At first she could hear individual drops, and then the walls of water slammed against the window with slapping thuds. Cam had seen some impressive storms in Florida—deep, resonating thunderclaps with crackling displays of lightning—but the staggering thing about this storm was its permanence. Storms in Florida were fickle and ephemeral. Utterly temporary. This one had settled in for the long haul. Cam wrapped herself in her blankets and kept watching it, analyzing the shape-shifting shades of gray.
“He’s out there, you know,” she heard a scratchy old lady’s voice say from the corner of the cupola.
Her fever must have been really high because Cam could actually see the shadowy figure of the long-haired woman from Asher’s photograph. Olivia, 1896 was sitting upright in the antique wooden chair where Cam usually piled her laundry. It probably was a pile of laundry, Cam reminded herself.
She’d had hallucinatory fevers before. The hallucinations usually went away if you didn’t talk back to them, so Cam ignored her.
“You really know how to dole out the ‘tough love.’ Isn’t that what they call it on Dr. Phil?” said the shadow.
It’s a pile of laundry, Cam repeated to herself. It’s just a chair and a lumpy pile of laundry. She fumbled around the floor next to her bed to find the Advil and swallowed eight at once.
“Pretty selfish of you to go ahead and decide for him how he needs to handle this,” said the chair.
“He doesn’t need to experience any more loss,” Cam couldn’t stop herself from saying. “It’s better for him to be angry than depressed.”
Rats, she thought. Now that Cam had spoken to her, the creepy witch would never go away.
“You are such a know-it-all,” the widow said. “Maybe he needs to grieve. He needs to say good-bye. Maybe he needs some closure.”
Cam hated that word, closure. It was even worse than tough love. “Where did you get ahold of the self-help books?”
“There is so much you don’t know about men.”
“Oh, and you know so much. Sitting up here and waiting your whole life for one to come home.”
“We weren’t put on this earth to go it alone.”
“Maybe not, but we all die alone, don’t we?”
“What am I, chopped liver?”
“You’re here to help me die?” A crack of lightning lit up the cupola, and Cam could see the figure more clearly. She sat with her eyes down, focusing nonchalantly on the needlework in her lap. She wore an ankle-length black skirt and a black cardigan sweater. Her nose was long and sharp. Her face was wrinkled and grizzled now, but her hair was still a beautiful, wavy strawberry blonde.
“Ayuh.”
“Now?”
“Soon, child.”
“You are a pile of laundry.”
“Mmmm.”
“Why did they send you? Why didn’t they send my father? Or Lily? And if this town is so magic, why can’t you just save me? How is it magic to give me something to live for and then just pull it out from under me? That’s cruel.” All the bullshit rainbows and flamingos and snowstorms in July can’t stop me from dying like some crazy lady, talking to a chair, Cam thought. How could she have believed that they could?
“He’s out there, you know,” the widow said again, lifting a creepy, gray, arthritic finger and pointing toward the sea. Cam got up and looked out the window. The sea looked like it was boiling. Hot licks of black lavalike seawater crashed together at odd angles. It was chaos. Cam looked back at the pile of laundry, but the woman had disappeared.
Her gaze shifted to the carriage house, just twenty yards away.
Cam sat on the bed, still watching the storm. “Pretty crazy, isn’t it?” she asked as a white zipper of lightning seemed to crack the sky in half.
“Hey, hon, I need to tell you something,” Alicia said, handing Cam a steaming milky mug. She had come upstairs with some hot cocoa.
“Yeah?”
“Perry said that you and Asher had an argument.”
“So?”
“Well, apparently after that, he left.” Alicia sat on the bed and held Cam’s hand.
“So?”
“In the boat, hon. He left in the boat, and no one’s been able to contact him. He’s lost out there in that storm.”
