A Gift Upon the Shore (42 page)

Nor between Stephen and me.

Throughout the three hours of school, he is silent, and sometimes I find him looking at me with a questioning gaze I find hard to meet. The other children sense that strain, especially Isaac, who is bewildered at the strange silence of the surrogate brother he loves as much as his true brother. And I am tired and irritable, and it slips out, despite my efforts to control it.

After midday meal, while I'm clearing the table, I hear Stephen volunteer to help Jonathan rake out the bam and pigpens. Jonathan looks at me, startled, and he is about to ask why Stephen isn't having his lesson with me. I shake my head slightly, and Jonathan takes his cue and says to Stephen, “I'd never turn down help shoveling manure. Come on.” And he leads the way out the backdoor. Stephen follows without once looking at me.

Enid and Esther have come into the dining room in time to hear that exchange. They stare at me, ready to ask the same question Jonathan almost did. I tell them flatly, “Stephen and I aren't having a lesson today,” then retreat to my room before they can say a word.

A short while later I'm following Shadow down the path to the beach. Again, I walk south, loop back to the trail to the tree, and finally reach that haven of green solitude. There I devote the next two hours to reinforcing Shadow's training so that she'll not only come when she hears the whistle, but bark as well, and today I begin the next step. I've brought Topaz's collar from my souvenir drawer and a rope to serve as a leash, and Shadow, after some initial balkiness, accepts them. I walk her a short distance down the path, tie her to a moss-sleeved branch, then return to the bench and sound the whistle. I hear her barking long after I stop blowing. I go to her, praise her generously, then repeat the exercise again and again, each time moving her a little farther away. She is an apt pupil, and she doesn't question my sanity.

Perhaps she should.

That night I stay up again to read. Before the family retires, Esther and Bernadette express concern about my health, but are satisfied with my explanation that I'm simply not sleepy yet. No one else inquires, and Miriam watches me with that chill, knowing smile.

I don't actually see her during this night's vigil, but about midnight the basement door opens slightly, and I know she's behind it, looking out to see if I'm here. At three the door opens again. Closes again. She knows I'll be here, and she wants me to know that she's still waiting.

You'll get sleepy, Mary. Sooner or later, you'll get sleepy
.

I'm already sleepy, exhausted, and I can't read. My eyes won't stay focused. I doze off occasionally, but I never let myself lapse into sleep except when Shadow is beside me, under my hand. She'll wake to the opening of the door, and her stiffening, her growl, will wake me.

I go to bed again at dawn and don't rise for breakfast. Bernadette comes in before breakfast to see me, frowns irritably when I tell her I didn't sleep well again last night, and declares that she will prepare one of her potions for me tonight. Then she informs me that she has fed the cats and dogs and asks if I want to be called later. I tell her to call me in two hours, in time for school. When she leaves, I wonder how much Bernadette has grasped of this game Miriam and I are playing. The medicine she offered to prepare for me tonight is not a soporific. I asked her specifically, and I've never known her to lie.

Today school is an ordeal exacerbated by Stephen's silence. There is an accusation in it, and my defenses are failing. I find myself repeatedly on the verge of tears, incapable of concentration, and in my burning eyes the shapes of my familiar world become alien and vaguely frightening. Today I feel Miriam behind me constantly, staring at me with that knowing smile. Yet when I look around, she is seldom there.

After midday meal I start for the beach path with Shadow, but I see Bernadette in the patch of elephant garlic at the southwest corner of the house. She motions to me to come over, then leans on her hoe amid the furled flower heads, already a yard high, bobbing in the wind on their long stalks. “I heard an interesting thing this morning, Mary.”

“What, and who did you hear it from?”

“Grace. Silly old fool. No sense at all. She said she'd heard that something terrible was going to happen soon.”

I feel myself stiffening, try to mask it with a smile. “Wasn't she more specific?”

Bernadette bends toward me, her tone mockingly ominous. “God is going to punish the wicked.”

“Really? Well, that's good news.” So Miriam is preparing for her act of god with a bit of prophesying.

