I didn’t tell him for over a week. For the first part of that time I was afraid that he was seriously ill. For the middle part of it he slept. During the last of it he was gone again. By the time I got to him, almost everyone on Peacock’s Island knew what my decision was but my husband.
By that time, everything had changed.
I got him to the doctor the day after he got in. He did not even argue vigorously; he was too subdued for that, and his stomach was hurting him rather a lot. He did not tell me this, but he did voluntarily ask for an antacid. I had never known him to take one before. When he went to get water to wash it down, I called Charlie Porter in Charleston and he worked us in late that afternoon.
Charlie had been at Virginia with Clay and Hayes, and they had remained friends as well as doctor and patients. He had a lucrative practice in the new medical complex over on Calhoun, and he and Hayes played tennis a couple of times a week, or sailed from the Yacht Club. Clay saw him less often, but regularly, usually when he was in Charleston overnight. Charlie and Happy sometimes had him to dinner at their house on Tradd, or he and Charlie went to the club. Charlie was tall, thin, bald, and laid-back to the point of seeming asleep much of the time you were talking to him. But he wasn’t.
“What you need most is a solid month at one of your own resorts,” he said at the end of the day, when he had come with Clay back to the town house on Eliott and was having a drink with us. He stood in front of the fireplace, where I had lit the little fatwood fire that was kept laid there, his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth.
“I don’t feel tired,” Clay said restlessly. “I never did. I just got too hot and got dizzy for a minute. You never got too hot?”
“I never move that fast,” Charlie said affably, and took a swallow of his scotch. “I don’t care how you feel. You don’t know how you feel. That’s your problem. You’ve been running flat out on empty for a long time. You need some rest and I’m not kidding about that. What do you think an ulcer means? What do you think passing out in the middle of a parking lot means? I know about that; Hayes told me. Carter told him. You’re lucky there’s not any permanent damage. Your heart and your blood pressure are basically okay, though I’d like to get the pressure down some. But there are other indicators and you’ve got all of them. God knows what your blood work will show. What are you eating? Are you eating? You say you’re not sleeping very well.…”
“I never slept a lot.…” Clay said, not looking at him.
“You slept more than two or three hours a night or you’d be dead,” Charlie said.
“Can you do anything with him, Stretch?” he said, looking over at me. He has called me that ever since we met. I come about to Charlie’s shoulder when we stand together.
“Nothing short of drugging him,” I said lightly, to mask the concern I felt. I was glad to hear that Clay’s heart was not faulty, but I did not like the sound of the passing out or the insomnia. Not at all. I could not remember a time when Clay had not simply functioned physically like a well-made machine.
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Charlie said.
And that’s what we did. Charlie wrote a prescription for Halcion and Zantac, and I went to the big Eckard’s on Calhoun and had them filled. On the way home I looked at the dense little city unrolling outside my windows. It was still balmy and there were people on all the narrow streets in the historic district and around Colonial Lake, strolling or jogging or riding bicycles or in-line skating. The twilight was clear and green, the kind of late winter light that speaks of coming spring and blooming things, and indeed, the big camellia bushes in the gardens of most of the old houses were full to bursting, and whenever I got in and out of the car I caught the breath of the Confederate jasmine that is January’s gift to the Lowcountry. I was caught and pinned with a sudden, overwhelming sense of sheer community, of the presence all around me of my fellow species. It was a benevolent presence, and I did not feel it as a weight but as a lifting.
Could I live here? I thought, turning off Meeting Street onto Tradd. Lights were coming on in the streetside windows. Through the sheer blinds and curtains that people in the shoulder-to-shoulder district South of Broad affect, I could see beautiful rooms swimming with lamp and firelight reflected off polished old wood, and the gleam of silver and china, and the dark chiaroscuro of gilt-framed ancestors on paneled walls.
If the worst happened, like Clay says it might, and we could not live on Peacock’s anymore, could I come and live in the little house on Eliott, and be a part of this?
I could if I still had the island, I thought. But then the image came, of masts and antennas and aerials and putting greens and golf carts, and of the silent pewter creek “redirected” so as to fool me into thinking that there was no water traffic outside my windows. A lump formed in my throat, and when Clay asked if I wanted to stay over at the town house, I said no, that I thought we should go home. I did not think that anything but the dark marshes would cleanse my mind of the pictures there.
