Islands: A Novel Part 8

There was a sheen of tears in her eyes, and I knew she was thinking of Gladys, our missing family member. I gave her hand a squeeze, and she smiled damply at me.

Henry and Lewis and Simms stood up. Henry spoke. "I talked to Charlie, and he said they're going to need us two or three straight days and nights," he said. "People are breaking legs and having heart attacks all over the place, trying to clean up this damage. I told him if we came in tonight we'd drop dead of fatigue, and he said to take the night off and begin early in the morning."

"He's the one who's going to drop dead if he doesn't let up," Camilla said. "I haven't seen him since the night Hugo hit, and I know he isn't sleeping more than an hour or two at a time. His voice sounds awful, all breathless and faint. Send him home, hear?"

"We will. Now listen, y'all," Lewis said. "We're going over to the island and take a look at the damage. There's not going to be any other time for it. I think...we've got to know."

"You what?" Fairlie squealed. "How the h.e.l.l do you think you're going to get over there? The d.a.m.ned bridge is out. The National Guard is patrolling regularly. The very least they'd do is arrest you. I heard they have orders to shoot looters. Have you completely lost your minds? What are you going to do, swim?"

"No," said Simms. "Sail."

Camilla and Lila and I simply stared at them. Then Lila said, "Have we still got a boat?"

"We have the old one," Simms said. "I moved the Venus way back up the Ashley River, and she should be safe. But the Flea is still bobbing around the yacht club dock. G.o.d knows why the club didn't blow away, but it didn't. They did a good job of securing the boats."

"The Flea...," Lila said. "But it's so tiny, Simms. And anyway, how do you think you can get onto the island without a patrol seeing you? I don't like this at all."

"She'll hold the three of us," he said. "And if you remember, we painted her red when we gave her to the kids. Even got a red sail. At night it shows up black."

"Well, y'all don't," Fairlie snapped. "What are you going to do, go in blackface?"

"Yes," Henry said.

"But with no lights-"

"Fairlie," Simms said, "I've been sailing that stretch from the yacht club to the island all my life. I could do it blindfolded. And the moon is almost as bright as day. We're just going to ease up to Henry's dock and then walk over to the beach house, and come right back. But we need to know."

My heart became a lump of dirty ice. No, Lewis, I said in my head. It doesn't matter. None of it matters but that you're safe.

But when he looked over at me and raised an inquiring red eyebrow, I smiled. It was what my brother would have called a chickens.h.i.+t smile.

"Boys' night out," I said, and they laughed a little. Presently they went upstairs in the big house and came back down in dark pants and windbreakers. They wore dark deck shoes, too, and dark socks.

We stared. They looked like a Mafia hit group.

"Simms brought them over for us," Henry said. "I'm supplying the blackface."

And he held out a tin of black shoe polish. Fairlie and Camilla and I began to laugh. Lila only stared.

"Well, go paint your faces, kemo sabes, and let us see our braves off," Camilla said.

"We'll put it on down at the dock," Henry growled, but she took the tin away from him and sat him down in front of her.

"Be still," she said. "I'm an expert at making up little boys for Halloween. You won't know yourself." And she began to smear Henry's face with shoe polish.

She did the others after that. Everyone stood or sat silently, not knowing what to say. They were Peter Pan's lost boys, of course, but they were something else, too. Something beyond the husbands and fathers and doctors and businessmen we had known all our lives, something harder than friends. Something wilder. They had drawn away into themselves, into the feral ranks of men, far away from the company of women.

"Well," said Henry. "Let's do it."

They turned to walk out of the garden and through the crippled streets toward the yacht club. We watched them go, pillars of darkness, moving silently. My scalp crawled. I did not know Lewis. I did not know these men.

"Henry, put something on your head," Fairlie yelled after him. "You can see that hair of yours a mile away."

