Perdita

by Hilary Scharper

  She stopped. “I go?” she asked, pinching my cheeks with her fingers.

  “Well, yes. That would be best.”

  “Why?”

  “I think—I think your sisters want you to come back. For now anyway.”

  “George,” she squealed, suddenly finding me very funny. “Garth like George!”

  “Am I?”

  “Marged all gone?” Now she was whimpering a little.

  “No, she’s not all gone. You have her doll. Remember? You can take it with you.”

  “Garth come, too?”

  I shook my head. “Only you this time.”

  “Take your doll?” She was thrusting her bundle toward me, her expression anxious.

  “Would you keep it for me?”

  “I keep! I keep Garth’s doll.” She grinned delightedly.

  Then I closed my eyes and felt her little fingers softly stroking the side of my face. She patted my cheek a few more times and then stepped away. I felt a slight, almost imperceptible movement of the boat. It wobbled unsteadily for a fraction of a second, and I heard a soft splash.

  Suddenly it seemed as if a huge school of fish were beneath me, shaking and rocking the boat as they rushed forward. I felt myself rise, as if on the back of an enormous whale…

  I clutched at the gunwales to steady myself and felt a sharp twinge in my chest, instantly recognizing the terrible pain that I had experienced in Marged’s room. A ghastly fear washed over me. I knew that I wouldn’t survive its full force a second time.

  I concentrated all my efforts on breathing. The water seemed to be trembling with the movement of thousands of water creatures below me. Then I heard Perdita begin to laugh. The air was instantly filled with the sound of other children joining in her laughter.

  It lasted only a few seconds. Then a heavy silence descended, and the water became glassy calm.

  Twenty-Four

  I collapsed into a deck chair and closed my eyes. The pain in my chest was gone, but I felt utterly drained and horribly nauseous.

  I must have drifted into a deep sleep…

  Clare.

  We were out in the boat, under the stars. She had the oars, and I was leaning forward trying to take them from her, but she shook her head, laughing.

  Clare was trying to say something to me, but I couldn’t hear her—and then the boat started to stretch and expand. I knew it was impossible, but she was being carried farther and farther away from me, her body becoming blurred and distorted.

  I woke up with a jolt, startled to find myself outside in the darkness.

  I felt myself begin to shiver violently. Then the first pellets of rain hit my face.

  I knew that I had to get myself inside, but I must have fallen asleep again, because I woke up to hear Clare calling my name.

  “Garth, wake up,” she was saying softly. “It’s going to rain…”

  I looked up and saw her face all in shadow. She was bending over me, her hair falling forward and brushing against my cheek, her hand lightly touching my arm. I could see the dark curve of her body as she leaned toward me.

  “Clare,” I whispered back. I reached up and took her face between my hands and began to kiss her—very gently at first—and then I started to pull her toward me.

  I felt myself being hauled upward, almost as if through water; swiftly rising up toward the surface and then breaking through, my lungs sucking in the cool air.

  I sat up gasping. The telephone had just stopped ringing.

  I got up unsteadily and stumbled into the cottage, almost falling over as I reached for the phone.

  There was no one on the other end. I quickly accessed my messages.

  It was Clare’s voice.

  “I’m just calling to say good-bye, Garth. I’m flying back to the UK tonight, and I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye.”

  She took a breath and cleared her throat.

  “I hope that you have a wonderful summer…and that you get your book done. Oh…and of course, I hope you find out who Miss Brice really is.” I thought I heard her swallow. “And I’m sure…I’m sure our paths will cross again. Stay well, Garth…and my best wishes to you always.”

  She hung up very quickly.

  “Oh, God,” I groaned out loud—and then all went black.

  Twenty-Five

  I looked up.

  The clock showed that I had barely ten minutes before boarding time.

  I sank down into a chair at the end of an empty row and stretched out my legs, still a little out of breath. It had been nothing short of a miracle that I had made it to the airport.

  Suddenly I sat up, thinking that I’d forgotten my briefcase in the car.

  No—there it was on the seat beside me. Marged’s diaries were still safe inside, each one carefully wrapped in Clarkson stationery. Edna had taken them out of her room only minutes before Ava Stewart’s lawyer had searched through Marged’s things.

  “He was very rude, Garth. He kept asking, ‘Did anyone come to see her?’ And something about a painting.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Not a damn thing, of course!”

  “Edna, couldn’t you keep these journals for me? After the funeral, I’m headed straight to the airport.”

  “I think you’d better take them. Listen, it looks like you and I will be the only ones at the service.”

  One of the flight attendants picked up a handset and announced that my flight would be delayed by thirty minutes. “Maybe I should find something to eat,” I thought, but I felt too exhausted to get up and start a search.

  I let myself sink deeper into the chair and thrust my hand into my pocket, anxiously fingering my phone and then feeling the envelope that Edna had waved at me as I rushed to my car.

  “Garth! I almost forgot. Marged said you’re to have this letter.”

