“You're serious?”
Well, serious, but fishing. He had a worm on the hook, but he wasn't sure there were any fish, and even if there were, he might be using the wrong bait. If she was going to laugh outright at him or go in for a big yowling argument, he'd reel in the line, shake off the water, then tap dance his way right out of it.
Just a joke. What are you crazy? Live out there with those people. The land that time forgot?
He decided to add something wistful and then shut up.“Something about the place. Different.”
“It's that,” Elise agreed.
“It gives you a certain⦠feeling. I don't know. Do you think we're too locked into our, um, lifestyle? In New Jersey, I mean.”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you think it would be good for the kids?” He was pushing it now. Getting ready to bail out if he had to. Checked for the parachute and made sure he was set to jump.
“I think today was the best day the family has had in long time,” Elise said.
“Me too. The boat. The water. I didn't even care that there weren't any whales.”
“Angie seemed really happy there visiting the old lady.”
“Todd loved the salvage yard. Learned more there than he learns in a month of school.”
“Does the house have electricity?”
“Natch. Phones too. For my modem hookup.”
“Running water.”
“I think.”
“Hand pump on the kitchen sink?”
“No, I think it's more sophisticated than that.” Was she teasing him now? He sucked on the beer, felt a crazy little glimmer of hope in his head, felt like a kid back in university. When was the last time he had done anything unpredictable?
“Darn.”
Now he was certain she was fooling him, ready to slam him back into the twentieth century with a thousand reasons why it couldn't be done. Meetings to be missed. School clothes to be bought, social obligations.
“Darn?”
“I was hoping for something really primitive,” Elise said.
“But you like the idea?”
“I love the idea,” Elise said, spilling her drink as she leaned forward to kiss her husband full on the lips. As if on cue, the kids popped up out of the side of the pool like trained porpoises, gushing chlorinated water all over the concrete apron as the sickle moon sent down its steely white light to sprinkle on the bay like crazy diamonds.
It was exactly 11:49
P. M
. when Kit Lawson phoned to tell Sylvie that she needed help. She was losing her mind. She was scared to death. She couldn't explain what was going on but desperately needed Sylvie to come over.
“Yes, I'll be there. Now calm down.”
Middle of the night
, the house seemed to say to her.
One of those middle of the night problems
. More than loneliness. A crisis of some sort. The Sea of Crises in a person's life. Surprised that it would happen to Kit, who always seemed to have such a
positive attitude. Night was her time, too. Moon, stars, looking up at things in space.
Ah, yes, walking the island this late at night. She'd almost forgotten. Grass all wet with dollops of dew. A distant sound of some young fool trying to drive his wreck of a car into a ditch or up a tree. Clear night this, with a big piece of moon like the half-eaten pie in her refrigerator. Smell of summer in the air. Invisible flowers. No wind. Sylvie wondered suddenly if she was really out walking on the worn path from her house to the gravel road. Was it a dream? Some of those dreams had been so real lately. Old age removing some of the distinctions between dreaming and waking. She touched her neck and felt the bones of her chin. Real enough for now. Walk on. Need to go help Kit.
Twin bats above her near the treetops skimmed the air. What other night creatures roamed this island of hers that she had not encountered? Hadn't had a bat in her house for over thirty years. Bats, eh?
Kit opened the door before she touched it. Light spilled out into the darkness, making it hard for the old woman's eyes to adjust.
“Come in, come in.”
“I'm here. Now just settle yourself and tell me all.”
But Kit could not settle herself. Her hands were frantic, independent things working at the air in front of her to make way for her to pace about. The look on her face was all desperation, confusion.
“I can't⦠I can't⦔
“Can't what, Kit? Just try to calm down and let me help you.”
“I shouldn't have stopped taking the pills.” Kit picked up a book and leafed quickly through it like she was speed-reading, but it was all nervousness. The book fell onto the floor and made a sound ten times larger than itself. Kit stared at it.
“Drugs of some sort?”
