Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  “That sounds wonderful, Mother.” I would have said that no matter what I felt, but, as it happened, I was absolutely sincere.

  THE LANDSCAPE OF THE CAPE seized me right after we crossed the Sagamore Bridge. But when we reached the lower Cape, past Eastham where the National Seashore started, its grip on me intensified to one that would never let go. Truro was like a place I’d lived in and loved throughout a whole previous life, a startle of recognition and old yearning suddenly satisfied. I didn’t know why, and even after all these years of returning, I still don’t entirely. It has to do with hills covered with beach plums and scrubby vegetation, half-down dune fences and sudden glimpses of ocean when you round a corner and there is sun glinting off the sapphire water and sea oats flexing their backs like dancers in the breeze. A certain quality of light, shining and purely crystalline, makes everything—even people—shimmer. Painters say it’s because the Cape is a narrow peninsula and any light, even that of a dark day, is repeatedly reflected by the water on three sides, like a visible echo, but it seems more than that. There, it’s as though everything lights from inside itself with an ongoing joy, unquenchable no matter what else happens. It’s why I went there when I’d lost everything, and it’s where Mother lives now, at least to me, and at least the part of her that taught me—in a backward way, yes, but taught me nonetheless—to hope for another day and take love where I could find it.

  The Mack house was nothing like the little shingled cottages that dot the Cape. It had been Lorna’s family’s year-round home when she was growing up. A porch wrapped around three sides of the two-story house, weather-beaten from generations of overlooking the ocean from the top of enormous dune-cliffs. A ladder rested against the house, and on the ground were drop-cloths and two paint pans with rollers alongside. We could see the line where the house was crisply white, almost but not quite matched by the oblongs where shutters had protected the last paint job. Several scrub pines and wild beach grass completed the yard, if you could call it that. We’d parked back on the narrow strip of asphalt that wound off Route 6 over the tops of the Truro hills, and made our way to the house on a wooden walkway. Steep wooden steps led down to the beach. I couldn’t even see another house, that’s how isolated it was, but in a thrilling, not a frightening way. Gulls rode the thermals overhead, only occasionally bothering to flap their wings as they cawed to one another.

  I wanted to go down to the beach, where I could hear surf breathing hard, but Mother said we had to get settled first. I lugged in what we’d brought while she inspected and noted what the Macks had left, like salt and pepper and cooking oil. Whitecaps sliced the ocean here and there to the horizon as I made my trips between house and car. The breeze smelled like clean laundry, crisp and dry and fresh.

  We’d not been there long when a man appeared on the porch and knocked on the screen door. Mother’s voice turned sharp.

  “You stay put,” she hissed at me, heading for the door through a long hall from the kitchen. “Yes, may I help you?” she said to the man who stood at the door in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt.

  “I’m Ben Chance, it’s spelled like ‘chance,’ but you say Chaunce, Lorna’s brother-in-law. She called Marilyn to say that you’d be up for a while. I didn’t want to startle you by working around outside without introducing myself.”

  “I’m Elizabeth Ruth Kenley, and the girl in the kitchen is my daughter, Ruth Elizabeth,” she said, opening the door and stepping onto the porch. My chest tightened. Mother always introduced me that way, as though I were herself backward. The screen door banged shut like a slap.

  “I hope you’ll have a nice stay. The phone has been disconnected for the season, I hope Lorna told you that, but you let me know if you need directions or anything else. Do you know where Day’s Market is, over on 6A? The only supermarket nearby is in Provincetown, a good nine miles one way, so if you just need a few little things, you’re best off running to Day’s.” Mr. Chance was medium height and build, with nothing to distinguish him: a clean-shaven face, sandy brown hair and regular, if somewhat rough-hewn features. But he had a smile that made you think you’d died and gone to heaven, there was that much plain goodness in it. In spite of what Mother had said, I was edging my way down the hall.

  She glanced inside. “Well, here she is now. Come on out, Ruth, and meet Mr. Chance.”

  “Oh, call me Ben.”