Cam looked again at the violent churning of the sea and sky. He can handle this, right? she thought at first, imagining the strength of his capable forearms hoisting and steering and managing the swells. There is nothing he can’t do. Then another clap of thunder rumbled deeply in the distance, rolling toward them menacingly like an oncoming train. It banged with a final, ear-splitting smack.
“I’m going to get him,” said Cam. “I’ll take the kayak.” She hoisted herself off the bed and began rummaging through the laundry—See, it’s only laundry. Adrenaline had taken over, and she forgot her pain. She pulled on her jeans and a couple of T-shirts and made for the stairs. She could do this. She had taken a few lifesaving courses at the Polynesian’s pool where they taught you how to make a life preserver out of your wet jeans by tying the cuffs together in knots and filling them with air.
“Campbell, you cannot go out there.”
“Yes, I can,” said Cam, but as she reached for the railing around the stairs she swooned from dizziness and almost fell over.
Her mom grabbed her elbow. “Wait for him here, Campbell. That’s all you can do, sweetheart.”
Cam threw open the glass door of the cupola and stepped onto the actual widow’s walk. The slanting rain soaked her instantly. She screamed “Asher!” into the wind. “Asher, you idiot. Come back!” She had wanted him to leave and enjoy his life without her, not leave the planet.
“He can’t hear you, Campbell!” her mom yelled.
She watched the beam of the lighthouse swing around the bay and scanned the water for a boat, but all she could see were dark platinum waves and whitecaps slapping into one another and hurtling toward the shore. “He’s got to be right out there. Why can’t someone just go look for him?” she cried desperately.
“They can’t send anyone out in that storm, Campbell. We just have to wait for things to calm down.”
Cam walked back and forth in the rain. “I’m staying out here to look for him.”
“Campbell, don’t be silly, you can’t do anything from there,” her mom said.
“No. This is my fault. I’m waiting for him.”
“Campbell!” her mom said, exasperated, and then she went inside to find a raincoat and umbrella. She found Asher’s yellow slicker sailing suit and forced Cam to come inside, dry off, and then put it on before stepping back out onto the widow’s walk. “Why can’t you wait inside? That’s why they built this thing. For waiting.”
“I just have to be out here, okay?” She needed to be feeling what he was feeling, without any impediments between them. She had to be out there, sending him thoughts, because thoughts are energy, energy is matter, and matter never disappears. Her thoughts could keep him close. She knew if she stopped paying attention he would drift away forever. “You don’t need to stay with me.”
Her mother stayed with her, of course, and the two of them shrank down and huddled against the wall. Alicia tried to shield Cam from the rain with umbrellas, but they kept whipping inside out from the wind. Finally she gave up and put her head down against her knees. Cam thought she heard her mumbling some Hail Marys.
“Is that the right prayer?”
“It’s the only one I know. I’m a bad Catholic.”
“That’s okay,” said Cam.
She kept up her vigil, visualizing over and over again Asher steering the boat for home. She imagined it drifting toward the dock, and then she saw him in her mind’s eye, hopping off gracefully and tying up the lines like she’d seen him do.
It was still raining when the first white rays of sun tried to shoot their way through the storm clouds. The wind had let up a little, but it blew the rain sideways against Cam’s face. The bay was calm now, but black and empty.
Cam t
ried to stand up but stumbled and fell onto her mom’s knees.
“Campbell, my God, you’re burning up!” Alicia said.
She helped Cam get inside and take off her clothes and then the convulsing began. The cold, the fever, the pain, and the exhaustion came together and erupted inside of her, and she could not stop herself from shaking. She was shaking so hard that it took Perry, Nana, and Alicia working together to get her into a warm shower and get her dressed. But the shaking continued until the seizure began, and that’s when they knew that the little square brick hospital in Promise was not going to do, and they piled in the car headed for Portland.
