ANNA PAGE WAS IN A BIT OF A CLEARING, THE FINGERNAIL MOON A light beam on her, standing frozen between the long stretch of adder snake and the shadow up the path. There were no such things as ghosts, she told herself. It was only another hiker in the woods, who perhaps knew the way out. She would walk quietly and carefully in his direction. He wasn’t poisonous.
In the moment of that thought, the snake slithered behind her, and a beast streaked at her from ahead, a primitive snarl filling her with the same terror she saw on the faces of patients learning their hearts were bad. She turned to flee, forgetting the snake altogether. It all happened so quickly, she wasn’t thinking about running, she was turning to run.
Her foot slid on the slates. Both feet came out from under her. She screamed as she hit the hard ground, from the terror, or from the pain of her hip landing on the sharp edges of stone, or from both. The beast continued charging, its monstrous head reaching for her with each stride.
“Bloody hell, what is it!” The deep voice sounding as the beast tore past. “Napoleon!”
“Graham?” Anna Page said. “Oh my God! Graham?”
Napoleon barked terrifyingly, a throaty peel echoing against the hills. The snake was already gone, leaving the awful animal to return to Anna Page. It poked its broad, slobbering snout into her, right up against her heart whacking hard and fast against her sternum as Graham came running, calling out, “Anna Page?”
She tried to remain perfectly still, to avoid the dog’s eyes lest he find challenge in her gaze.
Graham clicked on a flashlight to reveal the dog with his snout right in her crotch. “Napoleon, lay away, you bloody mutt,” he commanded. There was some lay in Napoleon—he went down on his belly—but there was no away. “Good God, Anna Page,” Graham said, “are you hurt?”
He ran a flashlight beam over her, finding a nasty tear in the arm of her jacket and in the shirt beneath it, a raw and painful scrape on her skin. “Hold the torch,” he said.
She took it—a weapon against the dog’s black mouth, if not much of one.
Graham lifted her arm carefully and bent it, a sensation shooting through her. Pain. Yes, surely it was pain.
“Are you hurt elsewhere?” he asked. Then to Napoleon, “Oh good Lord, Napoleon, lay away!”
The dog’s expression in the beam of the flashlight was so pathetic that it made Anna Page laugh with relief, and the dog licked her, a big sloppy tongue on her cheek.
Graham unstrapped the pack from around his waist and pulled out the emergency kit she’d been so quick to make fun of. He extracted a small pair of scissors and cut away the torn edges of jacket and shirt, which were as soaked and dirty from the forest floor as the rest of her was. He unfolded a moist cloth and touched it ever so gently to her arm. “That’s going to be a nasty bruise, but I don’t think it’s broken,” he said.
Clearly, he’d forgotten she was the one with the medical degree.
He set aside the cloth and opened first a tube of topical antibiotic, then a package of sterile gauze and tape. Napoleon settled on the ground and plopped his massive head on her thigh. The dog looked up at her as Graham’s steady hands dressed her wound, and she set her free hand on his fur—surprisingly soft—thinking of the last heart she’d worked on before she left California, a sixty-year-old African-American woman who’d had a massive heart attack. A widow-maker, it’s called, although it ought to be a widower-maker, with more women than men dying from heart disease, more blacks than whites. What had provoked the memory? The dog’s massive head? Graham’s hands so carefully tending her own wound? As the dog nuzzled her hand, begging action, she replayed the last moments she’d spent with my mother, all the signs she must have missed.
“Do you suppose you’ll be okay to stand?” Graham asked after the dressing was in place.
“Well, perhaps I won’t stand on my hands, but I don’t think I need my olecranon to flex my articulatio genus.”
He smiled slightly, a glimpse of unstraightened teeth, and still squatting beside her, he offered her a hand. In the gesture, she felt the shame and the bitter loss, the failure all over again.
“Oh, you’re hurt there as well,” he said, turning her palm that had been on Napoleon’s head toward his face. “Right there on the … that would be the metacarpus, wouldn’t it?” He touched a finger gently to the scrape. “It’s the muscles and ligaments we focus on more in the hiking world, but we enjoy sounding clever, too.” He brought her palm to his face as if to look closer. For an odd moment, she thought he might kiss it to make it better, the way Jamie was forever kissing whatever part of Oliver he had landed on, the way she supposed her own mother might have kissed her.
