Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20
Page 5
He called 911 and rode with her in the ambulance. They brought in a cot for him and he stayed with her in the ICU. He'd done this twice before but this would be the last time: Caitlin was brain dead.
His mind wouldn't stop clubbing him. Each time he woke from sleep his body felt bruised.
Michael and Jennifer came by to visit. Michael sat on the edge of the cot while Jennifer stood near Caitlin and stroked her matted hair. Scott wished they would leave but he didn't have the energy to say anything.
"We got in touch with your ex-wife,” Michael said.
The surprise barely penetrated. “How did you know how to reach her?"
"We've had her number for a while."
"And you didn't tell me?"
"She didn't want you to know."
Scott rubbed his own matted hair and felt dull-witted. “Is she coming?"
"She's already here. She's with the hospital administrator."
"The hospital administrator? Why?"
"To make sure that Caitlin is kept alive. To make sure you don't abort her this time either."
Scott heard echoes from the future: injunctions, hearings, his guilt and Caitlin's half-life on the cover of magazines.
He ordered them to leave, but before they could move the door opened and Dawn came in. Jennifer took her hand and the two of them looked defiantly at Scott.
Dawn's face was radiant. If she hadn't been much of a mother during Caitlin's waking life, she'd make up for it now.
* * * *
He drove home and took a shower and made himself a meal. He considered calling Bruce and asking to borrow a gun.
But he called Cary instead.
"I'll be right over,” Cary said. He brought a black bag. “Let me teach you,” he said.
He set the bag on Scott's dining room table and drew out objects: a doll, a worm, a fishing weight. He explained what he had in mind. Later that evening, they walked down to Cary's house and performed the surgery.
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Westness Walk
Neile Graham—Rousay, Orkney—
When a mile-long walk can take you five thousand years
(from a farm to a grave, a miracle of geography, of transdimensional space)
how can you believe this is simply a beach? On a small island? In the far north, north of Scotland, north of the civilized world?
It is. Low waves shadow your steps, echo them, count you as one of the passing fray. They don't mind you one bit. So you start at the beginning, at Midhowe, where the humble rusting hangar shelters the stalled, empty graves of
Neolithic farmers.
You're on a walkway above them. What do you look down on?
All of those five thousand years, or more? Each stall marks where the bones now aren't. How can you imagine the hands that made these?
You can't. Step out into the salt wind. On the promontory now you trace
Midhowe broch. It's new: first century B.C.E., the Iron Age, is almost like home now, isn't it? Isn't it? Okay, try
Brough Farm which flourished between 1200 and 1600, surely that's easier and you've already come a few steps down the beach.
Another broch here.
You try to imagine the towers so close, how the people might have huddled there against raiders, then spilled out in safety across the fields. Still no easier. Damn. How about the Wirk?
What? Not enough left to imagine at all. So St. Mary's Church.
Surely that's easier.
The small shape buttressed to keep it from sliding down the slope to those waves, or better yet here's Skaill farm, empty since
The Clearances.
The Norseness of its name brings you to Viking times. Does that make you uneasy? The dragon prows? The funny hats?
Walk on.
Here's another stalled chambered tomb. Knowe of Roweigar, safely buried in turf. The cow by the notice board eyes you with something like disdain.
You pass now the Knowe of Swandro (a broch, again kindly buried, visible only to the knowledgeable eye), the Norse Hall
(Vikings again).
So here an uneventful walk to Moa Ness, where Picts and Vikings buried their dead. You are pleased to hear the Picts had no grave-goods, were simply laid in their graves. That seems simple and clean.
Not so the Viking grave there, revealing a woman and her newborn, she, covered with many grave-gifts, two oval brooches, a silvergilt ringed pin with gold filigree and amber inlaid. Now it strikes you.
