Islands (25 page)

“Gladys…”

Camilla smiled. “Of course, Gladys. We couldn’t keep her out with six feet of barbed wire. Come on, now. I’ll take your clothes and wash them while you’re asleep, and there’s plenty of food in your fridge. Did you bring any other clothes?”

“A few, in a duffle in the back of the truck. They’re in pretty bad shape. I don’t know what happened to all my clothes….”

His voice began to fade, and the distance came back into his eyes.

“No matter. I’ll sort them out,” Camilla said firmly. “Come on. When you feel up to it, the rest of us will probably be around one or another porch tonight and in the morning.”

She began to bustle him toward the little guest house in the palmetto forest behind the pool. I knew now why she had insisted on furnishing and decorating it just so, and stocking it with linens and silverware and dishes. She had had a window air-conditioning unit put in, too. The little house waited there all summer in the deep shade of the palms and live oaks, perfect and inviting, for guests who never came.

Instead, Henry had come. I knew that Camilla had meant it to be the home that he came to.

He held back under her gently urging hand, and looked at me.

“I’ve missed you,” he said limply, and I began to cry again.

“You’ll never know how we’ve missed you,” I whispered. “You’ll just never know.”

“I hope I will, someday,” Henry said, and turned to follow Camilla up the path toward a bath and food and sleep.

I called Lewis at Sweetgrass and he called Simms and Lila, and by late afternoon we were all gathered at the creek, having drinks on Camilla’s front porch and talking of Henry.

“How was he?” “How did he seem?” they asked me over and over, and I could only shake my head helplessly.

“Old. Half sick. Weak. I don’t know,” I said. “He’s not really Henry. How could he be, after what he’s been through? Let’s wait and see how he is when he gets his bearings.”

“But did he say where…?” “Did he talk about Fairlie?” “Will he be staying here?” “Is he going back to medicine?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know. We really didn’t talk.”

“Then what did you do?” Lila said impatiently.

“Sat in the driveway with our arms around each other and Gladys and cried,” I said.

“Henry
cried
?” Simms was shocked.

“If he hadn’t cried, I’d cart him straight off to a shrink,” Camilla said crisply. “Anny’s right. We need to let him be, let him call the shots.”

“But what will we talk to him about?” Lila wailed, and all at once I wanted to shake her.

“What did you ever talk about?” I said.

“Well, you know. Just stuff.”

“Just stuff will do fine.”

Henry slept for the rest of that day and night and most of the next day. Or at least, if he did not sleep, neither did he leave the guest house, and we saw no lights and heard no sounds. A couple of times Gladys came clicking out the slightly open front door and wandered into Lewis’s and my kitchen and had a bite and a drink, but she looked at me, startled and half guilty, wagged her tail, and padded back toward the guest house.

“It’s okay,” I said the first time she did it. “I know he’s back. He’ll want you there when he wakes up.” And off she went.

In the morning Camilla tiptoed into the guest house with a pile of newly ironed clothes and a pitcher of fresh orange juice, but she did not stay.

“Still sleeping,” she said. “I could hear him snoring.”

“I think that’s Gladys,” I said. “She can blow you out of bed.”

“Well, whoever, they’re really sawing wood. I know you all wanted to see him, but I think it would be better, if he doesn’t come out by midafternoon, if everybody went back to their own place in town. Maybe he should just ease into the group one at a time.”

“That one being you,” Lila said.

“You know I always stay out here part of Monday,” Camilla said. “I just want to see if he needs anything. Then I’ll leave him be. But I’m not going to leave him totally alone out here. Not for a while. He’s going to start remembering in earnest now, and I want to be here if he wants to talk.”

But apparently Henry did not want to talk. At least, not about Fairlie, or the fire, or his lost time in the Yucatán. Camilla reported at midweek that he had caught up on his sleep and was eating like a sailor on shore leave, and had begun to lose the terrible skeletal look in his face and arms. He spent a lot of time dozing in the sun or reading in the pool cage, Gladys stuck to his side like a cocklebur, and he took the little kayak that Simms had brought out into the creek and vanished out of sight in the marshes for hours at a time.

“Does he talk?” I asked, when she called.

