Outer Banks (44 page)

“You want to die, don't you?” she shouted. “You're planning it, aren't you? I should have seen it; I've seen it before, in the hospital…I know what you're doing; you're going to go home and do it some nice, neat, seemly little way before you have to see the doctor…you've been telling me you were all week, and I didn't hear you…goddamn you, Kate! What is it, the cancer's back? Is that it? Well, let me tell you something: so the fuck what? You think it's going to be better for Alan to do it rather than let the cancer do it? You think it's going to be better for me? You think your little boy would thank you for this; you think your friends will? Did it make you feel better when your father did it; did that help you live your life? Death is bad, Kate, but to go courting it…that's obscene! If you kill yourself you've killed all there'll ever be on this earth of Stephen. And you'll kill Alan. And me. Kate…I'm not going to lose you again. I simply will not do it. Get your clothes and come on, now. Kill yourself on your own time; as long as I'm in this place with you I AM NOT GOING TO LET YOU DIE!”

She hauled me to my feet and tossed my clothes at me, and stood thrilling like a wire while I put them on. I looked at her while I did. Her face and body seemed wrapped in flame, shimmering in the dimness almost as Fig's had last night. I thought again that she was a beautiful woman.

We started for the door. Lightning and thunder flashed and boomed, close once more.

“Wait, get the diary,” she yelled over her shoulder at me.

“Why…”

“GET IT!”

I turned back and picked up the diary.

Cecie jerked the door open. The lightning forked again, close and greenish-white. The wind howled, and I heard it once again, far and pure and silvery out on the black sea. The singing. The singing…

Fig stood in the door. She stood very still looking in at us, as silent and sodden as a drowned woman. Her hair was pasted to her skull and her lipstick was eaten off her wide mouth and her cheekbones seemed carved from the dead white skull of something wild. Her eyes stared at Cecie and at me behind her, in the doorway, but I did not think that she saw us. I did not know what she saw. She might have been there a very long time; she looked as if she had just risen from the bottom of the sea. The lightning flickered again and she gave us a small, formal smile. In her hand was a ridiculous little snubnosed pistol with black and white calfskin on the handle.

I thought, very clearly, “It's only a toy. One of Fig's little pieces of theater. We're okay, because it's only a toy.”

“In the bonds, Effie Lee,” Fig said, and fired the gun. I saw the white spurt of flame before I heard the report. Thunder cracked then; I have never been sure that I heard a report at all. But, of course, I must have.

Cecie fell. Fig looked down at her. She shook her head slightly, as you do in annoyance when you have made a trifling mistake.

“Get it right, Newton,” she said, and fired again.

When she fell, it was backward, out into the rain.

I
T
is nearly noon, though from the angle of the sun on the back of my neck, you might think that it was mid-afternoon. It is strange, how different the light is just this much further north, and what a difference two weeks makes. The last time I knelt in the sun among flowers, in the Currituck Gardens on the Outer Banks with Cecie, the light hit me almost full in the face. Today it strikes my shoulders and neck and dapples the old blue sweater of Alan's that I wear for gardening in the autumn. We had frost this morning. The wind, before it dropped, was almost cold.

It fell only a few minutes ago, and now there is that profound hush that I love, that means the turn of the tide. I hear the earth hum again. I had not thought I would do that. I hear the earth hum, and the soft slap of the waves on the beach below my garden, and that is all. I do not hear the wind off the abyss. And I do not hear the Pacmen. This time tomorrow, I will know whether or not they
are still there. I think John McCracken will tell me that they are not. Somehow, I think they are gone; that they went with that other Kate when she died on the Outer Banks. For she did die. Just not from a small lead pellet. Not in a cold sea.

But if the Pacmen are still here, it is hardly important. I know something else about living and dying now. It is something entirely new to me. It changes everything.

Right now, just at this moment, the world is timeless again. The world stands still in high sun, waiting for the blue wind of autumn to come with the turn of the tide.

