Part 13 (1/2)

Before I got to the locker room I heard her say, ”Sandbags?” in a worried voice. I was in the shower with the water roaring down on me before I allowed myself laughter.

In the car on our way over to the island, I told Lewis about my encounter with Bunny.

”She's even more awful than I thought she was,” I said. ”She actually implied that Camilla schemes and manipulates all the time, to get what she wants. I think Camilla took her ball in kindergarten, or something. Anyway, she's never forgotten it.”

”She wouldn't,” Lewis grinned. ”Camilla is everything Bunny isn't, and won't ever be. By the way, did you know her name was Bernice, not Bunny? At any rate, she's had a thing about Camilla ever since Charlie met her. Thinks Camilla stole him from her. I've never heard her say anything, but some of the nurses have, and it gets around. n.o.body pays any attention to her.”

”I hope it never gets back to Camilla.”

”Why? She'd laugh her a.s.s off. You know nothing much ever bothers Cam. Who's the friend she's taking to the mountains?”

”I don't know, but he's packing a gun.”

He winced. ”So would I, if Bunny was my friend. What kind of supplies do you think they're taking?”

”Oh, you know. Bottled water. Toilet paper. Dress s.h.i.+elds.”

”Bad girl,” he said, grinning.

The sky was lowering when we reached the beach house, although the air was soft and there was a hint of some flowery fragrance in the air. Whether it was blooming on the island or borne in from far away on the tide, I could not tell. Except for Camilla's old gray Mercedes, ours was the only car in the sandy parking s.p.a.ce. There was an aluminum ramp now, up to the house, beside the steps. We had had it installed for Boy and Girl, who could no longer manage the stairs, and for Gladys.

”I use it sometimes, too,” Camilla said ruefully. ”The four of us old crocks crawling up it must be something to see.”

We had all laughed. Camilla might be badly stooped now, but she was so ethereally lovely in her sixties that the word ”crock” could not possibly apply. I was sure that she knew that.

We got out of the Range Rover and unloaded the back. Tonight was to be the feast of all our feasts. We had brought sherried she-crab bisque from Linda Cousins's kitchen, and both duck and quail, courtesy of Robert. I had bought some silken, hideously expensive truffled pate from O'Hara & Flynn. Henry and Fairlie were bringing rare-as-black-pearls white asparagus, which we would have with a caviar mayonnaise. Lila had stuffed an imperial crown pork roast and Simms was bringing champagne of a vintage that the rest of us would have had to mortgage our homes for. Camilla was making the dessert. She would not tell us what it was to be. Even though we had hauled food up these stairs hundreds of times, it was hard not to be excited about tonight's dinner. Everything about the day and the night had the breath-held air of antic.i.p.ation about it.

The turn of a century, the turn of a millennium...portent was everywhere. All of a sudden, midway up the stairs, I s.h.i.+vered, as if a goose had walked over my grave. I stopped and looked back at Lewis.

”What?” he said.

”This millennium thing feels like some kind of juggernaut bearing down on us,” I said. ”I don't want to live in a new millennium. I haven't used up the old one yet.”

”Go on up before I drop this, my little Luddite,” Lewis said. ”When we're ninety the Post and Courier will hail us as the only generation to see the year and the century and the millennium turn. We'll be interviewed incessantly.”

”You wish.”

From the outset, the night was Camilla's. She met us at the door virtually s.h.i.+mmering with excitement, thrumming with a kind of palpable radiance. I had seen her happy before, and laughing, and exhilarated, but I had never seen her like this. You could almost see the dancing particles of light around her, feel her exuberance. We both smiled, and then laughed. It was impossible not to.

”You look like somebody plugged you in,” Lewis said, kissing her on the cheek. ”Share with the cla.s.s.”

”Oh, I don't know,” she said, hugging us both hard. ”All of a sudden I just thought how many years we've all been together here, and how I've loved it, and how I've loved you both, and everybody, and how glad I am that it's never changed.”

An answering wave of love for her and us and the house and the island swept over me, and I hugged her back, and spun her around. I was shorter by five inches, but she was as light as a bird's wing, as a winged seedling borne down on the wind from a chestnut tree.

”Me, too,” I said, tears p.r.i.c.kling behind my eyelids. ”I can't even imagine what all those years would have been like without you...without us. We're like family. No, better than family, because we chose each other.”

”You know what Robert Frost said about family and home,” Camilla smiled. ”He said, 'It's where, when you go there, they have to take you in.' We've taken each other in through everything.”

”Till death do us part,” Lewis grinned, teasing her for her crazy delight.

”Till then,” she said, her eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g, and I knew that she was serious. Somehow, the thought made me uneasy.