When we got home I gave him one of the Halcions and he went to bed in our big bedroom. He was sleeping quietly when I came to bed a couple of hours later. But when I woke up, he was asleep on the little daybed in my sitting room across the hall.
“I got up to get some water and just wandered in there and fell asleep,” he said. But the next morning I awoke and found him there again.
“Okay. Tell me,” I said, when he woke, cramped and stunned, to find me sitting in the wing chair beside him.
“I…Caro, do you dream about Kylie?” he said, and my heart stopped and then jolted forward again. Clay had not spoken of Kylie since before Thanksgiving when he had found me in her room.
“Sometimes,” I said after a while. “I didn’t know you did, though.”
“I never have,” he said, and his face was slack and grayish in the early morning light, and his voice empty. “But for the past two nights I’ve dreamed about her, and they’re…not good dreams. It has something to do with the ocean. It seems louder than it has, or something…it keeps getting into my sleep. I always liked that sound before, but now…Listen, would you care if I slept in here for a while? Just until I get caught up and back to the office?”
He had promised Charlie that he would take a long weekend off. I had thought it was a wonderful idea, but now I was not so sure. Maybe, in this new vulnerability of his, the structure and discipline of the office would serve him better than this utterly alien, unformed time. Then I thought, My poor lost Kylie. First I bind her with my own need, and then her father, whom we thought had let her go a long time ago, calls her back with his delayed grief, or whatever this is. I had assumed that he had dealt with his own pain in silence, but perhaps he had merely buried it, and it had found a weakness in the wall only now and broken through. Old sorrow and an obscure anger welled; I can’t even handle my own need for her, I thought. Don’t ask me to shoulder yours.
“Of course I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “It’s probably a good idea. Didn’t Charlie say that Halcion sometimes caused increased dreaming?”
Clay sighed and rubbed his eyes, and turned over.
“I guess he did. I think I’ll nap just a little longer. Don’t wait breakfast on me.”
He slept for most of three days and nights. Sometimes I came and sat beside him and simply looked at him. In the dim light his Christmas tan looked bleached, and his sun-streaked hair was simply a lightless brown, dull, rough. He looked thinner and smaller under the light duvet I had put over him, and his face was naked and somehow blurred, hollow at the cheekbones and temples. He looked at once much younger and quite old. I remembered how he had seemed to me the second time I saw him, when he had come alone to the island in Shem Cutler’s boat, and I had seen that he was not golden and radiant after all, or limned in light, but merely a too-pale, too-thin outlander with no magic to him. Until he had smiled.
I wished he would wake up now and smile, but he did not. He simply slept, and slept, and slept, and I watched him as I had my children.
“Let him,” Charlie said on the third day, when I called him, alarmed. “It’s what he needs. It’s what I hoped he’d do.”
“He looks dead, Charlie.”
“Who looks good when they sleep, Caro? Except you, of course. Find yourself something to do and let him sleep. He’ll wake up when he’s ready, and you’ll see a big change in him.”
And so, on the afternoon of the third day, I got into the Cherokee and went at last to Dayclear, to do, finally, what I had promised Hayes I would do.
In the days after Kylie, I became skilled at living on the very top level of my mind. Part of this process consisted of a conscious, ongoing dialogue with myself about the things I saw in the world around me. I was aware that I was doing it; I even came to call the process my little class trips, as in, “Oh, look, class, there’s the first robin of spring,” or “Class, notice particularly how pretty Mrs. Carmichael’s tulips are this year.” Even when the nethermost core of me was screaming with pain and loss, even when foreboding loomed in my subconscious like an iceberg, I was able to take my class trips and keep myself in the moment. The amount of focus and single-mindedness it required was astonishing. If I could have harnessed it I might have lit leaves and paper to fire with the sheer force of my concentration. It is a talent I have yet to find any real use for, beyond the numbing of pain.
So even as I drove over the bridge onto the island, passing over the rippling marshes and the tranquil black water of the slough, I did not think, as I might have, of what I would see here if Dayclear became the epicenter of another Peacock Island Plantation property or, rather, what I would not. And I did not see in my mind the face of my depleted and diminished husband as he slept, or wonder what might become of him if I could not, after all, bring myself to deed the island back over to him. I only thought that if the mild weather continued we would have one of those rare, perfect, attenuated springs where everything reached its absolute optimum early and balanced there, shimmering with life and perfection, long after the savage young summer should have been born.
