Then on Saturday morning, Tamara abruptly announced that she had decided to leave, ostensibly to avoid the rush of Sunday traffic. Rae suspected that there were other, more important reasons, from the discomfort of the living quarters and the dearth of Tamara-style entertainment to Petra’s reflexive and unceasing prickliness around her mother, to say nothing of Tamara’s embarrassment over having broken down in front of Rae. Mostly, Rae thought, Tamara was feeling the need to draw back and recoup. She’d obviously faced as much as she could bear for the moment. Rae was satisfied—more than that, she was optimistic in a way she hadn’t been for a long, long time when it came to Tamara. Their relationship was by no means healed, and it remained to be seen just how far Tamara would be willing—or able—to allow it to change. But it was a first crack in the façade, and on the dock she met Rae’s embrace with a stiff hesitation followed by a long, tight hug and a quick turn away to the boat.
Whatever the reasons for her early departure, now that Tamara had been reassured as to her mother’s mental state and her daughter’s safety, she was ready to escape.
The trouble was, escape from Folly was no simple matter. Fortunately, Tamara had brought a cell phone for Petra’s use, or Rae would have been reduced to flagging down a passing sailboat to get Tamara a ride. It might actually have been easier to flag down a boat, since using the phone involved a hike even farther up Mount Desmond than the first time Rae had sought a signal. But in the end, Ed was summoned. He arrived two hours later looking not at all pleased at the prospect of being trapped on a boat with Tamara Collins, even for the short run to Friday Harbor. Rae thanked him, often and vigorously, until Ed relented with a rueful half-smile and said he’d see her Tuesday.
Rae and Petra stood shoulder to shoulder on the undulating boat dock. Tamara’s retreating spine was stiff again, but Rae thought it not quite as unyielding as it had been the last time Ed De la Torre had taken her away from the island, three months before on the eve of April Fools’. And this time Tamara turned before the boat reached the point, turned around and waved at them. The two generations on the shore waved back in farewell.
Then the Orca Queen was gone, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for Rae to wrap her arms around Petra. They held each other as they had not while Tamara was there to look on, their only motion the slow rise and dip of the boards beneath their feet. After a delicious interval, Rae spoke.
“I’m not going to be able to rest my chin on your head for much longer.”
“I’m the eighth-tallest person in my school, including the teachers.”
“I hope you don’t mind being tall.”
“No, I like it. I want to get to six feet.”
They separated then, to move along the dock and up the ridge of the promontory. Petra looked over her shoulder in the direction of San Juan.
“I hope she’ll be okay,” Petra said.
“She’ll be fine. You’ll be home in a week and a half.”
“It’s just that Mom really needs someone around to take care of.”
“She’ll have to make do with the horses and dogs.”
“And the cats.”
“And the cats, of course.” Rae saw the child glance again out to sea, and asked gently, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Maybe later. It’s all kind of a relief, you know? Not that I want them to get a … a divorce or anything, but at least it’s all out in the open. I mean, man, for about three weeks it was like you can feel that there’s something about to hit you, and you wait and wait with your teeth all clenched and when it finally comes it’s a relief, that you’re still walking around and it didn’t hurt as bad as you thought it would. You know?”
“I know.”
“But, Gran, you’re really looking great.”
“I’m feeling well.”
“I mean it. You look—beautiful.”
Rae laughed. “Oh come on, Petra, you need your eyes examined.”
“You do. Not like an actress or anything, but like a … a statue maybe. Like, ‘I am woman. I am strong.’”
“You know that song?” Rae asked in surprise.
“That’s a song?”
“Once upon a time, when we were all burning our bras.”
Ancient history not being Petra’s immediate interest, the child let it go. “Anyway, I’m glad to see you looking so good. I was real worried when we left you here. You looked kind of sick.”
