Folly

by Laurie R. King

  Fifty-three

  Tamara stepped off Ed’s boat onto the uneven planks of the dock and cast her habitually disapproving gaze up at the tired and sunburnt canvas tent, the six shiny new canvas-and-wood chairs arranged in a circle around the grimy fire pit, and the raw and idiosyncratic house going up in the background. For the first time in the rushed week since she had staggered off the little plane on the San Juan airstrip, Rae was grateful that she’d been forced to spend three days in California. Those few hours with Vivian among the wood had proved more valuable than six months of psychotherapy in restoring Rae’s sense of worth and identity. She was not this young woman’s unbalanced mother, she was not a mental patient, she was not an attempted suicide and a twice-bereft widow and the victim of a vicious attack; she was Rae Newborn, a strong woman with bad times and good in her past, determined that there would be good times yet to come. She caught up Tamara’s large suitcase and carried it easily along the promontory to the tent. Petra followed them, sullen still in her mother’s presence, while Ed deposited the bag of fresh vegetables, milk, and a block of ice on the dock, then slipped away as silently as his engines would allow.

  Petra headed for the building site. Rae dumped Tamara’s luggage on the foot of one of the two cots she had borrowed, which alongside hers (for Petra’s use, Rae having planned on sleeping up in the house during the invasion) took up most of the floor in the tent. Petra’s had a sleeping bag; the other two were made up with clean sheets.

  “I borrowed these for you and Don,” she told Tamara. “If he’s not coming, I could either sleep here, or take one cot out so you and Petra could have more floor space.”

  “We’re getting a divorce.” Tamara said it bluntly, looking at the fresh sheets, at the storage boxes jammed into the corner, at anything but her mother. “He moved out a month ago. Just before Memorial Day weekend.”

  “A month ago? But…”

  “I know, I should have told you. I threw him out a couple of days after I wrote telling you we were coming. We had a fight about it that didn’t seem to end, and then I found out about… I asked Petra not to tell you about it. I wanted to do it myself.”

  A month. Rae wanted to scream at the top of her lungs, a wordless roar of frustration and relief, could feel it building, and struggled to keep it down. She threw the bastard out an entire month ago—all that time of straining to hear the enemy sneaking up and fretting about where Don and his fucking court case were going to pop up next, a whole month getting ready to look into his smiling face and getting my teeth ready to smile back, all of that month completely unnecessary, as if there hadn’t been enough stress, as if I— Rae fought back the furious recriminations with an effort that made her shudder. But once she had, she could finally see Tamara, see the heartbreak on her daughter’s face, and she could be a mother again. She stepped forward and silently wrapped her work-hardened arms around her daughter, a thing she had not been able to do since her daughter was Petra’s age. For an instant Tamara stiffened, and then she gave way and began, painfully and piteously, to sob. A few minutes later Petra looked in the door. Rae met her eyes, and after a moment the spiky-haired, Doc Martens–wearing, black-clad girl pushed her way through the mosquito netting and came up to her mother and grandmother. Rae opened her arm and pulled her in, and they stood in a huddle, three women weeping.

  Tamara was the first to break away, looking miserable and blotchy but relieved that the worst was over. Petra pulled back, her heavy eye makeup halfway down her face, and searched for a box of tissues. Rae, on the other hand, was finding it hard not to burst into song.

  There were a lot of unanswered questions, however, and over the course of the long and unreal day, Rae tried to get them answered.

  It was Don’s affair that struck the final blow, Tamara confided when Petra was safely out of earshot on the beach in a bikini (a black one). She had put up with business practices that threatened the family’s financial and legal future, she had managed to overlook his tirades against Petra’s appearance, friends, and work habits, she had even forgiven the two occasions on which he lost control and hit her—Tamara, never Petra— but she could not forgive him for sleeping with his personal assistant.

