The Lace Reader

“You should have called the station,” he says. “We have a key.” It is not Jack’s father’s voice but his younger brother’s that I finally recognize.

“Hi, Jay-Jay,” I say, getting it, remembering now that Beezer had told me Jay-Jay was a cop.

He hugs me. “Been a while,” he says, thinking, I’m sure, how bad I look and running through a list of possibilities in his head. I fight the urge to tell him I’ve just had my uterus cut out, that I almost bled to death before the emergency surgery.

“You’re bleeding,” he says, reaching out for my arm. The cops here aren’t as scared by blood as the cops in L.A. are.

“Just a flesh wound, Copper,” I say too loud. He leads me inside and makes me sit down at the kitchen table. I’m bare-armed now, holding a paper towel to my forearm.

“You need stitches,” Jay-Jay says.

“It’s fine.”

“At least get some Neosporin on it. Or some of that herbal crap Eva sells.”

“I’m fine, Jay-Jay,” I say, just a little too sharply.

A long silence. “I’m sorry about Eva,” he says finally. “I wish I had something new I could tell you.”

“Me, too.”

“That Alzheimer’s stuff is all crap. I saw her a week before she disappeared. She was still sharp as a tack.” He thinks a minute. “You need to talk to Rafferty.”

“Who?”

“Detective Rafferty. He’s your man. He’s the one who’s handling the case.”

He looks around the room as if there’s something here, something he wants to say, but then he changes his mind.

“What?”

“Nothing…. I’ll tell Rafferty you’re here. He’ll want to talk to you. He’s in court today, though. Traffic court. Whatever you do, don’t drive with him. He’s the worst driver in the world.”

“Okay,” I say, wondering why Jay-Jay thought driving with Rafferty was even a possibility. We stand there awkwardly, neither of us knowing how to follow that last thread of conversation.

“You look good,” he says finally. “For an old lady of…what? Thirty-one?”

“Thirty-two.”

“For thirty-two you look great,” he says, and laughs.

I don’t go into the main part of the house until Jay-Jay leaves. As soon as I open the door, I realize that everyone has made a big mistake.

Eva’s right here in this house. I can feel her. Her presence is so strong that I almost run after Jay-Jay to tell him to call off the search, that she has come back, but the cruiser has already turned the corner, so I’ll have to call the station.

But first I have to see my Aunt Eva. She must have gone on a trip and not told anyone. She probably doesn’t even know the whole town’s looking for her.

“Eva?” I call to her. She doesn’t answer. Her ears aren’t very good, not anymore. I call again, louder. Still no answer, but I know she’s here. She’s up on the widow’s walk or down in the root cellar mixing up a new kind of tea, something with bergamot and kumquat essence. Or maybe she never left, is what I’m thinking, though I know that’s not possible. They must have searched the house. At least I assume they did. Didn’t anyone come in here, for God’s sake? Didn’t May? No, she wouldn’t, damn her. But the cops would. Or my brother. Of course Beezer would have looked. Of course that’s the first thing they would have done. Eva wouldn’t have been reported missing unless she actually was missing, right? But now she’s back. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, I think, laughing out loud because I’m still channeling Eva’s clichés.

“Hey, Eva,” I call to her, knowing how deaf she’s gotten, but giving it a try anyway. “Eva, it’s me.”

I’m not sure where to start looking. I stand there, in the foyer. Ahead are two matching parlors with black marble fireplaces facing each other from the ends of the long rooms. One of the rooms is closed off; that’s the one Eva uses as her tearoom. I enter the other one. It’s more like a ballroom than a parlor. The fireplaces look empty with neither flames nor Eva’s usual arrangements of flowers in them. Chairs are placed symmetrically and strategically, like pieces on a chessboard. I look at the huge suspended staircase. I know that my next move should be up, but I decide to check the tearoom first, then the other kitchen, and the root cellar, where she blends the teas. I’m calling to her, talking as I go, speaking loudly so that she’ll hear me. I don’t want to sneak up and scare her into having a heart attack or something.

