The Lavender Hour (5 page)

“Hey,” she said. “Am I interrupting, or are you ready for coffee?” “I'm always ready for a break,” I said. “Come on in.” “What are you working on?” Faye's interest was sincere. Unlike Lily, Faye was fascinated with my jewelry. At Christmas, I had given her a pin and on her birthday, a bracelet. She seldom went out without wearing one or the other, again unlike my mama, who, as far as I knew, had never worn the loop earrings I made for her. Today Faye wore the bracelet, a narrow band of brown worked in eight-square chain braid with filaments of gold woven in. She carried a box of doughnuts and was wearing sweats she'd probably picked up at the local thrift shop. Faye had more money than Croesus, but she was the most unpretentious person I knew. She was as
likely to wear the same faded sweats to a cello concert at the Congregational Church as to the town meeting, where she raised hell over issues of zoning and affordable housing. I thought Faye lived her life according to an inner compass the majority of people seemed to lack.

“Were you always like this?” I asked her one night earlier that winter when we both were one cosmo over our speed limit.

“Like what?” Faye said.

“You know. Not caring what people think.”

“Oh, I care, Jessie,” she said.

“You do?”

“Yes. I just don't let it rule me.”

I didn't think it was true about Faye caring about what people thought of her. I truly believed she didn't give a damn. But there was plenty she did care about. Bigotry. Prejudice of any kind. Cruelty. Suffering. And she held a deep disdain for affectation. In architecture or in people. One Saturday morning, when we were having breakfast at Bonatts, Faye ignored a woman who called her name from a table across the room. “That woman's trying to get your attention,” I said. “Well, for God's sake, don't look over or the next thing she'll be inviting herself to join us,” she replied. Later she told me the woman was the epitome of ostentatiousness. “She named her house,” she said. I said I didn't see why that was so bad. Hell, half the people in town had quarter boards identifying their homes. Ocean Breeze. Bide-a-While. Sea Reverie. Whale Watch. Gull Cottage. It's a Cape tradition. “But she answers the phone with her house's name. 'Hello, Ocean Manor,'” Faye mimicked. For someone who was one of the most compassionate people I'd ever met, Faye could have a sharp tongue.

I
PUT
on the kettle and told her about the piece I was working on and about the child with leukemia.

“It's curious,” Faye said, running a thumb over her bracelet.

“What's that?”

“Our hair is essentially dead, right?”

I nodded. “Beyond the follicle, hair is nothing but dead cells. Same as our fingernails.”

“Odd, then, that that part of us which is dead will outlast the living—the blood, body, bones.”

“Isn't it,” I said as I measured out the coffee. I felt the fingerlings of restlessness that talk of death could engender. (Ashley had told me once that she believed there were only two things that could permanently change a person's life: having a child and killing someone; but I knew having cancer changed you, too. Like genuine love, it leaves you powerless and vulnerable, feelings that never completely disappear, even with recovery.)

Faye didn't wait for the water to boil before she started in on the doughnuts. “What's the latest word from home?” she asked.

“Nothing new there,” I said. I hadn't talked to Lily in more than a week, and although one of the reasons I had moved from Richmond was to escape the burden of my mama's concern and her poorly concealed fear that the cancer might return, I was surprised and hurt when her daily check-in calls turned weekly and then even more sporadic. I blamed her involvement with the dentist. I'd heard from Ashley that Lily was still preparing for an Atlantic crossing, a plan that struck me as so perilous that I had regular nightmares about it. Dreadful, sweat-drenched dreams that haunted me in the morning. I couldn't understand why she had agreed to this voyage anyway. Lily had never been particularly athletic, nor had she enjoyed sailing. Knitting intricate lace-patterned shawls was more her style. When I tried to get Ashley to join me in confronting our mama about the dangers of the transatlantic undertaking, dangers that I saw as considerable—we weren't talking about a Sunday sail but a voyage of nearly twenty-five hundred miles from Virginia to the Azores, off the coast of Africa—my sister honestly seemed more concerned about the fact that Lily had stopped coloring her hair.

“Ashley tells me that Lily's started walking to get in shape,” I told Faye.

“Good for her,” Faye said.

“Well, I think the whole idea is insane. I mean, Lord God, in five years, she'll be seventy. She's too old to be attempting something like—” I stopped short, remembering that Faye and Lily were the same age. I glanced up to see if I'd given offense, but Faye was smiling.

