Islands

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Of course I’m not,” she said indignantly. “We owe her everything. And I never really thought that, anyway. It was just funny, both of us losing things so close together.”

  “Then maybe we’ll find them close together.”

  “I feel sure we will,” Camilla said.

  We said no more about the jewelry, but after I had settled her in bed and turned off her light, I went out onto my little back deck and sat in the chilly spring night, wrapped in Lewis’s old terry robe, trying very hard not to think about the unsettling conversation. I absolutely refused to let the faintest bladelike leaf of doubt sprout in my mind.

  When I finally went to bed, about two A.M., Camilla’s bedroom was dark, but out in the guest house, Henry’s light burned steadily.

  The next weekend Gaynelle called early Saturday morning and said, “The Iron Johns and the Thunderhogs—that’s us—are riding down to Folly Beach this afternoon. It’s nothing formal, just a spring run. We do it with the Johns two or three times a year. This time we’re all kicking in a little for Tim Satterwhite and his family. Tim got sideswiped by a twelve-wheeler on I-26 and busted his spine to pieces. He’s got to have about five operations. So we thought we’d do this one for him. Thing is, now, T. C. and I thought you and Henry might like to ride with us. We’ll just go down there, drink a little beer at Sandy Don’s, maybe eat some shrimp, and come on back. It’s a good introduction. Not too big, not competitive. Everybody’s friends. We won’t be racing or dragging or anything. Henry would go with T. C. and you’d ride with me. What do you think?”

  It was a spectacular day after a week of bleary spring rain, and I was literally itching to get outdoors. The three of us and Gaynelle had done little but stay in and read or listen to music, or, less often, watch TV. Camilla had slept, slept. The thought of sun and wind and noise and the sight of a beach that was not our treacherous old beach was suddenly irresistible.

  I told Henry and his face lit up. Before we could change our minds, I told Gaynelle we’d love it.

  “Pick you up around noon,” she said. “Wear a jacket and bring sunscreen.”

  I took Camilla in to breakfast and we told her about the ride. She closed her eyes for a long moment.

  “Am I losing you all to a motorcycle gang?” she said, but she smiled.

  “Oh, of course not,” I said. “It’s just this one time. Whenever again in my life am I going to get to ride with a motorcycle club?”

  “I take your point,” Camilla said. “So who’s staying with the old lady?”

  “Don’t say that,” I pleaded. “You look younger than either of us. JoAnne said she’d love to come, and she’s bringing her oldest daughter and her daughter’s friend. You won’t see hide nor hair of them. All they want to do is lie out on the dock and burn their butts in the sun. Their boyfriends are picking them up at six, and JoAnne will make you dinner, and we’ll be home not long after dark.”

  “Sounds good,” she said wryly. “JoAnne and I can continue our conversation about the time-space continuum.”

  Henry and I laughed. JoAnne was perhaps the sweetest woman I had ever met, but her interests lay more in the realm of reality TV.

  “Tell you what,” Henry said. “Tomorrow we’ll take you into town to the yacht club for lunch. It’s been months since you’ve been back in Charleston.”

  “Oh, Henry, I don’t think so,” Camilla said. “Soon, but not yet. Catch me some crabs and let’s steam them for lunch.”

  I was vastly relieved. Lunch at the yacht club was the last thing on earth I thought I could handle. Like Camilla, I thought. Soon, but not yet.

  At noon T. C. and Gaynelle roared up on their bikes, with JoAnne and her brood behind them in the truck. After introductions to the two teenage Lolitas, who seemed only marginally able to speak, JoAnne settled Camilla on the porch.

  “I made you curried potato salad for lunch,” she said proudly. “My family loves it.”

  “We’ll make it up to you,” I mouthed silently to Camilla, wincing.

  “You are going to owe me big time,” she mouthed back.

