Islands: A Novel Part 16

Nancy's voice rose to a wail. I knew that she was not speaking to me.

"You care more about that d.a.m.ned old dog than you do us! You always did! The dog and the precious Scrubs-"

Somebody replaced the phone very softly.

I told no one.

As often happens in the Low Country, the spell of bitter February weather morphed abruptly into spring and stayed there. The air was sweet and tender with the smell of the first bloomings, and the skies over the harbor were denim blue and dotted with fluffy white Disney clouds. Afternoon temperatures crept toward the seventies, rains were mild and showery, and Charleston moved outdoors.

We moved into the three houses on the creek. Or at least Camilla did, lock, stock, and barrel, into the middle house she had been in when I first saw the creek property. She was, she said, going to spend a week or two there, and she hoped we'd join her when we could; the marshes were greening and battalions of waterfowl were back. She had seen a flight of egrets the day before that had looked like a snowstorm, settling into a huge live oak across the creek.

"Camilla, do you think you should be out there alone all that time?" I said. "It's not like Sullivan's; there's not a soul around out there for miles and miles. It's really wild country. I'm not sure I'd want to be there alone even overnight."

"I'm not afraid," she said, smiling. "I never have been, on the water. It's not like I was the only living thing out there; the marshes and creek at night are as noisy as the VFW hut on Bohicket Road. Everything in the swamp is out trying to seduce everything else."

In the end, we had decided that we could not leave her alone on the creek, and on the following weekend we brought whatever furniture we could gather and set out in a caravan down the Maybank Highway. Simms had brought a huge truck and crew from the plant, and by late Sat.u.r.day afternon, we were in.

Lila and Simms had brought most of the furniture they had moved from their Wadmalaw Island place; it had been in storage at the plant. It was lovely: big, carved pieces with the look of the West Indies about them, and a lot of airy rattan. Their bedroom had a mahogany plantation bed, overhung with sheer white cotton fabric, that I coveted. By the time the crew left with the truck, everything looked as if it had been there for years, just waiting, Lewis said, for Architectural Digest to get there.

Our house, on Camilla's right and closest to the water, had a few rump-sprung pieces of wicker that had not been claimed from the Battery house and a quartet of plain iron beds that had been in the children's sleeping porch at Sweetgra.s.s. Linda and Robert Cousins, old now and withered of skin but still erect and vital, came out on moving day with a carful of wonderful old linen: sheets, coverlets, dresser scarves, napkins, tablecloths, a few thin, silky towels. They had long been folded away somewhere with camphor and lavender. It perfumed the whole house.

"They were Lewis's grandmother's everyday linens," Linda said when I exclaimed over them. "Miss Sissy was fixing to throw them out. I dug them out of the barrel and took them home and put them away. I always thought somebody might want them."

I hugged her. She smelled of the same lavender and camphor. "It will make this place home in an eyeblink," I said.

"Something needs to," she said tartly. "What you doing out here on this creek and marsh? You got a creek and marsh just like it back at Sweetgra.s.s."

We had, in fact; I had thought about that more than once. But it seemed to me that this marsh and this creek were very different from the ones on Edisto. This was creek water, slower and darker, though almost as wide. The land on the hummock was wilder. And there were no ghosts. That was the main thing. I was done with shades and remembrances every time I rounded a corner or put a foot on a creaking stair. I would never in my life stop loving and missing Charlie and Fairlie, but I could not have borne them catching at my heart twenty times a day. I needed life and the living, and hoped that we could make it happen here.

On the first night, we had dinner with Camilla, and I thought that it would take a lot of getting used to, deciding where we would all have dinner together, or even if we would. There had been no question of that at the beach house.

We sat in candlelight at Camilla's pretty French painted table, and ate oysters Robert Cousins had dug from the bank at Sweetgra.s.s, and Linda's she-crab soup. I had brought bread from the Saffron Bakery, and Lila had made an angel food cake, and Simms had brought wine. He did not bring champagne; he never did again, not to the creek.

