Praying for Sleep

  Oh, man, here I give up almost a year's salary, sounding all grandiose and righteous, and look what happens? I lose the trail completely. What would you've done, Jill? Tell me you'd've told him to stuff it too.

  But no, Heck knew. Jill would've skedaddled home and tucked Kohler's check in her jewelry box. By now she'd be fast asleep.

  In her pink nightgown.

  Oh, baby . . .

  Then, suddenly, Emil's nose shot into the air and the dog stiffened. He turned north, toward Route 236, and began to trot forward. Heck followed, feeling the line go taut and Emil pick up the pace.

  What's going on here?

  The breeze blew over them again and Emil began to run.

  Glancing down at the asphalt, Heck closed his eyes in disgust. "Goddamn! What was I thinking of? Bicycle!"

  Heck commanded Emil to stop, then examined the asphalt and found a tread mark leading unsteadily from the car toward the highway. The tread was very wide; the rider could easily weigh three hundred pounds.

  The surest clue though was Emil, whose nose was in the air. When a dog raises his nose and switches from trailing ground scent to trailing airborne, it's a good sign that the quarry's on a bike or motorcycle. They'd probably been upwind of the scent until the breeze a moment ago blew a bit of it back in their direction. Emil's ears twitched and he doled his weight from the left paw to the right and back again, ready to run.

  Heck was too. Airborne scent is the hardest to track and even a moderate wind will disrupt it. A storm of the sort that was expected would surely obliterate it altogether.

  Strapping the thong over his pistol, he wrapped Emil's red lead around his left hand.

  "Find, Emil. Find!"

  The hound broke from the starting gate and surged down the road. They were on the trail once again.

  What's different?

  Standing on the edge of the lake not far from the patio, Lis was momentarily disoriented. This place seemed both familiar and foreign. Then she understood why. The lake had risen so high that the shape of the shoreline had changed. What had been a voluptuous outcropping of lawn and reeds was now concave, and a cluster of small rock islands roughly in the shape of the constellation Orion had vanished--completely covered with water.

  She turned back to her labors.

  The two women hadn't returned to the dam but chose to build the new levee closer to the house, filling and piling sandbags where the culvert met the lawn. Even if the lake were to overflow the dam a line of bags here would, if it held, stop the water from reaching the house. Besides, she decided, they hardly had the time or strength to cart several tons of sand a hundred yards through a rocky culvert slowly filling with water.

  Portia filled the bags and Lis dragged or carried them to their impromptu line of defense. As they worked, Lis glanced occasionally at her sister. The rings and crystal necklace were gone and her delicate hands and short, perfect nails--fiery red--were covered by canvas gloves. In place of the black lace headband was a Boston Red Sox cap.

  Portia lunged energetically with the shovel, absorbed in the task, scooping huge wads of sand and pitching them into bags. Lis, with years of gardening and landscaping behind her, had always assumed herself the stronger of the two. But she saw now that they were, in strength at least, on par. Thanks, she supposed, to the hours Portia spent on health-club treadmills and racquetball courts. Occasionally the young woman would stop, pull off a glove to see what sort of honorable callus she might be developing, then return to the job. Once, as she gazed out into the forest, Portia twined a strand of hair around her finger and slipped an end into her mouth. Lis had seen her do this earlier in the evening--a nervous habit that she'd perhaps developed recently.

  But then, Lis thought, how would I know if she'd picked it up recently or not? She reflected how little she knew of her sister's life. The girl had for all practical purposes left home at eighteen and rarely returned for any length of time. When she had, it was usually for a single night--a Saturday or Sunday dinner--with her current flame in tow. She even spent the majority of holidays elsewhere--usually with boyfriends, sometimes workmates. A Christmas for two in a far-off inn, however romantic, didn't appeal much to Lis. During summer breaks from college Portia would travel with girlfriends, or work at internships in the city. When she'd dropped out of school her junior year, the girl had abandoned her Bronxville apartment and moved to Manhattan. Lis was then working at Ridgeton High School and living in a small rental house in Redding. She'd been hoping that after her sister left Sarah Lawrence, the young woman might come back to the area. But no, Portia smilingly deflected the suggestion, as if it were pure craziness. She added that she had to move to New York. It was time for her to "do the city."

  Lis remembered wondering what exactly this meant, and why her sister seemed to treat it as an inevitable rite of passage.

  What, Lis wondered, was life like when you "did" the city? Did Portia's daytime hours pass quickly or slow? Did she flirt with her boss? Did she gossip? What did she eat for dinner? Where did she buy her laundry soap? Did she snort cocaine at ad-agency parties? Did she have a favorite movie theater? What did she laugh at, Monty Python or Roseanne? Which newspaper did she read in the morning? Did she sleep only with men?

  Lis tried to recall any time in recent years when she and Portia had spoken frequently. During the prelude to their mother's death, she supposed.

  Yet even then "frequently" was hardly the word to use.

  Seventy-four-year-old Ruth L'Auberget had learned the hopeless diagnosis a year ago August and had immediately taken up the role of Patient--one that, it was no surprise to Lis, her mother seemed born to play. Her monied, Boston sous-Society upbringing had taught her to be stoic, her generation to be fatalistic, her husband to expect the worst. The role was, in fact, simply a variation on one that the statuesque, still-eyed woman had been acting for years. A formidable disease had simply replaced a formidable husband (Andrew having by then made his unglamorous exit in the British Air loo).

  Until she got sick, the widow L'Auberget had been foundering. A woman in search of a burden. Now, once again, she was in her element.

  Buying clothes for a shrinking figure, she chose not the shades she'd always worn--colors that made good backgrounds, beige and taupe and sand--but picked instead the hues of the flowers she grew, reds and yellows and emerald. She wore loud-patterned turbans, not scarves or wigs, and once--to Lis's astonishment--burst into the Chemo Ward announcing to the young nurses, "Hello, dahlings, it's Auntie Mame!"

