Chapter Six #3
She eased her foot back onto the accelerator, flicked the signal on, and turned toward the beach.
The narrow, one-lane road wound snakelike through the towering trees.
Though it was afternoon, you wouldn’t have known it.
The tree limbs were heavy with rain; their drooping branches darkened the road.
Here and there, small turnouts, overgrown with weeds, made space for parking when another car was coming from the opposite direction.
At last, they came to the driveway. A pair of dogwood trees stood guard on either side of the needle-strewn lane. Any gravel that had once been dumped here had long ago burrowed into the dirt.
Ruby turned down the driveway. The knee-high grass that grew in a wild strip down the center of the road thumped and scraped the undercarriage.
At the end of the tree-lined road, Ruby hit the brakes.
And stared through the rain-beaded windshield at her childhood.
The farmhouse was layered in thick white clapboards with red trim around the casement windows.
One side jutted out like an old woman’s bad hip—that was the addition her grandparents had built for their grandchildren.
A porch wrapped around three sides of the house.
It sat in the midst of a pie-shaped clearing that jutted toward the sea.
In this, the middle of June, the lawn was lush and lime green; in the dog days of summer, Ruby knew it would grow tall and take on the rich hue of burnished gold. Madrona trees marked the perimeter.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, soaking it all in.
A white picket fence created a nicely squared yard around the farmhouse. Inside it, the garden was in full, riotous bloom.
Obviously Caroline had paid a gardener to keep the place up. It looked as if the Bridge family had been gone a season instead of more than a decade.
With a tired sigh, Ruby got out of the car.
The tide made a low, snoring sound. Birds chattered overhead, surprised and dismayed by their unexpected guests. But no city sounds lived this far north, no horns or squealing tires or jets flying overhead.
There was now, as there had always been, a quiet otherworldliness to Summer Island, and as much as she hated to admit it, Ruby felt the island’s familiar welcome.
Time here was measured in eons, not lifetimes.
In how long it took the sea to smooth the rough edges off a bit of broken glass, in how long it took the tide to shape and reshape the shoreline.
She went around to the back of the van and pulled out the wheelchair, then wheeled it around to the passenger side and helped Nora into the seat.
Taking hold of the rubber-coated grips, she cautiously pushed her mother down the path. At the gate, Ruby stopped and walked ahead, unlatching it. The metal piece clanked, the gate swung creakily open.
When Ruby turned back around, she noticed how pale her mother was. Nora touched the fence’s sagging slat. A heart-shaped patch of paint fell away at the contact, lay in the grass like a bit of confetti.
Nora looked up, her eyes shiny and moist. “Remember the summer you and Caro painted every slat a different color? You guys looked like a pair of rainbow Popsicles when you were finished.”
“I don’t remember that,” Ruby said, but for a split second, when she looked down, her tennis shoes were Keds, speckled with a dozen different colors of paint.
It pissed her off, how easy it was to remember things in this place, to feel them.
Nothing seemed to have changed here except Ruby, and the new Ruby sure as hell didn’t belong in this fairy-tale house.
She walked back up the slope and took her place behind the wheelchair. She cautiously moved down the rutted path, guiding the chair in front of her. They had just reached the edge of the porch when her mother suddenly spoke.
“Let me sit here for a minute, will you? Go on in.” Nora fished the key out of her pocket and handed it to Ruby. “You can come back and tell me how it looks.”
“You’d rather sit in the rain than go into the house?”
“That pretty much sums up my feelings right now.”
Ruby stepped around her and walked onto the porch. The wide-planked floor wobbled beneath her feet like piano keys, releasing a melody of creaks and groans.
At the front door, she slipped the key into the lock.
Click.
“Wait!” her mother cried out.
Ruby turned. Nora was smiling, but it was grim, that smile. More like gritted teeth.
“I . . . think we should go in together.”
“Jesus, let’s not make an opera out of it. We’re going into an old house. That’s all.” Ruby shoved the door open, caught a fleeting glimpse of shadows stacked on top of each other, then she went back for Nora.
She maneuvered the wheelchair up onto the porch, bumped it over the wooden threshold, and wheeled her mother inside.
The furniture huddled ghostlike in the middle of the room, draped in old sheets. Ruby could remember spreading those sheets every autumn, snapping them in the air above furniture. It had been a family ritual, closing up this house for winter.
The house may not have been lived in in a while, but it had been well cared for. There couldn’t have been more than a few weeks’ worth of dust on those white sheets.
“Caroline has taken good care of the place . . . I’m surprised she left everything exactly as it was.” There was a note of wonder in Nora’s voice, and maybe a touch of regret. As if, like Ruby, she’d hoped that Caroline had painted over the past.
“You know Caro,” Ruby said, “she likes to keep everything pretty on the surface.”
“That’s not fair. Caro—”
Ruby spun around. “Tell me you aren’t going to explain my sister to me.”
Nora’s mouth snapped shut. Then she sneezed. And again. Her eyes were watering as she said, “I’m allergic to dust. I know there’s not much, but I’m really sensitive. You’ll need to dust right away.”
Ruby looked at her. “Your leg’s broken; not your hand.”
“I can’t handle it. Allergies.”
It was the best reason for not cleaning Ruby had ever heard. “Fine. I’ll dust.”
“And vacuum—remember, there’s dust in the carpets.”
“Oh, really? That comes as a complete surprise to me.”
Nora had the grace to blush. “I’m sorry. I forgot for a minute that you’re not . . . never mind.”
Ruby gazed down at her. “I’m not a kid anymore, and dusting was one of the many things Caroline and I had to learn to do after you left us.” She saw the pain move into Nora’s green eyes; it made her look old suddenly, and fragile.
That word again. It was not something Ruby particularly wanted to see. She grabbed the wheelchair and pushed her mother into the center of the room, where the ancient Oriental carpet sucked up the metallic thump of the chair’s wheels and plunged them into silence again.
“I guess I’ll have to sleep in your old room. There’s no way we can get me upstairs.”
Ruby dutifully wheeled Nora into the downstairs bedroom, where two twin beds lay beneath a layer of sheeting. Between them was a gingham-curtained window. A painted wooden toy box held most of Ruby’s childhood.
The wallpaper was still the pale pink cabbage roses that she and Caroline had picked out when they were children.
Ruby refused to feel anything. She yanked the sheets away. A fine layer of dust billowed into the air. She heard her mother coughing behind her, so Ruby leaned forward and wrenched the window open, letting in the sound of the waves slapping on the shore.
“I think I’ll lie down for a minute,” Nora said when the dust had settled. “I’m still fighting a headache.”
Ruby nodded. “Can you get out of the chair by yourself?”
“I guess I’d better learn.”
“I guess so.” Ruby turned for the door.
She was almost free when her mother’s voice hooked her back again. “Thanks. I really appreciate this.”
Ruby knew she should say something nice, but she couldn’t think of anything. She was too damned tired, and the memories in this room were like gnats, buzzing around her head. She nodded and kept walking, slamming the door shut behind her.