“Go ’head, Indy, you first,” Ry would coax his little sister. “And make it a
good
wish.
Good
wishes always come true. …
Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight …
“But you can’t tell anybody what you wish for. Or it won’t come true,” he would caution her.
I wish I may, I wish I might …
“’cept you, Ry, right? I can tell you?” she would ask, wanting to share the secrets of her child’s heart with her much loved big brother.
Have this wish I wish tonight.
“’fraid not, Indy. Got to be a secret, even from me …”
Many years later, Indy could still hear Ry’s voice, see the twinkle in his blue eyes as he searched the heavens for her very own wishing star and guided her eyes to it, encouraging her to dream.
Who could have done this to so good a soul as Ry?
“We gather together today in memory of our friend and brother, Robert …” Reverend Corson’s soft voice floated with the ease of a mist across the tranquil bay even as India’s eyes continued to skip from one face to another.
Surely not you, Peter Mason. You who knew Ry since nursery school, who fished the bay with him and shared the treasures of the marshes with him.
“… and to commend his loving spirit to its everlasting rest…”
Nor you, Ely Townsend, who spent so many summer days on the front porch of our house on Darien Road, watching the girls saunter by in their short shorts and halter tops on their way to the small stretch of beach at the end of the street.
“and so we ask you, Father, to have mercy on his soul…”
Or you, Nat Tomlin, who, with Ry, built that old playhouse in the oak tree behind our garage, where you used to sneak cigarettes and girls. The playhouse Ry fell out of when he was fourteen and broke both his legs. No football, no baseball, for all his freshman year.
“… to open the gates of heaven to your servant…”
The cry of a solitary gull echoed across the dunes and over the bay to her left, and India turned toward the sound. From behind an ancient stand of scrub pine, Devlin’s Light rose toward a cloudless sky. Though a storm was in the forecast for later in the afternoon, no sign of it could be seen at eleven in the morning. The shadow of the lighthouse reached almost to the jetty that stretched into the deep blue-green calm of the bay. Here and there a fish leaped out of the water as if to tease the ever-present gulls. But it was the lighthouse, always, that drew the eye and held the gaze.
A three-story clapboard, Queen Anne-style house, shaped like an L, with a six-story tower at the juncture of the two parts of the structure, Devlin’s Light had weathered many storms and had always survived intact. A few of the slate shingles had blown off in this storm or that, its red shutters had faded some and it sorely needed a good painting, but the lighthouse had stood on its present site since the year of its construction, 1876.
The irony of Ry being laid to rest almost in the shadow of the lighthouse that had so dominated his life was not lost on India. As a boy he had played in it. As a man he had devoted much time and energy to its restoration. There was no one spot on this earth he had loved more than he had loved the lighthouse.
The fact that someone had chosen to attack Ry in that place he loved above all others struck India as nothing less than obscene. It was merely an act of fate that he had not
actually died there, but in the back of the ambulance that had sped off through the early morning hours, sirens shrieking, though they’d not pass more than five cars between Devlin’s Light and Cape Hospital Emergency Room some twenty miles away.
“… and to grant him everlasting rest and peace in the harbor of your love, O Lord …”
An act of fate, she recalled, and of Nicholas Enright, who, from the deck of the old crabbers cabin he had purchased from Ry, watched as the lantern’s light had ascended the stairwell, then flashed a sudden and erratic descent before being extinguished at the bottom of the steep steps. It was Nicholas Enright who had called both the police and the ambulance, before setting off by rowboat across the small inlet to the lighthouse; Nicholas Enright who had found Ry at the foot of the winding stairs, who had ridden with him in the ambulance to the hospital, who had held Ry’s head and heard his last words and been the last human contact her brother had known on this earth.
India’s eyes wandered across the faces of the strangers in the crowd, wondering which one was Nicholas Enright, certain that he stood among them; since she’d never met the man who had moved to Devlin’s Light the summer before, she could not pick him out. Ry had had so many friends— most of whom she had never met—from Bayview State College, where he had taught for the past few years, from the environmental group that had worked with him to preserve the marshes, from the historic preservation group he had joined some years before to encourage renovation of the town’s many ancient structures.—Nicholas Enright could be any one of the men, young or old, who had come to pay their respects.