Bernadette's bright eyes glint. “Good news. So it is. I never noticed that God was very quick to punish the wicked in the past.” And she returns to her weeding, dismissing me, apparently, from her mind.

As I walk down the path to the beach I wonder if I'll ever understand Bernadette's religion or philosophy or whatever she calls it. In spite of that vein of cynicism that occasionally surfaces, she goes through all the motions of a believing Christian, and I don't think she'd bother if they weren't meaningful to her.

Today I
am
going to the beach—and staying there. I walk south with Shadow, who generally moves at a full run. It's refreshing to watch her, refreshing to feel the astringent wind at my back, to feel the heat of the sun, its reflection in the water-slick sand preceding me, dazzling my eyes.

I walk for about half a mile; far enough so that no one at Amarna can see what I'm doing. The first task today is to test Shadow near the ocean to see how far away she can be from me and still hear the whistle over the surf. I tether her to a log, then walk farther south, hide myself in the drift, and blow on the whistle. And I can hear her barking. When I've increased the distance to a thousand feet—I judge the distance by counting the ruined houses on the bank; they were built on hundred-foot lots—I add a new element to the exercise.

After I tie the leash to another log, I loosen the collar so it will slip over her head if she pulls at it. I order her to stay, walk down the beach past ten lots, then hide behind the scrolled screen of a derelict tree's roots. When I blow on the whistle, I hear Shadow barking, faintly at this distance, and I keep blowing. And hoping.

She doesn't disappoint me. Finally I see her running toward me. I don't show myself, but she doesn't need to see me as long as she can hear the whistle. When she has covered half the distance, I stop blowing. She hesitates, barks disconsolately, then begins weaving along the sand, nose down, until she picks up my scent, and when that leads her to me, she dances and barks, while I hug her and offer enthusiastic praise. I repeat this test four times, increasing the distance until I reach two thousand feet, and every trial is a success.

Satisfied, and exhausted with all my tramping up and down the beach, I make my way back to Amarna in stages, resting now and then, even napping in the dry, pale sand near the bank with my back against a burnished log, the sun hot on my aching joints. I'm in no hurry to return to Amarna. Yet I must finally. Shadow trots ahead of me, sniffing at the flotsam thrown up by the last tide. As I approach the path to the house a numbing anger grows within me that I should feel reluctant to return to my own home. It seems a long climb.

Through the evening meal, I am even more acutely aware of the tension underlying every word, of the veiled, accusing looks directed at me. I want to shout, “This is not
my
fault!” But I say nothing. After supper, while the family is at evening service, I take a bath, then stoke up the fire in the living room and settle in for another vigil.

This is the worst night. My body defies my intentions; my mind shimmers toward dreams, toward hallucination. The flickering light of the fire vibrates, and phantom shapes emerge from the dark. I slip in and out of sleep, and again I keep Shadow beside me, under my hand.

And again the basement door opens, once soon after midnight, the second time after four. I'm almost convinced that I hear soft laughter.

At five I go out to the deck. Another clear day. The moon hangs in the pastel wash of mist and sky, so nearly a perfect disk, my old eyes can't discern the slight flaw in perfection. But it isn't full yet.

Tomorrow night it will be full.

I don't bother to go to bed. I'm afraid to, afraid I might sleep through breakfast, and I am determined to make an appearance today at the morning meal. I let it be known then that I don't feel well, and the family's faces are mirrors attesting to the fact that I don't
look
well. For the first time since our final lesson I see something in Stephen's eyes other than accusing doubt.

And Miriam watches me, smiling that knowing smile. I wonder if no one else sees it.

Half an hour after school begins, I collapse, fall out of my chair amid the children's cries of alarm. They are convinced, and so are the adults when they come in response to the children's shouts. Jerry carries me to my room, then Bernadette takes over, sends everyone away. She's brought her medical case, and she listens with the stethoscope to my heart, checks my blood pressure with the old sphygmomanometer. She asks if I hurt anywhere. I shake my head. Then she prepares one of her teas—swearing irritably that it's only a combination of willow bark and foxglove, that there is nothing remotely resembling a soporific in it. Obviously I don't need a soporific now. I just need sleep.

