Islands

by Anne Rivers Siddons

“I can’t see a shrink, Henry. I just can’t, not right now,” I sobbed. “Can’t you give me some tranquilizers for a week or so? Maybe they’d give me enough rest to take hold of things. I’ve got too much to do to spend hours crying in a shrink’s office. I’ve got to get back to Bull Street and clean up. I’ve got to do something about Lewis’s clothes—”

  “You don’t have to do anything but get through this,” Henry said. “I know what happens when you put it off.”

  So he brought me a week’s supply of Xanax when he and Camilla came back from the therapist’s office in Charleston the next day, and I took one, and slept, for the first time, deeply and dreamlessly through the afternoon.

  But the next morning the fear was back like a skulking, stalking wild thing, held a bit at bay by the Xanax, but there underneath the surface, eating at my vitals like the little fox of the Spartan boy. I could control it a bit better; I could be alone for short periods of time, and I took the Whaler out once for almost half an hour. But the fear always came back.

  In those next few days, there always seemed to be a little cool wind on my back and shoulders, as if there was nothing behind me but empty space, and I found myself pausing frequently through the day to start to call Lewis, or plan what we would have for dinner. I looked for him everywhere until I remembered, and the remembering was so terrible that it almost brought me to my knees. I tried to hide it, but of course, I could not. Tears, tears, and more tears. I hated them and I hated myself for them, but I could not stop them.

  Camilla comforted me, as did Henry, but I knew that it could not go on forever. Henry was starting at the John’s Island Medical Center as a half-day consultant the following week, and Camilla was slowly but surely being worn down by my neediness. I could sense her withdrawal; it made the fear spike like wildfire.

  One afternoon she got up abruptly after yet another of my weeping spells, and said, “I really need a nap. And, Anny, dear, you need to go back to work. It saved me, after Charlie. And you need to go back to Bull Street. If you don’t, you’ll never be able to.”

  And she got to her feet and limped back to her own house. Henry and I sat for a while before the fire in my living room. The first true cold snap had come in the night before. Yellowed bracken and marsh grass were silvered in the morning, and the hardwoods off on the hummocks were dropping their muted leaves.

  I took a deep, rattling breath, and said despairingly to Henry, “How can I go back to work or to Bull Street when I can’t even be alone in a room? What’s the matter with me, Henry? I have never been like this in my life; you know I haven’t. I can’t just hang this crap on everybody. I’ve already worn Camilla out.”

  He reached out and covered my hand with his. “It takes as long as it takes, Anny. I’m not going to leave you alone. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “You’ve got to go back to work! You’re ready. It’s all planned. It’s a big step forward for you. I’d die if I kept you from that. I’m embarrassed to death. Look at how well Camilla handled everything after Charlie.”

  “Camilla is an entirely different animal, Anny,” Henry said. “Her will is solid iron. She simply did not allow Charlie’s death to really touch her. She never has. It’s your vulnerability that will save you eventually. It will let you feel it all, go through it all. That’s what this is all about. You should not be ashamed of it, or try to hide it.”

  “But Camilla is vulnerable, too, right now. She’s lost another friend. She can’t really walk and doesn’t know when she can. I can’t dump all this on her. I just can’t.”

  He looked at me for a moment. And then he said, “Anny, Camilla Curry is the least vulnerable woman I have ever known.”

  “Well, but if I stayed out here, I could help her,” I said stubbornly. “She needs somebody; she can’t be alone right now. And it can’t be you; you really must get back to work. I could run all the errands, do the cooking and laundry, all those other things you’ve been doing. I could learn to do her therapy with her. It would make me feel a little less useless….”

  He was staring at me with those blue, blue eyes. I saw with a pang that his eyebrows were almost completely white now.

  “Maybe you should try to go back, at that. You know everybody at your office well enough so that you don’t have to keep up a facade with them. Spend a night or two at Bull Street, see what happens. If it’s too hard, come back to the creek at night. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I still can’t go back to Bedon’s.”

  “But what would Camilla do, with us both gone?”

