Gabe leans up on one elbow and watches Mae in the moonlight that flows through the window when they sleep. She likes to leave the curtains open at night. Now the moonlight is annoying. It’s keeping him awake.
He puts his head back down on the pillow and looks at the ceiling with its swirls of plaster from another era. He was dreaming, just now, of the baby. It was a boy, and Mae was holding him, and when Gabe looked closely, he realized it was him. And then he was in the cabin, and the baby wasn’t a baby anymore. The baby was Gabe.
When he was five, Gabe found a photograph of his mother in a drawer.
“Is this her?” he asked Jonah. The woman had long hair and dark, sad eyes. She was holding an infant.
“Yeah, it’s her.”
“Is that me?”
“That’s you.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“No damn clue. Don’t give a shit either.”
Gabe took the photograph into his room, slept with it on his pillow.
And then: “Wake up, you little asshole. Wake up.”
Jonah stank of booze. He snatched the photo off Gabe’s chest. “Give that back!” Gabe shouted.
“She wanted to take you, you dumb kid. Know that? She wanted you to go with her, and you said no. Don’t you remember?”
“You’re lying,” Gabe said, then braced himself for the punch. But it didn’t come. Not that time.
“You told her you couldn’t leave me. You stupid, stupid little shit.” Jonah ripped the picture in two, then three, then four. “I used to be like you, and then my dad got to me. You used to be better, and then I got to you. I wish you were never born.”
“I’m never going to be like you,” Gabe said, but he didn’t believe it even then.
Jonah lifted the bottle he was holding. He said something unintelligible and stumbled out of the room. After a moment, Gabe could hear him outside, and after a while, there was the smash of his empty bottle against the cabin. The ground glittered out there, from all the broken glass right under Gabe’s bedroom window. Gabe tried to see the photograph in his mind. One day, he’d find her. Maybe she’d gone to New York City. He wished hard that night that he’d get the chance one day to tell her he was sorry he didn’t go with her.
Gabe stands, gets out of bed, dresses quietly and sneaks out the door. He’s in the driveway of the inn now, his feet walking, but his mind numb.
He starts down the driveway. Did his mother walk away, just like this? After he left the bay for good, he used to eat at all the diners and dives he could find in New York City, because he had long imagined his mother as a waitress in the city, imagined that she had run away to a slightly better life, at least. He would know her because of the sad eyes he still remembered from the photograph. Except he never saw anyone he thought was her, not even for a second.
He checks his watch. It’s past two a.m.; too late for a drink—but he wants one. He has wanted one, desperately, for days now. He walks faster. Go away and don’t come back. It’s Lilly’s voice he hears now in his head. The things he will never be able to do for any child, and least of all a child who doesn’t even belong to him. Not enough. I’m not enough. No matter what promise he made to Mae. Made to George. Made to himself.
He’s nowhere near ready enough for this. He’s not up to this. When Mae talks about the baby, when she describes hearing the heartbeat, when she starts discussing her plans for the nursery, he feels jealousy and resentment. He feels something black and rotten growing inside.
He stands on the riverbank and looks out at his father’s island, but sees nothing but the night. He could put the island in her name, maybe. Then when it sold she could use the money to help take care of herself and the child. At least he could do that for her. That might help with the guilt. It might help him forget.
What a joke. He’s never going to forget.
He turns and looks toward the inn: the porch light is shining. It would be so easy to go back there and get into bed with her and pretend he never left, that he never had these thoughts. They’ll chase him, though. They’re not going anywhere. Who he wants to be and who he really is are two different things. That ugliness, that part of himself he inherited from Jonah, is waiting just below the surface.
Things like this, they don’t stay buried. “You taught me that, old man,” Gabe says, turning back toward the river and Island 51. “Thanks for nothing. I’ll do what you want. But don’t you fucking haunt them. You leave Mae and her baby alone, because I am.”
There are canvases and art supplies on the screened-in porch, in the basket in the corner. While away the rainy day by painting something. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how-just try!
I’m sorry, Gabe’s note reads. He’s left it on his side of the bed. I know this will be hard for you to understand, but you and the baby will be better off without me. I love you and I always will. I wish I’d said yes when you said we should just be friends. I can’t believe I’m losing you again. I’m so sorry.
She tears the note in half. Both halves say I’m sorry. She lets them fall to the floor.
Is it because she wouldn’t let him see the baby? Is that what it is? She was lying there in the dark waiting for the technician to tell her the gestational age of the baby, and hoping so hard that some miracle would occur, that the technician would say, “You’re barely four weeks pregnant, how did you even know?” And then she had wished they would call Gabe in, and she would tell him the good news, and everything would be right again.
When that didn’t happen, she had started to cry. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t explain what was wrong to a stranger who stood in the dark, looking away politely because he’d probably experienced scenes like this before. When he finally asked if she wanted her partner to come in, she’d shaken her head no. And that had been that.