In more ways than one, Rae commented internally. “I wasn’t in very good shape, you’re right. Of course, the rain that day didn’t help much. But this place has been good for me. A thousand times better than I could have hoped. When I got here, it was still halfway winter, so I’ve been able to watch the island come to life around me. I guess the sap’s been rising in me, too.”
The analogy did not make a lot of sense to Petra. Rae diverted her with a question. “So, what do you want to do?”
“Don’t you have to get back to work?”
“I think I could afford to goof off another half-day.”
“Well, if you’re sure, could we go up to the spring again?”
This time, they wore swimsuits under their shorts. Rae plugged off the water inlet and she and Petra lay in the warmer waters of the upper pond, drifting into each other and the mossy banks and gazing up at the trees and the sky and the visiting life of the island. They saw the dragonfly again, to Petra’s joy, and discovered a number of slim, moist, earth-colored newts.
Rae assembled cheese sandwiches for their late lunch. When they had eaten, she turned to Petra and said, “Would you like to see Desmond’s secret cave?”
Rae’s two invisible doors earned her Petra’s ultimate encomium, “Cool!” but the cave itself rendered her granddaughter speechless, awestruck by the sheer romance of the thing. Rae said nothing yet about Desmond’s bones, not even when the girl crawled across the stains on the floor in the side cave, looking around. They continued on to the main cave, and Petra gave the moldering shelves the merest glance, preferring to stand silently before the rear wall and wait for the next drip to gather, appear, elongate, fatten, and finally tremble free from the rocky point to plink into the tiny pool on the floor.
“Can you drink that?” she wanted to know.
“I haven’t had it tested, but I should think it’s safe enough.”
After a minute Petra squatted down and swished her fingers in the water, then held them up to dab the drips onto her tongue.
“I wonder if there could be another cave underneath this one?” she asked in a dreamy voice. “I mean, the water must be going somewhere, or the cave would’ve filled up, even with that slow a drip. Don’t you think?”
“The water’s getting out somehow, that’s for sure. I just figured it was seeping back into the sandstone, but I suppose there could be another cave down there.”
The girl was obviously taken by the idea of caves atop caves, worlds within worlds.
“I want to be a writer,” she said abruptly, her back to Rae and her face in the lamp’s shadow.
“Do you?” Rae answered. “I think you’d be good at it. I remember all those stories you used to tell Bella.”
“Mom says I’ll starve to death.”
“What kind of writing?” Rae asked, stepping firmly around the question of Tamara’s judgment.
“Fantasy, science fiction, that kind of stuff. I really like the idea of caves for that. You know, like what if under here was a huge cave filled with diamonds and things, sparkling in the torchlight, and a whole city of people? They have a queen, and—” Petra stopped abruptly, becoming aware that she had an adult audience. Rae responded as if she had not noticed.
“I’ve never read much science fiction,” she told her granddaughter. “Never read much fiction at all, for that matter. My imagination seems to be wired into my senses too firmly, which may be why I’m a craftsman rather than a pure artist. Your way of imagining things isn’t tied down like mine. You’ll probably be a fine writer.”
> Now the embarrassment was from educated praise instead of inadvertent revelation, and it drove Petra briskly to her feet. She took a last look around the cave as if to point out how cramped and musty and dull it really was, and then turned back toward the entrance, her mask of disdain firmly in place. It made her look like her mother, although their coloring was entirely different.
The mask slipped again when Rae stopped her to point out the petroglyph of the breaching orca, halfway up the wall. They had to put out one of the lights to get the shadows to fall right, and then it leapt into view, as clear as if the artist had rubbed pigment into it. Petra went soft again, and one hand came out, then hesitated.
“Can I touch it?”
“It’s carved into the stone—you’d have to bash it with a hammer to do any damage.”
Petra’s fingers, strong and brown from long hours grasping reins, tipped by nails bitten short and painted a purple so dark it looked black, lowered delicately onto the incised image. She was not aware of holding her breath as she traced the arching figure, its swirl of pattern and the strong triangular fin, but Rae heard the faint sigh of satisfaction the child let out when her hand came away.
