Folly by Laurie R. King
“Bleak House? Years ago. I hope to God this isn’t that bad.”
Rae’s normally imperturbable lawyer had been practically spluttering with indignation when she wrote the letter; reading it, Rae could see why: Don—and Tamara, although Rae well knew who was behind it—had filed suit to get his mother-in-law declared mentally incompetent. Not in so many words: The words were all in polysyllabic legal language and therefore barely comprehensible. But there were a hell of a lot of them: LPS conservatorship and Petition for Appointment of Probate Conservator, Capacity Declaration and Springing Power of Attorney were a few of the phrases that leapt off the pages and straight into her brain when she flipped through the immense document. Then a dread word snagged her eye, and she went cold: “Dementia.” SPECIAL ORDERS REGARDING DEMENTIA, the official form was titled. The next one read CAPACITY DECLARATION, and then the searing phrase UNABLE TO PROVIDE FOR PERSONAL NEEDS. That form included half a dozen categories of mental disorder from DSM-IV, all of which had been applied to her at one time or another. She winced away from the list, and turned the page, and there she found her case history.
There was page after page of it, a catalogue of Rae Newborn’s lengthy experience with mental illness, from her first suicide attempt to the recent year of hospitalization, with a heavy emphasis on the month before Sheriff Escobar came for her. A signed admission form was the only contribution by Dr. Hunt, Rae was relieved to see, but there were also copies of the police reports (How the hell did Don get those? Did Tamara have them, or were they somewhere in my house?), descriptions of her bizarre behavior that led to full-blown psychosis during the weeks after the accident. Delusional, said the admission form. Hallucinating. A danger to herself “Gravely disabled,” someone had typed (Oh, not Tamara, please not Tamara…), and her physical state when she had been readmitted to the hospital.
The conclusion was what she would have expected: Rae Newborn’s continuing and dangerous instability as demonstrated by her moving to the island, away from psychiatric and medical supervision and into a state of “extreme isolation and primitive conditions unsuited to a woman of her age and psychiatric condition, tantamount to a threat of suicide or a cry for help.”
The final piece of evidence was a photograph, dramatically enlarged and without the distraction of a caption, showing her current surroundings. It took Rae a moment to realize that it must have come from the rolls she herself had sent to Petra a bare two weeks before, the very photographs that waited for her in the envelope with Petra’s handwriting on it. The picture was of the tent on a particularly wet and dreary day, when her living quarters had looked as wretched and tawdry as a gypsy encampment. Only a crazy woman would live like that.
Damn the man, anyway. She’d sent him enough money to keep Petra in fifty-minute hours for years, knowing that he would suck up most of it. Why wouldn’t the bastard stay bought off? And she couldn’t confront him, not unless she was willing to sever all ties with the child, which Don knew damn well she was not. All she could do was what she had been doing all along, which was to give him money while more or less pretending that she didn’t realize what he was up to.
She found a pen and scrawled her signature on the form, clipped to the document, which in many long syllables reiterated Rae’s desire for Pamela Church to continue acting as her legal representative in this and all other legal matters, and then sealed the return envelope irritably.
“I’ll mail it soon as I get back,” Ed assured her, then he drained his cup and picked up the laundry bag, his long-sleeved shirt, and her envelope. At the dock, Rae handed over the empty propane tank that she had left there earlier, and thanked him.
The sun was high in the sky now, the still air very nearly hot. Ed cast off with insouciance and accepted her push away. The engine kicked into life and he waved to her, then turned the boat toward the mouth of the cove. As the Orca Queen straightened out, Ed took both hands off the wheel and reached down to peel his T-shirt off over his head.
It was, Rae decided with amusement, probably a gesture as much of narcissism, perhaps even flirtation, as it was of comfort: the human canvas proudly displaying its colors. And it was truly an extraordinary sight, a well-muscled, gray-ponytailed man painted from wrist to beltline, glowing in the sun. Most of the shapes were too far away to make out, except one: Ed’s entire left side below the shoulder blade was covered with a red patch broken by dark lines, and although she had no idea what the red was, the stripes looked very similar to the bars covering the bottle on his arm, only bigger.
Leaving Rae to wonder if her deliveryman had once worked as a zookeeper.
Or if he’d done serious time in prison.
Rae shook herself to shed her dark speculations, and found that she had held on to Pamela Church’s letter. She stood on the undulating boards and read it a second time, becoming aware as she did so of the concern behind the indignation.
Pam was worried.
Damn, she thought. Don Collins had been a part of her life for fourteen years now, and the only good she’d gotten out of the relationship was Petra.
Don had known Tamara in high school, when she was a sophomore and he a senior. They dated a few times, then he graduated and went off to college, leaving his old friends behind, including Tamara. Two years later, when Tamara was a high school senior and Don came home for his spring break, they met again at a party Tamara went to her graduation pregnant, although none of them knew it at the time—certainly not Rae, who had not seen her daughter more than a handful of times that spring. Rae met Don for the first time at the graduation. She met him for the second time at the wedding, two months later, a formal if hasty affair at the house of Rae’s ex-husband, David, the house where the bride had lived under her grandmother’s care for most of her life, the house where Rae was watched like a ticking bomb. Petra had been born the following January.