THIRTY-SEVEN
STRANGELY ENOUGH, CAM FELT SAFE HERE. BACK IN THE HALLOWED, sterilized halls of Western medicine, her journey had come full circle. The irregular beeping of the monitors soothed her, and she felt cool, clean and hydrated, thanks to the saline solution pumping into her veins at 10 ccs per minute. They must have been pumping something else into her, too, because in spite of having been stabbed through the back of her rib cage with two thick chest tubes, she felt no pain.
She felt nothing at all, really. Was that her foot sticking out of the blanket, with the chipped remainders of black nail polish speckling her toes? It had to be. That was embarrassing. To be caught at death’s door without having had a pedicure. She wondered if the undertaker would paint her toenails black. What do they do with the toes? she wondered. Probably just cover them up. Just as well.
She heard that familiar hushed, mumbling sound of Alicia in a grave conversation with a doctor, and she knew it would soon begin to escalate. Especially when he told her what Cam already knew. That this was the end.
The hospice nurse had already been in, and Cam had heard her conversation with Perry.
“It will be over very soon, when the fingernails start to turn blue.”
“Blue like when your lips turn blue or like when your fingernail falls off blue?” Perry asked.
“Like the lips,” said the nurse, and then she left, leaving some information packets about death and dying.
“No. That can’t be true!” Cam heard Alicia yell. “You should have seen her two days ago. She was perfectly fine. How can this have happened in two days?”
“I believe she’s been fighting this for quite a while. Seven years, it says on the chart,” explained the doctor.
“Yes, but that was before,” Alicia said.
“Before what?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Alicia sighed. “Before we brought her to Maine. She was getting well here.”
“People often go through a kind of a wellness period. Or remission before a more serious attack. We don’t quite understand it. There’s still so much we don’t know,” he admitted.
“No. There’s still so much you don’t know,” Alicia said. “This was something different. She really was well. It was not a wellness period. I need you to find me someone who knows what they’re talking about.”
“Respectfully, Ms. Cooper—”
“Now! I want someone else in here, who is not just going to give up on my daughter!”
“Ms. Coop—”
“Mom,” Cam moaned without really meaning to. “Give the guy a break, will you? He’s just doing his job.”
“Cam?”
“It’s time for you to say something nice to me. You know, like, ‘You were the best daughter, aside from Perry, that I ever could have imagined. I feel so lucky to have known you. Honored to have been your mother.’ Something like that. Doesn’t the hospice brochure give you some kind of a script if you don’t know what to say?”
“I know what to say, Campbell.”
“Then you better say it, okay? For your sake, not mine,” said Cam. Her mom exhaled, let her arms fall to her sides, and walked over to the bed.
“You cannot conceive of the depths of my sorrow, Campbell Maria Cooper.” Alicia brought her fist to her mouth and her other hand to the rail of the bed and took a deep breath before she continued. “I will never be the same when you are gone. Things for me will be dim and gray and flat. But there is one thing that will keep me going, Campbell, and that is a belief in my connection to you. This thing. This crazy enmeshed love feeling that I have for you is real. Like this cup is real. Or this phone is real. And it will not just go away when you do. Okay? Wherever you are going, you will be connected to me by this thing, and you will never, ever be alone, okay? I want you to know that.”
“Wow, was that in the brochure?” Cam asked, sniffling.
“No, I made it up,” said Alicia, wiping her eyes with a hospital tissue.
“It was good.”
“Thanks.”
“Thank you for everything you’ve done. And for bringing me here, Mom.” Promise hadn’t saved her, but she understood now that it had made her life more complete than if she had lived a hundred years in Orlando. “I love you.”
Cam closed her eyes, letting her tears slide across her temples and land on the pillow. Her mom kissed her on the forehead, and then Cam turned her head to the side.
“Cam!”
“I’m not dead, Nana. I’m just resting.”
“Oh, thank God,” said Nana.
Perry held Cam’s hand and said, “You know, I think you gave me the wrong advice.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. I think I should try to be more like you. Not less.” Perry climbed onto the bed with Cam, so Cam could stroke her wavy blonde hair with her fingers.