  Out on the road, dipping in and out of pools of deep shade and warm sun, I relaxed and gave myself over to the rhythm of the road and the steady, vibrating roar of the pink Harley beneath me. I was not afraid of bikes anymore, providing no one took me too fast, but except for the first night riding with T. C., I had never really and actively enjoyed them. Today was different. Today I was drunk on wind and sun and rushing air. Ahead of us, Henry turned around on the Rubbertail, where he rode behind T. C., and gave us the little fighter pilot’s thumb jerk. He wore a helmet and goggles, but you could see that he was grinning hugely. I jerked my thumb in return. It was utterly unlike anything I had ever felt, this sense of being squarely and nakedly in the middle of the day.

  The two clubs met in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart on Folly Beach Road. We got there a bit late, and when we pulled around to the back end of the lot, a solid mass of bikers and bikes milled about like a huge eddy on a river. Suddenly I thought of a painting I had loved when I was a small child. It was Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, a brooding and romantic scene literally boiling with great, muscular horses plunging and rearing, their human tenders dwarfed by the beautiful giants. I used to sit for hours in my room, studying the painting in a book I had gotten from the library, trying to decide which horse I would most like to own. This reminded me of that.

  We met everybody. They were cordial, if a little surprised to see such obvious civilians in the company of Gaynelle and T. C., and such elderly ones at that. Elderly to their eyes, at least; some of the bikers were middle-aged, but most were younger, men and women, supple in black leather, many with elaborate tat-toos. Almost all the men wore handkerchiefs around their foreheads, and many had beards and ponytails. Almost all the women were younger, long limbed and large haired. Most were already reddened with the first of the spring sun. I liked most of them, and remembered none of their names.

  It is the noise that eats you alive. The rushing air and the pulsing power under you are seductive in their own right, but it is the great roaring surf of sheer noise that consumes you, takes you totally out of yourself. There must have been no more than thirty-five or forty of us, but the huge, primal bellow of the string of bikes along Folly Road drowned out the world. I found myself in a hypnotic state that only snapped when we pulled into the parking lot of Sandy Don’s.

  “How many deaf members do you have?” I asked Gaynelle.

  “Shoot, you ought to hear ’em when we rev ’em. You stomp the brake and rev it; blow you right to Miami. Of course the cops will be on you like ducks on a June bug.”

  Sandy Don’s was a rambling, sagging, weathered gray shingle building on stilts, canting toward the sea, over the beach just below the Holiday Inn and the huge newish pier. You could tell it had been there a long time. Weather and time had eaten many of its shingles, and its stilts were slick and green with the twice-a-day pounding of the ocean and encrusted with barnacles.

  “It used to be way back on the beach,” Gaynelle shouted at me, “but the beach is eroding real fast, and nobody thinks Don’s will be here much longer. Lots of beach houses have just gone into the water.”

  If anybody on Folly Island had had plans to lunch at Sandy Don’s on this day, they would have been disappointed. The parking lot was solid with bikes, some parked, some just coming in. Bikers milled around in the lot and climbed the rickety steps into the restaurant. From inside, the Shirelles and the ubiquitous Billy Gilman boomed out over the parking lot and the beach. We climbed the stairs behind Gaynelle and T. C., stinging fiercely with windburn and to all purposes deaf, staggering on rubber legs.

  Down on the beach I could see early sunbathers and surfers. The tide was far out, and a few children and dogs splashed at the edge of the flaccid surf. A searing bolt of pain ran through me: for a moment I saw the children of Sullivan’s Island, and our own dogs. I saw Henry, ahead of me, falter, and knew that he saw the same thing. But then
the children and dogs of Sullivan’s Island were gone in the blinding afternoon glare, and only the generic children and dogs of all beaches remained.

  There were tables on the deck, but the sun was savage and T. C.’s head was already magenta. My own cheekbones burned, and Henry was red of face, except where his goggles had left twin rings of white. Gaynelle had only turned a darker reddish tan and gained a million new freckles. T. C. found a table in the dim, cool, farthest recesses of the restaurant and we retreated there. Pretty soon the big room was thronged with bikers, all shouting and laughing and dumping bills into the helmet one of them passed. The jukebox thumped and pounded, and pitcher after pitcher of ice-cold beer appeared magically on tables, including ours. Ordinarily I did not care much for beer, but this was cold to the point of pain, wonderfully wet in dust-parched throats, and I drank it greedily. At some point in the afternoon, platters of fried shrimp and oysters and onion rings materialized on the tables, and more beer. We ate; I know we did, but I could not remember much about it later except that I had eaten myself nearly sick. Later on, as if at a signal, everybody got up to dance. I remember little of that, either, except the joyous abandon of dancing in a crowd to music that my feet knew by themselves, growing looser and looser and more supple with each song. I danced with a great many people, but I danced most with Henry. He did a loose, elegant shag, and I had a sudden, disjointed image of him and Fairlie, shagging in the surf of Sullivan’s Island on an August day. I pushed it away, and that moment became the present moment again.

