After the Fire (11 page)

“No,” Red said. “Do I need one?”

“Yeah, and I can pick one up for you in Victoria tomorrow.”

“Any chance of coffee over here?” Adam asked; he would usually have helped himself.

“Sure,” Karen said, getting up.

As she set cups up and poured them for Riley and Adam, she said, “I like you guys better when you’re human.”

“You might try it yourself,” Adam suggested. “Ever phoned yourself up to see how busy you always are?”

“Hey, that’s a new one on me,” Riley said.

“Right out of the late movie on TV last night,” Karen said.

“Why always watch it alone?” Adam asked.

Karen shrugged and turned away. Adam didn’t usually pressure her in this way, but, since Sally and Sarah had been here, he had begun to test her. She wasn’t sure how to handle it and didn’t want to. She had worked at being one of the boys for a year, and she wanted it to stay that way.

The ferry parking lot between sailings was an ideal place for Karen to teach Red the basics of driving. They agreed to meet there on Wednesday and Friday mornings between the 8:10 departure of the ferry to the mainland and its arrival back at 10:20. Without a gearshift to manipulate, Red was confident enough for the road after the first hour, and she drove them to the store for morning coffee.

It was an older crowd who gathered here, the first place where you might learn who had dropped dead at the bridge table last night, whose daughter was pregnant, or who had taken the money yesterday at the golf course. Over the months Karen hadn’t exactly been accepted here. She was more friendly with the younger women who worked behind the counter than with the other customers, but by now they expected her. The lack of greeting when she arrived with Red surprised her. Red seemed to take no notice.

“No coffee?” Karen asked as Red waved a hand against the cup Karen was about to pour her.

“I’ll get juice,” Red said.

“How long do you have to live on this island before you turn into a health freak?” Karen asked amiably.

“Until you get pregnant,” Red answered.

Karen glanced around, but no one seemed to have heard the remark. She led them to an isolated corner before she asked almost in a whisper, “Are you?”

Red nodded.

Karen still did not dare pursue the subject until they were back in the car.

“What are you going to do?”

“Have it,” Red said.

“Do you want it?”

“That’s why I’m pregnant,” Red said.

“When?”

“In about four and a half months.”

“You’re going to do it all by yourself?” Karen asked.

“Only way,” Red said. “Don’t you ever think about having a kid?”

“I’m gay,” Karen said, surprised at how undefensively it came out.

“I know,” Red said, “but that doesn’t make any difference.”

“I suppose not,” Karen admitted, “but I haven’t thought about it since I was a kid myself and just assumed I’d have to. I don’t think I ever liked the idea.”

“I don’t like the idea now,” Red granted. “But there’s no other way I’d get a baby.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Sometimes, a little bit, but mostly I think about how it will be when I have the baby.”

“Do you think people are going to give you a bad time?”

“There’ll be nothing new about that,” Red said. “I told Mrs. Hawkins. She was all right.”

“She would be,” Karen said.

She wanted to go on to say that she’d do anything she could to help, but it was too early in this new stage of friendship to make offers for the future. What Karen had to do now was build Red’s trust so that she could just assume Karen’s help when the time came.

Blackie, tied to the toll booth, was hysterical at the sight of them as Red steered the car through the narrow pay lane and out onto the wide blacktop with its reassuring margin of error. Karen used the marked lanes to teach Red the finer points of steering.

“If there had been a car in that lane,” Karen chided, “you would have taken off its fender.”

While Red practiced, the dog continued to bark.

“I’m going to kill that dog before I get her trained,” Red said finally.

“That’s what I’d think about a crying baby,” Karen confessed. “Better you let that dog develop your patience.”

Red looked at Karen and grinned. “You’re right.”

There were two cars already lined up at the toll booth. Rat had gotten out of his and was playing with Blackie by the time Karen and Red reached the booth. In the car, his wife nursed their baby.

“You guys ever want a baby sitter?” Red asked, looking in the window.

“Can’t afford it,” Rat’s wife said.

“No charge,” Red said.

Karen was unlocking the booth and worrying that Red’s sudden interest in someone else’s baby would give away her secret. But it would give itself away quite shortly. Red should probably tell people before they could see for themselves.

