by Maria Flook
She didn’t let the incident upset her and she prepared the cottage for Willis and Rennie. She studied the shelves along one wall of the kitchen—the reassuring cabbage roses on the shelf paper, roses the size of soup plates. She ran her hand over the roses, then went about making up a bed for Rennie.
She heard a car turn in the drive. She saw a strange girl was driving. Willis was in the backseat. The girl helped Willis lift Rennie out of the car; Rennie looked like a scarecrow. Her head fell back on the crook of Willis’s arm, her white hair looked wet and ropy. Holly met them at the door of the cottage.
“Welcome to Verbena,” she said, her pride was showing. She loved these shacks and couldn’t hide it. She looked back and forth between Rennie and the interesting stranger, but Rennie caught her attention. Rennie looked half alive in Willis’s arms. Her other half looked irretrievably gone. Willis didn’t look much better.
“This is Debbie,” Willis said.
“Oh, sure. Debbie.” Holly recognized the name and nodded at the young girl. Debbie was the love interest who had come and gone before her.
Willis arranged Rennie’s weight in his arms. He was looking for a place to put her down. Holly shook off her jealous twinge and led Willis into the little bedroom where she had made the bed and left the blanket turned down. The sheets were icy.
“Wait,” Holly said. “Someone should warm up the bed.”
Willis was soaking wet.
The two women looked at each other.
“Let’s both of us do it,” Holly said.
Debbie looked startled at the strange request. “Well, I guess it’s all right.”
Debbie and Holly got under the covers. They each felt shy and kept apart; then they saw that their reserve wasn’t going to warm the sheets, so they scissored their arms and legs as if they were making snow angels. Holly felt the cold sheets respond to their exercise with each swipe. They started to giggle.
Willis lost patience.
“Just a few more minutes to heat this up,” Holly said. Once and again, her ankle brushed Debbie’s and they both recoiled from the contact. They pedaled their legs under the covers and again collided.
Willis sat down in a chair, Rennie on his knee. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “We have to get a heater in here.”
Holly said, “I saw an electric heater at Nicole’s. I can go get it.”
Willis said, “I bet it’s swarming at the house. I bet they’re calling this a kidnap. You’re in it now and can’t go back there.”
Debbie said, “I’ll drive over and get the heater. No one knows me there.”
“That’s right, no one knows her,” Holly said. Five minutes ago she didn’t know this girl Debbie, either.
Debbie went to get the heater. Willis tucked Rennie into the warmed bed. “I wish I had some dry clothes for myself,” he said. “You didn’t think of that, did you? Some clothes for me?” he asked Holly.
“No. I didn’t remember,” she said. She was disappointed that she hadn’t foreseen the need.
“Here,” she said. “Give me what you have on. I can dry them near the stove while you wear that extra blanket.”
She draped his jeans over a kitchen chair near the oven door. The storm was wailing through the cottage, the wind lifted the furry bon-bon trim on the curtains.
Willis sat next to Rennie, watching her, but he didn’t know what to look for. It was the end, he knew that. Yet how long did the end go on—days or hours? He thought of the figure of speech “the beginning of the end,” which implied that there might also be a middle, and then an end, to the end. Exactly where was Rennie on that map?
He tried to talk to Rennie and get her to answer but she couldn’t say anything except the furry vowel sounds which started to sound familiar to Willis. He tapped her shoulder just to get her to say them, the sound of her slurred speech was in itself reassuring to him.
Debbie never came back with the heater. After an hour, Holly gave Willis his clothes, which were warmed through if not completely dry. They decided to go to sleep on either side of Rennie. They hoped it would happen in a dream while they flanked her. They were in bed for only a moment before they felt the wet sheets and recognized the slight ammonia scent.
“Jesus,” Willis said.
“She’ll be cold lying like that,” Holly said.