She’s probably upstairs. I’m not supposed to be climbing stairs yet, but I’m yelling to her now, and I realize I’m going to have to get up there. I use the railing to pull myself, but it’s easier to climb now than it was a few days ago, even though I can still feel the pull of the stitches with each step. When I reach the second-floor landing, I’m dizzy and have to sit down on a bench and wait until everything stops spinning. Finally I make my way to Eva’s room. Old canopy bed in the corner, fireplace, armoire. The bed is made, the pillows fluffed. I pick up a pillow and smell it, expecting Eva’s scent. Instead it smells of orange water, which is what Eva uses to rinse her linens. She must have changed the sheets recently. I check the walk-in closet. Everything hangs perfectly on the hangers. There is no laundry in the bins, which means that she has already washed the old sheets.

I spent a lot of time in this room when Eva took me in, a lot of time in this closet, actually, which Eva probably found odd but which she never mentioned. Eva is not my blood relation; she was my grandfather G.G.’s second wife, and no relation at all. Still, she understands me in the way a mother should and my own mother never has.

There are six other bedrooms on the second floor. She keeps all but one of them closed up for the winter. Actually, she rarely opens any of them now unless she’s expecting company, which happens more and more infrequently—or so she tells me every week, when she calls. Slowly I move through each of the rooms, looking for her, talking as I go. The ghost furniture stands pale, covered in sheets against the dust.

Exhausted, I climb to the third floor. Even now, at eighty-five, my aunt has more energy than I do. Somehow I know she is up here on the third floor. “Eva,” I say again. “It’s me, Towner.” I ascend the narrowing stairs heavily, holding both railings. I’m so tired.

This third floor is my floor. Eva gave it to me the winter I moved in with her, partly to appease me for having to move off Yellow Dog Island, which I loved so much, and partly because the third floor had the widow’s walk, and she knew I could use it to keep an eye on things, like May still alone out there on the island, refusing to come in. Except for an occasional climb to the widow’s walk, Eva doesn’t use these rooms at all now, and, as she tells me often, she hasn’t changed them since I moved. “They’ll be ready when you are,” she always says, and follows with some other zinger such as, “There’s no place like home.”

I climb the widow’s walk first, because I know it’s the only place Eva would go if she came up here. But there’s no sign of her. The only thing up here is a gull’s nest; I can’t tell whether it’s a new one or something left behind. I stand alone at the top of what was once my world. How many nights have I sat up here, checking on May, making sure her kerosene lamp went on in early evening, then off again when she finally went to bed? Every night of that one winter I spent here.

Salem Harbor has changed. There are a lot more boats than there used to be, and more houses around the perimeter on the Marble-head side, but Yellow Dog Island looks the same. If I squint my eyes and look past the harbor, I can imagine that I am a kid again and that at any minute I’ll see the sail from Lyndley’s yacht as it rounds Peach’s Point and heads toward our island for the summer.

I go back down to the third floor, where my rooms are. This is the only place I haven’t yet looked for Eva and the only place left where she could be. There are four rooms on this floor, which is gabled and smaller than the second floor, but the furniture up here is not covered with sheets, which seems odd, since Eva didn’t know I was coming. One room is a small library filled with all my school things: my desk, cotillion invitations, report cards. There were books required for school, and books that Eva required me to read when she didn’t think the school curriculum went far enough, old leather-bound books from the big library on the first floor: Dickens, Chaucer, Proust. Across the hall is the room that Beezer slept in on Christmas and during his winter vacations from boarding school. The last two rooms were my private suite, a sitting room with two fluffy couches and a little Chinese table between them. At the far end of the room, through French doors, is my bedroom. Since I’ve looked everywhere else, and since I know she’s got to be in the house somewhere, I figure this is where Eva has to be.

I push open the door, scanning the floor first, suddenly afraid. Maybe she didn’t come back. Maybe she’s been here all along, and they just didn’t check well enough. Maybe she has fallen somewhere up here and she’s just been lying here in horrible pain the whole time. “Eva,” I say again, dreading what I’m going to find as I open the door to what is the last room in the house, the last place she could be. “Eva, answer me.”

