3
As with a storm blowing through and clearing the air, following Penni’s return to the table and Jodie’s tepid apology and best wishes and a light hug, the four managed to navigate the rest of the cocktail hour and the entire meal with no further dust-ups, combining much conversation about Penni’s condition (when’s the due date?—November 14th; what’s Randall think?—he’s ecstatic, when home; how’s the pregnancy been so far?—only a few bouts of morning sickness; does your condo have room for a nursery?—as long as no one requests an overnight visit) with other small talk about their current lives and responsibilities, their summer plans, their friends and contacts and family life.
Late in the meal, Brooke and Leah told the younger sisters about some of their adventures during vacations on Bogue Beach, including a long tale about how they used to hide far up under the pier and eavesdrop on conversations from above—that is, Brooke listened and mimed the conversations for her deaf sister’s benefit. This practice culminated in an incident when a wedding ring quite literally dropped in Leah’s lap through the cracks in the deck following an emotional spat and the resulting fracture on the pier above (all elaborately mimed by Brooke—then and again tonight, more than forty years later). The girls had spent the rest of their vacation trying to find the ring’s owner (the husband) to return his ring and repair the breach with that simple gesture.
“That’s so sweet,” Penni said. “Did you find him?”
“How? We had no idea what he looked like or where he was staying or even if he was still in town. I think we’d heard his name—”
“Sean,” Leah said.
“That’s it. But we couldn’t very well go around shouting ‘Sean! Sean!’ everywhere we went.”
“I looked for someone with a pale band of skin on his ring finger,” Leah said.
Jodie laughed. “Lots of those in the bars in Seattle.”
“And a few that summer on Bogue Beach, as I recall. But none moping over a break-up or their missing ring.”
“So what happened to the ring?” Penni asked.
Brooke said, “Don’t look at me. Leah kept it, wouldn’t even let me hold it.”
“What did you do with it, Aunt Leah?”
Leah had never told anyone what she did with Sean’s ring. She considered coyly declining the question now but then reneged. “I walked to this end of the island, right out there where the ocean merges with the sound, and threw the ring into the fast-moving current.”
“You threw the ring into the ocean?” Brooke exclaimed.
“What did you think I did?”
“I don’t know—kept it, pawned it, buried it. Why throw it in the ocean?”
“I didn’t want anyone to find it.”
“We could look tomorrow,” Jodie said.
Brooke shook her head. “You haven’t seen how the current rushes past out there. That ring was gone the minute she tossed it—probably buried under four feet of sand and ten feet of water by now.”
Leah gazed off into space and said, “But part of me always imagined I’d returned it to Sean and that it patched their marriage and they lived happily ever after.”
“Yeah, in your dreams,” Jodie said.
Leah nodded. “Or in some better world.”
“Where’s that?”
Leah took the question seriously. “When I was a deaf child with an active imagination and a void where one of my main senses should have been, my mind created a quite vivid and captivating world where I could go if the real world was too difficult or confusing. I always felt safe there. I guess it was in that world where Sean got his ring and his marriage back.”
Brooke stared at Leah with wide eyes. “You never told me about that.”
Leah grinned. “There’s lots of things I never told you, Brooke.”
Brooke grinned right back. “Maybe this weekend we share all our secrets.”
The elder sisters looked at the younger pair.
“I don’t have any secrets,” Penni said.
Everyone looked at Jodie.
“Whoa! No way! You’ll disown me and toss me in Davey Jones’ locker after that ring.”
Leah said, “My dessert’s a secret. But I’ll share it once the table is cleared and the dishes in the dishwasher.”
That freed them all to a harmless task and goal.
Leah’s dessert was home-made amaretto cheesecake that she’d kept in the spring-form pan to protect its edges then set in a cardboard box with bubble wrap then in a paper bag with handles. Her reversal of this packing sequence, played out with high drama on the kitchen’s granite countertop, was watched with rapt attention and appropriate exclamations from the other three. Jodie especially liked the bubble wrap, which she began popping until Brooke grabbed it away from her and tossed it in the trash. When Leah got to the pan, she displayed the top of the cheesecake—a rich golden yellow with bits of crumbled amaretti cookies neatly ringing the edge—then loosened and removed the spring-form rim. She set the cheesecake on a serving plate and passed it around for all to view.