And sleep I have—a day of sleep, sweet sleep to knit up my raveled sleave. This is also part of my preparation.

The cast of the light in the windows serves as my clock, and I know it's evening when Bernadette comes in with a tray: a bowl of chicken broth and a cup of tea. She checks my vital signs, frowning absently, then props pillows behind me and puts the tray on my knees.

I ask, “What time is it?”

“Suppertime. So, have some of that broth. No—the tea first.”

I drink the tea, knowing I need the medicines that give it such a bitter, earthy taste. I take a few spoonfuls of the broth, and I am in fact ravenous, but I drop the spoon, let it clatter against the bowl, let my head fall back, my eyes close. “I'm . . . not hungry. . . .”

“Eat it anyway,” she retorts, then with a sigh, “All right. I'll leave it so you can have some later. Cold.”

She puts the bowl on the bedside table, removes the tray, then sits down beside me, presses her fingers to my wrist. “Pulse still a little fast. Thought you might be having a heart attack this morning. You could, you know. Blood pressure runs high. You've got poor Jeremiah going like a weather vane. Doesn't know what he should think.”

An astute observation, but I neither speak nor move, and she asks, “Is there anything you haven't told me? Anything hurting you?”

“No. Nothing you can do anything about.”

She snorts at that. “Well, maybe a few days' rest will do something about it.” The bed shifts as she rises, and I open my eyes.

“Bernadette . . . where's Shadow?” I can only hope I haven't let too much anxiety come through in my voice.

“You want her in here?”

“Yes. Please.”

“I'll find her.”

The door opens, closes. I lie waiting for what seems an hour, but no doubt is only minutes. I must have Shadow in this room with me.

And finally the door opens again. I shut my eyes, and I'm drowsily grateful when Shadow jumps up on the bed and nudges at my hand with her nose. I pet her perfunctorily, then seem to sink back into sleep. I hear the door close.

I'm not asleep. I watch the light fade into dusk, listen to sounds from the house: the family at supper; then the clatter of pots and dishes; then, finally, the house is quiet. I hear singing from the church.

I have no light to read by, so my mind flows free, casting up memories like flotsam. I remember my last phone call to my mother. I remember boys and men I loved, or thought I did. I remember making love. I remember deaths I've grieved. I remember walking with my parents on the beach, finding a shell so eroded in the tumbler of the waves that its outer wall was gone, exposing the spiral structure within. Dad said, “It looks like Mozart sounds,” and Mother laughed and sang a Mozart melody. She sang beautifully then, but she stopped singing after Dad died. But at that moment the nacreous spiral of the shell and Mozart made sense in relation to one another. And years later Rachel told me, “Painting works on the same level in the mind that music does. People think they're responding to the subject matter. They aren't. Not if the painting is good.”

I can't see the paintings on my walls in this dim light. I don't have to. I know them all, know their sources and the music in them. And I think about the books in the vault, remember the days before they were buried there, when Rachel pored over them, always frustrated by the shortage of time and light. It wasn't only the knowledge in them she sought; that was subject matter. She sought the music—the music that sings in the mind in response to relationships sensed in time, in cause and effect, in the
becoming
of transitions. She hungered for that music and reveled in the realization that her appetite was insatiable.

Evening service is over, and Bernadette comes in to check on me one last time before she goes to bed. I ask her to leave a candle, otherwise scarcely speaking or opening my eyes, except when she starts to take the bowl of cold broth. “Just leave it. I might wake up hungry.”

She shrugs, then goes to the door, pauses for a Parthian shot. “Be careful, Sister. We're not as tough anymore as we think we are.” Then she makes her exit, leaving me to wonder what she meant by that.

I wait until I hear no sound at all in the house, then wait a few minutes longer. Finally I push the covers back. I'm still dressed, except for my boots. When I was put to bed, Bernadette simply loosened my already loose clothing. I cross the worn carpet in stocking feet and, when I reach the sliding glass door, look cautiously out into the greenhouse. I see no lights in the north wing. I go to the door into the hallway, open it a few inches. No light under Jerry's door.