by Maria Padian
No question about it: Mr. Beady had been here.
Michael had tiptoed ahead of me into the bedroom. He emerged, shaking his head.
“Empty,” he said. “But it looks like someone’s been lying in the bed. Covers are all rumpled.”
“Let’s try the lighthouse,” I said, exasperated.
The path from the cottages to the lighthouse is the deepest, most heavily wooded on Spruce Island. On the hottest and brightest of summer days this path remains cold and shadowy. Year round it smells like Christmas trees in there, and tiny mammals, like red squirrels and chipmunks, rule. It’s the sort of place Monique Rose would love, and where I’d already promised to build fairy houses with her come summer.
But on a raw April night at three a.m. it’s one scary place. We had to walk slowly, since the combination of ankle-turning roots and pitch dark didn’t lend itself to running. The trees, swaying in the wind, moaned. I don’t know what made me do it, but I reached out and grabbed Michael’s hand.
It was amazingly warm. I remember feeling incredibly grateful to have that hand to hang on to, and as we made our way through the woods, I gripped it with bone-crushing intensity. Michael never complained—which is saying something, because I have pretty powerful paws. As we approached the end of the path, the sound of waves washing up on the rocks grew louder.
And suddenly we were there. The woods opened, and Spruce Island lighthouse blazed before us. Well, maybe “blazed” isn’t exactly accurate. Compared to the dark path and view of the lighthouse from the water, it seemed blazing, close up. It was definitely bright, and on a clear night could probably have been seen for miles. The lanterns, glowing from atop the stone tower, flickered when the wind gusted hard against the windows. They illuminated the air, heavy with moisture, so everything around us seemed bathed in gold.
Michael released my hand, taking a few steps to his right in order to get a better look. He crashed into something and swore.
“What the…,” he said, then gasped. In the dim light I could make out two shapes. Not standing, not lying on the ground, but seated. Reclining, actually. In aluminum beach chairs. They did not look human. The only thing I can compare them to is larvae. That disgusting, maggot-like stage of insect development: white, cocoon-like, and bloated. Only these larvae were giant, man-sized mutants.
“Oh my god!” Michael screamed, his voice high-pitched with fear. “Mummies!”
sol•i•tar•y
Larvae, mummies, whatever. Equally horrible, especially when the biggest of the two larvae-mummies reared its head at Michael’s scream. It pulled itself into an upright sitting position, like a big L.
“Michael? Brett? What are you doing here?” it said in Mr. Beady’s voice.
Of course: mummy sleeping bags. Nonna used them whenever Elders United for Peace and Social Justice held their annual winter solstice party. They’d all zip themselves snugly into the bags, settle into reclining chairs on the Gnome Home lawn, and peacefully contemplate the stars overhead in the cold night sky. The bags fit over their heads and tied securely at their chins, leaving just a small round opening at the face for breathing. Comfy and warm, the elders didn’t care one bit that the bags made them resemble giant insect larvae.
They made perfect sense on a cruel April night, in wind and fog.
I knelt beside the smaller mummy.
“Nonna?”
There was her face, poking from the head of the sleeping bag. Her eyelids flickered. She’d been asleep.
“Hi, hon,” she said dreamily. I wasn’t sure she knew me.
“Nonna, it’s Brett. Are you okay?” She smiled, and her gaze wandered from my face to something directly over my head.
“Look,” she said softly.
I twisted around. From where she reclined, Nonna had a great view. The lighthouse loomed overhead, a golden beacon that outshone everything. We couldn’t see the mortar crumbling off the tower, or the peeling paint, the rusty steel bars of the catwalk, the cracked windows. Only the perfect, lovely light. It was surreal, as if the combination of darkness, fog, and flame had taken us back in time, to the first night some solitary keeper climbed this tower and lit the lanterns.
Solitary: alone.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Nonna said quietly. “Such little things. Candles, really. Look how much light just a little candle makes!”
