Up Island, page 40
He smiled then.
“I’ve missed you, Pat. I wonder why I didn’t know that,” he said.
“About Luz…” I began.
“My sister Hannah is coming in to sit with her in a little while,” Pat Norton said. “And some of the others will spell her. Luz seems okay, considering. I don’t think she comprehends, do you?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem that way so far,” I said. “Thanks, Pat. When I’ve looked in on my father and cleaned up, I’ll be back to take over.”
“Molly,” she said, putting an arm around my shoulders, “let us do it. God knows we did little enough for them while Bella was alive. Maybe they wouldn’t have let us, anyway, but we could have tried harder. This is ours to do now.”
Then what is mine to do? I thought desolately, but did not say it aloud. It seemed an almost unimaginably selfish thought.
On the way back to the pond, Dennis laid his head against the back of the seat and, despite the truck’s drunken lurching, slept. Or I thought that he did. But just as we reached the cutoff down to the Ponder camps, he said, eyes still closed, “They weren’t what she told me. I don’t think they ever were. Just my grandmother, and I guess my father. In the long run they could have accepted her and Luz; maybe they knew anyway. They’ve accepted more than that in all the hundreds of years they’ve been in this place. She could have had some kind of life here. I could have…”
“You still can,” I said softly, but he did not answer.
Though it was nearly nine-thirty when I got home, there was no sound from my father’s room upstairs. Lazarus lay quietly on the rug in front of the dead fire, waiting for me. He thumped his tail and rose to meet me, and went with me up the stairs to wake my father and tell him about Bella Ponder. But the curtains were still drawn, and he was still asleep. I shook him gently.
“Let me sleep,” he murmured, not opening his eyes. “She’s here. Let me sleep.”
I went back downstairs and shucked off my clothes and slept, too.
They buried her in the old cemetery on a day so warm and still and tender that you could almost feel the leaves pushing out of their woody prisons, the first flowers stirring and fretting to be born. The sky over the Sound was a fresh-washed blue, and small, puffed, silver-limned clouds sailed slowly in from the south. From all the moist places up island the pinkletinks chimed. Every now and then the querulous honk of a returning goose broke the late-morning silence, and up at the edge of the cemetery one of the small roving herds of guineas darted and gabbled and dipped their ridiculous pinheads into the grass.
There were perhaps twenty assorted Ponders, plus their spouses and progeny, on hand, standing quietly around the newly-dug grave as the young minister from the Congregational church in Chilmark read the simple old service for the burial of the dead. I stood alone at the back of the small crowd; Dennis stood in the middle, obviously uncomfortable in a dark, rumpled suit that hung on him like a scarecrow’s. I had helped him pin the left trouser leg up that morning, so that it did not flap. There were no hymns sung, and no one said the elegiac words over the dead that I had dreaded. It would have seemed a sacrilege. No one seemed to expect Dennis to say anything, either, and he did not. When the short service was over and the concluding prayer done, the Ponders who remained up island shook his hand gravely, and some of them patted him awkwardly on the back, and Pat Norton, who stood beside him, said, “We didn’t think a get-together back at the farmhouse would be a good idea, with Luz there and all, but all of us will call you in a day or two. You’ll have more dinner invitations than you ever had in your life. And there are people lined up to sit with Luz in eight-hour shifts for two or three days, until you can decide what should be…you know, done about her. I guess you don’t know any more than we do about any family she might have left in America. If you want to see about nursing homes on the island, or some other kind of facility, I think we can help you there. There are one or two state-supported places. You just let us know. I’d bet that there’s enough cash in Bella’s account to see you through the first few weeks and get Luz settled somewhere. Molly, you know where she banks, don’t you? Banked, I mean? They’ll know. Nobody will hassle you about getting into her account, I don’t think, Denny. After probate, you’ll have the farm, of course, but we can certainly help out some…”
“Go home, Pat,” Dennis said, kissing her on the cheek. “You’re going to drop in your tracks. If you’ve left anything undone, I can’t imagine what it is. I’ll think about Luz and let you know. I don’t have to say thank you, do I?”