“Oh, yes. But not about…all that. He talks about the land around here—apparently he and Lewis used to hang around here with somebody named Booter—and he talks about Gladys, and dogs in general, and the state of medicine today, and what’s happening to downtown with the tourists and all. And he talks a lot about the old days.”

“At the beach house?”

“No. Earlier. When he and Lewis and I were kids out on the island. I’d forgotten how awful he and Lewis were. He laughs a lot about that.”

“So we shouldn’t mention the other stuff….”

“You can talk about anything else under the sun, but he’s obviously not ready for that. Let him set the pace.”

We all got to the creek about the same time the next Friday, at sunset, and Henry uncoiled himself from Camilla’s porch swing and came loping down the steps to meet us.

“Well, if it’s not the estimable Scrubs of Charleston, South Carolina, and Booter’s Creek,” he drawled, grinning hugely, and we all hugged and cried a little, and pounded him on the back and Lila and I kissed him. He smelled like sun and freshly ironed cotton, and, faintly, of salt and pluff mud, and his face and arms and legs were lightly tanned under a coating of new sunburn. His silvery hair was neat again, if still a little longish; somebody, Camilla, no doubt, had trimmed it. He wore crisp khaki shorts and a blue oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his forearms, and if you did not look too long into his eyes, he was fully and truly Henry again.

“You look good, man,” Lewis said, clearing his throat. “You really do. And my God, Gladys! Look at you! We ought to enter you in the Miss Charleston contest.”

Gladys, capering with manic glee beside Henry and barking up at us, shone as if she had spent a day at an exclusive spa, and wore around her neck a beautiful brown and black and white cotton scarf tied like a bandanna.

“I swore I’d never do that to a dog,” Henry said, “but I brought it back from Mexico for Nancy, and it was just the color Gladys is, so I gave it to her instead. Looks a million times better on Gladys. Really brings out the cheerleader in her, doesn’t it? Bath didn’t hurt, either.”

In a way, that first conversation set the tone for the rest of the summer. We found that, after an initial awkwardness, we could talk almost naturally among ourselves and around Henry without mentioning Fairlie or the fire. Henry helped by saying, that first night at dinner, “I know you all want to know, and I want to tell you. But not yet. I’ve got way too much to sort out. And you’ll understand that there are things I just can’t talk about, and maybe never will.”

We nodded, looking at him in the light of Camilla’s tall white tapers. But we did not know, not really. Only Camilla knows, I thought, looking at her. She was smiling and nodding her head very slightly. When he’s ready, she’ll be there, I thought, and was comforted. Camilla would understand a great deal without Henry’s having to say it. But Fairlie and the fire and the years at the beach house were always with him, we knew, and always with us.

For the rest of the summer, Henry stayed in the guest house, and Camilla stayed in her house. We came on weekends. It was not dissimilar to the way things had been at the beach house, except now, of course, Henry lived on the creek. Or did for the time being, anyway. He made no effort to look for a place in Charleston, and said nothing about continuing his practice, or flying with his doctors’ group. I wasn’t sure what he did with his weekdays; Camilla said he was out on the water a great deal, usually with Gladys, and spent a lot of time walking the fields and woods bordering the marsh. She thought that the days of solitude were when he wrestled with his demons; his eyes were often red when he came in for supper, as he always did. But at the meal, he was easy and soft-spoken, as he had always been, and often talked long to her over coffee, in the candlelight. But never of Fairlie. And never of the fire.

“He’ll get around to it,” she said tranquilly. “I think he’s a lot nearer to it now.”

He went to bed early and read late into the night, or at least Camilla thought that he did. Piles and piles of books lay about the living room when she went in to straighten up and take him his clothes and food. And his bedroom light burned late. She did not know where the books came from.

“Camilla, you’ve turned into Henry’s maid and cook,” Lila said early in September. “He ought to kick in, or help you find somebody to do for you.”

“He helps me more than anyone knows,” she said, smiling. “Including him.”

