“Well, that’s true, Scarlet. But this wasn’t about the odds. This time it wasn’t about her anger, or all that’s wrong with the world. It was about something that’s right, finally, about you, and about your child. She held my hand last night and said, ‘All right, Tom. Let’s just rest now. Everyone needs to rest, Scarlet especially.’ ”
He reaches for her hair again. “She was thinking of you, Scarlet, of you and of her grandchild.”
But something about this makes Scarlet pull away from him. Stop trying to control my goddamn hair! she suddenly wants to scream.
He’s closed his eyes now, and his words are broken, choking. “ ‘We’ll find a place you’d love, Addie,’ I told her. ‘Near the cottage, near us.’” He draws a long breath, then looks over at the hillside, where Dustin is stomping and probing with his flashlight and shovel.
He shakes his head and clears his throat. “I don’t think either of us was thinking too clearly about root systems at that point, surprisingly enough for a biologist and his environmentalist wife,” he says with a sad, quiet laugh.
Scarlet steps over to face him. “I don’t believe you,” she says.
He looks at her as if she’s slapped him. “What do you mean? Why in God’s name would I lie about such a thing?” he says.
“She was so passionate about this!” Scarlet says, still staring at him. “I mean, I can’t believe you talked her out of it! And come to think of it, why wouldn’t you lie to me about that? Why would this be any different from any of the things you’ve somehow failed to tell me?” And then she starts, ticking off a list of her resentments from the last year: “First, that her cancer’s back. Next, deciding to call Dustin here—why wasn’t I in on that conversation?”
She walks away and starts to pace along the creek. Dustin has returned from his trek along the hillside but chooses not to interrupt them; instead he retreats to a respectful distance, standing behind Tom’s car. Part of Scarlet, somehow detached from the strangeness of this moment, watches him from the corner of her eye, wondering if he’s used to scenes like this.
Tom walks over and reaches, again, for her arm. She turns to face him. “And while we’re at it,” she says, “how about this whole plan of dying in Cider Cove, with strangers taking care of her, instead of here at home, with you and me? No one discussed that with me either, ever.”
She is choking now, coughing and sputtering. She’s as surprised by this outburst as Tom is, and not even sure she means any of it. A month ago, when she’d heard of Addie and Tom’s plan for her last days, she’d come to see Addie’s choosing to die in Cider Cove as reasonable, and right. But now, preparing to place her mother’s body in the earth, suddenly, it seems, she is also resentful of that.
“I could have cared for her,” she says then, whimpering now, wiping snot and tears from her face with the back of her hand. “Here, at home.”
Through all this Tom has stood silently by the creek’s edge, watching her; in the dim light from the back porch Scarlet can see his pained look. Now he walks over and takes her into his arms again. She relaxes there for just a moment, considering the possibility of just letting all of this go now, leaving everything to him. But then she pulls away.
“And one other thing,” she says. “You never told me that you slept with Lou.”
He steps back and stares at her for a moment, then sighs as he runs his hands through his long, uncombed hair. He walks a few steps away, into the shadows between them, then stops and leans against the back doors of the Seafood House truck.
“That’s true, Scarlet,” he finally says, his voice hoarse and tired. “I never told you that. But I didn’t think of that as lying; I would have said something more along the lines of protecting you from something that, believe me, I wish had never happened.
“All these things you’re listing,” he goes on, waving an arm toward the creek, “I wouldn’t have thought of any of them as lies. We were only trying to protect you, trying not to burden you with all these details. Trying to do what we thought was best for everyone. And you know, you were being pretty cagey yourself through a good part of the fall.”
Scarlet winces at this memory, of phone calls she didn’t return for days, visits she canceled at the last minute. She was so confused about what she and Bobby were doing, so sure no one would understand. Leftover teenaged obsession, she imagined them all saying to her, shaking their heads. Classic female rescue fantasies.
“I know,” she whispers. “I know I kind of dropped out of sight. I’m so sorry about that now.”
They both turn to look at Dustin, who’s stepped from the shadows and cleared his throat. “I did find a spot that should work,” he says. “Should I get started?”
