For days, she was bedridden. The pain, the pain! Agnes called Dr. Rohatgi. There was nothing he could do; this was how the disease progressed.
She was being eaten from the inside. That was how it felt, she said. Like thousands of tiny razor teeth. Her healthy cells were being attacked and colonized by the mutant, deformed, cancerous cells. There was pain medication, but many times Dabney cried out in the night. She cried for him, mostly, but also for Agnes, and for her mother.
Mama!
Clen tensed, believing he had misheard her. But then she said it again, in a voice that was much younger than her adult Dabney voice.
Mama!
There had been times in their growing up-high school and college-when they had talked about Dabney’s mother, Patty Benson, and what she had done. Dabney had consistently spoken with what Clen would have called “resigned indifference.” She wasn’t cut out to be a parent. Whatever. Lots of people aren’t. She didn’t smother me with a pillow or drown me in the bathtub, she walked away. She left me in capable hands. I am grateful for that. I’m sure she has her regrets, wherever she is.
Clen had puzzled over her attitude. He knew that Dabney had spent years in therapy with Dr. Donegal in order to achieve such insouciance. But really, wasn’t she angry? Clen himself was furious at his father, the empty bottles of Wild Turkey on the coffee table, the long hours at the bar after work and all weekend long when he should have been teaching Clen how to throw a spiral pass, or how to run skillfully behind a toboggan and then jump onto it. He had cared only about drinking, drinking, drinking until it killed him.
The ugly truth was a punch to the gut: Clen was no better than his father or Dabney’s mother. He was no better.
Mama!
Clen wiped Dabney’s forehead with a cool washcloth and watched her eyelids flutter closed.
There were still good days, days when Dabney got out of bed smiling and went for her walk, although slower, and then slower still. One day, Dabney came home and said, “Mr. Lawson asked if he could drive me home. I said no, and still he slowed all the way down and trailed me for the last quarter mile. Do I really look that bad?”
Clen kissed the tip of her nose. “No,” he said. “You look beautiful.”
He could feel sand running through the hourglass. There wasn’t enough time to tell her how beautiful she was-how much he loved her or how sorry, how hideously, awfully sorry, he was that he hadn’t come right home from Bangkok. He should have come right home!
He had wasted twenty-seven years!
Twenty-seven years, it seemed impossible. Where had they gone? It had taken him seven years to learn the country of Vietnam, to learn how to live with people who looked at him in fear and distrust. His language skills were poor; he had gotten by with French and broken English. The country was as hot as soup; the only place he had truly loved had been Dalat, in the hills. The Times had gotten him a room at the Dalat Palace and every morning he opened the wooden shutters and gazed out over the lake. Every night he drank a dozen bottles of ice-cold 333 and shot billiards in the stone-grotto bar. Best billiards table in Southeast Asia, he could attest. People would come and go-French, Australians, soldiers, doctors, entrepreneurs who said that communism wouldn’t hold. It was human nature for man to want to make his own money, it didn’t matter if he lived in Dalat or Detroit.
Clen could have been with Dabney all that time. He had smoked so many cigarettes, and eaten so many bowls of pho and so many banh mi prepared on the side of the road by a woman wearing a triangle hat, squatting by the grill, turning the meat, layering the meat on a freshly sliced baguette with carrots, mint, cilantro, cucumber, and the sauce of the gods.
He could have been with Dabney.
He’d spent five years with Mi Linh, but she wouldn’t come with him to Bangkok. Bangkok was a hole, she said. He was lucky to have gotten out of there after his first year. Why go back? She had been right, it was a hole, far worse the second time. And then, he’d lost his arm.
He did not rue the loss of his arm the way he rued all those years without Dabney.
While Dabney slept, he worked on a surprise for her. It was taking him hours and hours to interview and transcribe-and still it would be incomplete. He just didn’t have the resources. Agnes helped him where she could. Agnes assured him that what he was doing was awesome in the truest sense of the word. It is the best thing, she kept saying. It is the very best thing.
Dabney was well enough to go to the Cranberry Festival. She donned her cranberry cable-knit sweater and her matching kilt and she and Agnes and Clen drove out to the bogs in the Impala with the top down. The weather was spectacular-a sky so blue it was painful to look at, and mellow sunshine, a gift in mid-October.
“Days do not get any more beautiful than this one,” Dabney said. She had, for the first time, allowed Clen to drive the Impala. She hadn’t come out and said so, but she was too weak to drive-and she leaned her head back with her face in the sun.
She was asleep by the time they arrived at the bogs.
“What should we do?” Clen asked, once they had parked in the space reserved for them. EVENT JUDGE, the sign said, because Dabney was to judge the chutney and the muffins.
“Wake her up,” Agnes said. She climbed out of the backseat. “Here, I’ll do it.” She jostled Dabney’s shoulder. “Mommy! Mommy, we’re here.”
Dabney’s eyes flew open and she sat straight up, adjusting her sunglasses. “Okay!” she said. “I’m ready!”
The bogs were crowded with visitors. Dabney was thrilled to see so many people in attendance-parents and children and older, year-round residents, all of whom knew her by name. There were free balloons and face painting and half-a-dozen food booths-chutney, cookies, sauce, juice, muffins-all made from the fruit harvested a few hundred feet away. Clen tried samples of everything, even though he didn’t much care for cranberries.
Suddenly, Celerie appeared, her hair in one long braid down her back, her cheeks as red as apples. She was wearing a cranberry-colored wool dress and black tights. Headband and pearls. She was a younger, fair-haired version of Dabney. Clen had been warned about this, but still he chuckled when he saw her.
“The guest of honor!” Celerie said. She hugged Dabney so hard that Clen saw her wince. Dabney was fragile, everything hurt, brushing her teeth hurt, she’d told him, and folding a napkin hurt, and he was tempted to tell Celerie to take it easy, but Dabney just smiled with relief when Celerie let her go and said, “You’ve done a brilliant job!”
Celerie beamed. She turned to Clen. “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Hughes.”
Clen bowed and said, “The honor is mine, Miss Truman.”
At the same time, they said, “Dabney has told me so much about you.”
Dabney sat at the judging table alongside Nina Mobley and Dr. Ted Field and Jordan Randolph, publisher of the Nantucket Standard. Tastes of this and that were placed before the judges, and Dabney made notes on her clipboard. Clen took a few steps back so that he could observe her in her element. He knew she wanted to give every participant a blue ribbon.
At one point, she raised her face and scanned the crowd. She was looking for him, he realized. He raised his arm and waved.
I’m here, Cupe. I’m right here.
After the festival, Clen, Dabney, and Agnes drove out to the airport to pick up Riley. He was staying for two nights to enjoy Nantucket in the fall; he had wanted to come earlier but he’d had a practical exam that morning.
Agnes was buzzing with excitement. When Clen pulled up in front of the airport, she jumped out of the backseat and said, “I’ll run in and get him.”