Islands Page 12

  The first time we had come over, to reconnoiter, the island had been deathly silent. There was not even any birdsong. Just the flat wash of the waves on an alien beach and here and there the flutter of a shredded flag.

  But a week later, when we came leading a caravan of pick-ups and SUVs laden with lumber and rolls of screen and shingles, the island had come stubbornly alive again. Everywhere, clearing and construction were going on. The air rang with the sound of hammers and power drivers and the growling of bulldozers. A good many cottage owners stood about, their bewildered dogs leashed beside them, watching the wreckage of their pasts come down and the tentative beginning of their futures rise. Some left and never came back, we learned later, but a surprising number of Sullivan’s Islanders were rebuilding.

  “Are we all insane?” Fairlie said that first day, watching Tyrell and a crew of men from Simms’s factory begin to unload supplies and clear rubble.

  “Probably,” Henry said. “But don’t you want it fixed up?”

  “Of course, it’s just that we never have anything worse than a few floods and muddy racetracks in Kentucky.”

  “It costs a good bit to live in paradise,” Camilla said, smiling at the battle-scarred old house that had been her family’s. “Daddy would have been tickled to death to see that the widow’s walk is still standing, when St. Michael’s steeple and those others took a hit. He was quite proud of being a practicing pagan.”

  The warm, still autumns of the Low Country linger long, sometimes until nearly Christmas. Simms’s crew worked steadily through October and into November, and we worked along with them on weekends. Back in downtown Charleston our houses were pretty much in order, and the plantations on Edisto and Wadmalaw were whole and functioning, if still sodden. Our offices were being healed, though slowly. I eventually got used to seeing downtown as it was in those first months; you can get used to anything, or at least fit it into the grid of your experience, so that it does not shock and pierce you anew every time you see it. Of all the sad wreckage around me, only the decimated old live oaks in White Point Gardens had the power to stab my heart and bring brine to my throat each time I saw them. Generally, I think, we knew that we were as okay as we could be at the moment, though in other parts of the city desolation was still unrelieved. All our attention went, that fall, to the beach house.

  On the last weekend before Thanksgiving, we packed food and brought wine and a bunch of late zinnias from Lila’s garden and prepared to finish the roof and the porch painting, and then to celebrate. Lewis brought champagne, and Simms brought a sack of oysters he had dug the day before from his creek bank on Wadmalaw. Henry and Fairlie had saved driftwood from their long walks on the beach that fall, and it was silvery dry and ready to go into the fireplace. Camilla had taken the bedding and quilts home and cleaned and dried them, and brought them back, sweet smelling and fluffed, and put them on all the beds in the house.

  “Just in case somebody wants to spend the night,” she said.

  “I know who that somebody will be,” Charlie said, smiling at her. She shrugged and wryly smiled back. It was fitting, I thought. Their bedroom had been hers as a girl. Let them be the first of us to fall asleep to the wash of the waves and wake to the clean, fresh smell of salt and seaweed.

  It was a nearly perfect day, one of those gilded ones you remember at odd moments for the rest of your life. I see it most often just before I fall asleep. The sun was lower now, of course, but at midday it was warm enough to discard sweaters and jackets. Indeed, Lewis was in shorts and a T-shirt, and Fairlie changed into a bathing suit from the drawer upstairs and swam, defiantly, for about five minutes. The rest of us cheered her on, but made no move to follow. The low angle of the light turned the calm sea to a sheet of glittering pewter, and she came dashing out of it like some sort of gangling goddess. I saw Henry grin, secretly, and Camilla, watching them both, smiled, too.

  We took the dogs out for the first time. It had simply been too hectic to watch over them before, and I thought that they would be nervous and agitated by the alteration of their world. I need not have worried about Boy and Girl; they were off for the water, noses to the sand, before the car door had closed behind them. Sugar followed, bounding up and down like a little rabbit, the better to see over these new dunes. Only Gladys was not happy. She had shivered and whined when we drove up to the house, and in the end Henry had had to carry her in his arms and settle her on the newly screened-in porch. She stopped crying, but she did not move from her spot under the hammock, and I sat in it and swung gently and patted her.

  “She needs to get back on her horse,” Henry said. “She can’t be afraid of the island for the rest of her life.”

  “If you’d sat out a class-four hurricane under this hammock, you’d be afraid, too,” I told him.

  Lewis and I and Simms and Lila finished painting the walkway and steps early in the afternoon, and Henry and Fairlie raked up debris and stray nails and scraps of screening and dried palm fronds, and dumped them into a huge lawn basket they had brought. Camilla and Charlie finished the last of the shingling. I remember sitting on the top step of the walkway, with the warm, tan sand and the blue sea stretching away beyond me and a sweet, light breeze on my face, watching them. Charlie was on the roof of the porch, tearing off damaged shingles and tossing them down to Camilla. He had taken off his shirt, and his big shoulders and barrel chest had pinked in the sun, and his nearly bald head gleamed red. Every time he loosed a shingle he called, “Heads up!” and Camilla, her chestnut hair loose and blowing around her face, her slender arms and hands flashing, would try and catch the shingle, or retrieve it from the sand, and toss it onto the mounting pile on the big tarp. She caught a good many of them, moving as lithely as the tomboy she had been when she was a child here. She was laughing up at Charlie, and he grinned back. It struck me that I had never seen them doing anything physical together. Even when we danced, Camilla danced with someone else. Charlie, as he protested over and over, did not dance. But in this coordinated ballet of toss and catch, you could see how good they might have been together, if they had danced.