He gave her the V for victory signal. We all laughed, and the little cold spell was broken. Still, when they had pa.s.sed out of sight, we looked at one another silently, as if to try to read in each other's faces what we should do next.

We sat down to wait.

Dark fell in earnest, and the mosquitoes came in bloodsucking squadrons, but we did not move to go into the house. As long as we sat in the candlelit garden, we could preserve the illusion of just another outdoor summer supper. There was a lot of wine left, and we drank a good bit of it. The heat and the silence and the wine dulled the anxiety, but it was still there, under the layers of succor. At first we talked a little.

"Remind me to try and get in touch with my office first thing in the morning," I said. I felt extremely guilty that I had hardly thought of the agency since we left for Mexico, two weeks and a hundred years ago.

"Oh," Fairlie said, "I forgot to tell you. Somebody called here from your office...would it be Marcy? And said that you've pretty much got no first floor, but the second floor and the files are okay."

My little office, a former town house in a moribund development, sat across Calhoun Street from the Veterans Administration Hospital, overlooking the Ashley marina. I could just imagine what the storm surge had done to it. I closed my eyes in profound weariness. All that work, all those fund-raising drives, all the scrounging and sucking up for money...

"We'll take Charlie's Navigator and go check in the morning," Camilla said. "In fact, we'll go check on everybody's places. Maybe nothing's as bad as it seems."

Later, I do not know how much, but the moon had begun to sink toward the South Battery, Lila said, "You know what this reminds me of? That scene in Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett and Melanie and the other women were sitting around sewing, waiting to hear that their men had come back from the Klan raid safely. There were Yankees all over the place, just like the National Guard now. The women never mentioned any of it. They just chatted as if nothing was wrong. I always loved that scene."

"Which of them would be Rhett and which one Ashley?" Fairlie said. Fatigue blurred her voice.

After that the talk died, and we simply sat.

I don't know how much longer it was when I heard the sound. I had been drifting in and out of sleep, and the candles were burned down, and the moon had set. It was almost totally dark.

In the profound silence we heard a jingle. And then the scrabble of claws. And then Gladys, sodden and filthy and ecstatic, slid and skittered onto the veranda, the whole back of her waggling.

Fairlie dropped to her knees and simply held the wriggling dog. I could tell, over the slurping of Gladys's tongue on her face, that Fairlie was crying.

The men suddenly materialized in the garden. Camilla lit a candle. We looked at them. They looked...exuberant. They practically gave off sparks.

G.o.ddammit, I thought. They were playing commandos, and we were sitting here simply dying. Sons of b.i.t.c.hes.

I knew where my anger came from, though.

"Well?" Camilla said. She sat up straight, with her hands folded in her lap.

"The beach house is standing," Lewis said. "I don't know how in the name of G.o.d it could be; there's literally nothing but rubble around it. But there it is. The s.p.a.ce under it took the storm surge; we saw the Ping-Pong table across the street down near Stella Maris, and I think the lawn mower is out on the point. But except for the porch screens and the stairs and walkway down to the beach, it looks pretty good. It didn't even lose any windows."

I felt tears gather in my chest and sting in my nose.

"What about...our place? How is it?" Fairlie said.

"You mean where is it?" Henry said. "There's literally nothing left but the dock. We went in there. I couldn't begin to guess where the house is."

"Oh, Henry," Camilla began, but he shook his head.

"We didn't use it much anymore. Even the grandchildren are beginning to have other things to do here in town. I'll find something to do with the insurance money, you can bet on that."

"Gladys?" Fairlie said, still hugging the dog.

"You know, she was sitting on the porch of the beach house, as far up under the hammock as she could get. She was s.h.i.+vering like a leaf, but the minute she heard our footsteps she began to bark. Gladys spent the remainder of her time on Sullivan's Island with my shorts holding her jaws shut. The guard was out in force."

"Did they see you?" I said.

"If they did, they had other fish to fry. You aren't going to know Sullivan's Island. There's just...almost nothing left."