I’m afraid I’ll see her sprawled on the floor with broken bones, or worse. I close my eyes against the thought. But when I open them, there is nothing. Just the room as I left it the year I turned seventeen: the same Indian-print bedspread that Lyndley bought me in Harvard Square, one of Eva’s patchwork quilts folded into a triangle at the bottom of the bed. On the wall across from the bed is a painting that Lyndley did for me the year before she died, all shades of blues and blacks with a golden path leading into deep water. It is a painting of the dream we shared, entitled Swimming to the Moon.

I walk over and stare at the painting, and I remember a lot of other things then, like the time Lyndley stole a huge bunch of flowers from Eva’s gardens and got in trouble for it, too, because she almost wiped out Eva’s annuals. She had my whole room on Yellow Dog Island completely decorated with those flowers when I got home that day, and she’d really overdone it; they were everywhere. May said it was too much, that it smelled like a funeral parlor. It made her sick to her stomach, she said. Lyndley thought that was an accomplishment in itself, making anyone sick with her artistic renderings. For some reason she found that very funny. It gave her an idea. She made me put on a dress and actually lie down on the bed like a corpse holding flowers on my belly, like Millais’s painting of Ophelia, and she said I looked beautiful as a dead person, and she started sketching me, but I ruined it because I couldn’t stop laughing, which made the flowers shake too much to draw.

I am jolted back to present time by the sound of footsteps on the stairway.

“Well, there you are,” Eva says, not even winded. I reel around. She’s wearing an old flowered housedress, one I remember, and she doesn’t look a day older than the last time I saw her, the year she came to L.A. with some garden-club group to see how the Rose Bowl floats were made.

I start to cry, I am so relieved to see her. I take a step toward her, but I’m dizzy from turning so quickly.

“You’d better sit down before you fall down,” Eva says, smiling, reaching out a hand to steady me, leading me toward the bed. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

“I’m so glad you’re all right,” I say, collapsing onto the bed.

“Of course I’m all right,” she says, as if not a thing has happened.

She covers me with the quilt. Though it is far too hot, I do not protest. This is a ritual of comfort; she has done this more than once.

“I thought you were dead,” I say, sobbing now, with relief and with exhaustion. There’s so much to say, but she’s shushing me, telling me she’s “right as rain” and that I should get some rest now, that “things will look better in the morning.” I know I should tell her to call Jay-Jay and also Beezer and let them know that she’s okay, but her voice is hypnotic, and I’m starting to fall asleep.

“Rest your weary bones,” she says, reading my mind the same way she’s always been able to read my mind, pulling the concerns right out of it, putting peaceful images in their place. “Things will look better in the morning,” she says again.

She starts toward the door, then turns back. “Thank you for coming,” she says. “I know this must have been difficult for you.” Then she takes something out of the pocket of her dress and lays it down on the bedside table. “I meant to send this with the pillow,” she says. “But I am old, and memory isn’t what it once was.”

I struggle to see what she put on the table, but my eyes are heavy with sleep. “Pleasant dreams,” she says as she walks out the door.

On her command I begin to dream, drifting up the stairs and out the widow’s walk, then out over the harbor where the party boat is coming back from its cruise to nowhere, carrying a load of sunburned tourists. The sun is going down, and a new moon is rising behind Yellow Dog Island, our island, and I can see some women there on the dock, though I don’t recognize them. Then I hear the blast from the party boat as it makes its turn, and I’m grounded back in the bed again, sleeping there. Two blasts as it heads into port. You can set your watch by those horns. Three times a day, you hear the horns as the boat comes back to Salem after each run—at noon and six, and again at midnight, on its last run of the night.

Like the muffs they resemble, the lace pillows were gathered and tied on each end. Traditionally, each pillow also had a pocket, and the women of Ipswich used the pockets to hold their treasures. Some held beautiful bobbins imported from England or Brussels, too precious to ever use. Other pockets held small pieces of finished lace, or herbs, or even small touchstones. Some hid poetry written in the owners hand, or love letters from a suitor, which were read over and over until the parchment began to tear along its creases.

