He died just before dawn. I came downstairs at first light, cold and muddled from a thin sleep and dreams of falling, to find Mike with Grammaude before the fire again, drinking coffee. I did not need them to tell me; they were laughing, and it was the soft laughter of remembrance.
She did not want us to stay with her that day. I would have, gladly, for I was hollow with loss and in need of company myself. But she was adamant about that.
“Go on out somewhere, you two,” she said. “It’s going to be a perfect day and the weather’s due to change. Go sailing.
Take her over to Osprey, Mike, and show her what you told me about. Fix a lunch and take some wine and hoist a glass to him, if you insist on memorials. He’d far rather you did that, out on his bay, than sit around here chafing the hands of an old lady who doesn’t need them chafed.”
“Are you sure?” Mike said. “I don’t like to think of you totally alone on this of all days.”
“My darling children,” she said, and smiled a smile that just missed being a grin. “I’m going to be less alone on this of all days than any other I can think of.”
Tears started into my eyes again, and she said in real, if mild, exasperation, “Oh, for God’s sake, Darcy, go on and let me be. There’s far less reason to cry today than there was yesterday. Save your tears for them as needs them.”
And so I let Mike Willis take me out onto Penobscot Bay in the wake of a soft following wind, on one of what I thought would be the last great days of this summer. But instead of his father’s sleek sloop, he came around the point from the boatyard to the yacht club dock where I waited for him in his grandfather’s old lobster smack, the
Tina.
“I thought both he and you would like this,” he said, when I had rowed my uncle’s dinghy out and climbed aboard. I looked at the stubby, wallowing old boat, its brass salt-pocked and its teak deck stained from years of rubber soles and the sea, and felt the solid sweetness of the straking under my feet in the slight chop, and I did like it. Mike ran up the jib to take us out into the bay, and I saw that the
Tina
had a set of newish Dacron sails. But other than that, I could imagine Micah Willis taking out his
Tina
just
as it was today, on a sweet day fifty summers ago.
“I feel badly about taking you away today,” I said. “There must be a million things your family needs you to do, and you can’t have really taken this in yet.”
“Don’t,” he said. “For some reason, it’s better today. I feel like being on the water. And Dad told me to get lost until tomorrow or the next day.” He squinted out into the dazzle where water met sky. “Every Willis in Maine will be congregating at the house today, and a good many of them drive me nuts. There aren’t many arrangements. He’ll be cremated.
And Dad wouldn’t let that fool of a preacher near him, so there’s not going to be a funeral per se, just a memorial maybe day after tomorrow, and that’s going to be on the boatyard dock. My cousin Seth from Machias is a Unitarian minister, and he’s going to come do it. Dad and I are going to take Grandpa’s ashes out on the
Tina
after that. He told Dad a long time ago he wanted to go into the bay.”
A thick clot of cold salt lay at the base of my throat. It had been there since I had kissed Micah Willis goodbye the day before, and it neither went away or grew larger. It did not feel like the fear, or even grief; I did not know what it was.
I swallowed around it.
“Where are you going to take him?” I said.
“Osprey Head,” he said. “That’s what he asked for. We’re going to go over and pick a spot this morning. I’d like you to be part of that, and he would too.”
“Mike,” I said, my heart beginning to pound, “I can’t go to Osprey. Please don’t take me. I can’t…you don’t know.”
“Yeah, I do, if you mean that’s where you did your swan dive that last summer,” he said mildly. He wore khaki shorts and a faded old MIT sweatshirt and Top-siders without socks, and he looked so much like the Mike Willis I had last seen out on this bay twelve years before that I could not even be angry with him for the little meanness of his words.
“I guess Grammaude told you too,” I said wearily. “She’s been the Mouth of Maine this summer.”
“I’ve known since the day you did it,” he said, looking over his shoulder at me. “Don’t forget it was my father who pulled you off your boat and carried you up to Liberty, shaking like a leaf in a gale.”
“Then don’t you see why I can’t go there now? I’ve been awfully sick for the past few years, you might as well know that too. Sick like in a psychiatric hospital. I just got out this summer and my dad wouldn’t take me; otherwise I wouldn’t be up here. My therapist said I needed to avoid conflict as much as I could—”
“I know all that too,” he said. “I don’t think your therapist meant you couldn’t go sailing on a calm day with an old friend. I’m sorry about the hospital, Darcy; you don’t know how much. But your dunking yourself in the bay off Osprey didn’t make it holy water. It’s water like any other around here, and there’s something on that island that could make up for what happened here back then. I’m sure of it. So we’re going.”
