S
he told him she wanted to spend her final time at home, and by home she meant the house on Charter Street.
I love you,
she had said.
And I have valued and treasured the time I’ve had with you in this cottage, but this cottage isn’t my home.
She swallowed.
I want to go home and if you want to be with me, which I hope you do, then I’ll have to ask you, humbly, to come with me to Charter Street.
Clen bristled. Now, at the end, she was asking difficult things of him. She expected him to spend time in the house she had bought and lived in for twenty-four years with the economist. He would, what? Sleep there? In the guest quarters?
And yet he understood that this cottage wasn’t her home, it wasn’t even his home, and it was too small for nurses and hospice workers to move around in comfortably. She had to go back.
“I don’t want to let you go,” he said. He felt dangerously close to tears, but he had promised her he wouldn’t cry, and so he poured a bourbon instead, and then he called Agnes and told her they were coming.
S
o many people wanted to visit that Agnes had to draw up a schedule: two people a day for ten minutes apiece. Dabney was propped up in bed, pearls on, headband in place. She could sometimes hold together a conversation, sometimes not.
Morphine. She said it made her feel like a dragonfly on the surface of a pond.
“I took you to Jewel Pond a dozen times the summer you were three,” Dabney said. “It was hard to get to, and more than once I got the Nova stuck in the sand, but you liked to throw rocks there, and we used to look for turtles. In the sun, it did look like a jewel. Like an emerald some days, a sapphire others. Do you remember it?”
Agnes said that she did, but she didn’t. She liked the picture Dabney painted: Agnes and Dabney alone at a secluded pond, Agnes wading in to her ankles to throw rocks while Dabney watched from her towel under the red-and-white-striped umbrella. Agnes taking a nap facedown on the towel while Dabney rubbed her back and read a Jane Austen novel.
Agnes and her mother, suspended alone in a happy, peaceful bubble. If Agnes had been three, then Box had been in the picture. He had been her “father,” he had adopted her in the months after he and Dabney were married. But he had been working, traveling, speaking, teaching, writing.
Agnes had held only one grudge against her mother, a ten-year-old grudge that was really the grudge of a lifetime: Dabney had waited sixteen years to tell Agnes who her real father was. Sixteen years. It had always seemed an egregious misstep on Dabney’s part. Agnes should have known much earlier; she should have
grown up knowing.
She remembered a comment made by Mrs. Annapale, her Sunday-school teacher, who had owned the bed-and-breakfast where Box had stayed while he was courting Dabney. Mrs. Annapale had said of Box, “He stayed with me every weekend until your mother agreed to marry him. Your mother used to bring you sometimes, too. Such a sweet baby you were!”
And Agnes had thought,
Huh?
When Agnes recounted this conversation to her mother, her mother had looked
very worried
for an instant, then she mentioned that Mrs. Annapale was getting older and might soon be mixing up Mary Magdalene with the Virgin Mary.
That had been a lie, or almost a lie. Not telling Agnes about Clendenin had been a lie of omission, a willful deception of the very worst kind.
Or so Agnes had believed until now—today, this past summer, since Agnes had met Clendenin. Now, her feelings had changed. She understood now, in a way she hadn’t before, just how
gone
Clendenin had been for Dabney. He had been on the other side of the world. The only way Dabney had survived was to pretend that he no longer existed. Agnes also understood how profoundly Dabney loved the man, and had continued to love him over all that time. The combination of the love and the hurt was powerful enough to keep Dabney from telling Agnes the truth. Plus, Box had been there to step in, a real father in every aspect but blood.
What,
Dabney had asked—calmly in the face of Agnes’s near hysteria at the age of sixteen—
does it matter?
Clendenin Hughes was just a name; his parentage was a matter solely of biology. He had never been Agnes’s father, Dabney had said ten years earlier, and he never would be.
But he was something now. Agnes wasn’t sure exactly what. At the very least he was someone else who loved her mother. In this he was a comrade, a teammate, possibly even a friend.
