Finally I called my father, and the next thing I knew I was weeping as though the news were brand new.
“I’m getting on a plane today,” he said.
Dad arrived that night to assess the situation and to offer what comfort he could. He worked his grandfatherly magic on Charlie, and for a little while it seemed that my boy was perking up. Dad took him to the Museum of Natural History one day and on another to the Yogi Berra Museum out in Montclair, New Jersey, where Yogi Berra himself happened to be that afternoon. He signed a baseball for Charlie that he carried around with him wherever he went, including the dinner table. They went out for ice cream every night after all the dishes were washed and put away. Dad told Charlie stories, wonderful stories about how he used to churn peach ice cream when he was a kid, and Charlie marveled at the fact that you could actually make your own. They were still talking about making ice cream when they came home one night.
“It’s a heckuva lot better than what you can buy in the stores,” Dad said with a laugh.
“Can you teach me how to make it?” Charlie asked.
“You betcha booties, baby! You can count on it! Get your momma to bring you down south to see me, and we’ll make ice cream every day.”
“Even blueberry?” Charlie asked.
“Even blueberry,” Dad said.
“You still have that old churn?” I asked.
“It’s somewhere under your Momma’s house,” he said. “You bring Charlie and we’ll find it.”
Dad’s magic had a shelf life with an unfortunately short expiration date. Within just a few days of his departure, I began to see all the signs of Charlie’s depression returning. God, I felt so impotent and so deeply sad to realize there was so little I could do for him or for myself that could change a thing. And feeling that useless made me more depressed. But hell would freeze before I would tell my mother. She’d have me in a shrink’s office in five minutes.
Who was I kidding? It was right after the Fourth of July. I knew it was time to head south, shrink or no shrink. It wasn’t that I didn’t have enough love to take care of Charlie on my own. It was anything but that. It was that I thought he needed to be buoyed by the love of everyone. Maybe the love of my parents, the friends of our family, and the island old salts would fill the air, he would breathe it in, and my little boy would be restored.
He was half sleeping, slouched against the window with his pillow bunched in between his shoulder and his cheek. His DS was in his lap, never too far from him. I know every mother in the world feels this, but my heart was so filled with love for him at that moment I thought it might burst.
I looked over at him for another moment and whispered, “Love you, baby.”
He grimaced a little, not liking being disturbed, and then he reached out and put his hand on my arm. It was a proprietary touch but also one seeking for reassurance that I was still there.
A few minutes later, he sat up rubbing his eyes with his fists. “Mom? Where do you think Dad is?”
“Heaven,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah, but you know, it’s like he’s still around. But not in a creepy way.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, like when before the end of the school year, I’d be studying for a hard test? It was sort of like he was there, telling me to keep at it, not to give up. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes. I do know. And you want to know something else?”
“What?”
“It makes me feel a little better.”
“Yeah, but not for long enough.”
“I agree with you, but you know what? I think it would be mighty strange if we weren’t sad right now.”
“Yeah.”
“One more thing: you don’t have to be sad every minute of the night and day, you know. And you can talk to me about it anytime you want.”
“That’s two things.”
“Right.”
I sighed then, realizing we were little more than two hurt birds flying back to the mother nest to heal. I hoped I had made a good decision. A long vacation of salted breezes, hammocks to while away steamy afternoons, building sand castles, and making ice cream with my sweet dad—all those things could go a long way to mend our broken hearts. I hoped.
Chapter 2
Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands . . . is covered with a dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle . . . attains the height of fifteen or twenty feet . . . burthening the air with its fragrance.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug”
Meet Annie Britt
Frankly, we had precious little to say to each other, but because he actually took his Old Man and the Sea hand off his fishing rod long enough to call me, I spoke to him. I had not heard from my estranged husband since the funeral. Of course, I was very polite to him. If I hadn’t known better I’d have said the spirit of James McMullen was conspiring to have us kiss and make up, but I don’t believe in that kind of nonsense. Well, not as a general rule. And that’s not why he called anyway. Buster, as he was known to all, had been to visit our daughter, Jackie, and our adorable grandson, Charlie, way up the road in Brooklyn, New York, and he didn’t like what he found. Like I had? Who in the world would be happy to see their daughter and her little boy struggling under the weight of that kind of traumatic and horrendous loss?
I mean, I don’t want to sound judgmental, but Buster’s not exactly the expert of the world on the hearts of women and children. Apparently there had been a recent conversation between Jackie and Buster, and apparently Jackie had cried him a river. Weeping is not my daughter’s style. At all. She’s a soldier, for heaven’s sake! But everyone has a limit of what they can endure. His call truly alarmed me. Truly.
She told Buster that she’s very, very worried about Charlie. He wasn’t coping well. He was having terrible nightmares, he was lethargic and not eating well. Oh, my poor dear little grandson! And just the idea of my daughter sobbing made my chest tighten. Buster, unsure of how to handle her, did the right thing. He brought the problem to me. As! He! Should! Have! After all, I was still the mother of the family, even if our child was a military nurse, toting a loaded gun around the world and even though her father preferred the waters seventy-seven miles to the north.
