She grabs the railing and her cane, walks toward the people. André slips her glasses over her nose, and her vision clears.
“How was the water?” asks a coiffed blond woman she has never seen before.
“Heavenly,” says Helen.
“Warm?”
“Oh yes. Warm as pee!”
With André’s help, she gets into the golf cart, then waves a royal good-bye to Jane, who hurries her bike up to the road.
“I suppose that was rude, and childish,” she tells André as they rumble up the slope. “I don’t know what comes over me. I just didn’t like the look of her.”
“You’re like a beach, marking your territory with pee.”
“What?”
“A beach. You know, a female dog.”
When she laughs too hard, her chest hurts. “You mean a bitch, dearie,” she says. “Like ‘itch.’
Bitch
, it’s pronounced. Bitch.”
“A beach on the beach.”
“
Je t’adore
,” she says abruptly.
“We do all right, old girl,” he says.
ON THE MILKWEED, THE MONARCHS
are collecting. Rabbits graze on the Yacht Club’s driveway. They come in cycles, and this year they are everywhere.
Having the best summer.
Hyperbolist though she is, cliché though it is, she needs, for reasons she can’t quite get a handle on, to have its meaning heard, received. She’ll repeat it to André as they return to the house in the golf cart, steering around dogs and relatives, teenagers, trikes, potholes, the Point plunged into Labor Day mode, the air tense, on high alert, toddlers tantruming on the road, people starting to mourn—one more day, school starting, too fast, almost over, but joyful too, legs fast-pedaling, faces to the sun.
On telephone wires, trees and roof peaks, hundreds of tree swallows are gathering to organize their migration. Helen spots a few young females—browner, drabber than the rest—among the metallic blues and clear whites. A group of swallows, she remembers, is called a flight, and she says it to André—“Look at the flight of tree swallows”—and he stops the cart, lifts the field glasses to watch for a moment, then offers her the glasses and returns to driving slowly down the road. The birds swoop and gather, separate and merge, trading places and liquid twitters in a constant, intricate exchange.
And so it is that Helen, bird-watching, does not register the parked oil-spill cleanup truck, or the triple-stranded pinwheeled power lines the Uh-Ohs have put in, or even the septic pile construction they drive past, another cottage torn down to make way for another oversized house. She has seen them before, certainly (the power lines especially took her aback when they first appeared), but she has developed an automatic filter of the sort she never had when she was young. Hers is not a willed oblivion, at least not consciously; her mind is fully, deeply occupied. In the air the birds are clever, acrobatic, but when they land on the road they turn to lumps of coal, then lift together when a person or vehicle draws near. She watches the flight eddies, the trading of partners, the way the patterns form, dissolve and reconfigure like one machine in motion—yet each bird with its own small, muscled heart. When Percy, passing on his bike, calls out to her, she doesn’t even hear, in a state of observation so pure it’s almost infantile, at the same time that she carries a knowledge that she’s been seeing these birds year after year (and always here) and that the medium they pass through is not just space but also time.
T
HE OVULATION PREDICTOR
kit turned yesterday, so they had sex last night and are doing it again this afternoon in the cabin, Rachel on top, Charlie traveling the (familiar, startling, plain, dazzling) country of her hips, waist, rib cage, and then she’s lowering down, his mouth finding first one nipple, then the other, salty from her swim; he shuts his eyes and sucks. Moaning, he maneuvers them both until he’s inside her, then deeper, farther, pelvis to pelvis, and he presses his fingers to her tailbone, urging her closer, into a rhythm, opening his eyes to catch a still (forever) shy glimpse of her most private self—hair swinging, face concentrated—their breathing ragged, matched, and then his eyes are closed again, his thoughts gone or almost gone and they are fucking, nearly slamming bone to bone. I can’t help it, I’m coming, he says, so deftly they flip, still locked, and then it’s three deep thrusts and over—he’s collapsed on top of her, emptied out but still inside. Rachel shifts but doesn’t roll him off. Sorry, he says, but it’s too late now (no spit allowed, and his hands alone won’t do it), and the Clomid exaggerates her every sensation in a way that leaves her jangly, off. On the floor, Major Deegan whimpers softly in his sleep. Charlie raises himself to his elbows. Okay? he asks, and waits for Rachel to say Wait a sec (she does), then waits for her to say Okay (she does), and then rolls off.
