TRESCO IS TWO AND A HALF HOURS FROM WASHINGTON, BUT only an hour and a half from Camp David. A thought had been triggered by something Thompson had said – about the box in his dream having been half finished. I let Hetta know I’d be back by dinner.
The sun has slipped behind the trees by the time I pull up in front of the cottage. It has turned cold. The temperature on the dash says three below. Wood smoke from the chimney hangs in the air.
It is ten years, incredibly, since I drove the U-Haul here, packed with Hope’s stuff.
I climb the steps and knock on the screen door.
It opens and she’s there, in jeans and a rollneck sweater. She’s changed her glasses – they’re smaller than they used to be. She has mitts under one arm, an apron under the other.
I feel the heat of the wood-burning stove on my face and smell baking.
Pam’s face is more lined than it used to be. Her trademark Marlboro Reds have taken their toll. She gives me a long, hard stare, then steps forward and hugs me.
‘Josh!’
I’m almost knocked off my feet by Poppy too.
‘Not surprised?’
‘Dog stopped her damn barking soon as you stepped out of the car. Only one person she does that for. What brings you here?’
‘Came to see you.’
She takes a drag on her cigarette and smiles. ‘Bullshit.’
It’s a minute or two before my mother-in-law lets me go.
‘I’ll put on some coffee. You staying?’
‘Not long. I should have called. I’m sorry.’
Pam ushers me inside. A rack laden with cupcakes is waiting to be iced by the sink. She orders me to take a seat and reaches for a pot of coffee.
A pan bubbles on the stove and a half-knitted sweater lies on the table. She makes them for each of her ‘old folk guests’. There are jigsaw pieces on a tray next to it, and next to that, a sudoku puzzle, a crossword and a book on homeopathy. I never could believe her energy and, even now, in her seventies, she still has plenty of it. She’d be up before everybody else, the last to bed, and in between, she’d tend to the every need of ‘her family’, the Five Pines’ twenty residents.
Pam trained as a nurse and has a gallows humor that sustained me during my years as a medic. What she has isn’t much – a small nursing home that’s become part of the community – but it’s hers. She’s worked hard. And she loves it too much to quit.
‘Knew you’d come. Just didn’t think it would take quite so long.’
I hear myself apologizing again.
‘Got yourself into some trouble last week, I read.’
On a cork board, amongst numerous scraps of paper with the scrawled numbers of doctors, florists and funeral homes, are some photos of the residents, a picture of our wedding, one of Hope and another of Jack, and an overblown tabloid headline: Prez’s Doc Tried To Save Crazed Protester.
We chitchat for several minutes, then suddenly she says: ‘You can cut the crap, Josh. I get six cards and half as many emails from you in a decade. So, why are you here?’
‘There’s something I need to ask you.’
‘To do with that?’ She points to the headline.
I can’t lie to her.
‘OK …’ She sits down slowly, watching me.
‘When I brought down the U-Haul, there were only two things of Hope’s I kept. Jack’s old blanket, and her portrait of him. Lately, I’ve taken to looking at it. A lot. I mean, really looking at it. It’s like having him in the room.’
‘She could sure paint.’ She sips her coffee, watching me. ‘They both could.’
‘This may sound strange, but have you ever come across another one?’
She leans back, studying me. ‘Another portrait of Jack? By Hope?’
‘Wearing that old blanket.’
‘The one she was working on when she died?’
‘This one’s different. Finished.’
She shakes her head.
‘No sketches? No preparatory drawings?’
She shakes her head again.
‘Have you been through all her things? The boxes—?’
‘Goddammit, Josh. You want to tell me the hell this is all about?’
I take my phone out and show her the picture from the cabin. Pam studies it a while, shakes her head and hands the phone back.
‘Nobody’s been here, asking questions, have they?’
‘Questions?’
‘About Hope and me.’
She reaches across the table and takes hold of my hand.
‘Hope died a long time ago, Josh. You’ve got to let her go. God knows I adored my child, but she was complicated.’
‘Tell me about it.’ Complicated was one of the three million reasons I loved her. ‘What about her things?’