“No. But I’m sorry about the pigtails’ would be a good start.”
Back at the farmhouse, after the Ponder cousin who was sitting with Luz had made us coffee and cut one of six or seven cakes that had come tiptoed out, we sat down in the living room and looked at Luz Ferreira. She looked back, alert and sweet-faced, smiling her joy at seeing Dennis again. The Ponder cousin had combed her hair into a silver halo and put a dab of lipstick on her little mouth, and there was a cloud of something that smelled like old-fashioned rosewater in the stale air. Dennis and I looked at each other. She could not have weighed ninety pounds, but she loomed as large in the dim old room as Bella ever had, as massive as an anchor. What on earth was going to become of her now?
“We need to talk a little now, Luz,” Dennis said finally. “We need to talk some about Bella, and then about…what we’re all going to do later. We need to make some plans.”
The sweet smile deepened. It was obvious to me that she did not comprehend that Bella was gone. I wondered if she ever would, and when she did, who would be there to help her bear it.
“All right, Denny,” she said, like a good child. “And then you can help me pack. I have a suitcase all my own; it’s blue. Bella gave it to me for Christmas…sometime.”
My heart contracted with pity.
“Where are you going, sweetie?” I said softly, pushing the spindrift hair off her face.
“Why…home with Denny. I know I can’t stay here. I can’t climb the stairs. Bella said I was to go with Denny now. I guess I’ll stay until she comes for me. I don’t remember what she said about that.”
I could feel pure pain twist my face; I buried it in her hair so that she would not see it.
“Oh, honey,” I began.
“Who wants some ice cream?” Dennis said loudly. “I saw some Chunky Monkey in the freezer. It seems a shame to let it go to waste.”
“Oh, I do,” cried Luz, clapping her hands.
I just looked at him.
“Come on in the kitchen and help me, Molly,” he said. “You can carry the bowls.”
He was halfway across the floor before I got up and followed him.
“We can’t put this off forever,” I whispered. “We were halfway there. Why didn’t you just go on with it? There’s not going to be a better time to tell her…”
He was fumbling in the freezer.
“Can you get her ready? Pack up some things, and all?” he said over his shoulder.
“Ready for what?”
“Ready to come back to my place with me.”
“You have got to be kidding,” I said, slowly and fervently.
He turned to look at me.
“No. It makes sense. You wouldn’t have to be running up here every five minutes, and no one else would either. No one would have to stay. You’d have both of us right down there at your doorstep. And there’s a lot I can do for her, more than you think…”
“Dennis, she just needs so much…”
“It would kill her to put her in some kind of home, Molly,” he said.
I was quiet for a long time, trying to think it out, trying to feel how it would be. The dwindling old woman, the very sick man, there in the glade with me. With me and the father I was, ever so slowly, losing. With only me and a dog and a place of straw under the steps where two swans had been but no longer were…could I feel that?
Could I do that?
Yes, I could.
“You know you’ll probably have to do it eventually,” I said slowly.
“But not now. Not today. By God, Molly, not yet.”
“Denny?” Luz called from the living room.
“Coming. Just getting your stuff together, toots,” he called back.
I went upstairs to find Luzia’s blue Christmas suitcase and pack her things.
It took a long time to get her moved into Dennis’s camp. Patricia Norton and her son and a friend carried Luz’s tiny body and her few possessions—scuffed, old-fashioned children’s things—to the friend’s Explorer, where the backseat had been removed. I went ahead with Dennis and together we moved his things out of the downstairs bedroom and I put fresh linen on the bed that would, now, be Luz’s.
“Where will you sleep?” I said, shaking out quilts and fluffing pillows. I had brought them from the farmhouse, new ones that Bella had obviously put away for a rainy day. Oh, God, Bella…they smelled of camphor and lavender, but they still bore their tags, and the creases of newness. Somehow, they turned the rough, masculine room into the bower of a young girl.
