Islands

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  We sat for a space of time, staring at the whispering blue flames. Then Camilla said, “Do you think we’ll lose Henry to Charleston?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Not in the near future, anyway. He doesn’t want to go back to town. And besides, he promised.”

  “What about you? Do you ever miss it?”

  I thought about it, and was vaguely surprised.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Not the things you’d think, the things Lewis and I used to do. Just Charleston things. I miss walking on the Battery on a windy winter day. I miss rooting around King Street. I miss the horses. I miss the bells of St. Michael’s, and the sunset at the end of Broad Street, over the palm trees. I miss the pluff mud.”

  She laughed.

  “You’ve got plenty of that right here.”

  “Pluff mud ought to be filtered through wisteria and gasoline and horse poop,” I said. “Sometimes I miss the sense of neighborhood. Not that I ever really knew many of my neighbors on Bull Street. But I knew they were there.”

  “Are you lonely out here?” she said.

  “Never. Not for a minute. I can get all the Charleston I need anytime I want it. No. This is home for me now.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “You know I am. I promised, too.”

  She sighed, and said, “I know you did. I just have to keep picking at it, to see if you’ve changed your mind. I guess I still think you might….”

  “Not a chance,” I said, and got up and went over to her, and kissed her cheek.

  She put her hand up to my face, lightly.

  “I’ve always loved you, Anny,” she said.

  “And I’ve always loved you. And I do love you. And I will love you. Now, how about some of that champagne?”

  She looked up at me. There were tears in her eyes, but she smiled.

  “I would absolutely love some,” she said.

  I brought the champagne and two of her Waterford flutes, and poured us both a frothing fluteful.

  “This is like old times,” I said, and held up my glass. “To us. Still the Scrubs, by God.”

  “Still the Scrubs,” she said, smiling. I knew neither of us believed that, but it was comforting to say it.

  It was, in fact, a comforting night. Peaceful. Full of the old, easy affection we had felt for each other from the beginning.

  “I’m glad we had this time,” I said. “We’ll have to make it a regular date.”

  “Second that,” she said, sipping her champagne. “Oh, listen, I forgot. I’ve got something for you. I came across it today and thought about you. Will you go look on my bedside table and bring me that little tissue-paper package?”

  I did. When I came back, she was still staring at the fire, her champagne barely touched.

  “Open it,” she said, and I did. Inside the nest of colored tissue paper lay a choker of tiny, matched pink pearls.

  “Oh, Camilla!” I cried. “They’re lovely. But I can’t—”

  “I’m never going to wear them,” she said. “I never have, really. Daddy bought them for me when I made my debut, and I wore them that night, to please him, but pink makes me look like old cheese, and my neck’s too long for such small pearls. They’ll be beautiful on you. Please let me do this.”

  I smiled, feeling tears start in my own eyes.

  “I’ll put them on right now,” I said, and did.

  “They look perfect,” she said. “Let’s toast the final, happy disposition of Daddy’s debut pearls. It sounds like a limerick, doesn’t it? Drink up.”

  We drained our glasses. The champagne was cold and lovely. I wondered who had chosen it.

  “Want some more?” I said, pouring a second glass.

  “No. I’m nodding as it is. Just tuck me in and have another before you go to bed. I’ll guarantee you sweet dreams.”

  I wheeled her into her bedroom and helped her into the white silk nightgown that was laid out, and watched as she slipped under the covers.

  “ ‘Good night, sweet princess,’ ” I said, kissing her forehead. “ ‘Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ ”

  She turned her face into her pillow.

  “And you to yours,” she whispered. I turned off her lamp and went out of the room.

  I did have another glass of champagne, but it wasn’t the same without Camilla, so I corked the bottle and put it in her refrigerator and let myself out, thinking that it would undoubtedly go flat overnight, but would make a good sauce for cold salmon. I trudged up the driveway to my own house, suddenly so tired I could hardly put one foot in front of the other.

  It must have been the emotion, I thought, smiling to myself, sliding between cool sheets and turning off my bedside lamp. “That was a real love fest. She was Camilla again. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve gotten her back.”