One evening as the light was fading—darkness came early in the fall—Agnes sat watching Dabney breathe as she slept and she said, “I forgive you, Mommy.”
Tammy Block came to visit, and Marguerite Levinson came with her golden retriever, Uncle Frank. Genevieve Lefebvre came, and Vaughan Oglethorpe came, smelling of embalming fluid. And every third or fourth day, Celerie came to discuss strategies for the future of the Chamber.
Nina Mobley came, announcing the news of her engagement to Dr. Marcus Cobb! Dabney asked Agnes to open champagne, although she herself could not drink any.
The woman Agnes had once seen pulling into Clen’s driveway showed up, identifying herself as Elizabeth Jennings, but when Agnes went up to announce this visitor to her mother, Dabney groaned and said, “Tell her I’m sleeping.”
When Agnes reported back to Elizabeth Jennings that Dabney was sleeping, Elizabeth nodded once sharply and said, “I knew she wouldn’t want to see me. Please tell her I’m sorry and give her this.” Elizabeth thrust forth a tarte tatin. “I’d like to say I made it myself but really, it was my cook.”
“Oh,” Agnes said. The tarte was dazzling with its glazed golden orbs of apple and caramelized sugar, but Dabney hadn’t eaten solid food in over a week. “Okay, thank you.”
Dabney’s former therapist, Dr. Donegal, came and stayed past the ten-minute limit. He was upstairs with Dabney for nearly an hour, and when he came back downstairs he was wiping his eyes.
And then the most surprising visitor of all. Or maybe not. Agnes had, after all, been wondering, hoping, praying, but she had been afraid to ask.
When she heard footsteps in the hall, she had thought it was Clen. Clen was staying at the house on Charter Street most nights, sitting with Dabney until she fell asleep, and then sleeping in the awful, tiny bedroom in the attic.
Like a scullery maid,
he had joked. He wouldn’t take the regular guest room because he felt he didn’t belong there. The attic room had only one twin bed. Agnes didn’t know how Clen got any sleep, but he wouldn’t switch rooms no matter how she implored him.
But the footsteps in the hallway did not belong to Clen. When Agnes looked up, the person she saw standing in the doorway of the kitchen was her father.
Box.
And only then did Agnes break down and cry.
S
he had everything she needed. Except…
The hospice workers were white angels with wings and soft voices. They wiped Dabney’s brow, smoothed her hair, rubbed her feet. They gave her morphine. Morphine eradicated the need for forbearance. Forbearance was, now, left to the healthy, the living. The hospice workers read aloud stories from the book Clen had made for Dabney. Or Agnes came in and read them.
Ah,
Dabney thought. Ginger O’Brien and Phil Bruschelli, ninth grade, the smell of the gym when basketball was being played in the winter, the squeal of sneakers and the thunk of the ball against the polished floor, the rustle and cheering and chatter of kids in the bleachers. Dabney used to stop in the gym for a few minutes after she was finished with Yearbook. Dabney used to mock up pages of the yearbook using rubber cement, and jellied squiggles of it would be stuck to her hands. She had worn her pearls and an oxford shirt and her Levi’s perfectly faded and broken in, washed only on Sundays and ironed while she watched
Sixty Minutes
on TV. Her penny loafers, perfectly scuffed, replaced at Murray’s Toggery the first of every August so that she could wear them around the house for a month before school started, breaking them in.
Could she go back to those days when she was happy and safe?
She said to Clen, “You had both your arms in ninth grade.”
“Yes,” he said. “I did.”
Clen was by her side. He gave the hospice workers a break or they gave her and Clen privacy, Dabney wasn’t sure which way it worked. Clen fed Dabney ice chips and put balm on her lips with the tip of his finger, and a few tears fell because Clen’s other hand, his left hand, had been strong and beautiful, too, but now it was gone. Turned to dust, Dabney supposed, somewhere on a distant continent.