"But the house," Lila said.

"But the house."

"Then we'll be all right."

"Yes," Henry said. "I believe we will."

Later that night, as it slid into morning, Lewis and I lay sweating and intertwined in the narrow bed in the room Fairlie kept for her grandchildren. The drone of mosquitoes should have maddened me, but I had been sleeping with mosquitoes for the past two weeks. It seemed to me that Mexican mosquitoes could teach Low Country mosquitoes a thing or two any day.

We were both simply too tired to talk, but we could not quite drift into sleep either. Above us, on the third floor somewhere, Boy and Girl and Sugar were padding around and snuffling. I knew that Gladys, wet and stinking and home, would be sleeping on Fairlie and Henry's bed.

I looked over at the purple Barney that sat on the little chair beside the bed. Lewis looked, too.

"Which is worse?" he said. "A Mexican ho' house or Barney?"

"Barney, by a landslide," I said.

And then we slept.

It was perhaps six weeks before we could cross over to Sullivan's Island, though we could and did sail along the strangely scalloped sh.o.r.e, or took Simms's Boston Whaler. From the water, it looked, I thought, like some desolate, sh.e.l.l-pocked beach during World War II, its battles over but its casualties still strewn, motionless. The dune lines were gone, or had been reconfigured into another seascape entirely. When we finally jolted down Middle Street, we could see that the palms, crepe myrtles, and live oaks that had shaded the old houses lay uprooted, leaves long dead. Some lay across the shattered roofs of the few houses that stood. There were no standing trees. There was no sea gra.s.s. Most of the cottages were piles of rubbish. But some stood, bravely and inexplicably, like sentinels who had failed to foresee a war. Ours was one of them. It stood alone far down the beach, nothing around it, its oleanders and palms gone. The walkway to the beach and the stairs had totally vanished. We never did find them. The porch screens had been torn like wet tissue paper. Washed-up debris from who knew where jammed the backyard, and a claw-footed bathtub tilted against the deck, obviously someone's treasure. s.h.i.+ngles littered the sand everywhere. But the windows were still stoutly boarded, and the roof, though partially denuded of s.h.i.+ngles, still sheltered, and miraculously the hammock still stood serenely on the front porch. The storm surge had obviously gone just under the porch and swept through the bas.e.m.e.nt, if it could be called that, and boiled on across to murder the houses toward the inland waterway, Henry's included.

The first time we had come over, to reconnoiter, the island had been deathly silent. There was not even any birdsong. Just the flat wash of the waves on an alien beach and here and there the flutter of a shredded flag.

But a week later, when we came leading a caravan of pick-ups and SUVs laden with lumber and rolls of screen and s.h.i.+ngles, the island had come stubbornly alive again. Everywhere, clearing and construction were going on. The air rang with the sound of hammers and power drivers and the growling of bulldozers. A good many cottage owners stood about, their bewildered dogs leashed beside them, watching the wreckage of their pasts come down and the tentative beginning of their futures rise. Some left and never came back, we learned later, but a surprising number of Sullivan's Islanders were rebuilding.

"Are we all insane?" Fairlie said that first day, watching Tyrell and a crew of men from Simms's factory begin to unload supplies and clear rubble.

"Probably," Henry said. "But don't you want it fixed up?"

"Of course, it's just that we never have anything worse than a few floods and muddy racetracks in Kentucky."

"It costs a good bit to live in paradise," Camilla said, smiling at the battle-scarred old house that had been her family's. "Daddy would have been tickled to death to see that the widow's walk is still standing, when St. Michael's steeple and those others took a hit. He was quite proud of being a practicing pagan."