“I wouldn't bet against her, Jessie. People tend to underestimate her, but Lily has always been a determined woman.”

I looked for hidden meaning in this statement, but Faye's face was guileless, clear. According to Grandma Ruth, Faye and my daddy had been “an item” before Lily arrived on the scene and swept him up. I didn't know if this was true. Before he died, when we still came to the Cape during the summer, I would watch him every time he was around Faye, but he treated her with the same slightly easy courtesy he showed all women and nothing more. And as far as I could tell, there was no sense of competition between Lily and Faye, although I knew women could be smart about concealing emotions. Once I asked Lily if what my grandma said was true, that she'd swept my daddy off his feet. My mama laughed and said that Grandma Ruth had it all wrong and if there had been any sweeping going on, it had been Lowell who was holding the broom, entirely avoiding the question of whether or not Faye was on the scene prior to her arrival. Back in the fall, shortly after I moved into the cottage and became reacquainted with Faye, I returned to the subject during a phone call to Richmond. “For heaven's sake, Jessie Lynn, that's ancient history,” Lily said. And then, “Do you seriously think Lowell would have been interested in Faye Wilson?” In truth, I couldn't picture it, perhaps because my mama had been so beautiful that I couldn't imagine my daddy attracted to anyone else. Certainly not Faye. And the more I got to know Faye, I couldn't really picture her with my daddy, who, while
good-looking, successful, and kind, had never been averse to small pretensions.

“Y
OU'RE DOING
good work with Nona Ryder,” Faye said, in a sudden change of subject.

“I wish I could do more,” I said. After two weeks of volunteering and five visits, I still hadn't laid eyes on Luke Ryder. Except in my dreams, where he had a starring role. I did not mention this to the volunteer group the previous week when we had gathered for our monthly meeting to share our experiences and to air our concerns and problems. (Beth, the former teacher, was already having a slight conflict with the hospice nurse on her case.)

Truthfully, at the last meeting, I had felt totally inadequate. Ben told us how he played gin rummy with his patient, a seventy-two-year-old woman with lung cancer that had metastasized to her bones. Gordon was reading the latest John Grisham to his, a forty-year-old man who had a failed bone marrow transplant. Sal cleaned an oven and did two loads of laundry for a patient with MS. Jennifer drove her cancer patient to his granddaughter's soft-ball game. Muriel was helping a woman with congestive heart failure sort through decades of family photos and arrange them in albums for her children. Listening to them, I marveled at their ease. When they asked how I was doing with Luke, I told them I read while Nona went out on errands. I did not confess to the group that, at odd times in the day, I would find myself preoccupied with the mystery of him, wondering what his favorite food was, what kind of music he liked, if there was a chance he would recover or go into remission, or if it would help him to hear my own story.

Our last group meeting ended with a prayer from the hospice chaplain, and then Faye told us what good and necessary work we were doing. “There is unexpected joy in the terrain of grief, sorrow, and separation,” she said, a more poetic statement than was usual for her. She told us we were doing soul work.

O
F COURSE,
intellectually, I knew I was helping Nona. There was some satisfaction in knowing that the short breaks away from the house had been doing her good. Her look of exhaustion had eased, if not the haunted shadows in her eyes. One of my former colleagues—a science teacher—had once told me that fetal cells stayed in a mother for twenty-seven years after she gave birth. At the time, I had thought it was one of those amazing facts that defy belief, but watching Nona those days, I no longer doubted it. I even wondered if those cells didn't remain forever, which would explain why she looked as if a real part of her was dying along with her son.

In spite of the difference in our ages, Nona began to confide in me. I learned that Luke was her only child, that he'd been divorced for two years—a fact that didn't break Nona's heart, as she never trusted his ex. “Marcia is one of those women who just can't sit still, always having to be going somewhere or doing something. All that rushing around just about drove Luke mad,” she'd told me, adding, “Not like you at all. Anyone can see you have a calmness to you.” “One thing no one has ever called me is calm,” I had demurred, flustered at the compliment. “Oh yes, you are,” she'd insisted. “I can see it in your eyes.” Another thing she told me about Luke's ex was that she is not a kind person. “And I'm sorry to say I see some of that in Paige,” she'd said. Nona worried about her granddaughter and asked me if I had experimented with pot when I was twenty-two. I lied, thinking that it was more important that she trust me than it was to offer reassurance about Paige.