I know I will never see them again, my sweet, punished Ginger, and Paul. Paul: less than nothing to me now. Less than zero. I know that we will not even speak of that night on the telephone, or write words about it in letters. We are done with each other. That died, too, on the Outer Banks. I will mourn Ginger. I have already forgotten Paul.

And I find I can remember nothing of the woman I left lying in the cabin at the Carolina Moon that night. Neither the sad, terrible, vulnerable young Fig Newton that she was, nor the even more terrible, mad, beautiful Georgina Stuart who came to Nag's Head. Nothing. When I think of her, I see darkness and a spurt of white fire. And that is all.

I saw a truly strange thing toward the end of that night, even stranger, somehow, than everything that had gone before: I saw a woman grow up before my eyes. I wish I had liked the sight better, or my part in it. When I got to the house in Nag's Head early the next morning, before dawn, Ginger was still asleep where Cecie had left her, on the couch in the living room, and it took me several minutes of shaking and calling to waken her. When she did, her face crumpled with grief and rage at me. When I finished speaking, it was another face altogether: much older, somehow harder, and with the child that I had loved irrevocably gone from behind the eyes.

I still do not know what she thinks. I know she knows that
I was somewhere with Paul, but she also knows that it came to nothing and is over now. What she made of Cecie, gone away without her clothes, I do not know. Neither do I know what she made of Fig, dead in the Carolina Moon Motel down the coast near Avon on the night of the great storm, dead and alone and without a car, in a room permanently kept by Paul Sibley. I do know that Paul was in Alabama by the time that Fig was ascertained to have died and could prove it and was cleared, and I know that there is no official doubt that Fig fired the gun that killed her. Powder burns and fingerprints and all that grisly arcana saw to that. I think that no matter what she eventually comes to believe, Ginger will not speak of it. She has her husband back, and from the look on her face when I drove away from there, she is going to keep him on a short leash from now on. He is going to need her attention and her protection; it was that I went to tell her that night. That, and to tell her that I loved her and would miss her.

No, I do not think she will speak of it. So I think that, despite the blaze of publicity that followed…
NOVELIST FOUND DEAD IN SEASIDE MOTEL IN HURRICANE, DEATH WEAPON FOUND,
etc.…We are done with it, if we want to be. Paul Sibley isn't going to mention it. Neither is Ginger, most likely. If Alan does, it will be when I am ready to talk of it, and only then. It is unlikely that Poolie Prout will, wherever he might be. I try to imagine how he must have felt, awakening in his room at the other end of the motel, the taste of the drug in his mouth and her gone, perhaps finding her there, perhaps hearing sirens…I feel sure that once he got the drift of things, he found it expedient to move his base of operations to a more hospitable climate. I imagine he left, as I did, before dawn that same morning.

It was first light as I drove over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Just as I had planned before I started out for Nag's Head. A long time ago; so long…I had driven most of the way in the rain, and for a great deal of the trip I cried. I thought of Cecie and of Stephen, of Paul and Ginger and Fig—the young Fig—and of
Alan, and I cried and cried. There were many people in the little car that night; I rode with the living and the dead beside the black sea, in the dwindling rain. By the time I came up on the big bridge, the rain was only a soft mist. I thought of the poem that Cecie and I had loved:

Grief doubled me over the steering wheel, and then I raised my head again. She was with me and would always be with me. I would see to that. I would never let her go. I thought of what she had said to me on the beach in Nag's Head: “As long as we live, they do.”

All right, then, I thought. While I live, she does. While I live, Stephen does. While I live, we all do. We live as we did then, we four, whole and clean and laughing. With all our hopes and dreams and that foolishness still ahead. That's enough. That's more than enough. That's everything.

I learned the central lesson of my life from Cecie Hart Fiori that night: that life can only be kept by giving it away. But then it will bloom.

When I came to the highest point in the arc of the bridge, I stopped the car and got out and walked to the railing. I knew just how to do this; hadn't I rehearsed it, only a scant week before? Yes, I knew how to do this. Down on the water the last of the rain dimpled the flat, oily gray swells of the great bay, but out at sea the sky was bright. Morning was coming up fast. The day would be fair.

