Barrier Islands Page 12

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  After seeing Greta the day after New Year’s, Brooke didn’t see her for several weeks. She’d heard at the General Store that she was sick in bed with a bad case of the flu but was declining all offers of care under a self-imposed quarantine. Won’t be responsible for infecting the entire island was what the note stapled to her door read when Brooke knocked several times but got no response. She thought briefly of pushing the door open—surely it wasn’t locked—but finally decided to grant Greta her privacy and isolation. She left the container of home-made chicken soup in front of the door with her own hand-scribbled note: Get better now! Love, Brooke. She wished she could call her aunt on the phone to check on her, but Greta had never had phone lines—“Mainland malarkey!”—installed to her cottage. So Brooke left her soup and hoped for the best.

  And apparently it worked—her soup or Greta’s obstinate independence or both—as Brooke glimpsed Greta with Andy on a blustery Sunday checking out some of the ice-coated sand sculptures at Winterfest, a recently instituted weekend festival designed to break up the monotony of winter and try to bring in a little tourist income in the off season. Brooke wanted to run up and give her aunt a hug but shied away from disturbing her time with Andy, or raising the ire of Miss Polly by publicly acknowledging and endorsing their “adulterous relationship.” She resolved to visit her aunt early in the following week.

  But then Lil was sick the following week and Brooke had no babysitter for several days. She could have taken Jodie with her to Greta’s but was suddenly fearful of Jodie coming down with the flu and no doctor or pediatrician available on the island. She’d never thought of the island’s lack of resident medical care before. The school nurse, a woman in her sixties who kept her pills in hand-labelled hand-blown glass bottles from the nineteenth century, was the closest thing they had to such care. But now, with everyone around her, or so it seemed, sick or recovering from illness, Jodie suddenly seemed dangerously vulnerable. Brooke thought of asking Daphne to babysit for an hour or two after school, but her sister-in-law was unusually scarce, working on a special project for school. So Brooke stayed in with Jodie all that week and, truth be told, forgot about her plan to go see Greta.

  Then Greta disappeared again and no one knew why. The girls at the General Store speculated, in whispers and knowing nods, that she might be shacked up with Andy, though someone else said Andy was on the mainland at a duck-decoy show. Others said she was doing her “art thing”—immersed in a burst of creative inspiration where she would cover her windows with easel paper and not emerge for days at a time. But no one really knew what Greta was up to, or cared much beyond the gossip. After twenty years on the island, she was still an outsider.

  So the following Tuesday, a gray fog-bound day that never brightened beyond dawn’s glimmer, Brooke managed to pin down Daphne and get her to sit with Jodie while she went to visit her aunt. As she walked through the back yards and sodden paths on the way to Greta’s, everything appeared different. Wind-shaped and stunted live oaks extended their branches like ghost arms out of the fog; low fences rose up like traps, vehicles loomed as sleeping giants. Brooke tried to shrug off the eerie images as the result of her overactive imagination, but a profound sense of foreboding settled over her as she neared Greta’s cottage.

  The foreboding only deepened when she reached the cottage and saw no lights shining through the windows. The place looked as deserted as one of the numerous rentals on the island closed down for the winter. Maybe Greta had gone with Andy to the decoy show. Brooke wondered if the windows were covered with easel paper, blocking the light. But a closer look revealed the windows weren’t covered, let her see into the seemingly deserted kitchen and living room. She knocked once on the door, then again, then again, each knock becoming progressively louder and more desperate. She tried the knob. The door was locked—not the knob but some inside latch. When had Greta installed that?

  Brooke walked the four strides to the door off the porch, the one that opened directly into Greta’s bedroom. It was solid wood. There was a window to the left of the door, but it had a shade pulled low. Brooke took a deep breath and tried the knob. The door creaked open.

  “Greta?” she whispered.

  No response.

  She pushed the door further open. “Greta?” she said, her voice only slightly firmer.