“A perfect spring for painting; I’ll have to get back to it,” I said chattily to myself.
But the other thoughts, the older, darker ones, were there. I felt them, bumping like sharks, down deep.
When I came into the settlement, it seemed that everyone in it was out renewing themselves in the sun. Old men sat on the porch and steps of the store, wrinkled old turtles’ faces turned up to the light, drowsing or nodding among themselves. I knew that, barring a deadly cold snap, they would sit there now until late next fall. A ritual herd movement had taken place.
A few of the younger men and women were scratching in the bare garden plots across the road from the cabins, turning over the rich black soil, perhaps to ready it for planting—though that lay a month or so ahead—or perhaps just to see what they could see. Old women hung laundry on sagging lines behind the houses; in the soft, fresh little wind sheets and underwear and overalls billowed like sails, and would, I knew, smell fragrant beyond words when donned, sweet with salt and sun. A couple of old women sat in chairs set out in front of the houses, watching children toddling and stumbling after thin black dogs and chickens in swept-out dooryards. In a dooryard near the end of the line of cabins, old Toby Jackson, near-blind and smiling, looked into the sky. I wondered what he saw behind his useless lids. Perhaps he smiled because it was wonderful beyond the telling; wouldn’t that itself be wonderful? His hands were busy with the coils of a sweet-grass basket, as they almost always were, and the grand paisley Legare Street shawl lay loosely on his shoulders, more decoration than protection on this soft day.
I went into the store and found Janie behind the counter, as usual. She had opened both the front and back doors, and light that did not reach the fusty old interior all winter flooded it, picking out the astounding clutter and shabbiness and dust. The iron stove was cold. All the old men were outside. Janie was propped, elbows on the counter, flipping through a book of lottery tickets. Out back I could hear garbage cans rattling. Esau, hastily tidying up for the spring that had come before he was ready for it.
“Hey, Caro,” Janie said, flashing her gold-toothed smile. “It’s God’s day, ain’t it?”
“It is indeed,” I said, smiling back at her. “You fixing to win the lottery?”
“From yo’ lips to God’s ear,” she said. “Shoot, why not? Lady over to John’s Island won fifteen thousand dollars last month. Never had a pot to piss in before, neither.”
“What did she do with it?”
“Got her boy to buy her a double wide over to Edisto. Gon’ start a beauty parlor over there.”
“Wonder why she didn’t stay on John’s?” I said.
“Oh, most of the folks around where she live is old. They either wears head rags or does hair wrappin’. Not much business in the old places.”
“What about you, Janie? Would you stay here if you hit the jackpot?”
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“You handin’ out money today?”
“Well, I wish, but no, I was just curious.”
She sighed.
“I don’t know. That’s God’s truth. There ain’ much over here. Never has been. But the spaces, they’re easy on the eyes, you know. The marsh and the woods, they don’t confuse the mind like the cities do. When I go over that bridge I always come home with my head achin’ and my eyes wo’ out from things and stuff. Look like I can’t look at but one or two things at a time. I might feel different if I was younger, but I ’spec it’s too late for me to move now. This old place, this is a good place for the old folks. We don’t need much, but what we do need is right here.”
I dropped my eyes. I had thought I might go from one villager to another, the ones I knew, anyway, and tell them what SouthWard proposed merely as part of an idle conversation on a spring day, but I saw that I could not do that. I could not say it but once.
“Is Ezra around?” I said. “I need to talk to him.”
“He and Luis gone over to the old cemetery with Auntie Tuesday to clean up the family plots. They took the chirrun and that Sophie with ’em. She want to make pictures of the markers, she say. I don’t know if Auntie gon’ let her do that or not. Ain’t too many white folks seen that graveyard.”
“Sophia’s not white,” I said in confusion.
“Yeah, she white. She might be black in her blood, but she white in her mind,” Janie said. “Least she used to be. Look like she changin’ some these days. Ol’ Ezra, he talkin’ his trash to her all the time now. Not many gals stand up to Ezra’s trash.”
I laughed, surprised at the acuity of her words. “White in her mind.” It was just what Sophia Bridges was.
“You know when they’ll be back?”
“I git ’em in here now if you really need ’em,” she said, and turned and went out onto the rickety little back porch. I followed, protesting that I could wait.
