Clendenin

As soon as the night air got a chill, she started to careen away from him.

Careen away from him. The phrase came unbidden, borrowed from their ancient history together, one of their first dates—sledding, during an unexpected snowstorm in December 1980.

Clen and Dabney hadn’t so much as held hands in December 1980, but this was not to say that they didn’t have a relationship. Dabney had pursued Clen with an enthusiasm that he suspected was based in pity. He was the new kid, too much smarter than anyone else to have made any friends. Dabney approached him one day after English class and asked him if he’d ever read Cheever.

Was she teasing him?

Of course, he’d said. He had gobbled the red volume of stories the year before, on recommendation from the young, vivacious librarian, Eleanor, back in Attleboro. He now knew all about commuter trains, gin and tonics, and adultery.

Dabney had taken to engaging him in conversations about books—she liked Jane Austen, he preferred Chekhov and Kafka—and from there she probed a bit into his personal history. What was his affinity with the depressing Russians? Had he moved to Nantucket from a gulag? Clen was hesitant to talk about himself, but he let certain details escape: He lived with his mother, he said. He was an only child. His mother waited tables at the Lobster Trap. They lived in a cottage out behind the restaurant.

That must be fun! Dabney said. Do you ever get to eat free lobster?

Clen nodded. His mother brought home lobster for dinner every night, along with dried-out crab cakes and small potatoes coated with congealed butter that looked like beeswax. He was sick of lobster, although he did not say this.

Dabney took to sitting next to him in the cafeteria, and at study hall, where she doodled in the margins of his loose-leaf paper. The doodles became notes. The notes said things like, I am an only child, too. And, I have no mother.

He raised his eyebrows at that one. Wrote below, Is she dead?

I don’t know, Dabney wrote back. Probably not.

Clen wrote, My father died drinking.

To which she drew a face frowning, with two fat tears.

Clen had wanted her to know that he didn’t cry over his father’s death. He hadn’t felt sad, only relieved, because his father had been a very large man with an even larger drinking problem, and…well. Clen had been surprised when his mother cried, but not surprised when she said they were moving.

We need the ocean, she’d said.

Clen had wanted the city, Boston; he’d wanted a shot at going to Boston Latin or Buckingham Browne & Nichols, where he could really get an education, but his vote didn’t matter. Nantucket it was.

Do you hate it here? Dabney wrote.

He looked at her. On that particular afternoon, they were swaddled in the hush of the high school library and Dabney was wearing her headband, and a strand of pearls that he assumed were fake—or maybe not, because something about Dabney announced money, even though he knew her father was a policeman. She had a freckled nose and those big brown eyes, which seemed to shine a warm light on him.

No, he wrote back.

  

When the surprise early snow came, they were not boyfriend and girlfriend, but they were not nothing. The snow piled up outside and Dabney wrote in the margin of his paper, Dead Horse Valley, 4pm. Dress warmly. I’ll bring my toboggan.

Clen had done his fair share of sledding and other winter sports in Attleboro, but he hadn’t enjoyed them. He was big and heavy, clumsy on skates and skis. If it was snowing, he preferred to stay inside and read.

Okay, he said.

The after-school scene at Dead Horse Valley during the first snowfall of the year was frenetic, but most of the kids were younger. The other high school kids, Clen surmised, were probably hunkered down in someone’s den, drinking beer and smoking pot. Dabney was waiting right on the road, wearing navy snow pants and a bright pink parka and a pink hat with a white pom-pom on top. She held up the most beautiful toboggan Clen had ever seen. It was made of polished walnut and had a graceful bullnose at the front; secured to the base was a green quilted pad.

“It looks too nice to ride,” he said.

“My father and I have been using this toboggan since I was little,” she said. “We take good care of it.”

Clen nodded, and again thought, Money. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in his rental cottage as nice as that toboggan.

Dabney manned the front and held the reins. “This is great,” she said. “You can push. We are going to fly!”

Clen wasn’t afraid of the speed, although the hill looked steep and bumpy and he wondered how the hell there could be a hill this steep on an island where the highest elevation was 108 feet. The other kids—the ten-year-olds and twelve-year-olds—were shooting down with high-pitched screams, some of them spilling halfway, some of them catching air off a bump and landing with a thud, then picking up even more speed. What frightened Clen was the athletic feat that was expected of him—to push the toboggan while running behind it and then to launch himself neatly onto the toboggan, tucking his legs on either side of Dabney. He didn’t think he could do it.

But for her, he would try.

He bent over and placed his gloved hands flat on the toboggan, and with his head down, he started running, pushing with all his might. Dabney whooped. Clen felt the momentum of the hill pulling him down. Inertia was real. He could not stop his legs from running. He would never be able to fling his legs up and get on behind her. Never.

No wonder the horse was dead, he thought.

He sent the toboggan down the hill while he stumbled behind it for a few steps before doing a spectacular face-plant into the snow. He raised his head to see Dabney flying indeed; the fancy toboggan might have been a magic carpet. She careened down the hill away from him, getting smaller and farther away, until she disappeared behind a stand of fir trees. He had lost her.