I didn’t bother to argue with her. Didn’t bother to point out that these were actually sixteen lanterns, with reflectors, and not one little candle. She seemed so pleased and peaceful, and it seemed ages since she’d rested. I wondered how many fentanyl patches it had taken to get her to this state. I sat on the wet gravel, my blue-jeaned bottom immediately soaked, and rested my head on her shoulder.
The four of us stayed like that for a long time. Michael and Mr. Beady spoke quietly to each other, Michael grilling him on every detail related to transporting and erecting the lanterns. Nonna drifted in and out of sleep, occasionally murmuring something I couldn’t understand. I hunched down into my raincoat, cheek on the cold, damp mummy bag, and tried to relax myself warm.
It occurred to me that this moment, this strange little scene on the beach, had been my reason all along for coming. Deep down I had known Nonna would never do anything to harm herself or hurt our feelings. Deeper down…pretty deep, actually…I knew Mr. Beady would take care of her, and certainly didn’t need me and Michael to come to the rescue. I had simply wanted to be with her when she saw her lighthouse blaze.
Because there wasn’t going to be a Memorial Day trip to the island for Nonna. We were that close to the end. The Former Queen of Denial understood that. I understood, the way I understand sunrises, tide changes, and orbiting planets. I don’t really get how they work, but I accept their existence. I have no choice.
I didn’t realize it then, but the redefinition that had kicked off on October 16th was almost complete. Since that afternoon, sometime after four p.m., I had shed and added more defining characteristics than I even knew existed. I had just one more to lose, and it would happen in a few days: “Only Granddaughter.”
hy•po•ther•mic
My body was sending all sorts of hypothermic distress signals. Uncontrollable shaking, for example. I kept thinking of the woodstove back at the cottage. I also figured that if I was this cold, Nonna might be as well.
Hypothermic: having a subnormal body temperature.
“Mr. Beady!” I hissed. Two heads turned toward me. “What time is it?” The big larva twisted, and I heard unzipping sounds.
“Four,” he said.
“Don’t you think we should get her inside?” I said.
Mr. Beady shrugged off his mummy bag and emerged fully clothed, even down to his heavy winter boots. He bent over Nonna, whose soft, even breathing made little puffs of steam, and lifted her in his arms. For an old guy, Mr. Beady is one tough bird. Even though Nonna was a featherweight, any sleeping person feels like a dead weight.
Michael and I grabbed the chairs and followed him down the dark fairy path to the cottages. He walked carefully, but then I saw him stumble over a root.
“Nonna!” I exclaimed. Mr. Beady regained his footing and kept moving ahead.
It’s amazing what a little adrenaline can do. It gives you the zooms, the energy to do what needs to be done. That moment, when I thought Mr. Beady was going to hit the ground and land on Nonna, adrenaline shot through me like an arrow, and I forgot all about my shivering legs, shaking like jelly.
“Let us take her; you’re tired,” I insisted.
“No, no,” Mr. Beady muttered, plodding ahead. “I’ve got her.”
“No you don’t,” I said, standing directly in front of him and dropping my chair. “You’re exhausted.” I reached both arms under Nonna’s shoulders and lifted so her head rested on my chest. Michael dropped his chair and did the same with her legs, and we gently hefted her from Mr. Beady’s arms. Together we continued along the dark path.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see
anything as that white-shingled cottage. The muscles in my arms burned, my breath came short and fast, and in the space of a few hundred yards I’d gone from totally cold to sweating. Mr. Beady opened the door ahead of us, so Michael and I walked inside, straight to the bedroom, and laid Nonna on the bed. I unzipped the wet mummy bag and pulled and tugged until I’d extricated her from it.
Mr. Beady had her all duded out in the Michelin Man parka and every other warm thing she owned. I ran my hands over her: dry as a nut. What’s more, she never woke up. Slept right through it all, which was a miracle since she hadn’t been comfortable in weeks. I sat alongside her, listening to her quiet, even breathing.
When I returned to the sitting room, Michael was stuffing split logs into the woodstove. Mr. Beady was banging around in the kitchen. Each cottage has a small propane stove, and he was setting a kettle of water to boil for tea. I collapsed into an armchair, too shattered to remove my wet raincoat, and stared at the orange coals flickering to life under Michael’s hands.