I called Jackie immediately and pleaded with her to spend the balance of the summer with me on the island. Maybe beseech is the better word because it was more begging than pleading. Oh, she hemmed and hawed around for a while, and suddenly to my astonishment, she gave in, making me swear on a stack of Bibles not to spoil Charlie rotten. I promised enormous personal restraint and thought, Gosh, that wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be, which was an indication of how worried she must be. And if she was that worried, maybe she needed to stay here for longer than a few weeks. There was no reason I could fathom for her to go back to Brooklyn. Why would anyone want to live in a place like that anyway? Glory be to God! All that noise? And it’s so cold in the winter! And you take your life in your hands every time you cross the streets with cars and taxis and ambulances zipping all around you like madmen! And the subway? Let’s just say I’d rather walk ten miles in the pouring rain than go all the way underground just to get across town—I’d be underground for good soon enough.
She could practice nursing at the VA hospital right here in Charleston, and Aunt Maureen could visit anytime. I liked Maureen. Not spoil Charlie? Let me tell you this: if you were ever caught in those enormous blue eyes, flashing from behind his stick-straight black bangs that longed for a trim (in my estimation), you’d open your heart and your wallet and give the boy everything in the world.
I knew I drove my daughter out of her mind some of the time. To be honest, she drove me a little batty too. She internalizes every blessed thing and broods, while I like to think of myself as liberated from the shackles of social convention, you know, undaunted by anything life throws my way and unafraid to speak from my heart. She thinks I’m too dramatic, which is patently ridicul
ous, and I think she’s not dramatic enough. Cleopatra was dramatic. Holly Golightly was dramatic. Lady Gaga is dramatic. I was perfectly in control of my personal theater, but the truth? I was very excited they were coming.
Even my house was buzzing with anticipation as though the floors and walls and windows knew that Jackie and Charlie were coming home. The sun was shining, and gorgeous breezes drifted from room to room, laced with the smells of the sea. It was Saturday and a perfect summer day, barely a drop of humidity and somewhere around seventy-five degrees. Who needed air-conditioning? I hardly ever used it unless the temperature was over one hundred degrees.
Jackie had called just an hour before to say that they were north of Columbia and if the traffic continued moving along she would be home in time for lunch. She used the word home. I didn’t know if she meant it to mean her home or my home, but that simple word home coming from her was so wonderful to my ears. And I hoped with all my heart that she still believed this was her home.
I had done everything within my means that I could think of to set the right tone. My largest pot was filled with okra soup, simmering on the back of the stove, and my rice steamer with warm fluffy white rice. Not an hour before, I had pulled a pan of brownies and a pan of corn bread from the oven, and they’d filled the kitchen with the delicious smells of butter and chocolate. The table was set with a cheerful tablecloth. I’d even cut some flowers from my garden—oh, all right, they were sprigs of white oleander that I rinsed to baptize the bugs away—but I put them in the middle of the table in my mother’s small Fiesta ware red vase and the mood was set. All there was left to do was pour the iced tea, drop in a lemon wedge, and put a blessing on it all. Soon I’d be sharing a meal with the two very dearest people in my world. Buster didn’t know what he was missing.
Oh! What an old fool I was to worry so. A ten-year-old boy didn’t give two figs about how his bed was made, but I made and remade his trundle bed three times. Three times! But you know, in view of his nightmares, I wanted that bed to look so comfy that he’d curl up under those covers, forget about his worries, and sleep the best sleep of his life. The quilt was new and had puppies all over it. Maybe we would name them together. Plus, I put fire escape ladders in every bedroom closet to ease any anxiety he and Jackie might have.
For fun, I bought him a stack of new comic books and a new yo-yo, a book on the history of baseball and another one packed with true stories about the pirates that once sailed the waters around Charleston. Then in a moment of whimsy I picked up a crazy Hawaiian-print bathing suit for him—the young people call them board shorts—and a T-shirt from the Charleston RiverDogs plus a schedule of their ball games. Would Buster come down and take him to a game? I hoped so, and if I had the occasion to speak to him again in this lifetime I would drop the hint. Diplomatically. If he wouldn’t go, I would, even if it was a hundred and five in the shade, which it usually was this time of year. We could eat hot dogs together and whatever else they had. Lord! I haven’t had a hot dog in years!
Lastly, I found a miniature picture of Jackie taken on the morning of her First Communion, reframed it, and placed it on his night table. It was such a precious photograph. There was Jackie in a beautiful white organza dress, her veil billowing in the breeze and her two front teeth gone missing. I remembered that morning like it was yesterday. It was good for a child to be reminded that his parent was once a child too.
I gave a gentle yank to the smiling ceramic shrimp that was attached to the cord hanging from the ceiling fan to circulate the air slowly like the breeze of a waltz. From the doorway I appraised it all for the tenth time. Charlie’s room, which was right next door to Jackie’s, had never looked more inviting.
