And in the case of the water supply, pipes made of polyvinyl chloride.
Rae climbed back to where she was working the day before, following the black and spongy remnants of Desmond’s handiwork. He had been painstaking in his preparation of the ground and his choice of route, and after two days of testing with her spirit level, she had decided to trust to his engineering for the most economical pathway from A to B, source to house—hauling the four-foot level through the trees was a pain. Now she was mapping out her needs, so as to give Ed an order for the PVC pipe and angle joins she would need. Desmond’s joins, having all been carved to serve the needs of the moment, rarely agreed with the angles of the plastic fittings available to his grandniece from the plumbing supply shop in Friday Harbor (or anywhere else, for that matter, in this world of uniform sizes) and the most fiddly part of her work would be to compensate for the differences in path this would necessitate, when for example his hand-fashioned join of fifty-two degrees caused the waterway to wrap neatly around a deeply rooted boulder, whereas her standard forty-five-degree-angle joint meant overshooting his path and running over uneven ground until it could be eased back up to his again.
It was not unsatisfying work, however, despite the frustration and the lingering urge to imitate Desmond’s techniques and thereby commit herself to a solid six-month job of building the pipeline out of cedar logs. She pushed away the temptation, reminding herself how delicious a long shower would feel at the end of a day of work, and continued with her tape measure and notebook.
A couple of hours later, she ran into the snag she had feared she might the first time she had walked the line. Her rigid angles trapped her between the choice of digging out (or blowing up) a depressingly large rock and having to build a long stretch of raised supports over a deep and treacherous gully. Even the native flexibility of the pipe would not get her around the corner, not without bending it to the breaking point. She finally sat back and studied the jumble, through which the wood-chip trail of Desmond’s rotted waterline blithely wove, mocking her attempts at adapting uniformity to a natural phenomenon.
“Hell,” she said, and laid down her tape measure. One thing life as an artist had taught her: Sometimes one had to walk away from a problem in order to see it right. She would try, quite literally, to approach this one from another angle.
Rae set off straight up the side of Mount Desmond, shoving her way through salal and huckleberry, watching carefully for insecure footings in the rocky soil. She couldn’t remember after all this time just how she and Alan had found their way to the top, but supposed there must have been a path worn by the island’s tiny black-tailed deer. The going was not too difficult, and she gained the clear top, blown and sweat-soaked but without having lost too much blood along the way.
The top of the mountain was, unlike most things seen through hindsight, even larger than she remembered it from five years before, a wind-scoured knob bald but for a few stunted trees and tufts of grass. She clambered up the last hillock, and her eyes were suddenly drawn to a slight unevenness in the overall rock, a bump. She had forgotten; how could she have forgotten? The Peak, Alan had declared it, years ago. The Height of Folly. He’d made a flag to plant on it, with a stick and Bella’s handkerchief, propping it upright with a handful of rocks: We claim this island in the name of King Desmond the First, Lord of Misrule. The rocks were still there, scattered around the bump. Rae picked one up, cupping it in her hand. Alan. Bella, he said, have you ever played King of the Castle? and the flag came down and the rocks scattered, and we all took turns shoving each other off The Peak, claiming possession of what Alan called the island’s moral high ground…
High ground was a lump about a yard square, tilting to a height of about eighteen inches above the rest of the summit. Rae kept her head lowered, looking only at the rock between her feet, and stepped onto the rise. Only then did she throw back her head to look out. There, due east, rising just above Orcas Island’s Mount Moran, stood Mount Baker, floating white above the mainland. Farther south loomed the pale bulk of Mount Rainier, vastly superior in all ways and knowing it. Rae turned around slowly, and the other islands came into view, with the edge of Puget Sound over the top of San Juan and the snowcapped wall of the Olympic range rising in the distance like a shark’s jaw. Then came Juan de Fuca and Haro Straits, followed by long, dark Vancouver Island, with its smaller neighbors laid across the water as perfectly random as stones across a Japanese pond. Closer to home, Stuart and Speiden, and finally a full circle, with Mount Baker again before her.
