Kingfisher(7)
Then she saw the tiny woman with her head in one of the refrigerators, rummaging through the shelves. She straightened abruptly and turned, her arms full of eggs, two kinds of cheese, mustard, pickle relish. She smiled at Carrie. Her hair was a mass of white curls, her face pale and seamed like a piece of old diner crockery, the only color in it her periwinkle eyes. The corner of the egg box slid. Salad dressings and sauces, Carrie guessed, and went to help her.
“Thanks, Hon.”
“Do you want me to make them?”
“No. I want you to start on the crab bisque. But take the note up first.”
She was, everyone swore, Hal and Tye’s mother. Carrie didn’t believe it. Nobody could be that old and move the way Ella did, everywhere at once, it seemed, even during the most chaotic of All-You-Can-Eat Nites. And she was elfin; how could she have come out with those tall, big-boned sons, themselves at least half the age of the inn? Whoever and however old she was, she knew everything about everything, though she could be half a heaping tablespoon short of explaining, even, for instance, the why of the note Carrie picked up off the countertop to take upstairs.
She went the quickest way, through the back door of the kitchen, down a battered wooden walkway to the only staircase, of the four built to give guests access from every floor to the grounds, that didn’t threaten to pitch her back down through a rotting tread. Lilith Fisher lived in one of the turret suites that once overlooked the lovely gardens and the yachts at the docks. Now it overlooked a weedy lawn and a couple of fishing boats. She was said to be writing a book about the history, the celebrities, the gossip surrounding the inn during its glory. Carrie had never seen her actually working at the big desk cluttered with books, papers, and old photos in the turret. Hal, it seemed to her, was the one doing the writing: every morning a note, elegantly hand-penned in real ink on heavy, deckle-edged paper tucked into a matching envelope with his wife’s name on it, asking her to join him that evening for dinner.
Lilith opened the door when Carrie knocked, then flowed away, scarf ends, sleeves, trouser hems fluttering as she said into her cell phone, “No. No! Really? He really did that?” She reached the far wall and flowed back, seeing Carrie this time, tossing her a preoccupied smile. “I can’t believe it. After all you did to protect him.”
Like Hal, Lilith was long-boned, tall, still willowy despite her ivory-white hair. She wore it coiled on top of her head, an untidy cinnamon bun held in place by a couple of colored pencils. Her eyes, behind half-moon glasses, were big, sunken, luminous, the creamy green the sea sometimes turned during a nasty storm.
Carrie held out the note. Lilith took it on an ebb turn and surged again. “No. Yes. I will.” Carrie backed a step toward the door; Lilith whirled abruptly, midroom, swirled back to her. “Of course, Heloise. The mourning doves. They can watch for him from my turret.”
She dropped the phone in a pocket and finally stood still. “Thank you, Carrie.” She opened the envelope; her eyes flicked over the note, then at Carrie again, some memory surfacing in them as frigid as an iceberg in a northern sea. “Please tell Ella that I will take my dinner alone tonight.”
And that was that for the lovely, old-fashioned note.
“Okay,” Carrie said, confused as always, wanting to ask why? What did he? Couldn’t they at least talk about it over dinner even though that might mean a few broken plates? Lilith’s eyes flashed at her again, this time without the chill, reading her expression, Carrie guessed, or maybe, in some nebulous way, her thoughts.
Lilith pushed her glasses up toward the cinnamon bun, worked a pencil back into place. She turned, gazed down at the bay through the turret’s curved windows, where Hal and his brother Tye, tiny figures in a small, rocking boat, sank lines into the shipping channel to see what they could lure up from the deep.
“We have no more plates to throw,” Carrie heard her murmur. “We broke them all long ago.”
“What?” Carrie’s voice came out in a whisper.
Lilith dropped her glasses back down onto her nose and peered more closely at the boat. “Ask Ella to send Hal’s jeans up with my dinner. I’ll mend that back pocket. How’s your father this morning?”
Carrie, staring incredulously at the tiny nail-paring-sized blur that was Hal’s jeans, answered absently, “He was lying on his back in a broken rowboat talking to a crow about fearsome porpentines.”
“Really? He said porpentines?”
“He did. Dead sober.”
“And the pickup? Did you get the brakes fixed?”
Carrie nodded, sighing. “I had to use some of my creel money, though.”
A smile flickered through Lilith’s delicately lined face. “Works for me,” she said. “The less you squirrel away in that old creel, the longer you’ll stay with us.”
But I need to leave, Carrie cried silently, her whole body tense with desperation, and Lilith nodded.
“I know.”
Carrie went back down an inner stairway that took her through the great dining room behind the reception hall. It was an empty, silent, beautiful place in which the backwash of the past, layers of memory, had accumulated. Huge windows overlooked the water, each framed with stained-glass panels depicting wild waves, cormorants and albatrosses, the frolicking whales and mermaids of the deep. The old glass was bubbled and wavery; passing boats and birds grew distorted in it. Sometimes, Carrie glimpsed odd things in the shipping channel through those windows: small ships with rounded hulls and too many sails, or leaner vessels with ribbed sails raked at an angle that might have crossed over from exotic seas where fish flew and whales had horns like unicorns just to visit Chimera Bay. The round mahogany and rosewood tables still filled the room, circled by their chairs. Waiting, maybe, for the doors to open at last, the guests in their glittering evening clothes to enter and feast. But the silver sconces and candelabra had grown black with age; the fireplace, its mantel carved from a single slab of myrtle wood, had been cold for decades.