Low Country (36 page)

blab it to you. Carter says to tell you that if you really

want to do something, pick Clay up at the airport in

Charleston tomorrow and take him somewhere nice

and relaxing for lunch, and then make him go home

and rest for the rest of the day. I told him I’d tell you.

And when I couldn’t raise you at the house, I knew

I’d find you here.”

“Did Clay ask you to tell me all this, Hayes?” I said,

my voice trembling. “Does he want me to take this

proposal over to Dayclear?”

Hayes looked at me soberly, and then shook his

head.

“No. He doesn’t know I’ve told you about our

needing to move things up, and he didn’t ask me to

ask you to go over there with it. I took that on myself.

It might have been the wrong thing to do, and he’ll

probably be pissed as hell at me, but I just couldn’t

dump anything more on him right now. And this has

got, repeat
got
, to be done and done soon. You can

tell him I told you if you want to. You know better

than any of us what he can take and what he can’t.”

322 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“I wonder if I do?” I said so softly that I did not

know if he heard me or not. Oh, my poor Clay…

“You really do love him, don’t you?” Hayes said.

“Your face looked like you were seeing ghosts.”

“I was,” I said drearily. “Yes, Hayes, I really do love

him. I always did. Did you ever doubt it?”

“Then…are you going to tell him I told you?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’ll have to wait

and see how he is when I pick him up tomorrow. I’m

not going to have him collapsing in the airport or

something. You’ll just have to trust my judgment on

that. Eventually I will tell him, of course.”

“Eventually I hope you will, or I will,” he said. “It’s

just that right now he needs for things to let up a little.

It’s a damned shame that the project has got to go

forward right away; I wish we did have those three

months he promised you. I just thought you might be

willing to take some of the load off him by talking to

them over at Dayclear.”

“You always did know which of my buttons to push,”

I said to him, and he smiled a little.

“I guess I did,” he said. “You don’t try to hide them,

do you? Well, will you do that at least? Will you go

over there and give them the proposition? If that hurdle

could be behind him when he gets

Low Country / 323

back, it would be a bigger help than you know.”

“Hayes, I…yes. Okay. I’ll do that. I may or may not

tell Clay you came to me with this, but I’ll go over

there and tell them what you propose for the property.

I may tell them I hate it, but I’ll wait till they’ve heard

the whole thing before I do that.”

“When will you go?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t push me on this. I’ll get to it. I want to think

it out first. You know I’m never going to find it accept-

able. But it should be up to them, and I’ll leave it like

that.”

“Fair enough,” he said, turning to get into the

Porsche and go back to his brunch and his Bowl

games. “Don’t leave it too long, though, Caro. It

wouldn’t do Clay any good at all to lose this offer. Not

at all.”

“You let me be the judge of what’s good for Clay,

Hayes,” I said, but he had started the big, soft engine

and did not hear me. I stood on the porch watching

the Porsche race off through the trees, leaving a rooster

tail of black mud-mist behind it, thinking it looked like

blackness and misery and meanness on four wheels

and very glad indeed that it was leaving my part of the

island.

When I picked Clay up at the airport in Charleston

late the next morning, he looked like a man

324 / Anne Rivers Siddons

returning from a funeral, and I hugged him hard and

we went to lunch at a crab shack on Edisto and had

crab cakes and beer, and then I drove us home and

bullied him into taking a nap, and he slept far into that

night, and I did not tell him what Hayes had come to

ask of me.

Time enough for that.

11

I
didn’t tell him for over a week. For the first
part of

that time I was afraid that he was seriously ill. For the

middle part of it he slept. During the last of it he was

gone again. By the time I got to him, almost everyone

on Peacock’s Island knew what my decision was but

my husband.

By that time, everything had changed.

I got him to the doctor the day after he got in. He

did not even argue vigorously; he was too subdued for

that, and his stomach was hurting him rather a lot. He

did not tell me this, but he did voluntarily ask for an

antacid. I had never known him to take one before.

When he went to get water to wash it down, I called

Charlie Porter in Charleston and he worked us in late

that afternoon.

Charlie had been at Virginia with Clay and Hayes,

and they had remained friends as well as

326 / Anne Rivers Siddons

doctor and patients. He had a lucrative practice in the

new medical complex over on Calhoun, and he and

Hayes played tennis a couple of times a week, or sailed

from the Yacht Club. Clay saw him less often, but

regularly, usually when he was in Charleston overnight.

Charlie and Happy sometimes had him to dinner at

their house on Tradd, or he and Charlie went to the

club. Charlie was tall, thin, bald, and laid-back to the

point of seeming asleep much of the time you were

talking to him. But he wasn’t.

“What you need most is a solid month at one of

your own resorts,” he said at the end of the day, when

he had come with Clay back to the town house on

Eliott and was having a drink with us. He stood in

front of the fireplace, where I had lit the little fatwood

fire that was kept laid there, his hands in his pockets,

rocking back and forth.

“I don’t feel tired,” Clay said restlessly. “I never did.

I just got too hot and got dizzy for a minute. You

never got too hot?”

“I never move that fast,” Charlie said affably, and

took a swallow of his scotch. “I don’t care how you

feel. You don’t know how you feel. That’s your prob-

lem. You’ve been running flat out on empty for a long

time. You need some rest and I’m not kidding about

that. What do you think an ulcer means? What do

you think passing out in the middle of a parking lot

means? I know

Low Country / 327

about that; Hayes told me. Carter told him. You’re

lucky there’s not any permanent damage. Your heart

and your blood pressure are basically okay, though I’d

like to get the pressure down some. But there are other

indicators and you’ve got all of them. God knows what

your blood work will show. What are you eating?
Are

you eating? You say you’re not sleeping very well.…”

“I never slept a lot.…” Clay said, not looking at him.

