Charleston

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  “If everything stays on track we should have everything signed by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. I don’t think anyone wants to go into the Thanksgiving holiday with things unresolved. It would be a disaster for the paper if that were to happen.”

  Eliza collected her disappointment around her before she spoke. “So I guess that means you can’t come home this weekend?”

  “No, we’re working through the weekend. I can’t risk leaving. Hopefully this all will be over Tuesday, and I can come home.”

  “I forgot to mention my mother called a few days ago to invite us to Middleburg for Thanksgiving. I told her I thought I could come, but I doubted you would be able to make it.”

  “Actually, no, that would be great, my mother has decided to fly out to Wyoming Saturday to see her brother. Lawton has a full week off from school next week, and we both thought it would be good for him to go. He’s invited Sam Logan, so they will have a good time pretending to be ranch hands. I’m all yours.”

  “But isn’t that going to be difficult with Issie?”

  “No. She and her cousins are meeting in Boston to discuss their grandmother’s estate. So to Middleburg—are we driving or flying?”

  “I was thinking driving but—”

  “A road trip. That’ll be good, I don’t think we’ve ever gone on a road trip together. By the way, Eliza, your mother isn’t going to give us separate bedrooms?”

  “She might.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ARE YOU PLEASED?” ELIZA ASKED WHEN HENRY CALLED Tuesday afternoon and said that they had signed the agreement.

  “Mainly just relieved it’s over. The terms were not what we wanted, but we can live with them, and I think we pushed them as far as we could. We just couldn’t delay any longer. Anyway, it’s over, now everyone can get back to work. I’m heading to the airport, hoping to get the four thirty flight. If I miss it, then there is one at five fifty, but it doesn’t get in until after eleven.”

  “Do you have the key I gave you?”

  “I’m pretty sure I left it in my Jeep at the airport. I’ll call you if it’s not there.”

  “ELIZA.” HENRY GENTLY SHOOK HER SHOULDER. HE TOOK her book, Summer and Smoke, and marked her place and put it on the table. He leaned down. “Eliza.”

  She shook her head. “You’re back,” she said and put her arms around his neck. “What time is it?”

  “Quarter to twelve.”

  “Was your flight late?”

  “A little.” Henry’s voice was quiet. He sat down on the sofa next to her. He reached down and picked up a map from the floor. “So I guess we really are driving to Middleburg tomorrow. Does your mother care what time we arrive?”

  “Umm, if possible,” Eliza said, still a little disoriented by sleep, “she would like us to get there by dinner.”

  “It’s about a nine-hour drive, isn’t it?”

  “It is, if we take 95,” Eliza said, “but we could swing west through the Blue Ridge Mountains. It would be a nicer drive, but it would add at least an hour.”

  “Let’s see,” Henry traced the routes with his index finger.

  Eliza ran her fingertips lightly over the top of his hand down to the end of his fingers. “When I was working at the Jasper Marlowe Gallery in London, a young Italian artist came in with his slides. He had painted hands on such a large scale that they looked like landscapes. He said he had been inspired by Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory of fractal geometry. I thought his paintings were beautiful, but Jasper wasn’t sure he could sell them. I wonder what happened to him.” Eliza turned Henry’s hand over and traced the creases in his palm and the creases across each finger. “Have you ever had your palm read?”

  Henry shook his head. “Have you?”

  “No, never.”

  “So let’s change that. Here, give me your hand. This may be the one thing you don’t know about me—I’m very good at palm readings. Here, let’s see. Interesting. You have an interesting journey.”

  “Henry, come on, you’re making fun of me.” She tried to pull her hand back, but he held on and pulled her closer.

  “I’m not. I’m really not. Look you have a line here that forks into a V. So you could have gone this way—more to the east, that was London—but instead the stronger line is the one that points south.”

  “Henry, that’s north.”

  “Not if you turn this way.” He lifted her up and shifted positions with her and took her hand again. “And you are going to fall in love with a man named Henry Heyward—see, you can almost make out a double H here. He is going to be so charming that you’re not going to be able to resist him, you will try—but you will fail—see how this line stops—that signifies the end of your resistance.”