But she had already taken up a weathered old wooden mallet, and with it she struck a mighty blow on a huge, age-blackened bronze bell that sat at the foot of the back steps. It was as big around as an oil tank, and rose above her waist. I thought it must be centuries old, and hand cast. It spoke with a great, ponderous boom that rolled away through the drowsing woods like summer thunder, echoing and echoing until I lost it among the farthest trees back to the west, fringing the inland waterway.
“My lord,” I said reverently. “That’s some bell.”
“Sho’ is. Used to be a quittin’ bell on one of them big indigo plantations on Edisto. Called folks out of the fields five miles away.”
“How did it get over here?”
“Esau’s great-granddaddy took it when they ’mancipated him, instead of money or a mule. Took him three weeks to git it over here by oxcart. Said from then on he was gon’ to be the only one to ring that bell, and while he was alive, he was. You listen now.”
I did. From far away came the thin shriek of what I first took to be a hunting osprey, or perhaps even an eagle, but did not sound quite right for that.
“That’s Ezra,” Janie said. “He got him one of them whistles ladies in the city carries to keep from gittin’ jumped on at night. They be on in here terreckly.”
And in ten minutes or so I saw them, trudging up the sandy white road that led away into the scrub and the forest. Mark and Lita capered in front, with Sophia just behind them. I could see the easy swing of her stride even though I could not make out her features yet. Then came Ezra’s great bulk with the tiny figure of his aunt on his arm, and behind him, carrying what looked to be hoes and a rake, came Luis Cassells. I realized that I would know his great-shouldered slouch anywhere. Auntie’s rangy yellow dog trotted at his heels.
When I had hugged the children and greeted everybody and they had settled Auntie Tuesday into a chair on the porch, Janie brought opened Mello Yellos and Mountain Dews for us, and we sat down on the porch steps. The old men nodded and smiled and dozed. No one spoke. Ezra and Luis looked at me keenly, but I simply could not get my tongue working. I wished I was anywhere on the face of the earth but here, about to propose this monstrous indignity to these dignified people.
Finally Ezra said, “I think you’ve got something to say to us, Caro.”
And I sighed, and took a deep breath, and said, “I’m only here because I promised I would tell you this. I want you to know that it is not my idea. I still feel the way about this island that I always have. But I promised.”
He nodded, not speaking. I could not read his eyes. Luis was not looking at me but out across the cleared field to the edge of the forest. Sophia Bridges looked at her feet. They were shod in muddy old tennis shoes and she wore filthy blue jeans and a sweatshirt whose message had long since faded. Her narrow, beautiful head was wrapped in a kerchief in the manner of the other women in Dayclear. She looked as near as Sophia could look, I thought, to belonging here.
Auntie Tuesday nodded her head and made a sort of hypnotic humming sound: “MMMMM hummmm, Mmmm hummmmm…”
I realized she was singing to herself, but I could not tell what the song was.
And so I told them. About the dilemma Clay found himself in—though I could not have said why I did that—and about his and Hayes’s long search for something that would save the company and the jobs of so many people, and finally about SouthWard. I did not think that the name would mean much to most of the villagers, but Ezra looked away from me, and Luis made a soft little sound of disgust, and I knew that they knew of it. I also knew, somehow, that they were not surprised to hear the name on my lips. I felt my face color, but I went on.
I told them everything Hayes had told me. I was very careful about that. I told them just what SouthWard proposed to build on this land, and also how they proposed to mitigate the project so as not to disturb the settlement or my house too much. I told them about the dredging and the rerouting of the creek, and about the berms and the greenbelts and the careful indigenous landscaping. I saw a few eyes go to Luis Cassells then. And finally I told them about the plans for the settlement, ending with the offers of health insurance and steady salaries and central heating and television and indoor plumbing for everybody, and about the catch-up tutoring for the children. Finally I fell silent. I was standing so that to look at them was to look into the sun, and I could not do it, and was glad. I pulled my sunglasses out of my pocket and put them on. In the dark green world the people of Dayclear stood silent and still, looking at me with polite, closed faces.
“You may want to talk about this among yourselves,” I said finally. “You probably will. I don’t think you have to decide one way or another right now, but I do think the company wants to move pretty quickly on it, so I guess I’ll go on and let you talk. Maybe Ezra can come and tell me when you’ve made some decision. I’ll let the…right people know. And I’ll answer any questions you have right now, if I can.”
I waited again. Nothing. Only still black faces, looking at me.
“Anybody?”