This was by no means the highest point in the San Juan chain, but it was the highest this far west. On a clear day like this the dark bulks of the freighters seemed close enough to step onto, and she felt that, had it not been for the unending breeze, she could have heard the slap of the motorboat that was laying a white trail across the placid blue surface. A large bird—eagle? vulture?—cruised the air currents below her, sliding off toward the blue-gray rise of San Juan. A few sailboats had ventured out of Roche Harbor for the day, harbingers of the summer masses.
Rae stood on her height and breathed in her surroundings, rapt with the glory of the day in the exquisite beauty of this place, and with the simple, rare, everyday, in-spite-of-everything joy of being alive. A terrible joy, sweet as the sunshine and cruel as the grave, to stand here with the breeze touching her face, alone, forever. The view at her feet was so beautiful it made the heart ache, and if there was darkness at the edge of her vision, it made the snow and the sea all the brighter. She smiled, sadly, at the echoes of a family’s silliness, and after a moment tossed the small stone she held back to join the others. Then she stepped down from her position of superiority to go look for the remnants of the small building Alan had discovered and judged a World War II lookout tower. All she could find were a few scraps of broken board, which surprised her a bit until she thought of the fierce winds the top must see. She’d probably find the wood scattered all the way down the side of Mount Desmond. Too bad; Petra could have used a photograph of the debris for her school project. The mountain itself would have to do.
Rae took a last glance at the Height of Folly and crossed the clear space to the western edge, the wind in her hair and the sun on her face as she studied the descending hillside. The spring was not far from a tall Douglas fir that had long ago been struck by lightning and split, growing again in bifurcation. She ought to be able to see it from here—and there it was, rising clearly above the rest a few hundred yards straight down the hill.
A few hundred yards straight downhill worked out to considerably more in the circuitous route Rae was forced to take, but she never lost the tree completely, and eventually she was standing at its base. She paused to take a drink from the flask of bottled water she had brought, and stood listening for the sound of water. When she could make it out, she pushed through the undergrowth to the spring itself.
The water seepage that made Newborn’s Folly habitable was a younger, less saline brother to the warm waters of Salt Springs Island to the northeast. Rae’s spring did actually come out of the hill tepid enough for comfortable bathing, and the first of the pools was just large enough for a floating body—had she been willing to hike halfway around the island for the privilege of washing in the same water she intended to drink. If the spring’s temperature had actually been hot, she might have been tempted, but she was grateful enough for its steady flow, cool or hot.
The water welled up from a layer of sandstone that rose from the sea at a seventy-degree angle, sandwiched between igneous rock, cross sections of the land’s stressful geological history. The more porous stone purified the water, and the first pool, which looked as if it had been enlarged by human hands long before Desmond Newborn came on the scene, was a clear, tepid bowl overhung by branches. There had been a layer of mud on the bottom when Rae first came up here to get a sample of water for testing, and she had slopped some of it out to see if the pool stayed clean. It had.
There was no one clea
r hole in the source stone, just a series of oozes and trickles that added up to a decent-sized stream, now making its way down to the sea in the old, natural course it had followed before Desmond diverted it. Rae intended to use only a part of the water, since taking all of it off again might kill the strip of vegetation dependent on its flow. It would take a lot of tinkering, but tinkering was one thing Rae Newborn was good at.
She rolled up the sleeves of her shirt and knelt down beside the pool to wash her face and arms. She sat back on her knees with her eyes closed, smelling the wetness, hearing the gentle rhythm of the falling water. It sounded like Bella’s breath, that childish half-snore in the back of the throat, more a texture than a noise.