  “Okay, okay”—she laughed and pulled her hand away—“you’re only describing what has already occurred. I see you’re not going to take me seriously.”

  “Eliza, I am.” He held her face in his hands. “Look at me. I could not be more serious.”

  ON THE MORNING OF THE DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, THE air was fresh and cool, and the sky was a hard blue.

  Henry reached over to the bedside table and checked his watch. “Twenty to ten, we probably should get up.”

  “Five more minutes,” Eliza said and pulled the covers back over her shoulders.

  “Okay, but I’m off to the shower.”

  Henry returned and sat down on the bed next to her. “Ten to ten. If we want to have any hope of making Middleburg in time for dinner”—he ran his hand down her back and smoothed away the drops of water that had dripped from his hair—“you need to get up.”

  “You smell like lavender.”

  “That’s because I used your soap.” Henry leaned over to put on socks.

  Eliza turned toward Henry and observed what he was doing. “Socks? New look?”

  “No, backup plan.”

  “Backup plan? For what?”

  “Stealth tactics.” He waved a sock in the air. “In case your mother gives us separate bedrooms.”

  Henry stood up to finish dressing, but then steadied himself on the chest next to the bed. He braced himself with his two arms and stepped away to put his head down. “God, I feel really dizzy.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Eliza helped him to the edge of the bed.

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Call Charlie. Get him over here.”

  CHARLIE INSTRUCTED ELIZA TO GIVE HENRY HALF AN ASPIRIN and have him lie down. “I’ll be right over.” When Charlie arrived, he called an ambulance and told Henry to stay lying down, not to get up. Eliza drove with Charlie to the hospital. He explained that it was hard to know what the problem was until tests were done.

  Charlie and Eliza found Henry in a curtained-off area of the emergency room. Painkillers and sedatives were being administered through an IV. A nurse was taping multiple ends of EKG wires to his chest and back. Eliza could tell that Henry was still in a lot of pain.

  A few hours later Charlie and the cardiovascular surgeon, Dr. Allison, arrived to speak to Henry. They had reviewed all of the tests. Dr. Allison did his best to explain to Eliza the rare heart condition Henry had inherited from his father. Certain muscles in Henry’s heart had thickened and made it hard for his heart to pump effectively.

  “It’s a rare form of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that does not always respond to medication. Henry, you need to undergo a septal myectomy.” Dr. Allison then proceeded to explain the complex procedure.

  “Do I have any other options?” Henry asked.

  Doctor Allison lowered his glasses. “I really don’t think so, Henry.”

  Henry looked at Charlie, who confirmed Dr. Allison’s judgment. “Dr. Allison is right, Henry.”

  “Do you have any more questions?” Dr. Allison asked.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, then, we’ll get things going as fast as we can.” Dr. Alliso
n left the room.

  “You sure this is the only way?” Henry asked Charlie.

  “Yes, Henry, the drug you’ve been taking hasn’t worked like we had hoped. I’ll be there the whole time,” Charlie said. “I need to go change.” He gave Henry a pat on the shoulder. “See you in a bit.”

  Eliza sat sidesaddle on the bed. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not great,” he said.

  Eliza tried not to watch the waves of lines across the screen.

  Henry winced and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Are you in pain?” she asked.

  “A bit,” he said, but she knew he wasn’t telling the truth. “Just hurts to talk. You talk, I like to hear your voice.”

  “Okay,” she said and squeezed his hand. “I remember the first time I met you. We were all down at Fenwick Hall for a summer party, and everyone had gone to where Stender Bennett and a few others where shooting skeet in one of the back fields. Stender had somehow acquired the revolving base of a Kentucky Fried Chicken sign, which he had mounted on a two-wheel trailer, and he had rigged up a skeet machine so that clay pigeons were slung over a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree radius. Weezie and I walked down to the dock to get away from what seemed like a very dangerous activity. You and Charlie were going off in a canoe to repair a dike. Do you remember that?”

