Chapter Four #2
Mommy would never walk into my room again?
She wouldn’t ever be here watching over me?
She wouldn’t be kissing me good night and waking me in the morning?
She wouldn’t be here to watch me grow into the woman she had promised I would become, beautiful, healthy, and strong, a woman just like her?
She loved my artwork and had recently begun to take me for walks on the Baxter estate to look at the sea and the scenery, imagining the pictures I would draw and the paintings I would create.
Would that never again happen? Would anything look the same without her?
Dr. Bush guided me backward to rest my head on my pillow. I felt my eyes closing again and tried to keep them open. I won’t be treated like a child, I thought, and then I heard him say, “Don’t fight it, Lisa. Let’s delay all the troubles for a while longer. We want you strong.”
I let my eyes close.
When I opened them, I saw Jamie sitting beside my bed, his arms on it and his head resting against them. I reached out slowly and touched his hair.
“Lisa,” he said through his tears. “My family is devastated. Even my father is crying. The whole village knows, and it’s like the end of the world down there. Many fishermen have docked in a show of sympathy, and even some stores have closed their doors.”
“I still don’t believe it.”
“I know. It was a true sea accident, with the engines dying and the boat and the skipper at the mercy of the roused sea, especially with those wind gusts.”
I started to sit up, and he leaped to help.
“Is my father back?”
“Not yet. Your grandfather is in his office.”
“Well, where’s my father?”
“He was on his way to some second meeting and didn’t hear about it until he got there. He’s coming from there, I think Phippsburg.”
“He probably finished his meeting first,” I said dryly.
Jamie didn’t respond. Then he took my hand and said, “I’m sorry, Lisa.”
My mother’s accident was one thing; my father’s reaction was only going to point up how cold and empty their relationship had become. Had it ever been anything more?
Not too long ago, when my mother and I were sitting near the cliff and looking out at the sea, I simply asked her why she had married Daddy.
I didn’t think she was going to answer, but after a long moment she turned to me and said, “If you don’t have solid home roots, you lose any sense of belonging and just drift.
When I joined the cruise staff, I rarely went home.
My father’s business took us first to Bergen, Norway, but we didn’t settle down there.
His business took us to many other locations, including the Middle East. I never really established long friendships.
By the time I came to Birdlane on a cruise, I was exhausted with loneliness.
“Melville was much younger then, of course, already quite well-to-do as his father’s vice president.
I admired his self-confidence, which has unfortunately metamorphosed into pure arrogance.
He was a handsome man and had a lot more personality, some sense of humor; I’d go so far as to say he was charming.
The first time he saw me with a group from the cruise ship, he was attending to some fisherman’s boat at the dock, and I was just standing there looking out at the sea and admiring the view from the island.
He came over and stood beside me. I didn’t even know he was there for a few moments, and suddenly I heard him say, ‘How can I help you? I really want to.’
“I don’t know if I would go as far as to say it was a flaming romance, but he did have everything I wanted, the stability and, yes, even the power and position. I know it all sounds like an excuse, but that’s how it was.”
“I’d better see to Grandfather,” I said now, starting to get up. “It’s all falling on his shoulders right now.”
Jamie helped me walk down the hallway to Grandfather’s office. We were both surprised to see that Daddy was there. He looked at Grandfather before he rose to greet me with a quick hug.
“We’re just finishing up the arrangements,” he said, as if we were talking about a business meeting.
“Mommy is gone,” I said. I didn’t even see tears in his eyes.
“For now, it’s best to concentrate on what has to be done,” he said. He looked at Grandfather.
“The funeral is in two days. She is with the funeral director in Bar Harbor,” Grandfather said.
“I want to see her.”
“According to what I heard, Dr. Bush thinks it would be wiser for you to gather your strength, Lisa,” Daddy said. “We can only go through this once.”
I shook my head.
“I can take her,” Jamie said.
“You can take her?” Daddy nearly shouted.
“Well…”
“Yes, he can. And he will, in the morning,” I said. “Grandfather?”
“Okay, Jamie. You can use our company boat. For now, though, please rest, Lisa. I’ll have Anna bring your dinner to your room.”
“Jamie will be eating with me,” I said.
“I’ve got to make some calls,” Daddy said angrily. “And, frankly, I’d rather be alone before we get inundated with mourners.”
