Up Island (46 page)

“No,” Bella said, not looking at me. “You do it. You can do it; you did a good job tonight.”

“Don’t you understand? The infection could get into her bloodstream. She could get very sick. She could die. She’s awfully frail, Bella. These sores should have been seen to a long time ago. I can’t help either of you when I don’t know anything’s wrong. You’ll have to tell me when you aren’t feeling well.”

“Oh, I will,” Bella said, smiling radiantly at me with her blue lips. I knew she would not.

The sores did soon begin to heal, but one morning Bella fell in the kitchen and could not get up, and I found her there that afternoon when I came, almost unconscious and soiled with her own urine. Luz was

398 / Anne Rivers Siddons

wailing thinly and monotonously from the living room. This time I did not try to reason with either of them. I went to the telephone and called Patricia Norton. She was there in fifteen minutes, her strong, pleasant face red with cold. I met her on the steps.

“I’m sorry. I hate to bother you. But they ran the nurse off last week, and I think that if she starts screaming that hard in the state she’s in, it will just stop her heart. My father isn’t well, or I’d ask him…I just need someone to help me lift her back on to the sofa in the living room. I don’t think she’s hurt or has had an attack. She just can’t get up. I’ll take it from there if you can help me…”

Patricia looked around the dingy living room and her brows drew together. I saw her take a deep breath, mouth closed, nostrils flaring, as if stifling shock.

“I had no idea it was this bad,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t see how you’ve managed by yourself this long. Let’s get her on the sofa, and then I’m going to call the others and we’re going to make a plan and go talk to Dennis whether or not he wants to listen, and get them both into a hospital or a home as soon as possible. This is…not acceptable.

“You’d better not tell her who I am,” she added under her breath as we went into the kitchen where Bella lay. I had covered her with a quilt, and she looked, in the dimness, like a vast, helpless amphibian cast up on a dark beach.

“Won’t she know?” I whispered back. “You look an awful lot like a Ponder.”

“I don’t think so. I haven’t been in this house since I was nine or ten. None of us has.”

But Bella did know. She knew, and she began to scream like a banshee for Patricia Ponder Norton to UP ISLAND / 399

get out of her house. She did not stop screaming all the while we pushed and pulled and hauled and swatted at her, not while we frog-walked her across the kitchen and living room and dumped her on to the sofa, and when she reached that haven she threw a vase and the heavy brass lamp at Patricia.

Her lips turned navy blue and her face deep magenta, and she began to choke and gargle and rasp.

“I’ll call for an ambulance on the car phone,” Patricia said, and ran out into the frigid darkness. The wind was high that night, and crooned around the corners of the house; I almost lost her words in the swell of it.

By the time the tri-town ambulance came hooting and fish-tailing up the glassy driveway, I had cleaned Bella Ponder and she lay, pale but calm and smiling, under a cocoon of clean blankets, sipping cocoa. It was obvious to the EMTs that, as she said, she did not need emergency ambulance service.

“My young friend gets terribly excited,” she said, smiling her great white shark’s smile at the two exasperated young men. “I didn’t know she’d called you until you came up the hill. I’d never have let her if I’d known. I have these little spells all the time. My doctor knows about them. It’s Dr.

Cardin, over in Oak Grove; he’s got his offices in the hospital.

You can ask him. I’m awfully sorry about this. Can we offer you some cocoa?”

We could not. The men went away, carefully blank-faced, no doubt cursing hysterical off islanders who called for help when help was not needed on icy, dangerous nights.

I looked at Bella. She did not look back.

“If you do that to me again, our agreement is off
400 / Anne Rivers Siddons

and I’m leaving,” I said, my voice shaking with anger. “And don’t think I won’t. You have people of your own who can and want to help you. One of them came tonight. Next time I’ll let them.”

“I promise I won’t,” she muttered, dropping her eyes. Her eyelashes lay on her waxen cheeks like black silk fans. I had seen Dennis’s lashes like that, in the exhausted sleeps that followed his chemo. Dennis…She would do it again, of course, if it happened again. But at the moment I was too tired to think ahead. I built up the fire and the stove, heated some stew for them, and went home and fell into bed. I did not wake until past nine the next morning.

