Islands Read online

  “Well, will you mind being alone out there? I’ve always loved it.”

  “Actually, no,” she said. “It’ll be good for me. I can be as sour and awful as I want to. Maybe I’ll run naked on the beach. Maybe I’ll pee on the fire. Maybe I’ll eat worms.”

  I laughed a little, because she sounded so like the old, non-murdering Fairlie, and because I could see her doing it all.

  “Pee away,” I said. “See you when I get back.”

  I called Camilla. Her voice was hoarse and nearly inaudible.

  “Have you got the flu?” I asked. “Fairlie said you did.”

  “Not really. Just laryngitis. I just didn’t much want to go out to the island with her.”

  “Do you hate the thought of her being there? I do.”

  “Of course not,” Camilla said. “It’s as much her house as it is mine. I just don’t feel like going.”

  “Well,” I said, “take care of yourself. I’ll be back in a couple of days. I’ll come up.”

  “Do,” she said. “I miss you when you go away.”

  The meeting in New Orleans was interminable and largely unproductive, and to add insult to injury, my connecting flight out of Atlanta to Charleston was four hours late. It was nearly three in the morning when I pulled into our courtyard on Bull Street. The downstairs windows were lighted. I frowned. I had thought Lewis would be out at Edisto.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of untouched coffee in front of him. He was in his scrubs, and he looked ghastly, white-faced and hollow-cheeked. His eyes and nose were red, as if he had been crying.

  “Oh, God, Lewis, what is it?” I cried softly, running to kneel beside him.

  He took both my hands in his, and squeezed them so hard that I flinched. I knew he did not notice.

  “Anny…,” he said, then his voice died. He cleared his throat. I waited, almost totally shut down inside.

  “Anny. The beach house burned. It burned tonight. There isn’t anything left.”

  “Fairlie,” I said, my ears ringing.

  His voice seemed to come from a great, windy distance.

  “Fairlie didn’t get out,” Lewis said, and began to cry.

  Part Three

  8

  THE NEW HOUSE—or houses, rather—sat on a small hummock of palmettos and live oaks, looking out over sparse, winter-grayed marshes into a wide, wind-whipped stretch of steely water. Around them, as far as you could see, there was nothing but marsh, hummock, forest, water, sky. Wildness. It was beautiful, even in winter, and I knew that when the marsh greened with spring and the waterfowl and the creek’s small, scuttling citizens came back, it would be spectacular. It was early February, and a low purple-and-orange sunset burned over the water and the marsh and woods beyond. The whole vista was steeped in a vast silence and stillness so profound that you instinctively whispered. Though it was creek and marshland much like that on which Sweetgrass had been built, it did not feel the same. I did not whisper at Sweetgrass. When I got out of the car with Lewis and stood looking at the three houses, I ached, suddenly and almost mortally, for the sound of the sea.

  We had turned off the Maybank Highway and crossed over to John’s Island from Wadmalaw Island. It seemed a long drive. I was used to the semirural landscape going to Edisto, and the banal jumble of small subdivisions, convenience stores, fast-food places, and occasional used-car lot along the highway was depressing.

  Though Lewis had not told me, I knew that we were going to see a place that the others had thought might be a possible replacement for the beach house. Oh, of course not that, but a place on the water that could shelter the Scrubs. We had not spoken of it, but I knew that I for one would never again go to Sullivan’s Island, never again spend time with the sight and the sound of that warm, personal sea. But that did not stop me from mourning them almost as deeply as I mourned Fairlie, and I did not think that I could like the new place. I did not say so, but I knew that Lewis could read my silences as well as my words. He didn’t speak much, either, during the drive. When at last he said, “Here we are,” his voice sounded rusty from disuse.