Oddly, Gladys adjusted to the creek better than I would have thought. She still followed me about, or slept at my feet wherever I sat down, but she did not whine anymore, or pace, sniffing, searching for Henry. I thought that perhaps there were no ghosts here for Gladys, either. It might be as restful for her as it was becoming for me.

For we were making an entirely new context for ourselves here, and on the whole, I did not mind. If I could not have all of it, the Scrubs and the old house and the sea, then I wanted none of it. Oh, we still had each other, but we did not feel like us, at least not to me. It was hard to tell about Lila and Simms; they seemed to do the same things they had done on Sullivan's Island, without comment or apparent pangs of memory. Simms sailed; he brought the smallest of his two sailboats to the creek and moored it to the deepwater dock, and vanished into the sun every morning we were there, ghosting back in at twilight. Lila made phone calls on her cell phone to clients and the office. She had taken up painting, and spent hours on the creek or in the marsh, hatted and netted against sun and mosquitoes, painting and painting. She was not at all bad, and by the end of summer was getting quite good. Her friend Baby, who had a small gallery on Broad Street, was giving her a show in the fall. All of us had Lila's paintings in our creek houses.

Lewis took to sailing with Simms often, rediscovering the joy he had taken in it when he was newly married and living on the Battery. I remember the photograph I had seen in his office on the day that we met, of him and the dark, beautiful Sissy, on the deck of a sleek, white sailboat, with Fort Sumter in the background. He was not as obsessively compet.i.tive as Simms, but he relished it when they won an occasional Carolina Yacht Club regatta, and was talking of getting a small boat himself, to keep at the creek.

I took to the water. I had walked at Sullivan's, walked and walked, for miles, mindlessly, often with one or more of the dogs, letting the sun and the wind and sea pour over and into me until I was drunk on them. I missed walking terribly, but it was not, after all, the same here on the creek. There was only the dirt road into the property, and it was blasted with potholes and soggy most of the time with standing rainwater. And the mosquitoes were after you like F-14s the instant you went out the door. Sometimes I put on layers of clothing and thick insect repellent and took Gladys for rides in the golf cart, but even she soon learned to hate the strafing mosquitoes. But she adored the old golf cart, and often simply sat in it, dozing in the sun, like an old lady waiting for the men to play through.

When I took out the Boston Whaler or the rowboat, she often went with me, wallowing clumsily about until she found a sunny spot on the floor that suited her. In the rowboat she napped, and in the Whaler she sat beside me on the backseat, her ears flapping in the wind, her tongue lolling crazily. Once in a while she barked at a waterbird or a sunning turtle or the distant flashing white flag of a deer on a hummock across the creek, but it seemed to be more of a duty bark than anything else. I did not worry about alligators here as I would have on Edisto. Though we had heard the bone-freezing roar of a big bull somewhere far away, across the water in the night, we had seen no evidence of gator colonies, and Lewis and Simms reported none to speak of on their sails down the creek toward open water. I did not worry about gators and slow, lame old Gladys. When she was not inside, she was with me.

I would come in from afternoon hours on the water and poke my head into Camilla's house. We all did, when we returned from wherever the day had taken us. It had not been planned; it was just that Camilla was, as she had always been, the hearth at which we warmed ourselves. It seemed entirely right and natural to check in with her when we returned from our travels. Often we sat long on her porch or in the screened cage around the pool in back and talked into the twilight, and sometimes made impromptu dinners. But often we just looked in, exchanged what-did-you-do-todays, and went back to our own pursuits in our own houses.

It was a fragmented existence, that first spring and summer. Lewis and I both still worked hard, though I had curtailed my out-of-town time drastically, and did most of my planning by telephone or e-mail. I had hired a young woman part-time, and trained her carefully, and was delighted to find that she was becoming very proficient indeed on the necessary out-of-town, face-time trips. I was in the little office on Gillon the early part of the week, at Sweetgra.s.s with Louis on Thursdays and Fridays, and, as we had been at Sullivan's Island, at the creek house on the weekends. We seldom went to Bull Street, though I tried to look in at least once a week.

