Islands: A Novel Part 12

"I couldn't leave Outreach that much," I protested, seeing the idea form itself in my head even as I demurred. "And I'd be away from home a lot more than I want to be. I'm at the age when I should be slowing down, not taking on a whole new career and routinely slogging around in jungles or deserts or wherever. It's a good idea, though."

Lewis leaned back in his dilapidated chair and swigged warm local beer, grimacing.

"Well, how about this?" he said. "How about you fly into one or two cities a month where they have medical volunteer programs like ours, and maybe a couple of times a year to Washington, and have seminars on setting up these programs? Teach the docs how you do it and how to recruit local talent, show them what and who's needed and how to locate them wherever the teams go. Maybe teach seminars for the nurses, too; they're probably the ones who'll end up setting up the programs. Make up brochures and a slide show or film or something showing what you've done in other places. Get some testimonials."

"I...how can I leave the office that long?" I said. "And who would hire me? I'd have to make at least enough money to cover expenses. I could donate my time, but airfare and hotels-"

"A," Lewis said, "Outreach can run itself by now. You know that. That Marcy of yours could head it and you could keep a little office s.p.a.ce there if you liked, help out when things were slow for you. B, who'd hire you? Anybody sponsoring these groups, in a New York minute."

"But how would they know about me?"

"Are you kidding? This bunch tells their sponsors. They tell others. And so on. You'll be launched in a month."

"Right, by G.o.d," said the tropical specialist, swatting on his neck something large and evil that was not a mosquito, but no longer noticing. "I'm calling my bunch before we leave here."

I thought perhaps his promise would be washed away with the p.i.s.s of the next morning's hangover, but it was not. I had an invitation in Pittsburgh and one in Houston before we left the jungle.

It's what I have done ever since. I keep a cubicle at the office in Charleston, and pay Outreach a modest rent, and I help out every now and then when they're abysmally overloaded. But mainly I spend a couple of days almost every week in cities around the country, and the rest of the time I'm on the phone with clients, or in meetings when they come to me. I miss working daily with Outreach, but as Henry had predicted, Marcy is a superb director, and with our enlarged staff and Camilla's bridge pals's largesse, the office rolls smoothly on largely without me.

Sometimes I hated that. I would think back to the early days, of scrabbling for funds and holding wet, squirming babies and chasing down empty-headed teenage mothers and trying to coax another summer out of my disreputable old car. I would remember the day I met Lewis, in the steaming rain in his parking lot, clutching a wriggling abandoned child, and my heart would squeeze with love and wistfulness for that wild-haired young woman and outrageous red younger man.

But all in all, I loved what I did, and I knew that it was important work, and I still went home most evenings to the dancing wild man, who was, if less red-thatched on top, still a laughing, freckled dervish. Lewis, in his sixties, had lost little but hair.

We spent a lot more of our time out at Sweetgra.s.s in the latter part of the decade. Lewis had acquired a rangy, dedicated young partner for his practice, and spent a great deal more time in the charity clinic. But except for emergencies, he kept his clinic hours to the first three days of the week, and came home to the Edisto house on Wednesday nights or Thursday mornings. When I came back home to Charleston now, it was in all probability to Edisto that I went. The slow, dreaming spell of the river and marsh, and the sweet whisper of the old oaks and longleaf pines in which Lewis had planted many of his acres for a cash crop to run the plantation, and the gra.s.sy hummocks and skeins of drifting gray moss soothed my airline-jangled nerves, and gave me back my young husband.

For Lewis flourished like the proverbial green bay tree at Sweetgra.s.s, and I could see, in his freckle-splotched face and wide, sweet grin, the day that we would sell or rent Bull Street and divide our time between Sweetgra.s.s and the beach house. We only kept the house now for a place to spend the night in town, or to put our feet up during a long, hectic day. I still loved my funny little Gothic cave, but more and more, Sweetgra.s.s was mine and Lewis's real home.

The beach house was still our collective home, the home for the ent.i.ty that was the Scrubs. Wherever we strayed, no matter what changes had come to us, we all came homing back to Sullivan's Island like pigeons, whenever we could manage it. It seemed to me to be even more precious now, with the years spinning faster away from us, than it had been in that golden time when time itself seemed to bubble like a bottomless spring from the sand.