She said to him, “You’ll know when to call the priest?”
Clen nodded, his lips pressed together until they turned white. He didn’t want to call the priest because he didn’t believe in Catholicism, maybe. Or he didn’t want to call the priest because it signaled the end. The priest meant something to Dabney, she wanted to confess her sins, she wanted Extreme Unction, she wanted permission to pass on to whatever came next. Her grandmother Agnes Bernadette had received last rites, and her facial expression had immediately settled into one of peace and acceptance, like a marble Madonna.
Clen had promised to call the priest.
But not yet. Not yet.
Ice chips, angels, hands soothing her aching feet, Clen’s voice, his mighty voice. How had she lived twenty-seven years without it? How had she lived without the green glen and weak tea of his eyes?
She said to Clen, “You have to find someone else. I meant to help you, but…”
“Hush,” he said.
“I couldn’t bear it,” Dabney said. “I was selfish, I wanted you all to myself. But, Clen, you can’t be alone.”
“Cupe,” he said. “Please.”
“Promise me you’ll try.”
“No,” he said. “I will not try.”
Clen, Agnes, the hospice workers—and then, finally, the priest. Not Father Healey, who had seen Dabney from Baptism to First Communion to Confirmation, but a new priest, a young man, a man too handsome for the cloth, if you asked Dabney. Father Carlos, he had a Spanish accent and soft brown eyes. He sat at Dabney’s bedside, took her hand, and said, “Pray with me.”
She had everything she needed except… And it was time to stop longing for that.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
She had confessed her sins and said her penance, but her real penance was that she would go without the one thing she needed.
Her journey was coming to an end. Forty-nine years. She had hoped for ninety-nine, didn’t everyone, but Dabney couldn’t complain. She hadn’t sunbathed on the golden shores of Saint-Tropez, she hadn’t visited the Taj Mahal, she had never seen the Hollywood sign or Mount Rushmore or the pyramids. She hadn’t shopped in Moroccan souks or eaten in a greasy spoon on Route 66.
But, Dabney knew, she had Nantucket. She had been born and raised here, she had worked twenty-two years in service to this island, and she would die here. She had been faithful to Nantucket. Oh, Nantucket, more of a mother than her own mother.
Everything she needed. Except.
And then, she heard his voice, or she thought she did. It was too soft at first to tell.
“Darling?”
She couldn’t believe it. She was dreaming, or in a morphine delirium. She had a hard time now discerning what was real and what was visiting her from another time. Agnes at three years old, throwing rocks to disturb the placid, emerald surface of Jewel Pond, was as vivid as Agnes yesterday reading to Dabney from the last pages of
Emma.
Darling.
Dabney opened her eyes, and there he was. Box. If she had had the ability to cry or cry out or smile or laugh, she would have.
She tried a word.
Here!
She meant,
You’re here! You came! You did not forsake me even though I so gravely forsook you. Darling? Am I darling? You have found it in your heart to come back to our home and call me darling.
Box understood
here
to mean,
Sit here.
He sat next to her. He held her hand.
He said, “Oh, Dabney.”
His tone of voice was not one she’d ever heard before. It was full of pain, sadness, regret, love. She couldn’t bear for him to say another word. What else could he possibly say?
“I love you,” he said. “I will always, always, always love you, Dabney Kimball Beech.”
She was able to blink at him. Her eyes were all she had left, but not for long, she didn’t think.
She tried again. “Please.”
He nodded. “Sshhh. It’s okay.”
“Please,” she said, or tried to say. The effort of it was too much. She was so tired. She closed her eyes.
She heard voices and felt things, she did not know what. She heard the voice of May, the Irish chambermaid, singing “American Pie.”
Where is my mother?
Your father is on his way, love.
Mama!
Dabney had taken an entire Saturday of her life to learn how to make beef Wellington so she could prepare it for Clendenin before the prom. The key to the puff pastry—which had to be made by hand, Pepperidge Farm wouldn’t do—was
very cold butter.
