2
Leah, Jodie, and Andrea stood along the railing of the cottage’s widow’s walk on Good Friday afternoon. Easter was much later this year, and the weather was far warmer than the year before. The light breeze off the water felt good under the hot spring sun. There were many people walking along the beach and off to the left, toward the pier, there were several clusters of sunbathers and even a brightly colored beach umbrella. No one was in the water, though, as it was still cold from the long winter.
“Brooke will be the first one in this year,” Leah said with a mix of wonder and sadness, still trying to convince herself that her sister really was gone.
Penni was downstairs feeding the baby after the drive out from the airport with Leah. Brooke Catherine had healed remarkably fast from her surgery and with no serious setbacks, and was now above normal in weight for her due date age and was fast catching up on those of her birth age. At seven months and five days old, she was animated and alert, taking everything in and selectively trying to express her will with reaches of her small hands and short grunts and coos. But she’d not yet begun to crawl or talk.
“The perfect age,” Leah had said on the ride out, “Responsive but stationary!” Then she’d spent the rest of the drive trying to remember Jasper at that age, and failing. She wished she’d kept his baby picture in her wallet, to help jog her memory. Maybe there was one stored with the pics on her phone, she thought; but she knew there wasn’t. She’d carefully removed all pictures of him as a baby and child from her daily life in the painful aftermath of his going off to college.
On returning to Atlanta after Brooke’s death, she’d not seen or communicated with Billy while Andrea was staying with them. After Andrea returned to Seattle, Leah had waited a few days then asked Billy out to lunch. And there, in that public place, she’d quietly but firmly ended their affair. “I thank you for all you gave me, but that is now past.” He’d accepted her decision without protest, thinking it was probably her grief talking. He could wait for her to heal then return to his side.
But she hadn’t returned to his side or his bed in the months since. To the contrary, she’d given notice to the Green Ways board that she was leaving as the charity’s director, then lobbied to have Billy appointed in her place. And once he accepted that position, she resigned from the board, severing all ties with the charity except for the generous monthly contributions drafted automatically from their family checking account. Throughout this process she’d thought often, sometimes nonstop, of Brooke’s last advice—to end the affair before it was too late. Perhaps she’d acted faster than Brooke had intended. Maybe she could have and should have used Billy to ease her suffering. But that would have only cemented her to him, then it would have been too late. No it was better this way. But then why did she feel so empty and lost?
Jodie gazed out on the idyllic scene—lovers prancing with their jeans rolled up and their toes in the water, families with children chasing each other with ribbons of kelp flying out behind them like pennants, an old couple walking quietly hand in hand. She wondered how she’d missed such placid beach scenes till now, and what she’d lost in the omission. For her the beach had always been linked to Shawnituck, and Shawnituck had always been associated with a topsy-turvy mix of excitement and dread—excitement at the freedoms Dad granted her, freedom to explore the island and do more or less whatever she wanted, and dread at the prospect of having to return home, to Mom’s version of order and advancement. Seeing this scene now—from Mom’s ideal vantage point, through her eyes—gave her a glimpse of what she might’ve missed in forever battling her mother’s will. “Where should we spread her ashes, Leah?” The question was intended to neutralize her sadness but instead opened a trapdoor to a void she wasn’t even aware she possessed. Her voice cracked on her aunt’s name, an old refuge in a huge new need.
Andrea heard the plea and sidled silently against her lover’s hip, put her arm around her waist and pressed her face into the notch between Jodie’s shoulder and neck. After eight years of close observation through all manner of situations and trials, she knew Jodie well enough to know that this regret was inevitable, had to come out and be confronted, and knew far better than Jodie that it would come out this weekend. That’s why she’d rented the cottage an extra day and persuaded Jodie to come in a day early “To get everything ready for Leah and Penni and the baby.” Jodie had laughed and said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were lobbying to be Mom.” She’d replied, “Somebody has to take care of you.” And then last night, with the windows open on the murmuring sea and a light and cool salt-laden breeze fluffing the curtains, she’d shown Jodie in every way she knew how that together they were strong enough to endure this, that in the full expression of their love they had resources neither had alone, ample to the need, any need. She could only hope now that Jodie believed in it.
For the moment Leah forgot her sadness in the face of her niece’s grief. She turned to console Jodie but saw that someone had beat her to the task. She smiled to herself and thought even Brooke would be happy—shocked maybe at first but in the end happy. In that seemingly simple assumption she acknowledged Brooke’s powers of adaptability that had allowed her to thrive despite her willfulness. She turned from her niece and gazed to her right. “I think we should toss them off the end of the island, where the sound meets the ocean.”
“Where you threw the ring,” Jodie said.
Leah laughed, surprised her niece remembered the story. “She never forgave me for throwing it in the ocean. Maybe she’ll go out there and find it.”
“The ring?” Andrea asked.
“We’ll get Leah to tell the story on our walk out there with the ashes.”
Leah laughed. “Don’t want to bore her with family legends.”
Andrea said. “I love family stories.” She’d grown up a virtual orphan, abandoned by her father and left with her grandmother by a mother out to restart her life but instead descending into addiction and mental illness, dying of AIDS when Andrea was sixteen.
“You’ll get them this weekend,” Leah said.
Jodie said, “We were thinking of moving to Atlanta, getting a fresh start.” The idea had come up just last night—well, early this morning—as the women talked about how difficult Brooke’s death had been for Leah. Then they’d talked about the possibility some more over breakfast. Andrea liked Leah and had enjoyed her brief stay in Atlanta. More significantly, she understood Jodie’s call to return to the east coast, maybe late but hopefully not too late.