  I wanted to think some more about that, but sleep seized me suddenly and bore me down, fathoms deep, where dreams lay.

  Even in the middle of it, I knew that it was a dream, but that did not spoil the sweet reality of it. Reality is often more vivid in that kind of dream because the dreamer knows he must soon leave it whether or not it is a happy dream. This was a very happy one.

  I was in a house by the water. Not one of the three new ones, but the one we all owned together, the big, old rambling 1920s cottage on stilts down at the un-chic western end of Sullivan’s Island. It was the first one that I knew; Lewis took me there the summer we were married, and I loved it as much in that first instant as I did in all the years we went there. I never said that to the others, because it sounded somehow presumptuous, as if an outlander were laying claim to something he had not yet earned. And even though they enfolded me and took me in as one of them from the first, I knew that I was indeed an outlander. It was Lewis they loved, at least then.

  In the dream it was winter, and there was a cold wind howling down the beach and scouring the gray-tan sand into stinging swirls. I knew how they would feel on my skin if I went out onto the beach: like particles of diamonds, almost bringing blood. I usually did not mind that, but this time I was glad to be inside the big living room. It was warm and lit and almost tossing in the wind, like the cabin of a ship. All the old lopsided lamps were yellow with light, and a fire burned in the fireplace at one end, spitting because the shed out back never quite kept the wood dry. At the other end, where the staircase angled up over the junk closet, the big old space heater whispered and glowed deep red. The air in the room smelled of wood smoke and kerosene and damp rugs and salt. In my dream it seemed the palpable breath of the house to me, and I breathed it in deep draughts. It gave life.

  “I know this is a dream, but I don’t have to wake up yet, do I?” I said to Fairlie McKenzie, who lay on the couch under a salt-stiff old blanket, by the fire, reading. Her bright hair spilled over the tattered sofa pillow in a cascade as red as the fire embers. Fairlie always seemed to me a creature of light and fire; she shimmered with it, even lying still.

  “No, not yet,” she said, smiling at me. “There’s no hurry. The guys won’t be back for hours. They never are when they’re surf-casting. Sit down. In a minute I’ll make some tea.”

  “I’ll make it,” Camilla Curry said from her card table beside the space heater at the other end of the room. She was copying something from a big book onto a yellow legal pad, her face and hands in a pool of light from the bridge lamp. I seldom saw Camilla without a pad and pen. She always had projects that seemed to engross her utterly, and the rest of us never quite knew what they were.

  “This and that,” she would say in her soft drawl. “I’ll let you see when I’m done.” But her projects were always works in progress, because we never saw one.

  “Let me,” I said, grateful to be a useful part of the tapestry of the dream. Camilla, even in the dream, was bowed with osteoporosis, as she had been for a long time. Somehow it did not distort her fragile, fine-boned handsomeness; I always thought of her as ramrod straight. Lewis said she always had been, until the cruel disease bega
n to eat her bones. We never spoke of it, but we all tried to spare Camilla undue physical stress when we could. She always saw through us, always hated it.

  “You girls stay still. You get so little time out here, and I’m here most of all,” she said. “I like to fiddle around in the kitchen.”

  Fairlie and I smiled at each other at the “girls.” I was nearly fifty and Fairlie was only a few years younger than Camilla. But Camilla was mother to the group. She always had been the one to whom you went to find something, learn something, confess something, receive something. We all knew that her role was self-chosen. Even the men followed the unspoken rule. Camilla made you want to give her the most you could of what she needed.

  She got up and floated straight as a hummingbird into the kitchen. Her shoulders were erect and her step as light as a girl’s. She sang a little song as she walked: “ ‘Maybe I’m right, and maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I’m weak and maybe I’m strong, but nevertheless I’m in love with you….’

  “Charlie says it’s a sappy song, but I love it,” she called back over her beautiful shoulder. She had on a sheer blouse and a flowered skirt, and wore high-heeled sandals. Because it was a dream, it made perfect sense for her to walk like a girl, to be dressed in the clothes of her girlhood, for Charlie to be alive. All of this made me even happier.

