The Lavender Hour Read online

  “Were you always like this?” I asked her one night earlier that winter when we both were one cosmo over our speed limit.

  “Like what?” Faye said.

  “You know. Not caring what people think.”

  “Oh, I care, Jessie,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I just don't let it rule me.”

  I didn't think it was true about Faye caring about what people thought of her. I truly believed she didn't give a damn. But there was plenty she did care about. Bigotry. Prejudice of any kind. Cruelty. Suffering. And she held a deep disdain for affectation. In architecture or in people. One Saturday morning, when we were having breakfast at Bonatts, Faye ignored a woman who called her name from a table across the room. “That woman's trying to get your attention,” I said. “Well, for God's sake, don't look over or the next thing she'll be inviting herself to join us,” she replied. Later she told me the woman was the epitome of ostentatiousness. “She named her house,” she said. I said I didn't see why that was so bad. Hell, half the people in town had quarter boards identifying their homes. Ocean Breeze. Bide-a-While. Sea Reverie. Whale Watch. Gull Cottage. It's a Cape tradition. “But she answers the phone with her house's name. 'Hello, Ocean Manor,'” Faye mimicked. For someone who was one of the most compassionate people I'd ever met, Faye could have a sharp tongue.

  I PUT on the kettle and told her about the piece I was working on and about the child with leukemia.

  “It's curious,” Faye said, running a thumb over her bracelet.

  “What's that?”

  “Our hair is essentially dead, right?”

  I nodded. “Beyond the follicle, hair is nothing but dead cells. Same as our fingernails.”

  “Odd, then, that that part of us which is dead will outlast the living—the blood, body, bones.”

  “Isn't it,” I said as I measured out the coffee. I felt the fingerlings of restlessness that talk of death could engender. (Ashley had told me once that she believed there were only two things that could permanently change a person's life: having a child and killing someone; but I knew having cancer changed you, too. Like genuine love, it leaves you powerless and vulnerable, feelings that never completely disappear, even with recovery.)

  Faye didn't wait for the water to boil before she started in on the doughnuts. “What's the latest word from home?” she asked.

  “Nothing new there,” I said. I hadn't talked to Lily in more than a week, and although one of the reasons I had moved from Richmond was to escape the burden of my mama's concern and her poorly concealed fear that the cancer might return, I was surprised and hurt when her daily check-in calls turned weekly and then even more sporadic. I blamed her involvement with the dentist. I'd heard from Ashley that Lily was still preparing for an Atlantic crossing, a plan that struck me as so perilous that I had regular nightmares about it. Dreadful, sweat-drenched dreams that haunted me in the morning. I couldn't understand why she had agreed to this voyage anyway. Lily had never been particularly athletic, nor had she enjoyed sailing. Knitting intricate lace-patterned shawls was more her style. When I tried to get Ashley to join me in confronting our mama about the dangers of the transatlantic undertaking, dangers that I saw as considerable—we weren't talking about a Sunday sail but a voyage of nearly twenty-five hundred miles from Virginia to the Azores, off the coast of Africa—my sister honestly seemed more concerned about the fact that Lily had stopped coloring her hair.

  “Ashley tells me that Lily's started walking to get in shape,” I told Faye.

  “Good for her,” Faye said.

  “Well, I think the whole idea is insane. I mean, Lord God, in five years, she'll be seventy. She's too old to be attempting something like—” I stopped short, remembering that Faye and Lily were the same age. I glanced up to see if I'd given offense, but Faye was smiling.

  “I wouldn't bet against her, Jessie. People tend to underestimate her, but Lily has always been a determined woman.”