—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

Chapter 4

WHEN I WAKE UP, I look on the bedside table, expecting to find a note. Instead I see my braid where Eva left it last night. Almost waist length the day Eva cut it, today it would reach only to my shoulders. I pick it up. The hair is fine, more like Lyndley’s hair than my own. The length shows bands of color like the rings of a tree, a summer’s sun, a winter’s darkness. At one end is a faded ribbon, tied in a double-knotted bow. At the other, fine hair curling up around it, is a dried-out rubber band Eva put on after she cut the braid from me. It is wound very tight, as if to hold everything still and together.

Hair is full of magic, Eva always says. I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but at least it’s true for my mother, May.

May would never leave Yellow Dog Island for long. For this reason she didn’t take us to Salem for haircuts, but to a barber in Marble-head who had a shop only a few feet from the public landing.

Old Mr. Dooling always smelled strongly of stale whiskey and fried food and vaguely of camphor. He was likely to wound you anytime before noon. Rumor had it he’d once slashed a kid’s ear right off. My mother insisted she’d never believed that story. Still, May always booked our hair appointments in the afternoons, when the barber’s hands were steadier and his alcohol haze had burned off along with the harbor fog.

May’s haircuts were Marblehead’s version of a magic show. The townie kids used to form lines up and down Front Street to watch as Mr. Dooling pulled the rattail comb through my mother’s hair. With each pull, the comb would snag on something, then stop. As he reached into the mass to unwind the tangle, he would find and remove everything from sea glass to shells to smooth stones. In one particularly matted tangle, he found a sea horse. Once he even found a postcard sent from Tahiti to someone in Beverly Farms. On it were two Polynesian women, bare breasts covered discreetly by long, straight hair. I never figured out if he was sighing because of the girls and their various attributes or because of their straight, untangled hair that—although it might not have yielded treasures like my mother’s—wouldn’t have required a full bottle of conditioner for a single haircut.

The day my mother and I began to break apart was over a haircut—not hers, but mine. My mother had finished. Beezer had gone next, getting the Whiffle Deluxe, which cost $4.99 and came with a tube of stick-up for the front.

I had never liked having my hair cut, partly because of the wharf rats hanging around outside watching the whole thing and partly because Mr. Dooling’s hands shook so much. On one occasion I covered my ears with Band-Aids before we got to town, figuring they’d be harder to lop off if the barber made a mistake. But May caught me and made me remove the bandages.

Although I wasn’t fond of haircuts, they had never actually hurt me until that day. I watched as Mr. Dooling fished the scissors out of the blue gook and wiped them on his apron. The first cut sent a jolt through me like an electric shock. I let out a cry.

“What’s wrong?”

“It hurts!”

“What hurts?” May examined my scalp, my ears. Finding nothing amiss, she asked again. “What hurts?”

“My hair.”

“The hairs on your head?”

“Yes.”

“Individual hairs?”

“I don’t know.”

She examined me again. “You’re fine,” she said, motioning for him to continue.

Mr. Dooling picked up a lock of hair, fumbled, dropped it. He stopped, put down the scissors, wiped his hands on his apron, then reached for the scissors again, this time dropping them on the floor.

“Jesus Christ,” Beezer said. May shot him a look.

The barber went to the back room to get another pair of scissors, unwrapping them from their brown paper and making several practice snips in the air before he reached my side.

I gripped the chair arms, bracing as he picked up another lock of hair. I could hear him breathing. I could feel the chafing of cotton against cotton as his arm reached forward. And then I had what the doctors would later cite as my first full-blown hallucination. Visual and auditory, it was a flash cut to Medusa and thousands of writhing snake hairs. Snakes screaming, still moving as they were cut in half. Screaming so loudly that I couldn’t make them stop; terrible animal screams like the time one of the dogs on our island got its leg caught in the tractor blade. I covered my ears, but the snakes were still screaming…. Then my brother’s face, scared, pale, pulled me back, and I realized that the screaming was coming from me. Beezer was standing in front of me calling my name, calling me back. And suddenly I was out of the chair and lunging for the door.

