Mary started the car and turned away from the road that led her home. She knew someone who loved these cookies, someone who wouldn’t feel bad about eating them and who wouldn’t make Mary feel bad about bringing them. Also, she was hoping Eliza would be home. She planned to ask her for one more ride, a ride to Bangor on August 3rd, at ten o’clock in the morning. She was supposed to arrive at nine thirty to check in. They’d have to leave by eight. It was a lot to ask. But there was nobody else.
———
Mary almost turned around at the last minute—it was weird, maybe, dropping in on Charlie Sargent like this—but what the heck. The man had brain cancer. He was dying. He had six months, maybe a year to live, that’s what he’d told her at The Cup. And it had almost been much less than that, if he hadn’t called the Coast Guard. He’d told her that too. The least Mary could do was bring him some cookies.
Mary had a clear view of the living room through the front window and she could see Charlie there, in his recliner. There was one lamp on, right beside him, and the front porch light was on too, like maybe he was expecting a visitor. His truck was in the driveway but there was no sign of the Audi that Eliza drove. There was a flicker of blue light that meant the TV was on.
Mary rapped softly on the door. She didn’t want to make a sick man get out of his chair, but she didn’t want to barge in without an invitation either. After a good long time, Charlie opened the door. When he saw Mary there with the cookies he smiled and said, “Mary!” like he was really glad to see her, and that made her feel good.
“Here,” she said, holding the cookies up. “These were extra. I thought you might want them. I know how much you like them.”
“I do,” he said. “I sure do.”
He stepped back and motioned for her to enter.
Charlie Sargent didn’t look so much like a knight in shining armor now, he looked pale and weak and thin. Charlie was more stooped than he had been just ten days ago, and his eyes looked almost colorless, like some of the light had leaked out of them. He looked exhausted both from the inside out and from the outside in.
Mary suddenly felt shy and out of place. “Where’s, um,” she said, looking around.
“My pain-in-the-ass daughter?” He smiled again. “I sent her to Ellsworth. Told her to catch a movie. Don’t know if she’ll do it, but I told her to. Sent Val with her.”
Mary laughed uncertainly, and Charlie said, “I’m kidding, about the pain in the ass.”
“Okay,” said Mary. “I know.”
“Sort of. I love her, you know, but sometimes there’s only so much concern one person can take.”
Mary nodded. Even Mary understood that. Ever since that night after her visit to A Cut Above, the night Vivienne had cried onto Mary’s cheek, when she was home with her mother, just doing something dumb like putting an ice-cream bowl in the dishwasher or searching through the On Demand movies on the cable, she sometimes caught Vivienne staring at her in such an uncomfortable way. A few times Mary even saw Vivienne’s eyes fill up with tears. It made Mary want to chew glass and spit it out at the world. “I know what you mean,” she said. Then she noticed that she was still holding the cookies and that she was still standing on the doormat. “Here,” she said. “Why don’t I put these in the kitchen. I have to be home soon anyway.” (She didn’t.)
“You can do that, sure, that’d be great. But after, if you have a few minutes, how about you just sit here with me.” Charlie moved slowly back toward his recliner. “Maybe we talk or maybe we don’t talk, either way is okay with me. But the company would be nice. Would that be okay?”
There was something pleading and kind in Charlie Sargent’s eyes when he said that, and a little of the color reentered them. He moved aside so she could pass into the kitchen.
“That would be okay,” she said. She had sort of been dreading going home to an empty house anyway—Vivienne was going out with the girls after work. “I wouldn’t mind that at all. I’d like that.”
Charlie settled himself in his chair and said, “It’s just that, sometimes you send everybody away and then you look around and wonder why you’re so lonely. You ever do that?”
She nodded. Did she ever. She brought the cookies into the kitchen, which was toward the back of the house and looked out over a small, untended garden. When she returned she took a seat on the edge of the couch and then, after a moment, sat all the way back. She looked around the room. It was simple and spare, with none of the ornate clutter and figurines that Vivienne favored. There was a single photograph resting on the table next to the couch—a beautiful woman who looked just like Eliza with her arms around a little girl. Eliza and her mother, clearly. Hanging on the wall behind the recliner was a photograph of what Mary guessed to be Eliza and her family: besides Eliza there was a man with thick white-blond hair and two little girls, maybe ten and eight.
Charlie closed his eyes, and Mary thought he might have gone to sleep, so she just sat there, looking at her hands and occasionally up at the TV. She didn’t mind sitting there. It was peaceful in the living room; there was a clock ticking somewhere. The television was on but the volume was turned down low: it was some cop show that Mary didn’t recognize, and a man and woman were speaking urgently to each other. While Mary watched, the woman started crying. The TV was much smaller than Josh’s TV. Then, after a few moments, Charlie started talking, although his eyes remained closed.
“Tell me some gossip,” Charlie finally said. “Who’s loading up now?”
