Islands: A Novel Part 24

"Henry, please..."

"Come on, Cammy. It'll still be broad daylight. T. C. will tell you how safe it is."

But when the truck came, followed by T. C. on the Rubbertail, Camilla went into her bedroom and closed the door.

"I'm really tired," she said, smiling. "You can tell me about it tomorrow."

Gaynelle's sister, JoAnne, a st.u.r.dy woman who did not come up to her sister's shoulder, had come to stay with Camilla. She was, Gaynelle said, a practical nurse, and Camilla would be in capable hands.

"Is this my baby-sitter?" Camilla said when we introduced JoAnne. But she smiled when she said it.

Henry rode off in his accustomed place on the back of the Rubbertail, and I went in the truck with Gaynelle and Britney. Britney was manic and monstrously affected; for the first time, I did not like being around her. She was fully made up, with lipstick, mascara, glitter on her cheeks and fingernails, and great circles of coral blusher on her cheeks. None of the endearing freckles showed, and her curly red hair was pouffed and sprayed into cementlike submission. She was not the tough, cheeky little girl I had found so endearing. She was a ghastly little copy of a rock star, or, I thought, perhaps a p.o.r.n star. Gaynelle smiled on her fondly, and tugged at her hair, or dabbed at her makeup. Fortunately her costume was in the backseat, tenderly shrouded in plastic. Her little blue jeans and sweatshirt anch.o.r.ed her at least a bit to reality.

At the used-car lot where T. C.'s friend kept his spare motorcycle, we left T. C. and Henry. Henry would not let us wait.

"Go on," he said. "I'm not letting anybody but T. C. watch me till I get my sea legs, or whatever. Bike b.u.t.t, maybe."

So we drove on to the consolidated middle school where the rehearsal was being held, and waited in the parking lot, Britney wriggling and whining until her mother told her to hush.

Just as the light was dying out, we heard the familiar grumble of bikes, and T. C. came sweeping into the parking lot on the Rubbertail and drew up beside us with a flourish. Behind him, Henry came putting in on a smaller, lighter bike that looked to me more like a muscular bicycle. He was helmeted and jacketed and goggled so that he could have been anybody at all, but was still unmistakably Henry, and he was grinning so widely that his teeth were the brightest thing in the gathering dusk. He swept up beside T. C., cut his engine, and swung off the bike as if he had been doing it for years.

"You see? I told you you don't forget," he crowed. "I could ride this baby from here to Key West. I didn't have a minute's trouble."

"He did good," T. C. said, nodding solemnly. "Not a bobble. I thought this light little 230 Roller might be good to get him started; a friend of mine got it for his boy. It's a good little basic machine. We can get Henry up to some serious horsepower if he wants to do it."

"I might, at that," Henry said.

"Where'd you get your Halloween costume?" I said, laughing.

"It's T. C.'s spare suit-up. Boots are a little tight, but I'd kill him for the jacket," Henry said.

"You look like a thug," I said.

"I feel sort of like one. It's a great feeling."

The pageant was just what I had thought it would be: a disjointed stampede of miniature trollops in pop-rock costumes, posturing and wriggling their meager fannies and pouting and smirking redly. Some sang, some danced, some did gymnastics, some twirled batons. Britney was the only one who played the harmonica. To me it sounded downright embarra.s.sing, but then so did the other contestants' offerings. Henry and I, twitching with suppressed laughter, would not look at each other. T. C. smiled fondly. Gaynelle took copious notes after every performance, writing in a little notebook.

When the rehearsal was over, most of the contestants were divested of their costumes by their mothers. Britney insisted on wearing hers home. She was nearly hysterical with all the adulation. She jumped into my arms and hugged me so hard that I was imprinted with makeup and spangles, and smiled with relief that this child was still, under the icing, the child I knew.

"I was the best," she crowed. "I was the prettiest, too. Cindy Sawyer, that's the one that did LeAnn Rimes, is s'posed to win, but I thought she looked stinky. It's gonna be me!"

She started in on the harmonica, and Gaynelle winced and reached back and took it away from her.

"Cool your jets," she said. "You did pretty good but you can do a whole lot better. I've made notes. We'll go over them tomorrow."

When we got back to the car lot to drop off the little 230 Roller and collect Henry, T. C. said, "Why not ride back with me on the Rubbertail, Anny? It's a warm night, and we can suit you up in Gaynelle's stuff. I promise to go real slow."

"Oh, I couldn't-" I began.

"Yes, you could," Henry and Gaynelle said together, and I realized that this had been planned all along.

"Oh, why not?" I said, thinking that perhaps if I screamed enough, T. C. would stop and let me off. They fitted me into Gaynelle's leathers, in which, I knew, I must look like a small bear, and I climbed onto the seat behind T. C. My heart was pounding out of my chest.