We talked often of selling it, or renting it, but I wanted, obscurely, to keep it. I simply could not give up every thread that had been woven for so long into my life.

We did not often see Camilla outdoors at the creek. The sun and mosquitoes savaged her fair skin, and she feared a fall now, as we did for her. She did garden, but very slowly and carefully; mostly she tended the common plantings and the pot garden that Robert Cousins and Simms and Lila's gardener, Willie, had put in. She was completely delighted to see us when we were there; we knew that, but she was also content during the weekdays, when she was alone. Indeed, she bloomed. Her fine, high color came back and a faint tan smoothed the lines around her eyes and lips. She had taken to wearing her hair in one long braid, down her back, and from a distance, if seen from the front, she looked like a teenager.

"What do you do out here all week?" I asked once early on, as we sat on her porch with drinks and nibbles.

"What I always did on the water," she said. "Garden. Write. Nap. Sun. Swim a little. Wait."

"For what? For Henry?"

For a month had gone by, and we had not heard from or of Henry. He was always in our hearts, heavy under the surface. But we had not yet called Nancy, or tried to track him through the doctors' organization. It had not, after all, been so long. Give him a little more time, we said.

"Well, for Henry, sure," Camilla said. "But mainly for all of you."

Once, after we had had everybody to our house for Sunday brunch, I had gotten angry at something or other Lila had said, and she had flared up at my reaction, and things were still cool when everyone left. Lewis was surprised by the heat of my anger, and so was I; Lila's comment had been so innocuous that I could not even remember what it had been an hour after she left. I was surprised at her reaction, too. We had sniped at each other like a couple of peckish old ladies.

"We're not the Scrubs anymore," I huffed at Lewis as we cleared away the dishes. "We're just a bunch of cranky old people hanging out in tract houses."

"Well," he said mildly, "if that's what we are, let's make the best of it."

And I suppose that we did. At least, we tried. But there remained a tentativeness, a strangeness, in our togetherness, and under it all now lay a deep grief for Henry. Grief and worry that became real fear.

When two months had gone by and we still had not heard from him, we began to talk among ourselves about trying to track him down. Lila and Simms were all for it.

"Something's not right," Lila said over and over. "Ordinarily we'd have heard something about him, or somebody would. And if they had, it would be all over Charleston. But it's as if he's dropped off the face of the earth. He could be somewhere sick; he could-"

"He said he'd call when he was ready," Lewis said. "He asked us to honor that. I for one am going to do it. If something had...happened to him, we'd hear. His doctors' organization would hear. We'd know."

"At least we could call Nancy," Lila said unhappily. "He must keep in touch with her."

"He'd call us if he called her," Camilla said. "Besides, she doesn't want to hear from any of us."

"How do you know?" I said, feeling guilt start up around my heart. Had the breach I opened been extended to include all of us?

"I just know," Camilla said. "Under the circ.u.mstances, I don't think I'd want to hear from us, either."

"What circ.u.mstances?"

"You must have figured out that she thinks we cut Henry and her mother off from her. I think she thinks that if it hadn't been for the Scrubs and the beach house..."

I was silent. Perhaps Nancy was right.

In early May we began to hear things. One of the doctors Henry and Lewis had been accustomed to flying with early in their tenure called Lewis to see if he'd heard from Henry. Lewis was at the clinic, and called me at work.

"I was floored," he said. "I guess I just a.s.sumed he was off on one of his flying trips with the docs in his organization. I haven't kept up with them. And maybe he has been. John hadn't been on the last three trips, and he was just now hearing about Fairlie. He's going to call around to some of the others that Henry has flown with. And some of the air-charter services they use. He said he'd let me know. Somebody's bound to have a record of him somewhere. But I have to admit, I'm really worried."