Long before Petra’s birth—perhaps, she suspected, even before he agreed to marry Tamara—Don had discovered the lever to pry a steady supply of cash out of his wealthy mother-in-law: guilt welded to family. Within weeks of the wedding, with Tamara barely in maternity clothes, Rae had stood outside the apartment doorway looking at the newlyweds, Don’s arm possessively wrapped around Tamara’s shoulders, blatant extortion in his eyes; in that instant, her financial relationship with her daughter and her new son-in-law was set. She wanted the newlyweds to move to a decent neighborhood? Fine, Don told her, but she’d have to help with the rent. She wanted Tamara to continue with her plans for college? Okay, but Don couldn’t afford two tuitions plus the cost of child care. An allowance, and an extra sum for health insurance and baby equipment, and the repair bills when the car broke down, and they really needed a computer. Then later—well, of course Petra could go to a cheap and basic day care with fifteen other babies, but for a little more …
It had been a source of conflict with Alan, who was deeply resentful, not so much about the money as the manipulation. By the time Alan came along, however, Petra was two years old and there was not a lot anyone could do to change the way things worked. The set monthly allowance died away once Don graduated from college and began to earn a salary in his father’s real estate firm; instead, Rae’s contribution went into a savings account for Petra (although Rae doubted much of it stayed there), to be supplemented by checks to cover the regular catastrophes that plagued the family. The vastly inflated sum for Tamara’s horse-training workshop was typical. Rae could not remember how many unreliable appliances she had replaced, how many tuition emergencies she had covered. The one time Don had tried a variation on a theme, asking her to become an investor in one of his schemes, had been the only time she had flat out refused him—the last thing she wanted was to become enmeshed in her son-in-law’s business. Even then, however, she had written him a check, to keep him in good temper. Rae had expected that the proposed visit from Petra would follow the same pattern, that permission would be given, followed by a regretful memo in Don’s writing to say that he was sorry, but the ex
This threatened suit was a whole different matter. Now, it seemed, Don wanted it all. He had probably gotten the idea during Rae’s hospitalization, when Tamara had been given a temporary conservatorship in order to pay Rae’s bills. That glimpse into Rae’s financial status must have set his mouth watering, and given him ideas.
Why, oh why couldn’t he have waited a few years to do this? Rae raged, but she knew damn well why he couldn’t: Petra. The child was thirteen, securely a minor, with five years to play her in front of Rae as bait and as threat. He knew damn well how much Petra meant to Rae, knew it better than his wife did. If Rae fought back, Tamara would side with him, and Petra would be lost to Rae until the child’s eighteenth birthday. A grandparent’s legal rights to a child were far from certain.
Damn, she thought. Damn and damn. How much was it going to cost her to buy two weeks of Petra’s company next month? She didn’t know if this counted as extortion or blackmail, but she did know one thing: For whatever reason, the stakes had suddenly expanded; the pressure would not stop until Petra was legally free to make her own decisions, or until Don got his hands on a lot more of his crazy mother-in-law’s money.
Maybe I should have asked Ed to take me over to San Juan and a telephone, she thought. Pamela had not asked for it, but the lawyer quite obviously wished a consultation, almost as much as Rae wanted reassurance.
Not this week, she decided. Maybe next Tuesday she would rent a couple of hours of the illustrated man’s time and phone her lawyer, tell her that what she wanted was to maintain the status quo, to avoid outright confrontation, to continue being allowed to buy access to her own family. If it left a bitter taste in her mouth, so be it. She’d eaten worse things than gall, and it was only for a few more years.
But damn, and damn.
To take the taste out of her mouth, Rae sorted through the other letters waiting on her cook table. The thick envelope from Petra was indeed the two rolls of developed film, and Rae ripped it open, then flipped quickly through the photographs, pulling a face at the shot of the campsite that Don had appropriated, remembering with the early shots how new the scenery had looked through the viewfinder, how exotic. Two rolls of thirty-six, and most of them, inevitably, rubbish: a bird on a branch that would only be noticed if an arrow were drawn to it; the subtle colors of a sunrise that came out dull gray on the paper. Some of them, though, were not bad. Two or three, in fact, were first-rate. One of the madrone tree sheltering the new workbench from the rain captured some interesting juxtaposition of the natural and the man-made that seemed to invest the qualities of one in the other: The bench looked like a living thing, emerging from a tree that itself looked far too perfect to be anything but an artist’s creation. And one of the photos of the house site before anything had been done to it was … eerie. Shot from the promontory in the angled light of early morning, the towers seemed to cry up out of the foliage like a pair of drowning hands. Tennyson, she thought; Tintern Abbey or Glastonbury.
Yes, a handful of the seventy-two were good. Professional, even.
And why did that particular word come to mind?
