For the first time in weeks, Melville felt hopeful. Maybe it was a side effect of the new drug that had made Finch behave so erratically, he thought. That would explain everything. Why else would something that had almost killed their relationship once before have come back so suddenly, as if the whole thing had happened not more than thirty years ago but just in the last few weeks? Melville hoped it could be explained away by the new drug that Finch was taking, the one that was said to cause hallucinations in some people. It would be great if Finch’s rage were mere hallucination. Melville would move back in, and he would never mention the fight they’d had. They would go on as usual, as if the whole thing had never happened.
Finch had been off the drug for several days. It should have cleared out of his system by now. But if Melville were honest with himself, he’d have to admit that the whole thing had started before the new drug. It had begun a few months ago with an offhand remark about Maureen. Before he knew it, they were fighting about everything, from the dripping kitchen faucet to the piles of newspapers in the hall.
The subject of Maureen had come up many times lately. And just as Finch always did when he didn’t know how to say something, he had quoted Hawthorne: “A woman’s chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it means.”
“If you have something to say, I’d appreciate your saying it straight out,” Melville replied. He didn’t like talking about Maureen. His guilt on that matter had almost done them in. He put a hand on Finch’s shoulder. “Tell me what this is about.”
“I don’t know,” Finch had said, suddenly realizing how confused he was.
Melville leaned over, taking Finch’s face in his hands. “‘This relationship has to succeed, not in spite of what happened with Maureen but because of it.’” He looked at Finch. “Those are your words,” Melville said.
“I know.” Finch was crying.
“You know how much I love you,” Melville said.
“Perhaps you had better keep reminding me,” Finch said.
He was losing Finch to this damned disease. It was a fact he seldom faced directly, yet there it was. He knew the inevitability of demise, but they had been together for so many years, happily together. Even after the Parkinson’s, they had been happy. He knew that the illness would rob him of Finch eventually. He’d found himself looking away when the shaking began, not wanting to see it. Luckily, shaking had not become a major part of Finch’s case, though there were many other elements of the disease that had taken their toll. He had to remove himself sometimes so that Finch wouldn’t see him cry.
He had read all the books, knew that there’d be a time when there was some crossover. If he were to look at things honestly, he would have to admit that it had already happened. Parkinson’s patients, if they lived long enough with the disease, often got what was called the “Alzheimer’s crossover” and started to show signs of dementia. When Finch had initially presented with a bit of dementia, Melville remembered how relieved they were to find out it was only Parkinson’s. Only. That was a joke. To say something was only Parkinson’s was like saying that Hurricane Katrina was only in New Orleans for a day. Parkinson’s was one of the cruelest diseases out there. If you lived long enough with it, if something else didn’t get you first, you’d end up in the fetal position in a bed in some institution, sometimes for years. Melville often wondered—often hoped, in fact—that he would have the strength it took to help Finch end things if it came to that. He knew Finch’s wishes, and he also knew that Finch had been saving pills for years against the inevitable.
But things were changing, and they were changing fast, with a look, an offhand remark, or a sarcastic tone of voice that he’d never heard Finch use before.
The night he kicked Melville out, Finch threw the volume of Yeats at him, hitting him in the head, leaving a bruise. Melville hadn’t seen the book for so many years—he and Finch had put it away after Maureen’s suicide, in a place where Zee would never find it.
“Get out!” Finch had screamed. “And don’t come back!”
Melville called a doctor he knew in Boston, a neurologist friend of a friend, and someone he’d had coffee with a few years back.
“Dementia is funny,” the doctor said. “Sometimes it’s worse when it starts. There’s so much anger involved. The patient is trying to hide his symptoms yet is clearly terrified. But then there’s a second stage, when things start to settle down. And usually that gets better for everyone for a while. I call it the honeymoon period. Of course there will also be a time when he may not even know you at all,” the doctor said. “But, hopefully, that won’t happen for a long time.”
