The Distinguished Guest, page 23
Gaby stood there, holding a tray. Lily saw coffee and her oatmeal. Gaby’s face opened in astonishment at the sight of Lily, dressed and tidied up. “Lily!” she cried.
Lily made a slight curtsying motion. “Yes, if you’d waited a few minutes more, you could have had the full effect. Shoes were next.”
“But I’m amazed. How did you do this?” She crossed the room and set the tray down on Lily’s table. She turned and looked Lily up and down as the old woman moved smoothly too, after her.
“Every now and then the Lord gives me such a day.” Lily gestured to the windows. “I think today it has to do with the weather. The wind.”
“Well, I’m delighted for you. Though I’m sorry the Lord had to give the rest of us a hurricane for you to have a good day.”
Lily looked dubiously outside to where the trees’ tossing had picked up. “This is a hurricane?”
“This will be one a bit later on.” Gaby shrugged. “This is what the weatherman tells us, so it must be true. And I have a great deal to do, as you may have guessed, so it is good luck, in a way, that you can do more for yourself today.” She gestured to Lily’s chair, and Lily moved to it and sat down. Gaby slid the table in toward her.
Lily had just begun to eat when the thought occurred to her: “But where’s Alan?”
Gaby was reaching over Lily’s bed, flipping the sheet and blanket back. “Alan has gone to the house he’s building, to see what can be done to protect it.” Vigorously she smoothed the bottom sheet out. She looked over at Lily for a moment, watched her lift a spoonful of the oatmeal to her mouth and tilt her head slightly back to begin the process of swallowing. Gaby’s lips tightened, and she turned and finished making the bed, her strong arms pulling everything smooth. She plumped the pillows and set them in place.
“Now,” she said. “I’ll be back in a bit. I’m going to take some coffee to Linnett.”
“Linnett is here?” Lily stopped, her spoon halfway to her mouth. Everything was topsy-turvy.
“Yes. She spent the night last night.”
“Was this on account of the hurricane too?” Lily asked.
“No, no, no. She simply had too much to drink.” Gaby smiled grimly, remembering. Then she frowned. “Well, perhaps it was actually a little on account of the hurricane, because the rain was so heavy then that we didn’t wish to drive her home through it. Anyway. She spent the night here, in Thomas and Etienne’s room.” She watched Lily take another slow spoonful. “I’ll be right back,” she said.
Lily could hear her in the kitchen, though she worked more quietly than Noreen. She strained her throat to close, then sipped gratefully at the coffee, which went down so much more smoothly. She stopped to rest. The pine branches on the tree outside bowed slowly, ceremoniously, and then slowly lifted.
Lily cried out faintly at their beauty, and closed her eyes momentarily in prayer, in her own slow sweep of gratitude for her cleared sense of her body, of herself. Help me, God. Help me make use of your gift to me today, she prayed.
And suddenly she understood what she had to do, what she felt now she’d been struggling not to understand for days, what she’d known was waiting for her, but doubted she’d have the strength to accomplish. How could she have doubted? How could she not have guessed she would be given the means, the power, when she most needed it? Her heart welled in sorrowful gratitude. When she opened her eyes, tears stood in them, and Gaby was in front of her.
She was frowning. “Lily, I am afraid I shall have to ask you to, really, to hurry a bit. I’m going to take you to Noreen’s for the day—you’ll be safest there—and I need to get over to help Alan. So you see, I am waiting for you.”
Lily didn’t have to think, the words were there. “Surely you don’t need to wait. Why can’t Linnett take me? You can see perfectly well I don’t need much help today.”
The idea startled Gaby, Lily could see this, but now the younger woman began to think it through. Lily took another mouthful of the cereal and lifted her chin so Gaby could see her slow effort, would take it into account—how long she would be if she had to wait for Lily to finish.
“Do you really think you could get to her car by yourself?” Gaby asked after a moment.
Lily swallowed once, then again. Dramatically she lifted her hand to her throat for a moment. Then she said, “Look at what I’ve already accomplished. A person who dresses herself. Who puts on her own lipstick. What is there that I can’t do?” she asked. “Except eat quickly, apparently. But everything else is possible with the Lord.”