  Only near the very end did she grow sullen and timid--mostly at the thought, it seemed, of an ungainly and therefore embarrassing death. It was during this time that, on morphine, she'd described recent conversations with her husband in such detail that Lis's skin would sting from the goose bumps. Mother only imagined it, Lis recalled thinking--as she'd protested to Owen tonight on the patio.

  She'd just imagined it. Of course.

  The chills, however, never failed to appear.

  Lis had thought that perhaps their mother's illness might bring the sisters closer together. It didn't. Portia spent only slightly more time in Ridgeton during the months of Mrs. L'Auberget's decline than she had before.

  Lis was furious at this neglect, and once--when she and her mother had driven into the city for an appointment at Sloan-Kettering--she resolved to confront her sister. Yet Portia preempted her. She'd fixed up one of the bedrooms in the co-op as a homey sickroom and insisted that Lis and Ruth stay with her for several days. She broke dates, took a leave of absence from work and even bought a cookbook of cancer-fighting recipes. Lis still had a vivid, comic memory of the young woman, feet apart, hair in anxious streamers, standing dead center in the tiny kitchen as she slung flour into bowls and vegetables into pans, searching desperately for lost utensils.

  So the confrontation was avoided. Yet when Ruth returned home, Portia resumed her distance and in the end the burden of the dying fell on Lis. By now, much had intervened between the sisters, and s
he'd forgiven Portia for this lapse. Lis was even grateful that only she had been present in the last minutes; it was a time she would rather not have shared. Lis would always remember the curiously muscular touch of her mother's hand on Lis's palm as she finally slipped away. A triplet of squeezes, like a letter in Morse code.

  Now Lis suddenly found herself gasping for breath and realized that, in the grip of memory, she'd been working with growing fervor, the pace increasingly desperate. She paused and leaned against the pile of bags, already three-high.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and was startled by her sister's voice.

  "So." Portia plunged the shovel into the pile of sand with a loud chunk. "I guess it's time to ask. Why did you really ask me out?"

  14

  At her sister's feet Lis counted seven bags, filled, waiting to be piled up on the levee. Portia filled two more and continued, "I didn't have to be here for the estate, right? I could've handled it all in the city. That's what Owen said."

  "You haven't been out for a long time. I don't get into the city very much."

  "If you mean we don't see each other very much, well, that's sure true. But there's something else on your mind, isn't there? Other than sisters socializing."

  Lis didn't speak and watched another bag vigorously fill with wet sand.

  "What is this," Portia continued, "kiss and make up?"

  Lis refused to let herself be stung by the mocking tone. Gripping a bag by the corners she carried it to the culvert and slung it fiercely on top. "Why don't we take five?"

  Portia finished filling another bag then planted the shovel and pulled off the gloves, examining a red spot on her index finger. She sat down, beside her sister, on the low wall of bags.

  After a moment Lis continued, "I'm thinking of leaving teaching."

  Her sister didn't seem surprised. "I never could quite see you as a teacher."

  And what exactly did she see me as? Lis wondered. She assumed Portia had opinions about her career--and about the rest of her life, for that matter--but couldn't imagine what they might be.

  "Teaching's been good to me. I've enjoyed it enough. But I think it's time for a change."

  "Well, you're a rich woman now. Live off the fat of the land."

  "Well, I'm not going to just quit."

  "Why not? Stay home and garden. Watch Oprah and Regis. There're worse lives."

  "You know Langdell Nursery?"

  "Nope." The young woman squinted, shaking her head. "Oh, wait, that place off 236?"

  "We used to go there all the time. With Mother. They'd let us water flowers in the hothouse."

  "Vaguely. That's where they had those big bins of onions?"

  Lis laughed softly. "Flower bulbs."

  "Right. It's still there?"

  "It's for sale. The nursery and a landscaping company the family owns."

  "Jesus, look." Portia was gazing across the lake into the state park. The water had pushed an old boathouse off its pilings. The ghostly white structure of rotting clapboard dipped slowly into the water.

  "The state was going to tear it down." Lis nodded toward the boathouse. "The taxpayers just saved a few dollars, looks like. The nursery, I was saying? . . ." She rubbed her hands together a few times and felt her palms go cold as the nervous sweat evaporated. "I think I'm going to buy the place."

  Portia nodded. Again a bit of yellow hair wound between her fingers and the tips of the strands slipped into her mouth. In the muted light, her face seemed particularly pale and her lips black. Had she refreshed her lipstick before coming out here to stack sandbags?

  "I need a partner," Lis said slowly. "And I was thinking I'd like it to be you."

  Portia laughed. She was a pretty woman and could instantly, as if by turning on a switch, become entirely sensual or charming or cute. Yet she often laughed with a deep breathiness that, Lis felt, instantly killed her appeal. This usually occurred when, as now, she was critical in an obscure way, leaving it to others to deduce their slipups.

  Heat bristled at Lis's temples as the blush washed over her face. "I don't know business. Finances, marketing, things like that. You do."

  "I'm a media buyer, Lis. I'm not Donald Trump."

  "You know more than I do. You're always talking about getting out of advertising. You were thinking about opening a boutique last year."

  "Everybody in advertising talks about quitting and opening a boutique. Or a catering company. You and me in business?"

  "It's a good deal. Langdell died last year and his wife doesn't want to keep running the place. They're asking three million for everything. The land alone's worth two. Mortgage rates are great now. And Angie said she'd be willing to finance some of it herself, as long as she gets a million and a half at the closing."

  "You're serious, aren't you?"

  "I need a change, Portia. I love gardens and--"

  "No, I think it makes sense for you. I meant, you're serious about us. Worki