“Desmond wouldn’t have done that, would he?” Petra asked. It startled Rae, hearing the intimately known name coming from another’s mouth. Petra seemed already to think of him as a personal acquaintance.
“No. That’s a Native American design—the people who hunted and fished these islands before the white man came. Some Salish or Nanaimo or Lummi probably got stuck here one stormy day with nothing better to do.”
Petra thought for a moment, and then she switched her flashlight back on and directed it upward. There on the low ceiling was a black discoloration, clear sign of the smoke from an ages-old torch.
“Aren’t you the clever one!” Rae exclaimed.
Petra ducked her head and her flashlight, and they left the cave.
Once they were out in the daylight, doors secured behind them and the sun dappling through the leaves above the campsite, Rae told her the rest of it, how she had found the bones she assumed to be those of Desmond Newborn.
She did not tell Petra the whole story—the bullet, the fire, and her private conclusions about what had happened. That, she decided, was too much family burden for a thirteen-year-old to carry. And because Desmond’s end was inseparable from what had gone before, she also kept secret the journal, the strongbox of mementos, and the locket. When the girl was eighteen, perhaps.
Then, to drive away the cold ghostly bones from Petra’s imagination, Rae tossed her a pair of leather gloves and put her to work.
Fifty-four
Desmond Newborn’s
Journal
September 12, 1927
Mere months ago I lightheartedly proposed to myself the idea of a house-warming party, to which I imagined inviting all the kind and disparate souls who have nurtured me in my quest and helped me regain a few shreds of human dignity. From the bank manager to the ironmonger, the powerful magnate of the Roche Harbor quarries to the lady who bakes my bread, I imagined them all gathered beneath my new roof, unlikely companions, the initial discomfort of their distinct stations in life melting under the warm unlikeliness of the event. Alcohol, too, might lend its hand.
And then my brother wrote to say that he was coming, and a heaviness began to settle in, as the air grows close before a storm, as the Front went profoundly still just before a push.
I find myself listening, as one listened out into no-man’s-land in the dark of night, when placed in a far distant post, waiting for the movement of a German raiding party: Every small breath of wind through the wheat seems designed to conceal the enemy, every distant rattle of their Maxim guns timed to hide the rattle of the crawling men’s equipment, every cloud across the slim moon placed there to obscure the movement of grasses. You remove your steel helmet so the roots of your hair can help listen to the dark, your very skin shudders at the rustle of a nearby rat, and if the man at your side has to stifle a cough, God helphim. Here, I do not know what I am straining so to hear, just that the heavy air demands that I freeze and stare out into the distance, sweating and breathless.
I force myself to move; that is the only way to conquer the urge to bolt. And so I build and finish my front door, a door more suited to a besieged castle than an island shack, and I mount it with three immensely stout hinges fashioned by the man who sold me this piece of God’s earth, my friend and benefactor Thomas Carmichael on Orcas Island—although as yet the door swings free, for I will not receive his latch until I row across to Roche Harbor tomorrow.
It is, I say so myself, a good house. It sits well on the land, for all that it is odd, like its builder, although a little more flamboyant and considerably more robust. Just to see it, standing up the hill from its small harbor, lends a man strength of spirit. To walk through it, to stand upon its floorboards and look through its windows, steadies a man and calms the urge to listen with every pore for the creeping enemy.
Yet he is merely my brother. Three years the elder and disapproving of all he surveys, but what of that? The island is mine, the house as well; Ws pale gaze cannot harm them.
My brother comes tomorrow, to talk me out of my folly. Let him try. Although I freely admit, to myself if none other, that the thought of seeing his face fills me with a terrible dread.
Fifty-five
In the wake of hard work, fresh air, a substantial dinner, and the absence of her mother’s eye, Petra went to bed early and fell instantly to sleep. Rae sat by the last glow of the fire, listening to Petra’s endearingly childlike snores mingling with the night. The moon was five days past full but the clear sky made it remarkably bright; the waves were high on the beach and receding.