THE PLAN THAT MELVILLE AND Zee had come up with today had been logical enough. He would drop by, ostensibly to pick up some of his belongings. Then they would see how things went. If Finch’s anger had been a product of the drugs, maybe he would have forgotten it by now. Melville would move back in and take care of Finch until the end. And if it were something else, some new progression of the disease, then they’d figure out what to do next.
It felt odd to knock on the door. He didn’t think he’d ever done that before. When he had first become involved with Finch, when Maureen was in the hospital, he’d almost never come into this house. He and Finch had always met elsewhere, usually somewhere in town. And later, after he’d moved his boat up here, when he thought Maureen wasn’t coming home, Finch had started leaving the door unlatched for him and he’d slipped into the house as quietly as possible late at night, so as not to wake Zee. In those first years, they had been very careful.
ZEE ANSWERED THE DOOR. “HE’S asleep in his chair,” she said. Melville checked his watch. “Three-fifteen.” Finch’s pill was due at four. He should have timed this better.
She was bundling papers in the hallway, her hands blackened, an old bandanna from Finch’s pirate days around her head.
“I’d been meaning to do that,” he said, remembering how Finch had talked him out of it every time Melville started to clear the newspapers. Finch had claimed he was going to read them all, though he couldn’t read anymore, hadn’t been able to for quite some time.
Finch was a bit of a hoarder by nature. Such was his respect for the written word that he could never bear to part with any printed material. Even the ad circulars from the weekend papers had to be kept for at least a month, with Melville sometimes sneaking them out of the house and down the street to throw them away, so that Finch, finding them missing, wouldn’t raid the trash and bring them back inside.
“Does your father know you’re doing that?” Melville asked Zee.
“He knows,” she said. “He doesn’t like it, but he knows.”
Melville helped her get the recycling bags to the curb. They were lucky—tomorrow was trash day, and in his current state Finch was unlikely to try to reclaim them.
They sat in the kitchen making small talk, waiting for Finch to wake up. She didn’t mention the Yeats book, and neither did he, though he wanted to. Part of him wanted her to have it. But years ago he’d made a promise to Finch, and Melville always kept his promises.
Zee checked her watch. It was almost four. “It’s nearly time for his next pill,” she said. “He should be waking up soon.”
As if on cue, she heard the sound of Finch’s walker.
“You got him to use his walker?”
“Yup,” she said.
“I’m very impressed.”
Neither of them spoke as they waited while Finch negotiated the long hallway.
Melville willed his heart to slow down. He couldn’t stay seated.
“I hired a carpenter to put some railings in the hall,” she said, sensing his nervousness, trying to calm him.
“Good idea.”
He took a breath and held it. He stared at the floor. When the walker paused at the kitchen threshold, Melville looked up at Finch.
Their eyes locked.
&n
bsp; “Hello, Finch,” Melville said.
Finch stood still and stiff, his expression masked and unreadable.
“I brought you some sirloin,” Melville said. “I put it in the fridge.”
Finch lowered himself into his chair. Falling the last few inches, he winced. When he finally spoke, it was not to Melville but to Zee.
“I want him out of here,” he said quietly. It was almost time for his next pill, so his voice was gone. The sound scratched as if tearing his throat. But his words were unmistakable.
18
ZEE TOOK THE PHONE into the den. She’d been talking to Melville for the last half hour, trying her best to calm him down. By the time she hung up, Jessina had put Finch to bed and had left Zee a note.
“Get some sleep,” she said to Melville after they’d talked in circles for the third time. “We’ll figure things out tomorrow.”