Mr. Beady rejoined us in the sitting room, pulling a chair alongside mine.
“Where are your parents?” he asked us. Michael and I looked at each other and shrugged. Mr. Beady narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
“How did you get out here?” he continued.
“Same as you,” Michael replied. “Drove to the Landing. Took a boat over.”
“By yourselves?” Mr. Beady asked. We nodded. He stared at us for a moment, uncomprehending. When he understood that we’d come out alone, he groaned softly and put his head in his hands.
“They’re going to kill me,” he said. “They’re going to think I put you up to this.”
“Actually, they’re going to kill you for dragging Nonna out here,” I commented. “With all due respect, Mr. Beady…what were you thinking?”
“I took every precaution!” he cried. “She was never in any danger. Dwayne and I made sure of that.”
“Dwayne Morin?” Michael asked.
“He brought us over in his fishing boat,” Mr. Beady explained. “Much bigger than the Dolly Llama. And got her up to the cottages using the lawn mower. You know, the big driving mower? Dwayne attached a trailer to it. We propped Eileen between the duffels in the trailer, with the cooler, and drove her right up the path.” I imagined the look of horror on my mother’s face when she heard all this.
“The lanterns?” Michael continued.
“I set them up a day earlier,” Mr. Beady said. “I’ve had them in Morin’s workshop for weeks now.”
“You’ve been planning this for weeks?” I exclaimed. Mr. Beady shook his head and stared into the fire. The wood burned bright now, and the room felt warm.
“I was thinking of the summer,” he said quietly. “This trip just…happened.” He looked at me, his eyes wide with a question. Asking me if I understood why he’d done this.
Absolutely.
The three of us remained quiet in the dark room, Michael occasionally feeding logs to the flames. At some point the kettle screamed, and Mr. Beady got up to make tea. Sometime in there I slipped off my raincoat and hung it on a peg. Dripping water formed a circle beneath it. I wrapped my hands around the hot mug Mr. Beady handed me, amazed at the intense pleasure of clutching something warm. Nonna coughed.
“Beady?” she said quietly. We both jumped up.
She was a slight bump beneath a mound of blankets we’d heaped on her. Mr. Beady sat gently on the edge of the bed and looked intently into her face. In the dim light I saw her smile at him.
“Eileen, how are you feeling?”
“Peachy,” she replied. “Except these blankets smell like mothballs.”
“I’ll take that up with the management, next time I see them,” he replied. He winked at me. “Could you do with some tea?” She nodded, and looked beyond him to where I stood. With difficulty, she pulled one arm from beneath the blankets and extended her hand.
Old people have these dry, thin hands. It makes me think of bird bones wrapped in Japanese rice paper. Only Nonna’s were cold.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. “I heard they brought you in on a trailer.”
“That didn’t go so well,” she admitted. “But I’m good now. I’m glad you’re here, honey.”
“Me too, Nonna.”
“It’s just like we imagined,” she said. “When we bought the island, years ago? We dreamed of making it work again. Do you think it’s silly? Do you think I’m foolish, dragging poor Beady out here?”
“I think he did the dragging,” I said. “And no. I don’t think it’s silly. I think it’s amazing.” She closed her eyes, and her head sank a bit deeper into the pillows. Like she was melting. Just talking exhausted her.
We heard it then: the outboard motor. Sound travels easily over water, with nothing to get in its way. So there was no telling how far the boat was from the island. But the sound was getting louder, which meant closer. Mr. Beady appeared in the doorway, holding a mug.
“That’s odd,” he said, frowning. “Dwayne isn’t due here for hours.”
“I wonder if they see the light,” she said. “Did you leave the lanterns burning?”
Mr. Beady looked at me.
“Of course,” he said. Nonna smiled.
“Lovely,” she said. “I like to think they see our light.”
It was still dark outside. I imagined the bright halogen lights of—what? a police boat? a posse of angry fishermen recovering the stolen dory?—plowing through the cold, choppy water, pulling up to the Spruce Island dock.