“I think everybody pretty much agrees that it’s up to you, Caro. Not us,” Ezra Upchurch said. His voice was as soft as the breath of a sleeping tiger, but it was still a tiger’s breath.
“Oh, no,” I said, distressed. “Of course it’s not up to me. It’s up to all of you; that’s the whole point. I’m only relaying the message. It’s entirely up to you all.…”
“Ain’t us owns this island,” a cracked old voice said. I did not know whose it was.
“I know that, but I’d never go against your wishes. You must know that. I promised my grandfather…I never would.…I only thought that this new thing might make things better for some of you. I know how hard it is to get good medical and dental care sometimes, and how much plumbing costs, and heating.…”
But I did not know those things and fell silent. I should not have come. I should not have come. I should not have let Hayes talk me into this. He had used my fallen husband to get me to do this; I saw that now. I took a deep breath and started to speak, but then Toby Jackson spoke. I had not seen him join the group on the porch. I supposed that his old wife must have guided him up the road.
“Miss Caro, is people gon’ come over here and pay to look at us?” he said.
Something cold and rock-hard around my heart cracked and broke open. I almost stumbled with the release of it.
“No, they are not,” I said as clearly as I could pitch my trembling voice. “They are not going to do that because I am not going to turn this land over to the Peacock Island Plantation Company. Not now and not ever. I’m sorry I even let them talk me into telling you about it, and we will not speak of it again unless you all bring it up.”
I waited a while, my breath coming fast and shallow, to see what they would say. A few of them nodded, and one or two smiled a little at me, as they always did, but still no one spoke, and I wondered if I had made myself clear. I started to speak again, and then did not. I stood a minute longer.
“Thank you for your time,” I said idiotically, and turned to go.
“Wait a minute,” Sophia called after me. “If you’ll give me a ride back it’ll save Ezra a trip.”
“Of course,” I said automatically. My ears were ringing with the silence of the people of Dayclear.
She left to get her things together and call Mark from the backyard of the store, where he and Lita were chasing a platoon of squawking Domineckers.
Luis Cassells came down off the porch and fell into step beside me. He did not speak, either, until we had reached the Cherokee. I got in and he put his hand on the rim of the lowered window and looked in at me.
“How are you feeling about all this? It was a tough thing to do and a brave one,” he said.
“It was a stupid thing to do,” I said. “I never should even have mentioned it. It should not have come up. Luis, do you think they understand that I mean to keep the island? That they’re okay; they’re safe?”
“They understand everything,” he said. “They’re grateful to you, even if they aren’t ready to show it yet. You don’t have to worry about that. They’ve always known where your heart was, Caro. They just haven’t been sure whether you would follow it.”
“I’ve tried to do that,” I said tremulously. I wanted to cry, to howl aloud. I had just doomed my husband’s company.
I said as much to Luis Cassells.
“It was the right choice,” he said.
“I just did in my husband’s entire future,” I said, trying to smile. “You’ll excuse me if I can’t feel too confident about my choice.”
He shook his tangled dark head. “Your decision about Dayclear isn’t the agent of your husband’s future’s tailspin, Caro, much as people might like you to think it is. And it’s not the only one for him. He could have others that don’t cost so much. You could, too…”
“No,” I said. “Not Clay. For him, I think the company has been the only one.”
“Then you don’t know anything, carita,” he said, and pulled his head out of my window and went back down the hill. It was not until Sophia and Mark were in the car and we were headed back down the road toward the bridge that I realized he had said not Carita but querida.
The Spanish for “dear.”
We were across the bridge and back on Peacock’s before we spoke. Sophia sat in the front seat beside me, her feet propped up on the Cherokee’s dashboard, her head thrown far back against the seat. The sinews in her long feet stood out as she wedged them for support, and her eyes were closed. She still wore the headwrap. Her feet were dirty; somehow I liked that. In the backseat, Mark’s sleepy grizzling had subsided into the real thing.
Finally I said, “I know you’ll have to tell Clay about this, but I wish you’d wait until after I do, okay? He’s not in good shape. It didn’t go well in Puerto Rico.”
“I’m not going to tell him,” she said, eyes still closed.
“Sophia…where are you on all this?”
She opened her eyes and looked over at me.
“I don’t know. I just…don’t know. You going to turn me in to headquarters, Caro?”
I laughed.
“For what? Disloyalty? I’m really the one to do that, aren’t I?”