The television was still on, but muted. Zee sat on the couch, flipped the remote, finding Turner Classics: Jane Eyre with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. She didn’t turn up the sound but just sat staring at the screen. “Who is Grace Poole?” she said to the television set. It was a game they had invented, she and Melville and Finch, a kind of Jeopardy! for the literary set. Something Finch had tried on his lit classes. Who is Grace Poole? was the answer. The question was one she had written herself: She takes care of Rochester’s crazy wife in the attic. No one had talked about the parallel to her mother when the question was asked. She thought now about the way her question should have been worded: She takes care of Rochester’s crazy wife. There was never any mention of an attic in Brontë’s book, and, in the film, it was more like a tower room than an attic. She had always gotten it wrong. It was Maureen and not Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife who lived in the attic. And though both Finch and Melville had challenged wrong answers all the time and must certainly have noticed the error of her question, they had never challenged Zee on this one.
Zee fell asleep to the sound of foghorns. She dreamed of the stars and of the Friendship, not the reproduction that was at the wharves today but the old one that Maureen had tried to write about. Then she dreamed about Bernini’s sculpture of Neptune and Triton as it had once been described to her by Maureen. Or maybe it was Lilly…. No, it was Maureen.
19
THE DAY MAUREEN KILLED herself, Zee had borrowed Mickey’s dory and gone to Baker’s Island to get the Yeats book in an effort to cheer her mother.
Maureen’s mood seemed better that day. Certainly she was kinder to Zee, whom she had been ignoring ever since the visit to Arcana’s psychic studio. The last few months had reminded Zee of the Snow White fairy tale, not just because of Arcana and an image she kept having of her holding out a poisoned apple, but because her mother, who had once loved Zee so much, had grown cold ever since the pronouncement of the psychic, as if the very existence of Zee were keeping her from her fairy-tale ending.
That was the way it was between them for the rest of the summer. Maureen stopped writing “The Once”—in fact, she stopped writing altogether. Mostly she just stared out at the water or sat upstairs in her room. She hardly ate and rarely if ever slept.
So on her way to the island to get the book, Zee was encouraged. Her mother’s mood seemed lighter, and though Zee hadn’t been able to talk her into coming along, Maureen had sounded almost interested when Zee told her what she was planning to do.
“You’ve always loved that book,” Zee said hopefully.
“Thank you for doing this,” Maureen said, and actually got out of bed and came down to the kitchen to see Zee off.
“I love you,” Maureen said to her.
It seemed an odd thing to say, because of how bad things had been between them since the episode with the psychic. But Maureen was smiling when she said it, another encouraging sign, or so Zee thought at the time.
In retrospect, Zee knew that such behavior was a common occurrence in suicide cases. The victim would often feel much better once the decision to end things had finally been made. The uplift in spirits often left family members that much more shocked when the suicide happened. “She seemed so much better,” they would declare.
Though Lilly had been Zee’s first suicide since she’d become a psychologist, she had heard stories from other therapists, including Mattei. A vast and rapid improvement in a depressed mood can be cause for alarm. In bipolar patients it is often the signal of impending mania. In suicidal patients it often means that they’ve made that final decision and, upon making it, feel an almost exhilarating sense of relief. But Zee had no such knowledge when Maureen died. Though to most people who met her, she seemed older, Zee had only recently turned thirteen.
Baker’s Island wasn’t as close by as some of the other Salem islands were; it was actually closer to Manchester than to Salem. When Zee finally got there, it was after three. She tied up the dory and hurried up the ramp.
Zee walked past the spot where the residents parked their wheel-barrows, the only vehicles used to carry things to and from the old cottages, and then she headed toward the cottage, greeting people as she passed, grown-ups and children she’d known since she was little, whose families had summered here for generations. She wanted to stop and chat with them, but she couldn’t. Not today.
She let herself into the cottage with the key that Maureen always left in the window box. The front room was dark and shuttered. Maureen hadn’t been here once all summer, a clue that only in hindsight Zee realized should have been cause for alarm. Every summer since Zee was a baby, Maureen had used the cottage as her writing space.