Lovely? Scary, more like.
in•de•fin•a•ble
Two days later she was gone.
It’s impossible to explain how I felt. Some feelings have no words. They’re just…indefinable.
Indefinable: incapable of being precisely described or analyzed.
Dad says that’s the whole point of the “April is the cruelest month” poem. He says in the end words fail. In the end we can only hope for peace so deep that it’s beyond what our puny little minds can absorb. I get that, actually. So since I can find no way to define losing Nonna, I wait for the hollow place inside me to fill again. I go through the motions every day and trust that there will eventually come a morning when my first waking thought isn’t “She’s dead.”
The outboard motor turned out to be Dwayne Morin’s fishing boat. And my parents. And the rest of the Emergency Contact card. Aunt Lorena had discovered Michael missing, then the car missing, then called my parents, who told her about my idea…. You get the picture. Like a long line of dominoes, one knocks into the other, and next thing you know you’ve set off a chain reaction from Mescataqua to Spruce Island. We were all less than happy to see each other. Mom couldn’t look Mr. Beady in the eye, she was that pissed. Dwayne Morin kept apologizing. Aunt Lorena and Uncle Jack kept thinking of more and more punishments for Michael: “No TV for a year! We’re cutting off your allowance! Online chess is history!”
The only calm person was Nonna. When Dad, in all his panic, rushed into the bedroom to find her, she smiled dreamily at him.
“Did you see the light?” she asked softly, before she fell asleep again.
As soon as it got bright enough outside to see the roots and rocks along the path to the water, we hitched up the lawn mower trailer again. I got in first, sort of a human cushion for Nonna. We stuffed the duffels around us and bumped slowly back to the boat. She didn’t say much but every once in a while gave a little groan. Mom walked alongside the trailer, and I could see her jaw tighten every time it lurched.
It took us all morning to get Nonna home. All day, actually. First carrying her carefully into Dwayne’s boat, then out of the boat and up the ramp and into the car…For the life of me I don’t know how Mr. Beady managed to get her to the island to begin with. It occurred to me he might be Superman or something, wearing full-body Lycra underwear under his flannel shirts, a big S emblazoned on the chest. I would have liked to tell Nonna that one. Mr. Beady in a Superman body suit.
&n
bsp; But she never woke up.
From the moment we left the island until we finally got her back to her bed in the Gnome Home, Nonna grew quieter and quieter. Her breathing became shallow, coming out in soft, irregular whispers. She went from talking in her sleep to muttering things we couldn’t understand to simply moving her lips soundlessly; speech abandoned her. She became very, very still. I watched her chest rise and fall, so slightly you could barely tell she moved. Sometimes a long while would pass between breaths, and I would think, “That’s it.” Then she’d give a little shudder and her lungs would fill again.
When she finally left us, it was morning, and we were all together. Light streamed into the living room, where we’d set up her hospital bed, and it smelled like the coffee Mom had just made. Mom sat in the rocker near the foot of the bed, while Mr. Beady had taken up residence in an armchair near the window. Dad and I sat on either side of Nonna. She took up so little space. He was holding her hand, watching her face, when her chest simply failed to rise. We waited. And finally he said, “She’s gone.” Then Dad bent his head, and his shoulders shook.
There are no words to describe the sound of your own father crying.
re•de•fined
I hadn’t counted on the heat. Nasty heat. Humid, out-of-season, early heat that catches you unawares when your skin is still pasty winter white and you haven’t gotten used to wearing shorts yet. The type of out-of-season heat wave that causes a run on fans at Rite Aid and gives overweight people heart palpitations.
Michael manages to bring up that delightful fact as the sweat pours off us one bright afternoon. We are clearing out the Gnome Home garage, by order of the Great Almighty Clearer Outer: Mom. The lease on the house is due to run out by the end of May, and we are busy removing every trace of Nonna, from the kitchen to the attic to the garage. None of us can bear throwing anything away, so what we don’t give away we pack into our house or have Mr. Beady truck to his garage. He seems grateful to be busy. I wonder what he will do with himself once we finish the job.