On weekends he was agreeable and funny and as sweet tempered as ever, and often came with us when we sailed or swam. But never with just one of us. Henry that early autumn was everyone’s friend and no one’s confidant. If Lewis, with whom he had always been closest, missed the lazy, bone-deep bond that the years had forged between them, he did not say so. I thought that he was simply glad to have Henry back, on any terms, as was I. In those muted bronze days of September, when the monarch butterflies came drifting in from the north and settled in shivering clumps on the trees and shrubs, and the great autumn writing spiders wove their fables in the early mornings, Henry was alone only with Gladys and Camilla.

Often, on those mornings, I would get up early and they would be sitting around the pool, dripping and bundled in towels, talking quietly. In the late afternoons, before we all gathered for drinks, Camilla and Henry and Gladys all stretched themselves in the lowering sun on Camilla’s front porch. Talking, talking. Once I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and looked out the kitchen window, and saw Camilla letting herself quietly out of Henry’s front door, and starting down the path to her house. I did not speak of it, except to say to Lewis once, “Wouldn’t it be something if they got together? They both know what this pain is like. They might be a great comfort to each other. And they’ve been together so long….”

Lewis looked at me oddly.

“Too much history,” he said. “Way too much.”

And as the slow days burned toward October, Henry seemed to me to have achieved a fragile peace that I thought might be the beginning of healing. Camilla has done this for him, I thought. He’s finally talked it out to her. It was just the right thing to do. Even if the rest of us never heard the particulars of Henry’s terrible odyssey, the one who could truly help him had.

Bless her, I thought. Without her he could have simply died of the infection of grief.

In late September there came a day so blue and bronze and heavy with the smell of ripening wild muscadines that I awoke with autumn literally itching under my skin. It was a Saturday morning, and Lewis had stayed at Sweetgrass to talk to an agricultural agent about his longleaf pines. I knew that the day was an anomaly; the thick heat and buzzing insects would come back with a vengeance. In the Low Country, cool weather often does not come until Thanksgiving. This day was a token, a promise to wilting souls.

It was still early when I took my bagel and marmalade out onto our porch. The sky was a brilliant cobalt vault overhead, but wisps of icy white mist clung to the shoreline of the creek. Tags of it drifted among the still-green grasses. Sound, muted and thick all summer, had a ringing new clarity; I could hear someone’s boat engine far down the creek as clearly as if it had been at the end of our dock, and the thumping helicopter sound of a rising flock of wood storks far across the water was crisp and clear. I stretched luxuriously, and started to amble, barefoot, down to the dock, simply to wrap myself totally in the morning.

Behind me there was a soft, mechanical whining, and I turned. Henry and Gladys were bumping down the path to the dock in the golf cart. Henry raised his hand and smiled and Gladys wagged her whole back end.

“Is this a day, or what?” I said.

“This is a day,” Henry said. “Gladys woke me up begging to go out in the Whaler, so I thought I’d indulge her.”

“She’s a good sailor,” I said, rubbing the thin hair on the top of Gladys’s domed head.

“Has she been in the Whaler much?” he said.

“I used to take her a lot. It’s better for her than the rowboat, because she can see out.”

“Well,” Henry said, getting out of the cart and lifting Gladys down, “I’m glad it isn’t her maiden voyage.” They started down the dock, the tall, thin man and the limping old dog. Henry did not ask me to go with them. I was obscurely hurt; I don’t know why.

I settled onto the bench seat in the pavilion and watched as Henry jumped down into the Boston Whaler. He reached up for Gladys, but she pulled back, turning her head from him to me and back again. You could read the confusion on her face. Finally she simply sat down.

Henry began to laugh.

“She’s not about to get into this boat without you,” he said. “Come on, hop in. I won’t keep us out long.”

“Oh, Henry, three’s a crowd….”

“Get in the boat, woman,” he growled, and I laughed and jumped down into the Whaler and picked up Gladys, who had come to the edge of the dock, waiting to be lifted in.

We went far down the creek, toward the place where it swirled into the larger creek, and then into the slow, dark river that went eventually to the sea. Along its path eastward the banks grew high with oyster-shell bluffs and slick clay banks riddled with fiddler holes. If you were still and silent enough, you could see the crabs in their thousands, busily cleaning their burrows and waving their great claws about. But the softest splash and the bank was empty in an eyeblink. Gladys barked dutifully, but she knew by now that she would never get her teeth and paws on a fiddler.