Tom sighs, and reaches a hand toward Scarlet. “Maybe we were wrong,” he says. “I’m sure we should have included you in more of these conversations. But I’ll venture to say you might make a mistake or two with your own child, Scarlet. It goes with being a parent.”
He looks so old then, so old and tired. He already looks like a grandfather, Scarlet thinks. Why, she suddenly wonders, is she doing this to him?
She walks over to take his hand, and she holds it to her wet cheek. “But we can’t bury her here, Tom,” she says. “You know we can’t.” She is stunned by how strongly she feels this.
She looks into her father’s eyes. “Not to protect me, anyway,” she says. “Why in the world would Addie suddenly decide I needed protecting? You’re the one with something to protect here.”
He’d said it himself, when Addie had proposed the idea. Having to disinter a body before Bert Schafer’s crews could start building—maybe it really wouldn’t be enough to get Schafer and the college to interrupt their plans. But it might be enough to finally get him fired.
Scarlet turns and leans against the truck now, next to Tom. “If that’s what we’re concerned about here, if you’re worried about losing your job, I’ll listen to you, Tom,” she says. “But not if it’s about me somehow, about giving me some sort of protection I didn’t even ask for.”
Tom sighs, then looks down at his hands. “Well, at this point I’m not concerned about getting fired,” he says. He looks over at Scarlet and smiles a weary smile. “It’s probably time I retired anyway. Might as well go out blazing.” He pulls her hand to his cheek for a while before he speaks again.
“But Scarlet, you must know this is true: before she died, Addie said it to me quite clearly. ‘Just bury me at home,’ she said. ‘For Scarlet’s sake, for her baby’s sake.’”
Scarlet nods then, remembering. Two weeks ago, when Addie first told them she wanted to be buried on Burnham Ridge, on the college’s land, Scarlet still wasn’t sure she was pregnant. And she felt afraid, for some reason, to tell Addie and Tom that she might be. She waited until she went back to Cider Cove three days ago, with confirmation from the hospital lab, to tell them. And that was when Addie told her she’d be a wonderful mother.
Oh, Addie, she thinks now, why do I have to do this without you? She buries her face in the handkerchief Tom hands her while he stands by silently, his arm around her again. Finally she says, “If you’re willing to go through with it, I want to bury her on Burnham Ridge. I want to do what she asked two weeks ago, when she still felt like fighting.” She looks at Tom and tries to smile. “I want my child to know that her grandmother held her ground against that bastard and never flinched, not even at the end.”
Those words sound slightly foolish, Scarlet knows, coming from her—as if they don’t quite fit her mouth. Does she even mean this? Yes and no. She would fight differently, she thinks. By not refusing to try chemotherapy one more time, for instance. You might have fought harder, Addie, part of her is thinking. For your grandchild’s sake.
Not that she’d timed her pregnancy particularly well, of course.
Does she even mean this—that she’d never have refused another round of chemo? There’s no possible way to know.
It’s not easy to maneuver Addie and her
coffin to the spot on the ridge that she had in mind. There’s an overgrown dirt road that would get them there a lot more easily, but Tom says it’s too risky to drive; it’s too dark to find their way in without headlights, he says, and someone in one of the houses below, on Haupt Bridge Road, might see the car lights and call the campus security office, assuming they’re drunken students.
For the first time the strangeness of this difficulty strikes Scarlet. Why a coffin at all? And not just any coffin: one made from the wood of her father and mother’s barn. Was this the Addie she knew, this woman with a sudden wish for a symbolic link with her past, with her childhood home, like this? Did she know her mother at all?
In the end Dustin pulls a makeshift wooden wagon with old bicycle tires that Tom and Addie used for hauling compost out of the shed. Somehow he and Tom manage to secure Addie’s coffin to it with a strand of clothesline and several bungee cords, and together they steer this awkward contraption, first across the rickety footbridge over the rushing creek, then up the winding switchbacks to the crest of the ridge.