  “I do.”

  Eliza had watched Henry get out of the canoe and walk across the top of the dike, arms out to the side, balancing one foot at a time on the top of the narrow boards that had been slotted between four square end posts placed eight feet across. And Eliza remembered being scared for him, she didn’t know what would have happened to him if the top board had wobbled and his foot had slipped and he had lost his balance and had fallen into the hole where all the water was rushing. She watched him walk across the top of the planks and then jump down on the opposite side and begin working with a board that had gotten jammed.

  Eliza didn’t tell him how afraid she had been for him. “I remember thinking it was pretty great that you knew how to fix a dike. None of the other boys from Charleston knew how to do that.”

  “Summers with Cleve.” Henry clenched his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Can I do anything?”

  He shook his head. “It helps,” he said, “your talking.”

  “I also remember the first time you asked me out, a week later. You came to Weezie’s and my rescue on a rainy summer afternoon. It was high tide, and the low places on Lockwood Boulevard were underwater. Weezie and I were in Billy’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle, and when we went around the curve, the car stalled and wouldn’t start again. We were trying to get it started when you stopped to help us.”

  “I recognized Billy’s yellow Beetle.”

  “And you gave us a ride home. You dropped Weezie off first. You said you’d come in from the country to go to a coming-out party that night—I can’t remember whose—and I said I was going, too, and when you dropped me off, you suggested I ditch my date and come with you.”

  “I remember that,” Henry spoke in short breaths.

  “But I wouldn’t do it because it wasn’t the proper thing to do. But then at the party you took being proper to an extreme and barely talked to me.”

  Henry closed his eyes and shook his head. “I wasn’t being proper.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “I was playing hard to get.”

  “You were?”

  Henry nodded his head. “As I remember, it worked pretty well.” He clenched his jaw.

  As Eliza spoke, she noticed her distorted reflection in the silver convex railing of the bed. She found it hard to keep her thoughts going forward. It was as if something had shattered, and words and images were spilling everywhere. She was unable to comprehend anything except that Henry was in the hospital, and he did not seem okay.

  Eliza could find nothing more to say, and they sat for a few minutes listening to the hospital sounds in the hallway—a food trolley rattling past, a visitor asking a nurse for directions, a doctor giving a resident instructions as they walked briskly down the hall.

  The drugs administered through the IV had begun to take the edge off Henry’s pain and make him groggy. “So tell me, Eliza, have you always been in love with me?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Oh no.” Henry tried to raise up on his elbows.

  She touched his shoulder. “Lie back down and rest.”

  “You are missing your lines again, and there’s that word again. You were supposed to say, ‘Yes, of course, I have always loved you.’ When I get out of here, we really need to practice your responses to my perfect setups.”

  A nurse entered and said that Dr. Allison was ready for Henry. She began to move things out of the way to roll the bed forward.

  “Eliza, come to think of it, you never told me what you wanted to steal from Anne’s house.” The nurse’s eyes widened. Henry winked.

  “We were interrupted, weren’t we?” Eliza played along.

  “Louisa arrived with Charles Stevens before you could answer me.”

  “Yeah,” she stretched the word out into two long syllables.

  “So?”

  “Umm.”

  “Eliza, there you go, missing your cue again. The correct answer is Henry. And come to think of it, you never gave me the present you said you had for me in your duffel bag. The one I almost destroyed my shoulder with.”

  Eliza was tempted to tell him about the copy of her notes on the Magritte that she had bound for him, the one in which she had written his name in the margins whenever her adviser had left the room. At the time, she hadn’t even been aware of what she was doing. But she didn’t. “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.”

  “Eliza, Charlie’s going to be with me the whole time.”

  “I know,” she said.

  The nurse left to find an orderly to help her move the bed.

  “You know, Eliza, I’ve been thinking that a winter wedding might suit you. It would be so unsouthern, say—mid-January but no later than February. Does that appeal to you?”

