Outer Banks (31 page)

I have had it easier than most cancer victims because of those five things, and the greatest of them has always been the timelessness. With that I could and can live. Without it, I simply do not think so.

I wish that I had died before Alan asked me to choose between that and him.

When the dew began to fall the little night wind off the sea was suddenly too cold, and I got up and went into the house and lit the birch logs in the fireplace. I made coffee and took the big road atlas down from the bookshelf and spread it out on my board
and looked at it, sipping coffee. There it was: Nag's Head. Lying far to my south in all that great, windy blue. And on its bright tan outer dunes a great black house with, now, a seaward wing like a gull in flight rising from it, and in that house three girls frozen like Keats' brides of quiet, waiting for me to come and finish, with them, a book that had lain open and unread for more than twenty-five years.

I studied the map. I could take 95 to below Philadelphia, 13 on to Norfolk, and then over to 158 and finally 12, to Nag's Head. It should take me no more than a day of steady driving. I would take the sports car. It should be a lovely drive; much of the last part of it bordered the sea, or was close to it. There were many bridges. One, the Chesapeake Bay bridge-tunnel, just before Norfolk, was immense. There would be wind, and blue space, and high sun, and under it, like a great tundra, the restless glitter of that other sea….

I saw, suddenly, what I could do. I could go, and I could spend my time in the sun with them, with Ginger and Fig and with Cecie…Cecie…as much time as I needed, or as little. And then I could get into my little red Alfa Romeo and start home again, home early, so that Alan would not yet be there waiting for me. I would go in the early morning, while it was still pearled and gray outside on the beach, and when I came to that great bridge across the air, I would need only to turn the wheel once, sharply….

I thought that at some point, in midair, I would not be able to tell which was sky and which was sea, and that it might well be like rising up to meet the young sun.

Outside, on the gravel, I heard the crunch of Alan's tires, and I went out to meet him on the front deck and tell him that I had decided, after all, to go to Nag's Head.

O
NCE
I left the Interstate at the Delaware state line a subtle change took place in the air and light, or perhaps I simply imagined it: I was in the South. Imaginary or not, the tenor of the journey eased and slowed, and the light thickened, and I stretched my legs and arms and took a deep breath. I smiled to myself. I had not been South in almost thirty years, but the pace of it still called out to my blood. It might have bothered me once; today, nothing did.

Highway 13 through Delaware down to Norfolk is studded like a cowboy's belt with small towns, farms, fields, and forests. There was something near-magical about them all in that golden September morning, some rare and wonderful thing to see. Perhaps it was nothing more than the light on a weather vane, or a roadside stand utterly scarlet with the first fall apples, or a sign on a sagging rural grocery that said
STOP. GAS. SEE BIG SNAKE.
But there
was no hour's passing that did not give me a gift to enchant the senses. By the time I left Pennsylvania I was singing along with the radio.

Just after noon, almost precisely between Laurel and Pepper, in Delaware, I saw a vacant field that seemed, at first glance, to be full of marching elephants. I slowed and stared; there were, indeed, in deep green-gold grass, a line of great gray shiplike elephants swaying trunk to tail across the field, and another line of them tethered, fortresslike, off to the side. Then I saw the trucks and the puddled billow of big, dirty tents, and the bustle of workmen in the distance, and saw that the elephants were being led by a man who walked at the head of the leader with a long pole.

I laughed aloud in pure delight.

“Oh, Lordy,” I said to the sweet, rushing air. “Circus has come to town. Everybody stop everything and go!”

A great surge of joy swept me, so fierce and pure that my head snapped back and my eyes closed for a moment, and wheeling dots of light swam behind my lids. I remembered the feeling from when I was a very small child; I would sometimes be so overwhelmed with it that I would dance about and hug myself. I had not felt it since then. I thought of something Cecie said once, at school, watching a cat out on the quadrangle lawn suddenly jack-knife from a demure crouch into a wild, stiff-legged leap, spin around twice, and shoot sidewise across the grass before subsiding into a sunny doze once more.

“That cat,” she said, “is having an attack of delicious. It's what Aunt Martha always called it. Don't you know just exactly how that feels?”

“I am having an attack of delicious,” I said to the elephants, and drove on down the sunny road laughing loudly. Anyone meeting me on the road would think I was drunk, or mad.

And I was very nearly both. I was quite literally drunk on sun and sky and rushing air and the music pouring out of the Blaupunkt, and strangeness and freedom. The top on the little red
Alfa Romeo Spider was down, and the sky overhead was steel-blue with oncoming autumn, and the sun was as thick and sweet as poured cane syrup. My hair blew wild around my head and stung into my mouth and nose, and I could feel the top planes of my cheeks beginning to burn slightly with the sun. Under everything there sang a kind of secret glee, a delectable and hidden madness. And of course it was just that; anyone who has planned their death and set a date for it
is
mad, though perhaps not in the commonly accepted sense of the word. Or, at the very least, has left human context behind.

