The Girls of August (11 page)

“It fits you,” I yelled over the surf roar.

“What does?”

“The battle.”

“You have no idea!” And she started reeling in her catch.

As it turned out, Barbara landed a redfish. A big one. Baby claimed it was just
under the legal limit. But I suspected it might have been a centimeter or so over.
Barbara was beaming. We took a picture of her holding it at just about breast level,
her hair swept up in a cascading ponytail and her sunglasses sliding down her long,
thin nose. I could tell the poor dead creature made her a tad squeamish, but her
pride at having landed it gave her the courage to boast.

“My kids aren’t going to believe this!” she said.

“Hugh isn’t going to believe it,” I said.

“He’ll say it was all staged,” Rachel chimed in.

“What do I do with it?”

“We’re going to put it in the fish cooler with the snapper and then we’re going
to have one hell of a fish fry!” I was pleased as punch that my early-morning vision
was about to be realized.

Everyone pitched in. I had to hand it to Baby. She not only knew how to fish, she
knew how to scale and fillet them too. Rachel made a to-die-for cucumber salad with
dry dill and cream. Barbara, who’d gotten a second wind thanks to the hair of the
dog and her triumph over the redfish, made a pitcher of mojitos, muddling mint she’d
brought with her from her home garden. I went all out, fixing hush puppies, corn
salad, and black bean caviar. I hummed a tune whose name I didn’t know as I dredged
the fish in cornmeal spiked with a touch of cayenne.

We ate outside and laughed and told secrets and lies. Barbara said that Hugh had
a third nipple, a little number down near the bottom of his rib cage.

“Do you suck on it?” Rachel asked.

“Oh, hell no.” Barbara emphatically shook her head and tightened her grip around her
glass.

“What?” Baby asked, scrunching her face. “You can’t have a third nipple. That’s freaky.”

“Well. It’s not a full-blown nipple,” Barbara said, as if that explained everything.
“Did you know,” she asked, leaning forward and pointing with her fork, “that men
can actually lactate?”

“What’s that?” Baby asked in a tone of voice that suggested she had already decided
that whatever lactation was, it had to be the grossest thing on the planet.

“Puh-lease,” Barbara said. “You know, milk, as in nursing.”

Baby looked at us with her pouty mouth hung open. She was not getting it.

“You know when women have a baby?” I asked her, wondering why I, the childless one,
was explaining this.

“Yeah.”

“They have breast milk. You’ve heard of that?”

Baby rolled her eyes. Evidently she thought we were the stupid ones.

“That’s called
lactation
,” I said in a steady, even voice. I didn’t want her to think I was talking down to
her.

Baby scratched her neck and looked up at the porch ceiling, pondering. Then she
tapped her index finger on the table and said to Rachel, “You mean to tell me that
men have breast milk? I don’t think so.”

Rachel stone-faced her. “Baby, you just suck on Teddy’s nipples long enough—it might
take you days or weeks, but I suspect you’re up to the job—and you will eventually
find yourself with a mouth full of Teddy milk.”

“Ewwww!” I said, and my stomach lurched.

“That is fucking disgusting,” Barbara said, swirling her drink.

“You all are crazy,” Baby said, crossing her arms in front of her.

Rachel smiled triumphantly. She had won.

“Does anyone want seconds?” I asked, changing the subject.

Barbara caught my eye and nodded in the direction of the beach. Earl was approaching
from the north.

“I want a wee bit more of that redfish,” Rachel said, poking around at the platter.

“These hush puppies are great,” Baby said, stuffing her mouth with a whole one,
and then she saw him too. With her mouth full, she said, “I’ll be right back.” She
stood, adjusted her sarong so that it tied around her neck, and walked down the path
to greet him.

“What the hell is going on?” Barbara asked.

“She’s already cheating on Teddy. I’d bet my bottom dollar.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Why not? Look at her.” Rachel glared in Baby’s direction.

“Just a hunch.” They were in an animated conversation and neither of them was smiling.
“She didn’t come home last night.”

“She what!” Barbara’s eyes flashed in the fading light.

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Well, where the hell was she?” Barbara pushed back her plate, picked up her drink.

“She wouldn’t tell me. Said it was none of my business.”

“Why that little bitch,” Rachel said. “I almost feel sorry for Teddy.”

Baby rose to her tiptoes and kissed Earl’s cheek.

“I have half a mind to tell him just as soon as we get back to the mainland.”

“Barbara,” I said, “we don’t know what’s going on. It could be anything.”

Rachel let out a rueful laugh. “Yeah, like what?”

I shrugged, sipped my drink. I watched Baby wipe the side of her face, as though
she were wiping away a tear. “I dunno. I mean, basically she grew up out here. For
all we know, Earl is her half brother.”

