After the Fire (22 page)

It was time to go over to Miss James’ house where Henrietta had promised to help her sort out whatever Red wouldn’t need or want. Red wouldn’t discuss it. She just would not put her mind to the fact that everything in the house was hers.

Karen arrived early and had the cardboard boxes from the store stacked on the porch waiting for Henrietta who had the key to the new padlock.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Henrietta called. “Everything seems to take me twice as long as it used to. I don’t know how I’d ever manage to catch a ferry.”

“Do you need help at your house,” Karen asked, “until Red comes back?”

“Oh, not really, child,” Henrietta said. “I can manage.”

Was she aware of taking up Miss James’ way of address? Karen at that moment didn’t mind being called “child”; she even felt gently claimed by it.

They had no trouble with the clothes. There were not a great many, and they all seemed to be clean. They could be boxed and sent to the thrift shop. When they’d emptied the closets and drawers, Karen took the vacuum to them while Henrietta cut fresh paper for lining.

“It will be a while before the smell of her sachets is gone,” Henrietta said. “It’s not something people do much anymore. Even my mother’s dollar bills smelled of her perfume.”

“I wonder what Red will do with this jewelry,” Karen said, looking into the dressing table drawer.

The contents looked oddly like the things her mother had sent to her, probably because Miss James had collected it in her travels too—ethnic junk rather than love tokens.

“Would you like any of it?” Henrietta asked.

“Oh, no,” Karen said, withdrawing.

“Well, we certainly can leave some things up to Red,” Henrietta decided.

In the bathroom she insisted on throwing out all the medicines, even the aspirin, and she directed Karen to sort through the towels for any that were badly worn. Underneath the towels, Karen found an ancient bathing suit about which they laughed. Then Karen started on the supply shelf.

“Red won’t have to buy toilet paper for years,” she said.

As she moved the rolls to be sure nothing was hidden behind them, one toppled over and revealed a stash of paper money at its hollow center.

“Look at this!” Karen exclaimed.

They counted five hundred dollars.

“What a place to keep money!” Henrietta exclaimed. “I imagine it’s the sort of thing Red does with her own. She’s simply going to have to open a bank account now.”

When they finally arrived at the kitchen, Henrietta proposed a break. She sat down so gratefully that Karen realized she was too tired for more. Karen made them tea, her first domestic act in this house.

“The kitchen ought to be pretty straightforward,” Karen said. “I can do that when I move in.”

“You might just remember to move any of the cleaning things or poisons out of the way of a baby while you’re at it,” Henrietta suggested.

“Isn’t Red lucky?” Karen said wistfully as she sipped her tea from a thin china cup.

“I hope so,” Henrietta said.

“Rat advised me not to wait for an invitation,” Milly said, standing at Red’s door.

“I don’t invite people,” Red said. “Now they just come.”

“Well, that’s good,” Milly said. “I see I’m not the only one to think of Pampers.”

There were boxes of disposable diapers piled neatly against the wall. The baby slept in the cradle on a luxuriant lambskin surrounded by stuffed animals, most of them locally made. And there were stacks of baby clothes on the few available surfaces.

“I could just about open a store,” Red said, looking around.

“That’s the island,” Milly said. “Whether your house burns down or you have a baby, the goods pile in. And after all, it’s Dickie’s child.”

“She’s a third-generation islander,” Red agreed complacently.

Milly walked over to the cradle to look at Blue, too small still to claim likenesses, but when she did, Red wouldn’t object. This strange, rootless girl had managed a pedigree for her bastard child, and obviously no one but its own grandmother was going to deny it.

“Has Sadie come?” Milly asked.

“We don’t need her,” Red said.

“I shouldn’t think you do,” Milly agreed. “Let’s just hope Blue hasn’t inherited Sadie’s love of the bottle.”

“People have choices about things like that,” Red answered.

So Red had thought about that, too, calculating all the odds. Blue could use some of Dickie’s good looks. And he hadn’t lacked brains; he’d chosen to be stupid.

“People who grow up here and don’t know anything else sometimes don’t realize what their choices are,” Milly said.

“That happens anywhere,” Red said.

“So how are you?” Milly asked, giving Red an evaluating look.

“I’m all right, but I’ve decided not to come back to work until September.”