  I had practically grabbed it from her, stuffing it into my jacket. “Edna, you’re okay to watch Mars until my friend Doug comes to get him?”

  “Oh, yes—but don’t expect me to ever give Farley back.”

  I heard her call out “good luck” as I tore out of the driveway.

  I was going to need some luck, I thought.

  Had Donna given Clare my message by now?

  I looked down at the envelope. Marged had scrawled my name and the date across the front, adding below: To be opened after my death. It had been written the day before she died.

  Dear Garth,

  I am growing weaker and weaker by the hour, but I am truly delighted by this. I am sure that this must be my death approaching, and I can only trust that I will not be disappointed.

  I strongly suspect, however, that we might not be granted time for another interview, and so I have decided to take matters into my own hands.

  I have had a solicitor come, a very nice man who merely glanced at my birth certificate and didn’t seem at all interested in my age. He just drew up a will for me without any fuss. It is a very simple will. All I really have is what I brought with me in that trunk.

  I have left you in charge of everything. I hope that this was not a great presumption on my part, but I do not think you will disappoint me in accepting this trust.

  Perhaps you will wonder why I have chosen you. But you must not think—not for an instant—that this is the last and desperate act of an old woman, abandoned by all her friends and family. In the very last days of my long, long life, it is you who have been a true friend to me. It is you who have listened to me with an open heart despite the great differences in our ages and despite all the slanderous things that have been said about me.

  Dr. Latham once told me that the Greeks believed that there were special kinds of storytellers: bards who became not just the carriers, but the gatherers of stories. Hesiod, he felt, was one such bard, but I think that you are a
nother. Perhaps this is why you took the time to listen to the story of a very old woman. You might have “abandoned ship,” so to speak, after that first visit and never come back. Indeed, for a few anxious days I greatly feared this, but you did return. I believe you returned because you are part of my story, but this means that I also must be a part of yours.

  Our beautiful Peninsula is filled with stories, is it not?

  Not just with people’s stories, but with the stories of all the forests, the stones, the sky and wind and waves. Mine is just one story, but I haven’t known how to tell it—until I met you. And so, if somehow we do not meet again, I want to tell you about my beloved Perdita, my little one. How it breaks my heart to leave her! Yet I know I must. It is an inexpressible comfort to me to know that you will take care of her. Don’t ask me how I know that you will, but I do.

  Before I came to this Home, I thought that Perdita must have come to me because of George and Andrew, that perhaps she was there to help me understand the nature of my connections to each of them. I was partly right in this. She came to me because the mortal loves of my life have indeed been intricate. But, as the wonderful Greeks knew so well, there are so many kinds of love—so many possible threads.

  For all the years that Perdita has been with me, I have felt that she has connected me to something else: something that has made all my mortal loves possible and yet has offered me the possibility of a great love. It may seem a very strange statement, but this is something that I have known is true because I have felt it so deeply in my very soul. It is only now that I think I finally understand why Perdita came to me.

  You see—it was the Bay who was with me that night, the night that I might have stepped out into its stormy embrace and ended my life forever. To this day, I don’t know how George pulled me back, except that there was a powerful thread that we shared and he wouldn’t let me go to it, not alone.

  But there was another thread, and it was between the Bay and myself. We had made it—strange as it may seem—in that moment between life and death, between the Bay’s form and mine. We made it as we acknowledged our affinity, as we acknowledged our impossible connection to each other.

  I think the Bay has always understood the nature of my love for it and has returned it. But I think that ours must be a love that comes of the fourth thread—biophilia as the Greeks called it—Perdita’s special province.

  I have come to understand that I have much more than a sentimental connection to this Peninsula and the Bay—that my heart holds far more than fondness for home and family and familiar surroundings. The wind, the sky, the water and the waves, the stars at night and the endless shore of rocks—all of this beautiful Peninsula. They are no mere backdrop to my human passions, no mere objects of my affection.

  Dr. Latham would have said that we are hypodoche to each other: myself and the Bay. Hypodoche, or what the ancient philosophers called the co-principles of each other’s becoming.

  I don’t know if there are other people who might understand this aspect of myself. George certainly did, and Andrew may have in his way—but it was George who truly knew it. Perhaps that is why he came to find me—to find me after we had become so lost to each other.

  But even so, even if I am the only human being on all the earth to have this love, then Perdita has the thread. In all that vast anonymity—in all that vast blindness—there is a thread. My love of the Bay exists and Perdita keeps it.

  To this day, I find it remarkable that the Greeks understood all of this. But it has been the trees who have tried to teach me of it, returning to me over all the seasons of my life and trusting that I might one day understand that I am but one being in an immense communion of hearts.

  And so now, at last, I can acknowledge that I am in love with Georgian Bay and all that is here. I have loved it all my life, and I love it still. I think that I will love it even in my death.

  This is the wellspring of all my other loves: for Tad and Mother, for Auntie Alis and Uncle Gil, and for Dr. McTavish. Andrew began to know this about me. How I am not sure, but he sought my heart understanding this aspect of myself.

