A Simple Thing (12 page)

Bobbie must have seen something in her face, because her eyes filled with tears. She ground out her cigarette in the ashtray on the table and leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Betty. “I'm sorry. Forget it; I shouldn't have said anything. I know you want this baby. And so do I.” Bobbie let her go and wiped a finger under each eye, careful not to smudge her mascara. “We'll figure it out.”

But how? What was she going to do? Betty thought about it for a long time after Bobbie left, and was still thinking about it a week later when the roses in the blue vase wilted and began to drop their petals. And that's when she began to form her plan.

Chapter 12

Susannah 2011

One Saturday morning about three weeks after they arrived, Susannah found herself climbing a tree—something she hadn't done since she was twelve, when it had been a heck of a lot easier. Hood had demonstrated how easy it was a few days ago, clambering up the branches in about thirty seconds. Of course, Hood was six inches taller and more than thirty years younger than she was. The trunk and lower branches were covered with moss, which made the footing slippery, and she was a little nervous she might surprise some squirrel that would object to her presence and sink its little squirrel fangs into her hand or arm.

She was climbing this particular tree, a bigleaf maple, because it stood on a slight rise, and if you climbed up seven or eight feet you could actually get a decent cell phone signal. In the past three weeks she had talked to Matt only a handful of times. He'd been impossible to reach, for one thing—always in meetings or, because of the three-hour time difference, asleep or eating a meal. He'd even been gone several evenings, which was strange because he usually hated to go out. When she did reach him, their calls were often interrupted because the wind blew or the rains came and the signal was lost.

She wedged her butt into a V where the main trunk split into two smaller trunks, uncomfortable but secure. She punched in Matt's number, only to have the “searching for service” message appear.

“Shit,” she said.

She had an urge to hurl the phone into the forest. She peered down through the fading gold leaves and sighed. She had been here three weeks and she couldn't escape the sense of a giant, looming
something
lurking beneath the surface of their new life here. She just didn't know what it was or when it would strike. The different rhythm was part of her unease. The kids disappeared for hours at a time without checking in with her, something that would have had her calling the police at home, but which was normal on Sounder. There were no pedophiles lurking in the schoolyard, as Jim and Betty pointed out; no drug dealers hiding in the shadows.

“Most people let the kids start to roam on their own when they're four or five,” Jim had said. “It's safe. They walk to school, climb trees, navigate through the woods. They get hurt they deal with it. It's great. They learn independence.”

But how do I learn independence?
In Tilton she did what every mother did and tracked the exact whereabouts of her kids at every moment via phone calls, text messages, and a network of other parents. But here Katie left for school at eight in the morning and didn't return home until dinnertime at seven or later. She didn't carry her cell phone because reception on the island was so spotty. She spent hours with Hood and Baker in the woods and the barn and on the beaches. She was exploring, she said. She was making new friends. This is why Susannah had brought her here, right?

Well, yes and no. On the one hand, Susannah loved living closer to the natural rhythm of her life—rising with the sun in the morning, working up a sweat chopping wood, falling into the deep sleep that comes from physical exhaustion and fresh air at night. She loved to stand at the kitchen sink in the mornings, gazing out the window at the mist over the meadow. She saw ring-necked pheasants scratching through the tall grass in the field, and heard the sweet, lilting song of winter wrens trilling from the Douglas firs and pines. She marked the coming winter with the fading light, the long shadows of the trees that fell earlier and earlier every day. The food she prepared and ate came mostly from the same ground she walked. It was a completely different life than the one she had known in Tilton, as she had hoped.

But it unsettled her, too. She knew, better than most, the capriciousness of nature and circumstance. The night was vast and black, the water infinite and unyielding. A sudden windstorm, like the one they'd had last week that had felled a two-hundred-foot Doug fir; a sudden ocean swell; a slight miscalculation with a tractor or chain saw—any small thing could turn on them, turn this from a place of refuge and protection to one of isolation and despair. She knew it—and feared it.