The warm, still autumns of the Low Country linger long, sometimes until nearly Christmas. Simms's crew worked steadily through October and into November, and we worked along with them on weekends. Back in downtown Charleston our houses were pretty much in order, and the plantations on Edisto and Wadmalaw were whole and functioning, if still sodden. Our offices were being healed, though slowly. I eventually got used to seeing downtown as it was in those first months; you can get used to anything, or at least fit it into the grid of your experience, so that it does not shock and pierce you anew every time you see it. Of all the sad wreckage around me, only the decimated old live oaks in White Point Gardens had the power to stab my heart and bring brine to my throat each time I saw them. Generally, I think, we knew that we were as okay as we could be at the moment, though in other parts of the city desolation was still unrelieved. All our attention went, that fall, to the beach house.

On the last weekend before Thanksgiving, we packed food and brought wine and a bunch of late zinnias from Lila's garden and prepared to finish the roof and the porch painting, and then to celebrate. Lewis brought champagne, and Simms brought a sack of oysters he had dug the day before from his creek bank on Wadmalaw. Henry and Fairlie had saved driftwood from their long walks on the beach that fall, and it was silvery dry and ready to go into the fireplace. Camilla had taken the bedding and quilts home and cleaned and dried them, and brought them back, sweet smelling and fluffed, and put them on all the beds in the house.

"Just in case somebody wants to spend the night," she said.

"I know who that somebody will be," Charlie said, smiling at her. She shrugged and wryly smiled back. It was fitting, I thought. Their bedroom had been hers as a girl. Let them be the first of us to fall asleep to the wash of the waves and wake to the clean, fresh smell of salt and seaweed.

It was a nearly perfect day, one of those gilded ones you remember at odd moments for the rest of your life. I see it most often just before I fall asleep. The sun was lower now, of course, but at midday it was warm enough to discard sweaters and jackets. Indeed, Lewis was in shorts and a T-s.h.i.+rt, and Fairlie changed into a bathing suit from the drawer upstairs and swam, defiantly, for about five minutes. The rest of us cheered her on, but made no move to follow. The low angle of the light turned the calm sea to a sheet of glittering pewter, and she came das.h.i.+ng out of it like some sort of gangling G.o.ddess. I saw Henry grin, secretly, and Camilla, watching them both, smiled, too.

We took the dogs out for the first time. It had simply been too hectic to watch over them before, and I thought that they would be nervous and agitated by the alteration of their world. I need not have worried about Boy and Girl; they were off for the water, noses to the sand, before the car door had closed behind them. Sugar followed, bounding up and down like a little rabbit, the better to see over these new dunes. Only Gladys was not happy. She had s.h.i.+vered and whined when we drove up to the house, and in the end Henry had had to carry her in his arms and settle her on the newly screened-in porch. She stopped crying, but she did not move from her spot under the hammock, and I sat in it and swung gently and patted her.

"She needs to get back on her horse," Henry said. "She can't be afraid of the island for the rest of her life."

"If you'd sat out a cla.s.s-four hurricane under this hammock, you'd be afraid, too," I told him.

Lewis and I and Simms and Lila finished painting the walkway and steps early in the afternoon, and Henry and Fairlie raked up debris and stray nails and sc.r.a.ps of screening and dried palm fronds, and dumped them into a huge lawn basket they had brought. Camilla and Charlie finished the last of the s.h.i.+ngling. I remember sitting on the top step of the walkway, with the warm, tan sand and the blue sea stretching away beyond me and a sweet, light breeze on my face, watching them. Charlie was on the roof of the porch, tearing off damaged s.h.i.+ngles and tossing them down to Camilla. He had taken off his s.h.i.+rt, and his big shoulders and barrel chest had pinked in the sun, and his nearly bald head gleamed red. Every time he loosed a s.h.i.+ngle he called, "Heads up!" and Camilla, her chestnut hair loose and blowing around her face, her slender arms and hands flas.h.i.+ng, would try and catch the s.h.i.+ngle, or retrieve it from the sand, and toss it onto the mounting pile on the big tarp. She caught a good many of them, moving as lithely as the tomboy she had been when she was a child here. She was laughing up at Charlie, and he grinned back. It struck me that I had never seen them doing anything physical together. Even when we danced, Camilla danced with someone else. Charlie, as he protested over and over, did not dance. But in this coordinated ballet of toss and catch, you could see how good they might have been together, if they had danced.

