Duma Key(127)

"Wireman!" I called. He'd gone the length of the dogtrot and was halfway up the staircase. I was limping as fast as I could and he was still pulling away. He waited for me, not very patiently. "Who told him the debris field was there?"

"Eastlake? I assume he stumbled on it while pursuing his diving hobby."

"I don't think so he hadn't been in that bathing suit for a long time. Diving and snorkeling may have been his hobby in the early twenties, but I think that around 1925, eating dinner became his chief diversion. So who told him?"

Annmarie came out of a door near the end of the hall. There was a goofy, unbelieving grin on her face that made her look half her forty years.

"Come on," she said. "This is wonderful."

"Is she- "

"She is," came Elizabeth's cracked but unmistakable voice. "Come in here, Wireman, and let me see your face while I still know it."

ix

I lingered in the hall with Annmarie, not sure what to do, looking at the knickknacks and the big old Frederic Remington at the far end Indians on ponies. Then Wireman called for me. His voice was impatient and rough with tears.

The room was dim. The shades had all been drawn. Air conditioning whispered through a vent somewhere above us. There was a table next to her bed with a lamp on it. The shade was green glass. The bed was the hospital kind, and cranked up so she could almost sit. The lamp put her in a soft spotlight, with her hair loose on the shoulders of a pink dressing gown. Wireman sat beside her, holding her hands. Above her bed was the only painting in the room, a fine print of Edward Hopper's Eleven AM, an archetype of loneliness waiting patiently at the window for some change, any change.

Somewhere a clock was ticking.

She looked at me and smiled. I saw three things in her face. They hit me one after the other like stones, each one heavier than the last. The first was how much weight she'd lost. The second was that she looked horribly tired. The third was that she hadn't long to live.

"Edward," she said.

"No- " I began, but when she raised one hand (the flesh hanging down in a snow-white bag above her elbow), I stilled at once. Because here was a fourth thing to see, and it hit hardest of all -not a stone but a boulder. I was looking at myself. This was what people had seen in the aftermath of my accident, when I was trying to sweep together the poor scattered bits of my memory all that treasure that looked like trash when it was spread out in such ugly, naked fashion. I thought of how I had forgotten my doll's name, and I knew what was coming next.

"I can do this," she said.

"I know you can," I said.

"You brought Wireman back from the hospital," she said.

"Yes."

"I was so afraid they'd keep him. And I would be alone."

I didn't reply to this.

"Are you Edmund?" she asked timidly.

"Miss Eastlake, don't tax yourself," Wireman said gently. "This is-"

"Hush, Wireman," I said. "She can do this."

"You paint," she said.

"Yes."

"Have you painted the ship yet?"

A curious thing happened to my stomach. It didn't sink so much as it seemed to disappear and leave a void between my heart and the rest of my guts. My knees tried to buckle. The steel in my hip went hot. The back of my neck went cold. And warm, prickling fire ran up the arm that wasn't there.

"Yes," I said. "Again and again and again."

"You're Edgar," she said.

"Yes, Elizabeth. I'm Edgar. Good for you, honey."

She smiled. I guessed no one had called her honey in a long time. "My mind is like a tablecloth with a great big hole burned into it." She turned to Wireman. " Muy divertido, s ? "

"You need to rest," he said. "In fact, you need to dormir como un tronco."

She smiled faintly. "Like a log. Yes. And I think when I wake up, I'll still be here. For a little while." She lifted his hands to her face and kissed them. "I love you, Wireman."

"I love you, too, Miss Eastlake," he said. Good for him.

"Edgar?... Is it Edgar?"

"What do you think, Elizabeth?"

"Yes, of course it is. You're to have a show? Is that how we left things before my last..." She drooped her eyelids, as if to mime sleep.

"Yes, at the Scoto Gallery. You really need to rest."

"Is it soon? Your show?"

"In less than a week."

"Your paintings... the ship paintings... are they on the mainland? At the gallery?"

Wireman and I exchanged a look. He shrugged.

"Yes," I said.

"Good." She smiled. "I'll rest, then. Everything else can wait... until after you have your show. Your moment in the sun. Are you selling them? The ship pictures?"

Wireman and I exchanged another look, and the message in his eyes was very clear: Don't upset her.

"They're marked NFS, Elizabeth. That means-"

"I know what it means, Edgar, I didn't fall out of an orange tree yesterday." Inside their deep pockets of wrinkles, caught in a face that was receding toward death, her eyes flashed. "Sell them. However many there are, you must sell them. And however hard it is for you. Break them up, send them to the four winds. Do you understand me?"