One day, Nona told me that before Luke got cancer, she had hopes he would remarry. “It came on fast,” she said. “Back in January, he was still fishing. I swear I never saw anyone get so sick so fast. You wouldn't believe it.” But of course I would. I knew about the shocking swiftness with which illness could derail a life.

I
POURED
our coffee and got cream from the refrigerator and thought of how the other volunteers helped their clients. “I don't
know,” I said to Faye. “I don't feel as if I'm making a difference.” I ran my hand through my hair, passed a finger over the welt of my scar. I wanted to ask her if there was any hope Luke's cancer would go into remission, but I kept the question locked inside.

She looked straight at me. “Hospice is elegant in its simplicity, Jessie,” she said. “We're there for care. We're there to lift the burden. That's all, and it's more than enough.”

I wanted to do more. I wanted to help the raven-haired man who sat in self-imposed isolation. “Honestly,” I said, as I split a chocolate glazed doughnut and handed her half, “I still can't understand why you assigned me to this case.”

Faye licked traces of chocolate from her fingers. “A hunch,” she said. Her voice was clear and sure.

“Well, I hope it pays off,” I said.

Months later, I would recall this chilly April morning and wonder what would have happened if, while we sat there, eating doughnuts and drinking coffee, Faye had not only heard my doubts but had began to share them. What if I had told her about how preoccupied I had become with Luke? What if, regardless of her hunch, Faye had assigned someone else to volunteer at the Ryder house? Could all that lay ahead have been averted? Or were some things preordained, destined to play out to their end?

W
HEN
I
HEADED
out for the Ryders' the next afternoon, I was in what my grandma Ruth called a pissy-ant mood. It was raw and drizzly, an absolutely miserable day that had even Faye grumbling. Earlier Ashley had called and had gone on and on about the lovely Richmond weather, as if by living in the North for the past eight months, I had contracted total amnesia about a southern spring. Today was in the midseventies, Ashley said, adding that the tulips were up and the lilacs and redbuds were in bloom. I told her that we were a few weeks behind in Massachusetts but that the crocuses and snowdrops were starting to poke through the grass. I didn't tell my sister that it had been raining for three straight days or that the lawn was still winter-dead brown or that Faye said Cape Cod didn't have spring, just a long, dreary winter that would suddenly be summer one day in late June. I loved Ashley, but from time to time, we fell into this weird kind of one-upmanship over the dumbest things. Like weather. That morning, after we hung up, I found myself growing homesick for the spring Ashley described, and for my mama, and wondered what I was doing on the Cape and what this year was proving. I didn't feel any closer to figuring out where I was heading than I had been back in September. Lately I had found myself missing teaching and missing my students. And mourning the lack of romance in my life. At one of our meetings, Gordon said he was discovering that one of the things about hospice work was that it helped him put his own life in perspective and made his problems seem minor. I was waiting. I had gotten a few leads on jobs from the alumni office at the Art
Institute, where I'd graduated, sent out inquiries and résumés, but so far nothing had panned out. On the man front, I had had precisely two dates since January, both blind dates and both disasters: a widower with denture breath, clearly looking for a new wife to care for him, no thank you, and a guy who'd had so many DWIs that I'd had to pick him up in my car and drive us to the Squire. I was beginning to feel like a nun. When I mentioned this to Faye, she said it seemed to her I had two choices. I could buy myself a vibrator, or I could think of this time as a kind of purifying fast; I told her that celibacy as a lifestyle was seriously overrated.

I had fully expected I would be married by this point in my life. Women in our family married young. My sister's theory—and Lily's, too—was that I hadn't spent enough time and energy focusing on the kind of man I wanted to attract. Not a problem Ashley herself had ever had. The day she fastened the hooks on her first double-A bra, Ashley settled her attention to the qualities she wanted in a perfect husband, portraits that over the years underwent subtle alterations. Even at thirteen, she took these deliberations seriously, no detail too minute to escape consideration. Hair and eye color and build were obviously up for debate, but so, too, were teeth, feet, brains, and the kind of car he drove, often in that order. I swear she actually spent hours contemplating whether smooth hands were better than calloused. In the end, she'd opted for somewhat calloused, just rough enough to add sensation to a back rub. There were certain deal-breakers. Her future husband would have to be elegantly built and slightly edgy, just enough to make him interesting over the long haul. And then Ashley ended up mad for Daniel, a man on the wrong side of stocky who was too kind for his own good. Which just went to show you. The human heart was too fickle to be trusted.