“Sorry to surprise you like that,” he was saying. “I guess I sorta figured you’d heard me. My boat engine and all.”
Rae gulped in a breath. Humor disarms’ was one of the vital lessons she had learned in her laborious climbs out of madness, second only to Pretend to be normal, and you will be. She, too, stood up straight, gave the hammer a puzzled glance and dropped it back into its holster, and rubbed her hands together to hide their trembling. She cleared her throat.
“Guess I was a little preoccupied,” she told him, and stretched her mouth into what she hoped resembled a smile. “I didn’t hear you coming up on me.”
“So I noticed. Next time I’ll toot the horn to warn you. Sorry,” he said again. He was watching her warily, as if aware that he was standing across from a woman who heard voices in the empty spaces behind her ears. Given her means of greeting him, Rae thought his reaction understandable. Fear was contagious.
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about,” she said, making an effort at easing the tension in the air. “I, er, don’t get a lot of visitors.”
Ed seemed to be thinking. And he was, but not about her words. He was reflecting, So, this really is a woman I dropped off here—Rae, not Ray—and not at all a bad-looking one, who’s trying hard to hide how spooked she was when she turned around and all of a sudden there I stood. Just like all the other single women on the islands—no matter how brave they look, they’re scared shitless and needing a man around. Which thought put a broad smile between his roguish white mustaches. “Yeah, the islands are like that in winter. Come summer, you could walk to Roche Harbor on the boat decks, but the rest of the year it’s quiet. ’Course, you’ll never get much traffic here, between the currents and the shoal and being a preserve and all.”
“I hope I don’t,” she said fervently, then realized how unfriendly that sounded. “Look, I was just going to make some coffee,” she lied. “Would you like a cup?”
“Oh, I won’t trouble you.”
“The only trouble is putting four scoops of coffee in the pot instead of two. I think I can manage that much.”
Ed relaxed a notch more: Humor disarms. “In that case, thanks, I’d like a cup.”
It was more than Rae could do to walk across the clearing with a perfect stranger at her back, particularly one who’d eyed her appreciatively, so she stretched out her hand in an “After you” gesture, and they walked across the clearing together, side by side though well apart. At the campsite, she filled the kettle and put it on the stove, then ducked into the tent for the wooden chair. She set it down a distance from its canvas-sling cousin, then picked it up again to shift it half a foot closer. In a practiced move she unbuckled the belt and slung it over the slatted back, then went to rinse out the coffeepot.
Ed had set two bulging paper sacks from the Friday Harbor grocery store on the aluminum cook table; she sorted through them until she found her milk for the week. She opened the bag of coffee grounds and spooned some in, checked to see that the mug she intended for her visitor was more or less clean, and then turned to ask if he took sugar. Ed was perched on the edge of the canvas chair with her hammer in his hands, running his blunt fingers over the satiny finish of the handle. She shuddered, as if he had been caressing instead the back of her neck, and her hands yearned to snatch the tool away from him.
“Sugar?” she asked through clenched teeth.
“No, thanks. What kind of wood is this?”
With that opening, Rae was freed to go over and draw the tool gently out of his hands, smoothing her own thumb over the dark rich amber handle that she had turned and shaped to fit her palm and fingers like a custom-made glove. “It’s Honduran mahogany. I had a piece left over, I needed a handle, so I thought, Why not? I don’t think it’s really strong enough for the purpose, but time will tell.”
“Left over. Like from remodeling your kitchen or something?”
Rae had a brief vision of a kitchen clothed in that rich wood—like drowning in melted chocolate. No; left over, as in a peace offering that didn’t work, she nearly told Ed, but said instead, “I made a little end table for my daughter.”
His face closed in slightly. “Would that, er, would that be the daughter I met?”
“The one and only,” she told him. Now. She watched his face, and this time her smile, though slightly sad, came more naturally. “She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?”