He had thought, When she gets back up to the top of this hill, I am going to kiss her. I am going to make her mine.

  

Thirty-some-odd years had passed, but there was an eerie similarity in Dabney’s tobogganing down the hill at Dead Horse Valley and the slide for the worse in her health, which had started in late September. Clen felt as helpless and inept and incapable as he had then. She was going. He could not go with her.

For days, she was bedridden. The pain, the pain! Agnes called Dr. Rohatgi. There was nothing he could do; this was how the disease progressed.

She was being eaten from the inside. That was how it felt, she said. Like thousands of tiny razor teeth. Her healthy cells were being attacked and colonized by the mutant, deformed, cancerous cells. There was pain medication, but many times Dabney cried out in the night. She cried for him, mostly, but also for Agnes, and for her mother.

Mama!

Clen tensed, believing he had misheard her. But then she said it again, in a voice that was much younger than her adult Dabney voice.

Mama!

There had been times in their growing up—high school and college—when they had talked about Dabney’s mother, Patty Benson, and what she had done. Dabney had consistently spoken with what Clen would have called “resigned indifference.” She wasn’t cut out to be a parent. Whatever. Lots of people aren’t. She didn’t smother me with a pillow or drown me in the bathtub, she walked away. She left me in capable hands. I am grateful for that. I’m sure she has her regrets, wherever she is.

Clen had puzzled over her attitude. He knew that Dabney had spent years in therapy with Dr. Donegal in order to achieve such insouciance. But really, wasn’t she angry? Clen himself was furious at his father, the empty bottles of Wild Turkey on the coffee table, the long hours at the bar after work and all weekend long when he should have been teaching Clen how to throw a spiral pass, or how to run skillfully behind a toboggan and then jump onto it. He had cared only about drinking, drinking, drinking until it killed him.

The ugly truth was a punch to the gut: Clen was no better than his father or Dabney’s mother. He was no better.

Mama!

Clen wiped Dabney’s forehead with a cool washcloth and watched her eyelids flutter closed.

  

There were still good days, days when Dabney got out of bed smiling and went for her walk, although slower, and then slower still. One day, Dabney came home and said, “Mr. Lawson asked if he could drive me home. I said no, and still he slowed all the way down and trailed me for the last quarter mile. Do I really look that bad?”

Clen kissed the tip of her nose. “No,” he said. “You look beautiful.”

He could feel sand running through the hourglass. There wasn’t enough time to tell her how beautiful she was—how much he loved her or how sorry, how hideously, awfully sorry, he was that he hadn’t come right home from Bangkok. He should have come right home!

He had wasted twenty-seven years!

Twenty-seven years, it seemed impossible. Where had they gone? It had taken him seven years to learn the country of Vietnam, to learn how to live with people who looked at him in fear and distrust. His language skills were poor; he had gotten by with French and broken English. The country was as hot as soup; the only place he had truly loved had been Dalat, in the hills. The Times had gotten him a room at the Dalat Palace and every morning he opened the wooden shutters and gazed out over the lake. Every night he drank a dozen bottles of ice-cold 333 and shot billiards in the stone-grotto bar. Best billiards table in Southeast Asia, he could attest. People would come and go—French, Australians, soldiers, doctors, entrepreneurs who said that communism wouldn’t hold. It was human nature for man to want to make his own money, it didn’t matter if he lived in Dalat or Detroit.

Clen could have been with Dabney all that time. He had smoked so many cigarettes, and eaten so many bowls of pho and so many banh mi prepared on the side of the road by a woman wearing a triangle hat, squatting by the grill, turning the meat, layering the meat on a freshly sliced baguette with carrots, mint, cilantro, cucumber, and the sauce of the gods.

He could have been with Dabney.

He’d spent five years with Mi Linh, but she wouldn’t come with him to Bangkok. Bangkok was a hole, she said. He was lucky to have gotten out of there after his first year. Why go back? She had been right, it was a hole, far worse the second time. And then, he’d lost his arm.

He did not rue the loss of his arm the way he rued all those years without Dabney.

While Dabney slept, he worked on a surprise for her. It was taking him hours and hours to interview and transcribe—and still it would be incomplete. He just didn’t have the resources. Agnes helped him where she could. Agnes assured him that what he was doing was awesome in the truest sense of the word. It is the best thing, she kept saying. It is the very best thing.

Dabney was well enough to go to the Cranberry Festival. She donned her cranberry cable-knit sweater and her matching kilt and she and Agnes and Clen drove out to the bogs in the Impala with the top down. The weather was spectacular—a sky so blue it was painful to look at, and mellow sunshine, a gift in mid-October.

“Days do not get any more beautiful than this one,” Dabney said. She had, for the first time, allowed Clen to drive the Impala. She hadn’t come out and said so, but she was too weak to drive—and she leaned her head back with her face in the sun.

She was asleep by the time they arrived at the bogs.