  The room beyond the door was darker than the dark day. It took a moment for Brooke’s eyes to adjust to the thin light. Eventually she could discern some of the details of the small room. There was a dresser with a mirror above glowing silver on the wall. There was a wooden arm chair beside the dresser and a pile of clothes on the floor. Brooke took one step into the room and looked behind the door. Her eyes had acclimated sufficiently to allow her to make out the small twin bed wedged between the door and the corner of the room. At first she thought the bed empty. Then came a low groan and a movement on the bed. Brooke nearly jumped out of her skin.

  Then she set to action. She closed the door behind her, ran to the side of the bed, stooped down and found the switch to the bedside lamp. The room suddenly leapt forward in what seemed a brilliant light. Huddled under many layers of covers but so slight as to hardly raise them in the least was Greta. Her cheeks and eyes were sunken, her skin a deathly gray, and her far-spaced breaths a hoarse rattle.

  “Greta! Greta!” Brooke said in what sounded like a shot to her but was hardly above a desperate whisper. “Greta, it’s Brooke.”

  Greta’s head rolled toward Brooke but her eyes didn’t open.

  “Greta, what’s the matter? Wake up!”

  Greta groaned again and moved her arms weakly under the covers but still didn’t open her eyes.

  Brooke then realized the house was freezing. Greta had electric baseboard heat but mainly heated with the woodstove to save money. Apparently neither heat source was on. Through the cold, she smelled a sharp odor and identified it as stale urine. Had Greta soiled her bed linens?

  Brooke panicked then. She jumped up and ran toward the living room. She tripped over a plastic dish pan, spilling the liquid it held, the source of the odor. Brooke grabbed some clothes off the pile by the dresser and wiped up the spill best she could in the dim light. Then she ran into the living room, turned on the overhead light, and checked the woodstove. It was full of cold ashes, with no paper or firewood in the box to the side. She’d have to bring wood in from outside but didn’t have time. She went back into the bedroom and found the control to the baseboard heater and turned it all the way up. Within a few seconds the metal of the heater began to click as it warmed. It would take a while to heat the room, but it was a start.

  She knelt again beside the bed. Greta’s head was thrown back on the pillow and unmoving. Only the intermittent rattling of her breaths indicated she was alive at all. Brooke needed help and needed it fast but had no idea how to get it. She looked about wildly for the phone she knew wasn’t there then screamed at the top of her lungs. “Where’s the damn phone!”

  She reached down to check the heater. It was warming steadily. She quickly checked to make sure there was no paper or clothing that might ignite if it got too hot. The heater was clear. Still, the room was freezing.

  Brooke leaned over the bed and put her face just inches from her aunt’s. “I’m going to get help,” she said slowly and firmly. “I will be back as quick as I can.” She started to say, “Don’t you die on me” but couldn’t bring herself to say the word, not aloud or even in her mind. The phrase ended at “Don’t you—.” She ran out the side door and slammed it in her wake.

  Though nothing on the island was truly remote, Greta’s converted fishing shack was as remote as any year-round residence. It sat at the end of a narrow sand track, several hundred yards beyond any other cottages or packed dirt roads. In the deepening dusk and the still denser fog, Brooke could hardly find her way, had to stare down at the tire tracks (from whenever Greta last drove her Jeep) to keep from wandering off into the dunes or thickets. Worse, Brooke really didn’t know where t
o go to find help. She could follow her earlier tracks back to Bridge and Lil’s, but that wasn’t the nearest house. She could try knocking at the cottages along this drive, but they were all seasonal and almost certainly empty. She would be wasting precious minutes pounding on doors to vacant houses without phone service even if someone were there.

  She finally decided to head for the main road and the small community center with its combination police and fire departments. They also had shortwave radio links to emergency services on the mainland. After several minutes of fast-paced walking, keeping an eye to the ground, she broke into a trot then a flat out run, no longer able to watch the ground but trusting her instincts to keep her in the track.

  Then she hit a pothole. She fell face first into a thick layer of slimy muck, knocking the wind out of her. The ground was soft and she wasn’t seriously hurt, but the sudden shock of the earth opening beneath her mixed with the dark and the mud and the fog nearly paralyzed her. This was an unfamiliar and dangerous world, even the ground a threat. How could she move forward?