The chef at the Club Car, an old man when Dabney was in high school, had repeated this several times:
very cold butter.
Albert Maku had found Dabney crying on the steps of Grays Hall. Everyone else was thrilled about starting Harvard—everyone but Dabney and Albert. He had spoken to her in Zulu and she had cried, because the world was so foreign and strange without Clen by her side. Clen was 140 miles away, in New Haven.
A blizzard on Daffodil Weekend—that had seemed such a travesty! Nina Mobley had nearly chewed the cross off her chain as she and Dabney looked out the office windows at the snow piling up on Main Street.
Oysters—Island Creeks and Kumamotos. She could have eaten ten times as many, and still it wouldn’t have been enough.
A 1963 Corvette Stingray split-window in Bermuda blue with matching numbers. That would have been nice, too, although where in the world would she have driven it? The point of that car had been in the wanting.
Matisse,
La Danse.
Maybe that was heaven. Blues and greens, naked, dancing, dancing in a never-ending circle, each time around as thrilling as the first.
She had been ambivalent about the pregnancy. For the eight months after Clen left, she stayed at home, cooking and cleaning for her father, playing solitaire, and reading novels of shame—
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
and
Vanity Fair
—as her belly grew rounder and harder and more embarrassing each day. The friends she’d had in high school and college had been stunned into silence. They stayed away. She was as lonely as she’d ever been.
In the delivery room it had just been Dabney, a nurse named Mary Beth, and Dr. Benton. The birth, in Dabney’s memory, had been painless, probably because she didn’t care if the baby lived or died, or if she herself lived or died. What did it matter without Clendenin?
But then, of course, they placed the baby in Dabney’s arms, and the loneliness melted away. A mother first, a mother forever.
Agnes!
Dabney had jumped on the bed while her mother applied mascara at the dressing table.
Dabney said,
Look how high I’m going!
She was in her red Christmas dress and white tights. Her mother had instructed her to remove her Mary Janes.
I am looking, darling,
her mother said. Her eyes flashed in the mirror.
That’s very high indeed. Be careful now. You don’t want to fall and break yourself.
“Mommy.”
Dabney’s eyes opened—yes, they opened still. Agnes stood at the foot of the bed with Riley; they were holding hands and they were engulfed in pink clouds, fluffy as cotton candy.
Agnes at the carnival in the sticky heat of summer, cotton candy all over her face and in her hair, begging Dabney to go on the Scrambler.
I’m afraid!
Dabney had said.
But you’re a grown-up
, Agnes said.
Grown-ups aren’t supposed to be afraid.
Agnes and Riley, all that pink. Dabney knew it. She knew it!
Clendenin was on her left, holding her hand, and Box was on her right, holding her hand. They were both there. Dabney felt that she did not deserve this, but she was grateful. She had everything she needed. Her heart was a kite, tethered to the earth by two strings, but it was time for them to let go so she could float away.
She was a dragonfly, skimming. Heaven was a Corvette Stingray in the sky, maybe.
Heaven was that they were all right there with her.
Clen squeezed. “Cupe,” he said.
Box said, “She’s going, I’m afraid.”
It was okay. In the end, after all, it was sweet, like freedom.
“Mommy!” Agnes said.
When Dabney closed her eyes, everything was pink. So pink.
Agnes:
We buried my mother’s ashes on the Friday of Daffodil Weekend in the family plot where her father and her grandmother and great-grandparents and great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandmother, the original Dabney, were laid to rest. My mother used to say that she hated to leave Nantucket because she was afraid she would die and never return, so it was a relief for me—and for Box and Clen, too, I think—once she was safely in the ground. We kept the burial private, just the three of us, Riley, and Nina Mobley, but at the tailgate picnic following the Antique Car Parade the next day, people surrounded the Impala to pay their respects—laugh, cry, and share Dabney stories. Celerie had made a huge platter of ribbon sandwiches in my mother’s honor, and this year they all got eaten, and all I could think of was how happy this would have made my mother.