“Ha! I’ll believe that when pigs fly,” Barbara said, pouring herself another drink.

I wanted to say, “Ease up on the booze, Babs,” but thought better of it. There was
already enough antagonism in the air. And in a bid to slide us back into vacation
mode, I made a suggestion. “You know what?”

Rachel and Barbara didn’t respond. I think they were pondering Baby’s situation
and hoping, to varying degrees, that she actually was doing something untoward.

“The dishes can wait. Let’s go lie down in the surf like a pod of beached whales.
What do you think?”

Rachel shrugged. “What the fuck. What else are we going to do out here?” She stood
and said, “Barbara, bring the wine. We’ll just suck straight from the bottle.”

“That sure as hell is better than sucking on Hugh’s third nipple,” Barbara said, laughing.

“I guess so,” I agreed. “Why oh why did you tell us that!”

We made our way down to the shore, satiated, slightly looped, simmering with curiosity.
When I looked, Earl was heading back the way he’d come. Baby wandered over. She was
quiet and reserved, and something about her demeanor kept us from prying. She looked
over her shoulder. When Earl was out of sight, she took off her sarong, adjusted
her bikini without any modesty whatsoever, and lay with us.

That night, I did not know if Barbara was restless or if Rachel wept or if Baby
stole away in the moonlight. Rather, I paid attention to my own self, sleeping like
the dead but dreaming of the living. Mac and I were elated over something. We didn’t
talk about it because words might have diminished our joy. He held me sweet and tight,
and we floated over Tiger Island, cocooned in the velvet canvas of the sky. Eventually,
we became our own star.

O
n our third full day on Tiger Island we, each of her own volition, fell into the
ease and isolation of the place. We lolled about, doing essentially nothing. I read
a trashy dime-store novel I plucked from Baby’s library. Barbara sunbathed and worked
on sudoku puzzles. Rachel sat in the shade and scribbled in a note pad she had brought
with her. Baby disappeared and returned. She set up a jigsaw puzzle on a tile-topped
wrought-iron table in the sun-room. She hid the box so we wouldn’t know what we were
working on, saying that it was the only fair way. I put together two corners on my
way to the bathroom. Someone else began fitting together pieces of sky. We swam,
we walked, we napped. We were quieter than before. And when we gathered for dinner—I
thawed out steaks I had brought with me and grilled them in the front yard, the
sea breeze ruffling my hair, the dream hanging over me with a sweetness I had not
expected—we talked about the turtle nest Rachel had found about a mile south of the
house, and Barbara said she had always wanted to visit Venice and hoped her kids
would go with her if she ever made it that far, and Baby said out of nowhere that
she didn’t think God should let babies die.

“Why would you say such a sad thing?” I asked.

“No reason. Sometimes I think about stuff. That’s all.”

Rachel started to say something but stopped. Then cocked her head at Baby and asked,
“Does Teddy know you know all those Gullahs on the other side of the island?”

“Of course he does,” Baby said, her face clear as a summer blue sky. “Why wouldn’t
he know?”

Barbara laughed a bitter, short laugh. “Yeah, I bet,” she whispered loudly enough
for us to hear.

“You know what, Barbara?” Baby stood and tossed back her hair.

“What?” Barbara slurred a bit.

“I think you’re just jealous. You ain’t got this.” Baby pointed at her body. “You
ain’t got nothing natural”—she flipped Barbara’s hair—“and you couldn’t hang on to
a man like Teddy if your life depended on it. And by the way”—she glared at all of
us—“somebody needs to put up the fishing gear exactly as I had it. It feels as if
I’ve spent half my life organizing this place and it’s going to stay that way.” She
grabbed her beach towel, turned on her heel, held up one arm, shot us a bird, and
marched down the beach.

“Hold on one minute,” Barbara cried, jumping from her chair.

I grabbed her arm. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t go after her.”

“Listen to me.” Barbara jerked away. Tears filmed her eyes but they did not fall.
“I will do any fucking thing I want. Including kicking that little tramp’s ass.”

She looked at us and her lips trembled. I think they were holding back a torrent
of words, of secrets. But the dam held. “Just forget it!” she said and then stomped
into the house. A few moments later, we heard her bedroom door slam.

I looked at Rachel, who simply shrugged and poked absentmindedly at her mesclun salad.

“What in the world is eating her?”

“Who knows? It could be anything,” Rachel said, aiming her fork at a cherry tomato.

“Aren’t you concerned? I mean, she’s been drinking like a fish. So far, this week
has been one long bender. Something is wrong!”

Rachel looked up from her plate, her eyes hooded with her heavy lids. “Maddy.”