“… as we commend our brother Robert unto You …”
Nicholas Enright had shared her brother’s last breath and, from the accounts of the ambulance attendants with whom she had spoken, had done so with gentle affection and the greatest of care. She needed to meet him, to thank him. And, she reminded herself, she had questions to ask that only he, as close a witness to the events of that night as had come forward, could answer.
“… in His name. Amen.”
“Amen.”
“What else can I do for you, Aunt August?” India asked, placing a stack of bone-china cups and saucers on the sideboard in the dining room.
“There are more plates in the kitchen, on the counter there.” Augustina Devlin waved a small, deeply tanned hand in the direction of the tidy kitchen that had served generations of Devlins. “I expect half the town or better will be coming to call at any minute. Weddings and funerals. It’s the same all over. Brings ’em all out. There now, what’d I tell you?”
August adjusted large round tortoise-shell eyeglasses on her no-nonsense face, which was framed by a cap of short-cropped, straight salt-and-pepper hair, and nodded toward the front window, past which seemed to drift a goodly percentage of the population of Devlin’s Light. It was only a matter of seconds before the screen door opened and the first of the townsfolk appeared in the front hallway.
Come to share our grief
, Indy thought as she moved with open arms toward Liddy Osborn, who had gone through school with Aunt August in the one-room brick schoolhouse at the foot of Peck’s Lane. Liddy, it seemed, had been there to share all the Devlins’ sorrows. She had been there to hold a weeping Indy the day they’d found Robert Sr., Indy’s father and August’s brother, dead of a heart attack out on the dunes off Lighthouse Road. And Liddy had been there when Nancy died, though India was just a baby when she’d lost her mother and had no firsthand recollection of that. Liddy had been August’s best friend, always. A dear, giving woman, Liddy had seen her own share of sorrow but had refused to let it destroy her loving heart.
And Grant Richardson, there in the hallway, behind Liddy. A county judge, as Indy’s father had been, and a friend of the Devlin family for as long as Indy could remember. Al Carpenter, the chief of police, and his wife, Patsy. Mrs. Spicer, the librarian, and Mrs. Donaldson, Indy’s third-grade teacher. Todd and Wanda Fisher, who ran the general store, and Ed Beggins, Ry’s first piano teacher. Bill Scott, who used to take Ry surf fishing off of
Cape May. And Liz Porter, who, as owner of the local paper, the
Beacon
, knew everything about everyone. All come to share the memories and the pain. All part of Devlin’s Light, as much as she was.
India had not, until this moment, realized how much she missed it, this sense of
connecting
, though each time she came home the past few years, it took her a little longer to shake off the city and the ugliness that came from having to prosecute its dregs. As an assistant district attorney in Paloma, Pennsylvania, she had seen enough crudeness and pain and evil over the past five years to last a lifetime. Every time she returned to Devlin’s Light, it became harder and harder to remember what drew her back to Paloma. Obligation, she told herself. Certainly it wasn’t Ron Stillwell, the fellow assistant district attorney she had, up until about six months ago, dated pretty regularly. At one time—it embarrassed her now to recall—she had actually toyed with the idea of marrying Ron, until someone had left an anonymous note on her desk tipping her off to the fact that he was also seeing a young law clerk on a lot more regular basis than he’d been seeing her.
Suddenly there was too much loss to deal with. It hit her like a sharp blow to the head and took her breath away. She fled to the back porch, seeking refuge where she always had when things became more than she could bear. She leaned over the white wooden railing and forced deep breaths, filling her lungs with the thick humid air laden with the smell of the salt marshes and something decomposing— probably some beached horseshoe crabs, she guessed, or maybe some hapless fish—down on the beach just a short walk over the dunes.
Why did it all look the same, she wondered, when their world had changed so suddenly and so completely?