  “Camilla, even if it’s a dream, I want to stay,” I called back after her. “I don’t want to go back.”

  “You can stay, Anny,” her plummy voice called from the kitchen. “Lewis isn’t coming for you yet.”

  I curled up on the rug in front of the fire, beside Fairlie on the sofa, pulling soft old cushions down to make a nest. I wrapped myself in the faded sofa quilt. The fire burned blue with damp, but gave off a steady heat. Outside the wind gusted and rattled the winter-dried palms and peppered the windows with staccato sand. The panes were crusted with salt. I stretched out my arms and legs to their farthest length and felt my joints pop, and the heat seep into them. I looked over at Fairlie to watch the firelight playing on her face. Twilight was falling fast; the men would come stamping in soon, letting cold, wet wind eddy in with them, rubbing their hands.

  “Don’t bring those smelly fish in here,” Fairlie would say from the sofa. “I’m not cleaning fish today or any other day.”

  And because it was a dream, Lewis would be there along with Henry, as he always had been, and would say, as he always said when he came back from an expedition on which I had not accompanied him, “How’s my lazy girl?”

  I closed my eyes and slid toward dream-sleep before the dying logs, happiness prickling like lights behind my lids. In the kitchen the teakettle began to whistle.

  “There’s plenty of time,” I murmured.

  “Yes,” Fairlie said.

  We were quiet.

  The fire came then….

  16

  I AWOKE TO A WASH OF CORAL LIGHT on the ceiling, and thought that it was either very early, just at sunrise, or late, at sunset. I could not seem to think which one lit the ceiling like this. I reached out for the bedside travel alarm Lewis had given me, and found that moving my arm even a little was agony. I tried to sit up, and that hurt even more. I held up my arm, insofar as I could, and saw that it was wrapped in gauze. My other arm was, too, up to my elbow. I could not think what to do about this. I felt as if my head was enclosed in a plastic bubble.

  “Try not to move much,” Henry’s voice said beside me. “I’ll give you something for the pain if it’s too bad. You can sit up a little now. How do you feel?”

  I turned my head on the pillow to look at him. He was sitting in the little slipper chair I had bought on King Street. So I was on Bull Street, and the warm light came from my bedside lamp. Night, then. Henry was slouched in the chair, his long legs stretched straight out, his hands jammed into the pockets of a tweed jacket. He looked ghastly, flayed, at the edge of death. My heart flopped in my chest like a gaffed fish.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I tried to say. “What’s the matter with me?”

  But only a froggy croak came out, and my chest and throat bloomed into fierce, scorching pain. I fell silent and simply looked at Henry, waiting. From inside the safe, airless bubble, I knew that Henry would tell me the story. Henry would fix the pain.

  He reached over and took my bandaged hand gently in his. “Do you know where you are?” he said.

  I nodded. Then I spoke again, forgetting the scorching pain.

  “Henry, I had the most awful dream,” I croaked. “There was a fire—”

  “Shhh,” he said. “Stop trying to talk. There was a fire, Anny. At the creek. You have some superficial burns; they’ll hurt for a while, but they’ll heal soon. But you inhaled an awful lot of smoke before they got you out, and you’ve had some pneumonia. I just brought you here last night.”

  I stared at him. “Creek?” I mouthed. “When? How?”

  “You’ve been in and out of consciousness for a week. Mainly we kept you sedated to keep you from coughing and tearing up your throat and lungs. You had some suction. I’m not surprised you don’t remember. I’m afraid your house is pretty much gone. I’m sorry.”

  “Camilla’s house?” I mouthed.

  “It’s fine. Just a little smoke damage. But, Anny”—and he took my other hand, so that he held both of them—“Anny, Camilla is dead.” Tears sprang into his eyes and he looked away.

  From the hermetic confines of the bubble, I stared at him. What was he talking about? A thousand days of Camilla danced outside the bubble: Camilla far down the beach, her hair flying, dogs milling and leaping around her. Camilla laughing in candle- and firelight. Camilla reaching out to me from under the umbrella, the day I met her. Camilla on the dune line, her old raincoat a blowing gray cloud around her. Henry was wrong. I would soon find that he was.