All the next day the white blanket of my fatigue dragged behind me wherever I went, and by the time I was to go up and read to Bella and Luz, I did not think I could take another step.

I got up slowly from the sofa, where I had dropped after coming in with groceries for all three houses, and the room took a slow, majestic spin around me. I shook my head and held on to the arm of the sofa and the spinning ceased, but my knees were still watery. I listened for any sound of my father upstairs, and when I heard none, climbed the stairs hesitantly. I hated to disturb any sleep he might find for himself, but perhaps, just this once, he would take the groceries to the farmhouse and read to the old women. If I did not sleep, I thought I would die.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed, staring out at the pond and the Sound beyond it. The evening was very cold, but the sky was clear, a tender, soft lavender that gave back a watercolor wash to the quiet water. The moon was full, or nearly so; later, I knew, there would be a silver-white path down the water to the

UP ISLAND / 401

horizon, and the lingering snow would be flooded with blue-white light. I did not think my father saw any of it. His eyes were fastened on another, different distance.

I went and sat down beside him, and put my arm around him.

“Can’t you sleep, Daddy? Want me to make you some cocoa?”

He shook his head, not looking at me. He was still staring at the hat.

“Well, then, maybe a Scotch. I’ll fix you one and you can have it up here while I run over to the farmhouse, and then we’ll have dinner. I got some clam chowder from the Black Dog.”

He did not answer, and I was beginning to feel real alarm when he turned his face to me. It was naked with yearning, terrible to see. I tightened my grip on his shoulders.

“She almost came, baby,” he said, and his voice was a rasp.

“I fell asleep when the sun was going down, and for a minute she was there. Just for a minute…and then I woke up. And I can’t go back to sleep now; I don’t sleep in the nights, and she won’t come in the daytime. I brought that hat up here, thinking she might know, somehow, but she still doesn’t come…if I could just sleep in the nights. Just one night…I know she’d come. I know she would.”

I put my head down on his shoulder silently, thinking for a moment how wonderful it would be to just give up, let go, opt out, let someone else take over. But there was no one else. I could not ask this wrecked old man to care for anyone else. He could not even minister to himself.

I remembered something.

402 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“I have some sleeping pills,” I said. “Charlie Davies gave them to me before I left Atlanta. I haven’t taken all of them.

Why don’t you try one? I don’t think they’re very strong, but they worked for me. You’re right, you do need to sleep at night.”

He nodded slowly.

“Maybe that would do it. Maybe it would,” he said, and the frail hope in his voice was more than I could bear. I jumped up and ran downstairs and got the pills, for the moment the fatigue forgotten.

When I got back upstairs he was already lying flat in bed, covered with the quilts, and his bedside light was off. I gave him the vial of pills and he shook one out and took it with the water I had brought.

“You want it now?” I said doubtfully. “What about dinner?”

“I’ll get some later,” he said back. There was almost a merriment in his voice, like a child who knows a secret. I turned away from him.

“Sleep tight, Daddy,” I said.

“Thank you, baby,” he said back. “Would you pull the door to when you go?”

I did so, leaving him there, waiting to go and meet my mother in the country of his sleep.

I went downstairs in such a fever of anger that I almost forgot the old ladies’ groceries as I stumped out to the truck.

I knew why she did not come to him in his sleep. It was because, for the last two weeks or so, she was spending her nights with me, and the dreams she brought with her murdered sleep as effectively as Macbeth. Every night she came, usually about three A.M., so that I had only had a couple hours’ sleep and would get little more after I woke from the dreams. She came and she raged like a wild beast, a madwoman,

UP ISLAND / 403

from behind her bars. She thrust her hands and arms out through the bars of her subterranean lair and clawed the air with them, and she raged and shrieked and howled out her impotent fury. In my dreams I was no longer afraid of her, but I felt a profound, all-enveloping despair. Whatever it was she so wanted, I could not give it to her. I did not understand her furious pleas. The despair would last long after I woke, until dawn broke, earlier now, and I slid back into the thin sleep of exhaustion. I thought that if my mother did not stop howling at me in my sleep I would go mad.