“Life was better here before cell phones,” a voice beneath her said.

Susannah, lost in her thoughts, was so startled she almost fell out of the tree. She looked down and saw Betty, who stood in the field about ten feet away.

“I saw you walking out here and came out to say hello, but you were up that tree before I could catch up,” Betty said. “You're in pretty good shape.”

“Thanks,” Susannah said. “But you should see Hood climb up here.”

“I've seen him,” Betty said. “He's quick.”

She pulled out her cigarettes and shook one out and lit it. “I wanted to thank you for bringing over those loaves of bread, and the cookies. And for taking the time to help the boys clear out the barn. Jim showed me all the work you did. That's a big help to us.”

“It was nothing. You've been so kind to us,” Susannah said.

“Don't let me bother you. Go ahead and make your calls. I'm just going to rest a minute before heading back.” Betty sat down on the grass.

“You're not bothering me,” Susannah said. She felt faintly stupid sitting in the tree, so she wriggled out of the crevice she'd been sitting in and stood on the thick branch just below her.

“Don't climb down on my account,” Betty said. “Stay. You can try your call again in a few minutes.”

Susannah took a deep breath, and wrapped one arm around the tree's main trunk. “I'll come down,” she said. “I'm not crazy about heights.”

“In that case, Barefoot would tell you to stay in that goddamned tree until you got over it,” Betty said with a smile.

“He would,” Susannah said.

She'd seen Barefoot often since the day of their boat ride. He stopped by Betty's most days—to check on the herb garden, drop off some tonic he'd brewed, or even to chop and cord her wood. Sometimes he'd come over to the white cottage and talk to Quinn, who had taken to life on the island like parched earth to rain. Quinn spent his afternoons roaming the woods and meadows and shorelines after school, sometimes with other kids, often alone, collecting crab shells and rocks and leaves and berries and strips of bark. He spread his collections across the dining table and the floor of the utility room where he slept. He asked Barefoot's help in identifying plants he didn't know, and listened to Barefoot tell stories about the animal life of the island, like the summer twenty years ago when beavers had suddenly appeared in the marsh down by Sitka Bay. They built countless dams and lodges, deepening part of the marsh into a pond that drew snowy white trumpeter swans and small hooded mergansers until nine years later when they disappeared as quickly as they had come.

Susannah looked at the thick branch beneath her feet, and at the ground below her, which was farther away than she'd realized. Now that she thought about it, she didn't remember how Hood had gotten
down
from up here. She lowered herself carefully and sat down, straddling the wide branch as she used to do when she'd climbed trees as a kid.

“Did you reach your husband?” Betty said. She sat on the grass with her knees up, feet flat on the ground. From this distance she looked young, almost girl-like, with her long, lean legs and her graceful neck, wrinkles hidden by a thick turtleneck sweater.

“No,” Susannah said. She sighed, and her breath rustled the leaves by her head.

“It's hard having a long-distance marriage,” Betty said. “I did it for twelve years.” She blew out a long stream of smoke.

“Really?”

“Yup. Sounder is a hard place to make a living. So Bill worked up in Alaska fishing for king crab, and came home summers.”

“That must have been tough.”

“In some ways. It was hard on Jim, not having his dad around.”

From where she sat in the tree, Susannah couldn't see Betty's face.

“And Bill and I—” Betty shook her head. “It was complicated.”

Complicated.
Maybe that was the word to describe the restless unease that Susannah felt about her own marriage. In the three weeks she'd been here she hadn't really missed Matt, not in the way she expected to, or in the way she thought she should. In many ways this distance between them was a relief. At home she always felt like she
wanted
something from Matt that he wouldn't give her, but if you'd asked her to name what it was she wanted, she wouldn't have been able to say.

She still remembered that time, years ago in Ann Arbor, when he'd come up to visit her at college. They'd gone for a long bike ride and wandered around bookstores and drank ouzo and then, inevitably, ended up in bed. The next morning she was lying there, with the spring rain washing the world in vivid green outside the window, when she had looked at him and thought, “What if I fell in love with Matt Delaney?” The thought startled her so much she had jumped, there in the bed, and woken him up.