  There was a lot more to it than that, of course; once the flood of catharsis was loosed, it took a while to reach its end. And with Tamara, who all her life had flat out refused the possibility that she might benefit from therapy, it all had to gush forth at once. Her manifold guilts were laid bare: taking Don’s side against Rae even when she knew Rae was right; withholding Petra when she knew full well that Petra was all Rae had left; even her shame at not having loved Alan as freely as he deserved. And eventually, with a bemused Rae stepping for a change into the role of counselor, the ugliest, hardest little truths at the bottom of it all began to work their way into the light.

  How although Tamara had loved her half-sister Bella, at the same time she had deeply resented her, because Rae loved the child so easily, and because Rae had chosen Alan over Tamara’s own father, David. How she had kept Petra from Rae because of that resentment. How when Bella died, Tamara secretly hated Rae for failing to turn to her, for reaching past her to seize on Petra.

  And buried deepest of all, a bitter confession that needed alcohol to prime it: Tamara’s lifelong guilt over her own birth. Intellectually, Tamara knew that she had not caused Rae to go crazy that first time; she had read enough about mood disorders over the years to know the biochemical inevitability of depression. Nonetheless, her heart was convinced that it was her fault. After all, David, David’s mother, and Tamara’s great-grandfather William had all told her at one time or another that her mother had been fine until her birth. How could she help believing that Rae had exchanged her sanity for her daughter’s life?

  Rae sat with her daughter, and rocked her and cried with her, bitterly cursing all those members of the family, cursing herself as well for not seeing, despite fifty-two years’ intimate experience with the mechanics of guilt and the failures of love, that Tamara had taken it all on herself. How could she have been so blind, not to realize what was happening with her own daughter? If Rae herself still harbored vague feelings of responsibility for her mother’s death—and that of cancer, when Rae was five years old—how could Tamara not blame herself for Rae’s mental disintegration, when it occurred nearly simultaneously with Tamara’s birth?

  God, Rae groaned to herself; the cycle was never-ending.

  No conclusions could be reached, not in a single afternoon of tears. Not in a week, even. All Rae could do was hold Tamara as much as Tamara would allow. All Rae could hope for was to lay the first cornerstone of a foundation, a base on which the future could be built. All Rae could do was to tell her daughter that she loved her.

  It made for a long morning and an even longer afternoon, with many repetitions and stumbling confessions and an apparently endless stream of tears. Rae listened, and murmured reassurances, and patted her daughter, and forced her to eat some lunch, until finally she began to cast around for distractions. She was not Tamara’s therapist, and even if she were, one fifty-minute hour was usually a day’s limit; this session had gone past four hours. At the next pause Rae interjected a gentle inquiry about the monies that she had arranged through Pam Church to be distributed between the three members of the Collins family. Tamara’s face twisted in a look of bitter satisfaction.

  “We got the letter from your lawyer the day after I threw Don out.”

  Tamara went on at some length about her pleasure in telling her husband that he would be receiving no more of his mother-in-law’s money, but Rae heard less than half of it. Don had known for a month that he no longer had any legal claim on the Newborn estate, yet less than three weeks ago someone had been calling around the islands in an attempt to find her, and it was after that that her tent had been invaded. Finally she shook her head. Jerry was wrong; Jerry was speaking personally, as a man, not a sheriff. Coincidence happened. Some trespassing kids, looking for cash or a stash, t
hat was all.

  The sun traveled across the sky, Petra turned herself over twice and applied sunscreen once, Tamara continued to pour out the years of repressed indignation, and Rae began to long for the saw and hammer; even the brutal labor of excavation started to seem attractive.

  By half past three she’d had enough. She got stiffly to her feet (canvas chairs were not intended for long sessions) and asked Tamara if she wouldn’t like to see the house. Tamara looked startled, having clearly forgotten her mother’s preoccupation for the last months, then dried her eyes. She looked awful, and Rae decided it was well past time to bring the session to an end.

  “I forgot to tell you,” she said, “I invited a couple of friends to join us for dinner. The local sheriff and a park ranger. I thought you might like to see who your mother’s been hanging around with.” Rae had originally invited them to provide support in the face of her son-in-law; now the guests would function as another but equally valuable kind of interruption. “Hey, Petra! You want a tour of the house?”