Graham lowered her hand. In the reflection of the flashlight beam off his glasses, she couldn’t read his expression.
“What on earth are you doing out in the woods by yourself?” he said. “What if you’d gotten lost?”
She turned away before he could see his admonition stinging as surely as a physical slap, before he could see the truth in her face, too, that she’d been horribly lost. Was she not lost? She pushed herself up and brushed the leaves from her slacks, her ears ringing with the remembered pitch of that last patient flatlining, the heart on the heart-lung machine emptied of blood, yielding to her touch where it once beat strong and sure.
“What on earth are you doing in the woods by yourself?” she demanded, anger filling the void left as she tucked the shame deep inside.
Though he looked taken aback, he only set an easy hand on Napoleon’s head and blinked at her from behind the wire-rims. “I suppose it’s what I do when I’m grieving, isn’t it?”
The dog sat unmoving under the weight of his unmoving hand, as if he recognized that Graham needed his steadiness, as if they’d shared this moment before. The two of them reminded her somehow of a photo she’d been sent recently, a transplant recipient pictured with the family of the donor. The donor had been a Teach for America gal killed by a drunken driver, the recipient a thirtysomething game developer who’d wasted some part of his fortune and all of his heart on cocaine, who didn’t deserve another heart but was the first match on the list. Months after Anna Page had all but forgotten them, the girl’s family sent her a photo: the mother and father, the brother who might have been Anna Page’s own brother, the sister who might have been Lacy, with whom Anna Page hadn’t spoken in a year. The dead girl’s parents stood touching the chest of the man who hadn’t deserved their daughter’s heart, in whose body it continued to beat. Just the photograph in a plain white envelope, with the name of the surviving sister on the return address. That was all that had come to Anna Page. She was living in Maine, the sister was. That was where the parents lived, where the transplant team had tracked them down to say that their daughter’s heart was beating but the rest of her was gone.
Graham reached his hand from Napoleon to move a strand of Anna Page’s wild hair from her face, the way her daddy sometimes did.
“I think my mother would like you,” she said, the words tumbling out with some force that she knew was too much. “You, too, Napoleon,” she said, stooping to the dog’s level, taking his face in her hands.
Graham loomed above her, tall and sturdy.
“She’s coming up from London next week,” she said.
“Up here to the Lakes?”
She rubbed the dog’s ears, saying, “She always meant to come, to see Aunt Ally’s other life.” She stood and peered down the dark path, Napoleon rising with her, rubbing against her leg, unwilling to let all that affection go. “Yes, I do think Ma would like you,” she repeated, “and I think you would adore Ma. Everyone does.”
He turned away, snapping at Napoleon, “Oh, good Lord, mutt, go chase your bloody snake.”
The dog moved to him, nudging his hand to pet him. “Good Lord, mutt,” Graham repeated, but he set a hand on the dog’s head, let it rest there. “I might open a room for your mum at Ainsley’s End, if that would do,” he offered.
Anna Page fi
ngered her bandaged arm, thinking there was no place to put her mother in the cottage, but uneasy with the idea of her staying at Ainsley’s End.
“That would be nice,” she said finally. “Hope will be relieved not to be crammed into the cottage with her mother’s ashes and her anger at Ma.” She stuck her hands in her pocket, her fingers meeting the tiny silver box. Napoleon made a hrmmmping sound, as if it were her presenting her mother in a bad light rather than the loss of attention that disappointed him.
“Well,” she said. “I should get back.”
She was relieved when Graham suggested he accompany her. “Mind, step in the torch beam,” he said. “And do let Napoleon lead, so he won’t trip us up.”
I do not often consider the stars, they give me a tissick. It is enough that there should be forty thousand named and classified funguses.
—BEATRIX POTTER, IN AN APRIL 1896 JOURNAL ENTRY
HOURS LATER, ANNA PAGE GOT JULIE TO WALK DOWN TO THE PIER ON the excuse of needing to check in at the hospital. As they stood outside the cottage door fastening the lock, she whispered, “Did you ever cheat on Noah, Jules?”
