Reprisal (3 page)

Only those few attended the memorial at White River--and none except Rebecca's roommate came back across the state and out to Asconsett Island afterward.

Only the three of them to watch Frank Reed's ashes, and tiny white chips of his bones, go spilling, drifting on the wind of a breezy, bright summer afternoon. Good sailing weather.

"Rebecca, I have things I need to do." Mother and daughter in hillside--duneside--conversation, starting down a long path eroded in soft sliding sand. Both slipping a little as they stepped. Asconsett Township had been considering setting wooden staircases into Sand Hill, from the town on up to the ridge ... had been considering it for three hundred years.

"Mom--things to do out here?"

"That's right. Did you bring the albums?" Joanna, stepping down sideways, had had a vision of herself tripping, rolling down the long slope clutching the little bronze jar. Tumbling down the hill with Rebecca crying after her.

"Yes, I brought the albums. I went out to the house and got them, and all those old boxes of photographs from upstairs. We brought them out; they're still in the car."

"Good."

"That's really--I think it's really the worst thing you could do is go through all that, with Daddy ... Daddy just gone." The slope of sand shifting beneath their feet.

"I want them, Rebecca. I want to be able to look at them."

"Mom, you should be home. We don't know anybody out here. You just rented a summer cottage and that's it, and you need to be home. All our friends are there ... and somebody has to get the mail sometime. Francie's called."

"Rebecca, you had a chance to stay in the house instead of on campus. You chose the dorm as an independence thing--fine. So now there are two instructors in our house, paying us three months' summer rent. ... If you were so worried about the house and the mail, you should have stayed there. It was your choice."

"Mom, I'm not worried about the house. ... You could come back and stay with Lianne."

"Oh, wonderful. What a prospect, having the McCreedys for comfort.--And as far as the mail is concerned, you can pick it up. It's not too much to ask for you to drive out to the house. ... When can you get your car?" The going had gotten easier, less steep. Tall sea grass grew in runs and bunches.

"It was the fuel pump. Mr. Lubeck said in a couple of days."

"Okay. Have him just charge it to us."

"All right.--And he said he was terribly sorry about Daddy."

"A nice man.--So it's not too much for you to drive out and get the mail from the renters."

"I'll go get it."

"--Because your father and I came out for the summer, and I ... I want to stay here a little while."

Walking down across the duneside ... two women having lost a man at sea. By no means the first for this little island's old whaling and fishing port. How many women in dark and heavy dresses had walked this sand and sea grass, had looked out over the paths down to steep streets of white clapboard houses, gray clapboard houses ... out to the small harbor's bay, and the Atlantic.

And each woman taken by surprise--after no matter how many years of apprehension. Still a sickening surprise, as if they'd never heard of drowning. As if their husband, their father, their son, was the first man ever to go out and drown in the sea.

"Mom, okay. I'd just like to know when you're planning on coming home."

Rebecca's voice had risen slightly in pitch the past few days, become faintly childish. She'd stepped back a year or two, wounded ... and three days after the memorial had had to be driven over from college--the old Chevy in collapse--driven to Post Port and accompanied out to the island by her roommate, an older girl, a student picking up summer credits.

This girl--young woman--had waited for them at the bottom of the hill. Very quiet, and seemed to find Joanna interesting. Perhaps checking out widowhood, loss--though apparently already familiar with loss of another sort. "Awful abuse, really disgusting," Rebecca had said, "--when she was a little girl.

..."

"I'd just like to know how long."

"Rebecca, I don't know. I have some things to do out here."

"Well, do you want me to stay? I can stay."

"No, sweetheart. Go back and do your classes. Summer credits will give you an advantage for your sophomore year."

"I can stay."

"I don't need you.--I don't mean I don't need you; I mean not right now."

"... All right."

Relief in her voice. And it had seemed to Joanna they both wanted to be away from each other for a while. Have Frank to themselves in memory.