Gaby sat down on the foot of Lily’s bed and stared out the window, weighing the idea.
“I feel very bad keeping you from Alan,” Lily said.
“It isn’t your fault, Lily.”
Lily took another spoonful, again exaggerating her own slowness. When she’d swallowed, she said, “You could draw Linnett a map.”
“I will ask her,” Gaby said, rising abruptly.
She came back beaming and brusque. “She said she will. I told her you’d be a little while, but that is fine with her. She’ll shower and the like. And I have a few things I’m doing—I’ve started to draw a tub of water, in case the electricity goes off and the pump won’t work. And I want to pack some lunch for Alan, and then I’ll be going.”
“I’m glad, dear,” Lily said.
Gaby paused. “You are sure you can manage.”
“If you’d like, I’ll get up and do the cha-cha-cha for you.”
Gaby smiled, and then looked around the room. “Are there things you’d like with you at Noreen’s for the day?”
“I think not. Watching the hurricane will surely be amusement enough for the likes of me.”
“Well, then.” Gaby stepped forward and quickly bent to kiss Lily’s cheek. “I’ll see you this evening.”
“Yes,” Lily said. “Be careful.”
As she made her way through several more spoonfuls of oatmeal, she could hear Gaby going in and out, the bang of the screen door three or four times. And then her car started. Lily could see it moving across the yard and disappearing into the driveway under the bending, swaying branches.
After a while she realized that she was hearing the water singing in the pipes behind her bathroom wall: Linnett, showering. She waited until it stopped, and then about five minutes more, and then she pushed her table away, got up, and—as she felt it—floated smoothly out of her room and down the hall to her grandsons’ room. She knocked.
“Just a sec,” Linnett’s voice called back.
And in a minute or so the door opened. Linnett stood with her crutches tucked under her arms, her hair hanging in long damp ringlets, her blouse dotted with water, her face clean-scrubbed. She looked older and tired without the makeup. “Lily!” she said.
“No canes, even,” Lily said, raising her empty hands.
“Are you ready to go now? I’ll be a few more minutes.” She waved her hand vaguely behind her, back into the room.
“No, no. That’s the point. That was Noreen on the phone.”
“Oh! I didn’t hear it.”
“Well, maybe because you were in the shower. Anyway, she’s coming for me.”
“But Gaby wanted me to take you.”
“Well, it turns out Noreen has to go out and get some things, candles and batteries and the like,” said Lily, thinking quickly. “And she said she’d just as soon swing by at the end of all that, since she’s not sure how long it will take, you know, they may be out of them at various stores and she may have to drive around a bit . . . ” A part of Lily was admiring her own improvisational skills. “So she’ll just get me whenever. And in all honesty, though I didn’t want to say so to Gaby since she was in such a hurry to get going”—she made her voice sound slightly irritated—“I think I could make use of the able-bodied Noreen. No insult intended, of course.”
Linnett was frowning. “Maybe I should just call Noreen back and confirm all this.”
“I told you, dear, she was going out,” Lily said impatiently. “And I should think you’d be grateful. You probably have things you should get too. And you should hurry home and draw some water.”
“Water?”
“Yes. If the electricity goes, you’ll have no pump, and you’ll need water to flush and wash up with. That kind of thing.”
“Ah,” Linnett said. She still looked dubious.
Either it would work or it wouldn’t, Lily thought. She turned. “I’ve got to get back to my oatmeal,” she said. “I need to try to finish up by the time Noreen gets here.”
She was aware of Linnett’s watching her as she made her way back down the hallway. After she’d sat down again, she was even more intensely aware of listening for Linnett, for her noises in the house and what they might indicate, but the wind had picked up now and was audible as a steady low sound through which Lily could hear nothing else. She was startled then, when Linnett appeared in her doorway. She’d put on makeup, and—Lily’s heart leaped!—she had her backpack on.
“I’m off, Lily,” she said. “Off to fight the storm at my house.”
