Architecture like this makes a person feel that human beings ought to be a different shape—Ray Bradbury hiring Frank Lloyd Wright to build a house on Mars. Head nearly full, be home soon. Gerry and his wife send greetings.
Love, V.
“The last one was from Kenya, wasn’t it?”
“Egypt, and before that, Kenya. She’s getting around.”
“Nothing else exciting?”
“Couple of things, nothing thrilling.”
“Fine,” Kate said easily. “Do you feel like going down to dinner, or shall we eat up here? Jon’s cooking up a storm.”
“I’ve been smelling it all afternoon, drooling on the rug. I’ll go down.”
“Need a hand?”
“Carry the wine, please.”
Lee rolled her chair over to the stair lift, maneuvered herself from one seat onto the other while Kate stood by making trivial talk and being unobtrusively ready to catch her. At the bottom, she checked that the walker was where Lee could reach it, then walked away, leaving her to it. She washed the grime of the day from her face and hands, then got to the table in time to hold the chair for Lee to lower herself into. Food, talk, paperwork, bed: just a day like any other.
Later that night, cuddling close for the first time since the heat wave had begun, Kate spoke into Lee’s ear.
“You don’t have to tell me whom you got a letter from.”
“Don’t I?”
“Of course not. It’s your perfect right to have secrets, nasty, horrid secrets, secret lovers probably—I don’t mind.” Here she began to nibble down the back of Lee’s neck while her fingertips sought out the sensitive areas along Lee’s ribs. “I’ll just tickle you until you tell, but I don’t mind if you don’t tell me. I can lie here all night tickling you, until you fall out of bed and have to sleep on the floor and—” Lee began to giggle and writhe away from Kate’s hands and teeth, and the two of them wrestled until Lee, whose upper-body strength after months in the wheelchair was greater than Kate’s, succeeded in pinning down Kate, who was not really trying very hard. Panting, Lee looked down into Kate’s dark and astonished eyes.
“You sure you feel like just lying there all night?” she demanded in a husky voice, and put her mouth to Kate’s.
It was the closest they had come to a normal night in a long, long time.
Much later, Kate muttered into Lee’s shoulder, “Don’t you think that will get you out of telling me about the letter.”
“Tomorrow, my sweet Kate. Tomorrow.”
“It was from my aunt,” Lee said, when tomorrow had come and they were still in bed, drinking coffee.
“But your aunt died.” Lee’s mother’s sister had been a real terror, the sort of ramrod-spined old lady who regarded fitted bedsheets as a sure sign of the country’s moral decay, who had left a clause in her will making it quite clear that Lee was to get not one cent to support her abominable lifestyle. “Don’t tell me her will included posthumous letters.”
“No, this is my father’s older sister.”
“I didn’t know your father had a sister.”
“Neither did I. Well, I knew he had one, but she disappeared so long ago, everyone assumed she was dead. You can read the letter if you want to. It’s in the top right-hand drawer of my desk.”
Kate padded down the hallway and brought it back, three pages of cotton bond covered with strong, thick writing. What would a handwriting analyst make of that hand? she thought idly, and sat down on the edge of the bed to read it.
“My dear niece,” it began. By the middle of the second page, Kate’s face was crinkled up in amusement, and when she came to the end, she laughed aloud. She took a moment to look back over the peculiar document. “A twenty-four-karat loony, isn’t she?” she said with a chuckle. “As if you’d jump at the chance to join an old lady you’ve never met out in the sticks. You could borrow one of Jon’s flannel shirts to chop firewood in. That is a truly great letter—I especially like the idea of hiring a PI to gather information about a niece. The throwaway line about malaria is good, too.” She retrieved her cold coffee and took a swallow.
“I’m going, Kate.”
Kate looked at her for a long minute. “That isn’t very funny, Lee.”
“No joke. I decided last night.”
“You decided last night. When last night?”
“Kate—”
“When? Was it before you decided to give me a taste of what it used to be like? Or after you found you could do it?”
“Don’t, Kate.”
“Don’t what? Don’t point out to you that insanity seems to run in your family? How can you even think about it?”