Over my head the mainsail bellied out with a great snap, and the
Tina
dropped her lee rail and lifted up and soared off toward Osprey Head like a toy paper boat in a breeze. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists on the rail and took a deep breath. I could feel the fear coiling itself like a serpent deep within me, but the cold knot held it down. At that moment I couldn’t have spoken if I wanted to.
But the steady sun on the top of my head and the peculiar rushing silence of a quiet day under sail soon loosened my fists, and I opened my eyes to find Mike leaning back against the wheelhouse, drinking wine from the bottle and looking at me. He handed the bottle to me, and I took it and drank.
It was lovely wine, soft and full of flowers.
“I thought I was going to die for a long time,” I said. It seemed necessary that he recognize my pain.
“Kill myself, I mean. I really did think that, and I’m still not sure I won’t someday. You can’t possibly know how strong the pull is sometimes. My family does that, you know. My mother told me that my great-grandfather did it by swimming out too far in cold water up here, and my grandfather went off Caterpillar Hill in his sports car. And she’s doing it too; it’s just taking longer. You feel almost like it’s an obligation, sometimes.”
“So you think you’ll get it, like a virus?” Mike said. “What your family has a history of is running away, your grandmother excepted. You don’t catch that, you learn it. And you’re getting a good start on it, seems to me.”
“How dare you say a thing like that to me?” I said, anger boiling past the knot. “You don’t have the slightest idea what my life has been like or how I feel. What about you? Grammaude said you were married for a little while but that you couldn’t take the idea that she had a lot of money, so you split. What do you call that if it’s not running away?”
“If you think you’re going to make me mad by throwing M’Lou up to me, try again,” he said, reaching out for the wine bottle. I passed it over to him. “Your grandmother was absolutely right about that. I did run. If I hadn’t I’d be a southern society architect today, designing cutting-edge barns for pampered horses, with weathervanes on the top of them.
Probably a bourbon drunk, too. I didn’t say running away was necessarily a bad thing. Not for me, anyway. I don’t think it’s the answer for you, though.”
“Well, you shit. Why is it right for you and not for me?
That’s hypocritical crap.”
“No, it’s not. I was running from a clear and present danger, a person with the power to do me real harm. You’re trying to run from a place. Places can’t hurt you. They can heal you sometimes, but they can’t hurt you. Only what you bring to them can.”
“Thank you, Dr. Willis,” I said sullenly. I would have been angrier with him if my shrink back in Atlanta hadn’t said substantially the same thing, many times. But I was still angry, and the thought of Mike with a wife, no matter what sort, suddenly rankled sharply.
“What sort of precious adorable name is M’Lou?” I said.
“Just the right one for precious, adorable Mary Lou Campion of Nonesuch Farms, just outside Lexington, in the heart of Kentucky’s fabled bluegrass country,” he said. “Lots of honey-blond hair. Lots of white teeth. Lots of charm and softness and lots and
lots
of money. I met her at Wellesley.
Her folks named her M’Lou because they were friends of the Whitneys. You know, the horse Whitneys? Marylou Whitney?”
“I know who the horse Whitneys are,” I snapped. “Why didn’t they just name her Sea Biscuit and be done with it?”
“Wrong stable. I know, though. I think the preciousness of her name, and all that it implied, got to me long before the money did, and what they all wanted to do with it and me. Or anything else. When it really started to bother me, I said I wanted to come back up here to live and practice. She said Maine was a toy place for rich people and I said what the hell did she think she’d been living in all her life. She said real people didn’t live up here. And I realized then that, to me, no place and no people on earth are realer than here on the cape. After that, I just…couldn’t stay. There wasn’t any real bitterness on either of our parts, I don’t think. We both knew we married in a hurry. She hadn’t even finished Wellesley. It was the spring after you left the last time.”
There was nothing to say to that, so I said nothing. The salt knot was back, but the anger had faded. So had the fear. I put my face up to the sun and closed my eyes and leaned back. I was very, very tired.
“Darcy, what are you going to do now?” he said.
“I don’t have the slightest idea,” I said. The sun on my eyelids felt heavy and hypnotic. I wanted to lean there forever, rocking on the pillowy sea under the sun.
