Vigil for a Stranger

by Kitty Burns Florey

  I told him I didn’t know. He took my wrist and held it tightly in his right hand. His hand was tanned a warm brown, my arm was so white it looked bleached. He held my wrist until we got to his door, and then he let it go. Where he’d held it, there was a mottled bracelet of red on the dead-white skin.

  I folded my nightgown and put it in my bag. I found a pair of earrings on the night table and tucked them away in my purse. Orin fussed awhile with the air conditioner, which was not working, then went into the bathroom. After I straightened out the bedclothes, I sat down for a moment on the edge of the bed and stared out the window. Opposite, there was a yellow brick building, a row of windows covered by tan drapes.

  There was something wrong with the day—this sunny Sunday morning in New York. I kept thinking about what happened to me at the Museum of Modern Art. Orin was angry because I couldn’t explain what was so upsetting; all I could say was no, it’s not the millions, it’s not the irony of it, it’s not the Bloody Marys I had at brunch. I still couldn’t explain it, but I couldn’t get the innocent town and the exploding stars out of my mind.

  I heard Orin pee into the toilet, then I heard water running. I was imagining what it would be like to live in that quiet town, unaware of the wild stars, the violence over my head—how terrible that would be: better to know. I stood up, holding my breath, and reached under the mattress. The gun was still there. I shoved it into my overnight bag and zipped it up. The toilet flushed. Orin came out of the bathroom and we walked to the train.

  James was going to California—not right away, probably in a couple of weeks. And not to stay, just as a sort of trial. He knew a couple of people out there—he mentioned the Rosenthals, whom I’d met, and somebody named Greg, whom I hadn’t. He wouldn’t sell the business just yet. Raymond could run it while he was gone—for two or three months, he couldn’t say for sure. He and Raymond would see how things went. Meanwhile, James might try to get into the restaurant business out on the coast. Or he might just buy himself a houseboat and drift for a while. The important thing was that he get away.

  Get away from you, is what he meant. I was reminded of Emile, who escaped to France. But James was very courteous, very considerate—almost the old James. He no longer reproached me. Evenings, we sat together with the cats, watching television in the living room, me on the pressback oak rocker, James on the Victorian love seat we had shopped for together the summer before. I tried to keep my attention on the television programs, but they meant nothing to me, and when they were over I couldn’t have said what all the laughing was about or who the characters were. James and I talked a little during commercials—mostly James. He said we could do it gradually, meaning split up. He meant it when he said the house was mine. It wasn’t much of a gift, he said—there was a huge mortgage, and I might want to consider selling it; in fact, the market was looking good, he had made a few inquiries on my behalf.

  He was over his hard feelings. He hoped we wouldn’t become enemies over this. He would always care for me, always hope I was doing well. He was looking ahead, and he hoped I was too. He was sure he’d be getting the word one of these days that I was having a big show in New York. “A retrospective,” he said. “Or are you too young for a retrospective?” He made his little jokes. His brown eyes, when I dared to look at them, seemed inexpressibly sad.

  “I hoped we could work this out,” I said to him once.

  “Well, you’re usually right about things, Chris,” he said. “But this time I don’t think so.”

  I dream about Emile. I am trying to paint a still life, a vase of yellow flowers. Emile is standing beside my easel. He is very tall, even taller probably than he really is, just as the dream flowers are yellower and more vibrant than any flowers in the real world.

  Emile is scolding me. Hurry, he keeps saying. You’ve got to go faster. Come on, damn it. Hurry.

  I am finding it hard to paint any faster. I want to paint beautifully. I am trying to put in every detail. I want my painting to be as perfect as life is, as complete. Hurry up, Emile says. He looms over me, he casts a shadow. His presence slows me down. If he would just shut up and go away, I could work faster, I could finish my painting. Come on, come on.

  Then I see why he is so desperate: as I look, as I move my brush across the paper, dip it in water, pick up paint, wipe the brush, approach the paper again—as I do this over and over, mixing colors, making every brush stroke perfect, as I do this, I can see that the flowers are drooping. They are dying. Even as I watch, even as I move as fast as I can from water to palette to paper, the flowers are drooping, they’re drying up, they’re fading, they’re dropping their petals, they’re dead.