Leah turned to her niece, both startled and touched by the suggestion. “Is Andrea ready for our oppressive summers?”
Andrea laughed. “Can’t be any worse than Seattle’s rainy winters.”
“And work?”
“Atlanta has some really good improv theaters,” Jodie said, “and they all need set designers. And Andrea is a real estate broker. Maybe Uncle Whit will give her a shot—on a trial basis, of course.”
Leah laughed. “I’m sure he’d be glad for an energetic young broker. And he’s short a woman since his office manager quit last month.”
“There you go,” Jodie said—the matter settled—in a tone that was hauntingly familiar but never before out of her mouth.
“There you go,” Leah said quietly. She leaned over and gave her niece a sideways hug and brushed Andrea’s hand visible at her waist.
“There who goes?” Penni asked as she approached from behind with Brooke Catherine clad in a pink sun hat and yellow terrycloth jumper balanced on her right hip. She came alongside Andrea but stopped a stride short of the railing, either afraid of heights or afraid she might drop her baby.
“Jodie and Andrea are thinking of moving to Atlanta,” Leah said. She walked around to get next to Penni and the baby.
“Really? That’s great, Jodie! I’m dying to have you on the east coast!”
Jodie laughed. “Boston and Atlanta are still a thousand miles apart. I checked this morning.”
“Better than
three thousand miles and three time zones—just a couple hours on a plane!”
“I figured after last fall, you’d swear off flying.”
“That was with Brooke inside my body. Outside she’s a lot easier and more fun.”
“Till she starts moving around.”
“Maybe by then I can get Randall to take a job in the South. I don’t know how many northern winters I have in me.”
“How about Atlanta?” Jodie said.
“They’ve got hospitals there, don’t they?” Penni said.
“One or two,” Leah said.
“Sold!” Penni said.
Andrea laughed. “That’s my line!”
Leah knelt down to Brooke Catherine’s level. The baby’s eyes were open but squinty, either from sleepiness on a full stomach or the bright light. “She looks like she’s ready to conk out.”
“I’m sure she is. She’s had a long day and a full meal. One thing I seem to be good at is making breast milk!”
“You were born for motherhood,” Jodie said.
“I guess I was—just took me awhile to find my calling.”
“Your job description for the next eighteen years.”
“At least.”
“At least.”
“Where are we going to scatter Mom’s ashes?” Penni asked.
“With the ring,” Jodie said.
Penni nodded. “That’s good. That’s where I would have picked.”
The four women all looked to the right, westward across a few hundred yards of dunes to where the sand ended and the ocean merged with the sound. Below their level, her eyes still open on the bright afternoon, Brooke Catherine was also gazing in that direction, had been looking that way all along.
3
Two days later, on a morning that was warmer still though hazy with a high fog that had yet to burn off, the women and baby gathered at that spot. There’d been a few early walkers as indicated by footprints in the low-tide sand, but at that moment no other people were visible at this end of the island. The beaches facing the ocean sloped gradually out to sea, resulting in wide sandbars at low tide. But here at the sound’s outlet, the beach ended with a sharp drop angling steeply to water rushing out of the sound with the still outgoing tide.
The four silently arranged themselves in a single line and stared down at the gray water flowing past. Penni and the baby were on the right-hand end, then Leah holding the pottery urn containing exactly half of Brooke’s ashes, then Jodie, then Andrea. On the slow walk out here Leah had shared the story of the ring, to the others’ amusement and amazement—at the audacity of the sisters eavesdropping on conversations from their hiding place beneath the pier, at the improbability of the ring landing in Leah’s lap, at her tossing it into the ocean rather than keeping it or letting Brooke have it.
But now arrived to their solemn task, no one spoke for some minutes. They watched the water from the sound, descended out of the mountains and across the foothills and the piedmont and coastal plain and draining into the wide bay and infused with salts and minerals to mix with all it had accumulated in its long journey, head now out to sea.
Leah finally looked up from the water. “Any words?” she asked quietly. She looked first to Penni, whose tears splotched Brooke Catherine’s sun bonnet as she shook her head. She turned to Jodie and Andrea. Andrea squeezed Jodie’s hand and shook her head once without looking up.
Jodie, her eyes clear and steady, faced her aunt. “I think the fact that we’re here together, as Mom asked, are words enough.”
Leah thought back to before she could hear, when actions were her words, when her life was defined by motion rather than sound. Their presence together at this spot on this day was enough, not only for Brooke but for them all. She nodded assent to Jodie’s simple declaration.
She loosened the tape holding the makeshift plastic cap on the urn and dropped the cap into the pocket of her coat. She held the urn to Jodie.
Jodie’s eyes held on her aunt as she shook her head and said quietly, “You.”
Leah turned to Penni and offered her the urn. Penni managed to meet her eyes and likewise shook her head. “You,” she whispered.
But Brooke Catherine, who was now propped on Penni’s shoulder, reached out toward the slick-glazed urn and brushed it with her fingers.
In that infant’s gesture, Leah found the strength to fulfill her duty. She cradled the urn in both hands and extended her arms over the water and inverted the vessel. The ashes and bone chips fell in a steady and resolute stream of gray lasting maybe five seconds.
In the few minutes since they’d arrived, the tide had turned. Now the ocean water rushed inland even as the land’s water still pushed out. The sea in front of them churned and chopped with white caps that crested and crashed into each other in random chaos. The ashes were quickly swallowed by the swirling water. A light spray kicked up by the chop and carried by the breeze washed over them.
From Penni’s shoulder, Brooke Catherine reached out—whether for the urn or the ashes or the roiling sea, no one, she least of all, could say for sure.
The End
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