Henry, too, was semiretired by now, and devoted a great deal more time to his trips out of town with the flying doctors. Fairlie, still darting and restless of mind and body, had largely given up her dance cla.s.ses, and grew bored and snappish in Henry's absences. She finally surprised us all by taking up riding and then teaching equestrian courses to children and preteens at the big equestrian center on John's Island. She bloomed again in the long, sunny days on horseback, and even entered a couple of shows on the hunter-jumper she preferred. She won in her cla.s.s both times.

We were all surprised; Fairlie had never before shown any interest in riding. We did not even know that she rode, or if she had told us, did not remember.

"But I always did at home, until I came to the College of Charleston," she said. "I was d.a.m.ned good. Ribbons and cups all over the house. It feels wonderful to be back at it, and Henry's gone so often. I'm thinking of buying my own horse. We always had them at home, though they were mainly flat racers."

"What does Henry think of all this?" Camilla said in amus.e.m.e.nt.

"He thinks it's great. Keeps me off his back."

"A horse will go great on Bedon's Alley," Simms said, grinning. "You can keep him in the kennel with Gladys."

For old Gladys, thin and patchy in her hide, and limping, was still alive and in relatively good health, and still fiercely and devotedly Henry's dog.

"The j.a.panese call it the one-pointed heart," Camilla said once, observing Gladys's devotion. "They talk about it in reference to artists who are consumed by their work, but I don't see why it shouldn't apply to dogs. I'm reading a book about sixteenth-century j.a.panese art."

"I thought you were writing a book," Lila said, smiling at her lifelong friend.

"That, too," Camilla said Our old dogs out at Sweetgra.s.s had long since died, and lay now in the dog cemetery under a live oak behind the house, in the herb garden Linda Cousins kept. There were many of them, the dogs of this place, back to the very first one, Lewis said. He often went to visit them in the cool of the evenings. Robert Cousins, who had been the master of many of their hearts, kept the graves clipped and mowed and the small headstones upright. I thought that he grieved truly for them. He and Lewis talked of them often, as if they had been old friends, lost. Well, of course they had.

Lila's wild-hearted little Sugar was gone. It seemed to me that she simply and finally wore out her great, joyful heart and went to sleep. Lila cried for days, and I cried, too. I had loved the ridiculous little dog, who had never known her boundaries. Simms had given Lila another Maltese, a puppy, for Christmas that year, and she was a lovely little thing, pet.i.te and winsome and so feminine as to make you laugh. Lila swore she batted her long eyelashes at you. Her name was Honey. Lila doted on her. I could never really warm to her, after my love affair with the tiny tiger that had been Sugar. But she went everywhere with Lila, in her large Realtor's tote, to all appointments and to the office and shopping, to the beach house.

"You spend more time with that dog than you do Simms," Fairlie said once to Lila. Fairlie was not a fan of Honey. The little dog had bitten her knuckles sharply when Fairlie reached to pet her.

"Well, I wouldn't stick my hand right in your horse's face...if you had a horse," Lila had said, in defense and only half teasing.

"A well-trained horse wouldn't bite no matter what," Fairlie had snapped. "Maybe 'well trained' is the operative word here. Does she bite Simms? I'll bet she does."

"I don't think she really knows who Simms is," Lila said sweetly.

We shifted uncomfortably around the dinner table. Simms's trips away were escalating as he neared retirement age, and his career was not slowing, as the other men's had. Logically, we all knew why. The medical-supply company was represented on three continents now. Simms would want to see everything in order before he eased off and pa.s.sed the reins. We all supposed it would be to his daughter Clary's methodical Rotary Club husband, by whom he had three interchangeable grandchildren. I wondered sometimes if he had not simply had his order for a son-in-law and successor filled early on. Timothy was perfect in both respects. It was difficult to tell how Clary felt about it. She was, as Fairlie said, the uncrowned soccer mom of the Western Hemisphere, totally immersed in her children.

Lila and Simms were very rich now, much more so than any of us were or ever would be. But very little had changed on the surface of their lives. They still lived on East Battery, in the beautiful old house they had always owned. They still came to the beach house, though Simms not so frequently as the rest of us. They had let the place on Wadmalaw go, and mostly Lila worked. Simms sailed often, ferociously and alone. Once in a while they spent some time with their daughter's family on Kiawah, but the children and grandchildren of Lila and Simms did not come to Sullivan's Island.