"There are things we can do, you know," Simms said that night at dinner.

It was Sat.u.r.day, and we were having the first of the sweet creek shrimp, boiled in salt.w.a.ter and peeled at the table. We were at our house. Shrimp juice wouldn't harm our old trestle table. Nothing would. Robert Cousins, who knew how to cast in the secret shrimp holes on Edisto with a cotton net, had brought them out that afternoon. Robert made his own nets. You could buy vastly more enduring nylon ones in every Low Country chain hardware store, but Robert thought them shoddy and somehow shameful. Lewis said he had once known how to weave the cotton nets, but it was an art that had to be practiced, and he'd forgotten. It was one thing, he said, that he planned to do with his retirement: get Robert to teach him once more to weave the beautiful, gossamer webs of cotton net, and to cast them.

It was a still night, and we could hear the tiny shrimp popping in the creek, and the plop of mullet. Camilla said they had only recently come back in force. The marsh was full green now, and so vast and deep and salt-rich that it seemed to breathe in and out like a single ent.i.ty. The moon was down; it would be near morning before it rose, but the stars bloomed like chrysanthemums. The mosquitoes sang and strafed. Far out over the water we heard, or thought we did, the rolling roar of the big bull gator.

After the primal bellow had faded, we all looked at Simms. He was leaning back in his chair and had the full, suffused look on his round face that we had come to know meant the international executive had temporarily taken over. Lewis called it his evil twin. Simms could be overbearing and obsessively stubborn in this persona. None of us wanted to see the evil twin decide to go after Henry. He would pursue him like the hound of heaven.

"Such as?" Lewis said, frowning.

"You know. Phone records. Credit card records. Car rentals. Airline tickets. Withdrawals and deposits at the bank. We've got the resources at the office. I could find him in a day."

"You sound like a skip tracer," Lewis said. "We told Henry we'd honor his decision to call when he was ready, and I think we need to do it. All this sounds so G.o.dd.a.m.n furtive."

The evil twin slunk out of Simms's face, and he sighed.

"I know it. It's just that he's my oldest friend except for you all, and I'm really worried about him now. I know the frame of mind he was in when he left."

A week or so later one of the nurses at Queens, who had flown with Henry and Lewis many times, heard from a Georgia nurse who sometimes flew with the organization that there had been talk around a minuscule village deep in the forests of the Yucatan Peninsula of an American who had come in a plane with American doctors and nurses and set up a rudimentary clinic and who had stayed on when the plane flew away.

At first he had continued to treat villagers in the clinic, but then he had begun to drink away most of the afternoons and evenings, in the cantina, and had stopped going to the clinic. He stayed in a small shack on the riverbank with an Indio teenager, one of the girls at the local brothel, and did not come out except to go to the cantina. There he talked to no one, only drank, until he stumbled home late in the evening. He never fell, but he was never entirely steady, either, and the villagers, who had become fond of him when he'd first come, tacitly looked out for him. They left fish and fruit and cornmeal on his doorstep. They a.s.sumed that the teenage prost.i.tute kept his house and cooked his food. No one knew. He had grown so thin that you could almost see through him. His beard had grown out and he shielded his eyes with dark gla.s.ses. Once, when a desperate young woman had taken her sick baby to his shack, he had begun to cry and told her that she would be better off going to the village shaman. n.o.body went to him for healing anymore.

The nurse told Bunny Burford, who immediately shotgunned it around the entire medical community that Henry McKenzie had turned into a falling-down drunk and was living in a jungle hut with a fifteen-year-old wh.o.r.e. The news reached Lewis at the clinic a scant two hours after Bunny began her broadcast, and he was at the hospital and in her office not fifteen minutes later.

He never told me what he said to her, but when he came by my office, he was angrier than I had ever seen him, and Bunny had been called into her boss's office for a meeting with him and Lewis, and had spent the rest of the morning crying in the ladies' room. She went home without speaking to anyone.

