We felt more tolerant of the guineas’ excitability after that—more of a kinship with their constant fretting. When one or two of them would get separated from the group and start to squawk, we’d say, “Hang on, you’ll find them in a minute,” and we’d crane our necks around until we spotted the flock pecking their way up the path from the boathouse or emerging from under the porch.
Over the course of the summer, they disappeared one by one—the occasional catastrophe of dark-gray speckled feathers in the grass. We’d lost other guinea hens in seasons past, but never at this rate. The flock began to stick closer together; they were more rattled, shriller—if possible. We’d count them each night and felt relief when they all were tucked in their roost and the door closed. When we were down to one, my uncle found a fox den nestled in the cliff about seventy-five feet from the henhouse.
*
The final guinea hen. She busies herself under the porch and along the path during the day. She weaves in and out of the grasses. She does not stop moving until she returns to the roost on her own before dusk each evening. It seems it is not easy to find peace as the last living member of your species at the end of summer on an island in the chilly Atlantic. What must she be thinking? There is no fear as great as her fear. From time to time she lets loose a great squawk, standing at the highest spot on the hill—a desperate hollow call out into a world where the wind blows and the sun shines and children and dogs run in the lawn but where there is no one that matters to answer.
As I watch her I remember a dream I’ve had that I am alone in a white empty room. I can hear Freddy and Benny talking, then arguing, and one of them starts to cry. But I can’t see them anywhere, and I cannot say a thing.
*
At noon, maybe sixty members of my dad’s expansive family—the family that has over the years become my mom’s family and many of her most beloved people—gather at her favorite spot by the flagpole, the spot where I like to picture her in the Adirondack chair, chatting with her sisters-in-law and gazing out at the water and laughing.
It’s breezy and sunny up on the hill. We break flag protocol—which requires an act of Congress or presidential decree to fly a flag at half-mast—at the request of Freddy and Benny. It’s not the kind of thing my grandfather would have ever permitted, but: Times have changed. Once, in 1974—on my mom’s first visit to the Cape on a trip back East from San Francisco—my grandparents still vibrant and in charge—after a family picnic on horseback down island and a vigorous trail-clearing expedition (known affectionately as a “chopping party”), everyone had gathered in the living room for cocktails. My grandfather was storytelling and holding forth as he loved to do: Harvard pranks, rowing regattas, feats of physical prowess, women he’d charmed.
My mother, sitting on a lumpy cushion stuffed with horsehair next to the enormous picture window that gapes out at the water and the old-money mansions that line Vineyard Sound, looked around the room, set down her drink on the wooden chest that belonged to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandson, pulled out a cigarette and a match, lit up, and took the universe’s longest drag. I believe she relished the silence in the room and the shock on my grandfather’s face for forty years. The slightest smirk on RWE’s face in the portrait over the mantel suggests that the Concord Sage himself has still not recovered. Always do what you are afraid to do.
My dad, the youngest and least assuming in a family of five other boys and a girl, had found his ticket. He didn’t know whether he wanted to disappear or celebrate, but he knew he was home—at last—with her.
*
He is standing next to me at the pole. I can feel him trembling. He whispers thank you to me—for doing the planning I guess, maybe for still being here. I have my hands on the shoulders of Freddy and Benny, who are wiggling with excitement at being the center of attention. John has his hand on the small of my back. In our ways, we hold each other upright.
First my dad, then Charlie and I, take handfuls of her ashes and face the ocean and offer them up to the breeze. Freddy winds up and pretends to throw a fastball with his. A slow procession from the crowd takes their turns. We watch each one. The wind is such that for a moment each handful hangs in the air like a beautiful specter contemplating our group—nearly returning to us, then spirited away, sometimes almost a recognizable shape, sometimes something entirely unfamiliar.
8. Summer House
Here is the summer house—the picnic dishes, the drawer of dull knives, the white sheets on the line that work the air of the cooler days like sails, like lost souls, like wings that need more imagining, filling the yard—huffing and brimming.
Here are the seventy-year-old antlers, the glass buoys, the miniature cairns of white pebbles, yellowed paperbacks, checkers, frayed semaphore flags, the tightly furled nests in the eaves of barn swallows.
Here is the swallow herself—swooping, whirling, screeching—frantic to return to her four wet beaks.
Here is the path to the gravestone like a trick map, like a prank, like an incomplete thought. Here the dip in the lawn where the groom found the bride, here the fever of remembering, here the work we do that we love to do.
Here lay my baby in my mother’s lap, drifting through his dream of the whine of an outboard. Here on the porch, the sweet globe of a plum. Here the tooth that pierces the peel like a door burst open, like a flood, like an afterlife.
Here are the children engulfing the house in a game of sardines, each one tucked tighter into the pooled dark of the closet until a single child is left to enter the room calling out, sensing in the hush that the rest have found each other—her hand lingering on the doorknob.
9. Reconstruction
Ginny writes: “It’s such bullshit that there are plenty of Joan Crawfords and assholes like my husband running around among us and your mom is not.”
She lost her dad a few years back—suicide. She knows what to say and what not to say. “We threw my sweet dad into the Beaufort River with three ospreys flying over (he loved ospreys because the daddies take care of the babies). There is something awesome about returning them to the earth.”
Her breast reconstruction has gone terribly wrong in the noncancer breast that they took off for good measure. An infection. The doctors have had to tear out the implant until things settle down and they can try again. For now we are both just two left boobs—mine real and hers fake.
“My mom’s death feels exactly like this wound on my chest,” I text her. “Sometimes I get confused about which pain I’m feeling.”
“I know,” she says. “Me, too.”
10. Red Face
Another thing I’ve spirited from my mom’s possessions is her blue cruiser bike. My dad tunes it all up for me, and it fits me really nicely, unlike her Tevas.