Now you can imagine the grief of one who would lay her there, them there, picture him and the shovels of shore dirt, picture that grief. See one death
(one life)
amongst all of these. You're safe now. Pass the Noust, a simple boat house. That's nothing much. Come now to the end:
Westness House, the laird's seat. It's only a big farm, a manor; there are stories here, too, those you don't need to make up for yourself (Bonnie
Prince Charlie! India!
Pre-Raphaelites and all! The 19th C!) There, now.
You're done. You've come so far and you're not even tired.
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The Oologist's Cabinet
Michael Hartford
My great-grandfather was an egg collector, one of the last of the gentleman oologists. At the height of his activities—he was born in 1886, and started raiding birds’ nests in about 1904—he had a reputation among collectors for daring and tenacity. In the newsletters and journals amateur oologists distributed among themselves, his initials—MQR, for Maxwell Quinn Russell—appear frequently above notes on the nesting habits of cliff-dwelling falcons and puffins, and sketches of rare tawny owl eggs. Other oologists, even some associated with universities in Chicago and Cleveland, corresponded frequently with him, asking him questions about the distribution of swallow-tailed kites and red-tail hawks, and the breeding patterns of spotted cuckoos. Toward the end of his life—he died in 1966, two years before I was born—he was gathering his papers for his memoirs, tentatively titled “The Egg-Collector's Notebook."
I know all this because I inherited his cabinet when my father died. It was a mahogany chest almost as tall as me, with intricate scenes of birds in flight and willow trees sighing beside winding rivers inlaid in teak and ivory. When the doors swung open and folded back against its sides, they revealed a warren of drawers and slots and yet more doors, many with yellowing index cards affixed to them behind gold-colored plates.
Inside the drawers and slots and cupboards were yet more boxes and small chests and papers tied with brittle blue and pink ribbons. And all of this nested containment, the boxes in boxes in boxes, was in the service of MQR's collection of empty eggs. The cabinet was, in the end, a massive container of air.
My wife couldn't stand the cabinet. Its vaguely Oriental styling and dark wood clashed with the bright, spare, modern furniture she prefers, and it gave off a camphor-and-dust odor when the doors were opened. Since its arrival at our house two years ago, a week after my father's death, the cabinet had squatted in almost every room, until finally it was banished to the back bedroom with everything else that is eventually forgotten: dresses and suits that have grown small as we've grown large, paintings that once seemed so avant garde but are now hopelessly dated, entire sets of dinnerware that are the wrong colors for the foods we eat now. The room was full to the point where it was almost impossible to walk through it, and the door stayed sensibly locked, as did my great-grandfather's cabinet.
Locked, that is, until this week. Last month my wife told me to get rid of the cabinet, she didn't care how: sell it, burn it, bury it at sea, just so long as it left the house. I couldn't imagine dragging the cabinet, my great-grandfather's life work, to the curb; I felt myself to be its curator, the keeper of a man's passion, and I had to deliver it into the hands of someone who would continue in my stewardship.
So I made inquiries. The dealers in art objects and antiques whom we know would be not much interested in the cabinet; their world i
s full of Barcelona chairs and Corbusier lounges, brushed aluminum and stiff plastic. But they know people who know people who live in darker, mustier, rounder worlds, where shadows fill up corners and surprising specimens burst out of uneven drawers. I've seen shops where apothecary tables are lined with jars of powdered monkey paws and extract of nightshade, and hat blocks split open to reveal lockets woven from corpses’ hair. We pass by those places, my wife and I, drawn instead to shiny surfaces like acquisitive crows, but I know they exist, so I know there is a race of people who surround themselves with camphor and dust.
I left my card with the dealers we know, with a brief description of the cabinet scribbled on the back: “oologist's cabinet, c. 1912, Orientalist style with rare collection intact.” The dealers, thin men with wire-framed glasses and starched white collars, would look quizzically at the card, look at me and recall the International table or Mondrian sketch we had bought from them, and slip the cards into their pockets. And I would thank them, look longingly at the Bitossi bowls displayed in their windows, then go home and wait.