  It had taken me a long time—years, forever, half my life—but I saw at last that I had to do something, and I knew what it was. I left the next day as soon as James went to work—late morning. I fed Ruby and Rosie, then drove out Whitney Avenue to my favorite gas station, the Sunoco place where they still pumped the gas for you, and checked the oil and washed the windshield. I stopped at a deli and picked up a can of rootbeer and a cheese sandwich so I wouldn’t have to stop for lunch. My overnight bag was on the floor beside me: underwear, shorts, sweatshirt, toothbrush, gun. As I drove over the river and picked up I-95, it occurred to me that the date was close to the anniversary of the night Charlie came up my back stairs to tell me Pierce was dead, twenty-one years ago.

  As I drove, it was as if a spell had been lifted, or a door long closed had been thrown open: I was able to think about Pierce the way I used to before I ran into Alison on the train. The old Pierce—not the Pierce who kept changing, the Pierce I couldn’t get into focus, but the true Pierce, the Pierce I loved, returned to me.

  I remembered the morning he came into the dining hall in his old green army cap, watched me eating oatmeal, and said, “Do you really like that stuff, or do you just eat it to be weird?”

  I remembered when he came back from Cleveland with a Bessie Smith record, how we sat in his room holding hands, not talking, just listening to “Empty Bed Blues” and “Long Old Road.”

  I remembered when he read Van Gogh’s letters and got so hung up on Van Gogh—how angry he was at the injustices of Van Gogh’s sad, saintly life.

  I remembered when his hair got long and curled around his shoulders and he wore a leather headband we bought at a peace demonstration on the New Haven Green.

  I remembered the summer he visited us in Jamesville, how he charmed my mother because he was so funny, and pleased my father because he worked hard for no pay, and skipped flat stones across the pond with Robbie and me, imitating the mating calls of frogs.

  I remembered him as Horatio, with Hamlet dead in his arms, saying Good night, sweet prince into a hushed silence.

  Just north of Boston, I ate my cheese sandwich, but before long I was hungry again, and warm, so I got off the highway at Ogunquit and bought an ice cream cone, which I ate sitting on a bench looking down over the ocean. The waves leapt up the rocks, dashing spray into the air, and subsided back into the dark blue ocean that was the color of Pierce’s eyes. The water was like a restless animal.

  I took a walk down the main street, where the sun and the blue sky made everything shine. The extreme and unseasonable heat had abated, we had had rain, and the leaves of the trees were dark and glossy. The street was lined with seafood places, craft shops with decoys in the windows, deli-type markets where you could buy cheese and chocolate and fruit-flavored teas. The souvenir shops I remembered from the trip with Pierce and Robbie were gone; maybe they were disguised as boutiques. I couldn’t find the diner where we pumped black coffee into Pierce, but it didn’t matter. The town was crowded and friendly, it smelled of sand and fish and seaweed, and the sky over the horizon was cerulean blue. The town reminded me of James. I thought of him with pleasure, even with hope: James with the heart of gold, James who waltzed with me on the ice, and who talked to the cats as if they were his children.

  The panic that gripped me in New Haven and New Yor
k, that dogged everything I did, had faded mysteriously away. This was what I had been needing, then: these familiar blues and greens, the huge sky, the sea struggling against the rocks.

  I stayed overnight in a motel in Camden—not the one where my mother and I giggled over the Magic Fingers. This motel was more like the one my parents used to run—a family place, with cabins. The woman in the office wore an apron and t-shirt; she looked as if she had been interrupted in the middle of making bread. She gave me a schedule for the ferry, as well as a coupon for a dollar off a lobster dinner at the same restaurant where my mother and I ate. My key was attached by a chain to a plastic seashell. My mother would have appreciated the cabin: it was spotless, white-painted inside and out, with a lumpy mattress on an iron bedstead, a chenille spread, and a bunch of daisies on the nightstand. There was a television, but I didn’t turn it on. I fell asleep early, my overnight bag with the gun in it tucked down at the end of the bed by my feet.

