You Lost Me There (29 page)

No.

You left me.

Like a dog, darling, you smelled her boyfriend off that tissue, the other male in your domain. And Russell, whom you despise
—

What?

Fine, it’s true.

Yes.

Sara, everything I regret—

But I don’t know how.

Betsy’ s funeral was scheduled
for a Wednesday morning, followed by a lunch buffet reception at Jordan Pond. The sunlight was white on the rocks, yellow on the water. Joel and I took the early ferry in together from Little Cranberry to Northeast Harbor, though we drove in separate cars from the parking lot: me in the Audi, Joel in Betsy’s Cutlass Ciera because he’d recently bent the front axle of his Explorer on public property.

In the week before she died, when she overheard death making plans, Betsy told Joel and me exactly what she wanted for her memorial. More precisely, she let us know what she did not want: no obituary in the newspaper, no program announcement at a church.

“If any of the snobs want to miss me, they can put a plaque up at the polo club: Betsy Gardner was not a member.”

To be cremated and have her ashes buried next to Bill’s in the plot in Bar Harbor was Betsy’s wish, and at graveside to have a short testimonial read by Joel, followed by a reception at Jordan Pond, with floral arrangements of mountain laurel and red sweet peas. Only family would be invited, and only the members she liked: Joel, me, Sara’s sister, Miriam, and a few relatives from Bill’s side I’d never met.

Miriam, who lived in Kansas City, sent us a foam cooler of frozen brisket. She said that she and her husband would come right away. She said she was glad to hear from me and hoped I was well, and that I might find a way to talk to God about my grief.

For the funeral I wore a green tie Betsy had once given me for Christmas, with a pattern of whales having sex. Already a small crowd of people was milling around the entrance. The cemetery was small, overlooking Bar Harbor, surrounded by a pine forest and wild ferns. Joel was nowhere to be seen, though we’d left the ferry parking lot at the same time.

The air was absolutely still. I was a little breathless when I arrived, my throat constricting. I couldn’t get out of the car. My blood seemed to get slower by the second. I avoided looking through the windshield and turned up the radio, some man yelling at me about immigration.

I felt a hundred things flowing through me, with no sieve to catch them.

Miriam stepped away from a stout pair of old women in hats and came over, opened the car door, and hugged me around the waist once I was standing. She looked like Sara only in the nose and eyes, the rest of her was petite and round, but still it was Sara who was standing in front of me.

“I always run into you at funerals,” Miriam said, and patted my chest with both hands.

I saw not Sara but Betsy in her face, I realized, which cheered me up, oddly. Miriam introduced me to her husband, a recent acquisition, Gary, the potbellied music instructor, a jazz saxophonist my age with a mustache, who nodded more than he spoke. Miriam was recounting a favorite story about Betsy when Joel arrived, parking Betsy’s car at the bottom of the cemetery.

The fluorescent orange stripe on the driver’s-side door was brightly visible in the sun.

Joel and I had spent a lot of time together in the preceding weeks. He was red faced and sweating, grizzled on the chin and jowls, wearing a wool blue blazer that didn’t fit him, carrying a bouquet of lilacs. I met him halfway to the gate and he squeezed my biceps but wouldn’t meet my eyes. He hitched up his khakis, passed me the flowers, and strode off to speak with the grave diggers, an old Mainer and a young Hispanic guy both wearing neckties tucked into their overalls.

We slowly gathered around the burial site. Joel greeted everyone. He started by reading from a piece of notepaper, “My mother was not a religious person. She did not believe in God. She did not believe in a lot of things. She’d be laughing at us right now. My mother was an idea woman. A political person. My mother loved conversation, though she was not much of a ‘people person,’ either.”

Joel stopped and his head jerked, as if he’d just woken up. The woods were full of buzzing cicadas. Miriam reached out to take Joel’s hand and began reciting the Lord’s Prayer. A number of us joined in. When we finished, Miriam looked around warmly, her small eyes twinkling as though she did this every weekend, and made a brief speech about Betsy meeting Saint Peter, seeing the “No Smoking” sign, and attempting to turn her walker around, but God needed a bridge partner and hauled her back.

A woman to be remembered, said Miriam. A modern woman who knew the satisfaction of mental combat. A woman who loved Mount Desert Island. Loved people untrammeled by the fashions of the day, who were unafraid to appear foolish, and she let us know in her own particular way, never to be repeated, that she loved us.

Back at the cars, Miriam told her husband that she’d be driving me and Joel to the reception. We slid into the backseat. “You boys look terrible,” Miriam said, staring in the rearview mirror. “You’d think somebody croaked.”

 

 

 

It was the day after my boat incident that I’d moved out to Little Cranberry for what remained of the summer. I was lucky the Rockefellers decided not to press charges, had been Betsy’s opinion, and the Bar Harbor police captain agreed. “You’re luckier than most of them,” he told me when I was released, and I assumed he was referring to the island’s other flashers. “Family doesn’t like the newspapers. Now, if it was up to me—”

He was the same officer who’d been called out to the scene, the one who responded after a grandfather Rockefeller reported a nudist on his sailboat. He and his grandchildren had been looking for hawks through a telescope, and spotted me instead.

The captain followed me out to my taxi. “Must be pretty high standards up there on campus.” He was squinting at me, though it was dark outside.

Back at the beach, I got the pills out of the car and chucked them in a dumpster, along with the starfish. It was nine p.m. by the time I returned home. I found my front door locked and Sara’s BMW gone. Inside, the living room was tidy, as if the maid had come through. I went up to Cornelia’s room, expecting it to be empty, but her purple backpack was still in the corner.

I sat on her bed and massaged my legs. I was sweating through my clothes. I had no idea what the right thing was to do, just probably the opposite of whatever my gut said, considering how well it had guided me recently.

