Outer Banks (43 page)

She drained her wine glass and said, “Come over by the fire. I can't get warm. And listen and don't ask questions until I finish. I don't think we have much time.”

And so we sat on the rug in front of the coal fire and I watched as it burned bluely down, and she told me. She drank wine steadily, and occasionally she shuddered, a great, profound ague, and her sweater and jeans steamed in the heat from the grate, and she told me about Fig Newton. She kept glancing at the locked door as she talked, and once, when the coal shifted and a lump fell to the bottom of the grate she jumped like a nervous cat. And she kept looking at her watch. It was nearly midnight when she began to talk.

“Kate, she's crazy, and we didn't know. I mean really crazy,” Cecie said. “She has been, all these years. Since the beginning. And since the beginning, almost, she's been after you, and now I think she's coming…”

“Cece…sweetie…”

“No!” she shook her head violently. “You promised! Don't talk. Let me finish…Kate, all afternoon after you and Paul left she was…just on fire, just burning up. Jittering around, talking a mile a minute, not making real good sense, almost…glowing. Like last night, you remember, only worse…and she made Bloody Marys before noon and started Ginger on them…Ginger wasn't in real good shape; you saw her…and by two Ginger had crashed and it was just Fig and me. The storm was really getting bad and I was getting worried; I never saw such wind, but she was just drunk on it, running outside in it, and singing, and yelling…said she heard the mermaids singing…and then she went up to the studio and did something or other up there until about five, and I took a nap…and then she came back and Ginger was up and we started on the scotch. I should have noticed something, but
I didn't; everything was just too strange…but I did notice she wasn't drinking, and that she was making the drinks herself and bringing them to us…well, Kate, I think she drugged us. I mean, I'm sure she did. Ginger was out like a light on the sofa by seven; nothing could wake her, and I went out, too, and if I hadn't thrown it all up after a couple of hours I'd be there on the rug by the fireplace. It was about nine when I came out of the bathroom, feeling just awful, and I tried to wake Ginger and I couldn't, but she was breathing okay, and then I tried the phone, to call Fig in the studio, and it was out, and so I started out there after her and…I saw her come down the stairs carrying her bags, and kind of look around, smiling this…
terrible
smile; God…and then she got in her car and drove off. So I went up to the studio; I really don't know why, and there was this note for Ginger saying she'd decided to go on home and beat the storm, and thanking her for the week. I knew that wasn't right; the storm was already here, nobody would drive in that…” Cecie smiled a watery, rueful little smile. “So I sort of…looked around. And I found the stuff she'd used on us in the bathroom; she'd left a lot of stuff behind. It's Dalmane. Makes you sleep like the dead, if you take enough. I know she gave it to us in the scotch because they tried it on me in the hospital and I threw it up every time, about two hours later. There was other stuff there; Percodan and something I think might be dexamine, and one or two antidepressants, and other stuff I never heard of. She must have been on it yesterday, and today, and maybe the rest of the time, too…”

I simply looked at Cecie. What was this madness she was telling me? Perhaps it was she who had become unhinged from reality; it had happened before…

“Oh,
shit,
Kate! I'm telling you the truth,” Cecie shouted at me. “You goddamned well better listen to me…so, okay, then I looked around some more and I found her diary. And I read it…all of it; I sat there and read it…and then I knew about her being crazy. Because it was all lies. You know what she read us this
past week? All the sweetness and light, all that stuff how much she loved us, about you being her soul sister, and Paul being a god, and all that? It was lies, Kate; it's not in the diary, that isn't what she wrote at all! What she wrote…God, she hated us! She hated me for being closer to you than anybody; I was right; she did think we were gay. Lezzies, she called us…and she hated Ginger, and she hated you most of all. For laughing at her and mimicking her; she heard all that, through the wall. She used to lie there and listen, night after night, oh, Kate, I
told
you…and she hated you for looking like you do, for having an aristocratic nose and name, for God's sake. She just
hated
that. She even hated you for trying to be nice to her. And most of all she hated you because she knew it was always you Paul wanted. She knew he only married Ginger for the money. She's the one that threw Ginger at him after you were gone, so he'd drop you, and rubbed it in to him about the money…and then she hated poor Ginger when he married her. Oh, Katie Lee, I knew that then, and I never told you…”

I shook my head silently. I looked at her. I did not know what to say, and so I said nothing.