A year earlier, I had agreed to marry CJ.
Riley liked to say that he fell in love with me before he even met me, on the day he saw my photograph on my mother’s desk at the Chamber office. He said he saw the picture and stopped dead in his tracks and thought,
That is the woman I am going to marry.
He said that his heart had never been broken before but the closest he’d ever come was when he found out I was engaged.
My feelings for Riley developed more gradually, which he understood. My emotional plate was full—with CJ, with my mother, with Clendenin. I know that I love him, I know he is the kindest, most delightful, most handsome, most talented surfing dentist on earth and that I would be nuts to let him go—but I’m not ready to talk about marriage. Especially not this weekend. We have agreed to see what the summer brings—we will be together on Nantucket—and maybe, maybe, I’ll move to Philadelphia with him in the fall.
My mother would be ecstatic about that.
After the tailgate picnic was broken down and all the antique cars headed back out the Milestone Road toward town, I waved goodbye to Box. He was going to the Boarding House with the Levisons. In the morning, we would have coffee together and then I would drive him to the airport—the way my mother always had—so he could head back to Cambridge.
Clen had ridden out to the Daffodil festivities on his bicycle, and he was getting ready to ride home. I was worried about Clen in a way that I was not worried about Box. I left Riley to pack up our picnic and help Celerie with the last of her tasks, and I walked over to talk to Clen just as he was climbing onto his bicycle.
I said, “What are you up to tonight?”
He said, “Bourbon. Fried rice if I feel ambitious. Sox game on the radio, maybe.”
“Riley and I are breaking out the grill,” I said. “Ribs. Will you join us?”
He shook his head. “You’re sweet to ask, but I’m fine.”
“Are you fine?” I asked. There had been a couple of nights when I had gone to Clen’s cottage and we’d both drunk bourbon and one or the other of us had broken down crying because we just
missed her so much.
Where had she gone? She had been here, so alive, the most alive person either of us had ever known, and now she was gone. Snap of the fingers: poof, like that.
When it was Clen who broke down crying—great big heaving sobs that sounded like the call of some enormous animal, a moose, or a whale—I had thought,
That is my father, crying over my mother.
It was true, but it was so weird that I had to say it multiple times to make it sink in. What would our lives have been like if he had stayed on Nantucket and raised me? Or if my mother had been brave enough to go to Thailand?
“Agnes,” Clen said. And I knew something was coming.
“What?”
“I’ve been offered a job,” he said. “Running the Singapore desk for the
Washington Post.
It’s an assignment I’ve wanted my entire career. The job comes with a two-bedroom flat, just off the Orchard Road.” He must have noticed the look on my face, because he started talking more quickly. “Elizabeth Jennings mentioned my name to someone who owed her husband, Mingus, a favor or three. She feels guilty, I think, about the way she treated your mother.”
“You’re accepting favors from Elizabeth Jennings?” I said.
“It’s the job I’ve always wanted,” Clen said. “I’ll grow old drinking Singapore Slings in the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel.” He smiled weakly. “Agnes, I can’t stay here without her. Every day is excruciating. I can’t stay here without her, and I have nowhere else to go.”
Leaving me, I thought, when we had just found each other. That part of the world would swallow Clen up for another twenty-seven years, and I would never see him again.
He said, “I agreed to the job on the condition that I be allowed to come back to Nantucket for the month of August every year. It’s monsoon there; most of the country takes a vacation. So you’ll get me thirty-one days a year, when I’ll be at your disposal, I promise.”
I felt my face soften. Every August together was a good compromise.
He said, “And you and Riley can come visit. You can come to Singapore on your honeymoon!”
At that moment, Riley swooped up behind me and hugged me with such gusto, he picked me right up off the ground. “Did somebody say ‘honeymoon’?” he said.