Jackie’s room had been her bedroom when she was a little girl, but it had long been turned into a guest room. After Buster went off fishing I had our Charleston rice poster bed moved in here, because frankly, I was getting too old to be climbing up bed steps to go to sleep. What if I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom? If I wasn’t fully conscious I could fall and break a hip. I would be found three days later by my neighbors, dehydrated and in agony. So I pushed Jackie’s twin beds together in my bedroom and had GDC Design Center make an upholstered headboard so it looked like I had a king-sized bed, which I needed like another hole in my head. Still, it was better than being found in an undignified heap on the floor. It wasn’t that I worried about osteoporosis. Thankfully I had the bone density of a much younger woman; I was a true Steel Magnolia. It was more like I just worried about everything, but I worked very hard not to let my anxieties show.
Jackie’s room looked rather amazing too, if I said so myself. I dressed her bed with all white linens and lots of pillows, including two antique European squares trimmed in hand-crocheted lace. I carefully folded my mother’s delicate handmade quilt over the foot. I had mended and repaired that quilt more times than I could count, but it was still so beautiful to me. The pattern was a mosaic of flowers in a large basket. Naturally all of the flowers were faded with age, but I could imagine how vivid they must have been when the quilt was presented to my mother as a wedding gift from her great-aunt. That was back in the day when a young girl learned to sew at her mother’s knee and grown women put great stock in the quality of their needlework. A wave of nostalgia washed over me. There were very few quilting bees around town these days, and it would be an extremely rare occasion to see generations of women gathered around a hearth doing needlepoint. These days young women play Bunko, drink white wine, and furnish their homes with a bed in a bag from some discount retailer. I know this because that’s how I acquired Charlie’s bedding and I did love to play Bunko and have a glass of wine myself. But still! What has this world come to?
Before I left the room, I smelled the inside of her closet. It was musty, like any closed area of a beach house can be. I opened the doors and hurried to my linen closet for a sachet of potpourri. Yes, I keep extra potpourri on hand because I make it myself from lavender that grows in a hedge of buzzing weeds in my yard. Besides, a sachet makes a wonderful hostess gift. And bumblebees love lavender.
Yes, I make lavender sachets. And yes, I am fast turning into, Heaven save me, my mother.
I pulled the cord of Jackie’s ceiling fan to get the air moving. I rolled the sachet between my palms to release the oils in the seeds and slipped the ribbon over the neck of a hanger, deciding to leave the door open. She would probably think the room was too fussy. I doubted they issued her lace-trimmed sheets in Afghanistan, but I wanted her to know that I cared about her so much that I’d use my very best everything for her. I put an assortment of new (well, okay, gently read) novels on her nightstand along with a bottle of some fancy Italian water and a pretty glass. On her dresser I left a waterproof canvas beach bag filled with an assortment of magazines, a tube of suntan lotion, new flip-flops, and a visor that said SULLIVANS ISLAND across the brim. I had done my best.
“Anybody home?”
“Yes, yes! I’ll be right there!”
It was the voice of Deb, my crazy wonderful neighbor. Deb ran the Edgar Allan Poe Library down the island and had for years. Until I took early retirement, I taught English and history for eons at the Sullivans Island Elementary School right next door, secretly specializing in South Carolina’s illustrious past, especially stories about the pirates and naturally, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe lived on Sullivans Island while he was stationed at Fort Moultrie right before the so-called Civil War. Anyway, Deb and I had known each other all our lives and she was the very best friend I’d ever had. And her husband, Vernon, well, he was another story. Let’s just say that Deb believed that once you got married, you stayed married. In fact, I bought her a needlepoint pillow that says A RETIRED HUSBAND IS A WIFE’S FULL-TIME JOB. True story.
She was standing on the top step of the stairs I descended every morning to walk the beach with her, wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat I hadn’t seen before. The crown was covered in a psychedelic bouquet of artificial flowers, and it wa
s about the wildest thing I’d ever seen. But then Deb was my most flamboyant friend, the complete opposite of the stereotypical librarian. She made me seem conservative.
“Hey!” she called out our traditional island greeting.
“Hey!” I flipped the latch on the screen door and held it open for her. “Come on in and tell me this instant where you got that hat! It’s gorgeous!”
“I got it at Belk. Big sale. Want to try it on?” She handed it to me.
“Indeed I do,” I said, plopping it on my head and checking myself out in the hall mirror. “I look like an ass in hats.”
“No, you don’t!” She gave me a friendly hug. “Is Jackie here yet?”
“No, but almost. She called from Columbia a while ago.”
“Gosh, I can’t wait to see her, Annie. The poor thing. How’s she doing?”
“I guess she can’t be doing too well, or she wouldn’t be coming here.”
“Stop! She loves you! You’re her mother!”
“It’s complicated, and you know it. Glass of tea?”
“Lord, yes. I’m parched like the Sahara.”
Deb followed me into the kitchen, where I took two glasses from the cabinet and filled them with ice from the freezer of my Big Chill jadeite green refrigerator that looked exactly like my mother’s from the 1950s.
“Here we go,” I said and handed her a glass.
“I still can’t believe you spent that much money on a refrigerator.”
“Some women lust after hats and others lust after appliances.”
“You’re so crazy. Is this sweet?” She pointed to her glass.