I raised my arm over my head and threw the diary far out into the misty air. I did not leave the rail until I heard it hit, far below.

*   *   *

Georgina Stuart was buried a week later in a private cemetery on Long Island. The Abramses and the Sibleys did not attend. But
People
magazine did.

*   *   *

I hear the screened door slam and look down from the dune line to see Alan waving at me from the deck. He is carrying a tray of Bloody Marys, and he is smiling. Everything looks good from up here, where I kneel surrounded by the rich black earth that I have hauled up in the wheelbarrow. Everything looks simple and good and very clear: the house, the deck, Alan, the scarlet drinks: everything.

“What are you doing?” he calls.

“Planting
rosa rugosa,”
I reply. “Beach roses. They came this morning from that garden I told you about, in Nag's Head. Currituck. Cecie had them sent when we were there; they're a surprise. There's a card with them that says, ‘L'chaim.” Only it's spelled, La Hime. You never could spell shit, Miz Fiori.”

“It wasn't me,” Cecie calls from the chaise in the sun at the end of the deck. “I can too spell L'chaim. I can spell shit, too, as far as that goes.”

She is looking much better now, a little heavier, faintly tanned from the days on our back deck, with only the thin white line of the bandage on her shoulder showing under the collar of her shirt. John McCracken, who took the bullet out and lost it and the record of her visit without raising a sandy eyebrow, says she can “resume normal activities” next week. She was ferociously adamant about my taking her to him, enduring the long drive and the pain with serenity. “Anybody else will report it,” she said. “It doesn't hurt.” And I don't think it did, not then. Cecie had simply gone away inside herself again. The bleeding was minimal, and stopped by the time we cleared Virginia.

So we will start with the Cloisters. And we will go on from
there. Cecie has given me back my life, for a little while or a long one. I am going to give her hers now.

“We can't see the roses if you put 'em up there,” Alan says, but he is grinning.

“Maybe not, but they'll be spectacular from the beach,” I say. “And they'll live forever.”

“Friendships between women are very complicated things, and not necessarily sweet. But I think those earliest friendships are some of the most formative of our entire lives. At 18, we're such unfinished people. When you come back together later, everybody's battered, beaten up, kicked. We're profoundly different people, and we're often wounded adults. We found the capacity of those old friendships was to heal. It was not only a vacation for us. But most of us went away feeling a lot wholer, and in some ways comforted.”

1. According to Ginger, “whenever a ship is going to go down you can hear something like singing in the wind. Bankers say it's mermaids calling the sailors…they say when you hear it, you have no choice but to follow it, and you end up on the shoals.” What is the significance of this myth for Siddons' characters? Did any of them hear the mermaids singing, yet not “end up on the shoals?” If so, what saved them? Who are the mermaids in Kate's life?

2. Kate can't help but imagine her cancer cells as microscopic Pacmen. How might this metaphor help her? How does it harm her? What is it that finally enables her to no longer fear the Pacmen? What does she mean when she thinks the Pacmen, “went with that other Kate, when she died on the Outer Banks?”

3. What does Kate mean when she refers to herself as an “abyss walker?” What is her abyss? Do you consider yourself one of the “non-abyss-people?” What role does her father's suicide play in Kate's understanding of her own abyss?

4. Kate muses, “how truly terrible, that it is easier to live a total lie, become a lie yourself, than assimilate to the hated truth.” Which characters weave fictitious lives for themselves? And why? What is it that forces each of them to confront reality?

5. How are the four grown women who return to the Outer Banks different from the young sorority sisters they were 28 years ago? Which of them have been “battered, beaten up, kicked” by life the most? How so?

6. How would you characterize the different kinds of friendships and loves explored in
Outer Banks
? Which have the capacity to heal, and which to harm? Is it possible to have one without the other?

7. Why do you think this novel was set on the Outer Banks? What role does the sea play in these characters' lives? Why are they all drawn to the ocean? How relevant are the pirate and mermaid myths for these characters?

8. What is it about Dorothy Parker's poetry that so captivates the young Kate and Cecie? What is their relationship to her acerbic lines as they get older? Why do you think it changes?