The Diviner's Tale (11 page)

Secretly proud of Morgan for fighting back, I canceled all work scheduled for that week and homeschooled him, as my mother had me, once upon a time. I like to think he learned more during our days working together than he'd ever have learned in class. Either way, unless Niles managed to keep this recent incident quiet, rumors were about to fly rampant, thanks to these same gossips, of my discovering a dead girl who not only was not the same girl they found alive and lost in the woods, but who wasn't found at all. I could already imagine some of the things they might say.

I made the whole story up to get attention for myself.

The girl was my secret daughter whom out of shame I had forced to live in the forest since infancy and in a fit of rage I personally hanged her.

No, she wasn't my daughter, she was someone I kidnapped, then hexed so she couldn't incriminate me, struck her deaf and dumb, and abandoned her that night in the woods so I could support my earlier absurd claim that—and so forth.

Variations, some milder, some wilder, of these stories would find their way along the grapevines out there in the community, especially among children Jonah and Morgan's age. I was determined to remove us from the vicinity the very day after final classes and not return until the twins started camp. Between now and then, I could only hope that the supposedly runaway girl's situation was resolved.

Our truck barely made the drive north. We overheated twice on the way up and had to stop along the interstate to give the engine a chance to cool down. The boys informed me that this was its swan song, its farewell performance.

"
Adiós,
" Jonah said.

"Goodbye, cruel world," echoed Morgan.

They were laughing so hard about the steam coming from under the raised hood, while other cars on the highway cruised past, that my frustration about it soon gave over to laughter as well.

"All right," I said. "When we get there—"

"If we get there," said Morgan.

"—we can look into selling it—"

"For about fifty cents."

"More like we give them the fifty cents."

"—and get something new."

"New
used,
you mean."

"We can afford what we can afford," I said, trying to stay with the mood. "Tell you what, though. I'm going to let you two pick the car."

"Now you're talking—"

"—turkey."

We laughed some more as the engine whined, coughed, complained, then finally turned over again.

"I set the budget, turkeys. But you pick the wheels, dig?"

Both groaned. They hated it when I tried to talk hip.

"We'll see what there is to see and our people will get back to you on it," Jonah finished.

What contrarian minds we come equipped with. At that moment, when my two bastions of strength were picking up the slack, trying to help me move past problems, giving me good advice with humor and their personal brand of quirky respect, I found myself shadowed by a feeling of having let them down. I couldn't help but think that if they had a father, another provider in their life, they would be riding right then in a real car. Not this absurd smog-belching artifact. Though they might put brave faces on it and insist otherwise, they deserved a father. Someone accomplished in the world who would love them as much as I—well, almost as much—and show them how to fix things that were broken and make things that weren't there before. Nep had served as a surrogate. Fathered them like they were the sons he never had. Or rather, as he had fathered Christopher during his short life. And he'd always been brilliant in his understudy role. But now he was sometimes there, sometimes not, and I felt his absence to the marrow of my bones, as both daughter and mother.

"You all right?" Jonah asked, after some miles in silence.

"You bet," I assured him, and briefly grasped his hand.

Once we grocery-shopped, then rolled past the stores selling cupolas with their weathervanes turning in contradictory directions and fields of lupines by the ragtag tourist zoo, we stopped for crab rolls at a pound in Ellsworth, where we also bought ourselves live lobsters plucked from a holding tank. Crossing the causeway from the mainland onto Mount Desert, I could smell the salt air and my heart quickened. Toward the end of the long day, we finally parked our poor limp truck in the municipal lot in Northeast Harbor and boarded the Bunker & Ellis launch that would carry us out to the island.