He looked up, surprised either by the phrase or by the fact that it had been the woman’s own mother who said it.
“I … well, I guess.”
“Bossed you all the way back to Friday Harbor, I’ll bet.”
“You’re right about that.” One mustache hitched upward in a rueful grin.
“And then she asked you to keep an eye on me.” It was a guess, but not too far-fetched; Tamara had paid neighbors before.
Ed went still, and Rae moved to reassure him. “Don’t worry about it. I figured she’d find someone who could check to see that I wasn’t lying dead under a tree or going nuts and talking with the birds.”
She watched him closely, saw his sea-colored eyes skitter sideways, muttered a curse under her breath, and continued, “I bet she told you I’d been in a mental hospital.” His eyes became very interested in his frayed canvas shoes; answer enough. Shit, Tamara; why do you do these things? Well, if old Ed knew that, he probably ought to know the rest—or as much of the rest as Rae cared to tell. She couldn’t afford to have all of Friday Harbor thinking of her as the madwoman of Newborn’s Folly. Even if it’s what she was.
“Did Tamara also tell you I was badly injured in an accident that killed my husband?” She couldn’t think for a moment why she had failed to mention Bella. No, giving him Bella would have been too much: Sympathy for a loss was one thing; the extreme pity for loss of a child quite another. “No, I didn’t think she’d mention the accident. A person’s likely to be a little depressed for a while, after that.”
She gave him back the hammer, the wood slapping against his callused palm, and turned to make the coffee. “You take milk?”
“No, just black. Look, I’m—”
“Ed, it’s really okay. I’m afraid that my daughter’s just a manipulative bitch. I’m only sorry you have to be dealing with her.”
“Oh, hey, no, I’m not going to be dealing with her,” he asserted, although Rae thought his righteousness did not ring entirely true.
“Why not? Report to her how I’m getting on, take her money, we’re all happy. If it isn’t you, she’ll find someone else. Don’t worry about it.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. I’d rather you than some stranger hanging off my shore with a pair of binoculars.”
Normal, all very normal. Who wouldn’t be a little depressed after what the newspapers would call a “tragic accident,” huh, Ed? And so maybe since you didn’t like Tamara Collins all that much anyway, you’ll take what she said with a whole shakerful of salt and say the hell with her and all her talk about Mother’s need for sedation and Mother’s raving about voices and watchers, and you’ll just decide that Mother is actually a nice normal crackpot of a female who just decided to come live on a deserted rock and rebuild a weird shack, for the fun of it. You take Tamara’s money (no, my money, Rae supposed) and don’t bother to keep quite as close an eye on things as you tell her you’re doing, and we’ll all be happy.
Besides, someone rich enough to own an entire island in the San Juans is bound to be a little flaky anyway.
In any case, the discomfort of talking about Tamara had distracted Ed from the possibility of another attack, and when he finished admiring the unusual handle on her hammer, he stretched out to drop it into its loop—even pointing the head in the right direction, either by intent or by accident.
“So, you build a lot of stuff?” he asked with a dubious glance at the strange-looking object (modernistic sculpture? clothes dryer? alien antenna?) that had so occupied her she hadn’t heard his boat approach. Rae thought she knew
the source of his discomfort; it was something she had been dealing with all her adult life, since that first hardware store owner had tried to talk her into a lighter hammer.
“I’m a furniture maker. Tables and desks, storage chests and chairs, sometimes kitchen cabinets if people want a custom job. I specialize in inlay work.”
This last was the deliberate addition she used to nudge people away from the mental image of badly designed coffee tables with uneven legs and into the realm of the true craftsman. People who knew their stuff would at this point ask her name, and recognize it. Others like Ed would not know her from Joan of Arc, but would nonetheless grant her the aura of Artist. Ed was nodding wisely.
“We got a lot of people up here who paint, do pottery, that kind of stuff. Guy on Lopez, sells his pots in Seattle for three, four hundred dollars each.”
