Duma Key(74)

I thought, You could do some real damage with a thing like that. Then I thought: My father was a skin diver.

I pushed it out of my mind and called what used to be home.

ix

"Hi, Pam, it's me again."

"I don't want to talk to you any more, Edgar. We finished what we have to say."

"Not quite. But this will be short. I have an old lady to look after. She's sleeping now, but I don't like to leave her long."

Pam, curious in spite of herself: "What old lady?"

"Her name's Elizabeth Eastlake. She's in her mid-eighties, and she's got a good start on Alzheimer's. Her principal caregiver is taking care of an electrical problem with someone's sauna, and I'm helping out."

"Did you want a gold star to paste on the Helping Others page of your workbook?"

"No, I called to convince you I'm not crazy." I had brought in my drawing. Now I crooked the handset between my shoulder and my ear so I could pick it up.

"Why do you care?"

"Because you're convinced that all this started with Ilse, and it didn't."

"My God, you're unbelievable! If she called from Santa Fe and said she'd broken a shoelace, you'd fly out there to take her a new one!"

"I also don't like you thinking that I'm down here going insane when I'm not. So... are you listening?"

Only silence from the other end, but silence was good enough. She was listening.

"You're ten or maybe fifteen minutes out of the shower. I think that because your hair is down on the back of your housecoat. I guess you still don't like the hairdryer."

"How- "

"I don't know how. You were sitting in a rocking chair when I called. You must have gotten it since the divorce. Reading a book and eating a cookie. A Grandma's oatmeal cookie. The sun's out now, and it's coming in the window. You have a new television, the kind with a flat screen." I paused. "And a cat. You got a cat. It's sleeping under the TV."

Dead silence from her end. On my end the wind blew and the rain slapped the windows. I was about to ask her if she was there when she spoke again, in a dull voice that didn't sound like Pam at all. I had thought she was done hurting my heart, but I was wrong. "Stop spying on me. If you ever loved me stop spying on me."

"Then stop blaming me," I said in a hoarse, not-quite-breaking voice. Suddenly I remembered Ilse getting ready to go back to Brown, Ilse standing in the strong tropical sun outside the Delta terminal, looking up at me and saying, You deserve to get better. Sometimes I wonder if you really believe that. "What's happened to me isn't my fault. The accident wasn't my fault and neither is this. I didn't ask for it."

She screamed, " Do you think I did? "

I closed my eyes, begging something, anything, to keep me from giving back anger for anger. "No, of course not."

"Then leave me out of it! Stop calling me! Stop SCARING me!"

She hung up. I stood holding the phone to my ear. There was silence, then a loud click. It was followed by that distinctive Duma Key warbling hum. Today it sounded rather subaqueous. Maybe because of the rain. I hung the phone up and stood looking at the suit of armor. "I think that went very well, Sir Lancelot," I said.

No reply, which was exactly what I deserved.

x

I crossed the plant-lined main hall to the doorway of the China Parlor, looked in at Elizabeth, and saw she was sleeping in the same head-cocked position. Her snores, which had earlier struck me as pathetic in their naked antiquity, were now actually comforting; otherwise, it would have been too easy to imagine her sitting there dead with her neck broken. I wondered if I should wake her, and decided to let her sleep. Then I glanced right, toward the wide main staircase, and thought of her saying Oh, you'll find it on the second floor landing.

Find what?

Probably it had been just another bit of gibberish, but I had nothing better to do, so I walked down the hall that would have been a dogtrot in a humbler house the rain tapping the glass ceiling and then climbed the wide staircase. I stopped five risers from the top, staring, then slowly climbed the rest of the way. There was something, after all: an enormous black-and-white photograph in a frame of narrow banded gold. I asked Wireman later how a black-and-white from the nineteen-twenties could have been blown up to such a size it had to have been at least five feet tall by four wide with so little blurring. He said it had probably been taken with a Hasselblad, the finest non-digital camera ever made.

There were eight people in the photograph, standing on white sand with the Gulf of Mexico in the background. The man was tall and handsome and appeared to be in his mid-forties. He was wearing a black bathing singlet that consisted of a strap-style shirt and trunks that looked like the close-fitting underwear basketball players wear nowadays. Ranged on either side of him stood five girls, the oldest a ripe teenager, the youngest identical towheads that made me think of the Bobbsey Twins from my earliest adventures in reading. The twins were wearing identical bathing dresses with frilled skirts, and holding hands. In their free hands they clasped dangly-legged, apron-wearing Raggedy Ann dolls that made me think of Reba... and the dark yarn hair above the vacantly smiling faces of the twins' dolls was surely RED. In the crook of one arm, the man John Eastlake, I had no doubt held girl number six, the toddler who would eventually become the snoring crone below me. Behind the white folks stood a young black woman of perhaps twenty-two, with her hair tied in a kerchief. She was holding a picnic basket, and judging from the way the not-inconsiderable muscles in her arms were bunched, it was heavy. Three bangled silver bracelets clung to one forearm.