The Shore (6 page)

1992

R
AIN

A
s she drives to the rest home Sally remembers the first storm she made, some ten years ago. She had been picking raspberries with her grandfather, in the thickets down the gravel road to the marsh, so it must have been June. She was wearing her twin brother's purple rain boots and the new dress her mother had gotten her from the thrift store in Modest Town, and she stopped every dozen steps to twirl a bit and feel the cotton skirt slap satisfyingly against her legs as it wound up. Mitch, who was ensconced on the living-room couch with his cast-encased foot propped up on mounds of pillows, had seen her going out in the boots and screamed that he could walk just fine, that Grandpa Tom could carry him, that those boots didn't belong to her and she'd better put them back or he'd drown her Barbies while she slept.

Mitch was lucky to have only one broken foot. Pierce, their older brother, had gotten him to jump off the balcony with her Rainbow Brite bedsheet as a parachute the week before by telling him it would make him fly. Now he was immobile for six weeks and she had his boots. She'd just grinned in the face of his whining and followed Grandpa Tom out the kitchen door.

If she looked back the way they'd come she could see the house, with its thick columns and sagging porch, where the oyster-shell road joined the gravel road out to the highway. If she looked hard she could track the white smear through the potato field, like a snail snot trail, to where it turned off into the woods to go down to the dock. The seam where the shells met the gravel was stark, the line of demarcation beyond which she was not allowed to wander alone. There was a tiny house past the very end of that oyster-shell road; Grandpa Tom had just rented it out to Mr. Bo and Miss Ellie, distant cousins who were expecting a baby, and she hoped that the embargo would be lifted enough to let her wander down and visit, when it got born. She liked babies, and her little sister Lilly was walking and wiggly and didn't like being held anymore.

Her mother had said that the people that lived down there were no-accounts, but no matter how she grumbled about it, Grandpa Tom rented to them just the same. They were family, he said, far back but still family, and even if they hadn't been they needed help. Daddy might manage the planting and harvesting now, but Grandpa Tom still owned the land, decided who could and couldn't rent the outbuildings scattered on the edge of the property and park their trailers on the boggy land by the creek that was too wet to farm. Daddy said he was a soft touch for hard-luck cases.

Grandpa Tom was waist deep in the brambles, his bucket already half-full, whistling “South Wind,” and she squatted down to get the berries he couldn't reach because of the arthritis in his knees. The shade felt good; the leaves of the potato plants in the field across the road looked like they were frying. The chickens had followed them, and were scraping for worms in the dust of
the road and the weeds of the ditch. A breeze came along, the thin, wafery kind that lasts for minutes at a time, and Grandpa Tom had said, “Go along, try with this one.” She'd reached out her hands, like he'd shown her, and felt the breeze between her fingers like long strands of dried grass, only this time she felt it in her mind too, as if her head was an empty room with all the windows open and the breeze was wandering through it. She'd grabbed hold and twisted, and the breeze twirled in on itself, picking up the cut grass on the road, spinning a confused chicken around a few times, then straightening back out.

“Very good! I am impressed,” Grandpa Tom had said, and she hadn't been able to stop grinning. She reached out again, and the breeze felt firmer, more substantial this time. She gave it a wrench.

Wind whipped the raspberry bushes, plucked the chickens, tore their buckets from their hands, threw her against her grandfather's legs like a wave at the beach. There was a silent pop in her jaw as Grandpa Tom yanked the breeze straight again, and just as suddenly everything was calm. She looked up at him. Raspberry juice splattered his face, and his shirt, and dripped down his mustache into his beard. “Always gentle, little bit. Messes are hard to clean up,” he'd told her, and scrubbed her face with his blue paisley pocket-handkerchief.

She was seven.

There has been no rain in weeks. The creeks are sandy paths, the cornstalks wither in the sun, the air itself sizzles. The long black road down to Parksley looks wet in the afternoon light, reflecting back ghost images of the woods and houses; the
double yellow line up its middle is blinding. Sally drives slowly, avoiding the drooping chickens milling about the shoulder of the road. People don't like it if you kill their chickens, even if they're pecking at roadkill on the double yellow when you do it.