  But then she thought of Greta, alone and dying in that shack. She pulled herself out of the pothole, wiped the mud from her face and hands, and pushed on, no longer running but walking as fast as she could while keeping an eye on the ground. When she reached the paved road, she turned south and started running.

  The community center was one of the first buildings on the highway as you came into town, just past the gas station and bait shop, both closed at this hour. A light glowed from the center and she ran up to the double doors at the entry. Thanks God one was unlocked. She burst into the small waiting room with the one desk in the corner. No one was there. There were halls leading off to the left and the right, one to the fire marshal, one to the police department. She ran to the left, to the police.

  Halfway down the hall was an open door with a light streaming out. She turned the corner and ran straight into Alton Powell, the only fulltime paid police officer in town, a barrel-chested, big-voiced man with a shock of unruly white hair above his quick smile.

  Alton was at first startled but then laughed aloud as Brooke crashed into his chest. “What you been doing, Brooke—mud wrestling?”

  “Greta! She’s sick. We need help.”

  Alton grew serious. “What’s wrong with Greta?”

  “I went to see her. She didn’t answer the door. I went inside and found her in the bed. She couldn’t talk. She could hardly move!”

  For a jovial easy-going lifelong islander, Alton could move when he had to. He grabbed his hat and his truck keys and was down the hall in a flash. He used the radio at the dispatcher’s desk to alert the Coast Guard at the ferry station of a “possible medical emergency,” concluding the transmission with, “standby for further instructions.” Then he was out the door and to his four-wheel-drive off-road truck.

  Without a word, Brooke followed and climbed into the passenger seat. In the truck’s dome light, she noticed that the backs of her hands and coat sleeves were smeared in drying dark mud.

  Despite the fog, Alton drove very fast over the paved road and down Greta’s drive, the truck swerving from side to side in the soft and wet sand. Brooke didn’t know whether to be terrified or relieved at Alton’s obvious urgency. She finally closed her eyes and surrendered to his lead. Greta would finally have help.

  Inside the cottage, Greta was still breathing, though barely—and with that awful thin rattle coming out of her chest, unlike anything Brooke had ever heard.

  Alton took one look, said “Stay with her,” then ran out to his truck to use its radio to call for more help.

  Brooke sat beside the bed holding Greta’s cool hand. She whispered, “Let her live.” She noticed then that the room was considerably warmer than earlier, no longer felt like a tomb. She looked to Greta’s ashen face. “I won’t leave again,” she said.

  But less than fifteen minutes later she was forced to renege on that promise as too many people tried to cram into the too small room. Each new visitor exuded a sense of island authority and proprietorship that ignored Brooke’s blood and emotional attachment to the patient. First came the fire marshal then the school nurse then the apothecary’s pharmacist then a coast guardsman with emergency medical training. Each newcomer gently but firmly pushed Brooke farther and farther from the bed until she was pressed against the wall between the dresser and the door. At first the sight of these attendants filled Brooke with hope that an intervention, any intervention, to reverse Greta’s condition was at hand. But as each visitor arrived, checked the patient, shook his or her head, and mumbled words unintelligible to Brooke but clear in their grave tone, she grew ever more impatient and furious.

  Finally, with a half dozen hulking figures each still in their damp coats and rain gear arrayed around the bed and staring down in silence at the gasping figure, Brooke screamed from behind, “Don’t just stand there—do something!”

  Alton, who was by then at the end of the line of attendants and closest to Brooke, turned to her and put his arm around her waist and eased her toward the door to the living room. Brooke tried to resist but was no match for his weight and girth and inexorable will. When he’d pushed her into the living room, she looked up and saw that the large room was full of islanders—many Howards, including Miss Polly, but also non-family members and a few faces she didn’t recognize. Where had they all come from? And as she entered the room, the low murmur of the crowd, which she just now became aware of, suddenly hushed and everyone turned to stare at her.