Then late one night, after my wife had gone to bed, the woman came to my door. It was raining out, had been raining for days, and her black coat faded into the darkness so that her pale face seemed to be floating in the dim porch light. She held up my card, on which the description of the chest was smudged as if she had worried it with her thumb, and looked up at me with a longing I have never seen before in a woman's eyes.
I hurried her onto the porch and took her coat; she stood wordlessly, her lank black hair dripping onto her shoulders, until I put my hand gently in the small of her back and steered her inside. Even when we got to the locked door where I fumbled for the key yet she had not spoken; she looked straight ahead with those desperate eyes.
When I finally got the door open, I apologized for the disorder. But she was already halfway across the room before I had the light on, moving quickly and surely and never once stumbling against the boxes and crates, almost as if she were floating above the disarray. I followed as quickly as I could, banging my shins against the corners and making a meandering path through the clutter. When I joined her before the cabinet, she was tracing the delicate inlaid patterns with her bony fingers. She straightened herself, smoothed her simple black skirt, and looked at me again with parted lips and those beseeching eyes.
I fumbled on my chain again for the cabinet's key, finally found it, and pulled open the doors. She stood in front of the warren of drawers and cupboards for several long moments, then knelt before the cabinet and pressed her palms against it. I thought I heard a low sigh, almost a moan, slide out of her mouth. I stepped back to give her space, almost tripping on a box full of old shoes.
She wasn't pretty, barely handsome, with straight black hair to her shoulders and skin so pale it seemed blue. Her eyes were a little too big for her head, set far apart, and almost solid black; I couldn't see the line between pupil and iris. She had thin, delicate hands with very long fingers, and elbows so sharp I thought they would cut open the sleeves of her white Oxford shirt. Her figure was like a child's stick picture, with only the slightest curve at breast and hip. I couldn't tell her age; she might have been anywhere between twenty and fifty. She gave off a smell something like gardenias floating in rainwater, sweet and loamy, with an undertone of decay.
The woman ran her hand along the yellowed index cards on the lower drawers, then pulled one open: a wide, flat drawer containing the eggs of the common woodland mallard. She brushed her fingertips on the mottled brown shells resting on their bed of red felt, then gently lifted one out. When she held it up between her thumb and forefinger, the dim line shone through it. Oologists drilled tiny holes in the sides of their purloined eggs to drain out the yolks and let the delicate shells dry; sometimes they pressed their lips to the wound to suck the moisture away.
She pressed her own lips to the empty egg, and then rolled it along her pale cheek, closing her eyes. I held my breath, fearful that she would press too hard in her urgency and crack the fragile shell, but she rolled it so gently it was as if her hand never touched the surface of the egg. The she laid it back with its empty siblings and looked up at me with those black, imploring eyes. I knelt beside her, close enough to feel her warmth, and watched her slide the drawer shut.
When she pushed her mouth against mine, so hard I could feel her teeth behind her lips, I was too surprised to resist. She was dismayingly strong for something so slight, and so nimble and sure that I couldn't have stopped her hands from pulling my belt clasp open if I had wanted to. And I didn't want to, even for a moment, even with my wife sleeping upstairs and the carton of books pressing into my back when she pushed me onto the floor. She was incredibly light, as if her bones were hollow, and her touch was as delicate as goose down and as quick as hummingbird wings, and it was over as abruptly as it had started. By the time I sat up and realized what had happened she was gone.
I slept later than usual on the steel-and-leather couch in the living room, and was visited in my dreams by wheeling flocks of sparrows. When I woke up, my wife was in the kitchen making an omelet. The acid sting of fresh onions made my eyes water, and I pressed my nose into the clean smell of her yellow hair. But she pushed me away, complaining that I stank of musty old papers, so I left to shower, the memory of my strange visitor running in rivulets down the drain.