“This is going to be a fine dog,” Rat said wistfully.

“I hope so,” Red said, struggling to untie Blackie while the dog jumped to lick Red’s face.

“Do you know anything about babies?” Rat’s wife asked.

“I’d like to learn,” Red said.

Rat had taken his wallet out and was paying Karen. Then he turned back to Red before he got back into his car.

“Who’s the lucky guy?” he asked amiably.

“Guy?”

“Woman starts getting interested in babies …” Rat said and shrugged.

“Better move it,” Karen said to him. “You’ve got a lineup behind you.”

“See you Friday,” Red said as she started back up the road, Blackie dancing at her side.

As Karen watched her go, she wondered why she hadn’t already noticed for herself that Red was pregnant, or had her hips always been that ample? Peggy had called Karen a hypocrite when she denied that she noticed other women’s bodies. But she just didn’t. She wasn’t attracted to bodies. It had been Peggy’s confidence which had drawn Karen to her, not her undeniable good looks. But Karen had come to wonder if confidence was like make-up, something you put on as you did your public face, which wouldn’t survive an honest scrubbing. Red’s manner was as innocent as her face of the will to attract. Karen’s new interest in her body was not erotic any more than was the sight of the breast of that young nursing mother. Karen was moved by such involvement in instinctive life. Was she abnormal to feel no such desire for herself?

Karen turned away from that question impatiently. She had had enough of internalizing the world’s judgments. She had heard Milly Forbes say having babies seemed to be a new vogue on the island. Anything Milly said could be discounted, but this outbreak of babies was like any other sort of epidemic in which people got caught not so much by instinct as by propinquity. Well, not Red. Red was as deliberately having a baby as she had made her vegetable garden.

The dog was part of the scheme, as was learning to drive, though Karen didn’t see quite how that skill fitted in with Red’s planning if she wasn’t going to buy a car. She wasn’t a borrower.

Abstracted as she walked down the dock to lower the ramp, Karen made only casual note of those in line for trips to the other islands. But her glimpse of Henrietta Hawkins driving off the ferry startled her out of her own musings. Henrietta’s face, despite the bright color at her throat, was as white as her hair.

T
HE LOWER HALF OF
Milly’s body was like an empty sack, not only without womb but without bowels or kidneys. That empty sack filled up with pain until the nurse arrived to puncture it with a needle and the pain leaked away, only gradually to fill the empty space again. At its peak pain was her reality which only the nurse could invade, but each time it seeped away, players waiting in the wings came onto a stage of several levels where they competed for her attention. Those actors on a level with Milly were gentle with her, wiping cold sweat from her face, asking her easy, pointless questions she could ignore. On platforms off to the side and above her, the actors demanded that she take part in the drama or pass judgment on it, which she hadn’t the strength to do. Yet, when she failed them, she could follow them off their stages as if she had traveling vision, see them change out of their costumes while they complained about her as if they really were her children and not professionals at all.

The actress playing her lost daughter Nora was the most irritating of all, throwing incomprehensible accusations at Milly like, “I didn’t run away; you did. You’re lost. Can you tell me where you really are? Can you? Then what does it mean that you don’t know where I am?”

“But I don’t,” Milly whined, turning restlessly against the attachments which both anchored and seemed to suspend her body.

Martin was sometimes on the first level, a face strained with concern, but more often he was up on his own platform turning it into a pulpit from which he gave pious speeches on his old theme: “Mother, your pain is tedious.”

He had no idea what pain was, she realized, no concept at all. He seemed to her such a silly, innocent boy, standing up there mouthing his platitudes like an actor, which he was. It wasn’t really Martin up there delivering Martinish lines.

Nor were those two on the other side really Forbes and his child bride. They didn’t take any notice of her at all, and they didn’t really do anything but gaze into each other’s eyes, but Milly was alarmed that they might. She told the nurse several times to warn them that she could see them perfectly clearly even when they went offstage, and she wouldn’t tolerate any of their sordid carryings-on.

Then gradually the pain rose onto that busy landscape like a blinding sun until she could see nothing else. She came to welcome it and to be reluctant to have it taken from her, for without it she had to live victim to all this posturing and moralizing from people or actors or whoever they were who had no conception of what she was going through.