“That’s nice, Per,” she said. “Take care of Mom.”
“I will.”
Nana was at the foot of the bed, rubbing her hand back and forth on Cam’s shins. She hung her head as she prayed silently through her tears. “Don’t be sad, Nana,” Cam said. “If things go your way, I’ll be having breakfast with Jesus or something, right?”
“I don’t know about breakfast. Maybe brunch. He likes my sausage and peppers.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s between me and him,” she said. She made the sign of the cross and then said, “Te amo, Campbell Maria.”
“Te amo, Nana.”
It was past midnight, and everyone had fallen asleep in the uncomfortable reclining chairs around her bed. Cam was grateful that Izanagi held her mother as they slept together in one chair. They had remembered at the last minute to bring Tweety, and he slept on his little perch inside his cage, making tiny little puffs with his exhales.
The whole stage had been set. It was time for her to leave, but Cam could feel herself holding on. Clinging to something.
She had learned a little about hope this summer, and she was going to hold out hope until her last wish came true. She knew he would come to say good-bye. She knew he would make it back. And when she opened her eyes, Asher was there.
He was wearing his father’s old cable-knit fisherman’s sweater, and he leaned on the bed rail as he looked at her. He’d been crying, and his eyes were red rimmed and swollen.
“Are you real?” she asked him. She had been drifting in and out of dreams for a few hours now, and she couldn’t be sure if it was him or some cruel apparition concocted by the crazy chemicals of her dying brain.
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Prove it,” she said. “Pinch me or something.”
“Cam, I don’t want to pinch you.”
“Then kiss me already.”
He placed his blistered hand on her forehead and kissed her gently on the lips. His lips and face were rough, and he tasted like the sea.
“I love you,” she said. She wanted to get that in before she ran out of time.
“I know,” he said, and that was better than him saying it back. She needed to know that he knew.
“The argument—”
“Cam, it’s okay.”
“I wasn’t trying to send you out into the Perfect Storm.”
“It was the perfect storm. I was trying to leave, and it kept pushing me back into the harbor. It was like it knew I needed to be here. With you.”
<
br /> “Asher?”
“Yeah?” The tears now flowed freely down his face.
“You were right about something.”
“Ass Whisperer, I thought you were always right.”
“Usually. But you were right about one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The Jimmy Stewart thing.”
“It’s a wonderful life?”
“Yeah. However it plays itself out.”
Cam looked out the window. A handsome, tall orangey-pink flamingo stood alone in a square patch of grass in the courtyard.
“Buddy!” she said delightedly, but she couldn’t tell if she thought it or if she actually said it out loud. The courtyard was flooded by a bright white light. Cam felt her entire soul become imbued with love. How about that, Cam thought. Death did not mean being without love.
She felt herself drifting. Her gaze followed Buddy as he spread his wings, flapped twice, and then took off, his neck folded in a Z, his long pink legs trailing behind him . . . departing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK COMES TO YOU ON THE SHOULDERS OF COUNTLESS FRIENDships. My heartfelt thanks to new friends who: got me day jobs, shared their offices (and beach houses), watched my child, bought me lunch, and sent me constant loving support. And to old friends who believed in the work a long time ago when believing seemed absurd. You are my heart and my other hearts.
I’m thankful to Cam, who bravely showed me her voice. Thankful to my daughter, Cadence, who makes this mothering gig a wonderfully delightful romp. Thankful to my own mom for showing me the way. And thankful to my gem of a husband, whose kind, brilliantly funny spirit inspired these pages. Many thanks to both his family and mine for cheering me on.
Thanks to the far-out and talented Alexandra Bullen for sharing her success when she didn’t have to. And to “Team Miracles”: the fabulous folks at Razorbill for their keen vision and committed support, and Josh Bank, Joelle Hobeika, and Sara Shandler at Alloy, whose brilliant ideas and persistent, encouraging warmth could melt through the most unyielding of writer’s blocks.