  The road was graveled and pocked with winter rainwater, and though small, stark one-story brick buildings stood on either side of the turnoff, the road itself was wild and steepled with moss and branches. There seemed to be nothing on either side but the old, encroaching forest. A few of the trees wore faded orange ribbons around their trunks, but they did not intrude on the thick, chilly isolation. When we came out into a clearing and saw the houses and the marsh and the water beyond, something prickled in my mind. It seemed that something else entirely should be standing at the end of the long, stout dock that stretched forever out over the marsh before it reached the water. I could almost see it, a sort of pentimento beneath the landscaped hummock and the three graceful little tabby houses set in a semicircle on a circular shell driveway.

  I looked at Lewis, my brow furrowed, and he grinned and said, “Booter’s. Remember?”

  And I did, suddenly: the tin-roofed pavilion where we had eaten oysters and drunk beer and danced like wild things under a white moon so long ago, the first time I had ever been out with Lewis. Now there was no flimsy lattice of sagging docks and grubby, wallowing boats, but instead the grand, silvered walkway and dock with a fretwork Victorian pavilion at the end, and three slips for boats, empty now.

  I looked back up at the houses, flushed pink with the last of the sun. Thick plantings of oleanders and crepe myrtle framed them, and the great live oaks behind them made a silvery backdrop with their moss. In the spring, I knew that resurrection ferns would explode from their trunks. The houses had long, low verandas and porch swings, and I could see, just behind them, a great screened enclosure that meant a pool. A small, low tabby building beyond that proved to be a guest house. Lights glowed sweetly in the mullioned windows of the middle house.

  “Oh, Booter,” I said around a lump in my throat. “What happened to Booter?”

  Lewis came around and opened my door, but I did not get out. I wanted to slam the car doors and wrench the car around and squeal out of this beautiful place that lay over the bones of Booter’s Bait and Oysters. A small bit of the sinew and bone of my youth was interred with Booter’s.

  There’s less and less of us left now, I thought. Not of the people we were. It’s being blown away, or burned or buried.

  “Booter is in the VA hospital with Alzheimer’s and emphysema,” Lewis said. “He’s been there a long time. Henry and Simms and I go by and see him sometimes, but he doesn’t know us. I don’t think he can last much longer. He sold the place and the chunk of land around it—it must be a hundred or so acres—about fifteen years ago, to some super-rich guy from New Jersey who wanted a private hunting-and-fishing place for his buddies and a getaway for his family. He got as far as these houses and the dock before he got hauled off to the slammer for insider trading.”

  “Who owns it now?”

  “As a matter of fact, Simms does,” Lewis said. “He bought it as investment property right after the guy got sent up. I think he thought he might develop it one day. But so far he hasn’t. He’s kept the houses and dock in good shape, but beyond that, nothing’s been touched. We thought it might…you know…” His voice was so freighted with hope that I smiled and squeezed his hand.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” I said. “Not at all what you’d think a New Jersey convicted felon would build. Let’s go take a look. Somebody’s here already. But I’ll bet you knew that.”

  He grinned and nodded, and we scrunched across the oyster-shell driveway and up to the middle house on Booter’s marsh.

  The weekend after Fairlie’s memorial service all of us except Henry met at Camilla’s loft and sat looking out over the cold, tossing harbor toward the island that no longer held anything for us, and talked about what to do next. From time to time, one or more of us broke off to mop at tears, and Lewis and Simms sat patting the old dogs, and looking steadfastly at the open ocean, not the island. Henry was
not with us. I did not know when he would be, again.

  Nobody had really wanted this meeting or this conversation, but Camilla had insisted.

  “If we don’t have a plan, we won’t do anything, and the Scrubs will just drift apart and none of us will even have each other. I know it’s too soon. I know nobody wants to talk about another place. But we need for things to go on, one way or another, and I think we need each other and the water, and I think we need to do it sooner rather than later. It will never be the same, but it might come to be something real to us. A different place for changed people, maybe, but still ours. I need the us of us. Please think about it for my sake, if nothing else.”

  And my heart pinched me, because Camilla literally never implored. And of us all, she had lost the most. Charlie, and her friend, and her house. I still thought of it as Camilla’s house. I think we all did, except maybe Camilla.