Come to that, none of ours did either, not really. Lewis's two daughters were both married, with children. They had fled California and their mother, and settled on Long Island and in Connecticut respectively, and went in the summers to Europe or the Caribbean or Point O' Woods. They called dutifully, and once or twice we saw them when Lewis or I had business in New York, for lunches with the grandchildren at the Russian Tea Room, or dinners somewhere stark and chic that the twins picked. They had brought the grandchildren to Edisto once while they sailed in the Greek isles, and the children sulked and sighed loudly, and refused to go out into the heat of the Low Country, preferring to watch television. They were unmoved by the ospreys and eagles and herons and wood storks, and refused even to accompany their grandfather to the wondrous baby alligator nursery. The bobcat, I supposed, had long ago gone to some black-water hummock in the sky, but on certain still nights when the river was silent except for the lazy slap against the pilings of the dock, and no moon rode the sky, we both heard, or thought we did, the faint rustle of spartina gra.s.s at the foot of the dock, and the slap-thud of heavy paws. The children did not come out to listen. The summer that they were with us, the Perseid meteor shower was closer and more spectacular than we could remember, extravagant fireworks in the sky, but the aggrieved children were glued to the hard-rock channel on cable, mourning the malls of Long Island and Connecticut. We were both exhausted and delighted when we decanted them from the ancient Range Rover at the Charleston airport.

"Truly the sp.a.w.n of their grandmother," Lewis said. The children did not visit again.

Henry and Fairlie did spend a lot of time with their daughter, Nancy, and her brood of tall, skinny red-blond children. They were as gangling and sweet tempered as Henry and as quicksilver as Fairlie, and we all enjoyed them when they came out to the beach house. But they, too, had their own enclave at Wild Dunes, and Fairlie and Henry saw them mostly there or in Bedon's Alley.

"I wish they had a place like this to run wild in," Henry said to us when he and Fairlie had come out to Edisto the last weekend of the year and the century. "They're going to grow up with no sense at all of the plantation life that all their people before them lived. They already think a plantation is a place with guides in costumes, that you have to pay to get into."

"I always thought you'd maybe buy a place out here or somewhere after your island place went with Hugo," Lewis said. "I remember that for a while you were talking about it. It's surely not too late. The Crunches are putting Red Wing on the market. I think Lila's handling it. We'd be neighbors."

There was an odd silence. Henry shoved his hands into his pockets and kicked at a stump. Fairlie looked off down the river.

"It just never seemed the right time," Henry said finally. "Listen, there's something-"

"I need to get back to town," Fairlie said abruptly. "The center has a new mare coming in from Aiken. I want to get a look at her."

She turned and started back to their truck. Henry looked at us helplessly, then shrugged and turned and followed her. "See you guys New Year's," he said over his shoulder. Lewis and I stared after them. I thought they had planned to stay for lunch.

I told Camilla about the little scene when I went up to have lunch with her the next day.

"He had something he wanted to say to us," I said. "But she just cut him off."

She looked out over the water.

"She's a force of nature," she said. "He could no more stand up to her for very long than he could to a category-five hurricane."

"You think there's something on Fairlie's mind that she doesn't want us to know?"

"Has been, for a long time. She's been downright distant. Usually you can't stop her talking."

And she had, now that I thought of it. Distant and even more restless than usual.

"Well, at least Henry seems pretty much the same," I said worriedly. "Or he did until yesterday."

"Bless his dearest heart," Camilla said, smiling. "It takes a lot to ruffle Henry. She can do it, though. I always wondered, in a way, why he married her, aside from the fact that he's crazy about her, of course. Henry needs a safe, sheltered harbor more than anybody else I know. He hasn't had a whole lot of that with Fairlie. Of course, he'd never say so, but I've known him all my life. I know when he needs his home port."

I had never thought of Henry as someone who needed an anchor, or a sheltered harbor. He went fearlessly and with relish into places few other men would go. But still, she was right; she had known him since kindergarten, at Miss Hanahan's Little School behind her home on Church Street.

"All of a sudden it feels like almost everybody I know is...somebody I don't know," I said unhappily. "I wish I knew what was going on with us."

"It's not all of us," she said, pouring me a last cup of the fragrant oolong that she knew I loved. "It's just some of us. Maybe we'll find out New Year's Eve. No better time to open people up. Don't fret, Anny. It will take more than a couple of burrs under our saddles to change us in any important way."