“No. No. Not like that. Treatment. Bipolar. Manic depressive, they used to say. Up. Down. Up, down. All the time. Then the medication. Evened me out. But I always felt⦠I felt⦠I felt⦔
“Take your time. I have all night. I'll be here.” Sylvie felt a profound calm come over her, even as she stared into the haunted, fearing eyes of her young friend. Odd. Sylvie always thought of herself as the crazy one. Kit: sane and smart, out to save the world. Old Sylvie, a bit odd in her ways from a solitary life, a little daft, but what of it? Eighty years to cultivate her own proud eccentricities.
Kit was crying now, kneeling upon the rag rug on the floor. “I always felt like the medication, the pills, changed me somehow. I could cope better, for sure. But I didn't feel fully alive. I stopped taking them a month ago. And I've been okay since. But now this. If John was here I think I would be okay, but he's not.”
“Do you have some of your medication here, Kit? Could you take it now?”
“No. I chucked what was left in the sea. I told myself I was cured.”
Sylvie reached out a hand and smoothed it across the island teacher's head, her long, beautiful, light-brown hair. “You've been doing pretty good, then, I'd say. We'll get past tonight and things will smooth out, I bet.”
“I don't know if I can get past this. I'm scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“I don't know. I don't feel safe. I feel threatened. And there's no real reason for it.”
“But it's in your mind, do you think?”
“I think so. But it feels very real. I can't shake it. God, it's like I need to claw away at something in me, rip open my skin and dig it out. Oh, Jesus. I hate this. I don't know what to do.
Nothing is fixed in one place. I think the room is spinning. Is the room spinning?”
Sylvie looked around and realized that, yes, to her, it did seem as if the room, the whole house had been lifted off the loose stone foundation and was twisting itself around somehow. But she knew better. The power of empathy.
Careful. Don't want to feed off the madness here
. That would be easy enough to do but it wouldn't help anybody. “Yes, the room is spinning. But now I'll make it stop.” She put two hands, palms upward, in front of her as if she were a crossing guard in Mutton Hill Harbour, asking the cars to stop and let the children cross.
The room slowed down and stopped. The house was still. A magazine fell to the floor from a precarious perch on the corner of the table. Now what?
Sylvie was thinking about how a mind can project things. Somehow. Breaks down all the traditional rules and limitations, but life gets powerfully confusing then.
“Do you
know
what you need? Right now?”
“I don't know.”
“Try to figure it out. Just tell me. I'm here.”
“I need a safe place where nothing can hurt me.”
“I understand that. Do you mind if we go out for a walk?”
“It's very dark out.”
“It is. The moon is low now in the sky. Some stars. You would know their names.”
“Some of them. There are millions.”
“I can take you to a safe place if you want to walk with me.”
“Yes.”
Sylvie knew what was wrong with the house. No, not ghosts. People project anxiety or madness and it invests itself in things. Animals knew that. A dog would bark at a stick used to beat it the day before. A cat would hunch up in defence if it came close to an axe, let's say, used to murder. Birds would not sit on the roofs of
some houses. With good reason. Kit had taken her dementia and painted it all over the inside of her good house. The house
had
been spinning. Better to be outside, walking towards the open ocean.
Sylvie held her friend's hand. Kit was sobbing, crying in small, fragile convulsions as they walked. The forest trail, though, did not seem frightening. The trees of spruce were tall, steady, silent, and compassionate. Moss grew on this little-used path. Moss the great comforter of stones. Stones asleep beneath such resplendent growth. Sylvie would point this out.
Midnight in a forest is not such a bad thing
.
“My mind is feeling more steady. But I'm still uncertain of everything. I was sure the island was the safe place I was looking for. Away from the pain of the kids in the city. Away from all that craziness.”
“I know. But you were right. The island is the safe place. Now try to forget about the mainland. If you listen, you can hear the dreams of the forest.” It was a foolish madwoman thing to say, but Sylvie trusted her intuition.
“What does the forest dream?”