Willis stood up and took Rennie from the bed so Holly could change the sheets. She had her key to the linen chest in the office and she brought an armful of bedding back to the shack. She put a towel under Rennie’s buttocks and sawed it gently between her legs like a diaper. She tucked her into the new linens; her limbs were so stiff it was like arranging arrows in a quiver. Holly remembered what she was told when her father was dying: death comes soon after the first signs of incontinence. It was an upsetting idea, that everyone’s last days would bring back these childlike humiliations.
Sometime during the night, the electricity failed and they were left in the dark. Holly didn’t get the lanterns from the office since it would be dawn in an hour. They got a little bit of sleep back and forth. Willis was coughing, which woke everyone up. Then, the storm itself deprived them of rest. It rattled and roared over the shack like a string of cars on a roller-coaster circuit.
In the morning, Holly made coffee on the gas range. Despite the circumstances, she enjoyed testing her occupancy in the cottage. She had never “lived” in one. She reached for kitchen utensils; the little copper measuring spoon for the coffee was in the divided drawer where she had placed it at the end of last season. Everything was arranged where she had left it when she closed up in the fall. For the last several days, Holly had had little control over events and she relished the organized bins of silverware, the stout towers of dinner plates, the nesting cereal bowls.
She scoured the three-piece drip coffeepot and the brewing coffee smelled rich and winy on the cold air. The storm had passed through, leaving the air cleansed and ionized. The cottage was remarkably bright from its two available windows. The remaining windows revealed only the stained particleboard shutters. She gave Willis a cup of coffee and a mug of weak tea for Rennie.
“Why can’t she have coffee? How is coffee going to kill her?” Willis said. “At this point.” His angry sarcasm betrayed his nervous mood. He no longer had his morning drugs to go with his coffee. “You have to go over to the CVS,” he told her, “for Rennie’s script.”
“I thought it was Douglas Drugs.”
“Doug Drug or CVS. She’s got two sheets.”
“I can’t go anywhere right now,” Holly said, waiting to see what he would say.
Willis fed Rennie the weak tea with a tablespoon. She was groaning and shifting under the covers. She lifted herself on her elbow to ask Willis, “Where’s my autograph book?”
“Hold on. I’ll get it,” he told her. He found the book on the floor.
Holly didn’t want to hear any more from it and she walked up to the office. She called Nancy Brookens, a nurse at the Aquidneck Island Hospice. Nancy Brookens had helped supervise Holly’s father’s last weeks. Nancy agreed to come over to check on Rennie sometime later that night. Holly didn’t explain to the nurse that everything was to be kept a secret, but hospice volunteers are discreet to begin with. Of course she would have to explain to Willis why she had invited a stranger.
When Holly came back to the shack, Willis was pacing around the kitchen in moderate distress. He slammed the kitchen cupboards open and shut as if he was disgusted he didn’t find morphine in the sugar bowl with the yellow Domino packets.
“Someone’s coming over here to see Rennie. She’s a nurse from the hospice service.”
“We don’t need a nurse.”
Willis stopped in his tracks as if he recognized his own row of symptoms lining up before him.
“Are you all right?” Holly said.
“You have two eyes,” he said. “Scroll.”
She touched his face with the back of her knuckles. One side of his face felt flushed, the other che
ek was clammy. He threw her hand off.
Willis instructed her, “Go to the telephone. Get Nicole to bring the heater over here and tell her to see if she can get over to Douglas Drugs.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth furiously, as if he couldn’t get rid of cat fur. “Shit. Just tell her about it, Holly.”
“Maybe this is a good time to get clean, did you ever think of that?”
He ignored her words and walked back into the other room and sat beside Rennie.
“The Glamor Girl is still missing,” he told Rennie in a loud voice. “You hear me? Calming seas now,” Willis said, “so it looks unpromising. She was lost in the gale, I guess. Rennie, are you hearing me?” His voice was too big for the little shack. Holly watched him yelling to Rennie. He was losing his temper, then he took a breath and started over. He was trying to spark a knee-jerk response from Rennie. Any other time, Rennie would have snapped awake like a fox terrier.
