We talked about Nep first. She floored me by saying, right off, that he had gone missing not long before they were to drive up here.
"Why didn't you tell me when I called?"
"Because he'd been found by then and I didn't think there was much point in worrying you."
"Where was he?"
"They picked him up walking along Mendes Road. Seemed like he was headed to your house, is what Niles said."
"But why would he—that's quite a ways."
"We have no idea and he doesn't seem to remember."
"Wouldn't he have a hard time knowing the way even?"
Rosalie's response surprised me. "Once a diviner, always a diviner, I guess. Not only that but I swear I saw mischief in his eyes. I think he was having a good time of it, if you want to know the truth."
My dear wayward father would one day finally wander right over the edge of the earth, I realized while hiking there along the beach littered with the rubble of sea scree. How horrified he would be if he knew I'd been reading some books on medical dowsing, on how to use pendulums and aurometers to identify detrimental energies and to eradicate negative thought-forms, in the hope of finding a cure. I knew better than even to bring it up. As a fellow diviner mentored by the man, I was to be abandoned by the one person I knew who truly fathomed the mysterious nature of the act. And as his only child—the only one he raised into adulthood—I knew the coming separation was going to leave a titanic emptiness in my life.
Rosalie told me that aside from his capricious, willful, unannounced march toward Mendes Road that day, he seemed to have entered a plateau phase. His aphasia, still relatively mild, was at times less depressing to him than a source of gentle laughter. When he referred to his shoe as a hard sock, or called a plate of scrambled eggs yellow gravy, he would catch himself and marvel at what a slippery slope his neuro-pathways had become. The doctors deemed this promising. He'd always been an apperceptive man and this served him in good stead. His sporadic lack of focus and tendency to misinterpret what someone had said was "often episodic rather than strictly progressive," Rosalie told me, and I couldn't help but notice her lingo had been affected by visits to the clinic.
"I know I've been pretty distracted these past weeks and haven't been as much of a help to you as usual," I confessed. "But I must say he seemed almost his old self at dinner last night. A slower Nep, for sure, but Nep."
"He has his good days and bad days. I'm hopeful he'll have only good days up here."
Hearing the concern behind her words, I looked over at Rosalie and for the first time noticed the ways she'd changed since Nep began his decline. Some people get stronger as their mate fades, as if the body knows by instinct it must compensate, keep the balance, lest it too begin to slide into the abyss of illness, while others grow weaker alongside them. My mother, for her part, looked robust, her hair recently dyed toward its original auburn to beat back the encroaching silver. She carried her compact, lithe body with a kind of stylish confidence unique, in my experience, to true believers and their counterparts, the self-assured atheists. No agnostic tentativeness infected her posture or stride. Her chinos and white blouse, her white running shoes and sensible straw hat, her handsome rose bandanna, all gave her the air of a mother and wife who was very comfortable being Rosalie Metcalf Brooks. But her jet-dark eyes were mildly sunken, the fragile skin beneath them white as vellum. Worry lines that had always given her forehead and cheeks distinction, making her look wise and serious beyond her years back when she was younger, now trenched themselves deeper into her flesh and extended their reach.
We walked a ways in silence, watching the gulls wheel and play. Far off, creeping along the line where the blue of air met the water's deeper green-blue, a huge tanker drifted northward, no larger than a millipede from my vantage. Casually, as if it were a part of my routine, I peered up past the rocky, eroded banks toward the woods' edge but saw neither a girl nor a smoking man.
After a minute Rosalie spoke again, breaking the thoughtful quiet.
"I've been meaning to give you this." She pulled from her back pocket a postcard and handed it to me, adding, "I kept it aside from the rest of the mail I brought up for you from Mendes because I wanted to wait until we had a chance to be alone."
The card, unsigned and without a return address, bore the image of a fresco in the basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. It depicted a group of women weeping over the dead and haloed saint while in the background a strange and incongruous figure in white, its back turned to the viewer, climbed a golden tree toward a heaven of green clouds. Il pianto delle Clarisse, read the printed title on the card, The Poor Clare Sisters weep over the death of St. Francis. On the reverse, in simple childish block letters clearly meant to disguise the writer's identity, the penciled note read, Leave me alone, little girl. I'm giving you fair warning.
Just as the sender intended, I was horror-struck.
"What does it mean?" Rosalie asked.
"I don't know what it means," standing still in my tracks.
"Any idea who—"
"I don't know who."
"Have you been in an argument with anybody?"
"Not a soul," I said, knowing my minor unpleasantness with Bledsoe would never trigger anything this harsh.
"You think it has anything to do with that man who spoke to the boys the other day?"
"Mom, I honestly have no idea what this is about," I answered, hearing that unfamiliar appellation strike a formal note between us with the same startled impact she must have heard. I asked myself aloud, "How are you supposed to leave somebody alone if you don't know who they are?"
"Cass. I need to ask you something, mother to daughter."
I looked at her, wishing I could buy time to catch my breath. Not that by catching it I would have been able to divine where that pretty postcard or its blunt directive came from. "Sounds serious."
"I spoke with Niles about what really happened down on Henderson's land that day."