  Later that afternoon the air grew cool and the low sun set, and Henry laid the driftwood fire and lit it. It sputtered a moment and then flared and settled to a soft, hissing roar. We all applauded. The heart of the house had come alive.

  We sat for a long time after roasted oysters and shrimp gumbo, reluctant to let the evening go. I felt as though I had slipped into a secure berth after a long, wild sea journey. I think we all did. No one spoke very much. But we smiled a lot.

  Lewis opened the champagne and poured it, and I passed it around. He lifted his glass, standing before the fireplace.

  “To the Scrubs,” he said. “One for all and all for one. And to the house.”

  We all lifted our glasses and said, “To the house,” and drank. I put my glass down and smiled over at Camilla, who was sitting on the hearth with her arms wrapped around her knees. But she did not look at me. She was watching Charlie, who sat opposite her in the old wicker rocker, with a faint line of puzzlement between her eyes. I looked, too.

  Charlie sat very still, glass in hand, staring straight ahead into the fire, a look of mild amazement on his face. And then, as slowly as a melting snowman, he leaned forward, out of his chair, and slid gently to the floor. The champagne glass crashed and tinkled, and a small lake of fizzing foam spread around it.

  Lewis and Henry were kneeling over him in a second, and I found myself gripping Camilla’s icy hands as we stood staring.

  “Help me get him to the Navigator,” Henry said sharply. “It’s the biggest. I’ll get in back with him. Lewis, you drive.”

  “Wait…,” Camilla began in a voice with no breath behind it.

  “No time,” Henry barked. “Anny, bring Camilla in the Rover. Fairlie, go with them.”

  “Where?” I said stupidly.

  “Queens. Emergency entrance. Leave the Rover out front. I’ll square it with security. Come on, Lewis, let�
�s go!”

  The Navigator squealed out of the driveway and was out of sight down Middle Street before Simms and Lila and Fairlie and I got Camilla into the Range Rover. As they pulled out, I saw Henry in the backseat, pounding Charlie’s chest with his fist. I could not see Charlie’s face. Henry’s was fierce, focused.

  On the careening drive back across the two looming bridges, I said nothing, but Simms, in the front seat, turned to Camilla in the back and spoke softly and steadily, in an even, everyday voice. I did not hear what he said. I could hear Lila murmuring to Camilla, too, but not her words. When I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw that she and Fairlie had their arms around Camilla, and Camilla was sitting very straight and still and white, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. In all the maddening time that it took before we screeched up to the emergency entrance at Queens Hospital, I never heard Camilla make a sound.

  It only occurred to me after I had braked to a stop that I had driven over the two horrifying bridges with no more thought to them than a four-way stop sign.

  When we reached the coronary intensive care unit, Henry and Lewis were sitting on a plastic-covered couch in the waiting room. They were silent, slumped, heads back against the couch. Both wore green scrubs, with masks dangling around their necks. I could see from the doorway that Henry was soaked to the waist with sweat. Their eyes were closed, and their faces were gray with fatigue.

  Henry seemed to sense us before we made a sound. He stood up. Camilla stood stock-still, staring at him, and he held his arms out to her, silently. Like a sleepwalker she walked into them, and he folded her against him, close and hard. Lewis went over and hugged them both. No one spoke.

  The original Sullivan’s Island three, I thought, and began to cry. Behind me, Fairlie and Lila did, too. Simms made no sound but a small, strangled choke.

  Late that night, as we led Camilla out of the coronary care unit and toward the Range Rover, she stopped and looked around at all of us. It was, Lewis told me later, virtually the only time they had heard her speak.

  “We finished the house, didn’t we?” she said, in a child’s wondering voice.

  “We by God did,” Henry said. She was clinging to his arm as if she was an old woman. He took her weight.

  “You’re coming home with us tonight, no questions asked,” Fairlie said. “In the morning we’ll deal with…everything. Tonight you need to rest.”

  “No,” Camilla said. “Just drop me by Tradd Street to get the car. I’m going to spend the night at the beach house.”

  “Well, then, we’re coming with you,” Lila and I said together.

  She looked around at all of us.

  “No,” she said, and her voice was low and rasping, as if she had been screaming. “It was my house first and it will always be my house, and that’s where I’m going. Do you think I could spend one night on Tradd Street without him? That was our house. The beach house is mine. And if any of you try to come with me, or come checking up on me, I’ll…call the police. I swear I will. Let me be, now. I have a lot to rearrange.”