Rae did not tell Ed that her small pieces went for five figures in New York and Los Angeles, and figured that he wouldn’t be too impressed that one of her more experimental armoires was owned by MOMA, but he seemed happier now that he could think of her as one of those artistic types. Artistic tendencies explained a lot—even, it would appear, threatening your deliveryman with a hammer.
“Another coffee, Ed?”
“Oh no, thanks, Mizz Newborn.”
“Mr. De la Torre, anyone who nearly gets clobbered by a woman’s hammer and still agrees to carry away her dirty laundry ought to be able to call her by her first name. It’s Rae.”
He ducked his head in embarrassment—not just, it seemed, at the indelicate subject of dirty underwear. “Yeah, it’s funny. I first heard your name in the boathouse … short hair and heavy coat and all—it was kind of confusing when your daughter called you ‘Mother.’ Wasn’t till you spooked when I came up behind you just now that I was sure you weren’t some kind of trans—whatever. You know, like you read about. Always thought it must be confusing for their families, and … Well, anyway. Next time I’ll toot the horn,” he said, wrenching the subject violently back to the very beginning of their conversation. “Good thing you didn’t happen to have a shotgun leaning against the tree. I’d have sure got a surprise then, wouldn’t I?”
Rae had been under the strong impression that a move on her part, back under the madrone, and he would have gone for her throat, but she assured him that she rarely blew away her delivery boys, and went to help him unload the rest of her provisions from the Orca Queen, then cast off his line from her ramshackle floating dock. As the engine caught in a cloud of blue smoke and he turned for open water, she thought about his words, and it dawned on her, with some amazement, that never once had she envisioned the old wood-handled revolver as a weapon of defense.
Eight
Rae Newborn’s Letter
to Dr. Roberta Hunt
April 6
Dear Dr. Hunter Dr. H,
I know you will be wondering how your client on the island is holding out coming along, and I wanted to reassure let you know that all is well that I’m doing well that the experience is proving
April 7
Dear Dr. H,
Well, still alive here on
April 8
Dear Dr. H,
My boatman comes in two days and
April 10
Dear Roberta,
You being the good and caring therapist you are, I have no doubt that your mind has followed me north any number of times over the last month, wondering, wondering. Having been here on the island for ten days now, I can say that I believe it will prove in the end to have been the right decision.
I will freely admit that the first few days were hard. Very hard. Partly that was because of coming cold turkey off the meds, and yes I heard voices and yes I saw ghosts out of the corner of my eye. And when Ed De la Torre, the man in charge of bringing my mail and keeping me supplied with bread and propane, first appeared last week he startled me quite badly. Fortunately, he spoke up rather than tapping me on the shoulder or—well, nothing happened, and Ed now knows to give me fair warning.
Actually, you’ll be pleased (I think) to know, the reason I didn’t hear him coming was that I was completely wrapped up in building a piece of furniture. That’s right, although what Gloriana, my New York gallery owner, would make of it I can’t imagine. It is, to put it in its most pedestrian terms, a driftwood-based workbench, but it is actually a far more intriguing medium than I would have imagined possible—the pale driftwood rises up out of the earth (it’s sitting on the open ground under a tree—yes, and just think what Gloriana would say at that! Although come to think of it, MOMA might be pleased at the plein air concept). Anyway, the branches rise up like a thicket of waving arms, intertwined to support each other and the heavy slab of the top. And you know what that top is? The front door of Great-uncle Desmond’s house, which turned up in the ground-clearing process. The door is solid cedar, which explains its longevity, and badly charred and full of nailheads or something on what used to be the inside, but I turned that side down, planed down the good side (removing the door latch first, naturally—this is a workbench, not a work of conceptual art), and it really is a remarkable piece of usable sculpture.
And the very first thing I did with it was to unwrap one of the glasses you gave me and set it on the middle of the bench, full of my first wine on the island. Magnificent. I even took some photographs of it—I’ll ask my granddaughter Petra to develop them and send copies to you, after I’ve finished the roll.