“Of course we do,” the Nora one said. “We are what you are going through.”

Bonnie, on Milly’s own level, said, “There’s nobody there, Mother. It’s the drugs they’re giving you for the pain.”

If Nora and the others were mere hallucinations, why were they in so much sharper focus and so much more audible than Bonnie, who faded in and out like a badly tuned FM station?

“This is a bit more than you bargained for, poor darling,” Henrietta said through a great deal of static. Was she addressing Milly or Bonnie?

Then all the stages were empty, even the one by her side. Milly was alone and terrified. She did not know where she was. She wanted her watch, but she could not find it. She could hear something like the magnified beating of a heart as slow as a funeral drum, and she knew it was her own. It had been taken out of her body. Someone must have found its key and wound it up like a great clock to tell other people the time. Milly hadn’t agreed to that. They’d gutted her like a chicken, left the cavity of her body open to these swelling winds of pain which were overcoming everything, not just the irritating sorrows of her life but life itself.

“I’m not ready!” Milly tried to cry out, but she had no voice.

“You should get some rest now,” Henrietta said to Bonnie. “Your mother is through the crisis.”

“For a while there I was afraid she didn’t want to live,” Bonnie said, “that she was just letting the infection take over.”

Henrietta heard a trace of guilt in that fear. Though Bonnie was staying with her father, she obviously wouldn’t be able to talk with him about such things.

“Would you like to go for dinner before you go home?” Henrietta suggested.

“What about your ferry?”

“I can stay with a friend and go back in the morning.”

“Then yes, please.”

Henrietta took Bonnie to a quiet little seafood restaurant which had survived the Hawkinses’ years away from town. It had been a favorite of Hart’s who, unlike most men, liked fish.

“The first few days went so well,” Bonnie said, “and then just all of a sudden that high fever …”

“A bit of very bad luck,” Henrietta said, handing the menu to Bonnie.

“What has she got to live for?” Bonnie asked.

“Why, all sorts of things!”

“Her only real interest is hating my father,” Bonnie said gloomily. “She isn’t really interested in any of us.”

“She wanted you here,” Henrietta reminded her.

“Not
me
,” Bonnie replied. “She’s an emotional baglady, you know. She treats us all like things she’s left behind. But she doesn’t want it to look that way. So in a crisis she rummages for one of us to make herself look like a mother—to the doctors and nurses.”

Henrietta hoped some of this anger was exhaustion and relief.

“I shock you, don’t I?” Bonnie asked.

“No,” Henrietta answered. “Your mother isn’t an easy woman. And she’s been very unhappy.”

“You sound as if you think that’s over.”

“She won’t have the energy for it for a while at least,” Henrietta said, smiling. “She might get out of the habit.”

“I’d make more of an effort to come out and see her, but I don’t really think she wants that. Oh, she says she does, but then she behaves as if I’m there to check up on her, to spy for Dad. And I can’t really tell her Dad doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about her.”

“He sent her roses,” Henrietta said.

“He paid for them and for the room because I asked him to. He’s very easy to guilt-trip these days.”

“How is it for you, staying there?” Henrietta asked.

“Oh, it’s all right, I guess,” Bonnie said tiredly. “I don’t see any point in resenting him for being happy, but it’s a hard contrast seeing Mother the way she is. I’d never marry.”

Henrietta thought of Red and of Karen. In her own day not marrying would have been a disgrace. No amount of evidence against marriage would have changed that. Though Henrietta had had several opportunities to marry before she accepted Hart, she still felt that old gratitude to him for her social legitimacy. She had it still even though he was no longer there to reinforce it.

“Marriage can be a relief and a joy,” Henrietta said, but she was embarrassed by such platitudes and grateful that their dinners had arrived to distract them.

While Bonnie retrieved clams and mussels from their shells, Henrietta could observe her at leisure. She was probably better-looking than Milly had been, but she had none of Milly’s artifice and magnetism. It wasn’t necessary to look at Bonnie though pleasant to do so. Her brown hair, indifferently cut, was clean and full of copper lights, and the color was coming back into her face with each bite of food.