“On the sofa in front of the fire,” he said. “You have no idea how often I fall asleep there anyway. Don’t frown, Molly, it’ll be much better. My books will already be where I am and I won’t have to get up and stump around in the dark looking for them, and I can get at the Scotch a lot easier, and if you should just happen, one fine day, to come around saying, ‘Please, sir, can I have some more?’ I won’t have to throw old Luz out of her room, and nobody will have to worry about corrupting the morals of an old lady.”
I looked at him, startled. Was he teasing me? He had been quiet and withdrawn all day, gone inside himself, I thought, against the weight of whatever it was he felt as he watched his mother lowered into the earth of up island. I realized that I was not likely ever to know what that was. I realized, too, that I was probably not ever going to be able to tell when he was teasing me.
How long, for Dennis Ponder and for me, was “ever” going to be?
He was not smiling, but something in his eyes was more alive, more present, than I had seen all day.
“We couldn’t have that,” I said, and bent to pick up the pile of used bedding.
“Molly.”
“What?”
“Are you? Going to ask?”
I straightened up and looked at him.
“Am I going to be around to ask, Dennis?” I said.
He frowned.
“Why wouldn’t you be?”
“My contract was with your mother. I have to assume it’s void now.”
“Your contract, if you want to call it that, was with me. She was just an agent. I don’t see any reason to void it unless you want to. Luz and I still need some looking after. I’ve gotten better about what I can do, but I don’t know…how long that will last. I’d have to get someone for Luz whatever happens. Why can’t it be you? Do you…are you thinking of going home?”
I shook my head impatiently. I had not been thinking of anything. Too much had happened too fast. Now, though, I saw just how profoundly our situation had changed. He was better, or at least had learned the parameters of his small world so well that he could operate in it almost unaided. Whether it was healing or mere adaptation, I did not know, but it was real. There were resources, now, to help with Luz; his Ponder kin stood ready, if he should ask. And the powerful chord that held me to the glade had always been, I knew now, Bella Ponder. Without her presence looming from the farmhouse on the moor, my hold on this small world felt flaccid and tenuous. I hung in the air of the glade, unable to touch earth, unable to fly away.
And, of course, there was my father. I could see it so clearly, all of a sudden. What had I been thinking of? I needed to get help for him and I needed to do it quickly. Why had I not seen it before?
On the other hand…Atlanta. I saw it clearly, in a split-second crack of clarity: the anonymous tiled clinic for my father, with the daily visits and the drugs and the steps forward and the slides back, and the needless, endless “family therapy.” And then the “long-term facility…” I had volunteered at enough mental health facilities to know where clinical depression in the elderly generally led.
And the sessions with Missy and Tee and some smooth-visaged, feral lawyer, in Missy’s ridiculous Laura Ashley office. Endless, endless…Or else, the talks with Tee alone, in the Ansley Park house he had wanted to give to Sheri Scroggins and now wanted back; the dull rehashing of hurt and anger and guilt where before there had been laughter and easiness and old, warm love. Could I do that? Could I sit in my own library or on my own terrace with Tee Redwine and try to reconstruct a life he had blown to smithereens? Did I want to?
And if I didn’t, what did I want? And who? Was there anything at all available to me that could possibly last?
“Dennis,” I said, “I don’t even know where home is.”
“Then stick around until you figure it out,” he said, and turned away to finish pushing a box of books out of the room with his crutch.
From my own camp the silent pull of my receding father was as strong as that of the moon on the tide.
“There’s the little matter of Daddy,” I said. “It seems to me neither of us has given that much thought. I don’t think it can wait, now.”
He did not speak. When finally he started to, we heard the crunch of the Explorer’s tires coming into the glade, and it was time to bring Luzia Ferreira home.
It was late, after dark, when I finished at Dennis’s and walked home across the glade. The moon path lay thick and satiny on the Sound, and though there was still no green on the branches of the hardwoods, there was the foreshadowing of it in the pervasive wet, cold greenness that shimmered from the earth and water. I was very tired. Luz had been as giddy and over-wrought as a child in a new place, and had had to be soothed and read to and fed by hand. She remembered the swans when she saw the glade, and cried out so frantically to go and see them that Dennis had finally said, rather sharply, “Hush. It’s past the swans’ bedtime. Tomorrow will be soon enough for the swans,” and she had subsided, and soon forgotten them in the shower of words from Anne of Green Gables that he was reading to her. It must, I thought, have been his daughter’s book. I did not know what he would tell her about the swans, but I was determined not to be there when he did it.