  Brooke burst into tears, blindly forced her way through the crowd and out the front door and onto the equally crowded front porch and beyond that out into the yard that was jammed with vehicles and bright as day with all the headlights blazing. She stumbled past silhouettes of bodies and around the fenders and bumpers of the four-wheel-drive trucks and past the corner of the cottage. There she finally found darkness, or the closest thing to it in this place at this moment and fell to her knees on the wet soft ground and sobbed.

  Alton knelt beside her, put his arm over her heaving shoulders, and waited for the worst of her sobs to subside. “Brooke, the pneumonia has progressed too far.”

  Brooke turned toward him. Despite the fog and the dark, she could see his face clearly in some light of unknown origin. His eyes were the kindest and most sympathetic she’d ever seen. “Can’t you get her to a hospital, with real doctors and real medicine?”

  Alton shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “This fog has everything shut down, Brooke. Normally we could bring in a medi-vac and have her to a hospital in under an hour, but not tonight. Nothing’s moving—no choppers or planes. Even the ferry is suspended. If I thought it would help, I’d take her myself in the skiff; but she wouldn’t make it, and maybe I wouldn’t either.”

  Brooke stared at him for the longest time. She couldn’t grasp how someone so young could be allowed to just die, how all of modern medicine could be so powerless in this place at this moment. Her eyes said all this, but her voice said nothing.

  “We needed to know about this several days ago, when we would have still had a chance.”

  She jumped up and ran into the deeper dark of the back yard, where it merged into dunes.

  Alton stood upright slowly on stiff knees. He considered following her but decided not to. He turned back to his responsibilities to the patient and the island residents that now surrounded her.

  When Brooke reached the dunes, she turned to her right and walked parallel to them until she found the opening to the water marked by a narrow boardwalk that became a dock extending out into the water invisible below. She walked without hesitation out onto the dock, directed by memory of her many visits at all times of day or night her first summer out here. Back then her concerns had been self-centered—at first loneliness for Leah, then confusion about some early love interests and crushes, then in a swoon over Onion, and often to clear her head of intoxicants before passing under Greta’s sharp eyes.

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nbsp; But tonight she had no thoughts for herself. At first she thought only of Greta, that her torment end soon and as painlessly as possible. She whispered aloud, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner” and somehow knew her aunt heard. From the end of the dock she could hear the water lapping against the pilings. She wondered how it would feel closing around her. At first it would be cold but soon not so much. Quickly numbness would take away all the shock and pain.

  Then she remembered Jodie. How could she have forgotten? Her worldly responsibilities didn’t end with Greta. They’d barely begun. For Jodie Greta had said in their last conversation in the Jeep parked at the end of the island. That’s all that mattered now.

  She found her way back to the cottage, her way lit by the light of all those headlights glowing in the fog. The smell of wood smoke was thick in the air. Someone had lit a fire in the woodstove. The cottage would be stifling by now. She emerged from the dark into the circle of light. Lil and Bridge were standing there beside Alton’s truck.

  “Jodie?” Brooke asked Lil.

  “Daphne’s got her at the apartment, long as need be.”

  Brooke nodded. She turned toward the cottage.

  “Onion’s on his way,” Lil said behind her.

  Brooke walked up the steps. As she entered the porch, the crowd gathered there silently parted. She considered taking the shortcut to the bedroom through the side door off the porch, but it was blocked by Miss Polly and her niece Barb, Andy’s wife. Brooke continued straight through the front door and the kitchen and the living room. The islanders grew silent, stepped back. Just before entering the bedroom she spotted Andy’s white hair and beard in the back of the crowd, somewhere near the woodstove. She paused and waved for him to join her, but his face disappeared. Had she imagined it?

  She walked into the bedroom. Those wedged in there pressed to the side, making a narrow path to the bed. Greta was lying there, same as before—her gray face framed by the pillow, her body hardly raising the bedcovers. Brooke stepped forward and touched her hand on the covers. It was only after standing beside the bed for maybe minutes or longer that Brooke realized the awful rattling breaths emanating from the shrunken shell of a body had ceased.