“It’s four days until Labor Day. Everybody goes home then.
Your grandmother always goes back to Northpoint the day after. Are you going with her? Going back to Atlanta?
What?”
“I have plenty of time to decide,” I said drowsily. “Why does everybody have to plan everything ahead of time? You sound like Grammaude. She wants me to come back with her to New Hampshire this winter and stay. Can you imagine what I’d do in a tiny little place like that all winter with nothing in it but a boys’ school?”
“I imagine it’s coed now,” he said. “Most of them are. I don’t know. It sounds like a good idea to me. I think she’s going to need you this winter. She’s grown awfully frail since I saw her last. And it would be easier for you to get her back up here next summer. Maybe you could teach at the school.
Most of them have very good communications curricula nowadays. They’d for sure waive the advanced degree require-ment for Peter Chambliss’s granddaughter.”
Teach? I had not thought about that. Teach…. In my mind I saw classrooms with sun coming through tall mullioned windows, and young faces serious about receiving what I had to give…. What I had to give. I had not thought in terms of giving for a very long time.
“I’m not coming back here next summer,” I said.
“It will kill her not to come.”
“She has Uncle Petie and Aunt Sarah,” I said. “She can come if she wants to. She can hire somebody to do the housework and tend to her; she’s always done that. She doesn’t need me to come to Retreat.”
“Yes, she does,” he said. I did not answer. He did not speak of it further.
“I’ll probably move my office back here,” he said minutes later. “Grandpa left me his house. Dad told me this morning.”
I did open my eyes, then, and looked at him. He was looking at the green bulk of Osprey Head, coming up fast on our bow. He had busied himself with the lines.
“Oh, that wonderful house,” I said, meaning it. “I always thought there was something magical about it. Will you live there too?”
“Yep,” he said. “I’ve wanted it since I was five years old. I didn’t know he knew that, though. I thought he’d leave it to Mom and Dad. But then they built the new one.”
We slowed and stopped, and the
Tina
settled into the water like a proper New England matron.
“Come on,” he said. “Roll up your pants legs. It’s shallow enough here to wade in.”
“No! I can’t!”
He jerked me up by the hand, and before I could even protest he had leaped over the rail and pulled me after him.
By the time I got my mouth open to scream at him, the cold green water had closed around my legs at mid-thigh and pebbles rolled under my sneakers. I stood gasping for breath, glaring at him. He was already going ashore, picking his way over the rocks.
“Not a ghost or a corpse or a ha’nt in sight,” he yelled back.
“Come on. You’ll get frostbite.”
Taking a deep, shuddering breath, I looked down into the clear, vivid green water. I saw pebbles and coarse sand, and snaking scarves of green seaweed, but nothing else. Nothing.
I hitched my sopping pants legs up and sloshed ashore after Mike.
We were on the other side of the island from the bridge and the eagles’ nests. I wondered why we had
not sailed around and gone ashore there. We could have put in at the bridge and tied up and not gotten wet. On this side, toward the body of the bay, nothing was visible but the distant bulk of Islesboro and, beyond that, a smudged blue smear, the Camden Hills. A line of white sails dotted the calm bay like children’s toys back toward Western and Green ledges and Hog Island, but none were near Osprey. We had the island and the sea to ourselves. Mike dropped the basket with our lunch and the wine in the shelter of a leaning glacial boulder and held out his hand to me.
“Come on. It’s not a long climb.”
“Is it the eagles? I don’t remember them over this far,” I said.
“Nope. They’re here, or the nests are…. Dad told me the young ones are hunting for themselves now, so there aren’t usually any around the nests this time of day. No, this is something else. Something new. You’re going to like this.”
We climbed for about five minutes, up through immature stands of fir and spruce, over flat rocks set flush into the earth and shawled with the hectic green, cloud-soft moss I remembered, through yellowing blueberry tangles and bracken going white-gold, and once through a perfect little stand of adolescent birches, their bark just beginning to roughen, gleaming like silver in the green gloom. He held his hand out behind him and I clung to it, feeling the rough place on his middle finger where the drafting pencil had worn a callus, stumbling on the loose shale and over deadfall limbs in my slippery wet sneakers. I had been trembling with cold when I came ashore, but by now my pants were drying, and sweat had begun to run from my hairline into my eyes, and no-see-ums bit like little points of fire.