  “I won’t go until she’s on her feet. It shouldn’t be too long now. Want to give it a try? Either way, I’m not going to leave you alone.”

  “I do not know what I would do without you, Henry McKenzie,” I said.

  “Anny, it is entirely my pleasure.”

  And so, on the next Monday morning, I dressed for the first time since the funeral in a skirt and panty hose and heels and drove into Charleston to go back to work. As I drove past the marsh and woods along the Maybank Highway, I talked to myself.

  “Doing okay,” I said chattily. “Not much traffic yet. Be on East Bay in no time.”

  As I swept over the Stono Bridge I told myself, “This hasn’t been hard at all. I can do this. I’m going to work just like a thousand other people on this highway. All I have to do is keep on doing what I’ve been doing. After all, I’ve done it a thousand times before.”

  I went over the Ashley River Bridge and followed the road around to Lockwood, picked up Broad Street to East Bay, and turned onto the cobbles of Gillon Street.

  “Piece of cake,” I said, parking in my spot in the little covered garage. I got out of my car and the fear swallowed me whole. My knees crumpled and I caught myself on the hood of the car and stood there, my head down, black spots wheeling in front of my closed eyes.

  All of a sudden I was angry. Furious. Boiling with a red rage I had never known before. I snapped my head back.

  “All right, goddammit,” I said through clenched teeth. “You’ve got Lewis. You’ve got Fairlie. You’ve got Charlie. You’ve even got Gladys. NOW GIVE ME BACK MY GODDAMNED LIFE!”

  A woman walking her dog along the waterfront park looked sideways at me and loped on. The fear and rage slowed a little; the fear did not subside, but it slunk away somewhere deep enough so that I could walk and breathe again. The rage drained away.

  “Thank you very much,” I said, and walked to the elevator. I had no idea who I was talking to. Not God, I did not think. Not now.

  I had called to say I was coming in, and my staff was waiting for me. Standing stiff and straight, not sure what to do with their arms, not sure how to arrange their faces. I wasn’t, either. This was the first time I had been, so to speak, out in the world. It took me by surprise.

  “Hi, y’all,” I said inanely. There were murmurs in return. Marcy came forward and hugged me awkwardly, with tears on her face.

  “I am so sorry, Anny,” she whispered. “I am so, so sorry.” Allie came next, murmuring something similar. One by one they came and hugged me as stiffly, as if I would break under their hands, and I hugged each one back. Would this orgy of hugging ever be over? Presently, it was.

  I cleared my throat and said, “I know how you all feel, and I appreciate your support more than I can say. Please forgive me if I act sort of goofy at times, or talk to myself. I’m going to get through this, but I just have to do it my way, and right now I can’t talk about it. But I can talk about anything else, and you should, too. You can all say ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ as much as you want to.”

  There was loosening laughter, and I smiled back and went into my office and closed the door.

  “That was good,” I said to whoever it was who might be listening. “I did that pretty well, if I do say so myself.”

  There were masses of paperwork to handle and phone calls to be answered, and I went through them one by one. See the efficient woman handle her workload?

  By lunchtime I was pre
tty much caught up, and my energy seeped out of me all of a sudden, as if a plug had been pulled. The fear did not come, but grief did: terrible, clawing grief that doubled me over at my desk and took my breath. All of a sudden I allowed myself to look ahead of me, something I had been afraid to do before now. What I could see was, simply, more of today: endless, endless days of watching myself go through a charade of normality, with the ache for Lewis’s voice and touch like a cancer in me. I saw nothing else. When I went out of my office to tell my staff that I was going home for the day, I felt a profound, humbling embarrassment. Grief is an embarrassment. I did not want anyone to see me coming, trailing my darkness like a pall on a sunny day. I knew that I did not ever want to walk into my office again. I knew that I must.