A rock roach crawled in from under the door.

I packed a bag and drove straight to the Cranberry ferry. The lot was deserted. I parked and cut the engine and prepared to wait for the next boat, a seven-hour wait. A motel up the road was open, the occasional minivan buzzing around; otherwise the area was dark and empty.

I rolled down the windows. The air was cold and salty. My scalp tingled.

And what Sara said came back to me slowly. There in jail, there sitting on Cornelia’s bed, it had been with me all day, but I couldn’t see her. I tried to see her and closed my eyes, but my memories were whitewashed. I tried to sleep with the driver’s seat cranked flat, but mostly I cried. I called her under my breath and remembered her shoe size. Her long fingers. I remembered when I held the box with Sara’s ashes over a stream near the house, how long the moment lasted until I tipped it over and then how quickly it was done. I remembered how happiness on her face was a look of sharing. How much I loved her. I remembered with painful clarity, with the words piped into the car, the moment when I’d asked Sara what she knew about writing screenplays.

I sensed people watching me from inside their rooms. Peering through binoculars. Through the windshield, it was as if the motel’s orange lights kept exploding. Memories rose from their soil beds and passed me, trailing wisps, axons that wouldn’t connect to any greater whole, and dissipated in the air around the car.

The air was so salty I could feel it on my teeth.

After the boat docked at Islesford, I called Betsy’s house twice from the ferry manager’s office, but no one answered. The Islesford harbor resembled Northeast’s, though it was smaller, more industrial, less layman-friendly. Fishermen at that hour were few, either hanging around on the long piers or cleaning gear. A wall of rigid, bristling trees in front of me was gauzy with fog.

I bought a grilled cheese sandwich at the harbor grill. After I said I was Betsy Gardner’s nephew, the bartender said of course he knew her, she insulted his food regularly. He gave me vague directions, and after a long walk, I was standing outside the cottage. It was perched on the coastline, gray-shingled, rotted by the sea air and winter sleet, gradually collapsing. There weren’t any neighbors. The front door was unlocked. The house inside smelled like Cape Near, of old birch shelves and ocean air and cigarettes, and newspapers in sheaves growing mold. The quiet was deeper than I’d ever before experienced. I spent the day reading an Agatha Christie novel in Betsy’s living room, and then exploring when I couldn’t sit still. The refrigerator was empty. For dinner, I found two cans of tuna fish and ate them while I studied Betsy’s map of White House conspiracies. I couldn’t make any sense of it. Clusters of cabinet members drawn by arrows to subcommittees and names of corporations, as if someone had fired Post-it notes from a shotgun.

A paper trail she couldn’t stop adding to, I thought.

I slept on a cot I found stored away in the basement, woke at dawn to the summer light, and lay there for three hours, studying the sky through the small window, hearing the wind drag tree boughs across the roof.

Betsy pulled in at lunch and parked her golf cart on the lawn. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, but was pale and shaky, smaller than usual in khaki shorts, a Shetland sweater, and a yellow slicker that reached down past her knees. Her legs underneath were thin as broomsticks. At arm’s length, peering up through her glasses under the beach hat, she wanted to know if I’d come to fix her roof. I said, How else would you get me out here? She harrumphed and squared me in the eye, then told me where to find the ladder.

“I heard about the boat,” she said, leaving it at that.

The temperature dropped quickly after dark. We drank a bottle of wine before getting to dinner, except Betsy only kept tuna in the house and I’d finished the tuna, so we opened a second bottle of wine and put on additional sweaters. She told me between cigarettes where she’d been, up at the hospital in Bangor. They’d made her stay over the previous four nights. The cancer they’d removed years ago during the mastectomy had returned, metastasized into a dozen lymph nodes on her right breast. The voice mails I’d ignored at the house had asked me to drive her up to the hospital, but since I never called back, she’d phoned Joel.

“I’m very disappointed in you, Victor.” She let it hover in the air. “Why don’t you get a goddamn cell phone? Even I have one.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Truth is, it’s to my benefit you’re so selfish. Joel and I had some conversation. It’s a long drive. I like him.”

“People change.”

“Well, some can’t,” she snapped. “I’m dying, Victor. This time it will work. I’m very depressed, I don’t know that you’d care.”

A moment later, I said, “I can’t lose you.”

We remained seated. Betsy carefully stubbed out her cigarette.

In the morning, I wandered out through the fog to the shed. The roof truly was in rotten condition. A third of the shingles had come undone and the rest looked ready to fall off in the next storm. I worked steadily at removing the bad ones and patching a number of small holes. I’d done some roofing one summer during school, and it looked as if Betsy’s roof dated to about the same period. Betsy weeded below me while I worked, and then went in for a nap. In town by the docks, I inquired at the market where I could buy proper supplies, and the proprietress put me on the phone with a hardware store in Northeast Harbor. They said they’d have them for me on the ferry the next morning.

The roof took an additional four days. At lunch, Betsy brought out tuna sandwiches and yelled at me not to fall. She wasn’t sure, she said, if her accident insurance covered people who were naturally unfit for labor.

At night, I read Agatha Christie novels aloud to Betsy until she nodded off, then I’d stay up listening to country music or talk radio, whatever I could dial in for company. I didn’t sleep much myself. I’d packed a fresh copy of Sara’s screenplay, and I forced myself to read it again. I asked Betsy on the fifth night if it would be okay if I stayed another week. In the backyard there was a hammock strung between two locust trees. “You look just like Uncle Bill,” Betsy said one afternoon when I was lying out there, reading the screenplay, and she went in and got her cane just to come visit and hold my hand for a minute.

One morning I unpacked a number of science journals I’d thrown in my duffel bag, and out fell the Gardner genealogy. I’d forgotten I’d packed it. I picked it up and went and found Betsy, watching television in her room.