Rae had known a sculptor some years ago, long before miniature fountains had become all the rage for executive desks and middle-class coffee tables, who had used water as a medium to combine the sculptural and the organic. Three of his works—aesthetic experiments, he called them—involved the slow welling-up of water into a bowl with perfect, precision-ground edges. The level gradually rose, to the edges and above, the surface tension holding it, quivering and alive as if it might be a substance far more complex than water, until finally the tension became too great and the liquid collapsed in a gush down the sides of the bowl and the next cycle began.
The spring had no such dramatic climax to its upwelling, but the water seemed every bit as alive as that in the sculptor’s artificial pools, and infinitely more mysterious. Moisture oozed, coalesced into drips, joined together in tiny streams along the mossy rock face, and on the far end of the smaller second pool burbled away down the hill between ferns and roots and new spring growth.
It was a hidden place, as springs should be, quiet and secret and gentle, a place of maternal strength. Its only violation until now had been Desmond’s water trough, and even that had been shaped by careful hands from wood that grew out of the same piece of earth that the spring did. Her own harsh PVC would have to be buried, she realized suddenly; otherwise she could never bear to come here. Even thinking about her water source—the island’s wellspring—would make her feel guilty.
And now that she thought about it, burying her ugly white pipe for the first hundred yards might also solve the problem she had with the incompatibility of her angle joins and Desmond’s route, since dropping it even a foot into the soil would mean shifting the route as much as a yard uphill in order to keep the actual level of water in the pipes the same. Desmond’s line came off the bottom of the pool; if she drew from farther up, deepening it a few inches with her pick, she could compensate. If, that is, the ground between here and the problematic join proved soft enough to dig.
Laying it out in her mind, picturing the area uphill from Desmond’s line, Rae thought it might just work. There was one area of rock, but that was the sandstone, and although it made her shoulders ache just thinking of the job, she thought it doable. Just.
It was ironic, thinking of this place in terms of picks and shovels and plastic pipes. It was one of the most peaceful and undisturbed places she had found, as if the earth’s basic purity welled up along with the water. Fern fronds thrust their heads up from a patch of earth, and she knew that salamanders and frogs would be hiding among the stones. Petra would love this place; Rae could imagine her granddaughter hunched over here, tracking the course of a dragonfly, feeling the magic of the place seep into her adolescent bones, giving rise to flights of imagination. Rae smiled to herself, and cupped a last palmful of the untested water from the pool. This time she sucked it in, chewing on the mouthful of liquid as if it were nourishment. It tasted like water used to, laden with minerals and the essence of the earth. She could only hope the flavor would survive the trip downhill.
With a last glance at the bed of soft mosses and taut fiddleheads, Rae laid her wet hand, fingers splayed, on the soft ground preparatory to standing up. That was when she saw it: a sharp indentation no larger than her thumb, directly in front of her fingers, caught in the slanting afternoon sun: a mark that had no business here, gouged into the soft ground at the side of her water source.
The mark of a stranger’s boot.
Fourteen
Rae’s Journal
Bad.
Very bad.
Thorazine, lithium, Prozac, I don’t have anything. I looked through the bottles to see but there’s nothing, not even powder at the bottom, and alcohol cools the trembling but my pulse is, Jesus, 120? 140? My heart’s going to explode or my head is, God I’d take lithium even if it turns my blood to cold mud, makes me slow and clumsy and stupid and defenseless, weak and exposed, old and helpless, dull and
Oh, bad, bad. Voices scratching at my ears, not the wind, not the waves, not the trickle of dirt from the hill trying to cover up the foundation again, not the worm in the soil or the deer in the brush but voices, nagging and teasing and laughing at me and telling me what they’re going to
bad this time, and cold.