‘Her things?’
‘The boxes from the U-Haul. Could anybody have gone through them?’
‘Let her go, Josh.’
‘Mind if I take a look?’
I drop to one knee and shine the flashlight under the door.
The light bounces off of the chrome fender of Jack’s Impala – so close it’s almost in my face. I sweep the beam across one tire, then another. Both flat. Breathe in dust and engine oil. The door, its hinges rusted to hell, has jammed a meter from the ground.
Pam is standing just behind me, waving a cigarette. The smoke drifts across the beam. ‘You got a painting and an old blanket. I got his klunker. Good old Jack …’
The way Jack told it, two days after quitting the military, he was making for the coast, enjoying his newfound freedom, when the Impala died on him and, long after he’d fixed it, he and the car remained in Tresco. Jack put it down to fate – the area had once been Shawnee land. Pam had a more prosaic explanation – the Chevy, a ’62 model, was a piece of shit that was running on borrowed time and wouldn’t have made the coast anyway.
Irony is the car’s now worth a small fortune and canny Pam is waiting for the right moment to sell it.
I roll under the door, haul myself to my feet, and dust down my pants and jacket.
Pam’s voice, muffled, comes to me from the other side of it. ‘Switch is on your left as you face the wall. Bulb’s probably shot, though.’
She’s right.
I raise the flashlight. Everything is covered in a thin film of grime. Spiders’ webs hang from two sets of shelves above a workbench; behind the webs are jars with mottled labels filled with liquids and assorted bits and pieces. The moving boxes are stacked against the wall next to the Impala.
I’d shoved Hope’s stuff into boxes four years after she died, and a year after I retrained as a psych. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the paintings. I simply wanted rid of them. Shipping it all back here, I thought, would solve everything. Out of sight, out of mind.
I work my way through the boxes now, find the one labeled ‘Studio’, open it, wedge the flashlight between my neck and my shoulder and start rifling through it. A watercolor of the house, a couple of the beach, the sea beyond the point, a load of still lives, and some sketches: of me, of Heather Kantner, of a load of old people I don’t recognize – her art therapy patients, maybe – and her mom.
But no sign of Jack.
I step back, and stumble over something behind me. There’s an almighty crash and my shoulder hits the wing of the Impala.
‘Josh?’
I tell her I’m fine.
I see the glow of my flashlight beneath the sump, kneel down, my forehead against the cold bodywork, and manage to roll it toward me with my fingertips.
The box I tripped over has split, its contents scattered between the Chevy and the wall. A scrapbook of the artists that had always inspired her: Klimt, Rothko, Picasso, Chagall. The small wooden casket in which she used to keep the things that had been most precious to her.
Inside it, there’s a leather bracelet from Pam, the china rabbit that somehow managed to survive her childhood and make the journey east, a couple of CDs of bands she’d loved, some items of jewelry, a handful of heart-shaped beach pebbles, and her favorite photos. This is probably where she kept the ultrasound scan before taking it to Lakeland that night.
There’s a shot of me taken the year we met, one of Pam smoking, and an envelope marked ‘Jack’ in Hope’s loopy, distinctive hand. It contains a medal ribbon and his three pieces of jewelry: the ankh, the weird, stylized tree in the circle, and the silver star.
There’s a photograph, too, in color, but so faded it could almost be sepia-tinted, of a couple of guys in flight suits and Aviators in the cockpit of a plane. It takes me a second to realize one of them is Jack.
I once asked him what he’d flown in Vietnam, but never got a straight answer. I knew forward air controllers hadn’t had it easy. Their job had been to fly low and slow over the jungle, watching for enemy troop movements and calling down strikes.
I smile to myself. Before Jack grew his hair, before he smoked himself to death, he had really looked the part.
There’s a motif on the fuselage, just below his right arm.
It’s a mean-looking blade with a snake coiled around it, jaws open, fangs exposed, ready to strike. On the side of the cockpit is a single word: Jackknife.
The scrawled signature bottom right of the picture catches my eye. The writing is unmistakably Jack’s.
I tilt it to the light.
It says ‘Mac’.