  “I didn’t know you could shag like that,” Henry said, during a brief stop for beer.

  “Lewis taught me,” I said. “Oh, Henry, you know what? He taught me out at Booter’s! It was the first date I ever had with him.”

  “There’s nothing new under the sun,” Henry said solemnly, and swung me up to dance again.

  “This is wonderful,” I said to Gaynelle and T. C., back at the table. We were all breathing hard. “Are bikers’ meets always so much fun?”

  She laughed. “Shoot, this is nothing. You ought to see Myrtle Beach at Bike Week; five hundred thousand of us, for a week. And Daytona, my God; a million bikers strong and something going on every second of the day and night for ten days. Some people don’t sober up until about Waycross, on the way home.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “God, where to start? Races and competitions and contests and drawings and live bands everywhere, and beer, and booze, and dancing, and every kind of outfit you can imagine, and every kind of custom bike…it’s incredible. Maybe we’ll go next year.”

  “Yeah,” put in T. C. “Henry would like the burn-out pit—suck, bang, and blow for the uninitiated…and the wet T-shirt contests, and especially the ladies’ wrestling and boxing and tattoo contests. We could try Anny out in the coleslaw wrestling competition, or maybe cornflake wrestling. There’s lots of options.”

  I laughed so hard that I could not get my breath, and Henry thumped me on the back.

  “Coleslaw wrestling; that’s for me,” I said, and hiccupped. “Is it what it sounds like?”

  “Yep. Great big pits full up with coleslaw out behind a couple of clubs. Ladies wrestle in them. There’s one lady from Omaha who wins every time. We figure she sleeps in mayonnaise. By the second day, under the sun, that coleslaw is pretty ripe.”

  I collapsed in giggles again, and Henry rose.

  “I need to get Cinderella home,” he said. “Would it be okay if we headed out?”

  “Sure,” Gaynelle said, looking at her watch. “My God, it’s nine o’clock. I told JoAnne we’d be back by dark. Let me run call her and we’ll get on the road.”

  Somewhere in the sweet, chilly dark on the ride home, I sobered up. Beer rose nastily in my throat, and my face and arms burned fiercely, but I felt wonderful, light and free and young. I knew that I would feel dreadful the next day, and cared not a whit. I reached up to shout in Gaynelle’s ear, and found that someone had tied me neatly to her waist with a length of soft rope. That struck me as so funny that I was off again. I was still laughing when Gaynelle and T. C. stopped the bikes at the foot of the driveway to the creek houses. We would walk the rest of the way so as not to wake Camilla.

  I stumbled in the darkness, and Henry took my hand.

  “I feel like your father is going to be waiting for me with a shotgun,” he said.

  “An empty Jim Beam bottle would be more like it,” I snickered.

  JoAnne was sitting on the top steps with her basket and the apparently endless afghan she was knitting. The back of Camilla’s house was dark, but one lamp burned in the living room and in the light of it. JoAnne smiled.

  “She’s been asleep for two hours,” she said. “Did my baby sister treat you right?”

  “It was fabulous,” I said.

  Henry walked her to the truck, saw her off, and then came back.

  “Want a cup of coffee?” I said halfheartedly.

  “God, no. Bed for me. I’ll take you up on the coffee in the morning, though.”

  We walked through my dark house, bumbling and bumping against things, laughing softly.

  “Coleslaw wrestling,” Henry snorted. “Suck, bang, and blow. ‘O brave new world.’ ”

  I laughed again and was still laughing when we reached my back deck. Henry would cut around the pool and up the path to the guest house.