He walked out of Grandfather’s office.
“He was never good at dealing with sadness and disappointment. Practically shrunk inside himself at his mother’s funeral. Your aunt can meet you at the funeral parlor.”
“I don’t…”
“Let her do something. I still practically pay for her existence. Her nursing salary is inconsistent.”
“Okay, Grandfather.”
He nodded and lowered his head.
Back in my room, I fought to stay awake again. Whatever Dr. Bush had given me lingered. I fell asleep before dinner and then almost right afterward. When I woke again, Jamie was leaning back in the chair, his eyes closed. I woke him and told him to go home.
“Okay. I’ll come get you at eight tomorrow morning if you want.”
“Yes.”
He kissed me and held me for a long moment before he turned and left quickly so I wouldn’t see him cry.
Grandfather was up early but looking years older.
I asked about Daddy. “He went to the company building. Work is his solution to grief. It’s his solution to everything,” he muttered.
“I’ll be going with you,” he said. “It’s too much to lay on that young man, and anyway, I want to go. We can’t just leave her alone.”
I started to cry, finally. Grandfather put his arms around me, but I felt how fragile he was, and most of the day I was looking after him as much as I was mourning Mommy.
I had never really liked Aunt Frances, but her nursing skills were important when it came to Grandfather.
He seemed to grow more fragile every moment at the funeral parlor.
She knew how to keep him steady and occasionally took his pulse, making it look like she was only holding his hand.
While we were there, I barely shed a tear.
I told myself that when I cried, I was admitting that Mommy was gone.
The funeral was different. Even someone made of stone would cry, I thought.
I had been to the Mount Desert Street Cemetery in Bar Harbor a few times when I was younger, but the one time that stood out in my memory was going there to visit Grandmother Harriet’s grave on the tenth anniversary of her death.
The Baxter section of the cemetery was clearly set apart from other gravesites by the monument that was erected in commemoration of the local men who had served in the Civil War on the right and a beautiful line of pine trees on the left.
One of the things I had learned in school, but especially at the cemetery, was that at the time of the Civil War, Bar Harbor was called Eden.
Grandfather Charlie liked to call it Eden all the time and joked that Adam and Eve had lived there. “A proper place for your grandmother Harriet to lie and wait for me,” he had said.
It was the first time I had heard the idea that the dead waited for a loved one before they went on to heaven.
“Makes the journey easier,” Grandfather Charlie had said.
Mommy thought it was a quaint, lovely, and romantic idea, but Daddy thought it was another example of religious nonsense.
Grandfather had made sure that on Grandmother Harriet’s tombstone there were two hands clasping.
Daddy had nothing like that done for Mommy’s tombstone.
In my heart of hearts, I vowed that I would do something special in the near future.
It truly seemed as if the entire population of Birdlane Island came to Mommy’s funeral and later paid their respects at the Crest. All my classmates, Mommy and Daddy’s friends, local shopkeepers, everyone who came, seemed afraid to talk too much to me before the funeral.
Maybe they were scared of seeing me cry and then feeling responsible for bringing on more grief for me.
Only Jamie was clearly unafraid and clearly as sad as I was.
He remained at my side as much and as long as he could.
Every few minutes, it seemed, Daddy would see us and come over to tell me to talk to other people.
“Show respect and dignity,” he ordered, and then added his mantra, “You’re a Baxter.” He looked angrily at Jamie as if Jamie was keeping me from doing that.
“I’m my mother’s daughter. Respect and dignity for her is what matters most,” I replied.
He turned red in the face and walked away.
In the days that followed the funeral, whenever Jamie was able to be at my side, he was, being a quiet support wrapping around the hollow ache that had settled inside me.
Jamie filled the empty space with things for us to do, small distractions meant to pull me away from my thoughts, memories of my mother that pressed heavily on me when I was alone.
“As long as you feel all right, I will continue to find things for us to do,” he said. “Everything has happened so fast; we never talked about your dizzy spell in the art room.”
“Dr. Bush examined me that day. All was fine,” I said.
I left out what he really meant: fine for now, but now was not forever. It was what everyone who lived off the sea and traveled it knew: you couldn’t see beyond the horizon, but you had to imagine what possibly could lie ahead and be sure your lifeboats were in good shape.