But it was precisely that death…or, rather, the idea of that vivid moment of free-floating, and the thought of exultant oblivion in bright air and water…that gave the day its wild sweetness. Death blued the sky to crystal and lit the sun to poignant gold; it stopped time like the sea did, and promised that winter did not have to come, or age, or pain. Or, in the odd way, death itself. I smiled again; I was dying so that I would not have to die. That
was
crazy, no doubt about it. No matter. The sense of control was as heady as wine. I was, with this death, finally in charge of the world.

“Death is the mother of beauty,” I said aloud. Who said that? Where had I read it? I had a swift sense of a winter classroom, with cottony gray outside tall, dirty windows, and a radiator hissing, and wet wool steaming. Randolph, almost certainly. I would ask Cecie. Cecie would know. It was the kind of quote we had loved; if I had heard it I would have quoted it to her, and she would remember. I did not doubt that she would.

“Half in love with easeful death,” I said then. That was Keats, I was almost sure of it. We had been just that, Cecie and I, in those untouched and unknowing days. And now I was again…

In mid-afternoon I stopped for a traffic light in a small town in Virginia. Onacock, I think it was, halfway down the long peninsula between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. The sense of great waters on both sides of me was heavy, though they were out
of sight, and the vast bridge and tunnel looming up ahead was like a spot of deep, cold shade on the sunny road. I had been driving since five
A.M.,
and my arms and neck and buttocks were tired. I rolled my head on my neck, back and forth, and saw, in the pickup truck ahead of me, a young woman reach up and touch the face of the man driving. He covered her hand with his, and then put his face down to hers and kissed her. She snuggled into his right arm, and he drove away with her head on his shoulder and his cheek bent to rest on her hair. I felt a single deep trembling pang, as if someone had touched a violin chord within me. How could I be leaving, have left for all time, Alan?

But I knew the answer to that. Far better to let him be anguished and angry at me than torn to death, along with me, by the Pacmen. Oh, far better, and a better love…besides, I lived in timelessness now. There was no longer any such thing as for all time, or forever. There was only this instant, this hour, this day. I would, I thought, write him a long letter on the night before I left Nag's Head. He would understand then. I had not said goodbye this morning; we had lain close together all last night, drifting in and out of sleep, and I had gotten up at four and simply put my packed bags in the Alfa and driven away. As I had left the dark bedroom he lifted his head and said thickly, “You going already?”

“Shhhh,” I said. “Go back to sleep. If you try to say goodbye to me I won't be able to go at all, and then you'll be mad at me. I'll call you when I get there.”

“See you in a week,” he said, from the depths of the down pillow. “I'll be here when you get back. Be careful. Love you.”

“I love you too,” I said, and swallowed a startled sob, and was away from there as the dawn broke. Going around the deck to the front of the house I felt a track of wetness drying on my face. I flung my arm out toward the sea in a backward salute and ran the rest of the way to the Alfa. Until I cleared the Hamptons and was bowling down the tunnel-like banality of the Sunrise Highway, I resolutely thought of nothing at all.

After that it was easy. I had not brought Alan Abrams on this trip. I had not even brought Kate Abrams; in a sense, she had already died. It was Kate Lee driving this car along this September road. Kate Lee, going back at last to find the truth of the four girls who had left each other all those years ago.

I thought, somewhere in those bright, spinning hours, that the truth of us might turn out to be just what we had thought it was then. No more and no less. That would, in an odd way, be immensely reassuring, as if somewhere, somehow, those girls still lived, whole and vivid. But I already knew that it would not. I knew that the instant I called Ginger Fowler Sibley a week before, to tell her I was coming.

Her voice was exactly the same. It was as if she stood in the next room from me, all those years ago. I felt the breath go out of me in a little sigh, and the smallest smile tugged at my mouth. She was Ginger only and fully, no doubt about that. I have read that the voice is the last thing to change with age.

“Oh, my God, Kate,” she burbled. “Oh, I can't believe it! Oh, you sound so…
good!
And you're coming; your nice husband said you'll come…”

“Well, I'm thinking about it,” I heard myself saying. Somehow I could not make myself say the words, “Yes. I will come.”

“Oh, Kate, please,” Ginger said. “I want to see the others, of course I do, but it's you I've missed most. We'd lost you so completely; nobody had any idea where you were for all those years, until the directory came out, not even Cecie…Kate, listen, I've hated it all these years, that we were estranged. I've known how badly I behaved, and how it must have hurt you…I've wanted so badly to try and make things right with you. Paul…” she hesitated. “Paul won't be here. He'll be at the Norfolk house. It'll just be the four of us. But if you don't want to, I'll understand…”

My heart gave a fishlike flop. Remembered love flooded me. I realized that it had been more than a quarter of a century since
I had minded about Paul Sibley, but that good, single-hearted Ginger had been suffering because of it all those years. Suffering at my imagined suffering.