  We stood for a moment on the deck, looking up at the low crystal stars over the creek. The big dipper burned and burned.

  “Want a light?” I said.

  “Nope. I can see.”

  He paused, and then bent and kissed me, a soft, short, sweet kiss. I could feel that his lips were chafed from the sun and wind. He stepped back and looked down at me.

  “Good God, I haven’t kissed a date good night since med school,” he said. “Should I apologize?”

  “No,” I said, feeling queer and detached from the night around us.

  He turned and gave me a brief wave, and disappeared up the path. I stood still, thinking nothing at all, just being.

  From the dark of the pool cage, I heard Camilla’s voice.

  “Henry,” she called softly, “did you have a good time?”

  Oh shit, I thought. I wonder if she saw? That would surely change things.

  “How did you get out here?” I heard Henry say sternly.

  “I came in the chair,” Camilla said. “The deck’s level with the house. I’m getting good at it.”

  “Hold on while I come and see you back to bed,” Henry said from the dark. “This is not funny, Cammy.”

  I turned around and went into my house, and was asleep before I got my jeans off.

  But after all, everything was unchanged the next morning. And on Monday morning Gaynelle came just as usual, and told Camilla about the ride to Folly Beach.

  “These two are naturals,” she said. “I’m going to get them to bike week in Daytona next year.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “Tell her about the coleslaw wrestling.”

  Gaynelle did. Camilla laughed, the laugh of a young girl.

  Henry came home from the clinic in the middle of the next week and said, “Susie called me at the office today. Tomorrow’s her eighth birthday. She’s having a party, and she says all she wants is for me to come and spend the night and make her happy-face pancakes for breakfast. Nancy verified it. I think I’ll go. I can’t put it off forever.”

  “Of course you’ll go,” Camilla said warmly. “And high time, too. Bring us some birthday cake.”

  As he was leaving for the party, Henry said, “Gaynelle is coming to spend the night. She insisted on it. And I think it’s a good idea. Cammy, if you’re going to be so rambunctious with that chair, I insist that there be three of you. We can’t have you breaking a hip.”

  “Oh, Henry, really!” Camilla snapped. “I don’t ever get to spend much time alone with Anny anymore. I promise not to even go to the bathroom by myself.”

  But Henry was adamant, and at sunset Gaynelle
drove up in the truck, bearing covered dishes and a flowered gift bag.

  “Lemon chicken and fresh asparagus,” she said. “And T. C. sent you some champagne. He said even a hen party ought to be elegant.”

  “Tell him he’s a sweetie,” I said, hiding a smile. T. C. and champagne? Michelob was more like it.

  Camilla smiled, but said nothing.

  Dinner was delectable. We ate until the platter was empty, and the candles on Camilla’s pretty table had burned low. Then Camilla turned to Gaynelle.

  “Now,” she said, “I want you to go home. You do enough for us. Dinner was past delicious. But I want to catch up with my old friend, and there’s no need for you to stay. We’ll talk a little about old times and drink T. C.’s champagne, and she’ll tuck me in, and that will be that.”

  “No, ma’am,” Gaynelle said formally. “I promised Henry.”

  Camilla’s temper shattered. I had seen it happen so seldom that I gasped.

  “I mean it, Gaynelle,” she hissed coldly. “I insist that you go home. It’s still my house. I can still live my own life. I WILL NOT BE BABY-SAT ANYMORE!”

  She was so upset that I said, “Please, Gaynelle. You can certainly use the night off and I can certainly handle things for one night. You must see how very hard it is for her to always be fussed over. I mean it, now. Scoot.”

  “All right,” Gaynelle said, with no inflection. “Give me a call if you need me. The cell phone is always with me.”

  “Thanks dearly,” I said as she left, and hugged her. She hugged me back, hard.

  “You take care,” she said.

  Back inside, I wheeled Camilla into her living room and helped her into a deep chair and lit the little apple-log fire that was laid. She stretched and sighed deeply and smiled.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” she said. “I’ll apologize tomorrow. I just get so…tired of it all. It never stops.”

  “Of course you do,” I said warmly. “It’s nice to have you to myself for a while.”