“I read the rest of it,” Cecie said, looking down at her clasped hands. “She tracked you all those years in New York, Kate. I don't know how. She doesn't say. But she knows all about your life, and I know how she got you here. Or at least, I know why right now, and not some other time. She's been having an affair for years with your doctor, and he told her. She knew…she knew your last checkup was next month. She knew all about your…illness; she knew everything. She said that it had to be now because you might find out you were going…not going to make it, and she couldn't let you get away with that. This one's on me'; she wrote that. Oh, my dear Kate…why didn't you tell me? I knew there was something, but I didn't know what…”

I looked at her, still shaking my head.

“Well, so anyway, she engineered this week, and then yesterday…or no, night before last…she called Paul in Norfolk and
told him you still loved him and that you said for her to tell him to come to Nag's Head. And…she was listening and watching you last night. In the hammock. Just like she did before, all those nights…She knows you came down here, Kate. It's in the diary. She wrote it last night. I wouldn't have known otherwise. I wouldn't be here otherwise.”

I said nothing; I watched her.

“She's coming here, Kate,” Cecie said. “I don't know how. I didn't see another car on the road, she may have had to stop, to wait some of it out. But you've got to get out of here. We've got to go now…”

I heard the wind outside in the silence, and the voice of the surf, and the bell buoy. All sounded further away. Lightning still bloomed, but the cracks of thunder had grumbled on past, up the coast toward the Tidewater. Cecie's breathing was even now, but light and fast. The coal fire snickered.

Far beneath me the abyss howled. Something down deep in it sang. Well, of course.

“Have you ever heard the mermaids singing, Cecie?” I said.

Her shoulders slumped and she closed her eyes.

“You don't believe a word of this, do you?” she whispered.

“Well…I know you do,” I said carefully. “I know you do, or you wouldn't have made that terrible drive…but Cece, it's just crazy. This is bad horror novel stuff. Fig's not coming here. How could she come here? You know she's a fiction writer…and listen to that outside…nobody could drive in that…” Color came back into her blue eyes, and she looked at me levelly. And I thought, “Cecie just did.”

For a fraction of a moment I could feel it, the danger prickling in the air around us, the full extent of her sacrifice for me. But then disbelief flooded back, and a deep, sweet, limb-numbing lassitude: too much, I don't care, so what, let it happen then…

“What will it take?” Cecie said, beginning to cry again. “What will it take?”

“My doctor would never do that,” I said, and felt, suddenly, an invincible raft of certainty solid beneath my feet, buoying me up. “John McCracken would never on earth have an affair with her and tell her about…all that. I know that, Cecie.”

“It wasn't McCracken,” Cecie said. “It was somebody named Hilliard. Your specialist, I think…”

I sat for a long time, it seemed, though it could not have been; sat looking into the fire. I saw us, the four of us, in a booth at Harry's in Randolph, drinking coffee. I saw us piled into my car, top down to the moony whiteness of a summer night. I saw us lying in the starlight of the Tri Omega house roof, drunk and singing. I saw us in winter nightclothes, sitting on mine and Cecie's beds, drinking hot chocolate. Each time, in all the pictures, we were laughing. We were laughing, and we were very young.

“Give me the diary,” I said through stiff, numb lips, and Cecie did.

“I marked some places for you,” she said.

I picked up the shabby book. The pages were coming loose from the binding; crumbs of glue fell over my hands, and flecks of yellow paper showered down. Fig's childish, looping handwriting covered the pages, closely and densely. There must have been hundreds of thousands of words in this book and the others like it, I thought. Words and words and words, a bridge of words stretching back into those years and forward into these…stopping last night.…

The first passage Cecie had marked was the first one Fig had read us this week, the one she had written the night of her initiation into the soroity. I stared at the page. I remembered what she had read to us, the cloying words that had made us giggle and squirm, words of adoration and sisterhood and that strange, canted love she bore for me.