“You slept more than two or three hours a night or

you’d be dead,” Charlie said.

“Can you do anything with him, Stretch?” he said,

looking over at me. He has called me that ever since

we met. I come about to Charlie’s shoulder when we

stand together.

“Nothing short of drugging him,” I said lightly, to

mask the concern I felt. I was glad to hear that Clay’s

heart was not faulty, but I did not like the sound of

the passing out or the insomnia. Not at all. I could not

remember a time when Clay had not simply functioned

physically like a well-made machine.

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Charlie said.

And that’s what we did. Charlie wrote a prescription

for Halcion and Zantac, and I went to the big Eckard’s

on Calhoun and had them filled. On the way home I

looked at the dense little city unrolling outside my

windows. It was still balmy and there were people on

all the narrow streets in

328 / Anne Rivers Siddons

the historic district and around Colonial Lake, strolling

or jogging or riding bicycles or in-line skating. The

twilight was clear and green, the kind of late winter

light that speaks of coming spring and blooming things,

and indeed, the big camellia bushes in the gardens of

most of the old houses were full to bursting, and

whenever I got in and out of the car I caught the breath

of the Confederate jasmine that is January’s gift to the

Lowcountry. I was caught and pinned with a sudden,

overwhelming sense of sheer community, of the pres-

ence all around me of my fellow species. It was a bene-

volent presence, and I did not feel it as a weight but

as a lifting.

Could I live here? I thought, turning off Meeting

Street onto Tradd. Lights were coming on in the

streetside windows. Through the sheer blinds and

curtains that people in the shoulder-to-shoulder district

South of Broad affect, I could see beautiful rooms

swimming with lamp and firelight reflected off polished

old wood, and the gleam of silver and china, and the

dark chiaroscuro of gilt-framed ancestors on paneled

walls.

If the worst happened, like Clay says it might, and

we could not live on Peacock’s anymore, could I come

and live in the little house on Eliott, and be a part of

this?

I could if I still had the island, I thought. But then

the image came, of masts and antennas and

Low Country / 329

aerials and putting greens and golf carts, and of the

silent pewter creek “redirected” so as to fool me into

thinking that there was no water traffic outside my

windows. A lump formed in my throat, and when Clay

asked if I wanted to stay over at the town house, I said

no, that I thought we should go home. I did not think

that anything but the dark marshes would cleanse my

mind of the pictures there.

When we got home I gave him one of the Halcions

and he went to bed in our big bedroom. He was

sleeping quietly when I came to bed a couple of hours

later. But when I woke up, he was asleep on the little

daybed in my sitting room across the hall.

“I got up to get some water and just wandered in

there and fell asleep,” he said. But the next morning I

awoke and found him there again.

“Okay. Tell me,” I said, when he woke, cramped and

stunned, to find me sitting in the wing chair beside

him.

“I…Caro, do you dream about Kylie?” he said, and

my heart stopped and then jolted forward again. Clay

had not spoken of Kylie since before Thanksgiving

when he had found me in her room.

“Sometimes,” I said after a while. “I didn’t know you

did, though.”

“I never have,” he said, and his face was slack

330 / Anne Rivers Siddons

and grayish in the early morning light, and his voice

empty. “But for the past two nights I’ve dreamed about

her, and they’re…not good dreams. It has something

to do with the ocean. It seems louder than it has, or

something…it keeps getting into my sleep. I always

liked that sound before, but now…Listen, would you

care if I slept in here for a while? Just until I get caught

up and back to the office?”

He had promised Charlie that he would take a long

weekend off. I had thought it was a wonderful idea,

but now I was not so sure. Maybe, in this new vulner-

ability of his, the structure and discipline of the office

would serve him better than this utterly alien, unformed

time. Then I thought, My poor lost Kylie. First I bind

her with my own need, and then her father, whom we

thought had let her go a long time ago, calls her back

with his delayed grief, or whatever this is. I had as-

sumed that he had dealt with his own pain in silence,

but perhaps he had merely buried it, and it had found

a weakness in the wall only now and broken through.

Old sorrow and an obscure anger welled; I can’t even

handle my own need for her, I thought. Don’t ask me

to shoulder yours.

“Of course I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “It’s probably

a good idea. Didn’t Charlie say that Halcion sometimes

caused increased dreaming?”

Clay sighed and rubbed his eyes, and turned over.

Low Country / 331

“I guess he did. I think I’ll nap just a little longer.

Don’t wait breakfast on me.”

He slept for most of three days and nights. Some-

times I came and sat beside him and simply looked at

him. In the dim light his Christmas tan looked

bleached, and his sun-streaked hair was simply a

lightless brown, dull, rough. He looked thinner and

smaller under the light duvet I had put over him, and

his face was naked and somehow blurred, hollow at

the cheekbones and temples. He looked at once much

younger and quite old. I remembered how he had

seemed to me the second time I saw him, when he had

come alone to the island in Shem Cutler’s boat, and I

had seen that he was not golden and radiant after all,

or limned in light, but merely a too-pale, too-thin out-

lander with no magic to him. Until he had smiled.