The Lavender Hour (22 page)

Ashley stared at me. “Jesus be, Jessie, when are you going to grow up?”

“I thought I saw you two disappear in here.” Lily stood at the door. Her cheeks were flushed, whether from alcohol or excitement, I could not tell.

“See you later,”Ashley said in a pissed-off voice, and slipped out.

“What did I interrupt?” Lily asked.

“Oh, Ashley's mad because she got Bill Miller here and I didn't fall at his feet and end up in bed with him, the rest of my life sorted out. I mean, isn't that what you want, too?” I wasn't convinced Lily hadn't had a hand in Bill's invitation to the party.

“Oh, honey, I only want what you want. Whatever makes you happy.”

The standard parental lie, I thought.

Lily hugged me. “I'm so glad you came, Jessie. It means the world to me.”

“Me, too.”

Lily noticed the earrings. “You borrowed them,” she said. I could smell gin and saw then that she was a tiny bit drunk.

“Do you mind? I forgot to pack any.”

“No. I'm glad you did. They look lovely on you. You should keep them.”

“It's a nice party,” I said.

“Did you see the drawing Sally Kincaid made? The map of our trip?”

“Yes.”

Lily smiled at me, and, in spite of the gray hair, her face looked suddenly young. “I always wanted to travel, you know,” she said. “It's always been a dream of mine. I mean in the real sense. I actually used to fall asleep and dream of visiting Portugal and Greece.”

Stubbornly, I kept silent.

Lily sighed and then inspected herself in the mirror over the bay of sinks, checked her teeth for lipstick. “You haven't told me what you think of Jan,” she said.

“He seems…”

She turned. “What?”

“I don't know. Kind of young. Aren't you afraid of what people are saying?” I stared at the crepelike skin of Lily's throat, her arms. “I mean he looks young enough to be your son or something. Aren't you a little ashamed?”

Lily's hand had been stroking her jaw, and now it dropped to her side. She gave me a steady look. “No,” she said. She raised her hand, and I drew back as if she meant to strike me, but Lily only cupped my face, her touch gentle, her eyes unutterably sad. “I don't
give a goddamn what people think or say, and I am most assuredly not ashamed. Furthermore, I won't let you taint this wonderful thing that has happened to me.” Her hand felt hot on my chin. “Can't you be happy for me, Jess?”

I had to look away, and then the door opened and one of Lily's friends poked her head in to tell her she was being summoned. In the distance, I heard the sound of a knife clicking against a glass, a voice raised in a toast, people clapping, someone calling her name. Lily left without another word.

The noise of the party had gone up a notch when I returned to the bar. My plan was to hang out there until the party was over. There was a large vase of stargazer lilies at one end, and their scent—nearly funereal in its heaviness—made me slightly ill. My head felt light, untethered to my body. I still felt the touch of Lily's fingers on my cheek, my chin. I wouldn't have minded getting a little drunk myself.

“Buy you a drink, young lady?”

“Uncle Brent,” I cried, and allowed myself to be enfolded in familiar arms. For the first time since I'd arrived at the club, I was genuinely glad to see someone. Brent had always been my favorite relative. When we'd been babies he had treated us for the usual childhood diseases. The summer I was ten, a splinter in my foot had become badly infected, and he was the only one I would let touch it. He had seen me through the whole cancer time. He wasn't my doctor—I had an oncologist—but Uncle Brent was there to explain things the cancer doctor didn't. My heart caught, he looked so much like my daddy.

“Look at you,” he said. “You have turned into a beautiful woman. I wish your daddy could see you now.”

Unexpected tears flooded my eyes.

“Hey now, none of that.” He pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped my cheeks, stroking over the exact spot Lily had touched earlier. “What are you drinking?”

“Gin and tonic.”

“Two,”he told the bartender. When we were served, he carried the drinks to a table off to the side, held a chair for me.

“I thought you were in Hawaii,” I said. My aunt Monica had died two years before, and after she died, Brent surprised everyone by turning over his practice to a young doctor and moving west.

“I was. I just flew in yesterday.”

“It was so nice of you to come to Mama's party.”

“I wouldn't have missed it,” he said. I'd forgotten how much he sounded like my daddy. After our daddy died, I used to fantasize that Lily and Uncle Brent would marry. It would be almost like having my daddy back, I'd told Ashley once, and my sister had asked what I planned to do with the inconvenience of Aunt Monica. Oh, maybe she'll get hit by a bus, I'd said with the single-minded callousness of a teenager. Ridiculous, but nearly two decades later, I still felt a twinge of guilt about Monica's death. “So how are you doing?” I asked.