  The ferry was scheduled to leave at eight, and I was at the dock by 7:30 to buy my ticket. Sometimes it got crowded, the motel woman had told me: first come, first served. I was in plenty of time. “Good day for it,” the ticket seller said. For what? For anything. The sun shone on the water in a shower of golden coins.

  Once we were at sea, the ocean breeze was cool, and I put on the sweatshirt I’d remembered to bring. Halfway there, I realized I should also have brought some supplies—a scrubbing brush, rags, Mr. Clean. I should have brought food and drink. I could think only of the gun, which was in the bottom of my purse wrapped tightly in a plastic bag. I hadn’t even brought my sketch pad. There was no store on the island—at least, there didn’t used to be, and when I asked a woman sitting near me on the deck, she said, “Mercy no,” as if the islanders had no need of stores, as if their only legitimate needs were rocks and gulls.

  “I hope you didn’t forget anything,” she said.

  “Nothing important.”

  From the ferry, I could look back and see the church spire rising over the town, and the cluster of white houses along the road that hugged the curve of the harbor. The ferry was running regularly again; it seemed newer than the one my mother and I escaped on, but nothing else had changed much. Plover Island looked precisely the same: the wild shoreline dotted with seabirds, the far-flung cottages, and our old cabin at the end of the sandy road, weathered and tumbledown, perched on its rocky little hill like something thrown up by the sea.

  Before I approached it, I took a walk around the island, skirting the rocky incline up to the cabin and heading down the level, dusty road that led away. There were wild roses along the road, blue morning glories climbing a wall, two kids on bicycles, a dog tied to a wooden clothespole. One cottage had undergone a posh remodel (Palladian window, skylights, latticework deck) but most of them were simple shingled structures with yards full of sand and beach-grass. I half-expected to run into the woman painter in her sun hat, or the two talkative old men with plums. Or Pierce and Robbie catching crabs down by the rocks. I wished, as I often had, that the miracle would occur and Robbie would come again to sit with me drinking tea from Gran’s old pot. Or Pierce himself: if he appeared suddenly in the path before me wearing his denim shirt, his army cap—what a gift, what inexpressible solace.

  How stingy the dead can be, I thought, but I felt no resentment at the thought.

  The sun was climbing in the sky. The purse slung over my shoulder was cumbersome, heavier by the moment. I took off the sweatshirt and tied it around my waist. I imagined the interior of the cabin, dark and musty, with a slight chill. I went down by the rocks, took off my sneakers and cooled my feet in the water, and then, my heart beating fast, I climbed the hill to the cabin.

  The lock was broken, but when I pushed open the door I didn’t see what I had expected: no one had trashed it, burned it out, spray-painted dirty words on the walls. Everything looked the same—just worse. It had been thirteen years. The cabin hadn’t gone unused: there was a pile of empty beer cans on the old bookcase, a plastic grocery bag hanging from a doorknob, a ticking pillow split open, a squashed cardboard carton that wasn’t there before. But it looked long-abandoned, except by mice and spiders and dust and mold. The place smelled terrible, a combination of ocean and animals and musty air and rotting wood.

  I didn’t stay inside long. I inspected everything, gingerly. I realized that a scrub brush and pail wouldn’t have gotten me very far. The cabin was reverting to what it always longed to be: a pile of rubble. It cared about the presence of humans as much as the sea did, the rocks. I had been half-wondering if it would be possible to rehabilitate it, to make it into a memorial not to Robbie dead but to Robbie alive: the brother who came up here to drink beer and catch fish and play poker, not the one who held a gun to his skull and pulled the trigger. I had been thinking of coming here summers with James, of fixing it up as we did the house: James and me in a sunny room filled with old white wicker furniture. But the cabin was beyond saving, and I didn’t really mind. This way, it belonged to Robbie: it was always his, if it was anyone’s at all. Take it, I said aloud, hoping I would get an answer, but the only sound besides my footsteps was the faint dash of the waves on the rocks down below.

  I walked down to the beach and sat with my arms around my knees. The sun beat down on my head. I should have brought a hat, I should have brought a can of something to drink. The ferry would return at five: it seemed a long way off. I had hoped to stay until sunset, maybe even sleep on the beach all night, but this was not possible, I would have to go back.