She forces herself out of bed. Downstairs in the kitchen she takes her morning-sickness pill, drinks juice, tea, eats half a piece of toast, some sliced apple. She washes her single plate and cup and puts them in the drying rack. She was so certain when she told Gabe she was going to keep this baby that it was what she wanted. She kept thinking she’d be able to make it work because she had to, because she had no family and because this baby, no matter the imperfection of the situation, was her family. She had thought maybe Gabe would be her family, too—and she had believed it, she really had. She had believed in her and Gabe. She should have seen this coming, but she didn’t. Now he’s gone, George is gone, Lilly has been gone for some time. She’s completely alone, and no matter how many times she tells herself that’s not really true, that she has a companion, the baby inside her feels only like an abstract idea, a distant, flickering lighthouse she may never reach—and when she does, what will become of her?
She walks to the fridge, looks at the calendar affixed there with a magnet. It’s Wednesday. There’s a note on the square date box that says she’s supposed to go play bridge at Jean Templeton’s, whom she ran into at the flea market weeks before, in another life. She and Gabe had been buying new board games to replace all the ones in the games closet that had missing pieces. Clue. Risk. Monopoly. An afternoon stretched before them with nothing to do but play games and be in love. “Ha.” Mae’s voice in the empty room startles her. It sounds like someone else. Jean had hugged her and told her how much they all missed Lilly, especially on Wednesdays, especially at bridge, and Mae found herself telling Jean that Lilly had taught her to play bridge years ago and that she’d love to be their fourth, if they’d have her.
Bridge. Jean. Brownies. Make Jell-O salad. This is her life now, these are her friends. Women in their eighties and nineties who will die and break her heart, too, as soon as she gets close to them.
“What’s the point?” she asks the empty room. There’s no answer, just the dripping of the faucet and the ticking of the clock. Gabe wrote that the baby would be better off without him, but he or she will probably be better off without Mae, too. “What kind of a mother can I be? What do I have to
give?”
She walks to the window and looks out at the river. Rain is starting to fall on it in big, fat drops. Endless rain, she’s lost track of how many days it’s been, and the river has been flowing faster, swelling bigger, every day. In some places, it rushes like rapids. It’s unrecognizable, a new threat. There are warning signs all over town and along the riverbanks advising people to stay away from the water: Caution. Warning. Danger.
But Mae doesn’t want to heed warnings anymore.
Her mother didn’t.
Her grandmother didn’t.
She walks to the lobby. She doesn’t bother with a coat. She leaves the door wide open behind her because there’s no one left to close it for.
Build a house of cards, then watch it collapse and try to build it up again.
George stops at a liquor store, then drives west until he’s close to the airport, where there are rows of generic hotels. He checks into the Holiday Inn. Do they put Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms anymore? Would it help him if they did? He slides open the drawer beside the bed. There’s only a channel guide for the television there. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. It’s the only Bible verse he can remember. And he’s not the type of person to be comforted by words like that. He tried it on the ship the night it went down. He tried praying, too. And in the end, all he could do was close his eyes tight and whisper, “Lilly, Lilly, Lilly, Lilly.” The only prayer he could believe in, the only thing that could lead him home.
He pours kibble into the ice bucket and watches the news while Bud eats. He fills the bathtub with water for Bud. He clicks the television off. He takes out the bottle of whiskey he bought, as well as the bottle of Percocet from when Lilly fell on a patch of ice and broke her wrist while out walking with Viv a few years ago. They’ve expired, but they’ll do. He puts these two items on the bedside table and contemplates them. Then he pours some whiskey into a mug and dumps some pills into his hand. But he chokes on the pills when he tries to swallow them. He spits them into his hand, and they leave a chalky film on his palm. He dumps them into the toilet.
Too much of a coward, even to die. But there’s always tomorrow.
Except tomorrow turns into three days in the hotel. Every night he takes one or two pills with a cup of whiskey. He doesn’t eat. This will kill him eventually, won’t it?
The room reeks of dog shit and urine. There is reproach in the dog’s eyes when he looks at George, head hanging low. There are probably laws against this. “At least I’m feeding you,” George snapped the night before. “Don’t look at me like that.” He’s not proud that he’s alienating the only friend he has left.
On the fourth morning, George wakes to the sound of pounding and barking.
“Go away!”
The knocking on the door continues. George thinks if he ignores it, whoever it is will go away, but to his shock the door swings open. He throws off the sheet and jumps up, stands there in his undershorts, mortified, caught. Dog shit, urine. The smell of his own unwashed body.
It’s Delia. There’s a security guard behind her. “Leave us,” she commands, and the guard backs away. She strides into the room. “Disgusting,” she says. “You’re going to have to pay for this, you know.”
Bud seems intimidated by her and cowers by the bed.
“Oh, for God’s sake, put some clothes on.” George is in his underwear. He doesn’t know what else to do but pick up the dirty clothes he draped over the chair the night before and scuttle off to the bathroom to dress.
When he returns, she’s standing beside the bed holding the whiskey and the pills.
“How did you find me?” he asks.
“I called your house, looking for you. A girl answered—her, I assume. Said she didn’t know where you were, that she hadn’t heard from you in days. That doesn’t seem to me like any way to treat your granddaughter.”