Julie’s expression startled Anna Page: the slightly raised brows over clear eyes so like the expression with which Jamie had greeted each pronouncement that Anna Page had a new guy.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Anna Page managed.
“It’s over, Anna Page. It’s done. You can’t convince me to get back together with my husband. If my mother put you up to this, you’re welcome to tell her I said forget it. I’m not going back to Noah. I want to go forward.”
Anna Page nodded as if this were exactly what she’d expected Julie to say. “Why don’t you, then, Jules?”
“Why don’t I what?”
“Go forward.”
“You—I am going forward, Ape. The damned papers are filed. I’m supposed to … what? Go out in the middle of the night to screw total strangers in dirty boats, like you do?”
Anna Page looked ahead toward the dilapidated boathouse sitting sadly at the water’s edge. “I thought you might screw him,” she said, the word awkward in her mouth. It was Julie’s word; Anna Page was just serving it back to her. It was, she remembered, the word that I’d used.
“You thought what?”
“I thought a good screw”—again trying not to stumble over the word—“might do you some good.”
“Hell, Anna Page, if you think I need you to find me lovers—”
Anna Page held her breath, but if Robbie was there, Julie hadn’t spotted him.
“Why don’t you, Anna Page?” Julie demanded.
“Why don’t I what?”
“Move forward.”
Anna Page didn’t know exactly what Julie was asking, except that it had more to do with Jamie than it did with men or sex. “Do you think Ma would find Graham attractive?” she asked.
Julie’s bark of disbelief rang brittle. “You want to do an Anna Page Woodhouse on your own mother? No. No, I cannot in a million years see your mother with Graham. Can you?”
But Anna Page thought it would serve her daddy right to have her mother fall in love with someone else. “Isn’t it funny what our moms didn’t tell each other sometimes, even as close as they were?” she said. “Like your mom. Can you imagine one of us not telling the other we’d been diagnosed with cancer?”
Julie could imagine not telling us all sorts of things. It was surprising what you could hide even from people who’d known you forever, or thought they did. If people didn’t expect a thing, they wouldn’t see it even when it was right in front of them.
Oliver’s soccer game, that’s where it started. Not the lies, but the rest. On a day when Jamie was having a dreadful morning but she’d promised Oliver she would go to his game. It was just a soccer game, and Oliver would be running around the field; he wouldn’t know it was Julie rather than his mom. It might easily have been Jamie’s idea, that’s what Julie said when she first told me this story. Julie had come to bring her sister groceries, and Jamie said she simply couldn’t do it that morning, that Oliver had been so disappointed when Isaac had taken him to the game alone.
“I’ll take your hat,” Julie had said. That’s what she told me. She’d wear Jamie’s hat and sunglasses. She’d drive Jamie’s car. And maybe Jamie had agreed or maybe she hadn’t. She hadn’t disagreed. So after she was comfortable again, after she was sleeping, Julie changed into Jamie’s jeans, took Jamie’s hat and her sunglasses, her car. Not the wig, though. The wig was styled like Julie’s own hair, made from what she’d had cut off after Jamie’s fell out.
When Julie arrived beside Isaac at the field, it was already the second half of the game, and Oliver was running toward the goal with the ball, his father cheering. Isaac didn’t notice Julie until Oliver was at the goal, as they were both jumping in excitement. “Hey!” he said, and he put his arm around Julie as Oliver’s little foot whacked the ball.
“Yaaaaay!” Isaac called out. “Yay, Oliver!”
He kissed Julie then, a big smacker on the lips, a fun kiss rather than a serious one, but still, it stunned her.
“Oh!” he said. “Oh my God. I’m … Shit, Julie. I’m sorry. I thought you were Jamie.”
Oliver raised his boy fists in victory and, searching the sidelines for his father, saw Julie. “Mommy!” he called out. “I made a goal!”
Isaac looked stricken. Julie felt stricken. But she put her hand around Isaac’s waist and waved, and Oliver ran off happily to the far sideline for a cup of Gatorade.