  “Thanks, and you call me Elizabeth. Ruth, this is Mr. Chance,” she said, taking care with the pronunciation.

  He extended his hand and took mine in a gentle grip. “Ben,” he repeated, looking at me. “Hi, Ruth. How do you like the place?”

  “I love it.”

  “Well, I’m sure glad to hear that. You two have a good time. I’ll try not to get in your way.”

  “Ben, would you like something to drink?” Mother said. I couldn’t imagine what she’d do if he said yes. Cooking oil was the only liquid in the house as far as I’d seen.

  “No, thanks, I’ve just had lunch and I’ve got a thermos in the truck, anyway. I’ll just be getting back to work.”

  “Well, thanks so much for coming by. We’ll see you again real soon,” she said, and it seemed she waggled her rear as she came back in, but I could have been wrong.

  THE NEXT WEEK WAS IDYLLIC. Mother’s mood was sunny as the beach where I read two novels and got a slight tan for the first time in my life. I didn’t even mind the extra freckles that popped out on my dead-fair complexion. I began to think I could survive without Roger. Ben’s truck pulled up behind our car by nine o’clock each morning and when I was at the house to use the bathroom or for a cold drink, I could hear him whistling “Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do” through the screened windows. The air was September-like, as it often is on the Cape at the tail of August, but sometimes it would heat up in midafternoon. Those days, Ben would peel denim or flannel and paint in his cotton T-shirt, grousing good-naturedly to me or Mother about the heat and how he couldn’t believe Marilyn’s father had gone and painted the good cedar shakes that would have weathered to their own dun gray, “like everyone else’s house.” He’d grouse about his three kids, too, saying they drove him nuts. But he showed us their school pictures, lined up in plastic sleeves in his wallet, and you could tell he wasn’t really mad. That was the thing about him, he was never really mad.

  I guess Mother noticed that, too. Or maybe that’s what I liked and she liked something completely different. Either way, each day she left me on the beach earlier, saying she’d had enough sun, and when I finally came up to the house, she’d be outside in a dress, leaning against the house and talking to Ben as he painted. She’d laugh, toss her head and clink the ice in the tall glass of tea, where a translucent slice of lemon straddled the rim, as though she could hold the sun anywhere she wanted. She was beautiful, she really was. The day before we were supposed to leave, she’d asked Ben if it was okay if we stayed on, since the weather had been so perfect and I still had time before school started.

  “No problem. It’s nice to have someone to talk to,” he said, and Mother beamed. Ben still had one side of the house, the porch and all the shutters to go.

  I can’t say what happened next, the ninth day we were there. Mother left the beach at one-thirty, saying, “You stay as long as you want, sweetie.” At about three, I climbed the steps to the house to use the bathroom, but I saw Mother and Ben sitting close to one another on the porch, Mother in a spaghetti-strap print dress that was the blue of her eyes and her favorite. Two glasses of tea were set to one side of them and Mother leaned toward Ben. I thought she’d be embarrassed if she knew he could see down the front of her dress, the way she was sitting. They were intent on their conversation as I took the first couple of steps toward them. Mother seemed to be holding her head at a funny angle and at the same moment I thought she’s going to kiss him, I thought no, she’d never. But I stopped. The air felt charged and I was afraid. I backed up and turned back to the beach. It’s embarrassing to confess this, but after I
waited another half hour, I still couldn’t get up the courage to go to the house and I finally went in the ocean up to my waist and relieved myself in that freezing water. Warmth spread around my thighs, welcome and shameful. The towel I’d been lying on was sandy when I wrapped it around my waist and sat on the beach just staring at the breaking surf, listening to it inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. I couldn’t read for worrying about when it would be okay to go back to the house and get into something warmer and more comfortable than a bathing suit and a damp, gritty towel.

  Dusk was coming on when I knew it would seem suspicious if I didn’t go on up. Gulls were resting on the sand, some with heads tucked under wings. You could just tell by the feel and color of the air that it was time.

