I see you everywhere (6 page)

I waited. I laughed my nervous laugh. “Well, I hope it involves a trunk of money buried in the yard that will support me like royalty the rest of my life.”

Right away, I was sorry for the joke, but Lucy kept on smiling, more like a grandmother now. “As you might say, don’t I wish.” She touched her throat for a moment, the place where she had worn that old cameo before we jazzed up her wardrobe. She kept doing that, always forgetting she’d given it up.

“My sister Vetty was thirty-seven when I met her for the first time,”

she said. “Imagine that. And all I knew of her till then was that she had done this rash, impetuous, ruinous thing: run off with what sounded to me like a perfectly respectable young man whose only shame was provenance. Isn’t that a comic, lamentable slap of fate?” She directed this question out toward the holly trees, the fireflies, the chorus of crickets.

“When I met her, this husband had left her, just as you’ve heard—no thanks, mind you, to our sanctimonious parents. Vetty and Josiah had no children, but she loved him. Such a passion for such an ordinary man, and oh how she tried to hold him! When he left the army after the Indian Wars, he came home—here—to run his father’s sawmill. Vetty was thrilled. He would be safe; they would sleep under the same roof ! But after five years he moved across town to look for another bride. I think if she’d had a family to meddle and cajole, events might have turned out otherwise. Never mind, though: he still gave her money, still split her wood, still went to their church—she was the one who had to change pews—but she was alone as could be. The more so for his being near. She had a talent, thank heaven, and by the time I arrived, she had a solid business as a seamstress. She was pitied, but also respected. No one blamed her. Hand of God and such.”

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I watched Lucy closely. “But you . . . you came up here to rescue her.”

“Oh no.” She looked at me, this time without a smile of any kind. “I came up here so she could rescue me.” Lucy reached down slowly and lifted her glass from the floor. “Another, thank you.”

I poured her the rest of the carrot juice. “Clement dear, when I was eighteen years old, I met a man of my own. A man the family couldn’t have approved of more! A man with whom I was smitten! Everything splendid! A nascent betrothal in everyone’s eyes, as it turned out, but his. There I was, six months later, not a gem on my hand, but pregnant as the sky is blue. So ordinary, as sins go; even
that
seemed sinful, how viciously ordinary it was. The most common of female mishaps. Now, my daddy could bear many less-than-agreeable things, but
common
things, no. My daddy belonged to the same club as my young man’s daddy, but they shared no business, so there was no leverage. We were one year into a fine new century. Duels were a thing of the past. And what could possibly make more sense, in my parents’ desperation to bury another scandal, than to ferret out and repossess fallen daughter number one to gain a refuge for number two? Logical, don’t you agree, Clement dear?” She drained her glass with a flourish and held it tight in her lap.

“Vetty. Imagine how ecstatically she must have awaited my arrival—

the sister she’d never laid eyes on, soon to deliver a baby, to give poor Vetty a flesh-and-blood purpose. Misfortune it might seem to some, but to her, it meant reunion with her family and the gift of the child she’d always longed for. As for alibis, I was said to be on a tour of Europe recovering from the attentions of a cad—a colorful affliction at best—and would return to the marriage market evanescent and worldly. I would be fed stories of Paris and Constantinople with which to charm new ranks of suitors. How clever my parents were. How thorough.”

“You had a baby?” I said. “You had a
baby
?” I was longing for a beer but didn’t dare leave the porch.

“A little boy,” she said. Not a hint of tears. She smiled rapturously at the night. “He was with us, Vetty and me, for less than a month when our father arrived. You could have knocked us down with a butterfly wing. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 36 36

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My, but his particular coldness . . . something more climatically suited to these parts than to steamy, gay New Orleans. A gene, I’m thankful to say, that seems to have dwindled into extinction.”

