“Yes,” he said. “I did.”
Clen was by her side. He gave the hospice workers a break or they gave her and Clen privacy, Dabney wasn’t sure which way it worked. Clen fed Dabney ice chips and put balm on her lips with the tip of his finger, and a few tears fell because Clen’s other hand, his left hand, had been strong and beautiful, too, but now it was gone. Turned to dust, Dabney supposed, somewhere on a distant continent.
She said to him, “You’ll know when to call the priest?”
Clen nodded, his lips pressed together until they turned white. He didn’t want to call the priest because he didn’t believe in Catholicism, maybe. Or he didn’t want to call the priest because it signaled the end. The priest meant something to Dabney, she wanted to confess her sins, she wanted Extreme Unction, she wanted permission to pass on to whatever came next. Her grandmother Agnes Bernadette had received last rites, and her facial expression had immediately settled into one of peace and acceptance, like a marble Madonna.
Clen had promised to call the priest.
But not yet. Not yet.
Ice chips, angels, hands soothing her aching feet, Clen’s voice, his mighty voice. How had she lived twenty-seven years without it? How had she lived without the green glen and weak tea of his eyes?
She said to Clen, “You have to find someone else. I meant to help you, but…”
“Hush,” he said.
“I couldn’t bear it,” Dabney said. “I was selfish, I wanted you all to myself. But, Clen, you can’t be alone.”
“Cupe,” he said. “Please.”
“Promise me you’ll try.”
“No,” he said. “I will not try.”
Clen, Agnes, the hospice workers-and then, finally, the priest. Not Father Healey, who had seen Dabney from Baptism to First Communion to Confirmation, but a new priest, a young man, a man too handsome for the cloth, if you asked Dabney. Father Carlos, he had a Spanish accent and soft brown eyes. He sat at Dabney’s bedside, took her hand, and said, “Pray with me.”
She had everything she needed except… And it was time to stop longing for that. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. She had confessed her sins and said her penance, but her real penance was that she would go without the one thing she needed.
Her journey was coming to an end. Forty-nine years. She had hoped for ninety-nine, didn’t everyone, but Dabney couldn’t complain. She hadn’t sunbathed on the golden shores of Saint-Tropez, she hadn’t visited the Taj Mahal, she had never seen the Hollywood sign or Mount Rushmore or the pyramids. She hadn’t shopped in Moroccan souks or eaten in a greasy spoon on Route 66.
But, Dabney knew, she had Nantucket. She had been born and raised here, she had worked twenty-two years in service to this island, and she would die here. She had been faithful to Nantucket. Oh, Nantucket, more of a mother than her own mother.
Everything she needed. Except.
And then, she heard his voice, or she thought she did. It was too soft at first to tell.
“Darling?”
She couldn’t believe it. She was dreaming, or in a morphine delirium. She had a hard time now discerning what was real and what was visiting her from another time. Agnes at three years old, throwing rocks to disturb the placid, emerald surface of Jewel Pond, was as vivid as Agnes yesterday reading to Dabney from the last pages of Emma.
Darling.
Dabney opened her eyes, and there he was. Box. If she had had the ability to cry or cry out or smile or laugh, she would have.
She tried a word. Here! She meant, You’re here! You came! You did not forsake me even though I so gravely forsook you. Darling? Am I darling? You have found it in your heart to come back to our home and call me darling.
Box understood here to mean, Sit here. He sat next to her. He held her hand.
He said, “Oh, Dabney.”
His tone of voice was not one she’d ever heard before. It was full of pain, sadness, regret, love. She couldn’t bear for him to say another word. What else could he possibly say?
“I love you,” he said. “I will always, always, always love you, Dabney Kimball Beech.”
She was able to blink at him. Her eyes were all she had left, but not for long, she didn’t think.
She tried again. “Please.”
He nodded. “Sshhh. It’s okay.”
“Please,” she said, or tried to say. The effort of it was too much. She was so tired. She closed her eyes.
She heard voices and felt things, she did not know what. She heard the voice of May, the Irish chambermaid, singing “American Pie.”
Where is my mother?
Your father is on his way, love.
Mama!
Dabney had taken an entire Saturday of her life to learn how to make beef Wellington so she could prepare it for Clendenin before the prom. The key to the puff pastry-which had to be made by hand, Pepperidge Farm wouldn’t do-was very cold butter. The chef at the Club Car, an old man when Dabney was in high school, had repeated this several times: very cold butter.
Albert Maku had found Dabney crying on the steps of Grays Hall. Everyone else was thrilled about starting Harvard-everyone but Dabney and Albert. He had spoken to her in Zulu and she had cried, because the world was so foreign and strange without Clen by her side. Clen was 140 miles away, in New Haven.
A blizzard on Daffodil Weekend-that had seemed such a travesty! Nina Mobley had nearly chewed the cross off her chain as she and Dabney looked out the office windows at the snow piling up on Main Street.
Oysters-Island Creeks and Kumamotos. She could have eaten ten times as many, and still it wouldn’t have been enough.
A 1963 Corvette Stingray split-window in Bermuda blue with matching numbers. That would have been nice, too, although where in the world would she have driven it? The point of that car had been in the wanting.
Matisse, La Danse. Maybe that was heaven. Blues and greens, naked, dancing, dancing in a never-ending circle, each time around as thrilling as the first.
She had been ambivalent about the pregnancy. For the eight months after Clen left, she stayed at home, cooking and cleaning for her father, playing solitaire, and reading novels of shame-Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Vanity Fair-as her belly grew rounder and harder and more embarrassing each day. The friends she’d had in high school and college had been stunned into silence. They stayed away. She was as lonely as she’d ever been.
In the delivery room it had just been Dabney, a nurse named Mary Beth, and Dr. Benton. The birth, in Dabney’s memory, had been painless, probably because she didn’t care if the baby lived or died, or if she herself lived or died. What did it matter without Clendenin?
But then, of course, they placed the baby in Dabney’s arms, and the loneliness melted away. A mother first, a mother forever.
Agnes!
Dabney had jumped on the bed while her mother applied mascara at the dressing table.
Dabney said, Look how high I’m going! She was in her red Christmas dress and white tights. Her mother had instructed her to remove her Mary Janes.
I am looking, darling, her mother said. Her eyes flashed in the mirror. That’s very high indeed. Be careful now. You don’t want to fall and break yourself.
“Mommy.”
Dabney’s eyes opened-yes, they opened still. Agnes stood at the foot of the bed with Riley; they were holding hands and they were engulfed in pink clouds, fluffy as cotton candy.
Agnes at the carnival in the sticky heat of summer, cotton candy all over her face and in her hair, begging Dabney to go on the Scrambler.
I’m afraid! Dabney had said.