“‘Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!’” she said, and her voice had a rich hill of laughter in it.
“When I first read that, in junior high, I thought it might have been written for me,” I said, laughing at her laughter. “It was just the way I felt. ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?…’”
“‘Are you—Nobody—too?’ God, if you thought that was you, just imagine who I thought it was. A little black girl in Brooklyn Heights with a rich mama and daddy who raised her white…I didn’t fit in anywhere. They left it up to me to decide which world I would live in. As it turned out, neither one wanted me very much.”
“And which did you?” I asked. It seemed suddenly that I could ask her anything. We had been through a great deal together, Sophia Bridges and I, whether we had perceived it like that or not. We had both lived for a time with one foot in a near-alternate universe.
“Oh, white,” she said. “You get lots more stuff white, and you get it easier and faster. I couldn’t really pass myself; I know I don’t look white. Just real classy black. But I rammed my way into the white world at school. And I married white. You probably guessed that. You can also probably guess it didn’t last long. After the novelty wears off, white really wants white.”
“Are you bitter about that?” She did not sound so, particularly. Not now.
“I was, certainly. When I got down here I was bitter about almost everything that smacked of either really, really white or really, really black. I can just imagine the message I was giving Mark.”
“Why did you come? The Lowcountry…under the surface, it’s about the blackest place I know,” I said. “You surely must have had a world of choices about a career and where you would live.”
“I had plenty,” she said matter-of-factly. “The thing is…my people come from here, Caro. I didn’t know that; I had no idea where our family originated. If my parents did, they never said. I think, in their minds, they just sort of invented themselves and me. But when I started in cultural anthropology one of the first courses I had involved the Gullahs of the Southeastern Lowcountry. I felt an immediate…I don’t know, a connection, I guess you’d say…and I started sort of surreptitiously researching names. I know my father’s family’s was McKay. Eventually I found what looked like a link to some Mackeys on Edisto. Peacock’s was mentioned. All this time I was either pretending none of it existed or that I was merely doing fascinating research. I never told Chris…my husband…what I was studying. He loved telling his little liberal white law partners that his wife was a cultural anthropologist. I don’t think he would have loved telling them she was a Gullah Negro whose ancestors came over in the hold of a slave ship from Angola. Come to that, I had a fine time pretending mine didn’t, either. Christ, I don’t know where I thought they came from. Certainly not on the Mayflower.”
She looked over at me obliquely.
“You could special-order us, did you know that? I didn’t. But you could. A lot of the Charleston and Edisto planters did. Our people were known to be good agriculturists, and we were so ancestor and family besotted that we weren’t likely to run away and leave our families over here. Made to order to the rice and cotton fields, wouldn’t you say? You could specify how many of us, and what sex and what age, even what height and weight. I wouldn’t have made a good field worker, but I would have done well as a house nigger. Skinny; not a big eater. Presentable enough for the front rooms. Light enough so if the massa knocked me up the kid could probably pass…”
I made a soft sound of pain, and she shook her head impatiently.
“I’m not trying to lay a guilt trip on you,” she said. “I know you’re one of the good ones. It’s just that…it’s my first experience with blackness. I don’t know how I feel about it yet. I don’t know what it’s going to mean to Mark. I don’t know where the next step will take me, or what it will be. I don’t know if I can make being black work; I was white too long. And I don’t know if white will ever work for me again. I don’t even know what’s important in the long run, in the big picture. Except that I know that is, over there.” She gestured back toward the island. “I know that somehow that’s awfully important. I know that it…needs to stay whole, over there, whether or not I ever set foot there again.”
“So, are you a double agent or what?” I grinned.
“Or what, I guess,” she said peacefully. “I don’t seem to be in any hurry to make lifetime decisions. I don’t feel like I have to, right now. It’s been a great month or so, just being…just teasing along on the moment.”
“Ezra’s good company,” I said.
“Ezra’s a pain in the ass.” She smiled. “But he’s sure a whole piece of cloth, isn’t he? I never met anybody like him. He’s more things in one skin than I thought was possible.”
“Maybe that’s what we’re all meant to be,” I said.