“Oh,” said Mary. “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t really know.” Loading up meant hauling a lot. With Josh gone she didn’t keep track of the hauling—the people who came into The Cup weren’t talking about it, that was for sure. If she tried she could maybe scare up some summer-person gossip, but she didn’t think that was what Charlie was after. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
“It’s all right.” He lifted a hand and let it fall back down to the recliner; his eyes were still closed. “Doesn’t really matter to me anymore anyway.” He didn’t say that in a self-pitying way, the way Vivienne might have said something like that; it was just a fact. Then he said, “How’s that baby you’re growing? You taking good care, now?”
“I am,” she said. She tried not to think about August 3rd, ten o’clock in the morning.
“Good,” said Charlie. “Good.”
Mary put a hand on her belly, where it was starting to jut out a little bit. She’d always been very thin—too thin—so to her it seemed very noticeable, this addition to her shape. She’d taken to wearing loose shirts, and she put her apron on the second she walked into work. She thought of the peach-sized bundle of nerves and cells, veins and organs, with the big alien head.
And then the next thing she knew she was blubbering like she herself was the baby. She swiped her arm across her nose and hiccuped, but she couldn’t stop, she just kept crying.
Charlie Sargent turned his head toward her and sat up a little bit and said, “Oh, now, Mary. Hey, now.” He made a motion like he wanted to comfort her, leaning toward her. She didn’t want him to bother himself getting out of the chair, so she shook her head and tried to talk. But she found she couldn’t; she just blubbered on.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said. He rested his head back in the chair, like he was giving her privacy to collect herself.
“I know,” she managed. “I know you didn’t mean to upset me. I’m sorry.” She snorted ungracefully.
“Nothing you have to be sorry about in front of me.” She nodded, grateful, and then he said, “There’s Kleenex in the kitchen. Bring the whole box, why don’t you.”
She knew that because she’d seen the tissues when she’d gone to put the lobster cookies down. Charlie’s kitchen was small and extremely tidy. There was a dish drainer with two plates drying in it. It sort of made her heart break, those two plates in the drainer, they seemed so lonely and brave. In the center of the table was a vase of cut flowers. A dish towel hung from the oven handles, its c
orners lined up with each other. When she came back from the kitchen his eyes were closed again and she thought about tiptoeing out the door, but then he said, “You okay? Can I do something for you?”
She thought, For me? He was the sick one. She said, “No. Thank you.” She waited a minute and then common sense and manners kicked in. She said, “Can I do anything for you?”
She expected him to give her the same answers she’d given him but instead he said, “You know what you can do for me?”
“What?” she said. “I can do something for you, I can do whatever.” I mean, brain cancer. The least she could do was help the man out.
“Just—just sit there for a little bit, will you? Just sit right there where you were sitting and talk to me.”
Mary sat. “That’s what you want me to do? That’s all?”
“That’s all. Make yourself comfortable.”
Mary sat all the way back on the couch. Then she took off her shoes and tucked her legs underneath her. Charlie opened one eye and smiled and said, “That’s more like it. Now, just talk.”
She hesitated. “About anything in particular?”
“Nope, just whatever’s on your mind. I like the sound of your voice. It relaxes me, makes me feel peaceful.”
So Mary talked. She told him all sorts of things, things she’d never told anyone. She told him how sometimes she woke up in the night and the future felt like a big dark hole she might actually fall into. She told him that when she imagined the baby, imagined caring for it and loving it and having it love her back, sometimes she felt terrified and she broke out in a sweat. She told him sometimes she got scared Little Harbor was the only place she’d ever see in her life. She felt herself gearing up to cry again and pulled another tissue out of the box and got it ready.
She told him that she didn’t know how to be a good mother.
Charlie said, “Course you do. You’ll know how when the time comes, anyway, if you don’t know it now.”
“I don’t,” she said. “Nobody ever showed me how.”
He sat with that for a moment and then he said, “My wife, Joanie, was the best mother you ever saw, and her mother didn’t exactly show her.”
“So, how’d she know what to do?”
“She learned by doing. Boy, the way she loved Eliza, it was something else. When she died, I wondered how I’d ever do right by Eliza without her.”
“But you did.”
“Lots of times I figured it would have been better if I’d been the one who died.”
“Oh,” said Mary. “Don’t say that, please don’t say that. You don’t mean that.”
“It wasn’t fair to Eliza, to lose a mom like that. Just when she needed her the most. But she’s been okay. She’s tough, Eliza. A fighter.”
Then Mary told him about Vivienne’s friend Sam. “She’s a good mother, I watch her all the time. She works hard, she’s a nurse, and then sometimes after she’s done being a nurse she works other shifts taking care of really sick people in their homes.”
“That’s a real hero,” Charlie said. “Someone like that. Where’s she do that kind of work, now?”
“Ellsworth.”
He nodded and then sat very still for a moment, so still that once again she thought he was asleep.
“The people she takes care of are dying,” said Mary. “And then she goes home and she’s with her kids, and—I don’t know. I just like watching her with them. It makes everything seem, I don’t know how to say it. It makes everything seem possible, I guess.”
Right after she said it she wished she hadn’t. Dying people! What an idiot she was, to say that to a sick man. She said, “I’m sorry, about that one part.”