  I looked for hidden meaning in this statement, but Faye's face was guileless, clear. According to Grandma Ruth, Faye and my daddy had been “an item” before Lily arrived on the scene and swept him up. I didn't know if this was true. Before he died, when we still came to the Cape during the summer, I would watch him every time he was around Faye, but he treated her with the same slightly easy courtesy he showed all women and nothing more. And as far as I could tell, there was no sense of competition between Lily and Faye, although I knew women could be smart about concealing emotions. Once I asked Lily if what my grandma said was true, that she'd swept my daddy off his feet. My mama laughed and said that Grandma Ruth had it all wrong and if there had been any sweeping going on, it had been Lowell who was holding the broom, entirely avoiding the question of whether or not Faye was on the scene prior to her arrival. Back in the fall, shortly after I moved into the cottage and became reacquainted with Faye, I returned to the subject during a phone call to Richmond. “For heaven's sake, Jessie Lynn, that's ancient history,” Lily said. And then, “Do you seriously think Lowell would have been interested in Faye Wilson?” In truth, I couldn't picture it, perhaps because my mama had been so beautiful that I couldn't imagine my daddy attracted to anyone else. Certainly not Faye. And the more I got to know Faye, I couldn't really picture her with my daddy, who, while good-looking, successful, and kind, had never been averse to small pretensions.

  “YOU'RE DOING good work with Nona Ryder,” Faye said, in a sudden change of subject.

  “I wish I could do more,” I said. After two weeks of volunteering and five visits, I still hadn't laid eyes on Luke Ryder. Except in my dreams, where he had a starring role. I did not mention this to the volunteer group the previous week when we had gathered for our monthly meeting to share our experiences and to air our concerns and problems. (Beth, the former teacher, was already having a slight conflict with the hospice nurse on her case.)

  Truthfully, at the last meeting, I had felt totally inadequate. Ben told us how he played gin rummy with his patient, a seventy-two-year-old woman with lung cancer that had metastasized to her bones. Gordon was reading the latest John Grisham to his, a forty-year-old man who had a failed bone marrow transplant. Sal cleaned an oven and did two loads of laundry for a patient with MS. Jennifer drove her cancer patient to his granddaughter's soft-ball game. Muriel was helping a woman with congestive heart failure sort through decades of family photos and arrange them in albums for her children. Listening to them, I marveled at their ease. When they asked how I was doing with Luke, I told them I read while Nona went out on errands. I did not confess to the group that, at odd times in the day, I would find myself preoccupied with the mystery of him, wondering what his favorite food was, what kind of music he liked, if there was a chance he would recover or go into remission, or if it would help him to hear my own story.

  Our last group meeting ended with a prayer from the hospice chaplain, and then Faye told us what good and necessary work we were doing. “There is unexpected joy in the terrain of grief, sorrow, and separation,” she said, a more poetic statement than was usual for her. She told us we were doing soul work.

  OF COURSE, intellectually, I knew I was helping Nona. There was some satisfaction in knowing that the short breaks away from the house had been doing her good. Her look of exhaustion had eased, if not the haunted shadows in her eyes. One of my former colleagues—a science teacher—had once told me that fetal cells stayed in a mother for twenty-seven years after she gave birth. At the time, I had thought it was one of those amazing facts that defy belief, but watching Nona those days, I no longer doubted it. I even wondered if those cells didn't remain forever, which would explain why she looked as if a real part of her was dying along with her son.

  In spite of the difference in our ages, Nona began to confide in me. I learned that Luke was her only child, that he'd been divorced for two years—a fact that didn't break Nona's heart, as she never trusted his ex. “Marcia is one of those women who just can't sit still, always having to
be going somewhere or doing something. All that rushing around just about drove Luke mad,” she'd told me, adding, “Not like you at all. Anyone can see you have a calmness to you.” “One thing no one has ever called me is calm,” I had demurred, flustered at the compliment. “Oh yes, you are,” she'd insisted. “I can see it in your eyes.” Another thing she told me about Luke's ex was that she is not a kind person. “And I'm sorry to say I see some of that in Paige,” she'd said. Nona worried about her granddaughter and asked me if I had experimented with pot when I was twenty-two. I lied, thinking that it was more important that she trust me than it was to offer reassurance about Paige.

  One day, Nona told me that before Luke got cancer, she had hopes he would remarry. “It came on fast,” she said. “Back in January, he was still fishing. I swear I never saw anyone get so sick so fast. You wouldn't believe it.” But of course I would. I knew about the shocking swiftness with which illness could derail a life.