“What?”

“Quit trying to fix everything.”

She speared the tomato, held it aloft, studied it for a moment, set it down, shoved
back her chair, and walked away, down the beach in the opposite direction Baby had
taken, enveloped in the day’s dying light, her shoulders slouched, signaling sadness
or defeat. I didn’t know which.

I looked out to sea, at the push and pull of the incessant surf. The wind was picking
up, the tide rising. Storm clouds burgeoned along the horizon, pulsing with lightning
as though the clouds were seizing, convulsing. So Baby was the organizer of the house.
Who would have thought it? And Barbara was threatening to careen out of control.
As I mulled over those two surprising revelations, a strange and unreasonable fear
crept into my bones. What would we do if the storm remained out there forever and
a day, relentlessly blistering the sky, threatening for all eternity to come ashore?

I was sunk in a deep sleep—the sort of sleep in which if you did dream, you would
never remember it—when a window-shaking clap of thunder roused me and, though my
lids were closed, I was aware that an ungodly bright flash had split the darkness.
I bolted upright, surrounded by the pulse of repeated lightning strikes, and remembered
Fossey Pearson’s warning about the intensity of the recent nighttime storms. I threw
back the covers, got out of bed, and checked on the others.

Rachel’s bed was empty. The storm must have roused her too. But Barbara and Baby
remained magically unaware, unruffled by the clamorous weather. The wind whipped
at the clapboard and I feared that we were in the grip of a sudden hurricane. But
surely they would have evacuated us. No one would allow four women and a handful
of Gullahs to perish.

“It’s just a bad, garden-variety blow,” I whispered to myself as I wandered the house
in search of Rachel. The jigsaw puzzle had one more completed block, but I still
couldn’t tell what the picture was. No signs of life in the kitchen. The bathrooms
were empty. Living room: nothing. Library: nothing. Damn it. Was she crazy enough
to be outside in this mess?

Reluctantly, but having little choice, I ventured onto the front porch. The howling
wind was cold and thick with stinging grains of sand. The rain swept sideways along
the porch and it, too, stung as though bursting with electrical current. Shivering,
I rubbed my arms. Remaining dry was out of the question. Lightning crackled again,
jagged, luminous, striking the wet sand. Thunder roared, echoing across the ocean.
Afraid, wet, miserable, I drew in my breath. Where was she?

“Rachel!” I called, but the wind whipped her name right back at me. I inched over
to the porch rail and hung on. I tried to shield my face as I searched. I scanned
the beach to no avail. I gazed into the pulsing darkness and the tumultuous sea.
There. Right there, in the boiling surf, in water up to her waist, Rachel stood naked.
She raised her arms to the sky and threw back her head. Even from this distance,
I could see by her contorted face that she was crying.

I called her name again and ran down the porch and across the beach, down to the
water. We might both die out here, but at least no one would ever be able to accuse
me of not trying to save her. A wave nearly knocked her over, and Earl’s comment
about the tiger sharks in a murky sea flashed through my mind. I looked at the raging
surf and then at Rachel. She had steadied herself and was gazing too intently into
the darkness. I feared she meant to allow the ocean to take her. I had no choice,
sharks or no sharks. I waded out and grabbed her by the waist.

“Rachel, honey, what in the world!”

She turned around, dropped her arms, and didn’t move. “Come on, baby,” I said. “Come
with me.”

Rachel wailed. It was a child’s sound. I ferried her toward the shore, feeling as
though I were guiding not a living, breathing person but an armful of scattered bones.
I led her back to the porch and, in the now ebbing storm, threw a towel around her
shoulders, held her, rocking her, until her sobs subsided and all the thunder was
silent.

“What is it? What’s going on, Rachel?” I pushed a strand of wet hair off her forehead.

“I didn’t want anyone to know.” She covered her face with her hands and wept.

“Tell me, Rachel. Do you understand? Please. Tell me.”

She nodded yes but kept her face shrouded behind her trembling fingers. “I have
cancer,” she whispered, “Left breast. It’s in my ovaries now.” She lowered her hands
and stared past me, all her fierceness gone. “There’s nothing anyone can do about
it.”

“Of course they can do something. They can always do something.”

I held her by the shoulders, and my deepest desire in the whole world at that very
moment was to shake some sense into her.

“No. Maddy.” She looked me in the eyes. “I waited too long. Me, a pediatric nurse.
Oliver, a freaking oncologist. I just ignored the signs. Not me, nuh-uh, never me.”

“Oh, dear God, Rach.” I reached for her hand, the enormity of what she’d just revealed
not completely sinking in. “Are you in pain?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. It doesn’t hurt yet.” She looked at the ocean and whispered,
“I just wanted…I just wanted to stop it before it did. Before I put the kids and
Oliver through all the shit people go through when they watch somebody they love
die.”