She passes the Perdue plant, slows down at the speed-limit sign and holds her breath as Parksley slides by—the Foster processing plant usually reeks—turns off Route 13 above Onancock, then pulls into the long driveway of the Tasley Assisted Living Facility and Rest Home. It winds artificially through a long stretch of bright green turf, a man-made lake peppered with mangy ducks twinkling from between the trunks of manicured oaks. The home itself spreads out in front of the lake like a bunker, a dark, squat three stories of cement and reflective windows, with a scatter of private cottages for the more mobile residents behind it. It's on the bay side, so that the residents can get a view of the glinting water of the port, and the boats sailing in and out. She and Grandpa Tom both like the sea side of the island better, with its peanut-butter smear of barrier islands at the horizon, but rich people like the bay, so the home is on the bay. The cousins have pitched in to get Grandpa Tom into the home; he's rich on paper, but all of his money is in the land, and he wouldn't sell a square foot of it, even if it meant being able to afford a room of his own.

Their family is large, if loosely connected now, the descendants of Grandpa Tom's grandmother Medora and her two husbands. Grandpa Tom's three cousins have already passed on; Helen and Kathy in their own homes, but Mark, the youngest of the three, and his wife Letty had both died in the rest home some years earlier, rather than in their red-floored house in
Belle Haven. It was supposedly a more modern, civilized way, but Sally wasn't so sure she agreed.

Mark and Letty had had one daughter together, and desperately wanted more. Rachel had been a sweet little girl but when she got older she'd fallen in with a bad crowd, then run off and gotten married, then come back to Accomack Island for a while before running off again and abandoning her husband and two daughters. The daughters had never been allowed to meet their grandparents. Cousin Letty had a son from her first marriage that the family had also never met; when she'd sued for divorce her husband had accused her of abandoning their child and been granted custody. He'd kept her from seeing her son when he was young, and so thoroughly poisoned the boy's mind against her that by the time he was old enough to choose for himself he had no wish to see her.

Kathy and her husband had also had one daughter, Nancy, who had been so anxious as a child that by the age of fourteen she refused to leave the house. Grandpa Tom had taken them to visit her a few times when they were young; Sally only remembered a quiet, mousy woman, the apartment over Kathy's dressmaker's shop cool and dim and smelling of face cream and zwieback. Kathy's son had fared much better, and between him and Helen's four children there were more cousins than they could count or keep track of, and since they were all much older or much younger than her and Mitch, Sally never bothered.

She sits for a moment in the parking lot, soaking in the damp chill of air conditioning before cutting off the motor. She can see Mitch in one of the shallow alcoves in the face of the building, crouched with his back against the cement. He works selling imported wine at Morgan's Specialty Foods in Onancock
and walks over to the home when he finishes in the afternoons. It's not until she gets close that she sees the phone at his ear, the crooked smile even though he's slowly rubbing his eyes with two fingers in the way that he does when he's had enough. She catches him in her shadow, and he mumbles a hurried goodbye before clicking off the phone.

“How's Brian?” she asks as she takes his hand and pulls him up. They're of a height still, though Mitch is barrel-chested and she's what her dad describes as “wiry as a polecat.”

“What makes you think I was talking to Brian?”

“You only get that smile when you're talking to Brian. What are you doing out here anyway?”

“Grandpa Tom kicked me out when my phone went off for the third time. Said he wasn't going to die in the five minutes it took for me to answer it.” The tinted doors open with a pneumatic hiss, and the glassy-eyed receptionist nods at them as they turn toward the elevators. There are couches and coffee tables and, for some reason, potted poinsettias in the reception area; the ceiling goes three stories up to a skylight but still the room is dingy, the furniture trying and failing to look homey. There's a litter of outdated magazines across the tables, and everything smells like orange furniture polish and dust.

“I didn't think you were allowed them in here, because of the pacemakers and things. Do you think Grandpa's figured it out?”