For all their initial reluctance about coming north, the twins were happy to be on the mailboat that doubled as the ferry here, and so was I. Familiar coastal islands glided by, pine-haired rocks with their pink pobblestone beaches in the bundling water. Out in deeper water, lobster buoys looked like gaudy painted Easter eggs. Henderson's woods, with its perplexing vision and voices, could not have been farther away, and that realization set my spirits flying. I gave Morgan a spontaneous hug from behind. Instead of wriggling away he hugged me in return, wrapping his wiry strong arms around my lower back while still facing forward toward the ocean. In another year he would be almost as tall as his mother. Jonah leaned against the rail beside us at the front of the mailboat, pointing as harbor porpoises lunged and stitched the ocean swells some hundred yards to starboard. His cheeks were lit up from the sea winds.

This was a moment people long for in a lifetime. The Greeks didn't have a word for it, they who had words for everything. Not a single word in English could compass such equanimity. I believe the Buddhists refer to it as
a peace which passeth all understanding.
It was like that.

The cottage was more of a wreck than I had expected. It had been a harsh winter up here. The front porch floor was peeling and in places looked like a great potpourri of dark red flower petals, and a few shingles were missing from the roof. Several fresh cigarette butts littered the grass beside the porch. That was odd. Had some lobstermen come ashore and rested on our steps, or a dayfaring family out for a sail looked in through our windows?

Inside the house, on the first floor, the sheeted furniture and rolled rugs and all the rest of the chattels seemed fine. There was still plenty of propane in the tank, and the electricity was working. However, we discovered that one of the seaward windows was broken, and inside the upstairs bedroom where I always stayed we found the feathery bloodied remains of a black-back gull that had flown, or been blown, right through it. The room was, remarkably, undamaged by rain. I had never seen such a thing before but figured there must have been quite a storm sometime in the past days that disoriented the bird and slammed it, with a heavy whip of wind, into the glass. We three got the window boarded up temporarily, scoured the stained floor, and buried the huge sea bird, and within a few hours, just before sunset, had the place more or less up and running. I was determined not to treat this unusual mishap as an omen, wasn't going to let it intrude on my renewed sense of calm.

Weary though we were, Jonah carried the big lobster kettle down to the goldening shore, past corridors of beach roses,
Rosa rugosa
with their devoted drunken bees, and filled it with saltwater while Morgan got a driftwood fire started in the pit. Tradition was that the first night was always a dinner of lobsters—
bugs
the boys called them, adopting local slang—and we weren't here to break with tradition. I set the table and lit candles and a hurricane lamp, leaving the overhead lights off that first night as a way of clearing the world away, literally blacking it out. We had our supper and stayed up late talking. When I finally sent them to their shared room, finished the dishes, put out the fire with cooking water from the pot, and extinguished the candles, I was deliriously tired, deliciously so. Waves crashed on the shore under the spray of endless stars. I felt as if I could sleep for a week.

The Metcalfs had been no lovers of modernity, and while the family had allowed electricity to be cabled to Covey back in the twenties when the other outer islands were serviced from Mount Desert, a telephone was never installed. No one was going to call. I went upstairs, carrying my lamp ahead of me, and, ignoring the newly boarded window, climbed into bed feeling safe from the world for the first time in weeks. I who never said prayers even said one of thanks, a Nep-like agnostic prayer.

Dear Lord, if you're out there somewhere listening, I want you to know how grateful I am for your giving us protection during our journey, and please I ask you please let these days we have here be peace-filled and undisturbed. Thank you for watching over my sons. Amen.

H
ARD SUNLIGHT SO
filled my room the next morning that I came awake in a literal flash. I was shocked not to find the bloody, thrashing seagull on my bed, where it had been just a moment before. In my nightmare, a figure hovering outside my window had cradled the gull in its arms like some demonic madonna, before burning each of the bird's eyes with the tip of a cigarette and throwing the helpless creature at me through the glass. I breathed in and out, tasting the sweet briny ocean air, trying to slow my pounding heart. Hearing no one astir, I figured the twins were sleeping in after yesterday's long drive, which was just as well. Sheltered though I was in truth, I questioned whether Covey was far enough away from Henderson's to be the sanctuary I'd sought. Rather than force myself out of bed and trek downstairs to prepare breakfast, I pulled the pillow over my head with the idea of stealing a few moments in order to think.