This passage finished up: “She almost vomited on me. I raised my face for the kiss and I saw her; she couldn't look at me. I made her sick. My face made her sick. The thought of my mouth on hers
made her sick. She ran into the kitchen and vomited in the sink. And she thought I didn't know why. Well, I know. I've always known. I've always known everything about her. I always will. I'll never lose her and I'll never let her go and she'll wish she had died before she almost vomited on me. The day will come when she'll wish she had died before that.”

The second was the passage written the night we had gone up to the roof to celebrate Ginger's making her grades. She had read that one to us, too. About the music of the spheres and the holy bond between us. About my face in the starlight, and her yearning to live up to my faith in her, to live for me.

“Effie's face in the moonlight looks like an effigy on a Crusader's tomb,” she had written. “Pure and chaste and perfect; nobody has a face like Effie's. But she doesn't want me. She's told me a thousand different ways. She only wants Cecie. I know about that; I know what they do together after they turn their lights off. I hear them. I hear them every night. Effie isn't pure. Effie is a devil whose flesh burns with the unclean passion for another woman's…”

I raised a sick face to Cecie. She shook her head and looked away.

The last passage was the one she had read us last, about the night that she and Ginger and Cecie had come to Paul's to have dinner. I remembered that we had all laughed about that, and Fig had said, laughing herself, “Lord, I embarrass myself. He must have wanted to drown me like a puppy. I followed him everywhere that year…”

“I heard them through the wall again tonight,” the passage said. “She was doing it again. Mocking me. Talking in my voice. Saying what she imagined I said to Paul, and what he said to me. Saying what she thought I wanted him to do to me, and what he would say and do if I asked him to…what does she know? What does she know of love? She thinks that what he says to her and what he does to her is love, but it isn't. What he says to me with
his mind and his eyes when we are alone, that's what love is, and she will never have it…so she mocks it. She laughs. Well, she won't laugh long, because I know him better than she does or anybody else in the world, and I know what he wants and I know how to get it for him and I will. And I will kill her. One day I will kill her for laughing. And him. When it's time.”

Cold started at my fingertips and ran up my arms and down my legs. It reached my heart and froze it rocklike and dead. I kept on thumbing pages. All of them were the same. All those years. Hate, venom, obsession, rage. Madness. Madness, clear and real and alive as the flames in front of my face.

I found the last page. Written this very night, only a few hours earlier. It was as Cecie had said, all of it. It was there. Fig's handwriting had grown larger and more erratic as she wrote, until the last few lines covered whole pages, and the point of her pen had torn through the flimsy paper. I could read the lines, though.

“It's time now,” they said. “Everything's right. It all worked. They're down there together and it's time. I can be halfway to Manhattan before the others wake up. She never should have laughed at me. She never should have. Oh, yes, it's time. And past time. Twenty-eight years past time.”

“What a book this would make,” was the last sentence.

I put the book down very carefully and put my hands on my knees and looked at Cecie without seeing her.

“Wow,” I said.

“Kate,” Cecie said, standing up, “get up now, and put your clothes on. We're leaving. You're going to have to drive, but I'll navigate for you. Come on, I'll hand them to you…”

“This can't be happening,” I said serenely.

“This is happening!” Cecie shouted. “I know how: I just figured it out, while you were reading; it's Poolie Prout, of course…she called him to come for her, and he did; he said he would, remember? And she drove over to the dock in the Sound to meet him…get dressed; she's coming, she'll be here…”

I stretched and let my head roll around on my neck.

“I don't care,” I said.

Cecie slapped me. She drew her arm back as far as she could and slapped me so that my head bounced on my neck. I put my fingers to my face and stared at her. She grabbed my shoulders and shook them and screamed into my face.