She pushed the pictures back into their sleeves and glanced at the other pieces of mail, most of them forwarded, most of little interest. But at the sight of one distinctive hand, she smiled involuntarily, then frowned. Vivian Masters, her wood man; more than that, a close friend. He had been, anyway, before Rae had decided that she could not afford friendships, had refused would-be visitors to the hospital, had on her release put herself in the hands of a trained nurse-cum-baby-sitter rather than submit to the loving arms of friends, had hired the woman to bring her up the coast rather than allow a friend to volunteer for the task. Strangers and professionals made no demands other than the financial, and did not grate on the nerves. What did Vivian want?
Dear Rae,
I hope this reaches you; nobody seems to know where the bloody hell you are.
I don’t want to bother you, but a couple of years ago you said you wanted a big walnut burl and last year I came across a real beaut. Just your kind of thing, dark and twisted and completely impossible for anyone else to use, but in your hands it’ll make the critics bleed. I’ll hold it for you forever, you know that, darling, but I just wanted you to know that when you’re ready for it, it’s ready for you.
No rush, girl. The tree has waited three hundred years for you, it’ll wait a few more.
I hope you’re better, Rae—last time I saw you, you looked like you’d been through the wars. Guess you had. Take care of yourself, girl, and, write a boy, eh? So we know you’re still walking the earth.
Vivian
When you’re ready for it…
Dark and twisted and impossible … Yes, it sounded interesting, it sounded like her kind of thing. Like my kind of thing used to be, once. Before I’d been through the wars.
Rae crumpled Vivian’s letter and threw it into the fire pit. After a minute, she fed the legal document to the flames as well.
Distracted by legal suits and painful reminders of times past, Rae went back to fiddling with the water line, and spent that day and the next at it. The work was hot and dirty, involving hacking into the ground to form the trench and continually checking the level, and she was overjoyed when, late on Wednesday, she completed the underground section, submerged the collecting end in the lukewarm water of the upper pool, and a few minutes later watched the first water trickle out of the plastic tube a hundred feet away from the spring. The rest of the line, aboveground and following Desmond’s path, would go a lot faster.
Thursday afternoon, more than halfway down the hill now between spring and house, with mud to knees and elbows, her back on fire from all the bending, her skin scratched and inflamed from the bushes and stinging nettles she was working her way through, and half her fingers glued together with the plumber’s cement she was using, Rae heard an engine. With a grunt and a groan, she came upright and staggered over to prop herself against a nice straight tree trunk until the engine came into sight. Even if it proved to be merely a passerby, any interruption was welcome.
It was not a passerby, it was Nikki Walls, stepping from her boat in a crisp uniform, as lithe as a teenager and nearly as perky. Nikki had stopped in twice since the day of their boat tour two weeks ago, each time bringing food, boundless good cheer, the curiosity and affection of a Labrador puppy, and (Rae had to admit) the good sense to leave before Rae grew too tired of her bounce. Rae pushed away from the tree trunk, discovering in the process that she had been leaning against a large patch of sap that was, now and forevermore, a part of her shirt, and stumped off down the hill to see what the park ranger wanted.
Nikki took one look at the shambling creature that came out of the woods, and left her hand firmly in her pocket. Rae waved a couple of stuck-together fingers at her in greeting and walked straight down to the shore, where the saltwater and sand scrubbed away the more superficial grime and made the myriad scratches and nettle rash sting fiercely. Plumber’s cement, obviously, was not designed to be soluble in water, but it would be a waste of time and solvent to scrub down properly twice in an afternoon. Besides, Rae was well accustomed to working with hands glued into mittens by one or another wood glue. It was one reason she almost never worked with Super Glue—getting that stuff off involved skin loss.
She came back from the beach to find that Nikki had already fetched the second chair from the tent and was sitting in it, thumbing through the photographs that Rae had been looking at again that morning and that she’d left on the log table beside the chair.
“These are good,” Nikki said, then looked up. “I hope you don’t mind—they were just sitting there.”
Rae had come to think of Nikki not so much a fairy as a small colorful mammal with the defining characteristics of curiosity and helpfulness. A Beatrix Potter red squirrel, maybe, tail flicking, clever tiny hands sorting through other people’s
“You’re welcome to look at the pictures,” Rae told her. “My granddaughter’s working on a school project; she wanted some shots of the island. I had her send me duplicates.”
“You know, this one of the bench should be in a book.”
Rae hoped she did not show the reaction she felt, a reverberation deep inside: She had sat in that chair with her morning coffee, studying that very picture and thinking that very thing.
Rae poured out two mugs of the juice, then dug around in her food storage locker for a package of fig bars and set it on the upright stump. With the formal hostess duties out of the way, Rae dropped into the canvas chair and leaned back gingerly. Even Nikki winced at the clearly audible grinding sounds that came from Rae’s spine.
“Thank you for interrupting,” Rae told her visitor.
“You sound ready for traction. And you look like you’ve been mud-wrestling.”
“I have been. I am determined to get water down here before Ed comes on Tuesday. I’m sick to death of fighting with those jugs.”
“How’s it going?”
“I’m halfway down. With the harder part half finished.”
“That’s great. Do you have a storage tank yet?”