bad
cold
shivering
drymouthed heartracing
can’t sit still
skin itching
bugs under my skin, crawling there
Oh God, oh Hunter, I’m sorry, this was wrong, I was wrong. I brought along a gun, Hunter, a smooth, well-made
handgun
pistol
revolver
with a wooden handle stock that is
delicious
smooth
worn
and it’s sitting on my desk with me right now, sitting
hard
strong
heavy
next to this journal, the end of the barrel holding the left edge of the journal open (see the dent?) with my hand
covering it
holding it
warming it
while my right hand writes these words, makes these lists and I list to the left and I list to the right and to the port and starboard and if I had any port I’d drink that with my right hand the woodwright/the wordwright and at my left hand the gun, and between them in a triangle/the top of a triangle formed by right and left and words and gun stands a tight little forest of six smooth phallic bullets, beautiful smooth pieces of brass and lead and I’m sorry
Dr. Hunt
Roberta
Hunter After Truth
I’m so sorry but there was a footprint near the spring and I’m tired, tired and
tired
lonely
alone
afraid
small
weak
tired
tired
tired
afraid
Fifteen
It was Petra, all unknowing and innocently asleep in her bed a thousand miles to the south, who reached out a hand and kept her grandmother from sliding the bullets into their chambers.
I’m sorry, Rae had written, knowing that Roberta Hunt would read the journal, but when she wrote the words, she seemed to hear herself say them, and suddenly she was wrenched back to winter the year before, to the first week of February, looking up into Petra’s horrified, tear-streaked face and telling the child, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
The dates had taken on a luminosity in the calendar of Rae’s memory, a counting-down of days.
November 1: repairing Tamara’s roof with Alan and Bella.
November 25: Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s beach house: children running, fragrant turkey roasting, cold sea air with the taste of wine on Alan’s mouth and wood smoke in his hair.
December 3: finishing Bella’s present, an intricate inlaid box bristling with secret drawers.
December 11: Alan’s last class, his grade sheet turned in, home now.
December 12: the world came to an end.
A middle-aged real estate broker with a cell phone in one hand and the remnants of a well-lubricated Christmas party singing through his blood. Alan was killed instantly. Bella died twenty-four hours later, or so they told her; Rae did not know it for a couple
of days. Rae was in surgery for five hours to piece together the smashed left arm, the torn flesh of her left breast and shoulder, the hairline fracture of the left jawbone, all injuries given her—cruelest of ironies—by Alan, some fluke of air bags, seat belts, and the driver’s-side impact that had flung her husband’s beloved body into her. His glasses had shattered against her chest. His skull had smashed her raised forearm. A later surgeon found a piece of his front tooth buried in Raes shoulder.
If Bella had screamed one last terrified Mommy! it was wiped from Rae’s memory. Or perhaps not entirely: Maybe it was the echo of that cry that came to her beneath the rain and in her moments of awakening.
Five days in the alien world of an intensive care ward at Christmas, a place that even Rae’s mind registered as bizarre (the grimly cheerful tinsel swags on the monitors still appeared in her nightmares), followed by two weeks in a private room, then nine more days under the care of Tamara’s series of round-the-clock nurses before Rae could pull together sufficient energy to throw them out. All these health professionals saw only the expected battering of the bereaved; not one of them looked deep enough to notice the massive weight of melancholia settling in. Sitting in a still house in a dumb haze, Rae knew what was happening. A part of her looked on, that portion of her mind that split away at times like these, to watch with dry amusement as she slumped for six hours in a chair without moving, to observe her friends arriving to take her to the long-delayed funeral and finding her unwashed, unfed, wearing old jeans and one of Alan’s plaid shirts, having to brush Rae’s hair and get her dressed around the cast on her left arm. Sardonically, the looker-on noted the people, a sea of faces: colleagues, students, friends, touching Rae’s good arm, tears on their cheeks; Rae herself was aware only of nothingness. Home again, to a house in which silence dwelt, silence and Rae and the looker-on who had accompanied her into depression each time before, whose grim business it seemed to be to make careful and disinterested note of the number of sharp knives in the kitchen, the length of the cord on the radio near the bathtub, the vent of the propane tank, the proximity of the wheels of passing trucks. Rae had just enough sense to give up driving then, not wanting to take anyone else with her when she went.
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