“Sorry, Mama.”
“You should be. She might have had the courtesy to tell us that Pensacola Beach isn’t the same as Pensacola, and it’s on an island, across two damned bridges, one long and one itty-bitty. If I’d known that, I might have stopped for gas.”
“I see a light.”
“Where?”
I pointed.
“I don’t see it.”
Mama turned the key in the ignition. The weak light from the headlights wavered and winked out. She pushed the button to turn them off with a sigh. “There goes the damned battery.”
We were in near-total darkness.
“I still don’t see it,” she said.
“I do.”
I pushed the car door open and—quite unintentionally—fell out into the pallid sand.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” said Mama. “I do not need an injured child to add to my troubles.”
I pushed the car door closed. “It’s a house, Mama.”
In fact I had seen neither house nor light.
“Knock loud because they might be asleep.”
I trudged off through the sand. It sank in over my tennies and over the tops of my socks. My feet itched. They were tender and painful from the morning’s battering with the footlocker.
Amid the shadowy tall grass, I squatted to relieve myself. Then I climbed to the crest of the dune, where I saw the light that I had lied that I had already seen. The light in the window of the house that I knew belonged to Fennie’s sister.
The scene was one-dimensional, no more substantial than a childish collage of pieces of dark construction paper. Sparse vegetation, dune and sand, sickly moonlight on panes of glass, verandahs up and down, were all mere raggedy fragments overlaid on the rough dark. The cloud passing over the moon made it wink slyly.
The light in the window went out. The sudden loss stunned me in place, but then, on a lower floor, a new light in the shape of a warped door opened. A core of darkness split the light instantly, like an iris opening; a crooked silhouette waved to me.
A voice called, “I see you, Calley Dakin! Bring your mama to me now, child!”
Twenty-four
“You are moonstruck and delirious,” Mama said.
Dismiss the message she might, but she slipped off her driving shoes all the same. She collected her pumps but did not put them on. Barefoot, clutching her Hermès bag to her bosom with one hand, she paused to lock the car before she took my hand and let me lead her. A cloud eclipsed our pitiful slice of moon and we flailed onward, every step potentially off the edge of the earth.
“Scorpions hide in the sand,” said Mama. “This grass is a mecca for fleas. I’m gone break a leg, stumbling around in the dark on these dunes. If I don’t die of a scorpion sting infecting a broken leg, it will be a miracle. You’ll be an orphan then, a pitiful orphan. You’ll be in an orphanage until you’re old enough to fend for yourself because you won’t stand a chigger’s chance in a hurricane of getting adopted. Jesus God, what was that? A buzzard? That looked big enough to carry off a grown man.”
I took it for her way of whistling past the graveyard.
But when we reached the top of the dune, Mama ceased her ranting.
The moon reappeared in the sky to spill its narrow measure of light upon the breakers and silver the beautiful shore.
SsssssssSSSSSSssssssssSSSSSSsssssssss
I was struck silent as Mama was.
Before I had seen only the dunes and the house on the dunes, the light in the window and then the door, and the silhouette of the woman who had called to me. Not the Gulf of Mexico directly behind it, not the water on the sand. I had not heard the Gulf of Mexico—I mean the greatest part of its noise, that of the water reaching the sand, the sand releasing the water. Before, I realized, the only sounds had been my own, and the natural twitching and sighing of the vegetation. This is not childhood memory refocused and refined. I had not heard the Gulf. It must have been silent. There could have been no waves at work upon the beach, for at the distance from the house I would never have been able to hear Fennie’s sister calling to me.
ssssssssSSSSSSSSsssssssSSSSSSssssss
Mama was struck silent for a different reason.
“Oh, Calley,” she whispered.
She was all atremble. I squeezed her hand hard but it still shook.
“Mama, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing’s wrong, baby. But that’s not Fennie’s sister’s house.”
“Yes it is, Mama. She called to me.”
“It’s my house, Calley. It’s my grandmama’s house. I lived there all the time that Mama and I were not getting along. That’s where I was happy, Calley, the only place I was ever really happy. I loved my grandmama. I loved her so much, Calley. I loved her more than you love me.”
Mama had never before mentioned her grandmama. Nor had I known that Mama and Mamadee had lived apart before Mama married Daddy, except for the semester Mama had spent at college. The information was so startling that it smothered any resentment over Mama’s claim that she could have loved her grandmama more than I loved her.
“You lived here before?”
Mama laughed. “Of course not. Grandmama’s house was in Banks. Grandmama died when that house burned down.”
Mama started down the dune. I had to run and skid down the declivity to keep up with her. I had never seen her move so fast when not going from one expensive shop to another.
“Oh look, Calley!” Mama pointed at the yellow light that suddenly glowed in the same upstairs window as before. “Fennie’s sister is going to put me back in my old room!”
The front door stood ajar across the weathered planks of the deep verandah. A white-haired woman peered out at us from the doorway. It was she who had called to me from the open doorway of the house on the very edge of the Gulf of Mexico.
Where the waves had been silent so I would be able to hear her voice.
“Stamp your feet,” the woman instructed.
Mama pounded up and down on the floor mat, shaking the sand loose from her bare feet.
I had never seen Mama obey so short and sharp a command—and one from a stranger too—with such immediacy and willingness. I stamped my feet like a little echo.
“I’m Roberta Carroll Dakin,” Mama said, trying to peer over the woman’s shoulder into the interior of the house. “You must be Calley’s friend Fennie’s sister.”
“I am Merry Verlow.” The woman placed a gentle emphasis on the am.
“You call her Miz Verlow.” Mama swatted the back of my head lightly.
As if I didn’t know that “Miz” was how you addressed all women, single or married.
“Welcome to Merrymeeting.”
Mama started. “Merrymeeting?”
Miz Verlow gestured inclusively. “My home.”
Mama was in a kind of distracted daze as she looked all around, but she shook it off, to say archly, “I am very happy that you are not a Dakin.”
“I confess I have only heard of the Dakins, through Fennie, of course,” Miz Verlow said, “who is related to them somehow. You are the first one I have actually met and I must say I am pleasantly surprised.”
The derogation of Daddy’s relatives, especially by someone who had never met any of them, went over very well with Mama. “Well, you would not be so pleasantly surprised if you met any of the others, because I am not a bit like the rest of them. I am by birth a Carroll, after all.”
“Oh?” Miz Verlow said. “Do come inside. I expect your feet are just about to take leave of your ankles, walk off this verandah, and dig a grave for themselves in the sand.” She stopped as I started past her. “Calley, just shuck those tennis shoes right here.”