“Oh, honey, no, no, no. There has got to be an answer. What does Oliver say?”

Rachel wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She lowered her head and mumbled,
“He doesn’t know yet.”

“What? Oh, God, Rach! You have to tell him. He’s a specialist. This is his field.
He’ll know what to do!”

Rachel sighed deeply and then looked at me again. “Madison McCauley, how long have
we known each other?”

“Goodness. It’s going on twenty-five years.”

“Right. And in that time have you ever known me not to be a fighter?”

I shook my head no and then I began to weep.

“There ain’t nothing nobody can do about this. Surgery couldn’t get it all. So I’m
going to need you. And when I get back, I will tell Oliver. And together, we will
tell our kids. But for now…well…for now, I need this time with us together. I need
it real bad.”

“Then what was that about?” I nodded toward the beach.

Rachel shook her head.

“Fuck it, Maddy. I don’t know. I guess I just got scared.”

“Please don’t do it again,” I whispered.

Rachel moved her gaze to the now quiet horizon. I knew she wasn’t going to answer.
She wasn’t a woman who made promises she couldn’t keep.

After we went inside and dried off and slipped into fresh pajamas, we met downstairs.
I had insisted. No one tries what Rachel did and then is left on her own. Not when
I’m in the house. And I admit, I stood outside her bedroom and listened for all the
right sounds—the closet door closing, the whirr of the hair dryer, the footsteps
heading toward the door. And you can bet I made it to the living room before she
did. I didn’t want her to know I was keeping tabs.

I was standing by the fireplace, pretending to study the Gaillard family photo gallery,
when Rachel descended the stairs.

“You know what I need?” she asked, her hand gripping the ornate oak newel post.

Her eyes had lost the frantic light of panic. Now they were calm and beginning to
swell from all those tears.

“What’s that?” I went to her and hugged her close.

“One of your famous hot buttered rums.”

That actually sounded perfect. “OK then. Two buttered rums coming right up!”

And then, because I was a good friend, I was about to insist with foot-stomping
vigor that hope was not lost. I was about to say, “Listen, Rachel, this thing isn’t
over yet. Do not give up.”

But perhaps because she sensed what was coming, she beat me to the pass. “Madison
McCauley,” she said, “you have to promise me something. No one knows unless I tell
them.”

“What are we talking about?”

“Tonight. The cancer. Everything. Deal?”

There was no way around it. I had to agree. And I could not betray her. As much
as I wanted to get us off this island at that very moment and get her to Oliver with
all his knowledge about cancer, I had to honor her wishes.

“Deal.”

She disappeared down the hall to use the downstairs bathroom and I went into the
kitchen and gathered up what I needed. Butter, dark rum, brown sugar. I searched
the cupboard and was surprised to find my secret weapon: nutmeg. I went about the
preparations as if nothing had happened, as if the world were intact. But as I ran
the water and poured the rum and lit the stove and monitored how long she’d been
gone, there was no doubt in my mind, my heart, my soul: The world as we knew and
loved it was over.

Tuesday arrived with blue skies that belied the tempest that had scourged us only
hours before. And Rachel seemed back to her old gruff, teasing self. As she breezed
past me in the kitchen, I handed her a cup of coffee. She winked at me, as if knowledge
of her imminent death were a sweet secret we shared, and then plopped down at the
table, saying, “Gawd. I could have slept fifty more hours. Why are you always the
early bird, Maddy?”

I knew I would not breach her confidence, but I also knew that until we got off this
island and she told her husband and children, I would carry the knowledge of her
illness as if it were the weight of the world. Perhaps it was. At any rate, from
her demeanor—it reflected no hint of doom—I knew the subject between us was closed.
At least for now. “Because somebody has to keep this troop of Amazons fed,” I said.

“Bacon! I want bacon!” Barbara yelled as she rounded the corner. “That’s what my kids
say every Sunday morning.”

“Is that what you want?” I asked.

“You bet.”

“You got it, sleepyhead,” I said.

“What does she have?” Baby yelled from the living room. She bounced into the kitchen,
curls damp, skin scrubbed and glistening. “I am sooooo hungry! Can you make pancakes?”
She pecked me on the cheek.

Surprised, I pulled away and moved over to the sink, where I grabbed a sponge and
stared out the window. The world looked washed clean. And with three cheerful women
on my hands, it appeared that the storm had washed clean their sorrows, fears, and
other inner malaises as well.

Baby held her arms out from her sides and spun. “It’s gonna be a beautiful day, mothers!”