“It’s what I need, Kate. I knew it as soon as I read the letter.”
“Right, fine, next summer we’ll go and visit your loony aunt Agatha, up on her island without any electricity. Next summer, when you can walk and climb stairs and drive the car.”
“I need it now, Kate, not a year from now. Sweetheart, I know you don’t understand, but I’m asking you to trust me. I need this. I’m suffocating, Kate.” She was pleading now, this strong woman who hated to ask for anything. She even put out a hand to Kate’s arm. “Kate, please try to understand. I just need to be on my own for a while.”
Kate made a huge effort. “Lee, look. I realize progress is slow, and God knows how frustrating you must find it, but throwing up your hands and doing something crazy isn’t the answer. If you think you’re ready to be on your own, then okay, go on a retreat, hire a cabin in Carmel, or what about that place in Point Reyes where you had that workshop? You’ve had to learn to walk all over again, one small step at a time. Regaining your independence is the same thing: one step at a time, not jumping off a cliff. Write your aunt, tell her to bring her malaria down for a visit, and then when you’ve had a few tries at roughing it, go and visit her.”
“That makes a lot of sense.”
“Good.”
“But I’m going now.”
“Jesus Christ!” Kate shouted, and slammed her mug down on the bedside table so hard, it dented the wood and sent a spray of coffee to the ceiling. “What the hell kind of game are you playing here? It isn’t like you to be so completely pigheaded. You’re acting like a child.”
“Okay, I’m a child, I’m crazy. While you’re name-calling, don’t forget ‘cripple.’ I’m a cripple, right? And I am, but not because my legs don’t work and I sometimes pee my pants. I’m a cripple because I can’t stand alone. Kate, your life has gone on, but you forget that I had plans for my life, too, plans that all depend on my being able to take care of myself. If I can’t take care of myself, how could I—” She broke off, but Kate was too upset to pursue Lee’s train of thought.
“Take care of yourself, then. Start cooking again. See more clients. Get back on track. But this…”
“I cannot stand by myself when I’m surrounded by people who want to protect me,” Lee cried. “I have to be around someone hard, like Aunt Agatha seems to be. Someone who doesn’t love me. I know it’s crazy, Kate, but it’s something I have to do. I have to try at least. I may only be able to stand it for two days and then scream for help, but I am going to try.
“Kate, don’t you see? I want to have a life again. I want to have my independence. I want to have…” She threw back her head and looked defiantly at Kate. “I want to have a baby.”
Kate sat stunned. They had talked about it, of course, before the shooting; it was a natural concern of any permanent couple. But Kate had never had any wish to bear a child, and Lee in a wheelchair—well, she hadn’t thought…
“Is that what all this is about?”
“All what?”
Kate shrank back from Lee’s dry-eyed glare. “I’m sorry, love, I didn’t know you were still…interested.”
“Because I’m in a wheelchair all my instincts have atrophied, all my desires and drives just vanished, is that it?”
“I didn’t mean that, Lee.”
“And you don’t even ge
t mad at me. Do you know how long it’s been since you shouted at me? Eighteen months, that’s how long. You pussyfoot around like I’m about to break, you and Jon. I can’t breathe!” Her voice climbed until it tore at her throat and at Kate’s heart. “I have to get out of here. I have to have some air, or I’m going to suffocate.”
And so Kate traded leave days and indebted herself to her colleagues, and drove Lee north to Agatha’s. She really had no choice, since she knew that if she refused, Lee would ask Jon. Or hitchhike.
She anticipated a long, tense journey, but to her surprise, as soon as the decision had been reached, Lee seemed to relax.
In the hospital bed, Kate’s body, which had begun to worry the ICU nurse with its raised pulse, also relaxed as Kate relived the good part of the trip.
They drove north on the coastal highway, slow but beautiful, reaching the redwoods by the afternoon. They dutifully made the rounds of the memorial groves, oohing at the height of the trees, admiring the immense cross sections with their little flags to mark the birth of Julius Caesar and the crossing of the Mayflower, and wondering at the enormous bearlike figures carved out of redwood with chain saws, which loomed up at the side of the road with a myriad of other beasts and cowboys and figures of St. Francis around their knees. SASQUATCH COUNTRY proclaimed one of them, and BIGFOOT LIVES HERE read another.