“What one part is that?”
“The—” She hesitated. “The dying part.”
He let out a parched little laugh. “ ’S okay,” he said. “You’re not talking ’bout anything I’m not thinking about.”
“Still,” she said.
“Sometimes I get so scared about what’s coming, Mary, that I shake in my bed.”
“That’s awful,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“But worse than that is when people pretend nothing’s happening.”
“That makes sense,” she said. “That would be worse.”
“The cancer, it’s in my brain. A tumor.”
“I know. You told me. I’m so sorry.”
“Got some fancy name to it, I can’t ever remember it half the time, glio-something or other. It was the size of a walnut, when they found it. Now—well, who knows. Who knows what size it is.”
She nodded and felt her eyes fill up again. She said, “Does it hurt?”
“Some headaches, that’s about the worst of it. From the pressure, Eliza told me, I don’t know, I guess there’s no pain receptors in the brain. I didn’t know that. Did you know that?”
“No,” said Mary. “I sure didn’t.” Then she said, “I just talked so much about myself. I feel awful about that, when you’re—”
“That’s what I wanted,” Charlie said. “That’s exactly what I asked for.”
“Okay. But…now do you want to talk? And I’ll listen.”
He didn’t answer right away and then he sat in silence for some minutes and she could hear the clock ticking. The television had changed, a news show now. With his eyes closed Charlie said, “Would you mind if I talked to you about Joanie, about Eliza’s mother?”
“No, of course not,” said Mary. “I wish you would. I really wish you would.”
He smiled. “First time I saw her, I was coming in from hauling, and she was sitting there on the wharf, swinging her legs back and forth, and I thought I was looking at a fairy-tale princess.”
“She was beautiful,” said Mary. “I can see in the photograph.”
“Inside too,” Charlie said. “Corny as that may sound. Beautiful inside and out.” He opened one eye and said, “I loved her so much, you know. She was all of it to me, all of it. And then when Eliza was born the two of them were all of it.”
“A love like that,” said Mary. “I bet there’s people who never get to feel that way, lots of people.” What Charlie was describing was so far from the uncertainty she’d felt around Josh, and later the fear, that they didn’t even belong in the same category. They didn’t even belong in the same conversation.
“Eliza, she’s upset with me that I’m not fighting this thing, this tumor. But what I saw Joanie go through, fighting something that was just going to beat her in the end—boy, Mary, I don’t want any part of that. I don’t want to go down like that.”
“I understand,” said Mary. “I don’t blame you.”
“You don’t?” He opened his eyes.
“I don’t.”
He sighed deeply. “Thank you, Mary. Thank you for saying that. I need one person to say that to me.”
“You’re welcome.” She felt the weight of that responsibility settle across her shoulders, but it felt right and satisfying, like the heft of a heavy blanket.
“They say that when you’re dying your world gets real small. They say you shrink it down to the people who are really important to you, that that’s what you’re supposed to do, that that’s what’s natural.”
Mary didn’t know what to say to that. She wished Sam were there; Sam would know what to say. Sam probably had conversations like these all the time. She waited to see if Charlie would keep talking, and he did. “The thing about it is that I know someday soon I’m going to see Joanie again.”
“You will,” said Mary fiercely.
“And we’ll both be whole and neither one of us will be sick. I don’t worry about Eliza without me. Eliza’s tough as nails and she’s got her family. I know she’ll be okay.”
“You talk like you’re dying tomorrow or something,” Mary said. “I’m sure you’re not.”
He laughed that parched little laugh again. “Probably not tomorrow, you’re right.”
“Probably not the next day either.”
; “Well,” he said. “Probably not.”
Then Charlie closed his eyes again and he didn’t open them when he said, “You’re going to do just fine, Mary, you and that baby of yours. I know it.”
“You do?”
“I feel it in my bones.”
“And how are your bones, usually? Pretty accurate?”
“Pretty accurate.”
After that it seemed like Charlie was fading in and out of sleep and Mary put her shoes back on and got ready to leave. Was she supposed to do something, though? Bring him water, put him to bed? When was Eliza coming back?
Once he opened his eyes and looked right at her and said again, “I know I’m going to see Joanie again. I just know it.”
“You will,” said Mary. “Of course you will.” She hesitated next to his chair and she said, “Can I do anything for you? Can I bring you something?”
“No,” he said. “I’m good here, I’m peaceful. But if I ever did need something you’d help me, right?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’m around.”
Now he opened both eyes and looked right at her and said, very earnestly, “Can you lean close to me for just a minute, before you go? So I can say something?”
Mary did as he asked, putting her ear close to Charlie’s mouth, and he whispered something, and she listened, and it took her a minute to process it, but after she did, she said, “I have to think about it.”
PART THREE
August
39
BARTON/BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Rob
On the first day of August, Rob met Christine Cabot in the Oak Room at the Copley Plaza: his choice, but he knew that Christine Cabot approved. The place conferred a sense of history and class that Christine Cabot would appreciate. The room was quiet and paneled in dark wood and it would be a very difficult place to make a scene, if one were inclined toward scenes.
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