“Well, good,” Lily said. “And if we all survive, I shall see you tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” Linnett said. “Actually, I was thinking I might just stay home and start writing. Unless you need me, of course. I mean, I don’t really have any more questions for you.”
“Oh no,” Lily said. “I’ll have no need. And I’m glad you feel ready to move ahead. That’s very good, very nice.” She paused, and then smiled slyly. “You imagine you have plumbed all my mysteries then.”
“I’d never claim that,” Linnett said. “Never.” She was grinning back. “But I do think I’m in good enough shape for an article for The New Yorker anyhow.”
“Well, good. Good for you.”
“You sure you don’t want me to stay until Noreen gets here?”
“My dear, the truth is, I’d relish the time alone. I literally can’t remember when I was last alone, you’ve all been such conscientious baby-sitters. So run along.”
“Hump along, anyway.”
“I’d never say it.”
“See you soon, Lily.”
“Yes,” Lily said. She listened carefully again as Linnett left. But she could hear nothing, and couldn’t tell whether she was truly alone until she saw Linnett in the yard tilted into the wind on her crutches, making her way laboriously to her car. She was aware of her heart, suddenly, pounding heavily in slow excitement.
It took Lily another half an hour to finish the oatmeal, and in that time the wind’s clamor picked up and the telephone rang twice. Noreen, she thought, and hoped it wouldn’t occur to the girl to get in her car and come see why Lily hadn’t been delivered to her.
A few branches lay in the yard now, Lily noted as she stood up, and the trees’ bending was more extreme, more violent. Surely they would all break, forced this far? There was rain blowing now too, spattering the windows. The noise of the storm agitated her curiously, she noticed she was a little breathless. But as she lifted the bed jacket from its hook in her closet, she had the comforting sense of another self, a consoling self accompanying her, and she spoke out loud, as though to a frightened child. “It’s perfectly all right now. It will be fine.”
With a sharp scissors Gaby had loaned her for her desk work, with sure fingers at her command—at the wind’s command, they were as steady as you could wish—she slit open the worn silk lining of the bed jacket (the slice of the blade through the ancient cloth as easy as the sigh of the wind) and spilled the bright-colored capsules onto the bed. Children’s colors. Mexican jumping beans, Lily murmured, remembering the children’s fascination with those mysterious, bright-colored things and their ceaseless dance. Her eyes unexpectedly filled with tears, and she spoke to herself reassuringly again.
She had far too many. In her wish to be thorough, to avoid the bad luck of being pumped alive again, she had seen several different doctors for prescriptions. She knew she risked being ill if she took too many, but she wanted a few more than the book recommended anyway, just to be safe. Carefully she counted what she thought was the correct dose into a pile, then fetched her water glass from the bathroom and scooped them into that. The rest she threw away.
While the wind shuddered against the house, she floated on its force into the kitchen. She found a knife to cut the capsules, heavier and sharper than any she’d used in her life. She barely needed to grip it to push it through the bright little shells. How useful, she thought, to have such a knife! And her own hands, how useful they were today too! She made herself admire their sure grip on the tiny, pretty pill-cups of powder, the way they turned each one so neatly out, pouring its contents into her glass.
When she’d emptied them all, she went in search of vodka to the cupboard where Gaby kept liqueurs. Yes, clear and cold-looking. And then to the freezer for some ice cream. It had been there awhile—it glittered with crystals when Lily opened it. But she dug down below the twinkling surface and scooped out enough to fill a small bowl with the stuff.
Her problem, she knew, would be eating fast enough to get all the pills down before she passed out. She had thought it all through, that she’d let the ice cream get good and soupy before she started, that she’d wait to drink the vodka until the very end.
She set everything down on her bedside table and went into the bathroom, whispering encouragement to herself. Carefully she repinned her hair, and put on lipstick. She sat on the toilet, then, and waited to move her bowels. She had read of the loosening of the sphincter at the moment of death, and wished, if she could, to avoid that indignity.