We had agreed for this one night to dress formally, over the groans from Lewis and Henry, and I went up to our bedroom and hung our evening clothes in the musty, mothy closet. Does anything else smell like a beach house closet? Out the window I could see scudding cloud shadows on the beach and water, and see the spartina bending down under the rising little wind. Little gusts of sand peppered the windowpane. Suddenly I was wild to be out on the beach to taste the wind, to let the blown sand sting and scour my face.

”Anybody want to go for a walk?” I said.

”Absolutely not,” Camilla said. ”I've worked all afternoon on my hair.”

”Me, either,” Lewis said. ”I'd join you in a nap, though. If we hurried up and slept fast, we could get in a couple of good hours.”

Even though he'd largely pa.s.sed on his regular practice to young Philip Ware, he sometimes went in when a real surgical emergency presented itself, and one had last night. He'd been in the operating room at Queens until three. Most doctors I knew were chronically sleep deprived, and grabbed naps when and wherever they could.

”Go on and take one,” I said. ”I won't be long. I just want to take the last beach walk of the century. I'll be back way before dark.”

”Take the dogs, will you?” Camilla called from the kitchen, where something smelled heavenly.

And so the two grumbling old Boykins and I went out into the stinging wind, and walked down the wooden steps to the beach.

It was colder on the beach than I had expected. The wind was straight out of the east, raw and smelling of dank, salty winter water. I scrunched my neck farther down into the cowl of my hooded sweats.h.i.+rt, and jammed my hands into my pockets. We crossed the corrugated ripples where the tide cut ran when it was full, and went down to the hard-packed sand just above the tidal slick. The tide was going out. Frothy lips of dirty white foam receded toward the water. Here and there a broken sh.e.l.l or a rubbery, glistening tentacle of seaweed lay half buried. Sometimes in the winter the beach was studded with sea gla.s.s and sh.e.l.ls and wonderful, twisted limbs and logs of driftwood, but today the beach was nearly empty, of both its artifacts and its people.

Boy and Girl sat down on the sand at the same time and gave me reproving looks. They refused to get up when I whistled to them, so reluctantly, I took a last look at the tossing green-gray sea and turned back toward the dunes and the house. Complacently, now that they had achieved their purpose, they gave me doggy grins and waddled ahead of me toward the steps.

I looked up at the house, thinking that it was the last time in this century that I would see it like this, looming like a light s.h.i.+p over the beach and the sea, just at twilight, with the windows glowing. As always, my heart lifted.

My eyes went past the house to the big dune to its left, and my heart gave a great, fishlike leap and then seemed to stop. There, on the dune line, just as I had seen it on the week before Hugo so long ago, was a figure cloaked in gray, looking down on me. I stood still. The dogs whined at me reproachfully.

Then the fading light s.h.i.+fted and the figure became Camilla, in her old gray raincoat, waving to me and calling something.

”Lewis and I are going for more ice,” she shouted through cupped hands. ”Be back in a few minutes.”

I waved back, standing still for a moment while my heart slowed its thundering. Somehow I thought I could not have borne another omen.

By the time they came in with the ice, dark had fallen. I had had a quick shower and was upstairs dressing. I felt, for some reason, as breath-held and tremulous as a young girl before her first prom. It was not, of course, the first time we had all seen each other in evening dress, but it was the first time on this island, in this house. Why that was important, I could not have said, but it was.

”You up there?” Camilla called out from the kitchen below. ”I could use a hand.”

”Yes,” I said. ”I'm coming.”

I went slowly down the old staircase, trailing my fingers on the splintery banister, stepping over the perennially damp spot on the runner underneath the leak we had never had fixed. I took a deep breath, and then came all the way down into the living room.

”Holy s.h.i.+t,” Lewis breathed.

”Anny, you look absolutely glorious,” Camilla said.

I could feel myself, ridiculously, blus.h.i.+ng.

The dress was black and fluid and long, thin-strapped and cut in a deep V in front and back. More of my modest, sun-speckled b.r.e.a.s.t.s showed than in anything else I had ever worn. I had bought it impulsively at Saks several years ago when they had marked almost everything down to nearly affordable, thinking that a plain black evening dress would probably last my lifetime and should come in handy one time or another. But in the intimate light of my own bedroom my b.r.e.a.s.t.s had seemed to protrude like overripe melons from the bodice, and the black silk cupped my ample behind like lascivious hands, and I had never worn it. But tonight it was just us....

In the past two or three years, a thick silver streak had appeared in my hair, running from part to ends as if it had been painted there. I secretly liked it, though I often said I knew that I looked like a skunk, because it was the only distinctive thing about my still-untamable thatch of curls. Tonight I wore a pair of silver earrings I had bought in Arizona, when I'd gone there to work in the remote Four Corners area with Lewis and Henry. The earrings were ornately scrolled and pierced, and hung halfway to my bare shoulders. They and a pair of excruciatingly painful black satin high-heeled sandals that I could not remember why I had bought were the only accessories. I had practically no jewelry, and had never really wanted any.