  “I think we should do it,” I said, clearing my throat. “I don’t think we should drift too long. What if we’re not us except when we’re together?”

  We looked at each other and then at Camilla. She was smiling faintly, but there was a pleading, almost painful to see, in her brown eyes. I wondered if I was the only one to have noticed that Camilla looked as though she had been starved and beaten. She seemed to have aged years in a scant week. Her candle glow was gone. I think we would have agreed to anything to ignite it again.

  Within five minutes it was agreed that we would begin to look for a place on the water where we could weekend and summer, not too far from Charleston, but well away from the road and bridges that crossed the Cooper River, toward Sullivan’s Island. In truth, I don’t think that most of us cared much at that point where this place might be, or even what it would be like. But even if we did not want it, we needed it. That seemed enough for now.

  “I might know a place,” Simms said. “It could work very well. Let me take a look and let y’all know.”

  “Oh,” Lila said. “If it’s where I think it is, you’ll love it.”

  “I doubt that,” I said to Lewis on the way back to Edisto. “But I’d hate to see us just drift apart. And Camilla really needs us to be together.”

  “We’ll at least take a look,” Lewis said. “You know it can’t be Sullivan’s, Anny, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be good.”

  And, standing in the cold, fast-falling twilight on Booter’s hummock, I looked at the shining lighted windows and smelled the sweet smoke of driftwood and cedar and heard the little slap of the river against the dock pilings, so like what I heard at Sweetgrass, and thought that perhaps, just perhaps, this might be good. Or at least, not bad.

  Camilla threw the door open to Lewis’s knock and we walked into a large, beamed room finished in washed cypress, with exposed cypress beams and a great river-stone fireplace, and a wall of bookshelves on either side of it. There was little furniture, but a fat denim sofa sat before the fire, and two flowered chintz easy chairs that I recognized from Camilla’s Tradd Street house, and the flokati rug that Lila had given Camilla after Hugo lay before the fire on the wide, sage-painted boards of the floor. The windows were small and deep set and mullioned, but there were a great many of them on the wall facing the marsh and the river, and the last embers of the sunset flamed in the panes. The light here would be glorious, except perhaps in late afternoon, when it would swallow the room. But then you could draw the drapes. They were heavy and lined, made of rough linen in a green just a breath deeper than the floors.

  Well done, I thought, swiveling my head around the room while Camilla stood smiling and with her hands folded in front of her, waiting. Whatever else it is, it’s a nicely done house. Not a cottage. A house. I can’t imagine sand on these floors, or oars and crab nets stacked in the corner, or old beach clogs from fifteen years back under the kitchen table. But maybe this is what and where we’re meant to be now.

  Camilla went out of the room to fetch drinks, and I said to Lewis, “It’s nice, isn’t it? But it looks like a house for grown-ups. The beach house was always for kids, even if it was for old kids.”

  “They didn’t call it Never-Never-Land for nothing,” Lewis said. “Would it be so bad, growing up?”

  “Not if I don’t have to dress for dinner and put on shoes.”

  “You don’t have to dress at all,” he said. “There are two other houses exactly like this, plus a guest house. We’d have one of them. You could go naked as a jaybird all day for all anybody would know. Good plan, as a matter of fact.”

  Camilla handed around drinks and said, “Do you think you could cut it here, Anny? There are other places we can look, of course, maybe something big enough for all of us together, like the old house. But you know, we always said we’d do this. Live like this. Maybe we should try it on for size for a year or so.”

  “It seems…oh, I don’t know. Sort of big,” I said. “Do you think we’d rattle around?”

  “There has to be a place for Henry,” Camilla said.

  “Do you think he’ll come back?”

  “He’ll come.”

  For we had lost Henry, and it felt to me like a fatal wound.

  I had hardly seen him since before the fire, although I knew that Lewis and Simms had seen him on the day after that terrible night. But after that he seemed to vanish; he did not answer the Bedon’s Alley telephone or the one at his office, nor could we raise him at Nancy’s house. She did not seem to know where he was, and her voice was so bleared with grief that I did not have the heart to pursue it with her.