Scarlet herself feels helpless and lame, trailing behind with a small shovel and a pickax, but Tom refuses to let her help them; it’s all she can do to get him to let her carry a few tools. When they reach the crest and find the spot Addie suggested to Tom—a tiny clearing deep in the woods with two old oak trees on either side—he and Dustin drink some water and rest for only a few minutes before they start to dig.
Both of them are shirtless and coated with sweat and mud by the time they lift the coffin and begin to lower it carefully into the grave they’ve just finished digging, and there are hints of pale gray light at the horizon. Scarlet stops them for a moment, just long enough to kiss the worn siding from her grandparents’ barn and whisper good-bye.
It’s remarkable how perfect it feels, and sounds, when Tom hands her the shovel and she throws in the first few scoops of dirt. The scratch of soil on the rough wood makes a weighty sound that she feels in her chest. When she hears it, and feels it, it’s as if all the tension in her arms, her back and neck, everything she’s been holding over these last few days, falls away from her, filtering down with the dirt.
This is absolutely right, Scarlet thinks. How could they have considered doing anything else? Addie is no phoenix; to cremate her would have felt so wrong. Her birdlike bones belong here, in the earth that she loved. Heavy now with certainty, weighed down with dirt—her body beginning the long, slow process of feeding the trees and mosses and ferns above her. Not reduced to ashes, floating on the waves and the creek, fleeting and ephemeral in a way she herself certainly never was.
Scarlet would like to stay here longer, talking to her mother, asking her for advice. Would you call my feelings for Bobby love, Addie? she could ask her. Is this anything like what you felt for Tom? But she knows they are running out of time, and so she steps away, leaving Tom to throw in a next shovelful of dirt and have his own time, now, with Addie. She steps back next to Dustin, who’s waiting with his own shovel, looking out toward the river.
Tom throws in one shovelful of dirt, then falls to his knees and starts to sob. Scarlet can’t bear to see it, and she makes a move to reach for him, but as she does Dustin gently takes her hand. “Let him grieve,” he says quietly, still looking toward the river. So she turns to look with him, her heart heaving, while Tom weeps for his sweet Adeline.
The sky is pink when Tom and Dustin finish packing the sod over Addie’s new grave. The birds have been singing for a good hour. As they make their way wearily down the path, Tom and Dustin steering the clumsy wagon, they pause for a moment, listening to a plaintive dove in the trees overhead. At the edge of the creek, a great blue heron, disturbed by their arrival, lifts off, its vast wings only a few feet from their heads.
Dustin takes a quick swim in the creek before leaving to drive the truck back to Cider Cove, refusing Scarlet’s offer of breakfast. “Better get on the road,” he says. “Your neighbors might wonder what this seafood truck’s doing in your driveway.” Before Scarlet can point out that it hardly matters now, he’s on his way.
While Tom showers, she cooks eggs and toast. When he returns to the kitchen, he is dressed in a completely uncharacteristic jacket and tie; he plans to arrive at the office of Burnham College’s president promptly at nine, “in full mourning attire,” he says, with the news of where Addie is now buried, and the quiet suggestion that perhaps the college might want to preserve a portion of Burnham Ridge, at least, from Bert Schafer’s bulldozers.
“He wouldn’t listen about the cerulean warbler—or the Cuvier’s kinglet, for that matter,” Tom says, shrugging, his mouth full of scrambled eggs. “I’ll tell him he left us no choice.”
Scarlet spreads some of Addie’s blackberry jam on her toast. “You don’t think she really saw a Cuvier’s kinglet up there, do you?” she asks.
He takes a drink of coffee, watching her over the rim of his cup, then wipes his mouth with his napkin and rises from the table.
“I’m a scientist, and also an optimist, Scarlet,” he says. “What do you think?” He smiles at her then—a mischievous smile, she thinks, though she can’t quite read it—and walks out of the room.
A few minutes later, on his way out the door, he hands her a black loose-leaf notebook. It is Addie’s last field notebook, Scarlet realizes as she pages through it, and Tom has marked the last completed page, dated May 10, 2001—a year before she died—where Addie has drawn what is, apparently, a Cuvier’s kinglet.
nineteen
WHEN TOM ARRIVED AT the president’s office, the secretary raised her eyebrows, but said nothing, when she saw his shirt and tie; she was new this year, and someone Tom did not know well, fortunately—and so she asked no questions about Addie. When he saw the president hurrying out to greet him, he feared for a moment that news of her death had somehow reached him already. But then he saw his happy, beaming face.
