arrives, he and Rachel have sex, though they try only once this cycle; they’re both worn out and she’s been told to skip a month of Clomid, since it gave her a cyst. They do not go back to Ashaunt for Columbus Day weekend, which comes just three weeks after his mother dies—they go camping in the Berkshires with friends instead—but they do go the following weekend to find the place almost deserted, save for Rusty and his wife, up from New York, and Margie and Gus Childs, who have winterized their summer cottage and moved there year-round after losing all (“Not
all
,” says Rachel) their money in a dot-com company gone bust.

Over the course of a few weeks, another season has taken hold, asters fading, poison ivy and Virginia creeper deepening to red, the bayberries turning from blue to silver. Charlie spots a few tree swallows diving and remembers from his grandfather that the birds sometimes delay their southern migration to fill up on bayberries, nourished by the wax, eliminating the seed, sowing bushes along the migrant path. He swims both days that weekend, at high tide from Gaga’s Rock, where her dock used to be—now, just one old piling attached to a boulder. On his paths, he collects bayberries, which he will later melt down, skimming off the wax to make two stubby olive green candles that burn down to the socket—a quality the early settlers believed meant good luck.

He avoids the swimming dock at the Yacht Club. He has never swum there much anyway, preferring to enter the water from the shore, but now it will be several years before he goes in there, and never again without a flicker, a flash, of his mother going down. The oil-spill workers have finished their scrubbing. You can still find coatings on the rocks, but the black spots look almost natural, a dappling, and anyway Charlie isn’t in the mood to look too hard.

He catches a bluefish that they grill for dinner. He builds a fire in the woodstove. Rachel grades papers, naps, sits on the porch, plays her violin, wanders with Deegan up the empty road. She does not swim. For one thing, it’s cold. For another, the water has taken on a power for her that she cannot shake. Plus she’s pregnant, though only barely—the home test, then the blood test, read positive three days before—and walking carefully, as if carrying something made of spun glass (the child will turn out wiry, strong, a climber of trees, scaler of rocks). Are you excited, she asks him at night as they lie in bed, and he says it’s too early to get excited. It will take a visible sign for him to believe there’s truly something in the works. He leans to kiss her belly, but she contracts her stomach muscles away from him, and he feels suddenly, surprisingly left out. Are you okay being here, she asks him a few minutes later, and when he says What do you mean, she says Because of your mother, though for this question, as with her previous one, she must already know the answer, which is that Ashaunt
is
his mother, a second mother, as in a second home, except that for him it’s a first home, perhaps even a first mother, both in how it holds his mother’s traces and in how it nourishes him as she often could not.

“I was thinking,” he tells Rachel, “of having a rock carved with her name, and maybe something she wrote. There’s a boulder behind the Red House that she always liked.”

“That’s a nice idea.”

He reaches to the floor for his backpack and pulls out a notebook with a marbled cardboard cover, and another, spiral-bound, then several more. He piles the books on the quilt in the valley made by their outstretched legs. “I thought I might find something in one of her diaries.”

“You took them?” Rachel picks one up, sets it down. “Did you really? Were they just out somewhere?”

“In her study.”

“But hidden?”

“Not exactly. She once told me that she’d burned a lot of her diaries and letters, around the first time she got sick.”

“So you think she wanted these ones to be found?”

“Maybe. Or else she forgot about them or got distracted. I don’t know.”

“Have you read them?”

“As a boy I used to. Once she wrote me a note in the margin:
Dear Charlie, I know you’re reading this.
I wrote
Hi Mom, Love Will
in mirror writing.”

“You had fun with her.”

“Sometimes.”

He opens the diary with the marbled cover. In the woodstove, the fire hisses and pops. At the foot of the bed, Deegan startles in his sleep. As Charlie leans into the diary, he catches sight of the word
private
on the inside front cover, in penciled letters so faint they might have been written and erased, or perhaps they’ve just faded over time. If Rachel notices the word, she does not say, nor does Charlie point it out. There is Privacy and privacy, he is beginning to think, just as there is Trespassing and trespassing, the land you walk because it was there before its owners and will, with any luck, stay on after them, and because you care about it, and because it’s filled with green and growing, dead and brittle, expected and unexpected things.

May 15, 1960
.
Back again. At last I can breathe.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WHILE
THE END OF THE POINT
is a work of fiction, it draws some of its features from an actual place, whose inhabitants were unfailingly generous to me as I plumbed, borrowed, discarded, researched, collaged, refigured and freely invented. At times, I changed dates to suit my story; for example, the oil spill in the novel takes place in 1999, when in reality, the Buzzards Bay Bouchard oil spill occurred in 2003.

This novel would not exist in its current form without the many different kinds of help I received from the following people: Joan Austin, Charlotte Bacon, Joseph Bettencourt, Lydia and Louis Biglarderi, Dorothy Ann Cairns-Smith, Jacky Garraty, Beverly Glennan, Marcia Cornell Glyn, Lawrence Graver, Ruth Graver, Suzanne Graver, Bayard Henry, Sharon Jacobs, Connie Laux, Margot Livesey, Michael Lowenthal, Suzanne Matson, Marissa Matteo, Baba and Frankie Parker, Vicky Pennoyer, Brendan Rapple, George Salvador, Bridgette Sheridan, Laura Tanner and Kathy Waugh.

I am ever grateful for the support, insight and friendship of my longtime editor, Jennifer Barth, and my longtime literary agent, Richard Parks. Thanks, as well, to Jane Beirn, Shannon Ceci, Mark Ferguson, Richard Ljoenes and Danielle Plafsky at HarperCollins for all they have done for this book.

For gifts of time and space, I am grateful to the Blue Mountain Center, Boston College, the MacDowell Colony, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Thoreau Institute and Wellspring House.

Jimmy, Chloe and Sylvie bring gifts beyond measure.

To all, my deepest thanks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ELIZABETH GRAVER
is the author of the novels
Awake
,
The Honey Thief
, and
Unravelling
. Her short story collection,
Have You Seen Me?
, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in
Best American Short Stories
;
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards
;
The
Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses
; and
Best American Essays
. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. The mother of two daughters, she teaches English and Creative Writing at Boston College.

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Also by Elizabeth Graver

Have You Seen Me?

Unravelling

The Honey Thief

Awake

CREDITS

Cover design by Richard Ljoenes

Cover photograph © Steve Banfield

THE END OF THE POINT. Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Graver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reproduce the following:

“What Have They Done to the Rain” taken from the song by Malvina Reynolds. Words and music by Malvina Reynolds. Copyright © 1962 Schroder Music Co. (ASCAP). Renewed 1992. Reprinted by permission of Schroder Music Co.

“The Idea of Order at Key West” and “Sunday Morning” from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

“Dulce et Decorum Est” from
Wilfred Owen: The War Poems
, by Wilfred Owen. Editor John Stallworthy. Copyright © 1994. Used by permission of Chatto & Windus and the Wilfred Owen Literary Trust.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

EPub Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN 9780062184863

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