At first he’d worried that the mechanics of it all might get in the way, but in fact their sex life, sometimes skittish, has improved over these past eight months, oiled and lubricated by its scheduled appointments and the unsheathed slide of it, the urge toward alchemy: she wants a baby. So does he. For a moment, they lie there in the sunbath coming through the skylight, hands interlaced; then she hoists her legs high against the wall until she’s nearly upside down, courting gravity. Impulsively, he joins her, though his legs are too long, the wall too short. Rachel extends a foot to waggle at his and he waggles back, and for a moment, he can almost see it—a rush of dim-witted, driven minnows ramming their heads against the great, round, hard-shelled sphere that is the egg, and he feels for his sperm an almost fatherly affection for how they will strive and batter, head-butt, drop aside.
He lowers back down, gets up, pulls on his shorts. “I’m going to dig the porpoise up,” he says.
While the idea has only now just come to him, it feels suddenly urgent on this, the fastest-cycling, quickest-draining weekend of the year.
“Huh?” Rachel cranes her head to look at him. “What? Why now?”
“I’d like to assemble the skeleton with wire and glue and hang it from the rafters, like at the Whaling Museum. If you wait too long, the bones can decompose.”
He had meant to do it earlier, last summer, or earlier this summer. What happened? He’d gotten busy. Gotten married. Now and then, he had remembered the porpoise he had buried but always at inopportune times—when he was on the train going to work, or in the middle of a thunderstorm in the cabin, or once last winter when he’d come across a box in his parents’ attic (unable to sleep at Christmas, he paced and rummaged), and in the box, among letters, photographs and travel guides, a pamphlet titled “
St Ninian’s Isle Treasures”
that told the story of how, in 1958, a Scottish schoolboy found a hoard of silver objects and part of a porpoise jaw under a cross-marked slab in a church, and how the bowls and bones were believed to date to AD 800. As he’d flipped through the pamphlet, a postcard had fallen out, from his mother to him, dated July 1976:
After Agnes’s funeral, we went to the Shetland and to this island, where a little boy discovered treasures that are over a thousand years old! It put things a bit in scale for me, as I’d been very blue. He found them in ’58 so must be around your age.
Write Bea a sympathy card!
Love, Mummy.
In the pamphlet, a photograph of the porpoise’s jawbone—slender and long, gray and captivating. That a postcard addressed to him was among his mother’s possessions did not surprise him at first (as he plundered, so did she), but then he noticed that it had no stamps. So she’d never sent it, which meant he’d never known that she’d thought of him on an island in Scotland where a boy, now man, around his age, had dug to find an ancient bone.
“Were you thinking about this while we were having sex?” Rachel asks.
“No.”
“You were.”
“I wasn’t,” he says truthfully. “But now that you mention it”—he sighs—“I was in love with her. Before I met you. She had a perfect little blowhole, and the way she leaped in the water—”
“Sweetheart, she was dead.”
“I didn’t mind.”
Rachel hoists herself higher on the wall and pulls a sheet across her torso. “Necroporphia. Poor thing. And now you’re still tormenting her. How long have I been lying here?”
“At least five minutes.” He bends to kiss her. “Plenty long. You should get up.”
He reaches to the floor for her clothes, but when he hands them to her, she gives him a dark look and lets them drop to the floor. “I
hate
this,” she says, and he sees her mood turn. This, the heading into waiting, is the part she hates—and he, by proxy, hates her hating, for how it makes her frantic, anxious, discontent. “How is it that I can write a book but I can’t make a baby?
”
she asked the last time she got her period. Charlie is more of a fatalist, which almost translates into being an optimist: It will happen when it happens, and if it doesn’t, they can always adopt. He adopted Deegan, after all, as a stray found by Rusty’s girlfriend on the Major Deegan Expressway, and he loves the dog in a way beyond words.
They’ve been trying to have a baby for ten months. In July, Rachel turned thirty-five, an age that, though it seems young to Charlie, is considered by the experts to be the gateway to Advanced Maternal Age. That same month, she made an appointment for them to go in for testing. He: plenty of sperm, moderate motility, she: decent numbers, a few uterine fibroids. The doctor filled her with blue dye, and they watched her tubes appear, ghostly and thin, like violin strings, on a screen. Louise Bourgeois, the seventeenth-century French midwife Rachel wrote her dissertation-turned-book on, would advise them to be sanguine, without anger, or offer to purge Rachel of bad blood or improve her womb with a pessary. Instead, a prescription for Clomid, to “give your ovaries a boost.”
“Come help me. It’ll distract you,” he says. “And maybe we’ll find an arrowhead or old coin.”