“Well, I keep busy. My golf game's improved. I do some work at a volunteer clinic.”

“And you like Hawaii?”

“Love it. You should come out and visit.”

“You must miss Aunt Monica.”

“More than you can imagine.” His voice was raw.

“Maybe you'll see her again,” I said, keeping my tone light.

“You mean in another life?”

“Do you believe in that?” I asked. “Do you believe in life after death?”

“You're asking the wrong question, Jessie.”

“The wrong question?”

He nodded. “The question is, is there life before death?” He took a sip of his drink and sighed. “Of course I miss her, Jess. Always will. But I know better than anyone that death is a normal part of life. We just forget that. It's the fear of death that's so terrible. It holds us back from life.”

“You sound exactly like Faye,” I said.

“Faye?”

“Faye Wilson.”

He gave the faintest of faraway smiles, as if remembering a sweet moment, and that trick of time happened when you could look at someone and see exactly what they looked like when they were six or ten or seventeen. “God, I haven't thought about her in years,” he said. “I used to have quite a crush on her back when the whole family used to summer on the Cape. She was quite a looker. A bit wild, too. She never gave me the time of day. We all thought she was smitten with Lowell. When did you see her?”

“I'm staying at the Harwich Port house this year,” I said. “Faye is the volunteer coordinator for the local hospice, and I've been doing some volunteer work with her.”

“Good for you. Hospice is a great organization. Those people do amazing work. I don't know how I would have managed during the last months with Monica without them.” His eyes focused on some imaginary point, and I knew he had gone off to a place I could not follow.

Off to our right, a woman laughed. Voices swirled around us. “The man I'm caring for has pancreatic cancer,” I said.

He leaned in, back in the present. I could sense his professional interest click in. “When was it diagnosed?”

“In January.”

“What kind?”

“Adenosarcoma,” I said. I had read this on Luke's chart, learned it was the fastest kind of cancer.

“So he must be close to the end, then,”he said, accepting the inevitability of Luke's death.

“How does it happen? Death, I mean.”

“You mean the physiology of it? The process?”

“Yes.”

“Well, basically, the body wastes away. It's a series of losses. Systems begin to shut down, one by one. Digestive is the first. Then bowels and bladder.”

I thought about what Luke had said. I don't want to die piece by piece. “And the last?”

“Well, the heart, of course. And hearing,” he said. “Hearing is the last sense to disappear into unconsciousness.”

“It's so hard to watch,” I said, swallowing against tears.

“But a blessing to witness, too,”he said.

“I don't know if I agree with that,” I said automatically.

“Every death is a gift to the person observing,” he said. “A tremendous lesson and blessing.”

“Even Monica's?”

“Yes.” His eyes watered momentarily, and a spasm of pain crossed his face. I realized then that he loved my aunt and that I'd never had the slightest clue about their marriage.

“How did you stand it in the end?” I asked. “When everything was hopeless.”

He seemed to understand I was asking about more than Monica. “There's a middle ground you have to find.”

“A middle ground?”

“Between clinging to false hope and falling into hopelessness.”

“I don't understand. How can there be a middle ground?”

“The middle ground is that space—maybe a few months or weeks or a day, even an hour—that you can reasonably hope for.”

It wasn't enough. I wanted more.

T
HERE WAS
a roar of laughter from the front of the room. While we'd been talking, Lily had been opening gifts, and now she held up one—Faye's, I noticed from the gift wrap. It was a T-shirt inscribed

WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY. Lily slipped it on right over her dress.

I looked at my uncle and saw him smile at Lily.

“I think this trip she is so goddamned set on taking is crazy,” I said.

“Why?” His voice held no judgment. He seemed to honestly want my answer.

“Why? Let's start with she doesn't know the first thing about sailing.”

“She'll make a good mate. And Jan's nephew and his wife are flying in from Denver to meet them in Norfolk. Both are experienced sailors.”

“That's the first I've heard of it,” I said, and wondered why neither Lily nor Ashley had thought to give me this crucial piece of information.

He looked over to where Lily was opening another gift. She looked both silly and spunky in the teal dress and Faye's T-shirt. “Your mother is stronger than you give her credit for, Jessie. She always was the tougher of the two.”

I looked at him, surprised, and then realized he was right. Lily had always been the enforcer. My daddy had been the easy one.