“Maybe. Who knows? I guess it will emerge. For now I’m going to just let it carry me. You know, Caro, I guess I was waiting to hear what’s going to happen to Dayclear, waiting to see…what Clay will do. If he goes ahead with it, I know now that I’ll have to resign. If not…well, I’m not likely to get another job that lets me write my own ticket in my specialty and pays me like Clay does. It’s the kind of job that makes a reputation early, and that means big bucks. I want Mark to have the kind of education I did. He’s no more apt to want to live in Dayclear than I do, even if his ancestors’ names are on those grave-stones, but he needs to be able to walk back and forth between worlds as easily as he crosses a street in Manhattan. Or as easily as you go back to…wherever it is you go back to.”
“I haven’t been back to my hometown in twenty-five years,” I said. “But I see your point. There’s nothing stopping me if I wanted to. I always meant to; my daughter, Kylie, always wanted to go so she could hear the garbage trucks in the morning. To her, that was about as exotic as you can get.”
She put her hand over mine briefly. It was cold and rough with the dried mud of her ancestors’ resting place. I rather hoped some of it stayed under the perfect ovals of her nails.
“You’ve never mentioned her name,” she said.
“It’s hard to talk about her,” I said. “I’m trying to learn to make her a normal part of my life now. I think maybe I’ve enshrined her too long.”
“I cannot even imagine what would happen to me without Mark,” she said. “I cannot imagine who or what I would be. I don’t see how you’ve gone on.”
“Well, I have other people I love, other things,” I said. “All of us do. It’s hard to see that at first, but…we do.”
And then I remembered that, so far as I knew, she did not, and muttered, “Sorry. I assume a lot.”
“Oh, I have them, too,” she said. “Even if most of them are dead. I just found them. It’s a powerful feeling.”
“Maybe not all of them are dead,” I said, thinking of Ezra’s black eyes on her.
“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe not.”
We were silent again until I pulled up in front of her condo in the harbor village. Despite the balmy weather, it was still winter, and the darkness had swept in suddenly and completely from the west. There were a number of big white yachts in the harbor, their portholes radiant with the lights of cocktails and dinners being celebrated, and the flagstone walkway around the harbor was full of tanned, sun-bleached people strolling to the shops and restaurants, or from one boat to another. In the old live oaks the tiny white lights that always reminded me of Christmas twinkled in the skeins of silvery moss. Soft rock music drifted from somewhere. It was festive and rich and quite lovely, and about as real as cotton candy. I knew suddenly that if I ever saw this over on the island I would have to leave. That day. That moment.
We made a date for lunch the next week—I was not going to let this accessible new Sophia go—and I drove slowly back to the house. It was dark except for the light I had left in the kitchen. As I pulled into the driveway, I saw a man come out of the back door and down the steps. Before I could even feel uneasy, I saw that it was Hayes Howland and felt a sharp sting of resentment instead. I did not want Hayes going in and out of my house when I was not there. I supposed, with weary resentment, that I would have to start locking my doors after all. It was ironic to think that when I finally capitulated to that, it would be Hayes I was locking out, and not the occasional random robber or rapist.
I met him at the back steps.
“Are you stealing the silver?” I said, trying for lightness.
“Looking for Clay. I haven’t been able to raise anybody on the phone all afternoon, and I got uneasy. I saw Charlie at lunch, and he said Clay was not in such hot shape. You weren’t locked, so I went on in. He’s asleep upstairs. I didn’t want to wake him.”
“Good of you,” I said waspishly. “He’s been sleeping a lot. Charlie says he needs it. He also says he’ll be just fine once he gets enough rest, so I’m letting him do it. I expect he’ll be back at the office in a day or two. Can it wait, whatever you wanted with him?”
“Oh, yeah. I was just being a mother hen. But now that I’m here…Caro, have you had a chance to do what we agreed on? About Dayclear?”
I knew in that instant that that was why he had come. Not to check on Clay, but to see if I had been to Dayclear yet, to put the company’s proposal to the village. I don’t know why it made me so angry. From the beginning I had known that he was in a hurry for an answer.
“I’ve just come from there,” I said, looking straight at him in the darkness. I could scarcely see his face, only the gleam of his pale blue eyes.
“I told them exactly what you told me. And essentially they told me it was up to me since I owned the island, and I told them that it wasn’t going to happen. And it’s not. I’m sorry, Hayes. I know that puts you all in a bind. But you redid the plans once. Surely there’s an avenue you haven’t explored yet. In any event, I cannot let it happen, and I won’t.”
He stood silently, looking at me, and then down at his feet.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Caro,” he said. “Clay will be, too.”