She gets up, pulls on her shorts and tank top, then sits on the edge of the bed. “What if someone comes while we’re digging up a corpse?”
“They can help. Anyway, who would come?”
“Kids, or your mother.”
“My mother hasn’t been down here in twenty years.”
Does she not understand by now that his parents never visit the cabin uninvited? Almost no one does, except in winter, and then it’s raccoons or local kids who swipe the CD player and leave crushed beer cans on the porch. He lets the cabin path stay tangled and unclipped, enjoying the feeling of ducking into a tunnel to his secret world. Over the years, his mother has threatened more than once to raze the cabin. She has called it a hazard, fretted that renters’ children will find it, fall off the porch or through its rotten planks and sue. She has talked about wanting to open up the land between the Red and Big Houses, fell the trees, clear the brush, a clean sweep. Once she even hired a bulldozer, though fortunately Holly persuaded her to send it back. For all that, she has let his cabin be, and Charlie can count the number of times she’s been inside it since he moved in and made it his own. Even after he expanded it, put in the skylight, and—a little house-proud—gave a few tours, his mother did not come (his father ventured down to admire the post-and-beam construction and smoke his pipe on the porch).
A few months after he
’
d brought Rachel to Ashaunt for the first time, she’d told him it was the cabin that made her fall in love with him, its tree-house shape, its built-in bed, rocking chair, books and bones; the way he, hardly domestic at home—what she calls home—sweeps and cooks here, catches fish, heats the soapstone bed warmers on chilly nights. It was April that first time he came with her, his daffodils blooming along the path to the cabin. His stucco bungalow, now theirs, in Concord, was still filled with his roommate Andy’s stuff: blue leather couch, big screen TV, a poster of Nastassja Kinski winding naked around a snake. Socks and sneakers lay on the floor; dishes were stacked in the sink, awaiting the cleaning lady who came every other week. Though Charlie had bought the place when he was twenty-eight with the money he inherited from Gaga, it had never really felt like home. Here, a different story. Never before, Rachel told him, had she witnessed the way a place could become a person, a person a place, but as she’d walked the labyrinth of paths he’d made, she’d felt as if she were walking the folds of his beautiful (damaged—his teeth still chatter, his ears still ring; he’s told her the basics, spared her the details) brain.
“Did you know that there’s a disease called seal finger?” she says as they go onto the porch. “It causes numbing if you touch the seal. Sometimes people have to get their fingers amputated.”
“Cool, but this is a porpoise, not a seal.”
“Oh. What is a porpoise, anyway? I should know that. Is it a kind of dolphin?”
He nods. “Like dolphins but smaller, and with shorter noses.”
She stops above him on the steep stairs. “So maybe dolphin means ‘big nose.’
Le Dauphin
. I wonder if that’s why the French chose it for the title of the firstborn male prince.”
Her mood is lifting; he can tell. Her legs are long from this angle, and she isn’t wearing underwear; he can see up her cutoffs to the dark thatch of hair. “Come, dauphin.” He reaches toward her. Pet names do not come easily to him. Cohabitation, marriage, do not come easily. Rachel is, for one thing, considerably more complicated than he’d first thought. She is Zolofted and Klonopinned, or was until she started trying to get pregnant. She holds her breath past cemeteries, knocks on wood. Now she rubs her belly over her shirt, like a pregnant woman in a movie. The miscarriage in May was an early one—a chemical pregnancy, the doctors called it. Rachel told her parents, sister, closest friends—first that she was pregnant, then that she was not. Charlie told no one.
At the bottom of the stairs, she stops and holds her hands up. “I’ll need gloves,” she says.
THE PORPOISE IS BURIED IN
the clearing next to the cabin. Scrub grass grows over it. A beige rock marks the spot. He’d found the creature several years ago washed up on the beach, tied a rope around its tail and hauled it up the path with the help of his nephews. Lardy and heavy, it had been, out of its element, not pulling its own weight. “Heave-ho!” he’d sung with the boys, and together they’d made pirate eye patches out of leaves and kelp. They had buried the beast, his nephews’ eyes alight with the adventure, and Charlie the uncle who’d do anything. (He’d taken them winter camping at Teal Rock, built driftwood rafts, hunted with them under milkweed leaves for monarch caterpillars to hatch into butterflies, the jade-green, gold-seamed chrysalis an astonishment each time.) He’d meant to wait a year for the porpoise’s flesh to leave its bones, two at the most (the naturalist he’d asked at the Audubon Center had said that would be plenty), but somehow time had passed, until today.