The table took up the better part of a working week, a ridiculous waste of time considering that I’m living in a tent and winter is only six months away, but it served its function, a restorative one you could say, reminding me of who I was before (a person you never knew, but may have glimpsed) and allowing me to focus on what exactly I am doing here, restoring this wreck of a house.
(Do you notice, by the way, that this letter is heavily laced with what my old junior high English teacher would disapprovingly call run-on sentences? Think of it as stream-of-consciousness at work, a continuation of our sessions. Better you should think that—bill me, even, for reading this!—than just think what lousy grammar Rae Newborn has.)
One bit of business. You may be—may already have been—contacted by my local sheriffs deputy, who came growling up (his boat, not him—everyone zips around here in a most amazing variety of water-craft, most of them powerfully engined. Sort of like a wilderness Venice. In fact, my island being in a quirky twist of current, when—not if, but when—I finally give in and get a boat, it’ll have to have a big motor. Your secret Freudian side can make what it will of that statement). Where the hell was I? Oh right, the deputy. Bobby Gustafsen, a real sweetheart of a man (Oho, says Dr. Hunt; Oh no, says Ms. Newborn: a much married, father-of-twins sweetheart of a man in his early thirties) who eyed me warily as if I was about to leap at him. Deputy Gustafsen came by, mostly to make contact with a new resident (it’s that kind of a place, despite the watery distance between neighbors) but also to bring me a photo my local department down there sent him, asking if I could identify the man as one of my attackers. It didn’t look much like either of them, but it’s nice to know the department down there hasn’t written it off completely. Anyway, I gave him your number, as a character reference more than anything. If he calls, reassure him that although I may occasionally imagine little green men, in this case they were just a pair of human (?) creeps. Scumbags, as Sheriff Escobar called them, and I can only thank God yet again for my neighbor Joseph, not only for happening along when he did, and being willing to intervene, but for simply being able to back me up: that on this one occasion, despite all my false alarms and fantasies, I wasn’t hallucinating, and I didn’t beat myself up. If Joseph hadn’t come, you and I would still be having our thrice-weekly sessions and I would have long since come to believe that those two bastards were every bit as incorporeal as the eyes at my windows and the footsteps on my deck.
Instead of which I am here, I am working, breathing a whole hell of a lot of fresh air and eating vas
t quantities of fairly monotonous but terribly healthy food, and at the end of the day I’m far too tired to listen for voices in the tiny waves that brush on my rocky beach or to look for eyes watching from the rapidly leafing-out bushes around my tent.
So, dear Dr. Roberta-my-shrink, let your mind cease its fret over this wayward and unreasonable client—-for the moment anyway. It is all proceeding in the right direction, and if I slip, if the voices begin to reemerge in the night, I promise I will resume my meds. Much as I love you, I am becoming attached to my hundred-fifty-acre rock, and I would not wish to trade it for the pale green confines of the hospital. Except, perhaps, for the relative comfort of the beds.
With hopes for your physical and spiritual health (for of the mental, I have no doubts) and with all affection,
Yours,
Rae Newborn
Nine
Not too many lies in that letter, Rae thought that night as she addressed the bulky envelope (aside from the impossibility of resuming meds when they lay on the ocean floor). No need to lie, really, and best not to if she could avoid it.
She picked up the glass of wine, the glass so delicate as to be ethereal, and drained the last swallow of California Merlot. The Hunter’s farewell present—a gift that could only have been from one friend to another rather than from doctor to client—had been two of these lovely long-stemmed things; a pair, the psychiatrist had told her firmly, not so that Rae could save them until she had a guest, but so Rae wouldn’t be tempted to leave them on the shelf in the category of Things Too Precious to Use. If she broke one, well, she had a replacement; if she broke that, well, it was only the surviving member of a pair.
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