“I guess that won’t kill me,” Milly decided. “When are you going to move?”

“September, probably,” Red said.

“That’s going to be a change,” Milly said, looking around. “Surprised me, Miss James did.”

Red’s face had closed, and Milly knew her well enough to recognize the signal and back off. At that moment, Blackie arrived at the door, a low growl starting in her throat.

“It’s all right, Blackie,” Red said.

Milly laughed.

“She’s not used to so many people,” Red explained, rubbing one of Blackie’s ears.

“You remember about the highchair when she’s ready for it,” Milly said.

“Thanks.”

Milly walked back up the road relieved to have seen the baby and satisfied her curiosity about the way Red lived. Milly would certainly never have wanted to raise a child, children, alone. She would never have lived alone by choice. And to live that poor, like somebody out of a past century—Milly was sure she would have taken to the streets before she did that. Nothing was a real choice for a woman unless dictating among disasters counted. Maybe being alone wasn’t so difficult if you’d never been happy.

“Certainly I’ve been happy,” Milly said to herself as she got into her car.

Stuck behind a family of cyclists, the youngest no more than five, wobbling and weaving along behind the others, Milly dawdled along until there was a safe stretch of road to pass. Islanders cursed this summer traffic, and Milly did, too, but she liked the summer, remembering her own children on bicycles coming down the hill toward her like a flock of birds.

“M
ISS JAMES IS NOT
going to just disappear,” Karen said with nervous firmness to Red’s silence on the other end of the phone. “Red?”

“I’m listening,” Red replied softly, “I don’t want to wake Blue.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Karen said impatiently, “but either she’s awake so you can’t talk or she’s asleep so you can’t talk.”

There was no reply.

“With no funeral, with no memorial, Miss James doesn’t just go away,” Karen tried to explain. “Getting rid of her clothes didn’t help.”

“What do you want to do?” Red asked.

“Exorcise her,” Karen replied.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“We have to do something to let her—or anyway this house—know she’s dead.”

“Don’t you want to stay there?” Red asked.

“I do … if I can,” Karen said. “But it’s your problem, too, Red. I can’t do it by myself.”

“Can’t you ask Mrs. Hawkins?”

“Hen didn’t inherit this house. You did.”

“I know, and I’ll deal with it. I really will when I can.”

“Listen, Red, if I give a sort of party, would you at least come to it?”

“I guess so,” Red said, “if I can.”

Karen hung up, disgusted.

“Well, what do you think of her now?” Karen demanded.

In the two days since she’d moved in, Karen had stopped talking to herself and addressed all her remarks to Miss James whose spirit in this house was too lively to seem like a ghost.

“You’re meant to be her problem, not mine.”

The house was so clearly designed for one person that trying to live in it without taking Miss James’ place left no comfortable place to be. Other chairs in the living room were adequate only if you didn’t want to read or watch TV. Even in the kitchen Miss James’ chair was the only convenient one if you were waiting on yourself. But whenever Karen tried to assert herself, to take Miss James’ place, she was filled with restless apprehension.

Karen was grateful Miss James had not died in her bed, but she herself had not slept well in it for the past two nights, waking often with the peculiar sensation that she was trapped in someone else’s skin.

None of the strategies she’d developed for living alone seemed to work in this house. She found herself reverting to all the tricks she had learned to avoid going home. She couldn’t believe that this might happen to her again wherever she went. That would be simply too discouraging.

Red obviously didn’t know what Karen was talking about. Maybe by the time Red moved in, it would be all right, or she’d be too preoccupied and insensitive to notice. She had no trouble nursing a dead man’s baby. Maybe she could live comfortably in a dead woman’s house.

Karen wondered why she’d ever thought she could make friends with Red. It wasn’t just that Red’s vocabulary was so limited that she couldn’t understand half of what Karen said; Red didn’t care. But then, who did?

“How could you live all those years,” Karen demanded, “like this?”

Was she really asking Miss James, or her mother? Neither would answer her, and perhaps she was a little crazy, having slipped first into talking to herself and now slipping further into talking with the dead. At least when she talked to herself, she responded.

Answer me!
she wanted to shout but instead rushed out of the house and down across the road to the sea. She stood watching the pleasure boats anchored out by the point. She hadn’t once been fishing. Adam had asked her, but she couldn’t have made friends with him. That wasn’t what he’d have wanted. Now that the pub was full of summer people, he hardly bothered to speak to her.