"You must have pressured him," I said, and slipped the postcard into my jacket pocket before stooping to pick up a spindly gray spike of driftwood that was perfect for a walking stick. The death of St. Francis, patron saint of birds, that was the scene depicted on the card. Quite a prescient choice of imagery, I thought.
"A little. But he knows how concerned I am, and there were so many different versions of the story I heard—"
"I could have told you myself, if you'd asked."
"Well, I didn't want to put you through it."
Under our feet the beach rocks clacked hollowly, scraping and chattering against each other. A petty argument among stones.
"Cassandra, do you have any idea who that girl was?"
"Laura Bryant? I would have thought Niles told you all about her."
"Not her, the girl you thought you saw before."
"No. I did think at the time she seemed familiar, but I don't know why."
"Was she a composite of sorts?"
"You mean like in a dream when we combine people we know into new ones?"
"Something like that."
"No, Ros. She was her own person. I swear I didn't make her up."
That gave her pause, but only for a moment. "Did she look at all like Emily?"
A jolt of recognition vaulted through me. The hanged girl, I now realized, did look like Emily Schaefer, my brother's classmate who died the year before he did. With my walking stick I knocked down a small stack of flat stones someone had piled meticulously, from largest to smallest, there in the middle of the path. Someone? Morgan or Jonah, must have been. I didn't want to think otherwise.
"I already told you. Maybe you should have asked Niles to read the transcript of my deposition, if you were so concerned about putting me through it again."
"Don't be angry with me, Cass. It's just that I'm worried sick."
"I know what you're really worried about," I said, spontaneous as a slap.
Rosalie made no reply. How could she have responded, anyway? We were
the only two people who understood what unsaid words lay behind what we had just broached. We two and, I now began to fear, perhaps the man who wrote this obscene and absurd postcard, although his presence in my life made less sense to me than the hanged girl, the found girl, less sense than anything. Surely Roy Skoler could have nothing to do with this. I hadn't laid eyes on him for almost thirty years and had heard nothing about his doings.
"You're not right about that," she countered, unconvincingly. She removed her hat, gathered her hair back behind her ears, and replaced it. A familiar tic. "After hearing what happened and watching you these past couple of weeks I wonder if you aren't headed into a really bad patch again."
"Who's to say I'm not already there?"
Covey was meant to have been our haven, but here was the confrontation we had been sidestepping for years. If we were ever to have a bond after Nep—our mediator, our family's glue—left us, we needed to brave these troubled waters. Ignoring the issue of Christopher seemed to be what both of us wanted, had always wanted, but I had to wonder if this recent confluence of events was going to make forestalling impossible. What would I have given to lie down on a tuft of beach grass here in the sun and take a nap that would last all summer.
"You really think that?"
"No, I don't know. Besides, I'm not a kid like I was then. I have more resources to work with."
"That's good to hear. Because unless you're keeping a whole world of secrets from me—"
I shook my head, though of course I had been.
"—you're not even close to being where you were those years after Christopher passed, up into your teens. I doubt you even have a clear recollection of what it was like when you ran away that time. You were gone three nights, four full days. We thought we might have lost our other baby, too."
"I was just hiding from the world."
"Near the same woods where they found Laura. Don't you remember how terrified your father and I were?"
"That was a long time ago. It's more a dream now than anything and I wouldn't mind leaving it that way."
"I wonder if you don't do a little too much wakeful dreaming for your own good."
That caught me off-guard. "We all do our best," I murmured.
"Look, Cass. I don't want anything except for you to know I'm concerned. And that you should feel free to talk to me about anything anytime. Come to me first. Open up if you need to. I'm here for you, you know."
"Thanks," I said, having no better idea how to respond to this. "I'll give what you're saying some thought."
"But I haven't really said yet what I'm saying."
"So what you're saying is—"
"Don't you think it would be a good idea for you to get some counseling while the boys are away at camp?"
"Niles made sure I saw his therapist person, and we pretty much got nowhere. Let me be frank with you. I have no intention of going to another psychiatrist, another therapist, another legalized drug merchant. There's nothing more they have to give me."
She remained quiet.
"I'm perfectly fine," I said, hoping that would end it. I knew Rosalie had come up here to be with me, and within the parameters of her own sense of motherdom she was doing the right thing—which reminded me of a saying of Nep's, Do right because it is right, a beautiful phrase Rosalie attributed to the Bible but really comes from Kant. I did appreciate what was unselfish in her words even as I disdained what else I knew she was subtly trying to negotiate with me.
We had stopped walking. Had made it nearly halfway around. The two houses on the other side of the island were pitched on the widest of the many sheltered coves that gave Covey its name. They were in view now, framed by tall droopy spruces. From where we stood there still seemed to be no signs of life in either. Shingled with traditional unpainted cedar and streaked dark brown from years of heavy weather, they had a crepuscular look, like two petrified dinosaurs. A humble jetty reached into the lapping water where some buoys bobbed, those of lobstermen willing to come out this far. I saw that the cormorant's skiff hadn't risen with the tide. Gulls squawked overhead, birds I always thought of as malicious, their yellow beaks stained with that red spot like blood. Seagulls were supposedly the souls of dead mariners, and today I believed it.