“Get out,” he manages.
She shakes the pill bottle. “How many of these did you take?”
“Maybe two . . . but over a period of time . . .”
“Ha!” She spits the laugh out at him. “Two Percocet and a sip of whiskey, and you thought that was going to kill you? That’s just a regular night.”
“It’s a regular night for me, too,” he mumbles.
“I suppose you had hoped that if you succeeded, I’d feel guilty,” she says.
“I didn’t think about you at all.”
“And that’s supposed to hurt me.”
“Truly, you were the last thing on my mind.” This is a lie. The truth: every night as he fell asleep, he heard her words in his head. You killed my son. If the pills and whiskey didn’t kill him, he was sure those words were going to.
She prowls the room. “You can have anything if you have enough money, you know,” she says. “That’s why they let me up here when I had called enough hotels, when I finally found you. Anyone can be bought. When Anthony died I ended up with a lot of money, more money than I will ever know what to do with. And I can have anything, but there’s nothing I really want.” She looks thoughtful. “You hate this place, don’t you?” He nods and sits down on the bed. The dog curls protectively around his bare feet. “Yet you won’t go home.”
“There is nothing to go back to. Mae—she hates me. And Lilly, gone, never loved me.”
“That’s a stupid thing to say. Of course she loved you.”
“You don’t know anything about this and I’m not interested in your commentary.”
She adjusts the fur coat draped over her shoulders like a cape. “I came back to Alexandria Bay once, you know. Maybe fifteen years ago, over Christmas. I remember driving through that same old archway, the one that says ‘Heart of the Thousand Islands,’ and realizing the place hadn’t changed. That hurt. It brought it all back. I drove to your inn, and I sat outside and idled the car for a while. Then I drove back through town to that bland Holiday Inn on the outskirts.”
George frowns at her.
“Later, I worked up the stomach to drive back into town. I parked a bit down the road from the inn. I saw your girl outside, shoveling the snow. I knew it was her. I watched her for a while.”
George feels tired. He lies back and stares up at the ceiling. He feels like a child being told a bedtime story. And it’s better not having to look at her. Her voice, when it is separate from her cruel, ruined face, is almost pleasant. Husky, sad, wise, like an aging starlet.
“After a while, I saw her go inside, and then she came out and walked down the road, straight past my car and over to the community center. So I waited, and then I got out of the car and I went there, too. The door was locked. I peered inside and spotted her, passing by with a bunch of papers in her hands and then stopping, startled, when she saw my face. She opened the door for me. I searched her face for signs, for any resemblance to my son. She looks just like Virginia, doesn’t she? But absolutely nothing like Chase. I said to her, ‘I’m just visiting and I was wondering what’s going on here at the community center.’ ”
A weight on the bed beside George. Bud has joined him. He reaches out his hand, places it on the customary spot, just below his neck.
“She told me there was a matinee, a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet, for Christmas. She said she was the props manager and the stage manager because she was going to go to business school in the spring. I felt proud in that moment, George. A girl with a head on her shoulders.”
“She has a name,” he says, his eyes closed.
Delia ignores him. “I went to the play. You were there, but you didn’t recognize me. You sat there with Lilly, held your wife’s hand and acted like every single thing your granddaughter did or said was the absolute most brilliant thing anyone had ever done or said.”
He remembers how Mae had pulled it all together so well and gave a little speech at the end. He can picture it. And, yes, he was proud of her.
“Is this is why you came here? To tell me that you enjoyed the community theater production you saw in my town?”
“At the end, the scene where Lady Montague says that the death of her son has shriveled her, or something like that—that it was like a bell, beginning to toll her doom. I almost left the room then, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. But that was it, that was the moment I realized I was never going to feel better, ever. The death of my son shriveled me up. I died when he did, but I was forced to keep on living. And there it is, George. The end. Finis.”
He lies there, stays motionless, his hand on the dog’s neck. It wasn’t the story he had hoped for. “I prefer a happy ending,” he says.
She’s still holding the whiskey and the pills. “I don’t have a happy ending for me. Maybe for you, though.”
“Not possible.”
“You really don’t understand, do you? Families have secrets. But most have no power at all.” She shakes the bottle at him. “Don’t be a coward. You may not feel it right now, but you do have something to live for. You’re lucky. And, George?” She says it in a way that startles him. He sits up on the bed and there’s her face again, but her voice is different now.
“If I’d been a better mother, maybe I would have raised a boy who didn’t drink too much, who didn’t shrink from his responsibilities. But I wasn’t. And my remaining children, I didn’t do such a good job with them either. You don’t want Mae coming into this fold. Trust me. Please.”
Her voice—a despair he recognizes.
“No one could have done anything differently,” he says.
“Do you really believe that?”
He thinks of Lilly in the car. “Yes,” he says.
“Then stop blaming yourself. Let me have my unhappy ending. Let me protect Mae from the vicious cycle our family became. I care about what happens to her, but it will always be from afar. You go back to her. Her family, it’s you.”
There are some nice new coffeehouses in town. Go and drink so much coffee your hands start to shake.
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