  I POURED our coffee and got cream from the refrigerator and thought of how the other volunteers helped their clients. “I don'tknow,” I said to Faye. “I don't feel as if I'm making a difference.” I ran my hand through my hair, passed a finger over the welt of my scar. I wanted to ask her if there was any hope Luke's cancer would go into remission, but I kept the question locked inside.

  She looked straight at me. “Hospice is elegant in its simplicity, Jessie,” she said. “We're there for care. We're there to lift the burden. That's all, and it's more than enough.”

  I wanted to do more. I wanted to help the raven-haired man who sat in self-imposed isolation. “Honestly,” I said, as I split a chocolate glazed doughnut and handed her half, “I still can't understand why you assigned me to this case.”

  Faye licked traces of chocolate from her fingers. “A hunch,” she said. Her voice was clear and sure.

  “Well, I hope it pays off,” I said.

  Months later, I would recall this chilly April morning and wonder what would have happened if, while we sat there, eating doughnuts and drinking coffee, Faye had not only heard my doubts but had began to share them. What if I had told her about how preoccupied I had become with Luke? What if, regardless of her hunch, Faye had assigned someone else to volunteer at the Ryder house? Could all that lay ahead have been averted? Or were some things preordained, destined to play out to their end?

  four

  WHEN I HEADED out for the Ryders' the next afternoon, I was in what my grandma Ruth called a pissy-ant mood. It was raw and drizzly, an absolutely miserable day that had even Faye grumbling. Earlier Ashley had called and had gone on and on about the lovely Richmond weather, as if by living in the North for the past eight months, I had contracted total amnesia about a southern spring. Today was in the midseventies, Ashley said, adding that the tulips were up and the lilacs and redbuds were in bloom. I told her that we were a few weeks behind in Massachusetts but that the crocuses and snowdrops were starting to poke through the grass. I didn't tell my sister that it had been raining for three straight days or that the lawn was still winter-dead brown or that Faye said Cape Cod didn't have spring, just a long, dreary winter that would suddenly be summer one day in late June. I loved Ashley, but from time to time, we fell into this weird kind of one-upmanship over the dumbest things. Like weather. That morning, after we hung up, I found myself growing homesick for the spring Ashley described, and for my mama, and wondered what I was doing on the Cape and what this year was proving. I didn't feel any closer to figuring out where I was heading than I had been back in September. Lately I had found myself missing teaching and missing my students. And mourning the lack of romance in my life. At one of our meetings, Gordon said he was discovering that one of the things about hospice work was that it helped him put his own life in perspective and made his problems seem minor. I was waiting. I had gotten a few leads on jobs from the alumni office at the ArtInstitute, where I'd graduated, sent out inquiries and résumés, but so far nothing had panned out. On the man front, I had had precisely two dates since January, both blind dates and both disasters: a widower with denture breath, clearly looking for a new wife to care for him, no thank you, and a guy who'd had so many DWIs that I'd had to pick him up in my car and drive us to the Squire. I was beginning to feel like a nun. When I mentioned this to Faye, she said it seemed to her I had two choices. I could buy myself a vibrator, or I could think of this time as a kind of purifying fast; I told her that celibacy as a lifestyle was seriously overrated.

  I had fully expected I would be married by this point in my life. Women in our family married young. My sister's theory—and Lily's, too—was that I hadn't spent enough time and energy focusing on the kind of man I wanted to attract. Not a problem Ashley herself had ever had. The day she fastened the hooks on her first double-A bra, Ashley settled her attention to the qualities she wanted in a perfect husband, portraits that over the years underwent subtle alterations. Even at thirteen, she took these deliberations seriously, no detail too minute to escape consideration. Hair and eye color and build were obviously up for debate, but so, too, were teeth, feet, brains, and the kind of car he drove, often in that order. I swear she actually spent hours contemplating whether smooth hands were better than calloused. In the end, she'd opted for somewhat calloused, just rough enough to add sensation to a back rub. There were certain deal-breakers. Her future husband would have to be elegantly built and slightly edgy, just enough to make him interesting over the long haul. And then Ashley ended up mad for Daniel, a man on the wrong side of stocky who was too kind for his own good. Which just went to show you. The human heart was too fickle to be trusted.