“Of course I'm coming,” I said. “I've missed you all, too. Oh, I have! Lord, though, Ginger, where on earth did you find Fig?”

There was another pause. Then Ginger said, “Kate, don't you know who Fig is?”

“Who she is?” I said. “No…”

“Kate…Fig is Georgina Stuart. You know, all those books with the half-naked women on the jackets? All those television talk shows? All that shit in
People
and
Entertainment Weekly?”

I could not speak. I literally could not. Fig? Georgina Stuart? Whose string of lurid bestsellers and affairs and public outrages were the stuff of tabloid headlines and national morning and late night shows, whose platinum-streaked mane and half-naked breasts had been in as many magazine pages as the rapturous harlots on the covers of her paperbacks? And whose husbands had been nearly as numerous? Even I, buried in flowers by the sea these many years, knew who Georgina Stuart was. You would have to have lived your life on Uranus not to know.

“Stuart?” I said numbly. I heard my voice squeak.

“Stuart with a U,” Ginger laughed. “You know how she felt about you. I always thought she wanted to be you, and I guess she did, at that. I don't wonder she borrowed your name; she borrowed everything else. Don't you remember? She even looks sort of like you, Kate, or like you used to. You wouldn't know her now. Literally. God knows how much weight she's lost, and how much plastic surgery she's had.”

“Dear God, old Fig Newton is Georgina Stuart,” I said, beginning to laugh. “I wouldn't miss this for anything in the world. I'm going to have to read one of those awful books before I get there. And she'd really bother with the likes of us now?”

“It was her idea,” Ginger said happily. “She called one day early this month out of the blue and said she was coming down
this way on a book tour, and wouldn't it be fun if we could meet at my house on the beach, like we did that time back at school. You remember. She even offered to pay for it, but of course, I said no to that. And Kate, she absolutely insisted that you come. She said it was a condition. She wanted me to write you because she said she knew she used to drive you crazy and she didn't want to spook you off. She even offered to send a private plane for you. I said I'd bet the farm you wouldn't come in a private plane, but I'd ask, so consider yourself asked. I know she really did bug you awfully at school, but she seems so different now, really nice, even if she is famous all over the world. Don't let what you remember of her keep you from coming. She's bound to have changed…”

“No, I don't care about that now,” I said. “I'm dying of curiosity.” And cancer, I thought but did not say, and giggled. “No plane, though. I'll drive down. I've already looked at the map: I think I can do it in a day. Listen, Ginger…what about Cecie?”

“Cecie's coming, if she can get her mother-in-law into a respite program of some kind the government has. She's wheelchair-bound now. There's not anybody else to stay with her.”

“Mother-in-law…” I said stupidly.

“Have you heard from Cecie at all?” Ginger said. “I've kept up with her a little, but she hasn't mentioned you…”

“No,” I said softly. “Not at all.”

“She's had an awful time, Kate,” Ginger said. “She married an Italian policeman in Boston; she was there visiting some relative or other right after you left school, and met him then, and fell for him like a ton of bricks. Vinnie Fiori. Vicente Fiori. I met him once, early on, when we were up there for a convention, a big, blackeyed, good-looking guy with more charm than you ever saw, and just idolized Cecie…anyway, they had two little boys, and then when the kids were still small, he got shot in a bank robbery and paralyzed from the waist down, and she stopped work to take care of him, and did that, almost completely, for twenty years, and the old lady for ten, so far. I don't even know when she moved in with
them. Vinnie died about two years ago, and the kids left as soon as they could get out of there, and she's been looking after that old harridan ever since, in that miserable little house in Quincy. She never went back to the Tidewater. I don't think she's had one vacation since Vinnie was shot. God knows what she's lived on. They've never had anything. It's been just terrible. I thought maybe you knew.”

“Oh, Cecie,” I breathed silently. “No, I didn't know,” I said.

“Well, she said she'd walk every step of the way if you were going to be here, and I said I'd see that you were,” Ginger said. “You know she doesn't drive; she's still scared to death of cars. So Fig's sending the stupid-ass plane for her, and Fig and I are driving in Fig's new Rolls to pick her up at the Currituck airport. I was afraid maybe she wouldn't want to come…you know Fig and I are awfully comfortable, and somehow I figured you probably were, too, and she…but she said herself she couldn't wait to rub elbows with some success, for a change. And she wasn't being sarcastic. In all this time, in all the times I've called her, or gotten a letter from her, I've never heard her sound in the least bit sorry for herself…”