Penni said, “I hope decadent desserts aren’t prohibited during pregnancy.”
“Not that I know of,” Leah said.
“No,” Brooke said. “You get to eat seconds—for the baby.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
The platter ended up with Jodie. “See y’all later,” she said, walking away with the cake.
The others all protested until she turned and brought the cheesecake back, still beautiful and fragrant with a wonderful almond scent—and intact. But not for long, as Leah cut four generous pieces and set them neatly on plates.
She handed the largest to Penni after first inserting and lighting a birthday candle she’d found in the pantry. “Congratulations, Penni. And all best wishes for a smooth and uneventful pregnancy.”
“And painless delivery,” Brooke said.
“And healthy child,” Jodie added.
Penni blew out the candle.
They carried their plates and cups—strong dark coffee for Brooke and Leah, herbal tea for Jodie and Penni—into the living room to seats around the fire. Brooke sat in the upholstered chair, Penni took the rocker opposite, and Leah and Jodie sat on the couch facing the fire, kicking off their shoes and curling their feet under them.
By then it was night. The wind had died but the ocean’s murmur forced its way through the walls and into their silence. Brooke stared into the dwindling fire, its embers radiating warmth and a deep red glow but no sound or movement. The other three looked at each other and to Brooke with contented but slightly uneasy grins, as if to say, “This is nice, but what do we do now?”
Penni said, “I have a hip-hop mix on my phone.” While there was no cable or Internet service, there was a flat-screen TV with DVD player flanked by speakers for digital or CD music.
Leah laughed. “What’s hip-hop?”
“How about some EDM?” Jodie suggested. “We could stand to move after sitting all day.”
Brooke said to the fire, “I have pancreatic cancer.”
The other three froze. Brooke’s quiet uninflected tone—as if saying “Let’s have chicken for dinner tomorrow” or “How about a game of Scrabble?”—bore no relation to the meaning of the words she’d spoken, or to the woman who’d spoken them.
Brooke looked up from the fire to face them. She took a moment to look into the eyes of each, starting with Penni seated opposite and ending with Leah, just to her right on the couch. “There,” she said with a satisfied nod. “Now you know why I called you here.”
Penni said, “Does Dad know?”
Brooke laughed. “Are you kidding? You think he’d let me come down here if he knew? You’re the first I’ve told.”
They looked at her with something akin to horror.
“Don’t worry. I’ll tell him when I get back. Jeez.”
Leah’s eyes were glued to Brooke’s face in the way they used to attach when she was little and deaf and dependent on her sister to hear everything
she’d couldn’t, in a way that made her feel like she could never look away or Brooke would be gone. “How long have you known?”
“Since the day I called you about coming here. I called late because it took me that long to get a confirmation on the rental.”
“Oh, Brooke,” Leah said, her words barely a whisper as the air had all gone out of her lungs.
“Now enough of that. We’re here together and we’re going to have fun!” She stood and did a little shimmying dance in front of her chair. “Where’s that dance music, Jodie?”
None of the other three moved.
“What’s the prognosis?” Leah asked.
“Prognosis-smognosis! You know those doctors—all doom and gloom, as if you might sue them if they’re optimistic and get it wrong.”
“And treatment?”
“‘Existing treatment options for unresectable tumors are more palliative than extendatory.’ Can you believe that doc-speak? They actually make up words to avoid saying things like ‘inoperable’ and ‘terminal’. They hold your life in their hands and speak in a language you can’t understand!”
“But you’re going to do something.”
Brooke laughed again, her deep rich former laugh. It had been missing since their arrival. “Leah, Leah—always the fixer. Yes, I’m going to do something. There’s a Phase Two trial in ‘immunological intervention’—more foreign words but at least they sound better than ‘unresectable’—right there at Carolinas. It’s a new combination of drugs that showed promise in the initial trial.”
“Starting when?”
“It’s already started. They’ve poked and prodded and debriefed me in every way possible. I’ve made up my own word for all this. I call it ‘uploading’—blood, bone marrow, urine, stool, tissue samples. I’m stored in the medical cloud now. If anything happens to this me, you can download a new me out of the cloud.”
Jodie jumped off the couch and went out onto the deck. The ocean’s murmur became a brief roar until she shut the door, softly but firmly, behind her.