I didn't want to admit it, but my monster was back, aroused from its sleep, ranging around my perimeters. That much I had to acknowledge. A nightmare was just a nightmare, but I could no longer deny that the hanged girl bore all the hallmarks of one of my forevisions, though as forevisions went it was the most inscrutable, baffling one I had ever experienced. Unlike in times past, when I could see some direct correspondence between what I foresaw and people or events in my everyday life, this time I could make no such connection. The question was, What was I going to do about it? Or, more to the point, Was there anything I could do?

What finally decided me on leaving Little Eddy for Covey Island was, among other things, that the police investigation, largely based on forensics and the work of the expert Niles had me meet, preliminarily concluded that I had in fact suffered a hallucination. Some mess-up in a visual neural pathway. Plausibly Charles Bonnet syndrome, but my age and perfect eyesight didn't fit the profile. Peduncular hallucinosis was suggested, but I presented with none of the typical accompanying symptoms. Optic neuritis, schizophrenia? Not likely. In the end, they settled on a probable transient stress disorder, a delusional episode. If nature abhors a vacuum, authorities deplore the inexplicable.

The therapist was well-meaning to a fault, a woman who cited James Thurber as a possible fellow sufferer, saying the cartoonist who wrote "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" saw an old lady with a parasol walk right through the side of a truck once. A large rabbit spoke with him about world affairs from time to time. On another occasion, he witnessed a bridge rise lazily into the air, like a long balloon. She was, in essence, assuring me that even those afflicted with mild madness have a creative, viable place in our culture.

"Imaginative people such as yourself are sometimes carried away by the very thoughts that make them special in the first place," she had proposed. "But it's important not just to understand the difference, but feel it in your heart. Feel the difference between reality and the fantastic make-believe that you experience as real."

I remember lowering my eyes as she finished uncoiling this string of thought that reduced me, I felt, by its implication to a kind of infantilism.

"To be balanced, you must know how to distinguish between dreaming subjective experience, such as your waking nightmare, and objective living experience. Does that make sense to you?"

"It does and thanks," I answered, knowing this was the only response that might spring me from her soft leather chair.

Point was, I hadn't been dreaming, but none of them had the least tangible reason to believe me, nor was there any hard neuroscience or accepted psychological model known to them that might connect my "vision" of the dead girl to the discovery of the lost girl. So, what I saw never "objectively" happened. The rope we found that day came back from the lab with no identifiable evidence suggesting any possible narrative that would indicate a recent hanging. The fibers were too weathered and weak to readily support the weight of even a child. As for the Styrofoam cup, it did turn out to have been dropped by one of Townsend's survey team, a cup from Crowley's General Store in the small downtown of Little Eddy, hazelnut with sugar. The pink knit cap was the girl's. She apparently lost it while running, trying to avoid being seen by Niles and me when we descended into the forest. And though the search and investigation were supposed to have been an in-house affair, with details kept under strict wraps, word got out, I assume courtesy of Bledsoe. Much of the story was picked up, with errors and exaggerations abounding, by some regional papers and beyond. Not as if I had a clipping service, but my phone started ringing, and most of the people on the other end with questions for me weren't locals. A few unfriendly letters, most of them unsigned, populated my mailbox. A call from Rosalie's pastor offering to speak with me. Turned heads at the grocery store. Even the boys had gone a little quiet on me, not knowing what to say.

Only after I got the call from Matt Newburg, the school principal, telling me a number of concerned parents wanted to remove their children from my summer school class, was it clear I might want to consider getting away for a while. When he added that my continuing education course on Homer and Virgil was canceled due to low—that is,
no
—enrollment, all nine people having pulled out, the die was cast. For obvious reasons, I myself postponed the dowsing appointments on my schedule. I was in no state to ramble around alone in some remote field or woods. Never before had the uninhabited earth seemed threatening. And the telephone might as well have been an exposed live wire.