"Lewis," I said, my heart cold, "could it be Henry? It doesn't have to be, does it? It could be anybody at all...."

"It could indeed. And if that b.i.t.c.h says one more word about Henry I'll get her fired, so help me. Stan was ready to do it today."

His voice trailed off. He swallowed hard, and looked out my window into the little courtyard, where summer had exploded showily.

"But you think it is," I whispered.

"I think it could be."

We left the office and drove by the Bedon's Alley house, but it was shuttered and the gate was padlocked, and the palms and crepe myrtles that lifted their heads above the brick wall were dry and unkempt. No one had been there for a long time. Nancy's house on Tradd was just as silent and empty, and no one answered the phone at the house on the Isle of Palms.

"Maybe they've gone to get him," I said.

"Can you see Nancy and that husband of hers whacking their way through the jungle with a machete?" Lewis said grimly.

I couldn't.

We called everybody together at the creek that night, and told them what was being pa.s.sed around Charleston. Simms yelled, "Oh, f.u.c.k it," and banged his fist on the table, and Lila began to cry. Camilla was silent, staring at Lewis. The candlelight flickering on her face made her look impa.s.sive and alien, a priestess at a shrine a millennium before the rise of Rome.

"I can find out easily enough where he is, if it's him at all, now that we have a start," Lewis said. "His organization surely keeps records of its flights, and who was on them when. I'll call in the morning. And if it's him, I'm going to go get him."

"I'm coming, too," Simms said. "You'll need help with him."

"With Henry?" Lewis said incredulously.

Simms started to argue, his face re-flushed with red, but Camilla slapped her own hands on the table. Everyone looked at her.

"No," she said. "n.o.body's going after him. Don't you know it would kill him to have us see him like this-if it's even him? Either he comes to us, or he doesn't, but we do not go after him. I simply won't have it."

We stared at her. None of us had ever heard quite that note in her voice before. It was as cold as arctic core ice.

"Okay," Lewis said after a moment. "You're right. We wait and we hope and we pray."

"Yes," Camilla said, her voice gentle again. She shone in the gloom.

In late summer, Henry came home.

10.

AUGUST ON THE MARSHES AND CREEKS of the Low Country is never comfortable and often h.e.l.lish. The heat ratchets up until it swallows air and breath and will. No ocean breezes reach in from the barrier islands. Insects so various that no one seems to know half their names hold their national conventions here. Snakes and gators grow torpid and cross; waterbirds hunker down until late afternoon, and the marshes stink so in the hammering sun at low tide that it can make you nauseous. The wild, four-footed citizens of the marsh come out only in the hot, thick nights, and humans, on the whole, go elsewhere. Indeed, many of the beautiful old houses in downtown Charleston were built as summer homes by the wealthy owners of the rice, indigo, and cotton plantations on the creeks and rivers, to escape the pestilential swamps. The slaves who were left to tend the crops died by the hundreds of yellow fever.

But late summer here has a seduction all its own, or at least it did for me that year. The heat and humidity ran thick in my veins in a honeyed la.s.situde. The still, shimmering air over the marshes seemed a kind of magical scrim out of which anything at all might come gliding. There was no question of the kind of productive activity and purpose here that we pursued back in the city. Somebody once said that the two most important things ever to happen in the South were civil rights and air-conditioning, not necessarily in that order. I agreed about civil rights, but in the steaming summer days, on slow Low Country water, I wasn't sure about the air-conditioning. Living slowly and mindlessly on the summer marshes was as sensual as going naked. And I always secretly loved the ripe, brimstone smell of pluff mud.

When we were at the creek in summer, we did very little, and did it very slowly. Having an indolent streak in my deepest soul, I cherished the sweet nothingness. Lewis, still a dervish even after all the years I had known him, slowed down and was content, up to a point, to lie on the porch reading or float aimlessly in the screened-in, shaded pool. He could do it for only about a half day, and then he began to prowl, and would soon take his fishing gear and go out in the Whaler, or borrow Simms's boat and sail as far down the creek as it took to catch a little wind.