"You know that's not true," my mother said. "You're not fine."
"I'm clearheaded enough to know I don't need more tedious therapy sessions and designer antidepressants."
"It's good advice you're ignoring."
"Besides, I don't have time for such self-indulgence. It doesn't look like the boys are going to be away at camp after all. They said in no uncertain terms they didn't want to go."
"And you let them make that decision for themselves?"
"I'm not going to shoehorn them into going somewhere they don't want, in the name of making them have fun."
Rosalie walked along beside me for a time, dispirited. "I only wish you were more religious. Having faith, believing, would help you more than any human therapies."
Not wanting to tread into this subject, I did say, "I have faith. It's my own kind of faith. But I don't not believe. You ought to know that."
She said nothing.
Hoping to keep the peace, I finished, "Listen, I know you're worried for good reason. When we go back down I'll look into it. No promises, hear, except to give it serious thought and maybe have a conversation with somebody."
"Fair enough." She brightened a little. Of course she saw through my attempt to mollify her but knew when enough was enough.
We were about to pass by Mrs. Milgate's house, the smallest on the island.
"She's away, seems," said Rosalie, noting the closed curtains. "That's unusual for Angela. Bless her, I hope she's all right. She's the last person on the island who knew your uncle Henry from the old days."
I wanted to tell my mother about that burned-syrupy smell of baked beans but thought the better of it, not wanting to wander back into the quicksand of her concerns, saying instead, "Should we go knock?"
"You know how much she covets her privacy. I don't think dropping in unannounced would sit too well with her," answered Rosalie as we hiked toward the farther cottage, whose sunned linen curtains were also drawn. I wondered, Had they been drawn before? I couldn't remember. It occurred to me, the sometime outsider, what a dangerous choice it was to be a hermit. Your trade-off for privacy was to thwart the company of others who might help when you most needed it.
"Are you sure we shouldn't go back and check on Mrs. Milgate?"
"When Angela wants us to come by, she always gets in touch, lets us know through Mr. McEachern," which put an end to it.
Before our exchange about my suspect mental health, I was tempted to broach with Rosalie my curious encounter with the little girl and her grinning dog. Now I knew I had to keep that to myself as well, if for no other reason than not wanting to be accused of further delusion. I consoled myself with a new theory that the girl might have been part of a boating party that put to shore. Perhaps she had meandered away, went scouting while her parents slept off their lunch on the beach back by one of the hive of small inlets where they'd moored. Smoked a cigarette or two. Yes, that was it. This made such sense I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it before. No phantom, she was just a girl given to taciturnity, shy, like I had been when I was her age.
When we rounded a cliffed corner that would take us along the western edge of Covey and back toward home, we saw a colorful flotilla of sailboats, some with orange sails, others red, turquoise, bright lime-green. Must have been a race. They were all going in the same direction, half a mile out. A lustrous mirage flying across the wide water. They were every bit as bright and blurry as the girl had been, I assured myself.
Rosalie said, "I have one more thing I want to talk about before we get back."
"That sounds serious, too," smiling in a vain attempt to lighten things a little.
"I'm afraid it is. Niles's wife came by to visit me the other day."
I didn't like th
e way this was headed any more than the previous business. I waited for Rosalie to continue.
"She's worried about you and Niles."
"Poor woman," I said, wondering for just a passing instant whether she would have been capable of writing the warning on the postcard. Unlike Niles and myself, but very much like my mother, Melanie was a regular churchgoer, a devout believer. The card did have religious imagery on it. But then I pictured Melanie Hubert, whose faults were no more serious than being overly sweet, a little too convinced of her own goodness. Still, in her darkest hour, she wouldn't have been capable of sending such an ugly threat, would she? "You know Lucretius's saying Fear begets gods—"
"I know it because you've told me a hundred times. You also know I couldn't disagree with him more strongly."
"Melanie's a case of fear begetting devils. I'd set her straight if she wanted to ask."
"You'd already left for Maine when she came over."
"All the more reason for her to stay calm. Niles will always be one of my best friends, and neither she nor anybody else is going to change that. But Melanie has no need to be worrying about me and Niles."
We walked most of the rest of the way home in silence. No doubt I was deluding myself to think Rosalie was satisfied. But despite the conversation's downward turns, I hoped the air was cleared between us, at least on a few thorny subjects, so we could now continue our time together without outside distraction.
Early afternoon. The tide going out. Some sandpipers were mincing in the shallows ahead of us. We rambled past a dead horseshoe crab, which Rosalie taught me during one of our walks around Covey years ago is not a crab at all. More akin to a spider, she'd said. An arthropod, not a crustacean. And while the Lord's given them three hundred and fifty million years to learn better, they still swim upside down, clumsy as sots, truffling for sea worms and bottom grubs. For all their primeval armor and a sharp tail like a fencer's foil, horseshoes were about as threatening as a clump of seaweed. Nep hadn't been the only one to try to teach me about the teeming world. I needed to remember that.
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