Good, Sylvie thought. She is willing to let go of her own madness and move into another sphere of crazy thought. “The forest dreams itself into the past and into the future. Old tree trunks rotting gracefully back into the soil. Seeds asleep. Past, future, and right here now. Going back and moving forward. All at a pace much different than our own. The forest dreams itself into being. It breathes slowly as it sleeps and in doing so cleans the air. There are no single trees, only the forest. The forest is satisfied with itself and sleeps well at night.”
“Is this the safe place?”
“Well, it is, but you need open space right now. You need the sea and what it can give.”
They walked on and could smell the apple blossoms of the old crabapple tree that grew by the soft, moss-covered knees of
an old homestead. Apple blossom gave way to wild rose, and even without daylight there was colour in the minds of two women.
The rounded stones found the feet of Sylvie and Kit and led them towards the edge of the sea, to the shelves of stone, flat as dance floors, which allowed them easy footing. Sylvie did not know if the whales would come for them tonight. She would try, but she knew something had changed. So many things unseen changing around her. Like Kit, she sometimes felt uncertain of anything, less stable than ever before. But the feeling usually only arrived at four or so in the morning and never stayed around until breakfast. Age, she had counselled herself. It was only old age.
“We always think we are at the centre of things, that we have some sort of control, but we don't always,” Sylvie announced. Uncertainty confirmed was a way in to Kit's dilemma.
“Copernicus moved the earth away from the centre of the universe and everybody got angry at him. He assumed the centre was the sun and even that was wrong.”
Sylvie nodded. “Maybe there is no centre. Just like the way that there is no beginning and no end. The dreaming forest would know this. And the sea. Listen to the sea.”
And the sea talked, tongue guided by the moon, translated the effect of storms many, many miles away. Wind talking to water, water sending her story through the waves on and on through the deep, shushing in final syllables on the flat stone and evoking small stones into some kind of poetry along the sandy pockets. Cool water swaying the kelp back and forth. Verse, chorus, dance.
“Copernicus is showing,” Kit said.“Look.”
Ah yes. The moon, what was left of it. The half-pie about to slip into the sea.
“Where, Kit?”
“That big crater middle and to the left.”
“That's him?”
“It is. What's left of him. One of the first things on the moon I learned to identify.”
So the moon was with them, as was Copernicus, who had been wrong about the sun being the centre. She could feel the sleep of the forest behind her, could taste and feel the endurance of the patient sea in front of her.
“I like it here,” Kit said at last, interrupting the endless announcements of the small waves.
“I knew you would. You've been here before. But not at night, I bet.”
“Never at night. This is beautiful. But if we lose the moon, will we be able to find our way back?” Caution but not paranoia in her voice.
“Yes.”
“Are we waiting for something to happen?”
“Are you feeling better?”
“Yes, a little. Maybe a lot.”
“Then something has already happened, but we'll wait longer.”
“Part of me is calm. The other part is still a raging lunatic.”
“Which one is more powerful?”
“The crazy one, but I'm trying to keep her distracted with the beauty of all this.”
“Good tactic.”
“What if I can't straighten myself out? What if I have to leave here and stay in an institution again? What if I can't teach?”
“I don't know, but that's all tomorrow. Or the next day. Right now there is just this.”
There was a phosphorescent flush of something on the rocks of the outer shoal. A signal. News perhaps. Sea creatures did not necessarily sleep at night. Diatoms celebrating the evening with their light. Portuguese men of war afloat, entangling their prey.
Nations of fish swimming, travelling great distances on highways marked clearly by rivers within the sea. And something about magnetism. Something about the earth guiding creatures to where they needed to be at the right time of the year. And the moon, with her gentle but powerful tug.
The half-moon grew immense as it prepared to dip into the cold silver bath of the sea. Sylvie was sure there was a sound as the lunar south pole touched down on the Atlantic. Then, it seemed to increase the speed of its descent, anxious for the full bath of night and the sleep that would follow.