When she was through, she came out and arranged her pillows. She shut the door to her room; she came back to the bed and opened the edge Gaby had smoothed down. She sat down and slowly lifted her legs up and stretched them out. “There you go,” she murmured. She pulled the covers neatly across her midriff. Then she reached for the ice cream and stirred it until she could no longer see the granules of the drug. She began to eat.
Of course, Lily had planned too what she would think of during these moments. She had assumed that she wouldn’t have arrived at this point unless there were losses, sorrows, that brought her here, but she had been determined not to dwell on those—they were inevitable, after all—and to remember instead all the places she’d loved being in. And this is where she traveled now, as she drank the ice cream spoonful by spoonful (in spite of its odd, bitter taste, it went down more easily than she could have hoped) and then sipped slowly at the full glass of vodka.
She remembered sitting in the tent formed by the skirt of her mother’s dressing table while Violet got ready to go out. A wonderful fleshy light came through the sheer pink fabric of the table, making Lily’s hiding place seem like the inside of a shell. And the dizzying floral smell of Violet’s perfume! Or perhaps it was her powder. Everything, at any rate, that was safe and encircling and female.
And then the nearly empty bedroom in the parsonage in Belvaine—they had so little furniture then. The astonishment of physical love in the long afternoons they stole together that first summer of their marriage. The girl who did the laundry couldn’t be persuaded to use less than far too much bleach, and the trousseau sheets, dampened with their sweat, transferred that odor to Lily and Paul. Later in the day Lily would often catch a whiff of herself smelling bleachy and innocent, a well-scrubbed woman, and she’d blush in the midst of whatever else she was doing.
The nave at Blackstone Church, soaring and dark. The creak of the wooden pews, the little four-holed trays for the tiny communion glasses—the children loved to poke their fingers through them—the deep red-velvet cushions, worn to white on the welting and around the buttons. The woolly, wet smells in winter of people’s coats and scarves and gloves, the welcome chill of the dark, damp space in summer.
Lily’s eyes were closed now, and she’d stopped reaching for the vodka. The storm around her raged fully. Her room had darkened, and the windows were smeared with a paste of seawater and rain and the leaves the storm had stripped from the trees and chewed alive. As she slipped deeper into her drugged slumber, her will was affected too, her grip on her visions loosened. Her father was there, silent and angry at something she’d done. She couldn’t get him to speak to her, he kept his face averted.
And then she was a bride, young and also old somehow, faltering on her canes as she made her way down the long dark aisle at Blackstone. The faces, black and white, were turned to her in judgment, in dislike. She whimpered. Someone was waiting for her—the bridegroom—at the end of the rows of pews, but she couldn’t see who it was, every step forward drew her somehow farther back, she was losing control of her limbs.
Perhaps it was the noise of the branch falling thunderously on the front stairs, splintering them, that called her back. Perhaps not. But suddenly she resisted the pull of her own ending. There were things she had left undone, and her mind struggled now to make sense of them. It was Paul, calling her, telling her that she’d left one of the children—the boy she thought—left him alone in his room somewhere. She stirred, her hands fluttered on the coverlet. She struggled back up to near consciousness.
And then the center of the storm passed over her, and there was a great, hollow stillness. Lily had recovered just enough of herself to know what this was: the eye.
The I, she thought. Lily.
And was amused at this joke. Her joke. God’s joke. A nearly invisible smile twitched on her face.
Though after a few minutes the storm moved on, for her, miraculously, usefully, the world stayed as still as it had been in that moment, as still and deep as a lost meadow. She heard a voice she took to be her mother’s calling “Lily? Lily?” And she rose from the sunstruck field she sat in. “Coming,” she thought she said. “Coming.”
But she didn’t.
As she’d pulled out onto the main road from Alan’s driveway, Linnett watched a car with a boat on a trailer behind it pass, going in the other direction, away from the sea, the boat swaying wildly, ominously, in the wind. Already limbs were strewn here and there on the road, and Linnett’s own car moved sideways frequently with the slam of the storm. She was hung over, she was frightened, and she decided not to stop anywhere for batteries or bottled water. Several other cars driving inland passed her as she drove along, one other of them also pulling a rocking boat. Of course, she thought, you’d want to get them out of the water.