They stayed the night in a run-down cabin surrounded by the ageless hush of Sequoia sempervirens, a quiet broken only by the fluting voices of children coming home from the nearby state park’s campfire program and later by the huge juddering roars of the logging trucks gearing down two hundred feet from their pillows. At one in the morning, when Lee announced that she had counted forty-three of them since they turned off their lights, and expressed some concern that there might be no trees left if they didn’t get an early start the next morning, Kate reassured her that the noise wasn’t logging trucks, it was a Sasquatch with digestive problems, and Lee got the giggles and began to sputter childish jokes about Bigfart, and on that high note they fell asleep.
In her damaged sleep, Kate’s mouth curved into a smile.
The next afternoon, Kate’s car, veteran of many wars, broke down in Reedsport, a town on the Oregon coast not exactly bursting with rental agencies, but even then, Kate managed to salvage the trip and divert the underlying tension by bullying the mechanic into lending them (for a price) his wife’s two-year-old Ford. When it was loaded with their things, they shifted to the bigger, and faster, interstate highway and continued their way north.
Lee, reading the map, discovered a town with the unlikely name of Drain. She then began to search for further oddities, coming up with Hoquaim, Enumclaw, Pe Ell, and finally let out a cry of triumph.
“My God, Kate, there’s a town in Washington called—are you ready?—Sappho.”
Kate took her eyes off the road. “No, I won’t believe that. You’re making it up.”
“I swear it! Look,” she said, thrusting the map under Kate’s nose.
“It has to be a misprint.”
“I must go to Sappho,” Lee declared.
Kate grinned, picked up Lee’s left hand and kissed the ring she wore there, and managed to convince herself that everything was all right.
And on one level, it was. They drove through Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley, two women in a foreign and well-watered land, where massive sprinklers hurled sparkling jets of water hundreds of feet through the air. They found two lakes to swim in, one noisy and crowded, the other newly opened and pristine. They stopped at two Pioneer Days museums to look over the rusty plows and make the requisite comment that women must have been tiny in those days, or else the leather of those shoes must have shrunk considerably in a century.
Kate, desperate to believe that all was well, saw only the sunshine, heard only Lee’s laughter in the water and her shriek when the tiny fish nibbled her leg. She did not see that Lee’s smiles were occasionally just a bit forced, she closed her ears to the long silences, put a succession of tapes in the Ford’s player, talked a lot to herself.
She did not take conscious notice of the fact that Lee had not touched the wheelchair since they had left San Francisco. When Lee had Kate stop at a drug store so she could go in and buy some aspirin, the fact that Lee was chewing the things like peanuts was miraculously hidden behind the surface irritation that Lee had not asked Kate to go in for her. Bit by bit, as the miles passed, Lee became less and less willing to acknowledge her disabilities. They spent more than an hour every day at rest stops, Kate walking up and down the cement paths between the summer-worn lawns and the crowded parking strips while Lee hobbled, sweating and determined, to the toilets, refusing the wheelchair, ignoring the wide-doored handicapped stalls, feeling the eyes on her like so many burning coals, ready to snarl at Kate should she dare offer help or to stab a stranger’s hand with icy politeness: Thank you, I can manage.
Outside the yellow rest rooms, cars came and went, truckers parked and used the toilets and rolled away, picnics were packed away and others spread out, and finally Lee emerged, one aluminum prop after the other, and made her way, three inches at a step, to the car. She would not allow Kate to park in the handicapped slots, would coldly rage and spit and wound if Kate tried to save her some steps, made it easier, acknowledged Lee’s limitations. It was painful to stand by helplessly as Lee drove her legs to take one step, then another, excruciating to witness the effort Lee went through that Kate could so easily save her, agony to stand and watch as Lee battled furiously to compel her body to obey her will.