She did love him, of course. He was so tied up in all the unspooling years of her life that he was like the golden oak newel post in her mother's house, something you passed by and touched every day but didn't notice. Then, one fall weekend they'd rented a little cottage on Lake Michigan, near their old camp. They were walking on the pebbled beach when a storm came up, the clouds thick and full over the lake. The skies burst and they were pelted with hail, stinging their cheeks and legs and arms as they ran. It was right after that, after they were back in the cabin and sitting by the fire with steaming mugs of coffee, that Matt had said, “Do you ever think about getting married?”

Does he mean do I
want to get married
ever
? Does he mean married to
him
?

“I don't know,” she said. “Do you?”

“Only to you,” he said, and he turned then to look at her, his eyes on hers. And she had felt something rise in her like the waters of the lake after a storm, swirling and full and warm. So he loved her like that. She was the one. And the fact that he felt that way about her—that it was so clear and direct to him, like the layers of bright angel shale in the canyons he studied—was enough to make her forget any doubts, to want nothing more than to let herself feel that way about him, too.

But here she was eighteen years later and three thousand miles away, plagued with a doubt bigger than she had imagined, or wanted to admit.

“But I'll tell you,” Betty said. “Once Bill died I missed him more than I ever thought I could.”

Susannah brought her attention back to the present. “Jim told me he died young,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“Car accident,” Betty said. Her voice was matter-of-fact.

“That's awful. I'm sorry. Here on Sounder?”

“Yes,” Betty said. She shrugged. “Accidents happen.”

Something in the tone of her voice caught Susannah, tugged at her.

“That's what everyone said when my sister died,” Susannah said. “ ‘Accidents happen.' But it didn't help.”

“Right,” Betty said. “Because people say, ‘Accidents happen,' but what they really
believe
is ‘Accidents happen,
but not to me
.' Then when it does happen and it's you—it's hard to know how to live with that. I didn't want anyone's pity, or blame.”

“What happened?” Susannah's curiosity overwhelmed her.

“Just one of those things,” Betty said. “I tortured myself with a lot of what-ifs for a long time afterward. But you have a choice: you let it eat you up, or you eat it up.”

If only it was that easy
. Susannah was tempted to tell Betty all about the day with the blue, blue skies and Janie and her orange life jacket.
Maybe she would understand.
Or maybe she'd avoid her, too, as her mother had, as her father had. She couldn't remember that her dad had ever looked at her again—really looked at her—after that day.

“It's funny. I still think about Bill almost every day, even though he's been dead forty-three years.”

Susannah looked up at the sun hitting the bright gold leaves above her. “I know. I think about my sister every day. And she was only three; it wasn't like losing someone you've been married to for years and years.”

“I don't know,” Betty said. “When someone dies you mourn the loss of all that possibility, whether they're three or sixty-three, don't you think?”

“Janie would have turned thirty-six this past summer,” Susannah said. Somehow it was easier to talk about, sitting up here in the tree, without having to look at Betty's face. “I keep thinking she'd be married and have kids of her own, and that her kids might have been friends with Katie and Quinn, or might even have looked like them. Janie had brown eyes, too, and wavy brown hair like mine. She was ten years younger, so maybe we wouldn't have been
best
friends, but I bet we would have been close.”

Unlike Susannah, Janie was fearless. Why, one time their father, drunk and furious, had made Susannah and Jon stand against the wall while he sat in his big leather chair and screamed at them. Susannah couldn't even remember what they'd done wrong. Out of the blue Janie had toddled over and put her little hand over his mouth and said, ‘No yelling! You stop that.' He'd been so surprised that he'd shut right up, and then had started to laugh. Nothing like that had ever happened in their house before. No one—not Jon, not Susannah, not their mother—had ever talked back to their father. But Janie, who was all of two and a half at the time, Janie did.