“What is this with storming out onto the deck?” Brooke asked. She looked over at Penni who was sitting on her hands, straight-backed and still in the unmoving rocker, staring across at her mother. “If Leah bolts, we’re really in trouble.”
“Can I go help her?” Penni asked.
“Good luck!” Brooke said.
Leah caught Penni’s eyes and nodded—both affirmation and thanks.
Penni followed Jodie out into the night.
Leah looked at her sister. “This is hard on them.”
“I’m the one with cancer!”
“I mean getting them out here for this.”
“Better over the phone or in a text message? What would you have suggested, Sis?”
“And Dave?”
“He’ll go all to pieces, but he’ll be loyal and attentive as a puppy dog once he recovers.”
“The boys?”
She laughed. “They’ll fly in from all over the country like the damned 82nd Airborne—second opinions, cutting-edge therapies, treatment centers! They mean well, but I needed this so I could handle that.”
“This?”
“This weekend.”
“The girls are devastated.”
“They’ll bounce back.” She chuckled. “It’s in their genes!”
Leah smiled and extended one jean-encased leg onto the coffee table.
Brooke extended hers likewise, crossing Leah’s on the table, her bare foot at the end of those jeans in pale and stark contrast to Leah’s hiking shoe.
Jodie wasn’t on the deck. Penni sensed that fact first then confirmed it as her eyes adjusted to the dark, with just enough light leaking out from the living room to allow her to confirm the wide deck was empty. There was an opening in the railing to the right that seemed to tumble out into pitch blackness but on closer examination revealed stairs leading down to the dunes and the beach beyond. Standing at the head of those stairs, Penni felt dizzy and disoriented. She grabbed the nearest railing post and closed her eyes, waited for her spinning world to steady. The ocean’s roar, seeming to come from all directions, filled her head.
But then slowly settled in the more familiar singsong of the crashing of surf off to her left, an elemental rhythm that was somehow steadying. When she opened her eyes the stairs leading to an intermediate landing then on down to the beach were clearly visible. And in the distance the surf, the source of that noise, was dimly sketched with a faint phosphorescence. That would be where Jodie went. She headed down the stairs, holding the railing firmly.
Once on the ground, she kicked off her slip-on canvas shoes and peeled off her socks. The sand was cold on her warm feet but somehow reassuring against her skin, recalling some distant memory. She shivered once, hugged herself, then headed off through the dunes.
Jodie said something from her seat on the sand at the high-water line, but the sound of the surf drowned her words.
Penni sat next to her. She’d braced herself for the touch of cold wet sand against her hands, but the sand was actually warmer than the air and dry. Closer to the ground and below the breeze, the night didn’t seem near as forbidding as from the deck. By now Penni’s eyes were fully adjusted to the dark and she could make out the water, the waves, the line of the horizon with clouds breaking up to reveal clusters of stars. From up at the house, she’d wondered how Jodie was brave enough to venture out here. Now she wondered how they’d be brave enough to go back.
“I’m sorry about what I said,” Jodie repeated, her words now clearly audible.
Penni thought Which time? She initially suppressed the question then said it anyway. “Which time?”
“Am I really that hard on you?”
“No more than any big sister.”
“You only have one.”
“Thank God!”
This allowed them both to laugh.
Jodie continued. “I meant about your pregnancy. I assumed Mom had brought us all the way out here to let you announce your news.”
“She didn’t know.”
“So I now see. I have this problem with jumping to conclusions.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry for what I said. I’m happy for you, and now I’m happy for Mom. You couldn’t have planned it better.”
“I didn’t plan it at all.”
“Just came naturally.”
“How do you mean?”
Jodie stared at the dark ocean, the silver curl of the crashing waves. Combing the white hair of the waves blown back when the wind blows the water white and black. There was a very good chance that some of the molecules in that mix were here billions of years ago.
“What do you mean ‘naturally’?”
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. Jodie sighed, the sound in almost perfect harmony with the briefly retreating wave before the next crashed. “We should get back before you catch cold.”
Penni didn’t move.
Jodie touched Penni’s near hand, pale white against her dark knee. “You’re living for two now, you know.”
Penni thought Which two? but said nothing as she stood, brushed off her hands, then pulled Jodie to her feet.