Later that afternoon the air grew cool and the low sun set, and Henry laid the driftwood fire and lit it. It sputtered a moment and then flared and settled to a soft, hissing roar. We all applauded. The heart of the house had come alive.

We sat for a long time after roasted oysters and shrimp gumbo, reluctant to let the evening go. I felt as though I had slipped into a secure berth after a long, wild sea journey. I think we all did. No one spoke very much. But we smiled a lot.

Lewis opened the champagne and poured it, and I pa.s.sed it around. He lifted his gla.s.s, standing before the fireplace.

"To the Scrubs," he said. "One for all and all for one. And to the house."

We all lifted our gla.s.ses and said, "To the house," and drank. I put my gla.s.s down and smiled over at Camilla, who was sitting on the hearth with her arms wrapped around her knees. But she did not look at me. She was watching Charlie, who sat opposite her in the old wicker rocker, with a faint line of puzzlement between her eyes. I looked, too.

Charlie sat very still, gla.s.s in hand, staring straight ahead into the fire, a look of mild amazement on his face. And then, as slowly as a melting snowman, he leaned forward, out of his chair, and slid gently to the floor. The champagne gla.s.s crashed and tinkled, and a small lake of fizzing foam spread around it.

Lewis and Henry were kneeling over him in a second, and I found myself gripping Camilla's icy hands as we stood staring.

"Help me get him to the Navigator," Henry said sharply. "It's the biggest. I'll get in back with him. Lewis, you drive."

"Wait...," Camilla began in a voice with no breath behind it.

"No time," Henry barked. "Anny, bring Camilla in the Rover. Fairlie, go with them."

"Where?" I said stupidly.

"Queens. Emergency entrance. Leave the Rover out front. I'll square it with security. Come on, Lewis, let's go!"

The Navigator squealed out of the driveway and was out of sight down Middle Street before Simms and Lila and Fairlie and I got Camilla into the Range Rover. As they pulled out, I saw Henry in the backseat, pounding Charlie's chest with his fist. I could not see Charlie's face. Henry's was fierce, focused.

On the careening drive back across the two looming bridges, I said nothing, but Simms, in the front seat, turned to Camilla in the back and spoke softly and steadily, in an even, everyday voice. I did not hear what he said. I could hear Lila murmuring to Camilla, too, but not her words. When I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw that she and Fairlie had their arms around Camilla, and Camilla was sitting very straight and still and white, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. In all the maddening time that it took before we screeched up to the emergency entrance at Queens Hospital, I never heard Camilla make a sound.

It only occurred to me after I had braked to a stop that I had driven over the two horrifying bridges with no more thought to them than a four-way stop sign.

When we reached the coronary intensive care unit, Henry and Lewis were sitting on a plastic-covered couch in the waiting room. They were silent, slumped, heads back against the couch. Both wore green scrubs, with masks dangling around their necks. I could see from the doorway that Henry was soaked to the waist with sweat. Their eyes were closed, and their faces were gray with fatigue.

Henry seemed to sense us before we made a sound. He stood up. Camilla stood stock-still, staring at him, and he held his arms out to her, silently. Like a sleepwalker she walked into them, and he folded her against him, close and hard. Lewis went over and hugged them both. No one spoke.

The original Sullivan's Island three, I thought, and began to cry. Behind me, Fairlie and Lila did, too. Simms made no sound but a small, strangled choke.

Late that night, as we led Camilla out of the coronary care unit and toward the Range Rover, she stopped and looked around at all of us. It was, Lewis told me later, virtually the only time they had heard her speak.

"We finished the house, didn't we?" she said, in a child's wondering voice.