The memory came back during the day, though, and I found concentrating at work almost impossible. Everything reminded me of her: the sharp, light letter opener; the desk drawer full of pencils and paper clips; the long, delicate neck of my desk lamp. By the time I left for home I could see her pale hands pressed against my window and her black skirt fluttering on the coat rack. She had said nothing to me, but I knew more than hoped that she would return.
That night I waited until my wife went to bed, and I sat on the porch with MQR's papers. I was reading about his 1913 journey down the Cache River in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker, when I heard the light tap against the window, almost inaudible above the raindrops. I found her waiting on the steps in her black coat with my smudged card again in her bony fingers.
I took her coat, folding it on my chair, and followed her to the back room, which I had left unlocked. We repeated the previous night's scene, with slight variations. This time she went to the drawer full of pale blue robin's eggs, and she wrapped one gently in her damp black hair before kissing it on the end and setting it back as if putting an infant to bed.
This time I was ready for her kiss, but she still overpowered me with her urgent shove. I tried to look up at her face, to hold her head in my palms, but she pinned my arms with her elbows and covered my eyes with her fingers, which were strangely webbed where they joined her hands. She let out a sigh and bit my lip before she stood. I watched her leave—I knew I wasn't supposed to follow—and I tasted the metallic tang of blood on my tongue.
The next morning I managed to avoid my wife completely by rising early—I hardly slept at all, but I didn't feel tired—and going in to work before anyone else arrived. I kept my office door locked but the windows open in spite of the rain. Had anyone looked in, they would have thought me hard at work. But I spent the day sketching eggs on the backs of envelopes: cream-colored hawks, black-striped terns, dainty white hummingbirds. I also tried to draw the woman but all I managed were her bony webbed fingers and round black eyes.
I came home early, before my wife, and went to the back room. In a cardboard box under the window I found some old clothes, and I took out a colorfully striped shirt that had been packed away years ago: orange on blue on green on red, alternating up the sleeves and down the front and back. Once it had seemed fashionable. I put the shirt on, rolling the one I was wearing into a ball, and was surprised to find it still fit, though it was tight in the shoulders.
When my wife came home, she smirked at the shirt. I tried to tell her I thought I should bring some color back into my wardrobe, but she dismissed me with a wave of her hand and walked away. After s
he fixed herself supper and disappeared into her own room, I settled onto the couch again with MQR's papers and waited, occasionally looking down to admire my shirt.
When she arrived at a little past midnight—I was dozing on the couch when she knocked—I tried to embrace her on the porch. I wanted to take her there, wordlessly and roughly, to prove that she wanted me and not my great-grandfather's cabinet. But she pushed me away and went to the back bedroom, pausing at the hallway door to look over her shoulder at me and smile. She had never smiled at me before, and the expression was strange on her pale, blank face. I hurried after her.
That night was different from the previous two. She wore a simple brown slip instead of her black skirt and white Oxford, and when I caught up to her she turned to face me and pulled the slip over her head, revealing her pale nakedness. She was slender and boyish in build, narrow-hipped and hairless, though her belly was oddly distended. She waited for me to unlock the cabinet, then knelt and opened the cupboard containing the green heron eggs. While she held one of the hollow shells to her breast, I disrobed and took her from behind, at last in command. She held the egg gently no matter how roughly I applied myself, and she offered it to me over her shoulder. I kissed the egg, and her fingers, and the soft nape of her neck. She leaned forward, let out a cry that was sharp and shrill and only barely human, then pushed me away.
I fell onto my heels and watched her place the heron egg back into its cupboard. Her eyes were solid black disks when she bent down to kiss my forehead, and before I could speak she threw open the window and climbed out into the rain, leaving her dress behind.
In the morning I prepared a breakfast feast for my wife: thick slabs of toast smeared with strawberry jam, soft-boiled eggs, spicy Italian sausages fried until the edges were crisp black. She squinted at me and took just the toast. I ate the eggs and sausage and made more toast, but I was still hungry and stopped for donuts on my way to work.