  The teenager eyed her mother with a wariness that ill concealed her concern, and shrugged to indicate a general state of disinterest; nonetheless, she was on her feet in seconds, with the sandy towel wrapped around her waist like a sarong. Tamara automatically ordered her to put on her shoes, and Petra equally automatically started to bristle, but when Rae actually agreed with her daughter, explaining that building sites tended to collect a lot of sharp objects, Petra subsided, digging a pair of rubber flip-flops out of her pack. They weren’t exactly what Rae had in mind, but she would compromise this time.

  They started at the workbench, where Rae showed them the old black-and-white photograph of Desmond’s home tacked to the tree. Looking back and forth between picture and reality, she had to admit she had a ways to go. Her towers looked particularly sad, capped as they were by hunks of plywood in place of Desmond’s neat shingle cones.

  “There’s some things I’m willing to leave to experts, and that roof is going to be one of them,” Rae told them. Petra looked mildly disappointed, Tamara approving, and they went up to look the house over.

  It was highly satisfying to have an audience, even an uneducated and not terribly responsive one. And because most of what she had done up to now was simply reproducing Desmond’s genius, and Rae believed in giving credit where it was due, she could praise and brag with no fear of vanity. She had already decided not to tell them about the bones she’d found: time enough for that disturbing knowledge.

  Two other things she kept to herself: the access door beside the fireplace, invisible but for the splinter latch behind her hanging tool belt, and the one into the subfloor crawl space, hidden beneath an ancient and filthy scrap of carpeting to keep curious adolescents from venturing under the house to see Desmond’s Native American mortar—and the figures it held. She led them proudly up her new stairway to let them admire the view. Tamara then retreated to the tent with a cool wet cloth across her swollen eyes while Rae and Petra swam in the cove and then laid the fire for the steaks Jerry was bringing.

  The two upholders of law and order on the islands arrived in Jerry’s boat just after six, Caleb in tow. Rae strode down both to meet her guests and to convey a quick warning to the adults over the child’s fiery head.

  “I haven’t told my daughter and granddaughter about the s-k-e-l-e-t-o-n,” she spelled out. “And, I just found out that my daughter is divorcing her husband, so walk carefully around that topic as well.”

  With that Petra came onto the dock, no doubt at her mother’s urging, with an offer to carry something. Jerry shook her hand and then placed a white bakery box in it, with a caution that it should not be tipped, and introductions were made there and at the fire. Nikki, at her most cheerful, took up the conversational ball and ran with it while Jerry occupied himself at the cook fire, a red-and-white-check apron over his clean blue shirt. Rae listened to the conversation with half an ear, the rest of her mind occupied with the problem of Don Collins. Should she be concerned for the safety of her daughter and granddaughter? Was there any unequivocal evidence that someone was laying siege to Folly?

  None at all. Jerry Carmichael’s mother-hen nervousness was contagious. Enjoy the party, Rae, she exhorted herself. Quit fretting about the Watchers in the woods and pay attention to the rare pleasure of friends and family.

  All in all, the evening was not as awkward as it might have been. Tamara even came out of herself to flirt mildly with Jerry, to the well-concealed amusement of Nikki Walls, and they all ate far too much. Rae and Nikki did the dishes while the shadows grew long and Jerry talked to Tamara and Petra, Caleb nestled into his lap. When Rae glanced over at the fire pit, she was amused to see Petra sitting with her Doc Martens outstretched, propped on the rock ring in a position identical to Jerry’s—although she lacked a sleeping child draped over her chest. Rae finished drying the dishes, tossed the towel over its branch to air, and crossed to the fire; before she could sit down, Jerry got to his feet and asked if he could have a word. Caleb stirred in sleepy protest as Jerry transferred him into his mother’s arms, where he settled instantly with small childish sleep-noises.

  Rae walked with Jerry down to the beach, glowing still in the last rays of sunlight. Jerry scooped up a handful of flattish stones and proceeded to skip them over the smooth face of the cove waters.

  “Escobar phoned to say one of the guys he’s charged is pleading guilty, and the other one will go to trial. You’ll have to go testify for that in a few months.”