  I stretched out on the sand and fell into a light, uneasy doze. Fitfully, I dreamed about the cabin as it was when Emile and I cleaned it out. Denis runs around, he is wearing blue shorts, a red-striped shirt, he is shouting questions and raising dust. The dream came and went; I was conscious that it was a dream, and that the dream was half memory. Denis is small, joyful, perfect: my son. And suddenly, he’s gone—just disappeared. Impossible, but it has happened. We look everywhere but he can’t be found. Emile says he must have been stolen by Tom, the man who ferried us out: remember how well they got along, he says, remember how much Denis liked him. It was Tom, Emile says. But I know it was Emile, and I fling myself on him, hitting him with my fists, and he crumples at my attack, there is blood, he cries out, he tries to shield himself with his hands, and though I know it’s only a dream, though I feel the sand under my back and hear the water beat against the rocky shore, I hit him until he lies still.

  I opened my eyes to find that the sun had gone behind a cloud. The sea was grey and choppy, the sky a less intense blue, but it was still warm, and my face was hot and tight, probably sunburned. I didn’t feel well—the horrible dream was still vividly with me. I sat up, took my hairbrush from my purse to brush my hair back from my face, and wiped my face with a tissue. I turned my mind from the dream, and from the consciousness of how thirsty I was. All around me there were fat gulls standing on the rocks. They paid no attention to me. I wondered if I was merging with the elements just as the cabin was. I looked out at the sea, and at the church steeple rising above the town. This was where we sat out on the rocks. This was where Pierce took out the gun and aimed it at the gulls.

  Why do you have that gun?

  For protection in the big bad city.

  I thought about how it could have happened, how he didn’t die, how he could have become a balding Manhattan businessman. He would have been doing drugs in New Mexico, hard stuff, Lord knows what—not pot or peyote or LSD but something Charlie and I had never even heard of, something nobody did anymore. Pierce would try anything. And he lent his car to someone, and when his car went off the cliff he was tripping, he was out of commission for days. And then he was confused, disoriented. At some point he would hear about his own death. He would get a kick out of that. And then he would worry about me, Charlie, his parents, his old girlfriends. He would want to return and reassure us, but—

  I couldn’t go any further. It was absurd. It was like one of those impr
obable movies from the fifties that featured amnesia and shrinking men and death rays that wiped out the entire populations of sleepy little New England towns. I put my head down on my knees. Pierce was dead. He’d been dead for twenty-one years, almost to the day.

  I was so thirsty I was tempted to drink sea water. I thought of books I’d read about shipwrecked people, movies about people stuck in a lifeboat with a pint of water that had to last until they were rescued. The fifties were big on shipwreck movies, too—people always went out of their heads from thirst. I wondered if that was happening to me. I considered knocking on a door, and asking for a drink of water, but I didn’t do it. I wasn’t that far gone, I told myself. I was bored, hot, hungry, tired. The gulls didn’t move. The rocks were their kingdom—the rocks and the sea, which was like cold wavy glass, bluish grey near the shore with a hint of green farther out. I tried to remember why I came to the island. It seemed to me that I had come to find Pierce and Robbie, but at one time I had something else in mind, though I couldn’t recall what it was.

  I walked up to the cabin. Maybe, miraculously, someone had left a can of intact beer or a bottle of water. The door swung on its hinges. The hinges were rusty—hopeless. Inside, I looked in the middle of the front room and watched the dust. The air was vibrating slightly, the dust was never still—even in the dimness, with no sunlight to come in through the filthy windows, I could see the dust move. All around me, spiders hung motionless in their webs. Somewhere there were mice. Maybe there were other animals, but I couldn’t hear them, I couldn’t hear anything. From the cabin, even the sea was almost quiet.

  I wondered who had been here, who left the beer cans and the pillow. There were no homeless people on Plover Island, no derelicts, no bag ladies. It was teenagers, probably, who came over from Camden to drink and fool around: how perfect, a deserted cabin. I imagined them groping each other on the filthy floor, bleary-eyed kids with their lives ahead of them. Not knowing what ghosts prowl here.