Rennie’s eyes looked ahead, blinking every few seconds, but the eyelid didn’t wash away her dull expression. She was breathing very fast, in short little sips that hardly lifted her breast. Rennie wasn’t asleep or awake. She seemed to be in a pre-death holding area where her mind was free of all external stimuli; even the voice of her beloved stepson was banished from that tarmac.
Holly came over and lifted her wrist, but she didn’t really know how to read Rennie’s pulse. She felt a tiny puttering, but it could have been her own pulse she was feeling in her fingertips.
“This is awful to watch.” Willis rubbed the back of his hand over his nostrils, sniffing.
“Maybe she doesn’t feel anything,” Holly said.
A car drove into Neptune’s circle. It was Nicole and the kids. Nicole walked into the shack with a small electric heater. “Someone named Debbie came over last night. She said you need this heater—”
Willis pulled Nicole inside the door. “Look, can you get over to Douglas Drug for a script?” Willis asked. He recited the prescription number.
Holly took Willis’s hand off Nicole’s wrist. She took the heater from Nicole and plugged it into the wall, but the electricity was still out. “Do you have power back at the duplex?” Holly asked Nicole.
“Yeah, we’ve got it.”
“You do? I better check the circuit breaker.”
Willis again turned to Nicole. He repeated the prescription number.
“Write it down,” Nicole told him.
Willis tugged the kitchen drawers looking for a pencil.
Lindy and his little sister walked up to Willis and asked about the puppy. He looked down at the children. He was sorry he hadn’t thought about them. Yet he didn’t regret his gift to Sheila.
Willis asked Nicole, “Another thing. Can you call the hospital and find out about Fritz?”
Nicole nodded. For Fritz, she displayed a murky apathy. “What about the dog?” Nicole said. “These kids are pitiful.”
Willis gave Nicole a piece of paper with the information she needed for the drugstore. “When can you get over there?” he asked her. He was ashamed of his helplessness and changed the subject. “I guess Easton Way is quiet?”
“Last night there was a whole posse. Two different black-and-whites idling for an hour. The air pollution. Your brother was there this morning for a while. Do they know you’re here?”
Willis said, “They’re not looking for us. Munro knows where we’re at. He knows his mother’s dying and he’s letting me do the dirty work without him. Then he’ll charge into it.” He took her elbow. “Nicole, get us some refills—”
Holly told Nicole, “Forget about getting the dope. This is an opportunity for Willis. Since he’s stuck here anyway—”
“Here at the detox ranch?” Willis said.
“Why not?” she said. “You could try it.”
“It’s a little more than an ice cream habit, Holly, or maybe you haven’t noticed.”
“Oh, I’ve noticed,” she told him. Her tone implied a lot—she had suffered, she had gone without.
He looked back at her. His eyes were wide and black, like rabbit holes.
It was the first time she had seen him so frightened.
Both Nicole and Holly studied him.
“What are you two staring at? Let’s invite all the neighbors,” Willis said.
Holly told Nicole to get the prescription.
He waited for Nicole to return. His face showed a gloss of sweat, which he wiped away but it came right back.
“What’s happening now?” Holly said, seeing a shift.
“Fuck, I don’t know. Feels awful, feels like the flu.”
He started bouncing a ball, an old pinkie he found on the bookshelf. The rubber was so dry and decomposed that every time the ball hit the floor it sent a cloud of pink dust into the air. He bounced the ball until Holly grabbed it. He sat down again near Rennie, shivering from evaporating sweat.
Nicole came up the drive and Willis went out to her car. She handed him a narrow white bag with a pharmacy sticker on the outside. “We can sign for this one more time and that’s it,” she told him. “What are you going to do then?”
He went inside the cottage and into the bathroom. His nerves had shattered the minute Nicole arrived and he no longer had to wait. He unwrapped the suppositories and started whistling Roland Kirk’s “Serenade to a Cuckoo,” something tongue-in-cheek, ridiculously lively. Yet it didn’t sound right. It had a bitter, off-key error somewhere in its refrain. Holly couldn’t tell if Willis was doing it wrong on purpose.