  Ashley was right, though, about me. I never spent a lot of time thinking about the particulars of my dream match. When girlfriends asked what my type was, I'd laugh and say male. But recently—running on the beach or in the evening while working on a bracelet—I would find myself daydreaming about a man I could truly imagine at my side. He stood tall and had raven black hair. He drove a truck.

  At night, too, I continued to dream about Luke. In one, we were in a boat that carved a wide wake in the sea behind us. We were laughing. It was ridiculous, of course, like mooning over a movie star. And just as far-fetched. I still hadn't met him in person. I was swooning over a photograph. I chalked it up to an excess of hormones and the mystery of the as yet invisible Luke. I reconsidered Faye's suggestion that I get a vibrator.

  ON MY way to Nona's, I detoured for my daily run to Dunkin' Donuts. Inside, I filled my Thermos with French roast and on impulse ordered some cranberry muffins—the hydrogenated-shortening, heart-attack-in-a-box kind that the Food Police are always ranting about. Right after my operation, I had been vigilant about what I put into my body. I had cut back on meat and alcohol, eliminated artificial sweeteners. As time went on, I had become less disciplined and slipped back into my old, bad habits. Still, thinking about the fat, I almost put the carton back on the shelf, but then I remembered something else from Bernie Seigel's lecture back in the autumn, a story about a woman who was furious when she learned that she had cancer. “I don't smoke,” she told him, as if bringing up a bargain she had struck. “I stopped eating ice cream years ago.” As I remembered it, Seigel's point was that there was no surefire prophylactic against illness and death and that it was better to eat an occasional ice cream cone that brings joy than give it up and be angry. Good point, I thought. Maybe that was one of the tricks I was learning in starting a new life. Enjoy small pleasures.

  A bucket next to the register was filled with daffodils, six stems to a bunch. On a whim, triggered no doubt by my earlier conversation with Ashley and my sister's picture of spring in Richmond, I bought two bunches.

  When I arrived at the Ryders', Jim, the hospice health aide, was already there, earlier than usual. People think the volunteers are angels, Faye told us during our training, but it's the health aides who are the real saints. The rest of us get the credit, but they're the ones who do the heavy lifting. The messy stuff of daily life. This whole program woul
dn't work without them.

  I parked by the curb so that, when Jim left, he'd be able to back his green Jeep out of the drive. Nona met me at the door. Her face was splotchy, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed, and the sight unnerved me, for, like Faye, Nona was old Cape Cod stock, stoic and sensible, emotions held in check. Immediately, I feared the worst and my heart rate quickened, but then I heard the sound of conversation from the other room. Jim was saying something, although I couldn't make out the words. There was a pause and then deep laughter. I took a breath. Not a crisis then. Nona was simply worn out. I tried to imagine what it must be like to have your only child be dying, but it was too painful to contemplate.

  “We could sure use some sun,” I said.

  “Welcome to April on Cape Cod,” Nona said.

  I often felt like I was saying the wrong thing, talking about the weather while, in the next room, her son was dying. In training, we'd been told that ordinary conversations gave families a break from the constant sorrow and brought normalcy to their days. I knew—from experience—that this was possible, and yet it still felt odd to converse about things like the weather. There was another burst of laughter from Luke's room. We both turned and looked at the closed door.

  “Jim's good for Luke,” Nona said.

  “I know,” I said. I felt a stab of envy, and then felt small and mean-spirited.

  In the kitchen, Nona spent a few minutes combing the cupboards for a vase to put the daffodils in, all the time muttering about how Marcia had made off with everything that wasn't nailed down. According to Nona, the divorce was a nightmare, and Luke nearly lost the house over it. I thought that, in some way, she blamed Marcia for Luke getting cancer. Earlier she had confided that Paige still held her mother responsible for the divorce. Finally Nona unearthed a water glass large enough for the job. Watching, I noticed, not for the first time, how deformed by arthritis her fingers were. I thought of all the work caring for Luke entailed, even with hospice help. Again, as I had been the first time I saw her, I was swept by a desire to fold her in my arms and comfort her. I held back.