“Maybe. It's not like he'd say anything.” Mitch met Brian at service camp two summers before, building houses for poor people in Appalachia in between praying and singing hymns. They'd stayed in contact over the winter, phoning and meeting up every so often, then went again to the same service camp
the next summer. He'd come home with the smile, a smile Sally had never seen before, and though he kept it put away most of the time it always popped out when he'd been talking to Brian, or talking about Brian, or sometimes for no reason at all when he was sitting still and thinking. Their mother still points out pretty girls at mass and asks him if he doesn't want to date more, and their father tells her to leave him be, Mitch is a good, responsible boy that others would do to take notes from, Pierce being one. Sally suspects that he plans on getting through his entire life without ever bringing up the fact that he's just not interested in girls that way.

The elevator smells like vomit, Lysol, and cold medicine, and Sally mashes the button to the third floor until the door rumbles closed. As they lurch upward, her stomach is left somewhere in the lobby. She leans back on her hands on the waist-high handrail that runs along the wall, then kicks her feet up onto the one catty-cornered across from her and suspends herself above the antiseptic floor. Elevators make her nervous. Rest homes make her nervous; they're too much like hospitals, which also make her nervous. She suspects that one of the uniformed nurses will pull her into a padded room, strap her into a straitjacket, and no one will ever see her again.

When she was six, Sally came down with bacterial pneumonia. She had started feeling bad one afternoon and fallen asleep on the living-room couch while Mitch and Grandpa Tom played Chinese checkers in the kitchen; Lilly hadn't been born yet and Pierce was grounded to his room for doing something stupid. She'd woken up after dark with a raging fever. She remembers
enjoying the fuss, as her parents always seemed so terminally busy. Her dad had bundled her into an old blanket that he didn't know had been set aside for rags and hauled her to the car, her mother running frantically after. She'd been wedged between them the entire drive to Salisbury, her father hunched over the steering wheel, muttering, her mother whispering that maybe he should slow down, just a little.

She hadn't been to Salisbury, which was off the Island and across the state line in Maryland but still the nearest city to home, since she was born. She hadn't been to a hospital since she was born, either, and craned around to see everything as her father carried her in. They'd filled out forms, talked to nurses, then set her down on a paper-covered table until a doctor could look at her. He came in with his hair all tufted up on one side, eyes dark with lack of sleep, and immediately told her to open her mouth. She'd cooperated, swinging her feet so they bounced against the rubbery cushion of the table, holding absolutely still while the nurse stuck her and filled little glass vials with thick dark blood for testing, until they brought out the medicine in glass eyedroppers.

“What are you giving me?” she'd asked.

“Excuse me?”

“What are you giving me, what does it do?”

The doctor had looked at her for a few moments as if she were a chair that had suddenly started speaking.

“Little girls should be seen and not heard. It will make you better, that's all you need to know.”

She'd opened her mouth for the dropper and swallowed, then made faces at his back as he'd left the room. He was a nasty adult; all she'd wanted to know was what he was giving her.

It was just a hazy memory now, though Sally still felt a strange annoyance whenever she thought about that doctor too hard. The impetus had been planted then. She had no interest in medicine particularly, or the workings of the human body, but she loved chemicals and was dying to know what you could do with them. How they worked. How they cured people.

Grandpa Tom said, whenever she brought it up, that the world could always use another pharmacist or three, or, failing that, someone that knew how to make bombs and mix napalm. But what she hadn't mentioned, because she figured that he knew, was that you didn't get to be a pharmacist without school, and there was no school for pharmacology on the Shore, or even in Salisbury.

Grandpa Skip, her father's father, who lived on the mainland and didn't have all his money tied up in property even though he had several farms all through Virginia, had promised before she was born that he'd pay the way for any of them to go to school, so long as they worked hard and made good. So far, few of her cousins had taken him up on the deal. Most of them were content to stay where they'd been put, could not uproot feet that had been planted since birth in the thick, rich soil of the Shore. She liked to think that she felt even more deeply the thrum of tide in her veins, the pulse of the land, that the islands were more hers, and she more part of them, than any of the other souls who called them home could ever be. But even that pride could not scratch her traveling itch, make her want to stay forever. She wanted there to be a greater destiny, a more important role in her future than just filling in her grandfather's empty footsteps.