Why was she suddenly so angry with everyone, the dead as well as the living?

“I’m sick of this place,” she said aloud.

“Then move on,” she answered.

Oddly there was no blank wall of WHERE before her but an open, even inviting, horizon. She didn’t feel afraid.

Karen walked back up to the house, went in and sat down at Miss James’ desk. She had cleared it of everything personal, but Miss James’ scent still clung to the blank stationery. Karen took out four sheets and began to make signs for the island’s billboards.
You are invited to share memories and thoughts of Miss James at her house on Friday at 7:30 p.m.
She paused, considering, then printed
Karen Tasuki.
Let them say it wasn’t her place to do it. Let them decide not to come.

“I’ve got to make it my place until I leave,” she said to Miss James, who seemed a little more willing to share her desk than she had been.

Now Karen had things to do to get ready for the party that might or might not take place. She baked a modest number of cookies, bought a few cold cuts and some cheese, a half a dozen bottles of wine, and arranged to borrow the smallest coffee maker from the hall, as well as cups and glasses.

In the three days she prepared, no one mentioned her signs to her, and no one called to offer help. Perhaps they expected her to ask for it. She didn’t need any.

On Friday afternoon, when she’d finished her duties at the ferry dock, she went home and began to make a small number of sushi.

“Why not one last one in the eye for silly Milly Forbes?” she asked Miss James or herself; they both agreed.

Adam, if he came, actually liked sushi. For a wistful moment, she admitted to herself that she wanted him to come, and Riley and Rat and his wife, Homer and Jane, all of them. But she stopped that hope by concentrating on what she was doing.

In the middle of her task, it came to her that what she really wanted to do was learn Japanese. Why? Did she have to have a reason? Then she had one. She wanted to be able to read that gravestone she had so rashly claimed for her great-grandfather. If she wanted to learn Japanese, why not go to Japan? She would be little more of a stranger there than she was here. Her father would be appalled. Well, as he said himself, she was a grown woman. And she could afford it.

For the first time, her inheritance from her mother occurred to her as a blessing. She was, after all, free to make her own terms with the world. Why on earth had she been hanging around the edges of other people’s lives when she had her own? Here she was in Red’s house, envying Red’s good fortune, even taking on what she thought of as Red’s responsibilities when she could be on her way to Japan. The world out there beyond this little island was full of people, among whom there might be someone she could risk wanting on her own terms.

At seven o’clock, Red arrived, the baby asleep in a carrier on her breast, in her hand a basket full of things for the baby, on top of which was a pie.

“I couldn’t get here any earlier,” Red said. “I don’t seem to be as well organized as I thought.”

“I didn’t expect you to help,” Karen said, too relieved to see her to leave room for grievance.

Red looked around at the food and drink.

“It sure looks different,” she said.

“It’s beginning to feel that way, too,” Karen agreed.

“Is it okay if I put Blue on … your bed?” Red asked.

“It’s Miss James’ or yours,” Karen said. “I just sleep there.”

“Karen, I’m sorry you’re mad at me. I wish I could be your friend, but I can’t now. I don’t know how. It’s something maybe I’ll never learn.”

Karen looked at Red, so lately in the bloom of pregnancy, now white and drawn with all the new demands being made on her, and wondered at her own anger. “You are my friend and a good one,” Karen admitted. “I haven’t any business being mad at you. I’m sorry.”

Milly sat at the desk which had been Forbes’, finishing a letter she had promised to write to Bonnie. Writing was far easier than she had expected, not only because it didn’t have to be a performance for everyone else on the party line but also because she felt so much closer to Bonnie since she’d been here. Milly’s sense of mortal power over her daughter had faded considerably, but her affection for her had not, nourished as it was more and more often by memories of her as a child, memories of all the children in those long sunny summers here on the island. She could recall to Bonnie a remark she’d made when she was around twelve: “I’m so glad, Mother, you don’t make jelly and pies. We get to eat all the berries we pick.” There had been a time when her children had approved of her. Though Bonnie certainly had her reservations now, Milly sensed that she was now more in her daughter’s good graces than she had been for some years.