This year the house had not been opened. As Zee entered the doorway, she watched a mouse dart and hide; she couldn’t see where it went. The cottage was tiny, only two rooms, the large front room with a small soapstone sink and hand pump and an old-fashioned icebox. A round table sat in the middle of the floor. If the house had been on the mainland, its decoration might have been right out of the Shabby Chic or Maine Cottage catalogs, but here one recognized it as the accumulation of hand-me-downs or discarded items from other places that had been collected over a number of summers: an old rubber bathing cap hanging on a hook, its chin piece cracked and splintered, a straw sun hat from the 1920s that had once had a silk flower on top but that now had only a small hole where that flower had once been attached.
Zee pulled open the four French windows over the sink, then pushed out the shutters beyond. Bright light flooded the room. A nursery web spider took shelter in a crack between the rafters.
Zee had always loved this place. When Maureen planned to stay overnight, she usually brought Zee along, her only requirement being that Zee learn to amuse herself, so that Maureen could write undisturbed. That was fine by Zee, who spent as much time outside as she could. On rainy days she would sit on the rug and draw pictures or play solitaire while her mother worked on her stories. Sometimes Zee read the old Nancy Drew mysteries that had been left there by her step-grandfather’s first wife when she was a child.
The rug was rolled up in a corner. It bulged slightly in the center, something she hadn’t noticed before. Either it had been improperly stored or something had been rolled up with it. Her cards, maybe? A box of crayons?
The door to the bedroom was closed. Zee hesitated before it. For as long as she could remember, she’d been forbidden to enter what had once been the bedroom. Though there was a double brass bed in the corner, they did not sleep in the room when they stayed here. Maureen slept instead on the couch and Zee in a sleeping bag on a huge canvas air mattress on the floor next to her mother.
Zee opened the door and stood looking at what had once been her parents’ marriage bed. The brass was greening where a leak in the roof had caused a slow drip. She could see the sheets on the bed, never changed, and she could make out the faded green chenille bedspread, which smelled musty from the leak.
On that last day of Maureen’s life, Zee stood again in the bedroom on Baker’s Island. But something was wrong with the picture. It wasn’t just that t
he roof was leaking or that the green chenille bedspread was mildewed from the moisture. It was something else. As she looked at the pillow, she realized that the Yeats book was not there. The one thing her mother wanted, the one thing she had come here to get, was missing.
Zee tore the house apart looking for the book. She looked behind and under the bed. She looked in the icebox and in all the drawers. She even looked outside, around the whole perimeter of the house. Finally she spotted the rug and again noted the bulge in the center of it.
She rolled out the rug, and with it something went tumbling. The force of the rolling threw whatever it was across the room. Hopeful, she took a step to retrieve it, and she saw the mouse. It was the same mouse that had scurried across the floor earlier, and with it was a tiny mouse, presumably its baby. Their eyes were wild. The mice were frozen in place. Zee realized that in rolling out the rug she had destroyed their home. Beside the baby mouse, as if in haute décor, was the silk flower the mice had gnawed from the old straw hat and the ball from her game of jacks that had rolled under the bed so long ago. Next to it was the book.
STRYCHNINE WAS THE POISON MAUREEN had researched for her story, the one she’d had the housekeeper use on the captain. It was also the poison Maureen ended up using on herself.
There were many easier poisons available, a few she had learned about from Ann and others as nearby as her garden. Maureen had considered and rejected them all. Strychnine is a poison that travels up the spinal cord and heightens the intensity of the convulsions it causes. It is a terrible way to die. Any emergency worker who has ever seen strychnine poisoning would be unlikely to forget it. The seizures are often brought on within ten minutes of ingestion and are triggered by stimulation of any kind—from fear of death to bright light to the sound of a distant car passing on the road. Theoretically, it is possible to survive strychnine poisoning, if one could keep the poisoning victim absolutely calm and quiet for twenty-four hours or so, until the poison clears out the system. But it almost never happens. A noise, or even the softest touch, will set off seizures that flex the back until the head and feet touch the floor, the body creating an almost perfect arch. After each seizure the victim will collapse in a heap, gathering the energy to seize again. After five or six seizures, the body’s energy is drained, and the victim dies of respiratory failure or exhaustion.
The Map of True Places Page 17