  We stared, stunned.

  She took hold of Henry’s arm again, and he just nodded at us, and together they walked down the long white hall and into whatever would be the rest of Camilla’s life.

  Part Two

  5

  ON A SMOKE-GRAY AFTERNOON in late October 1998, we sat on the porch of the beach house, wrapped in sweaters and towels against the stiff little wind out of the east. Soon it would bring rain; you could smell it coming, and there would be a big wind, because it was born in the east where all the big changes get started. It would be the end of the lingering, muted colors of the few hardwoods, and probably the end of the long, sweet fall. Already we lit the fire earlier, and came in out of the purpling twilights ready for heat and drinks and hot food. But on this afternoon the sense of endings was powerful, and we shivered on the porch longer than we might have otherwise.

  Something was gnawing at the back of my mind, something out of memory. I could almost see it glimmering in the depths there, like a goldfish. But I could not catch it in my hands. It seemed important, but I did not know why. It wore a sheen of unrest like scales.

  I heard the wind pick up, and across the windows the spatter of sand from off the top of the dunes. We all lifted our heads.

  “Summer’s over,” Henry and Lila said together, and we all laughed. I got it then.

  “Do you all remember that time that I was down on the beach, and I thought I saw Camilla on the dunes? It was an afternoon like this, when you knew the weather was changing for good. And everybody laughed at me, and said I’d seen the Gray Man, and that a storm would be coming…”

  And then I stopped. Not three weeks later Hugo had come. And Charlie had been one of those who teased me about the Gray Man. I looked over at Camilla.

  She smiled from her rocker beside the fire. It had become her place since Charlie had been gone. Before, it was his.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s been a long time. We talked about that, Charlie and I. He thought it was funny, even after Hugo. He said he was surprised it had been you who saw the Gray Man; he would have thought Fairlie, maybe. I don’t think he thought you were given to…fancies. After Hugo I remembered it from time to time, but I never laughed at it.”

  I studied her in the firelight. I thought that of us all, the past ten years had changed her least. Of course, by now the osteoporosis had bowed her considerably, and there were streaks of silver in the thick chestnut hair. But her medieval face was unlined, and her brown eyes still glowed in their hedge of lashes. She still wore her hair tied back at the nape of her neck, and sometimes still let it blow free. She was still slender, still fine boned, still as serene as a white candle. She still walked the old dogs on the beach, albeit much more slowly, and she still laughed with Lewis and Henry about their early days on the island.

  She spent a great deal of time at the beach house now. At first we all worried about it, about her being alone and lonely for Charlie, but we came to see that in some primal way it nourished her. There was color in her face now that had not been there for a long time, and she laughed more often than I could remember her doing. I thought that she was truly beautiful now, as a few women become when they reach their early sixties.

  The rest of us had not fared so well. Henry was totally white haired, though still lanky and brown as a stork. Lewis had lost all but a tonsure of his red hair, and now his head was as freckled as the rest of him. Fairlie was still as slim and supple as a girl, and her red hair still flamed in the sun, but the skin of her face had wrinkled all over, very finely, like loved old organza. From a distance you did not notice it; Fairlie now was very nearly Fairlie then. But only nearly.

  Lila had grayed and somehow shrunk a bit—Charleston women did not let themselves get fat—but she still wore her chin-length bob anchored off her face with a band or her sunglasses, and her long, flowered skirts, and her voice was still true and piping and sweet. It was hard to think of Lila as the coolly competent real estate magnate that she had become, but she owned her own firm now, and made, literally, millions. The old houses south of Broad were being bought up by the dozens by affluent newcomers, and renovated, and Lila sold a good number of them.

  Simms was totally gray and had grown a mustache, also gray, that should have looked ridiculous on his round downtown face, but somehow did not. He had stopped, I thought, looking like the youngest one in the men’s grill at the yacht club. When had that happened?

  I had threads of white in my explosive black mop and a bottom that cried out for the panty girdle I would not wear. Thank God Lewis proclaimed it merely “cuppable.” And there was a little more chin now. Forty-five was not thirty-five.

  I felt a great flush of love for us all that afternoon. We were still the Scrubs. When I looked at us, my brain registered the changes, but my eyes still saw us all as we had been in those first summers. Our then-faces were imprinted on my retinas. The heart sees what it needs to see.


  The house truly had not changed in any essential way. Even the porch railings and the stairway to the boardwalk that we had built in the weeks after Hugo were a little shabby now, and teetery. And the then-new roof shingles had weathered to the no-color of the old. There were a couple of formidable leaks on the stair landing and in the kitchen, and there was a lot of talk about getting them fixed, but somehow no one made the call. We set out pots when it rained and enjoyed the tinkle and plink of raindrops into them. I don’t think that anyone wanted any more change.

  “We’ll have to do it sometime,” Lila said worriedly, the real estate doyenne in her coming out. “It’s going to depreciate a good bit if we don’t.”

  “For God’s sake, have you listed it?” Lewis said, and she flushed and laughed.