A six-month-old golden retriever flew past Lee, trailing its leash and its indignant, laughing owner. Lee teetered, leaned into the arm braces, stayed upright, and Kate began to breathe again. A fall, every fall, meant either long minutes of wracking effort or an assistance from Kate, followed by hours of bitter silence and (until recently, when Lee had renounced them) a surreptitious pain pill at night. No fall this time, not even descending the Everest of the four-inch curb. She had not even noticed that Kate had moved the car one space closer, six precious feet, or at any rate, she said nothing. Perhaps this will be a good day after all, Kate thought, starting the engine and putting the car into reverse.
The next day, they reached Puget Sound, and the following morning set out for the ferry to Aunt Agatha’s island. Through the foggy, low-lying pastureland, around the northern end of Fidalgo Island to Anacortes, Kate followed the signs, finally steering down into a huge parking lot next to the water, where they were directed into a loading lane. She cut the engine and opened her door to go and buy their tickets, but she stopped at the touch of Lee’s hand on her arm and Lee’s first word since they had left the motel.
“No.”
“I was just going to buy the tickets. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“No, don’t.”
“I think we have to buy them before they let us on.”
“Not now,” Lee ordered sharply, and Kate stared at her profile, feeling uneasy now. Lee was getting terribly worked up about something. Kate knew that Lee had a lot of unresolved and probably unresolvable feelings toward the father she had never known, but Kate had had no indication before this that she was transferring those feelings to the man’s sister. This is not good, she thought unhappily, but she pulled her door shut, and felt Lee relax a shade beside her.
Long minutes passed. A ferry appeared through the thinning fog. It docked, then began to spew forth a stream of speeding cars and trucks, like a shark spawning, with a smaller but no less determined string of pedestrians appearing along the other side of the waiting area. She’ll be one of those, thought Kate; there’s no point in paying to drive a car across if the people you’re meeting have one. An older woman came into sight—no, too young. There was another, looking more likely. Kate leaned over the seat and began to pull the bits and pieces over to one side, and suddenly Lee made a noise in the back of her throat, flinging open her door to heave her clumsy legs laboriously out onto the pavement and begin ha
uling herself upright against the car.
Kate stopped her clearing activities and opened her own door. She stood out on the asphalt, looking toward the off-loading pedestrians for a straggling senior citizen, and then she realized that Lee was looking in the other direction, the direction they had come from. Kate looked, but she saw only the latecomers being directed into their lines—cars, campers, and a flashy red motorcycle weaving between the others. Lee waved her hand wildly, and Kate looked more closely. Could it be—yes, it was the motorcycle that had attracted Lee’s interest. A messenger from Aunt Agatha? But how could Lee know? Suspicion began to blossom in Kate’s mind, and she looked at Lee over the top of the car until, reluctantly, Lee answered the pressure of Kate’s gaze and looked back, and Kate, seeing the same wrenching mixture of excitement and guilt and fear and defiance that she had seen there the day Aunt Agatha’s letter arrived, only ten times stronger, knew instantly what it meant, knew why Lee had been silent and why she’d stopped Kate from buying the tickets. The truth was so devastating, so utterly appalling, she could feel nothing else, not even the anger that Lee was obviously expecting from her. She just stared, at Lee and then at the motorcyclist, who was somehow now standing in front of Lee.
The small figure in the bright red leathers with a zigzag of purple down each arm bent over in a deep bow, pulled off the purple helmet, and straightened up, shaking out a head of pure white curls. She held out a hand to Lee.
“You’re Lee,” she stated. “You look like your father.”
“Aunt Agatha,” Lee answered, with an uneasy sidelong glance at Kate. The woman followed her glance, then stretched her hand over the roof of the car to Kate.
“And you must be Kate.”
Kate looked at the small brown hand, the wrinkled little face, sallow beneath a deep tan, the sparkling blue eyes that looked like Lee’s, but she did not see them, saw only, clear before her, the evidence that Lee had made a great number of plans that patently did not include her. There had been nothing at all vague about this arrangement, how she intended to meet Aunt Agatha. Kate looked away from the older woman, back to her beloved.
With Child Page 10