The group of kids on the porch parted to let me through. Some of the smaller kids were crying. I ran down the stairs, hearing the door behind me open and slam a second time and Beezer yelling for me to wait.

When he reached the Whaler, I already had the bow and stern lines untied, and he had to make a running jump to get into the boat. He landed facedown, his wind knocked out. “Are you okay?” he wheezed.

I couldn’t answer him.

I saw him looking back at May, who was out on the porch with Dooling, arms folded across her chest, just watching us.

I had to choke the engine three times before it caught and started. Then, ignoring the five-miles-per-hour limit, I opened it up, and my brother and I headed out to sea.

We talked only a few times about what had happened that day. May made two ill-fated attempts to get me to see reason, taking me to town once to talk to Eva about it and the other time calling someone at the Museum of Science in Boston and asking him to explain to me that there were no nerve endings in hair and that it couldn’t possibly hurt when it was cut.

Sometimes, when you look back, you can point to a time when your world shifts and heads in another direction. In lace reading this is called the “still point.” Eva says it’s the point around which everything pivots and real patterns start to emerge. The haircut was the still point for my mother and me, the day everything changed. It happened in an instant, a millisecond, the flash of a look, the intake of breath.

For two years no one cut my hair. I went around with one long side and one short.

“You’re being ridiculous,” May said to me once, coming at me with a pair of scissors, attempting to finish the haircut and take back her power. “I won’t have it.” But I didn’t let her near me then or anytime after that.

We had family dinners every night, sandwiches mostly, because May would shop on the docks only once a month when she went to town. The sandwiches were always served in the formal dining room on the good china and were followed by a small Limoges plate of multivitamins, which my mother referred to as “dessert.” This final course could take a long time to finish, because May required us to eat the vitamins with a dessert fork, all the while practicing polite dinner conversation, something she had learned from Eva.

“I have a question,” I said, balancing two vitamins on my knife.

May gave me “the look.” I put my knife down. “Yes?” she said, waiting for me to ask in the small-talk style we had developed in order to keep from really talking about anything.

“Why did you give away my sister?”

Beezer’s eyes widened. It wasn’t the kind of thing we talked about. Ever.

May started to clear the table. I thought I could see a tear forming in the corner of her eye, but it never fell.

After dinner I went to my room. My haven. No one came in anymore. Every night I wore a ski hat to bed with one of May’s nylon stockings under it, covering my scalp, so that she couldn’t come in and trim my hair at night. I rigged my room with booby traps: strings, bells, crystal glasses I’d stolen from the butler’s pantry—anything that would wake me at the first sign of an intruder. It worked. My mother gave up. Once, my dog Skybo, whom Beezer had given to me for protection the summer before, got so badly tangled in the strings that we had to cut him free, but no one else bothered me. After a while May stopped coming into my room at all, but I never let my guard down, not for one minute.

It was Eva who finally fixed things. One day in late summer, I went to see her at her shop, begging for a lace reading. Except on my birthday, which was a family tradition, I didn’t usually ask Eva to read for me. I didn’t really like to be read—it made me feel creepy—but I was desperate. I’d lost Skybo. He was an unfixed male, and he had a tendency to wander. He was one of the island golden retrievers, trained by Beezer as a puppy, so even though he was tame enough for the house, he still had a wild streak. He was a great swimmer. Whenever I swam or took the boat, he followed me. Sometimes he set out all by himself.

I was a mess. I’d looked everywhere on Yellow Dog Island. I took the Whaler to town. I searched the wharf, the marine-supply store, and even some of the fishing fleet but turned up nothing. Finally I headed for Eva’s.

She was working on a piece of pillow lace, sitting beside a fireplace that was filled with chrysanthemums instead of flames.

It was late in the season, and the water was really cold. I was frantic. I told her the story, told her I feared the worst—hypothermia, maybe, or that he had been caught in a shipping lane and run over. Eva looked at me calmly and told me to get myself a cup of tea.

“I can’t drink tea. My dog is missing,” I snapped.

Like May, Eva had also mastered “the look.” I made the tea. She kept working. Every once in a while, she would glance up and gesture to the tea. “Don’t let it get cold,” she said. I sipped.