She got up to pull the drapes across the French doors to the terrace, where the dull glitter of low winter light on the water was blinding. I got up and went back downstairs to my office for the last time in the only century I knew.

7.

THE NEXT MORNING, New Year's Eve, 1999, I got up early and went over to the Queens Hospital Wellness Center to do my stint on the treadmill and the weights. I tried to do it every time we stayed in town, which we'd done the night before because we were going out to the beach house around midafternoon. But I'd never liked it, and only did it because Lewis insisted, and it did make me feel better.

Henry did it religiously most mornings when he was in town, and relished it. For one thing, it kept his body compact and trim, and for another, it was the hands-down favorite unofficial social club of the downtown community-the men, anyway. They all knew each other, and were easy in the knowing, not caring a whit about sagging stomachs or softening biceps. I envied them both the effortless companionship and the careless acceptance of their bodies.

For myself, I had no corresponding network of exercise buddies, largely because I got there earlier than most women did, and was glad of that. I hated the idea of jiggling and huffing and sweating under the eyes of anybody else, most especially the sleek women who came to the center on their way to lunch or committee meetings, carrying their street clothes in Saks bags. So I came early, m.u.f.fled in sweats, and sought out the farthest treadmill in the room, and the weight bench farthest from the mirrored wall. Usually I had my corner of the gym to myself, but today there was someone striding vigorously on the elliptical trainer next to my favorite treadmill. Before I could sidle away, a high female voice cried, "Mrs. Aiken! Anny! Happy New Year!"

Oh, s.h.i.t, I thought. Bunny Burford. Just exactly the note I want to end the century on.

Bunny was a legend in the downtown medical community. Once, when I first knew her, I called her an icon, and Lewis grimaced and said, "An iceberg would be more like it."

"But she's always giggling and trilling and hugging," I said. "I don't see any ice in that."

"That's because the real Bunny Burford is submerged so deep very few people ever see her. But way down there she's cold as steel and twice as hard. If you don't know how to handle her, she can be d.a.m.ned dangerous. Don't ever tell her anything personal, Anny. She won't forget it, and she'll find a way to use it."

"Then how did she get to be deputy administrator of Queens? Seems to me you'd have to have something more going for you than spite and ambition."

"Oh, she does. She's smart as a whip, and she runs a tighter ship than Charlie ever did. She was his secretary when he first came to the hospital, and she made herself more and more indispensable, until she really could run it almost as well as he could. Trouble was, not many of our big supporters liked her, and the staff certainly didn't. She was merciless to the nurses. Henry always thought she wanted to be a doctor, and made her position at Queens into the next-best thing. Her authority is almost una.s.sailable. It would take someone years to learn as much about the hospital and the people there as Bunny knows. She fancies herself a sort of social hostess, too. She shows up at every party and fund-raiser and seminar as though she were an ordained part of it, and smiles and flatters and listens raptly until whoever's being courted is floating ten feet off the floor. In that sense, she is a good fund-raiser. It's one of the reasons n.o.body wants to challenge her."

"And the other reasons?"

"Well, like I said, she knows an awful lot about an awful lot of people. I don't know if she's ever used any of it or not, though I've heard she has, but everybody knows she could. Now that's power."

"She sounds awful," I said. "I don't see how an...an outlander could just come into Queens and get herself an inside track like that."

"Well," he said, "for one thing she's not exactly an outlander. She grew up on Church Street and went to Miss Hanahan's Little School along with most of us, and her brains got her a scholarship to Ashley Hall with a lot of the girls. I don't imagine she was ever really part of all that...she went to the Little School because her mother was a teacher's helper there, and they lived on Church dependent on somebody or other in exchange for her mother's doing the cleaning. I don't know where or if she went to college; I think I heard business school. I know she wasn't around Charleston for a while. And then, just after Charlie came in to take over, she appeared in his office and asked to be his secretary, and she was so smooth and a.s.sured and obviously smart, and she asked for so little money, that he hired her on the spot. You know Charlie...he was never a detail man. He was more than glad to have somebody competent to handle all that. And she was very, very competent. Good looking, too. That didn't hurt."