“I know. Let me tell him, Hayes. I want him to hear it from me.”
He shrugged. I could just make out the gesture.
“Better do it soon,” he said, and padded away over the carpet of wet live oak leaves to the Porsche that crouched in the dark like a big cat.
I watched him out of sight, and then walked around the house and through the front yard, over the dunes and down to the beach. I had not known I was going to do that, but this time there was no heaviness, no darkness, no prickle of panic. I merely felt still and empty and very tired. I slipped off my sneakers and padded across the silky, snake-cold sand to the firmer, icy salt-slicked sand at the fringe of the surf and sat down on the trunk of the fallen palm tree that had been Carter’s fort and Kylie’s balance bar.
There was no moon, but the stars were huge and cold and near, and the sea itself seemed to breathe off a kind of radiance, like smoke. It made a long, infinitely gentle susurration: Hushhhhh. Hushhhhhh. There was almost no surf at all; what there was was white lace against the blackness of the beach. There was no other sound, and no one at all on the beach. I knew that if I looked behind me I would see the lights of all the other houses that fringed our stretch of shore, see their windows lit for dinner and the coming evening. But I did not look back. I looked far out into the whispering sea, and I looked up into the sky.
“I wonder what you would make of all this?” I said to my daughter in the sky, or in the water, or wherever it was that held her. I felt her very near. “I wonder what you would do about the island if it were your decision to make.”
But of course I knew the answer to that; she would make the decision that I had made. She was me and I was her. There had never been any question of that. It struck me then that it was time. It was, finally, time.
“I’m going to let you go,” I said aloud. “I don’t know how to do it, but I’m going to do it tonight. You need to be your own person now. If you were still with me, I’d be doing this about now…trying to learn to let you be yourself. So this is it, kid. You’ll have to help me. I don’t know what I need to do next.”
I wriggled off the log and stretched out against it, leaning my head back, letting it take my weight. The damp cold of the sand seeped through the seat of my blue jeans, but it seemed a point of connection to the earth, not an uncomfortable intrusion. I closed my eyes and willed myself to think of nothing at all except her. I tried to empty my mind even of the image of her, and let just her essence, the warm, secret displacement of air and space that was Kylie in my soul, fill me.
It was a mystery, what happened then. I think everyone gets perhaps one to a lifetime. I know that I made it in my mind, but I know, too, that it was more than that, and I will always know that, no matter who tries to dissuade me. No one will, because I will never tell anyone. Not even Clay. This was my mystery, mine and Kylie’s. I lay still on that empty beach with her filling me, and behind my eyes there began to appear golden prickles of light, like the ones that always come when you hold your eyes shut hard. And then one of the pinpricks began to grow larger and larger and brighter and brighter, so that it pressed hard against my lids, and I opened them to ease the pressure and the light drifted out of me and into the air, very slowly, and up into the sky. I watched it as it grew smaller and smaller, and finally I lost it among the winter stars.
I closed my eyes again and waited. And then I saw behind my eyelids that very slowly, infinitely slowly, it disengaged itself from the body of stars and grew larger and more golden, and began to drift down again, down and down until it hovered in front of my face and bumped at my cheeks and lips with a cool sort of frisson, like the feeling a lit sparkler makes against your skin. A kiss, a nibble. I opened my eyes and it came in. I closed them. I felt it linger there just behind my lids, warm and cool at the same time, and then it slid down and down and came to rest in my chest, in what felt to be the absolute center of me. And there it stayed, until I finally opened my eyes for good and all and said, “Yes. Okay. You’re safe and so am I. Thank you, darling. Go to sleep now.”
And I believe that she did. And I believe that she sleeps there now and always, and will never again have to answer some sad, silly, frantic summons from me or anyone else. Wherever else she is I do not know, but I believe that the very living core, the essential flame of her, is inside me. I believe that.
When I finally got up off the beach and went inside my house, it was to find my husband still asleep on my daybed, his face looking, finally, cool and smoothed and full again. I kissed him on the forehead, and he stirred and mumbled, and then fell back into his long sleep.
“I just wanted to tell you that I have her home, and I think you can go back to your own bed,” I whispered.
In the morning when I woke, I found a note on my bedside table that said, “Feel terrific for some reason & have gone into the office. Call me later. Thanks for hanging in there.”
I lay there looking at the new morning on the face of the sea and thinking that if I was lucky there was time for coffee before I called him and blew his world to bits.