Two women, mother and daughter, walking down a summer sandhill through sunshine and blowing sea grass, the little bronze jar sun-warm under Joanna's arm. Below, the small island ferry, fresh-painted white and green, had come in. Tourists had been filing off it, walking down Strand Street. ... And at the foot of the path, the waiting roommate--tall, pretty, her dark-blond hair coiled up in a French knot --had stood slender in a somber slate-gray long-skirted dress with a white collar. She'd been looking up at them, apparently observing sorrow.

Joanna soaped and rinsed, rinsed again in rusty water. She cupped her single breast, then put her right hand down to cover her vulva, held it, pressed it gently for comfort. ... Still a woman. But not beautiful enough to call back the dead.

She turned off the water, stepped out of the stall, and stood drying herself on a towel that smelled of salt, a worn towel--one of the light-green ones, brought out for the summer. She thought, as she dried, that she should shave her legs. ... Maybe tomorrow. And she'd be shaving them now, only so no woman would notice she needed to.

A poor reason to do it. A poor reason to do anything.

Joanna went into the bedroom, sorted through her top dresser drawer for panties and bra--its right cup filled with her foam prosthesis--and while she was doing that, called absolutely without thinking.

"Frank."

Hadn't even thought about it. It just came out.

But now that she realized, Joanna did it again, to hear the sound of it.

"Frank? ... Frank!"

Waited for an answer. Waited for a sound. As if she might be discovering one of the great secrets of the ages--a new thing, a thing no one had ever thought of before. To simply call the dead and force them to answer.

"Frank!" As if she were angry with him for not answering. That would make the calling stronger. ... And knowing it was so sad, so foolish, she nevertheless couldn't stop calling and walked out of the bedroom and called down the stairs. "Frank?" Soft inquiry, in case soft calling was what was needed, after all.

She went naked down the stairs to the entrance hall, walked into the living room, and called his name. And since he hadn't answered, it meant he might answer, might be somewhere else in the house.

She was afraid to go outside into the sunshine. If she kept calling there, she thought she wouldn't be able to stop, but would walk down the front steps and out into the street and go on down the hill to town past the cottages and fishermen's houses. Naked and calling her husband until the police or firemen came. Or women came out of the houses and put a blanket around her.

It was a shock to realize how much she'd loved him. She'd known it, but not how much. And he was only a man, not terribly special. Not terribly special.

It was that tenderness of his not being special that she had loved. And now she knew it freshly, as if she'd felt no sorrow before.

Joanna called once more, just in case, then went upstairs to get dressed.

"I just don't understand that language. I don't have any feeling for it at all." Rebecca put her books down on their study table. Spanish was her only early-morning class today; she didn't have another class until after lunch.

"You'll get it." Charis was sitting at the other side of their table, reading, making notes. She always made notes. ...

"Meaning you'll help me get it."

"That's right."

"You shouldn't have to do that ... spend time helping with my work."

Charis looked up from her book; her eyes were colored a complicated topaz.

Beautiful eyes, of course. "I like to help you, Rebecca --and you've had a bad time."

"Well, I have ... and you've really been a friend, Charis, not just a roommate." Rebecca sat at the table, and slid her Spanish textbook farther away. "--And I hear it gets harder the second year."

"What?"

"Spanish--and I have to take two years, and then Spanish Literature. I just think it's an unfair requirement."

Charis closed her book. "No, it isn't. If you go to the trouble of learning a language, then you ought to read the best that language has produced."

"I just don't want to do it ... any of it." Rebecca thought there was no good reason to be crying --sure as hell not over fucking Spanish.

"Oh, sweetheart ..." Charis got up, came over and bent down to hug her. "Come on ... come on." Charis was wearing a man's white dress shirt and jeans and sneakers, and she looked like a goddamn model.

"And you look like a goddamn model," Rebecca said, and tried to catch her breath, stop crying.

"No, I don't."

"Yes, you do."

"Shhh ..."

"I still don't believe it, that Daddy's gone. I forget it for a minute, and then I remember it and it's all new and terrible."

"It'll take time."