"Please go slow," I yelled and he nodded, and started the Rubbertail.

It felt like a gigantic live, wild thing between my legs, the sheer power of it shooting up my spine and into every inch of me, down to my toes and out to my fingertips. I clutched T. C. around his waist and buried my face in his jacket, and we blasted out of the lot and away. For about a mile, I did little but try to breathe enough air into my lungs and shut my eyes and hang on. And then, very gradually, I began to feel the night wind on my face, and smell the wet, loamy beginnings of spring on the black, moss-hung road out to the creek, and the rhythm of the bike and the road came into my legs and hips. I lifted my head and looked around; it was like flying. There was nothing between me and the fresh, rushing night. By the time we reached the creek, I was laughing jubilantly. When I got off, my legs crumpled under me and T. C. had to catch me.

"Happens to everybody the first time," he said. "I've seen folks that couldn't walk for a day. You did great."

Henry and Gaynelle and Britney pulled into the gravel circle behind us.

"You looked like a real biker b.i.t.c.h," Henry said, coming up and hugging me. "How'd you like it?"

"Biker b.i.t.c.h? Watch your mouth, sailor. I loved it. I really did."

"Told you," Henry said.

When I told Camilla about it the next morning, she just smiled and shook her head.

"Next thing, you'll be cleaning houses with Gaynelle," she said. "And taking that child to get acrylic nails and collagen."

"Oh, Camilla..." I felt obscurely hurt.

"I'm sorry. I just mean that I can't abide that poor child, for some reason. She's way too old for her age. It's eerie. She's going to be burned out by the time she's twelve."

The next day, Sunday, Gaynelle asked if she could come over and borrow some books.

"Of course," I said. "Bring Britney and I'll take her out in the Whaler, if the weather holds."

There was a pause on the line, and then Gaynelle said, "I think I'll leave her home this time. She's not too fond of Camilla. In fact, I think she's afraid of her."

"Oh, surely not," I said, shocked. Camilla had never been anything but pleasant with the child, even though, as I knew now, she did not care for her.

"Well, it's funny," Gaynelle said. "She usually doesn't dislike anybody, but she knows things. She always did."

"What things?"

"Who likes her and who doesn't. Things like that."

"Gaynelle, I don't think Camilla dislikes Britney," I said. "She's just ill. You know she's not doing well."

"I don't think it's that. It doesn't matter. Not everybody likes children. And I don't think Camilla is as ill as all that. Sometimes when she's writing in that book she's just vibrating with energy. She writes like a demon."

"But you know how shaky she is on her feet."

"Yes," Gaynelle said.

The weather did indeed hold for the next week. It was easy to forget that the bone-chilling damp cold could come back. The first living things began to return: we heard peepers, and the first mullet splash, and, one night after dinner, the blood-freezing roar of the big bull gator. It sounded as though he was on the front porch.

Camilla cried out and I gasped.

"I forgot to tell you," Henry said. "I've seen his crawl, where he drags his tail up and down the bank, about a half mile down from the dock. I think he's looking for a lady. We'll soon be up to our a.s.ses in alligators. Or maybe it's the mullet he's after."

"Is he dangerous?" Camilla laid her hand over her heart. Her face was pale.

"Not unless you're a mullet or a poodle," Henry said. "They don't stray far from the water, not out here. Of course, down in places like Hilton Head and Fripp, where they've built villas all over their habitat, the gators have moved right onto patios and into swimming pools. And Chihuahuas don't last long."

"But he wouldn't come up here, to the pool or anything..."

"No. There's nothing up here he wants. He's got it all down in the water, and beside it."

We talked of many things, as we usually did. Dinner hours that week had been quiet and pleasant, and Camilla seemed better than in many days, and talked vivaciously to Henry about the time when they had run wild on Sullivan's Island, before graduations, before marriages, before births...before deaths. One evening when I got up to clear the table, she said to Henry, "Stay and talk to me awhile."

He nodded.

I felt ridiculously excluded.

"Call me when you're ready to go to bed," I said.

"Henry can do that," she said. "You go on and get a good night's sleep."

But I lay awake for a long time. The lights from Camilla's house had not gone out by two A.M. I turned over and buried my head in my pillow. The last thing I heard before sleep was the roar of the big gator, claiming his kingdom and summoning his queen.

14.

THE WEATHER HELD, and we slid into February on its promise. In the Low Country, February is a long sigh of relief. It is unlikely to get really cold again, not the blossom-blasting cold of January. The great camellia trees in Charleston gardens and on the river plantations are heavy and languid with blooms, and along the roadside into the city, daffodils and forsythia burn like little fires. To me, the soft radiance of this green spring was a sword in my heart. It had been a very long time since I had spent a Charleston spring without Lewis.