“What should we do?” Clen asked, once they had parked in the space reserved for them. EVENT JUDGE, the sign said, because Dabney was to judge the chutney and the muffins.

“Wake her up,” Agnes said. She climbed out of the backseat. “Here, I’ll do it.” She jostled Dabney’s shoulder. “Mommy! Mommy, we’re here.”

Dabney’s eyes flew open and she sat straight up, adjusting her sunglasses. “Okay!” she said. “I’m ready!”

The bogs were crowded with visitors. Dabney was thrilled to see so many people in attendance—parents and children and older, year-round residents, all of whom knew her by name. There were free balloons and face painting and half-a-dozen food booths—chutney, cookies, sauce, juice, muffins—all made from the fruit harvested a few hundred feet away. Clen tried samples of everything, even though he didn’t much care for cranberries.

Suddenly, Celerie appeared, her hair in one long braid down her back, her cheeks as red as apples. She was wearing a cranberry-colored wool dress and black tights. Headband and pearls. She was a younger, fair-haired version of Dabney. Clen had been warned about this, but still he chuckled when he saw her.

“The guest of honor!” Celerie said. She hugged Dabney so hard that Clen saw her wince. Dabney was fragile, everything hurt, brushing her teeth hurt, she’d told him, and folding a napkin hurt, and he was tempted to tell Celerie to take it easy, but Dabney just smiled with relief when Celerie let her go and said, “You’ve done a brilliant job!”

Celerie beamed. She turned to Clen. “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Hughes.”

Clen bowed and said, “The honor is mine, Miss Truman.”

At the same time, they said, “Dabney has told me so much about you.”

Dabney sat at the judging table alongside Nina Mobley and Dr. Ted Field and Jordan Randolph, publisher of the Nantucket Standard. Tastes of this and that were placed before the judges, and Dabney made notes on her clipboard. Clen took a few steps back so that he could observe her in her element. He knew she wanted to give every participant a blue ribbon.

At one point, she raised her face and scanned the crowd. She was looking for him, he realized. He raised his arm and waved.

I’m here, Cupe. I’m right here.

  

After the festival, Clen, Dabney, and Agnes drove out to the airport to pick up Riley. He was staying for two nights to enjoy Nantucket in the fall; he had wanted to come earlier but he’d had a practical exam that morning.

Agnes was buzzing with excitement. When Clen pulled up in front of the airport, she jumped out of the backseat and said, “I’ll run in and get him.”

Dabney watched her as she hurried for the entrance.

“She’s rosy,” Dabney said. “Rosy like I’ve never seen.”

  

That night, Dabney cooked the four of them dinner in the gourmet kitchen of the Joneses’ big house. Clen lit logs in the enormous stone fireplace and they all hunkered down on the deep, soft sofa and chairs while Dabney ferried in platter after platter of delicacies—dates stuffed with blue cheese wrapped in bacon, Nantucket bay scallop ceviche, rosemary cashews. It was a feast already, and those were just the appetizers. Riley acted as bartender, pouring champagne for Agnes, filling Clen’s scotch, and making himself a series of increasingly stronger Dark and Stormys, which they all sampled, even Dabney. Riley talked about the rigors of dental school and Agnes told stories about the kids in her after-school program and Dabney checked to make sure everyone was eating and that everything was delicious.

She stopped on her way back into the kitchen and kissed Clen.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered.

There wasn’t enough time.

Dabney decided it was so nice by the fire that they should simply eat dinner there, like a picnic, rather than at the table. Dinner was beef Wellington with homemade mushroom duxelles, real foie gras, and homemade pastry, and a cheesy potato gratin and pan-roasted asparagus with toasted pine nuts and mustard-cream drizzle, and a salad with pears and dried cranberries and pumpernickel croutons.

“Mommy,” Agnes said. It was always “Mommy” now, Clen noticed, or maybe it had always been that way. What did Clen know? “You’ve outdone yourself.”

“I can barely move,” Riley said. He fell back into the cushions of the armchair. His plate was clean; he had gone back for seconds of everything, which had made Dabney fuss over him more, if that was even possible. “It was so delicious, boss.”

“I first made beef Wellington back in the spring of 1982,” Dabney said. “Before Clen and I went to the junior prom.”

“This one was even better,” Clen said.

Dabney tucked herself under Clen’s right arm, and he felt her smile against his chest. She had eaten next to nothing, but neither Clen nor Agnes had nudged her about it because it did no good. Dabney ate when she was hungry, which was about once every three days. That she had outdone herself was right. Clen knew that this was the last meal she would ever cook.

There was, no doubt, an elaborate and scrumptious dessert waiting somewhere within the confines of the Joneses’ enormous SubZero refrigerator, but none of them would partake in it tonight. Dabney fell fast asleep against Clen’s chest. Agnes and Riley rose to silently do the dishes while Clen sat and enjoyed the dying embers of the fire before carrying the ninety-six pounds of Dabney Kimball back to his cottage to bed.

Stop time, he prayed. Now. Stop it now.