  Bull Street was dear and beautiful beyond comparison to me, and awful past enduring. I looked at the mellow old brick, and the pretty fan light, and the arched carpenter Gothic windows; I walked through the first floor over the lovely old carpets from Lewis’s Battery house; I climbed the stairs to the sitting room and bedroom where we had spent so many mornings, with coffee and the newspapers, and nights with television and, later, love. And I knew as well as I have ever known anything that Lewis was here. I could not touch him and he could not touch me, but we both knew the other was here. And I knew also that I could not stay with him. I could not ever look into those dead pearl eyes again.

  “I’m so sorry, baby,” I whispered, starting to cry again. And I ran out of the house, leaving the lights on, and got in the car and called Lila on my car phone, and spent that night with her and Simms on the Battery. I was shaking with shame when I got there, but Lila came out to meet me, and put her arms around me, and said, “It was way too soon. I thought so from the beginning. Nobody is that strong. Come on and we’ll have a nice dinner and a bottle of wine, and tomorrow morning I’m taking you to see Pritchard Allen. And no arguments.”

  “Sometimes we call it an adjustment disorder,” Pritchard Allen said. She was a sweet-faced woman a few years older than me, and had had a successful solo practice for many years. She had gone to Ashley Hall with half of the women in Charleston. I felt soothed with her, at ease.

  “Acute anxiety, even fear, is not an unusual response to sense stressors of most kinds,” she said. “Bereavement is supposed to be a separate syndrome, but I’ve never thought that. You’ve lost three of the people you loved most. You’ve lost a house that you adored. Sometimes there’s some fear of separation from major attachment figures involved. You’ll probably have considerable depression later on. Under the circumstances, I think I’d worry about you if you weren’t scared to death half the time. Yours is probably the acute type, meaning it lasts less than six months. If it’s longer, we call it chronic. Either way, we can treat it, and you can help yourself a great deal. I can give you something a little stronger than Xanax, and something to help you sleep. You shouldn’t use them for more than a few weeks, but I doubt that you’ll have to.”

  “You said I could help myself?”

  “Yes. Figure out what you need. And then get it.”

  I felt better driving back to the creek, as if I were myself again, no matter how damaged, and was not watching some parody of me move mechanically through my life. I felt that I could sleep for twelve hours and wake in my own skin, and I did that.

  But I knew that I could not yet leave the creek, not at night. Not yet. And that I would not ask myself to do so. Figure out what you need, Pritchard Allen said. And then get it. What I needed was Henry and Camilla and the creek.

  Henry did not, after all, start his new position at the medical center when he had planned to. Camilla fell again, this time breaking one frail wrist. She was badly bruised and shaken, and furious with herself, and consequently with us.

  “So here you are, back again,” she snapped at me. Her face was white with pain.

  “Here I am,” I said equably. I understood that the pain was not in her wrist.

  After she was in bed, I sat by the fire with Henry. He knew, though I did not tell him, that going back to Bull Street had been a catastrophe, and he did not pursue it. I was grateful, but worried about him.

  “You don’t have to stay here full-time,” I said. “Stay in the mornings while I’m at work, and then I’ll spell you when I get home at noon. For goodness’ sake, get your career going again. You’re too valuable to just drop out.”

  “I can stay a little longer,” he said. “She really needs somebody who can lift her. Look at you; you’ve lost fifteen pounds if you’ve lost one. You couldn’t pick up a bag of feathers.”

  “I can certainly handle Camilla,” I said, annoyed. “I’m staying. You’re going.”

  “I’d really rather you didn’t stay here alone right now. You’ve got way too much on your plate. You’ve got too much to sort out. You’ve got your own career to think about. I think the answer is to hire somebody, at least part-time. Just until she’s well again.”

  He put the idea to Camilla while we were having drinks that evening. She went white again, as much with fury as with pain.

  “I have never had hired help to look after me in my life, and I’m not about to start now. I’m appalled that you even thought of it, Henry,” she said coldly.

  “Cammy, Anny and I can’t stay here all day. We’ve got to get on with our lives. You do, too. You must see that.”

  “All I see is that I don’t need any damned hired help!”

  “We’ll be back here at night,” Henry said sharply. “But either you get some help in here or I’m calling the boys.”