  The nurse barreled in with a large heavy-set man in green scrubs following behind her. “Okay, we’re ready,” she said in an overly cheerful tone. She asked Eliza to step away from the bed. The orderly pulled up the side railings until they clicked in place.

  “There’s no way I can kneel at the present moment.”

  Eliza leaned down and kissed Henry. “I’ll be waiting right here for you.”

  ELIZA WATCHED THE DARKNESS COME. SHE WAS COLD IN the hospital room and couldn’t find a comfortable way to sit in the chair. She would not let herself think too long about what Henry had said. When his words came close to her, she felt that if she listened too much to them, they would disappear, and she feared they would never come back. Eliza remembered being in the chapel at Simon and Caroline’s wedding and hearing that soft laugh—like the slowed-down sputter of a lawn mower and, without thinking, looking back over her shoulder for Henry. At some point in the night a nurse came in and told her that the surgery was going longer than expected but that Dr. Allison would come and speak with her when it was over. The nurse returned with a blanket. As Eliza waited through the night and early morning, she missed hearing the bells of St. Michael’s strike the hours. On her fingers she counted all of the churches on the Charleston peninsula south of Calhoun. Fifteen. She traveled each street to double-check herself—on Meeting Street—First Scots Presbyterian, St. Michael’s, the Circular Congregation; on Church Street—First Baptist, the French Huguenot, St. Philip’s; on Archdale—St. Luke’s Lutheran and St. John’s Unitarian; on Hasell—St. Johannes Lutheran and St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church; on Broad—the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist; on Anson—St. Stephen’s Episcopal; on Wentworth—Grace Episcopal Church and the Redeemer Presbyterian; and on Pitt—the Bethel United Methodist. Eliza roamed the streets again to make certain she had not left any out. She wondered how the Master of the Moon was doing. When Henry was better she wanted to g
o and try to find him. The evenings were cold now, and she wanted to make certain he had a warm place to sleep. She thought about Charlie’s two little boys chasing fireflies and the simple joy they got from trying to capture beautiful things. She tried to think of things that didn’t make her sad, but over the course of those long hours she felt a slow gravity pull her down away from everything.

  The morning was well on its way when Dr. Allison appeared. Charlie stood two feet behind him. Something had shifted. Eliza remembered only two things. She remembered the space between the moment she saw Dr. Allison and knew what he was going to say to her and the moment he actually did say it. The space was solid, a large invisible block that stopped everything in the room. And she remembered his shoes. He wore white rubber clogs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ELIZA FELT THAT IF SHE CONCENTRATED HARD ENOUGH she would be able to discover where Henry was. She believed she could find him again. He would be in his beaten-up Jeep coasting along, arm hooked outside the window, sleeves rolled up, tanned face, blue eyes, calling her name, and she would be with him again.

  ELIZA DROVE DOWN TO FOLLY BEACH. SHE FELT AS IF SHE were looking for something she had lost, something she had misplaced, that if she kept looking she would find it again. She felt certain she could find Henry. She knew where to look. If she just opened one more door, turned one more corner, he would be there. She walked to the water’s edge and watched the curved shadows of worn-out waves. He was somewhere out there in a boat, mainsail line in one hand, rudder in the other, and jib line held between his teeth, and he would be tipping his boat on its side to go as fast as he could.

  ELIZA WENT TO THE BACK OF THE ISLAND. SHE WAS CERTAIN she would find him fishing in the salt marshes. She was certain as she turned the corner she would see him standing waist deep in the water and casting across the marshes. She would call to him. As she ran down the narrow, uneven path through the scrub pines and brambles, she became more convinced the closer she got.

  HIS BATTERED TENNIS SHOES, STIFFENED BY THE SALT, were in the same place he had kicked them off. She knew if she looked underneath them she might find a trace of Henry, some clue that he was still somewhere. They felt heavy in her hands. But she could find nothing. She went inside and found herself moving a blue and white plate that had been left on the kitchen table.