The wooden porch swing still hung at one end, its new coat of white paint giving it a clean summer look. Aunt August’s prize yellow roses stretched over the trellis in full and glorious bloom. The day lilies crowded in a riotous jumble of color against the stark gray of the back fence, line-dancing like manic clowns in a sudden gust of breeze. Fat little honey bees went from blossom to blossom, like little helicopters, oblivious to everything except the promise of
pollen and the effort necessary to gather it and take it home. A small brown sparrow plopped upon the ground below the railing and pecked intently in the dirt. Finding what she was seeking, she returned to her young, all plump, dun-colored and downy-feathered little bundles waiting to be fed by the base of the bird bath in the midst of the herb garden. An ever curious catbird landed on a nearby dogwood branch and began to chatter. Just like any other summer day in Devlin’s Light.
So. It was true what they said: Life went on.
“Indy?” Darla Kerns leaned out the back door, her long blond hair hanging over her right shoulder like an afterthought.
“I’m here, Dar.”
“Want some company?” Darla asked hesitantly.
“If the company is you.” Indy smiled and patted the spot next to her on the swing. Darla sat, and for the third or fourth time that day, Indy put an arm around the shoulder of the woman who was her closest friend, and who, for the last year and a half of his life, had been Ry’s lover.
And for the third or fourth time that day, Darla totally shattered into gut-wrenching sobs that seemed to hold her very soul.
“Indy, I’m so sorry.” Darla wiped away mascara, which had been long since wept into a darkened patch under her eyes. “I just can’t cry it away. No matter how hard I try …”
“It’s okay, Dar. I understand.”
“Every time I think about it, I just …”
“I know, sweetie. It took you and Ry so long to get together.”
“When I think about the years we wasted … years I spent married to a man I never loved … when Ry and I could have been together …”
“Don’t, Dar. You can’t change it. Be grateful for the time you had.” India heard the words roll off her tongue and wished she had something more to offer than clichés.
“Oh, I am,” Darla whispered. “I am. It just wasn’t enough.”
“It never is.” India stroked her friend’s soft blond hair, much as she had earlier stroked Corri’s. So many in pain. So many to be comforted. “How are your kids today?”
“Devastated. Especially Jack. He has been so withdrawn since this happened. He and Ry had become so close.” She mopped at her face with a wet linen square trimmed in lace. “Corri doesn’t look much better today.”
“She is so filled with pain it’s a miracle she can hold it all in so tiny a body.”
“Well, to have lost her mother … such as she was … and now Ry, who was—let’s face the truth here—the only loving parent that little girl ever knew …” Darla’s voice held a decided and bitter edge.
“Ry told me that Maris left a lot to be desired when it came to being a mother to Corri. But you know, I just never understood why he married her. Maris was just so … so …”—India sought to be tactful—“not Ry’s type.”
“Maris was a hot little number and she wrapped that hot little self of hers around Ry so tight and so fast he never knew what hit him.” The words snapped from Darla’s mouth in an angry clip. “I swear, Indy, I never saw anything like it. I never saw a man go down for the count as quickly as Ry did for Maris Steele.”
Amare et sappere vix deo conceditur.
Aunt August, a retired Latin teacher whose conversations were inevitably sprinkled with Latin phrases, had muttered this when Ry announced his marriage to Maris.
Even a god finds it
difficult to love and be wise at the same time.
“Well, if nothing else, it’s given Corri a family. If not for that, when Maris drowned, Corri would have been left totally alone. Ry never did find her father when he was going through the adoption proceedings last year.”
They sat in silence, each lost in their own memory of that day two years ago when Maris Devlin’s small boat drifted ashore without Maris in it.
India had never warmed to her sister-in-law. She had thought Maris to be an ill-mannered gold digger, and it had always been on the tip of her tongue to tell Ry so, but she could not bring herself to hurt him. It wasn’t until after Maris was gone that Ry admitted he’d been sucker punched but had remained married to her for Corri’s sake. Maris had not been a very good mother, Ry had confided, and Indy had feigned shock even though she’d heard tales of the woman’s shortcomings from both Darla and Aunt August
long before Ry had spoken of it. Then, over the past eighteen months or so, he and Darla had rediscovered each other. They had appeared so like a family at Christmas, at the Easter egg hunt at the park last spring, at Aunt August’s sixty-fifth birthday party in early June.