  “We’ll surely see him at the memorial service,” Lila said, still white with shock. And Camilla, bowed by more than the osteoporosis, agreed.

  “Let’s let him be for a while,” she said. “He always did go off by himself when something was wrong.”

  I could imagine nothing wronger than what Henry was facing, and agreed not to try to hover over him with offers of help and comfort. Obviously, there was neither for him, and would not be, for a very long time.

  Henry was having Fairlie’s remains—and none of us could bear even to speculate about what that term meant—sent to the farm in Kentucky after the service, and he would follow, and see her buried in her own earth.

  “I don’t know any more than that,” Lewis said dully two days after the fire. He had not spoken directly with Henry since then, either, but had found a note from him under the windshield of the Range Rover in the courtyard on Bull Street. We were staying there until after the memorial service, which would be held, heartbreakingly, at Henry and Fairlie’s house on Bedon’s Alley. I could no more imagine it empty of Fairlie’s darting, hummingbird presence than I could imagine Henry staying on in it alone. Like the others of us, my mind could cast itself no farther forward than the memorial service.

  The night before the service Henry appeared at our Bull Street door with Gladys on her leash, at his heel. Both man and dog looked as if they had been boiled down to sheer bone and sinew. Henry was gray all over—face, hair, lips. Beside him, Gladys whimpered and shivered. She did not know where she was, but she surely knew that nothing good was going to come of this outing.

  No, he would not come in, Henry said almost formally, or rather, oddly shyly. He did not look at us directly.

  “I have an awful lot to see to, and I badly need for you all to do something for me,” he said.

  “Anything,” Lewis and I said together.

  “I want you to take Gladys, if you possibly can. I can’t…look after her anymore. I’ve got her bed and blanket and food and medicine out in the car, and if you agree, I’ll get Tommy and Gregory to take the golf cart out to Sweetgrass in the morning in Tommy’s truck. I’d appreciate it more than I can say if you’d stay close to her, and take her around in the cart every so often. She’ll love Sweetgrass, and she’s used to being in the cart around water. I thought if you all, you know, found another place…”

  “You know we’ll take her. I love her,” I said, starting to cry. He hugged me, briefly and hard. I could feel his he
art behind his sharp breastbone, beating in great, dragging thuds. He bent and laid his chin on the top of my head, and then lifted it and looked at Lewis and me squarely for the first time.

  “She’s an old lady,” he said. “I may not get back in time. I always thought I’d like her to live until her life gets to be a burden to her. You all know her almost as well as I do; you’ll be able to tell if that happens. I hope you’ll feel you can honor it.”

  I nodded, past words, and Lewis put his hand out and Henry gripped it hard with both his own. His knuckles were blue white.

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “It may be a while, but I will call. I need…to be away until I can…well. I hope you’ll honor that, too.”

  He bent and put his arms around Gladys and simply held her for a long time. He said something into her once-glossy ear, and then he was gone. Gladys began to whimper in earnest, and by the time I could see through my tears to kneel and take her in my arms, she was shivering hard.

  We took her into our bed that night, and she lay between us, in my arms, until the shivering finally slowed and stopped. I could feel all her bones, and her faltering heart. She could not have spent many nights in her old life without the scent of Henry and Fairlie in her nostrils.

  Just before dawn I could feel her begin the twitching that means deep doggy dreams, and I whispered to her: “I hope they’re the best dreams in the world, and I hope I can make them all come true.”

  All over Charleston people were asking, “What happened? How could such a thing happen? Why was she out there by herself? Where was he?”

  It’s odd, I thought. It’s entirely proper and natural downtown to die of illness or old age, but an accident, especially a spectacular one like this, is alarming, almost taboo. Maybe it’s so in any tight-knit community. People know each other so well that what happens to the one resonates profoundly with the rest. Donne had it right. No man is an island. Each man is a part of the main. When the bell tolls south of Broad, it tolls for us.