"Charis, there's been time, and it's still just as bad.--You have a tissue?"

"A bandanna. A week or two, isn't time."

"I don't want to use your bandanna." Rebecca got up and went to her dresser for a tissue. "And you've been really great--going to the memorial at the chapel, and then taking me out to Asconsett ... when we scattered the ashes."

"I was glad to do that, Rebecca. The service, and going out to the island. I thought you and your mom did a proper thing, a good thing, out there." Charis sat down again, opened her notebook.

"Right, starting with a real treat for you at the chapel." Rebecca took another tissue, and went back to sit at the table. "--Getting to meet the summer faculty leftovers and a few friends, and my grandfather--who's the only man left in our family--and Mom's New York agent. Both of them really nice, but a little weird." Rebecca blew her nose. "My grandfather Louis is very eccentric. ... Well, he's pretty old. He used to walk like a soldier, you know, striding around? And now he walks like an old man. And it's so sad ...

those little old-man steps."

"But he loves you. They all care about you."

"Charis, I know they do--but not the way Daddy cared about me. And I know I sound like some stupid child."

"No, you don't. And you still have your mother."

"Oh, tell me about it." Rebecca thought she'd start crying again if she just sat there, so she got up and went to her closet--what the college called a closet. None of the dorm rooms had big enough closets.

"Your mother's ... formidable."

"That's the word." Rebecca looked through her clothes. She'd been feeling fat all morning in this ridiculous skirt and blouse. She'd like to wear chinos and just a T-shirt, but from the back-and most people didn't worry about what they looked like from the back--in those pants she'd look like a pigeon walking around. A five-foot-tall pigeon. The chinos had been another dumb purchase.

...

"--So, I don't think you need to worry about her handling this."

"Worry about my mother? Charis, my mother ... Joanna Reed was always able to handle anything."

"Including you?"

"Hey, absolutely." Rebecca moved hangers, considered her summer dresses. What was the problem? Why didn't she have just one thing that looked good on her

...? "Charis, you have to understand that Daddy was special. He was the one in our family who did the ordinary things that had to be done. My mother is the extraordinary one. She does the things other people are afraid to do."

"Can be scary, that kind of energy." Charis had filled a page with notes; she turned to a fresh page.

"It does scare me. It did, anyway, when I was a kid." There was a nice dress, short sleeves ... and of course it was deep pink and made her look like a candy apple. "--My mother's not like other people, and she knows she's not like other people. And I think there's this sort of contempt, you know. She's very nice, she's kind, but there's this sort of quiet contempt for people who aren't ... special."

"Meaning you, as not being special." Charis didn't look up from what she was doing--not being rude, just doing two things at once. When they started rooming together, first of the summer session--and Charis had come up to Rebecca at registration, and talked with her, and then out of the blue had asked if they could room together--Rebecca had thought she was rude when she kept working like that while they were talking, having a conversation. But it was just something she did ... something most people couldn't do, probably.

"--Absolutely meaning me as not being special. Charis, she loves me, I know she loves me, but there's this "And what is my plump, not very pretty, not terribly intelligent, and slightly disappointing little daughter up to now?

Probably not much."--And my dad just didn't think that way about me. I could

..."

"Relax?"

"Exactly. I could relax with him, Charis. And now I don't have that, and I'll never have that again, and it--yes, it does scare me. You bet." She looked through the closet again. Nothing that did anything for her. And she kept buying stuff ... it was ridiculous. "You can relax with me, Rebecca."

"Not if you were my mother instead of my roommate, I couldn't. You're another one of those ... beautiful achievers. It's just not fair."

"I'm not that at all, Rebecca.--And you are intelligent and attractive."

"Oh, sure." Rebecca closed the closet door.

"And as far as "fair" goes, I've heard of that rare bird." Charis closed her notebook. "--But I've never seen it."

"Well, my father made up for a lot of that unfairness, for me. He was really a wonderful man--I loved him, and you would have liked him, Charis. People liked my dad; he was very good."