“Well, I've monopolized you enough for one evening. There's a gentleman across the room who has been looking over here for the last ten minutes. He seems to be growing impatient. Shall we oblige?”

“In a moment,” I said. “You go ahead. Mingle with the widows. I'll be right there. No disrespect to Aunt Monica, but as Ashley would say, you're fresh meat on the market.”

He laughed and kissed my head. “You've grown into a magnificent woman,” he said before he left. “I always knew you would.”

Across the room, I heard Lily give a shout of glee. She was tipsy, I saw now, and nearly stumbled. Jan was at her side instantly, steadying her, smiling at her, as if she were absolutely perfect. I thought about what Ashley had said earlier. He's a nice man. He makes her happy. Give him a chance.

Lily caught my eye, held it for a long moment. I raised my glass in the air and smiled. “I love you, Mama,” I mouthed.

Lily grinned and blew me a kiss.

I sent one back, and then waited while Bill Miller crossed the room and made his way back to me.

M
Y FLIGHT LANDED
at Logan at four thirty, but we were, delayed at the gate because of a mechanical problem with the door, and it was well after five by the time I had reclaimed the Toyota and headed back toward the Cape. I was light-headed with exhaustion, both from the party, which had gone on until nearly three in the morning, and from the emotions of the trip. It had been difficult to say good-bye to Lily. Earlier that day, when Ashley picked me up at the house, I'd had the distinct and unshakable feeling that I was parting from my childhood home for the last time and had been unable to hide my tears.

“I won't have you worrying,” Lily had said, misunderstanding.

“I'm not, Mama,” I'd said. I'm sad.

“I'm embarking on an incredible journey. The trip of my lifetime.” Lily had sounded like a child on Christmas Eve. “And I don't want to have anyone dampen it with their tears.”

“We'll write every day,” Jan said. At the party, he'd announced that he'd made arrangements to e-mail from aboard the Odyssey every day of the two weeks the trip would take. Fourteen days seemed both an unbelievably short time to make a transatlantic voyage and a terribly long time to be out to sea. Since I hadn't bothered with an Internet hookup at the Cape cottage, Ashley promised that she'd keep me informed. Our tiff in the ladies' room of the club was forgotten, although she still thought I was crazy not to have latched onto Bill.

Before the party ended, he had asked if he could drive me to the airport on Sunday and mentioned the possibility of flying to the
Cape for a weekend. “I don't think so,” I'd said, and saw the flash of surprise on his face before he regained control.

“Perhaps another time,” he said, but we both knew it wouldn't happen.

Ashley couldn't understand why I didn't even try. “What's so wrong about him?” she asked.

He's not Luke, I thought but could not say. “Stop trying to fix my life for me,” I'd said instead.

“Well, somebody should,” she said.

A
S
I headed south out of Boston, I exceeded the speed limit, hoping to arrive back on the Cape in time to see Luke. I was held up again by repairs on the Sagamore Bridge but still managed to make it to the Harwich exit of the Mid-Cape Highway by quarter to seven. I stopped by the cottage to unload my luggage and phone Nona.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi, Jessie,” she said. She sounded spent.

“I just got in,” I said. “How's Luke?”

There was a pause—long enough for my heart to go flat— before she answered. “About the same.”

“I thought I might stop by.”

“He's sleeping now,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, unable to conceal my disappointment.

“Can you come by in the morning?”

“Sure. And tell him I called, okay?”

I rang Faye next, but there was no answer. Too antsy to stay at the cottage, I got back in the Toyota and, with no clear destination in mind, headed toward Chatham, eventually ending up at the parking lot by the Coast Guard station. I turned off the ignition, rolled down the window, and listened to the lapping of waves, remembering the day I'd sat there with Luke. That day seemed very long ago. In the last light of evening, I watched one of the fishing fleet come through the cut. On the sidewalk, two boys skateboarded recklessly past, narrowly missing a family of four just coming up from the
beach. The mother and two children were blond; the father had hair as dark as Luke's, reminding me of a story a woman from L.A. once told me. The woman's mother had been Danish and her father Jewish. She and her brother had hair as dark as their father's, and when they were young, their mother colored their hair blond and washed their arms in peroxide to bleach them, too. The woman had sent me her hair to fashion into a necklace. It was wiry and defiantly black. Her story held the entire history of her family, she said. I watched as the family climbed into a green sedan, not even taking time to brush the sand off their feet. I imagined them going off to a dinner of fried clams.