  “You know what they’ll do! They’ll haul me off to some awful place in California and I’ll die there.”

  “Then it’s a helper,” Henry said. “Here or at Gillon Street. You choose.”

  Camilla’s brown eyes filled with tears and my own stung in reply.

  “I can’t take the city right now,” she said softly. “It’s too much. We’ve all lost too much. I need to be…just with you all. I need to be here.”

  And so it was that, a week later, I found a notice on the bulletin board in the John’s Island BI-LO, and Gaynelle Toomer came into our lives, riding a flamingo-pink Harley-Davidson 2000.

  12

  THE WEEK BEFORE Gaynelle came was the worst week I could remember. Later I would look back on it and think of it as the February of my life: dull, leaden, endless gray, with no hope, no sign yet, of spring. A time to simply try and not yield to death by slow, cold suffocation. The time of the shocking, tearing pain was largely past. I now believed that Lewis was gone. It remained to me to try and find a way to live with that. I could not see one, and for a time, did not try. I simply kept on in my accustomed groove, head down, as an old pony at a children’s party would, long after the music has died.

  I went to work in the mornings and came back to the creek in the afternoons. Henry was always there; he had insisted on staying full-time until we found someone for Camilla. None of his phone calls to the hospital or the home nursing organizations yielded anyone who wanted daylong duty on an isolated creek so far out of Charleston.

  “They’d have to drive too far to buy lottery tickets,” Henry said wearily. “No matter. I’ve got the folks at Queens looking for me.”

  I did the shopping and cleaning and helped Camilla, so far as she would let me, in the afternoons. I managed to get light suppers together, mostly soup now, with the winter closing down on us, and the dark falling early. We would sit by the fire afterward, always at Camilla’s house, so she would not have to limp over to join us, and talk desultorily of nothing much, certainly not our three numinous dead. And not of what might come next. If anyone had asked me what my plans were, I could only have stared stupidly at them. My plans were simply to live through each day.

  We did not speak much, but Camilla seemed to have found her old serenity again, and smiled at us every now and then, or closed her eyes in appreciation of the music pouring from the little cassette player. She loved baroque music. I never had, but found
it soothing and softening now.

  But still, it was a dull, dead, frozen time, and all of us took refuge in early sleep. I would settle Camilla into bed, and then Henry would walk me to my door, give me a brief, silent hug, and disappear out back to his guest house. For the first few nights after Lewis’s death I had hardly slept at all, fearful of the horror of either dreaming of the pearl-eyed man or waking up and remembering that he was gone. But I slept now, great, dreamless, sluglike drifts of sleep. I could neither remember nor imagine the long nights at the beach house, when we had laughed and drunk wine and told scurrilous stories, and listened to the hush of the surf. Now if I woke at all, I would hear only the winter stillness of the marsh, and perhaps the hunting cry of an owl. Henry said that he had heard the bellow of the great bull gator, closer now, but I never did.

  Each morning, almost always around six A.M., I awoke in tears so violent that they doubled me over and took my breath. I would stuff the bedcovers into my mouth to keep from howling aloud, and cry until I was drained and faintly nauseated. After that I had only dry eyes and the heavy dullness; but I knew the tears would come once again at dawn. It did not seem to matter much.

  On the Friday of that week, I came home at noon to find Henry trying to maneuver Camilla back into her bed. She had not fallen, but he had heard her cry out and found her halfway in and halfway out of her bed, unable to move either way. She was in pain, and he was having a hard time trying not to hurt her.

  “Camilla, you know you’re supposed to holler if you need to get up,” I said, rushing to help Henry. She felt like a bundle of feathers and reeds under my hands.

  “I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to call Henry McKenzie every time I want to go to the bathroom,” she spat out between clenched teeth. “And if anybody comes dragging a bedpan in here I’m throwing it at them. Full.”

  We laughed a little. Camilla was down there somewhere, beneath the surface of this straw woman. I helped her into her bathroom and looked at Henry.