She laughed a tight, dry little laugh. “Our father was such a shrewd strategist. I suppose it didn’t take him long to see how very
useful
it was that our sister Amy was expecting her fourth child. Aristide, your greatgrandfather and my brother, would never have let it happen. He’d always written, secretly, to Vetty and her husband. His twin sister and his best friend from school: the union always seemed right to him. But he was abroad at the time of my calamity, ignorant of the entire affair. I sometimes think my parents sat quietly on their decision till after he had shipped out to the far, far East. So Amy, our favored sister, the only one not to betray and disappoint, well bless her soul if she didn’t all of a sudden have
twins.
One quite the bruiser, astonishing! No one ever saw a newborn baby so big, no mother was prouder. She wrote me often, I will say that. She sent me a portrait every year at Christmas: my son in her lap. Sometimes, you know, I think about the pressure on Amy to be the good one, how much more strenuous that must have felt once I fell by the wayside, too.”

“Wait,” I said. I belong to one of those families in which every single member could produce under torture a flawless family tree, every gnarl and knot in place, reaching back five generations. I was doing some hasty scrambling through the branches. Amy’s twins were my great-uncles Charles and Christopher, both recently dead. I asked her, Which one?

“Ah,” she said, “here ends my confession, dear one.” She handed me her empty glass, stood, and leaned against the back of her chair.

“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to. I’ll keep it a secret.”

Mentally, I was busy reconfiguring two batches of second cousins; which were in fact descendants of Lucy?

“If you should be so lucky as to live a life this long—that is, if you consider it luck, and I am not saying you shouldn’t—I cannot possibly hold you to a promise like that. But promise me this.” She put her arm Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 37
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through mine. As she leaned against me, I could smell her gardenia powder, a smell like attic and garden together. “Promise they’ll burn me in that splendid green dress you made me buy, the one with the golden sash.”

The next day, when I came home for lunch, she looked as if she’d been impatient for me to arrive. She asked if I had time to drive her to the bank. On a table in the living room sat a large box covered with dark green alligator skin. She had no further use for jewelry, she said; it might as well be somewhere safe. Then she reached out and pressed something into my hand. I felt a slight prick and looked down at the old blue cameo. Its sheer familiarity, as something inseparable from her, made me lightheaded, yet I felt I had to tell her it shouldn’t go to me because I’d never, ever wear it. But she said, “Can you please send this to your cousin Gaia? She likes Victorian. And please insure it, Clement dear.”

“For how much?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, waving a hand, “enough to convince the postal service it’s too valuable to lose.”

After the bank, Lucy said she was too tired to shop for music. I took her home for a nap and went by the sanctuary. When I finished cleaning cages, I drove to the record store on my own. Later, after dinner, I brought the boom box out on the porch. We listened to song after song after song. Bob Marley was in the middle of “Exodus”—I love how he sings it
Exey-duss,
taking that lofty word away from the Bible—when suddenly I got it. My cousin Gaia was Lucy’s great-granddaughter. What did this change? Everything and nothing.

I looked over at Lucy, to express to her what I felt more than what I had learned, but she was asleep again. Her body was getting ready to sleep for good. A few weeks later, before the rest of the clan arrived to divvy up the other spoils, Dad and I managed to get ourselves into a canoe without tipping over, to scatter her ashes on Lake Champlain. I had this image of Lucy flitting weightless over the water, that gold hippie sash like a peacock’s tail: Lucy, up there, invisible, finding out what it’s like to kiss the sky.

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∞

we stretched a worn chenille bedspread on a rock beside the gorge, weighed down the corners with six-packs of beer and Coke and a basket of sandwiches (cucumber and chicken between fat slices of Aunt Lucy’s sourdough-prune). Except for the surrounding birch trees—

which made me achingly homesick for everything northern, everything dependent on frost—the place made me think of somewhere southwestern: along a twisting sinew of river, slabs of rock leaned every which way, like a band of precarious drunks. The river flowed down a shadowy corridor, some twelve feet wide, with lichen-stained walls. A few people had arrived just before us, so the road leading in was a tunnel of dust, dust that now coated my skin and hair, since I’d ridden in the back of the pickup to be with Ralph’s dogs, Tuck and Moe. Along the way, brandnew no trespassing signs leaned out from the encroaching woods. My backside, thanks to the potholes, felt like it had been shot full of novocaine.