"Good looking?" I asked incredulously, thinking of Bunny's towering, blocklike figure and nearly vermilion hair, piled high in a lacquered coil that looked as if a mortar sh.e.l.l could not dent it. Her eyes were pale blue and narrow, and her mouth was large and lipsticked to the same shade as her hair, and all her features seemed to sit in the middle of her face, as in a child's drawing. She seemed absolutely impenetrable. She did have pretty skin, though, taut and pink and white, and virtually unlined. I wondered if the rest of Bunny, beneath the tailored Talbot suits she wore, was as smooth and soft and dewy. It was a bizarre notion.

"She was good looking, in a kind of Amazonian way," Lewis said. "She was tall, with a little waist and those incredible b.o.o.bs and hips, and her hair was almost as red as Fairlie's, and she wore it in a long pageboy. And she always wore thick red lipstick that made her look like she'd just eaten a racc.o.o.n or something. She always seemed to me like Stupefyin' Jones in Li'l Abner. Oh, yeah. She cut quite a swath for a while. Charlie dated her some when he first came."

"What happened with that?" I asked.

"Camilla," he said. "There was no contest there."

So on this last morning of the last century in the millennium, I flinched as if I had been bitten by a blackfly, and said, "Hi, Bunny. You're up and at it early this morning."

She wore a neon-pink velour top and pants, and her astonishing bosom jutted shelflike and absolutely immobile in front of her as she strode on the elliptical trainer. It was hard not to stare at it. She wore matching pink pom-poms on her white exercise shoes.

"I've got plans for later," she said coyly. "I need to get started early. What about you all? Aren't the Scrubs going somewhere exotic like Hawaii or the Riviera to see the millennium out?"

I thought that her notions of exotic did not exactly coincide with mine, and I hated the familiarity of "the Scrubs" on her lips. n.o.body else I knew but Bunny ever called us that, except us.

"Exotic in the extreme," I said. "Sullivan's Island, to be exact."

"Oh, yes, Camilla's beach house. It must really be something special; I heard enough about it from Charlie over the years. I've never seen it. We always went to the Isle of Palms."

I did not know who "we" was, and did not ask.

"Well, it's not very special, I'm afraid, except to us. It's practically falling apart. We all own it equally with Camilla now."

I was immediately sorry I had told her that; it was no one's business but ours. But something about the way "Camilla" also sounded on her lips put my back up; a sly sort of familiarity, maybe. I knew that Camilla would probably not even remember who Bunny Burford was.

She smiled broadly, her cheeks bunching up into tight little apples, and said, "How convenient for Camilla. Well, she always did know how to get what she wanted, even in kindergarten. I can remember her just standing and staring at a ball I was playing with, smiling and smiling, until I gave it to her. I never saw that smile fail. I'm surprised she hasn't smiled somebody else into taking care of her since Charlie died."

I felt cold rage spread in my chest, but would not give her the satisfaction of showing it.

"Camilla hardly needs taking care of," I said. "She usually takes care of us."

"Bet she does," Bunny said, grinning fiercely. "Well, have the Scrubs got all their supplies laid in?"

"Supplies?"

"For Y2K," she said as if to a backward child. "You know, water and food and kerosene for heating and cooking. Toilet paper, toothpaste. If the bridges go out, you all could be stuck over there for weeks."

"Sounds wonderful," I said. "I've always wanted to do that. What about you? Have you battened down?"

"Oh, yes," she said complacently. "My friend and I have reservations at a lovely hotel in Asheville, and my car is already packed with everything you could possibly need for a long siege. My friend is even bringing his gun."

"Gun?" I had a crazy image of Bunny stalking through the woods in all her ma.s.sive pink fuzziness, gun at the ready in case some woodland creature was unlucky enough to show itself.

"We don't antic.i.p.ate needing it," she said. "The hotel is very secure, and it's a lot easier to defend yourself in the mountains. But we feel safer just having it. You never know who might break into your room in a power outage."

True, I thought. It's undoubtedly open season on room service waiters.

Aloud I said, "Well, good luck to you, Bunny. I hope you don't have to use any of that stuff. And have a happy new whatever."

"The same to you," she said as I got off the treadmill and started for the shower. I wanted to get in and out and dressed again before she came into the locker room. Bunny Burford naked and pink and dripping was more than I could handle. I turned away so she could not see the laughter starting in my eyes.

"You all get your supplies in, you hear?" she called after me. "Better to be safe than sorry."

"Right," I called back over my shoulder. "I'm just on my way to pick up sandbags now."