  The house looked deserted. Ben’s truck was gone. Quietly I opened the screen door into the kitchen. Nothing was out for supper, although that in itself wasn’t unusual. I couldn’t attach the foreboding I felt to anything; it just free-floated around me and I was too afraid to call her name. I began going as quietly as I could from room to room. When I found no one there, I looked up the staircase to the second floor and called softly.

  “Mother? Mother? Can I come up?”

  There was no sound. I sat against a half-dozen throw pillows on a tweed couch that edged a braided rug, and tucked my legs under me. A big wooden coffee table, covered with magazines and coasters, squatted in the center. The living room was homey, with remnants of good furniture left over from when Lorna and Marilyn Mack’s father had been the best plumber on the outer Cape interspersed with tag sale fillins bought since the house had become the Mack daughters’ vacation home. An upscale Goodwill with goodwill to spare, like Ben. Overstuffed chairs reached out in invitation. Big clam shells and smaller scallops and whelks—even a starfish—lay scattered on end tables. Books, board games and jigsaw puzzles waited in stacks in the living room, shelved for a rainy day. Seascapes and sailing ships that looked to have been painted by a member of the family, an amateur with fair talent, hung on the walls. There was a fireplace, too, with some driftwood on one side of the hearth. It was the kind of room I most wanted to belong in, a room for sinking into cozy familiarity, but as evening began to close against the windows, I sat still, caging wild anxiety within my ribs, and waited.

  I WOKE, STIFF AND FREEZING, IN THE same position in early dawn light. It took minutes to unbend my legs, minutes more before they would hold my weight. I shifted the still-damp towel from around my waist to my shoulders, over the top of my bathing suit. I looked out the window, which, of course, I should have done the previous night. Gulls roiled the sky, gray, with no notion of sunrise. Our car, the top of which would have been visible from the living room window, was gone. Still, even knowing that much, I crept up the stairs and called “Mother?” softly several times before I dared go to the bathroom and get into jeans and a sweatshirt. I came back downstairs into the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea while I tried to figure out what to do.

  Several hours passed. I puttered around the house, looking for any task that might need doing. The last thing I wanted was for her to come home and find me idle. Every dish was washed, the bathroom scrubbed, the house swept and straight. Nothing seemed to warm me: not the clothes, not the tea, not the work, and finally, everything else done, I dared a hot shower. I washed my hair, standing too long under the hot spray, sudsing it twice before I let the force of the water rinse it. I cried a little, then, but not much. I needed to keep a hold on myself, I knew that much. Afterward, I folded and hung the towels I used and cleaned the bathroom again just to be sure I’d left no annoying trace.

  For lack of something else to do, I set my hair on the rollers I’d stuck in my suitcase but not used in ten days. For a moment, I tried to find myself in the mirror, mirror. A jittery, spotted girl, her eyes yellow and face spectral in the strange light was there: not exactly reassuring. I put on a little rouge and lipstick, and encouraged by looking better, added a trace of eyeliner. I just wanted to look like a person, that’s all it was.

  I was at such unraveled ends, and so frightened that I moved constantly in an effort to distract myself. I refolded everything in my suitcase and straightened the linen closet in which the Macks had odd towels and sheets stuffed in irregular folds. When my hair was dry, I brushed it out, and went downstairs again.

  Then I just sat. It must have been another hour before I heard a motor outside, and hurried to the window. It was Ben’s truck.

  “Hey, Ruthie. You look mighty pretty,” he said when I went out onto the back porch. He was carrying a paint can in each hand, a sheet of plastic tarp rolled under one arm. Every evening, he cleaned up the paint supplies, and every morning toted them back to the house from his pickup. “I hope your Mom won’t mind if I keep on working. I’ll do the shutters and stay out of the way.”

  “Sure,” I answered, completely baffled. Since the first day, he’d never asked about working. Why would he? It was their house.

  “I’m…sorry, Ruthie,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Look, I mean, can I talk to her a minute?”

  “Mother? She’s not here.”

  Ben looked confused. “She run to the store?”

  “No. Well, I mean I don’t know…where she is.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “I guess she was gone last night when I came up from the beach.”