Julie slipped away before the game ended, before Oliver could run over to them. She returned to Jamie and Isaac’s house, changed back into herself, and told Jamie about her son making a goal. That’s what she told me, that she shared the details with her sister, as if Jamie had been there. But not the kiss. Not that brief moment of Isaac’s lips on hers before he realized she wasn’t Jamie. Not the putting her arm around Isaac and waving to Oliver, imagining he belonged to her.
For the sake of normalcy that Christmas, a month after Jamie died, Isaac asked Julie if she would help him host the annual Christmas Tree Lane gathering at his house, where Jamie had hosted it for a decade. It was a few weeks after her funeral, and Isaac and Oliver were home from Thanksgiving with Isaac’s family on the East Coast. The rest of us could bring cookies and goodies, and we could make hot chocolate, like we always did. We would walk the two-block stretch of Fulton south of Embarcadero that, each holiday season, becomes an extravaganza of lights and trees and displays: the requisite manger and child, and Santa and Mrs. Claus kissing, but also—because this is Palo Alto, where a bit of everything thrives—multicultural “Peace and Joy” holiday dancers and enormous and endangered polar bears sitting on drums. My favorite is a very realistic dummy hanging from a gutter, with his ladder fallen back against a nearby tree as if it slipped from under him, the lights he was trying to hang when he lost his balance dangling down the front of the house.
When Julie arrived early, as promised, to help Isaac set up, Oliver was napping, having managed to stay awake after school just long enough to cut out and decorate the sugar-cookie dough he and his daddy had made the night before. He’d spent so much time on a single cookie that Isaac finally asked if he didn’t want to decorate another, but Oliver had looked up at him with gray eyes that were Jamie’s eyes, her straight, serious brows, and said, “This is the way Mommy likes cookies.” It was an angel with red sprinkles in the middle and tiny silver sugar balls carefully spaced around the edge.
The minute the cookies went into the oven, Oliver lay down on the floor and stuck his thumb in his mouth—something he hadn’t done in a year, until his mother got sick—and fell into an exhausted sleep. Isaac, almost as exhausted, carried him to his bed and sat stroking his soft hair. By the time he smelled the cookies burning, it was too late.
He set the tray on the kitchen counter and lay down on the couch. He couldn’t much sleep in those first weeks after Jamie died, so when Julie arrived, he was lying there sta
ring up at a crack in the smooth, flat ceiling that Jamie had managed to create out of developer cottage cheese.
“You don’t happen to have an angel with red in the middle and those sugar balls around the edges, do you?” he asked her.
Julie uncovered a whole tray of beautifully decorated stars and angels, unburnt. She’d woken early to make them, before her shift at the library.
She went into her dead sister’s kitchen and opened her dead sister’s refrigerator, extracted the gallon of milk, and poured it into her dead sister’s pan. The burnt cookies were still on the cookie sheet, sitting on hot pads on the center island. It was the first time she’d been in her sister’s house since Jamie died.
Isaac went to wake Oliver, calling, “Guess who’s here, Owl,” leaving Julie alone with Jamie’s toast crumbs in the toaster, her stained dish towels, the dust collected in her refrigerator grate when she was alive. It was worse than the funeral, her sister’s absence more intimate here where she ought to have been. There were only ten cookbooks on the shelf; it didn’t take Julie a minute to alphabetize them.
Isaac returned with a half-asleep Oliver in his arms. He set his son down in the kitchen and turned him to see his Aunt Julie standing at the stove, pouring chocolate syrup into the warm milk. There was nothing to the boy. He was so thin. They were both so thin. Cookies and hot chocolate would do them good.
Oliver’s face lit up, and he ran and leaped into Julie’s arms, shouting, “Mommy!”
As she caught him, her elbow knocked the cookie pan, which clanged to the floor, the burnt cookies crumbling to pieces at her feet and on the countertop, on the stove, in the sink.
“Where have you been, Mommy?” Oliver demanded, his little head still buried in Julie’s shoulder.
The milk in the pan boiled over then, and the doorbell rang. It was the beginning of a very long night that never did see any Christmas lights or decorations, any dummy man hanging from a decorated-house gutter, trying not to fall.