  “I thought I might.”

  “Also, something else came up in questioning them. Apparently one of the guys thinks the man who hired them may have been trying to drive you to suicide.”

  That was a jolt. Jerry felt her go still, and his big hand sought out her shoulder, a gesture clearly visible to the three variously speculating women near the fire.

  “I guess I was assuming he only wanted me to be crazy,” she told him in a small voice.

  “Do you have that kind of an enemy?”

  Rae turned slightly so that her back was to the campfire, as if Tamara might be able to read from her face what she was about to say. Jerry’s hand fell away, but he remained close, his upper arm brushing her shoulder. “I have that kind of a son-in-law,” she told him. “Or I thought so until today.”

  “Son-in-law. You mean Tamara’s—”

  “Don Collins. He’s greedy, he’s crooked, and he’s always in a tight place financially. But I just found out that they’ve been separated for nearly a month and that Tamara’s filed for divorce, so he surely can’t expect to inherit anything now. If it was him, I’m safe.”

  “Did you tell Escobar about this? Has he talked to Collins?”

  “I told him in a general sort of a way, at the time.” Although that had been in the weeks after the attack, when Rae as a witness had left much to be desired.

  “I think I should make sure he’s seen the possibility.”

  “Maybe … oh, hell. Have him get in touch with my lawyer. She knows my whole history with Don.”

  “Will she give it out?”

  “I’ll write her a letter, asking her to open her files. You could witness the letter—that ought to make it legal.”

  “Do it tonight. If Collins had anything to do with hiring those two, he’d most likely have phone records, cash withdrawals, that kind of thing.”

  The sun dropped behind the heights of Vancouver Island; Rae dry-washed her tired face. “This is going to be hard on Petra.”

  “Harder on her if he’d managed to injure you. Though how he thought he could make you commit suicide, I can’t imagine. Sounds like a bad thriller.”

  At that, Rae turned to stare at him, incredulous. “What are you talking about? He very nearly did.”

  “Oh, Rae, come on. You had a breakdown. Hardly surprising, under the circ—”

  She thrust her left arm under his nose, forcing him to look at the scars. She tapped at the highest one, the pinkest and freshest of the three. “Tha
t was serious, Jerry. Five more minutes to myself, and I wouldn’t be standing here.” She watched his face, seeing the realization and the fleeting twist of revulsion. When she was certain he had understood, she added, “Depression kills, Jerry. It doesn’t take much of a nudge.”

  “I, um … I didn’t really think …”

  “I know. I’ll go write that letter now.”

  She went through the campsite and into the tent, where she took out her pad and a pen. On the canvas wall above the desk she had fastened Caleb’s drawing of Rae with the twenty-three crabs at her stick feet, the only piece of decoration in the place. The artist himself had wakened from his nap and was chattering with Petra, a bittersweet reminder of long overheard conversations between the girl and Bella. Rae listened for a minute to Caleb’s serious lecture on the life and habits of the hermit crab, then went back to the letter. When she had signed it, she called Jerry in to sign as well. He read the few lines, scribbled his name, and folded the document into a pocket.

  Then it was time for the San Juan natives to leave—Jerry distracted, Nikki curious, Caleb alone lighthearted. Rae and Petra waved them off at the dock, and walked through the midsummer’s evening to join Tamara at the fire.

  Tamara stayed only two nights. On the Friday, the three Newborn women ate blueberry pancakes and then went for a hike up Mount Desmond, diverting on the way back to dabble in the tepid spring-fed pool (where Petra discovered both salamanders and dragonflies). On the way downhill they picked a giant bouquet of paintbrush and brodiaea and a few late blossoms of Nootka rose. They went for a swim in the icy cove—even Tamara, who was trying hard—and in the evening Ed came to taxi them to Roche Harbor for dinner. They spotted a distant orca on the way over, ate a satisfying meal, watched the sundown ceremony in the boat harbor (complete with salute from the miniature cannon), went back to play a few surprisingly congenial hands of poker in front of the fire (Tamara really was trying), and went to their cots content.