I called out to my father, but got no reply, and went up the dark stairs to look in on him. It was barely eight o’clock, but he was already deep in sleep. Whether or not the pills had taken him no longer mattered; night and sleep were his world now. I saw, with my new clarity, that he was already more than half gone from me, half down there with her.
I knew then that I would have to take him home. The weight of the knowing almost bent me double.
My mother came to the edge of my cave that night. Free of her subterranean bars, she fluttered there for a long time, and for some reason I could not see her clearly, but the sense of her was terribly strong. In my dream I literally willed my eyes to see her and finally they did; she was smiling. It was a small, curved, kitten’s smile; I had seen it many times before, when she had made her point, won her game. As I stared, she turned away and then she faded.
“No, you won’t,” I said to her in my dream, between clenched teeth, and I struggled so hard to reach her that I could feel, in sleep, the sweat start on my face. But I could not reach her, and I could not wake.
Beside me, on the floor, I could hear Lazarus begin to growl, softly and eerily, and then I heard him spring up and scrabble across the floor and out the dog door, and heard his great, booming barking begin. Still I struggled in sleep, caught in the tendrils of the dream. When the barking did not stop, I woke abruptly.
He was still barking. There was a purposeful note in it: It was not the barking that meant he was bored and simply wished to start a commotion. I sat up in the damp, tangled sheets, aching all over from the force of my struggle to wake, feeling thick and heavy and mindless. The barking went on and on. Outside, the morning light was pale and new.
I knew Lazarus would not stop until I stopped him, so I got up and pulled on the clothes I had left in a pile beside my bed—my funeral clothes; what a long time ago that seemed—and started heavily for the door. I heard Dennis then.
He was shouting hoarsely from down by the pond, over and over. I could not make out what he was saying. My heart literally stopped. Daddy…
But then I heard that he was saying, “Get Tim! Get Tim! Molly, bring Tim!,” and I turned and scrambled up the stairs and into my father’s bedroom and shook him hard. I knew without seeing why Dennis wanted my father. I will never know how, but I did.
He did not want to wake, and he did not want to come with me when he did, and was petulant and then quite sharp with me; I simply grabbed him by his shoulders and pulled him out of bed and jerked him to his feet. I remember being shocked that he was so light; he seemed, now, all hollow bone, like a huge bird. But I did not dwell on it; I would deal with it later. When I had him on his feet, swaying and fussing in his too-large pajamas, I bent and literally jammed his feet into his slippers. Then I pulled him down the stairs so fast that we both nearly tumbled to the bottom.
“What are you doing?” he kept demanding, in a sick child’s whine. “Where are we going? What is the matter with you?”
We were halfway down the path to the pond when we saw them. I stopped abruptly, and he did, too. He stopped struggling with me and slowly, very slowly, his arms came down to his sides. Then he lifted them slightly, as if he might be about to stretch lightly after sleep.
The two swans were waddling awkwardly up the path toward us. Behind them, Lazarus capered, barking and barking, keeping his distance. Behind him, Dennis ran and fell and got up and ran again, laughing. Laughing. The swan in front was smaller than the one behind, obviously newly grown, and so white that she shone in the pale sun. There seemed to me no doubt that it was a pen. She was frightened and angry, and she kept stopping and turning around and darting her beautiful, sinuous neck at the larger swan and at Lazarus, and once or twice lifted her wings into the busking position. They glistened as if they had been dipped in liquid crystal. But the big swan behind her would hiss and grunt and thrust at her with his beak, and she would start forward again. Charles. There could be no doubt, either, that the big, dingy cob was Charles, and that he was bringing his new pen to see my father. I sat down on the path and began to cry.