Bodies, half clothed or naked, sprawled on the rocks, soaking up sun. Because of the restless geology here, privacy was easy to come by; as we zigzagged toward Clem’s favorite spot, we passed a sudden crevice where a lean brown couple were making love.

Only two or three people were swimming. On my stomach, leaning over the steep drop beside us, I could just touch the surface of the water if I stretched. “Jesus!” I said, electrified by the chill. Clem had already helped herself to a sandwich. “Oh, you’ll go in. It’s too hot not to.” As if to prove her point, Tuck and Moe plunged, side by side, splashing us all. They panted as they swam, noses tilted toward the sky.

“Oh Christ,” said Ralph. He took off his shirt and dove in.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“There’s a waterfall down there, around that corner,” said Clem. She sounded nonchalant. “We go through this routine every time, but usually they wait till we go in.”

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Hector walked the edge of the river, abreast of Ralph and the dogs, who floated down in tandem, cradled on a lazy current. The four of them slipped out of sight where the river made one of its many sharp turns. Clem saw my anxiety (she always does). “Relax. Farther down, it’s not so steep. Hector pulls them out. Ralph gets to push.” She laughed.

“Hard to believe they once worked for a living, those goofy dogs.”

Clem pulled her sunglasses down off her head, over her eyes. She unclasped the top of her bikini, tossed it aside, and lay back on the bedspread. “Cancer, come’n get me.”

Her breasts are smaller than mine, but tight and golden, like our father’s skin—the Basque in the woodpile, he likes to say. Her nipples are darker, too, a startling purple. I realized that she was significantly older than the sister I’d been determined I would leave behind for good; older than I wanted her to be. She was nicer, which I struggled not to see, but also less relaxed. Above her glasses, I saw the first hint of lines at the peak of her nose.

“Have you thought about the jewelry?” I said.

She raised her head, looked at me, then lay back down. “Not really. It’s all in a big leather box we drove to the bank. I didn’t ask to open it; that seemed rude.”

“Rude never stopped you before,” I said, though I found myself speaking lightly.

“Well, yeah, touché, Miss Manners,” said Clem. “But you know, family jewels don’t exactly fit the life I picture for myself. I mean, rubies on the Outer Banks? Hatpins on Kilimanjaro?”

“When do you plan to be on Kilimanjaro?” I was saying when I heard a loud “Heads up!” Ralph’s voice, followed by whooping laughter and a lash of ice water. The dogs arrived ahead of the men and shook themselves all over our small encampment.

“Pigs, you pigs! You boorish Eskimo pigs! Shit!” Clem was on her feet in an instant, clutching a towel.

“Watch your language, missy.” Ralph took Clem’s towel and wrapped it around her from behind, squeezed her tight in his muscular arms. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 40 40

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“Scrub me down, hot stuff,” she said, and twisted inside the towel to face him. Then she pushed him back, threw the towel over his head, and dove past him straight into the river. In the water, her skin turned blue as moonlit snow. The dark bottom of her bathing suit split her body in two. Before she arched back to the surface, I saw the soles of her feet, the dust rising quickly in a cloud, their pallor reflecting the sun.

“She’s an athlete, I’ve always been jealous of that,” I said.

“Strong swimmer,” said Hector. “But crazy, too. I saw her go off that rock. Her and Ralph. Me? No way.” He looked upstream toward the site of the fatal dive.

Clem broke the surface. “Yahoo! It’s fuckin’ polar down there!”

“Make room,” called Ralph, and he dove in again. Hector bent over and untied his sneakers. He set them aside symmetrically paired, then took off his T-shirt, folded it into a square, and laid it on top of the sneakers. If Clem and Ralph made one logical couple, Hector and I would fall together sensibly as well: careful, circumspect. But who was I fooling? I was alone.

“Come on in,” said Hector, smiling warmly at me, and then all three of them were in the river, heads bobbing on the surface. Even the dogs had deserted me, still on land but roving their way upstream, hunting for untended food.

Clem was treading water next to Ralph. “C’mon, you overeducated pseudo-bohemian pondscum,” she called out.

This was exactly the sort of moment with her that made me feel so small. “Maybe later,” I said. “I think I’ll read for a little. I don’t think I’m hot enough yet.”