  “I don’t believe you,” I croaked, and the pain flared again.

  He shook his head. “Listen to me, Anny. She was in your kitchen. She was lying on the floor behind the island. Gaynelle didn’t know she was there, so she didn’t go back for her when she pulled you out, and the fire and rescue people didn’t know, either. When Gaynelle checked on her in her house and found her missing, she told the firemen and they went back in. The fire was almost out then, anyway. It was smoke inhalation, not fire. She didn’t look at all bad.”

  Why couldn’t I make my head work? What was Camilla doing in my kitchen? How could she have gotten there without my hearing the cumbersome chair? I remembered putting her to bed. I remembered coming home dead tired and getting into bed and falling asleep immediately. I remembered the dream of the beach house, and the fire at the end of it….

  But I could not remember anything else. Why could I not remember being in a fire? None of this was making any sense. I felt mindless with fatigue.

  My face must have been piteous, because he leaned over and pushed the hair off my forehead, and sat back down in the little chair, his long frame dwarfing it. I thought that I had never in my life seen a man so tired.

  “I’m going to tell you all of it,” he said. “We’d thought we’d tell you just the bare bones for now, but I can see that that’s not going to do. Don’t try to interrupt. I don’t think I can do this but once.”

  Gaynelle came into the room then. I gave her what must have been an idiot’s meaningless smile. I wondered why I could feel nothing. Well, of course, it was the plastic bubble. Sylvia Plath had written about the bubble: The Bell Jar. I was pleased to know what it was, this feeling of unassailable isolation from the world.

  She kissed my forehead and straightened the bedclothes, and sat down on the little love seat across the room.

  “I asked Gaynelle to join us,” Henry said. “She’s staying with you till you get on your feet. She’s the one who saw the fire and pulled you out. If it hadn’t been for her, you most assuredly would not be here. The fire was terribly hot and fast. She has some things to add, too.”

  He took a deep breath, and went on.

  “
Your blood tests showed a pretty substantial amount of sedative. Ambien, I’m almost sure. You wouldn’t have waked up, I don’t think, not until it was too late. We think Camilla put it into your champagne; you must have left the room at some point. We’re testing the glasses from her kitchen now. I don’t doubt what we’ll find.”

  The pink pearls, I thought. She asked me to go and get the pink pearls. How silly they both were. She had given me a loving gift.

  “And after you were asleep, we’re pretty sure she went over to your house and started the fire. They found a gasoline can and a lighter in the kitchen.”

  We were all silent for a moment. This was beyond pain. It was like hearing a piece of fiction read aloud.

  “She could walk,” Henry said in the dead monotone. “She could all along. Gaynelle saw her do it once. After that, she watched Camilla as closely as she could. You know that she wouldn’t leave you alone with her. Gaynelle caught on long before I did.”

  “I should have told Henry at the very beginning,” Gaynelle said miserably from across the room. “But it just seemed so…crazy. I doubted my own eyes. I thought I would just watch, and together we could keep you safe. When I heard that she shouldn’t walk anymore, and had to have the chair, I was relieved. But I guess I never really believed that. I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “That makes two of us,” Henry said.

  “Her hip was broken,” he went on. “I think it just collapsed under her in your kitchen. That happens a lot with osteoporosis as bad as Camilla’s. She must have been on her way out of the kitchen when it broke. She surely called out, but you couldn’t have heard her. Jesus, those last moments before the smoke got her…

  “Well, anyway, Gaynelle was outside in her truck. She never went home. She was watching, and when she saw the smoke, she called 911 and then went in after you. When they got you to Queens, she called me. By the time I got there, the pneumonia had a good hold. It happens fast after being in a fire. Basically, we just pumped you full of antibiotics and kept you sedated until you could be moved. I knew you wouldn’t want to wake up in the hospital. And I wanted you close enough so I could look in on you. This seemed like the best choice.”