Rae poured herself a glass of Scotch and took it down to the promontory. She felt restless, although she could not have said why. The moon, perhaps, and the nervous chittering of the high water retreating from wet rocks, to say nothing of the accumulated stresses of the last month pulling at her, stresses that ranged from the unforeseen reawakening of many kinds of life forces simultaneously to the heavy responsibility of a sleeping child, and taking in along the way murdered skeletons, familial revelations, the faces of her attackers, three cartons of shattered glass beauty, interesting ghosts, the crippling secret guilts of a daughter, and the rebirth of her life as a woodworker. Her flesh crawled, as if the soft night were studded with unfriendly, even malevolent eyes, watching her every movement. She rested her hand on the pocket of her sweatshirt from time to time, to reassure herself with the bulk of the pistol inside.
She sat as far as she could from the dark fringe of trees around the campsite, out on the farthest point of the promontory, settled on a flat rock with her knees drawn up to her chest. The Scotch helped calm the shivers along her arms and shoulders, and reduced the twitches up the back of her neck.
However, drink also lowered her resistance to the sensation of unheard voices in the bone behind her ears, a faint hissing pulse of sound that seemed, as always, to hold words that she had to strain to hear.
But she would not strain to render sense out of voices that were nothing more than the breeze in the trees and the blood in her veins. Petra required Rae’s full and capable presence. If it meant another dip into full-blown madness and voices at the end of the girl’s visit, well, she would deal with it, but not now. She drank her Scotch and watched the shadowy boats lying off her shore, rocking gently with the tide. The rapidly expanding population of the holiday weekend, she told herself; the low conversations she imagined could well be coming from them. Mosquitoes whined, and after a while, she went to bed.
Lying on the cot, inside her canvas walls, Rae’s unease only grew. She was excruciatingly conscious of the net window above Petra’s limp form, of the loose flap of the door across from her feet, of the flimsy canvas, just inches from her hand and hip, requiring only a sharp knife to enable an arm to reach in and grab. It was irrational, it was anxiety and not fear, but sh
e began to feel as if the night air were a blanket laid over her face, and she was sweating far more freely than the cool air would justify. She lay rigid, heart pounding and breath uneven, fighting against a panic attack that she could not walk off for fear of disturbing Petra and which refused to fade on its own. She was not far removed from whimpering in the back of her throat when Petra turned over and spoke.
“Are you okay?”
Rae hadn’t realized the child was awake. How long had the child been lying there listening to her grandmothers labored breathing? Rae swung her legs over the side of the creaking cot and rubbed her face.
“Yes, sweetheart, I just can’t sleep. I’m sorry to wake you.”
“You didn’t. I had a dream, about a bunch of orcas, playing and fighting in a tangle under the water, and one of them swam right past where I was standing. It was beautiful, with a sort of white patch when it went by, but kinda scary, too. That’s what woke me up.”
“You know, I actually saw an orca do that, not too long ago,” Rae told her. “When I was out on Jerry Carmichael’s boat. It went right underneath us. It was magical.”
“I liked Jerry,” noted Petra, distracted momentarily from the topic of her dream.
“He’s a nice man.”
“Is he, like, a boyfriend or something?”
“Just a friend. I think he and Nikki are about to get together.”
“Nikki’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”
“She is indeed,” Rae agreed.
“I guess it must be hard, after … I mean, you loved Alan a lot.”
Ah, thought Rae, the things that can be spoken of in the safety of darkness. “Yes, I did. And yes, it is hard. Very few men would have any idea of what they’d be getting into.”
Petra thought about this for a minute, then retreated back to her dream. “What do you suppose it means when you dream about orcas?”
“What does it mean to you?”
“God, Gran,” Petra complained in disgust, “you sound just like my shrink.”
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