"I want so badly for it to be this time next year," I said to Gaynelle once, while we two and Camilla sat watching Britney pottering about on the end of the dock. A school of river dolphins had been hanging around for a week or so, often so close that you could have reached out and touched their slick, rubbery skin. They would poke their heads out of the water and give you those cunning smiles, and a conspiratorial gaze out of the one great visible eye. They seemed so benign and sweet tempered that the urge to pet them was strong, but Henry had told us not to do it.

"They don't need to think they live here," he said. "Get too friendly with them, or feed them, and they won't move on when they need to."

"Will the alligator eat them?" Britney asked anxiously. The big bull was audible almost every night now, though not yet visible.

"I don't think so. But I don't want to tempt fate," Henry said.

So Britney, having been admonished, did not reach out to touch them. But she stayed on the dock for hours, watching, watching.

"I think they talk to each other," I said once, smiling, to Gaynelle.

"I wouldn't be surprised," she said.

Now she reached out to touch my arm fleetingly.

"I know about that," she said. "You keep thinking that it'll be better when a year has pa.s.sed, and none of the anniversaries will be the first one. It wasn't as bad for me after Randy, of course. But it wasn't good, either."

"Time pa.s.ses," Camilla said dreamily. "After a while all the anniversaries run together and you can't separate them anymore."

"Is it better then?" I asked.

"No," she said. And I felt a surge of shame, because I had been so drowned in my own loss that I had not, in a long time, thought that Camilla, too, must still mourn Charlie.

Britney's after-school day care center had raised its rates considerably, and I knew that Gaynelle was having a hard time coming up with the increase. So, impulsively, I told her to bring Britney to the creek for the few after-school hours until her mother's workday ended. Sometimes Gaynelle stayed later than usual, to make something she thought might tempt Camilla for dinner, or to tackle a cleaning job I had not yet gotten around to. So Britney was often with us until quite late, and a couple of times I insisted that she and her mother stay for dinner.

"Can you stand it, just a few times now and then?" I asked Camilla. "She's really settled down a good bit. I haven't heard the harmonica in weeks."

"Oh, of course," Camilla said. "Don't mind me. I'm getting so cranky that I don't even like myself. And I know you and Henry are fond of the child."

I was. And Henry, surprisingly, was delighted with Britney. I never quite knew why. He was fond of his own grandchildren and saw them often, but Britney seemed more like a daughter born very late to him. He took her with him in the Whaler when he went out, and was teaching her to fish and crab, and often she accompanied him when he went off for short trips on the 230 Roller, which T. C.'s friend had rented to him for a month or so.

"You're spoiling that child horribly," Camilla said once, smiling indulgently at him, when he came back from the clinic with a plastic bag of goldfish for Britney. "And she's already cosseted enough."

"Not in the right way," Henry said. "She knows how to priss her little a.s.s down a runway, but she doesn't know how to be a kid."

Gaynelle was pleased by the bond between the two.

"She can learn things from him and you that I couldn't teach her," she said. "I never did like the idea that she thinks shaking her booty is the be-all and end-all."

"I've always wondered why you let her do those pageants," I said, thinking that I knew Gaynelle well enough now to voice the question.

"There wasn't much else that I could give her," Gaynelle said softly. "Oh, I taught her to read, and she's beginning to write little things that are sort of nice. But private school is out. And this is the only thing she's really wanted with all her heart. I know the pageants are trashy. I hoped she'd get bored with them. I was going to pull her out of them next year, anyway. Now she's got you and Henry and the creek on her mind more than the pageants. It's a G.o.dsend."

Henry and Britney sputtered in from a bike excursion to Edis...o...b..ach just then, and came up onto the porch laughing.

Britney was choked with giggles, her little freckled face contorted with them. She was completely covered with dust, and the red curls were wild.

"Want to share the joke?" I said, smiling at Henry's face, sunburnt and younger by far, with his teeth flashing white through the dust, than when he had come to the creek last August.

"Henry was telling me all about how bad he and Dr. Aiken were on Sullivan's Island when they were little," she said. "They used to run through these old tunnels and stuff naked!"

"Don't go getting any ideas," Gaynelle said, smiling at her daughter. There was no trace of the little princess in Britney now.

"I grew up on the island with them, too," Camilla said. "They were my best friends."

"Did you go naked, too?" Britney said, fascinated.

"In the house," Gaynelle said. "Now."

They went off to wash their respective faces, Gaynelle behind them, and I said to Camilla, "You know, I've wondered if Britney doesn't remind Henry a little of Fairlie. There are a lot of similarities, if you think about it."

"I sincerely hope not," Camilla said levelly. "That common child is hardly compet.i.tion for Fairlie, alive or dead."