  “God,” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t you call me?” Then he slapped himself lightly on the cheek. “No phone, stupid,” he muttered. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” This conversation was not comfortable for me. Had I made Mother look bad? There could have been six working phone lines into that house and I wouldn’t have called him or anyone else. Except Roger, but I didn’t have a phone number for him yet, so that was a moot point.

  “Can I…do anything to help?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, Ruth, I mean, is this like her, leaving you alone like this?” He was hesitant, stammering a little. Embarrassed.

  “I’m fine. Thanks, though,” I said, turning back toward the door.

  “Look, I’m not going to just leave you by yourself.”

  “I’m really fine. Thanks, Ben,” I said and went inside.

  I stayed inside, pacing from room to room. Reading was impossible and I couldn’t find anything to do. Maybe this is the time she won’t come back: as it happened it wasn’t, but the thought was surely in my mind.

  Perhaps another hour passed. The truth was, I simply couldn’t take it any longer. His niceness just got to me. I needed it, so what came after was my fault.

  I went outside to find Ben. Shielding my light-stunned eyes with my hand also let me avoid looking at him. “I was thinking…maybe I could…Could I help you paint?”

  Ben looked startled. “Of course, you can. That would be fine. Come on here, let me get you set up. You take this shutter. I’ve got an extra tarp over there. You grab it, spread it out.” He demonstrated and I copied. “Good. Make your brushstrokes go like mine, sideways, okay?” He went on, explaining minutia that I didn’t need explained, but his voice was soothing, as though everything here were normal.

  We worked on like that the rest of the morning. Usually Ben went home for lunch, and today followed suit. Around noon he said, “Marilyn’ll be looking for me about now. Come on, we’ll get something in you, too.” He gestured with his head toward the truck and put a lid on his paint can.

  “Thanks, but I’m not hungry,” I lied. What if Mother came home and found me gone?

  “Nope, like I tell the kids, don’t even bother to argue. You’re coming!”

  He didn’t live far, as he’d said. He lived in a modest little Cape house, less than five minutes away. I hung back a little as he went in the side door. He reached back and gently took me by the shoulder, pushing me in front of him.

  “This is Ruth Kenley, Elizabeth’s daughter, who I told you about. Her mother’s off shopping, and Ruth’s been good enough to help me w
ith the shutters.”

  Marilyn was a sweet-faced tiny woman who wore glasses. One side of her dun hair was tucked behind an ear. Her kitchen had wooden cabinets and yellow curtains and smelled like chicken. Ever since that day I’ve loved a kitchen with yellow curtains. “Wonderful!” she said. “I would have been happy to have your mother, too. Come, sit down. I’ve got some soup on, and the kids will want peanut butter and jelly. How about you, honey?”

  I felt as though the power of speech were gone. “Anything. Thank you very much for having me.” My voice sounded dry and whispery.

  A sunbleached, sneakered boy of about seven tore into the room. “Daddy! Mark said I couldn’t touch his Tonka truck! But you said share!” He was indignant.

  “Where are your manners?” Marilyn admonished. “Matt, this is Ruth.”

  He reined himself to courtesy and looked at me. “Hi.” He got it out, and wheeled back to Ben.

  “Hi, Matt,” I said, but he was paying no attention.

  “What about the trucks?”

  “Hey, buddy, I just walked in the door. My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut. Let me get some food and we’ll talk to your brother before I go back to work.”

  The lunch passed quickly. I had the peanut butter and jelly, not because I liked it, but because it was what I thought would be the least trouble. Ben attended to the Tonka crisis. Jenny, his daughter, wanted to show him a painting. Marilyn laughed and said, “It’s like this all the time, they keep us hopping. Actually, this is mild—there’s another one, Claire. She’s at the beach with a friend today.”

  We drove back to the house and worked on the shutters. Ben started to replace some of the dry ones on the front of the house, where he’d also finished painting, because, he said, the place might as well look good even if we were the only ones looking at it. Then he laughed at himself.