She went up to the bathroom door, but she respected his privacy and didn’t turn the knob. “Christ, Willis, will you stop it. Stop whistling that song,” she whispered through the hinges.
Chapter Twenty-six
Rennie was listening to Willis talk about the Glamor Girl but she couldn’t rally enough strength to surface from the half-sleep which she was starting to prefer over her fits and starts of alertness.
She thought she saw it again: Bill Hopkins’ whiskery frontage after five days out on the Bank.
Perhaps it was just subliminal suggestion with Willis going on and on about that other dragger, but Bill Hopkins was pestering Rennie like an impatient suitor waiting for her to pack a picnic basket and come ahead with him. Rennie felt the sweet, separate world she was entering, bordered from the ordinary human world by a clear, gelatinous membrane. She took little notice of current events taking place outside her envelope. She was cocooned in a dissolving egg, in the soothing albumin syrup of recollected love.
Once Rennie rose up on her elbow entirely alert. She told Willis, “There isn’t too much that can scare Bill Hopkins.”
Willis leaned over Rennie to hear her breathless attempt to speak.
“He’s scared of just one thing.”
“What’s that?” Willis said.
“Cables. Oh, Bill has a terrible fear of cables. He saw a bad accident, a man lost his eye working the hydraulic winch.”
“That’s ugly.” Willis commiserated. He was excited to hear her voice after so long a silence.
“Cables always make him nervous, and there he is working the tows, every time out. Cables. It’s an unnatural fear. No, that’s unfair—any fear is natural, I guess.” She flopped back and shut her papery eyelids. Willis was stunned by the spontaneous oratory.
Holly’s mouth was wide open, she felt her tongue drying. She told Willis, “Nancy Brookens says they start seeing their dead; their loved ones start coming closer.”
“Jesus Christ,” Willis said.
“No, really, they start reaching out from both directions.”
Willis was alarmed by the idea of it. Bill Hopkins hovering somewhere in the shack. Willis had often imagined Bill Hopkins’ plight out on the ocean. How long did he last before he drowned or the cold got him? Did Bill Hopkins have any premonition of his fate when he worked the Hathaway winch and emptied tons of shellfish on deck, then set the rakes back out? With each tow, the rakes pulled in glistening slag heaps of variegated shell, until the mountain
rose high as the rails.
When the Teresa Eve turned back for another tow, her crew knew it was greedy fishing. When at last she was steaming in, her diesel at full throat, just past Pollock’s Rip, the sea was too rough to shuck and bag the catch. Those days they would head into the harbor and do their shucking in lee before off-loading it. That night when they started home, the combers were tight, one after another. The crew stood outside the wheelhouse tipping back D.W. Dante, the onboard brand for the last many years. Everyone had two or three hits from the bottle, enough to warm up. There wasn’t room to spread out after dredging almost seven hundred bushels of scallops. The weather was peculiar—black and airless on top, but the sea was running eight to ten feet, with oddball crests. They were out there in weird waters, in the lunatic fringe. The weight of their haul pulled the water up over the freeboard and she rode the chop like a gravy ladle; the sea dipped juices into the bowl. Freakers curled over the rails. Giant combers hit the quarter and shifted the tons of scallops. The next wave crested and rolled in behind her; its black wall plowed over the stern like a garage door slamming, crushing them under. The men were pitched abreast of her as she sank; the whole treasure spilled back. Thousands of notched mollusks twirled loose like Liberty dollars.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The whole day passed. Holly kept looking for any traffic, but Neptune’s was a ghost town. No one showed up. Rennie’s condition seemed worse.
Willis told Holly, “It’s good to talk to her even if she can’t hear me.”
“Read that book to her,” Holly said.
Willis started thumbing through Rennie’s tiny suede autograph book. He read some stanzas out loud to Holly, fragments of poems and other oddities.
“The cut worm forgives the plow.” They looked at one another and shrugged.
“All wholesome food is caught without a net or trap.” Willis said, “I wonder what Bill Hopkins would say about that.”