I stood still, beside the truck, the bag of groceries in my arms.

“I hate you,” I said clearly and dispassionately to her, in the cold, silken air. “If that’s what you want, then that’s what you’ve got. I hate you for what you’re doing to both of us.

You’re killing me with your furies and your fits, and you’re killing him with your absence. Why the hell can’t you just go to him one time? God knows you’ve got enough presence to spread over six states. Put some where it’s needed.”

I drove carefully up the still frozen hill toward the farmhouse. I was still bone-tired, but I felt a bit better. Perhaps my father would sleep this night. Perhaps I would, too.

But it was not a better night, after all. Bella and Luz had obviously been quarreling all afternoon, and were still at each other when I came in. The house was cold and stale and malodorous with whatever food Bella had not put away in the kitchen, and the fire in the living room was out, and papers and magazines and used tissues were scattered all over Luz’s bed and the floor, and all of a sudden I could hardly bear the

404 / Anne Rivers Siddons

fusty mess of sickness and age. My temper flared again.

“Whatever it is you’re fighting about, just stop it right now,”

I snapped. “I’m tired to death, and I’ve got to rake out this place and get you some supper, and I don’t feel like listening to you snipe at each other while I’m doing it.”

“It’s her fault,” Bella said stubbornly, sounding like a gargantuan sulking child. “She insists that you’re reading
Once
and Future
to us, and I can’t tell her you’ve read that twice already and that we’re in the middle of
Penrod and Sam.
I’m not going to listen to listen to
Once and Future
again. I’m sick of it. It was my time to choose, and
Penrod
is what I chose, and
Penrod
is what I want to hear. You tell her so.”

Luz began to wail. “That’s not so! We were reading
Once
and Future.
I know we were! She’s just mad because I spilled stupid soup on her stupid crossword puzzle. I know we’re reading
Once and Future,
and I want to hear about the Wart and the sword!”

“Shut up!” Bella shouted. “You little old baby, you just shut up! You get your way all the time because you’re a little old crybaby! I spend all my time doing for you, and you keep wanting everything…!”

“Big old bully!” shrieked Luz. “You’re the one who gets her way all the time! You get your way because you’re the biggest and you can walk and I can’t—”

“HUSH!” I shouted, and they both stopped and looked at me, the whites of their eyes showing.

“Just be quiet. I will not listen to this. I’m not going to read either one tonight. I’m going to straighten this place up and heat your supper, and then I’m going home and get some sleep. You can watch television or

UP ISLAND / 405

scream at each other, I don’t care, but I’m not reading to you.”

And I didn’t. I stalked into the kitchen and washed their dishes and emptied the garbage and heated their clam chowder and brought it to them, and I picked up the room and built up the fire, all in a stony silence. They pleaded and promised, and Luz began to sniffle again, but I held firm. I could not wait to be out of that spoiled-smelling farmhouse and into the clear, cold air.

“Now,” I said to myself when I was under way, skidding down the long lane to Middle Road. The rising moon hung low over the Atlantic, and I could see that it left its luminous paths on sea and Sound alike. The whole world was light and shadow: snow drifted on stone walls, woods, moors, beaches, and boulders, the occasional blue bulk of a house, windows lit yellow. Over it all, great clouds of stars swarmed.

I took a deep breath and waited to feel better. But I did not.

Bullying two sick old ladies had not helped at all. I felt craven and cowardly and ashamed of myself, and I felt a deep, despairing fear for my father, and the fatigue was back in all its sucking power, and under it all there trembled something so akin to red, killing rage that it frightened me. I thought that if it surfaced, something would happen that would change the world forever. Something would die. Something else, perhaps, would be born.

I took a deep breath and pushed the anger back down. I drove on carefully, thinking determinedly of nothing but supper and bed. I remembered that Lazarus was still at Dennis Ponder’s cabin, and if Dennis should happen to fall asleep, he would be there all night. Somehow I could not bear the thought of that. I skewed the wheel and the truck slid into

406 / Anne Rivers Siddons