  And George—he always knew it because he shared it. At last he came to recognize it. George came to fully know it because his painting has always been his best teacher. Now I see it much more clearly: it was Perdita who came to him, too.

  And you, Garth. You do not know your own wellsprings fully yet. But I think you are a kindred spirit, kindred to the Bay. As such—and if you choose—your capacity to love is a great one. You are capable of great risks, especially the risk of a love in all its fullness. I believe that you will pick up the thread, the thread that is Perdita.

  You will wonder how I know this, but all that I can say is that I recognized you. I saw you—for what and who you are. And then, of course, Perdita knew you immediately. That first day when Perdita brushed past you and you thought she was the cat—how we laughed about that together!

  You see, I was asking the trees to help me when you came in through the door that first time. You came in so quietly, and it startled me. It was very terrible to be put in a Home so suddenly! Edna was so kind—everyone was so kind—but I felt so forlorn and lost…so without a true friend.

  I feel a great compassion for old people, Garth! Sometimes we are but a hairsbreadth away from being locked up and put out of the way. Often we are treated like children again: very, very young children without words, and then everyone feels they can speak for us. Sometimes we are lucky—as I was when Allan and Gregory took care of me. But what happens when we are not? Haven’t I been left to die here? How can I speak out against that lawyer’s letter? It seems even my own birth certificate is no match for that document. And hasn’t Ava left me here with a bag of gold—gold to secure Edna’s silence? Ah, if you only knew how many bribes—how many little bags of gold—are left here, day after day, because one of us is not wanted.

  It is a shepherd who rescues Perdita in Shakespeare’s play, and I have been blessed by many shepherds here at this Home. My Perdita, too, has need for shepherds. Hers is a story as old as the Greeks, and yet she has truly been the lost child of many, many successive generations. Who will rescue and preserve her now? I know she will go back to her sisters—but ever will she return to us, offering us the fourth thread of her bundle.

  I am growing very tired, and this frustrates me terribly, because I have much more that I wish to say. You have been so remarkable both to me and to those who reside in this Home. Even in my short time here, I have heard so much gratitude and thankfulness expressed for you, especially for your kindness and for your gift of listening. Ever shall I be grateful for that afternoon when I heard your voice calling out to me. I believe even now, in what I know are my final moments—I believe that it was the Bay who sent you to me.

  I have no strength for more, but I close this letter trusting you will understand the fullness of my heart.

  May God always bless you.

  May the wind and the trees always carry your name—branch to branch, breath to breath—across my beloved Bay.

  Marged Brice

  I folded the letter and carefully put it back in its envelope, quietly wiping my eyes. An elderly man with a walker was trying to sit down next to me, and I quickly stood up, taking his bag and setting it down beside him.

  “Does this airline let seniors board first?” he asked querulously.

  A silver-haired woman sitting on his other side quickly assured him they did. He began to complain that “seniors” shouldn’t include everybody over sixty-five. “There’s a big difference between me and a sixty-five-year-old,” he announced.

  “I’m not quite there myself, but how old are you, sir?” the woman asked conversationally.

  “Eighty-two and still travelin’ on my own. Goin’ to see my daughter. You married?”

  Before she could answer, the airline announced early boarding. The woman kindly offere
d to assist him, and together they cautiously made their way toward the gate. She deftly got him positioned close to the attendant taking boarding passes and then blocked the stream of first-class passengers with her body.

  Suddenly I thought of Edna—

  Something was wrong with the man’s documents. I could see the other passengers growing impatient behind him. Half a minute later, the woman stepped back, and the elderly gentleman pushed his walker forward, the woman waving encouragingly at him.

  Edna.

  She had been the real heroine in all of this. Edna had told Marged Brice that she could trust me.

  Marged sitting in her room at the Clarkson, her long, slender fingers reaching out toward the trees outside her window.

  “What would you have done if you were George?” That had been her question to me, but I hadn’t been able to answer her—not at first.

  Was I answering her now?

  I looked out the window and across the tarmac, watching a long line of suitcases moving up a conveyor belt.

  George must have gone to Marged, I told myself. His paintings were so remarkable. Wasn’t she there in his brushstrokes and in the inimitable quality that made his work timeless?

  But had George Stewart and Andrew Reid been the only ones involved? I watched as the last of the suitcases disappeared into the belly of the plane. Hadn’t there also been Marged’s wild and beloved Georgian Bay? Was that why Perdita had come to her?

  Suddenly an image rose before me…there on the beach at night, shivering in a towel, I had heard a woman’s voice calling from out of the darkness for her dog…

  Perdita knew you immediately…

  There on the rocky shore, Clare had appeared, moments after my swim in the Bay’s bracing waters, just as the stars began to appear across its rippling surface…both of us returning to a place we loved…

  That first day when Perdita brushed past you and you thought she was the cat—how we laughed about that together…

  I felt my phone vibrating in my shirt pocket.

  “Clare!” I exclaimed.