“Tom, Tom—perfect timing. Come in, come in. We have something very interesting to talk about!”
When he stepped into the office, there was Lou, seated across from the president’s desk, beautifully and expensively dressed, looking quite composed and, Tom thought, more smug than usual.
“Hello, Tom,” she said. “I thought I might meet you here.”
“Good, good,” the president nearly shouted; “then the two of you have already spoken about this. Marvelous.” All the while he bustled nervously around the room, arranging chairs, jumping up to refill Lou’s cup of coffee. Normally rather reticent, he grew positively gregarious when there was talk of financial gain for the college. I smell a new donor in the room, Tom thought. He had no idea, though, just how large a donor he was seated next to.
“Spoken about what?” Tom asked suspiciously, looking not at the president but at Lou.
Ten minutes before he arrived, Tom learned, Lou had presented the president with an offer—more than twice Bert Schafer’s—for the three hundred acres of land surrounding the college. All of it: Rising Valley to the northeast, Sunday Woods to the south, and all of the deeply wooded Burnham Ridge, towering above Nisky and Kleine Creeks—land that extended north as far as the east-west interstate, and east all the way to the Delaware River canal path. Her conditions for the purchase were simple: that the land be maintained as a nature preserve and wildlife refuge—untouched, for perpetuity, except for the construction of a series of trails and a few inconspicuous blinds for bird watchers. It was to be called the Addie Sturmer Kavanagh Preserve.
She suggested, but didn’t require, that the college use some of the funds to establish a new undergraduate program in environmental studies. To be directed by Tom—if he wished. At the president’s suggestion that some of the funds might go toward a new art center as well—also named for Addie, of course—she readily agreed. The president was beside himself with joy, and a degree of disbelief. “I certainly never expected to have a day like this when I left the house this morning,” he said when Lou finished describing her offer to Tom.
>
Tom, who hadn’t said a thing while Lou laid out her plans, simply laughed. “Neither did I,” he said. And, turning to Lou, his palms spread in front of him, he said, “You win.”
She looked steadily at him then, serious and unsmiling for the first time that morning. “It’s not a war, Tom,” she said. “Or if it is, it’s not about us. It’s about Addie.”
The president, tactful—and unspeakably grateful—fund-raiser that he was, chose this moment to excuse himself to go ask his secretary to put in a call to the college’s attorney. When he left, Lou smiled, her tone light and airy again as she went on, “And maybe now Addie can finally rest from all her wars, Tom—wherever you and Scarlet have put her.”
Tom smiled back at her. “Well,” he said, “she’s not where I’d expected her to be. All I’ll say is that her daughter seems to have acquired some of her mother’s fighting spirit.”
“She’s had it all along,” Lou said. Then she added, “And you know, I do understand why. I have to admit I like having an enemy.” She leaned closer to Tom as the president walked back into the office. “It’s nice to have a new one,” she whispered.
“You mean our illustrious local developer?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, no; he’s small fry. I’m going after your slow-witted, sanctimonious senator next. My friends in Washington have already suggested a few worthy opponents I might get behind.” The president cleared his throat then, shuffling some papers on his desk, and she turned to face him with her practiced smile.
twenty
ADDIE HAD TRIED, BUT failed, to read Proust. Swann’s Way from Remembrance of Things Past—so ungodly long, and only the first volume! But this had been a final suggestion from Candace, her friend from the library. They’d had lunch together in March, a week before Addie and Tom would pack the car and drive to Cider Cove to meet the hospice workers and “set up camp” (Tom’s words) in Cora’s studio. When they’d discussed the arrangements by phone, Cora had insisted on that room, with its wraparound porch, its east windows with distant views of the water, and its south windows open to several seed-filled maples between Cora’s house and the one next door. “You’ll see and hear more birds there than anywhere else in the house,” she’d said.
In Hovering Flight Page 25