Simms and Lila did not love the marsh in summer. They came to be with us, but they did not stay on as we sometimes did, and the heat seemed to punish and cripple them. They took to leaving early to go back to Charleston, pleading business pressures. But I knew that the constant sweat bled something vital out of them. In late July Simms had a couple of men from the plant come and install air-conditioning in their house, and after that they stayed a bit longer. Lewis and I had big, sluggish ceiling fans that did absolutely nothing but stir the fetid air, but I think it seemed to us that anything more would disturb the immutable rhythm of the seasons on the marsh. It did not, however, prevent us from relishing the cool, dry air when we had dinner with Lila and Simms. Only Camilla seemed to be truly comfortable in August. She was very thin; warmth and humidity seemed to nourish her like a blood transfusion. Even I wondered at her capacity for heat. She bloomed in it, like an orchid.

My business slowed considerably in the dog days of summer, and I often came out to the creek a day or so before Lewis. He always had much to do around Sweetgra.s.s, as I did, but in August I was simply incapable of focused action, and loved the world of the marsh and creek precisely because I could let myself, without guilt, swirl and float on its surface. Camilla was almost always there now, though she seldom went outside except to the pool cage. Lila and Simms hardly ever came that summer except for an occasional Sat.u.r.day and part of Sunday. I wondered if they would come back to us in the cool of autumn, but it was a lazy wondering, without undue concern. I would care more about it in the fall. In August, what would be, would be.

The morning of the precise middle of August was already flat and white at eight o'clock, and the sheets were slick and molded to my body when I woke in the dim bedroom. I was alone, except for Gladys, who, to accommodate the heat, had wriggled down to the foot of the bed. Lewis was still at Sweetgra.s.s, planning to come to the creek that evening. Simms and Lila were refrigerating comfortably in Charleston. I heard splashing from behind the house that told me Camilla was faithfully doing her laps in the pool. I looked out my window over the marsh to the creek. The tide was full out, and the marsh glimmered poisonously, like a dead fish in the low sun, and probably smelled like it. The creek had shrunk, as it did twice a day, to a ribbon. But unlike most recent days, its surface was ruffled. Wind. Out on the creek, a wind blew in from somewhere.

I pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and tied my hair back with a lace from some forgotten shoe, and padded barefoot out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. The air was stale and hot, but the tiles were cool under my feet. I flipped on the overhead fan, and made coffee. As I stood drinking it and staring out at the little dappling of wind, Gladys came limping into the kitchen, toenails clicking on the tile. She nosed at her food without interest, but drank deeply from her water dish, and looked up at me as if to say, "Just another s.h.i.tty day in paradise, huh?"

"I tell you what, Gladys," I said. "There's a breeze out on the water. Remember breezes? Let's take the Whaler out and find it. It may not last."

She thumped her tail. I put on a white cotton hat and flip-flops and slathered on sunscreen and insect repellent, and we went out into the still morning. Whatever wind there was did not reach the house. The humidity was like a wet wool overcoat.

Camilla was on her front porch watering pots. She wore a white terry beach wrap and sungla.s.ses, and her wet hair was braided and hung down her back.

"Where are you two going?" she called out.

"Out in the Whaler. There's a breeze out there. It looks like heaven."

"Don't stay too long. Breeze or no, you could die in that sun if you broke down and n.o.body was around."

"We'll be back in a couple of hours," I said, and waved, and Gladys and I went down the wooden walkway to the dock, stepping skittishly on the already sizzling boards.

Gladys was so lame that I had to lift her into the Whaler, but once in she struggled up into her usual seat beside me, and I nosed the boat out into the dwindled creek. There was an avenue of water scarcely wider than a city street, but it was freckled with wind, and glinted in the sun. We picked up speed, and Gladys's ears blew back, and she gave a great doggy sigh of contentment.

I hugged her lightly.