Elin Hilderbrand - The Matchmaker

Morphine. She said it made her feel like a dragonfly on the surface of a pond.

“I took you to Jewel Pond a dozen times the summer you were three,” Dabney said. “It was hard to get to, and more than once I got the Nova stuck in the sand, but you liked to throw rocks there, and we used to look for turtles. In the sun, it did look like a jewel. Like an emerald some days, a sapphire others. Do you remember it?”

Agnes said that she did, but she didn’t. She liked the picture Dabney painted: Agnes and Dabney alone at a secluded pond, Agnes wading in to her ankles to throw rocks while Dabney watched from her towel under the red-and-white-striped umbrella. Agnes taking a nap facedown on the towel while Dabney rubbed her back and read a Jane Austen novel.

Agnes and her mother, suspended alone in a happy, peaceful bubble. If Agnes had been three, then Box had been in the picture. He had been her “father,” he had adopted her in the months after he and Dabney were married. But he had been working, traveling, speaking, teaching, writing.

Agnes had held only one grudge against her mother, a ten-year-old grudge that was really the grudge of a lifetime: Dabney had waited sixteen years to tell Agnes who her real father was. Sixteen years. It had always seemed an egregious misstep on Dabney’s part. Agnes should have known much earlier; she should have grown up knowing. She remembered a comment made by Mrs. Annapale, her Sunday-school teacher, who had owned the bed-and-breakfast where Box had stayed while he was courting Dabney. Mrs. Annapale had said of Box, “He stayed with me every weekend until your mother agreed to marry him. Your mother used to bring you sometimes, too. Such a sweet baby you were!”

And Agnes had thought, Huh?

When Agnes recounted this conversation to her mother, her mother had looked very worried for an instant, then she mentioned that Mrs. Annapale was getting older and might soon be mixing up Mary Magdalene with the Virgin Mary.

That had been a lie, or almost a lie. Not telling Agnes about Clendenin had been a lie of omission, a willful deception of the very worst kind.

Or so Agnes had believed until now-today, this past summer, since Agnes had met Clendenin. Now, her feelings had changed. She understood now, in a way she hadn’t before, just how gone Clendenin had been for Dabney. He had been on the other side of the world. The only way Dabney had survived was to pretend that he no longer existed. Agnes also understood how profoundly Dabney loved the man, and had continued to love him over all that time. The combination of the love and the hurt was powerful enough to keep Dabney from telling Agnes the truth. Plus, Box had been there to step in, a real father in every aspect but blood. What, Dabney had asked-calmly in the face of Agnes’s near hysteria at the age of sixteen-does it matter? Clendenin Hughes was just a name; his parentage was a matter solely of biology. He had never been Agnes’s father, Dabney had said ten years earlier, and he never would be.

But he was something now. Agnes wasn’t sure exactly what. At the very least he was someone else who loved her mother. In this he was a comrade, a teammate, possibly even a friend.

One evening as the light was fading-darkness came early in the fall-Agnes sat watching Dabney breathe as she slept and she said, “I forgive you, Mommy.”

Tammy Block came to visit, and Marguerite Levinson came with her golden retriever, Uncle Frank. Genevieve Lefebvre came, and Vaughan Oglethorpe came, smelling of embalming fluid. And every third or fourth day, Celerie came to discuss strategies for the future of the Chamber.

Nina Mobley came, announcing the news of her engagement to Dr. Marcus Cobb! Dabney asked Agnes to open champagne, although she herself could not drink any.

The woman Agnes had once seen pulling into Clen’s driveway showed up, identifying herself as Elizabeth Jennings, but when Agnes went up to announce this visitor to her mother, Dabney groaned and said, “Tell her I’m sleeping.”

When Agnes reported back to Elizabeth Jennings that Dabney was sleeping, Elizabeth nodded once sharply and said, “I knew she wouldn’t want to see me. Please tell her I’m sorry and give her this.” Elizabeth thrust forth a tarte tatin. “I’d like to say I made it myself but really, it was my cook.”

“Oh,” Agnes said. The tarte was dazzling with its glazed golden orbs of apple and caramelized sugar, but Dabney hadn’t eaten solid food in over a week. “Okay, thank you.”

Dabney’s former therapist, Dr. Donegal, came and stayed past the ten-minute limit. He was upstairs with Dabney for nearly an hour, and when he came back downstairs he was wiping his eyes.

And then the most surprising visitor of all. Or maybe not. Agnes had, after all, been wondering, hoping, praying, but she had been afraid to ask.

When she heard footsteps in the hall, she had thought it was Clen. Clen was staying at the house on Charter Street most nights, sitting with Dabney until she fell asleep, and then sleeping in the awful, tiny bedroom in the attic. Like a scullery maid, he had joked. He wouldn’t take the regular guest room because he felt he didn’t belong there. The attic room had only one twin bed. Agnes didn’t know how Clen got any sleep, but he wouldn’t switch rooms no matter how she implored him.

But the footsteps in the hallway did not belong to Clen. When Agnes looked up, the person she saw standing in the doorway of the kitchen was her father.

Box.

And only then did Agnes break down and cry.

She had everything she needed. Except…

The hospice workers were white angels with wings and soft voices. They wiped Dabney’s brow, smoothed her hair, rubbed her feet. They gave her morphine. Morphine eradicated the need for forbearance. Forbearance was, now, left to the healthy, the living. The hospice workers read aloud stories from the book Clen had made for Dabney. Or Agnes came in and read them.

Ah, Dabney thought. Ginger O’Brien and Phil Bruschelli, ninth grade, the smell of the gym when basketball was being played in the winter, the squeal of sneakers and the thunk of the ball against the polished floor, the rustle and cheering and chatter of kids in the bleachers. Dabney used to stop in the gym for a few minutes after she was finished with Yearbook. Dabney used to mock up pages of the yearbook using rubber cement, and jellied squiggles of it would be stuck to her hands. She had worn her pearls and an oxford shirt and her Levi’s perfectly faded and broken in, washed only on Sundays and ironed while she watched Sixty Minutes on TV. Her penny loafers, perfectly scuffed, replaced at Murray’s Toggery the first of every August so that she could wear them around the house for a month before school started, breaking them in.

Could she go back to those days when she was happy and safe?

She said to Clen, “You had both your arms in ninth grade.”

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”

Clen was by her side. He gave the hospice workers a break or they gave her and Clen privacy, Dabney wasn’t sure which way it worked. Clen fed Dabney ice chips and put balm on her lips with the tip of his finger, and a few tears fell because Clen’s other hand, his left hand, had been strong and beautiful, too, but now it was gone. Turned to dust, Dabney supposed, somewhere on a distant continent.

She said to him, “You’ll know when to call the priest?”

Clen nodded, his lips pressed together until they turned white. He didn’t want to call the priest because he didn’t believe in Catholicism, maybe. Or he didn’t want to call the priest because it signaled the end. The priest meant something to Dabney, she wanted to confess her sins, she wanted Extreme Unction, she wanted permission to pass on to whatever came next. Her grandmother Agnes Bernadette had received last rites, and her facial expression had immediately settled into one of peace and acceptance, like a marble Madonna.

Clen had promised to call the priest.

But not yet. Not yet.

Ice chips, angels, hands soothing her aching feet, Clen’s voice, his mighty voice. How had she lived twenty-seven years without it? How had she lived without the green glen and weak tea of his eyes?

She said to Clen, “You have to find someone else. I meant to help you, but…”

“Hush,” he said.

“I couldn’t bear it,” Dabney said. “I was selfish, I wanted you all to myself. But, Clen, you can’t be alone.”

“Cupe,” he said. “Please.”

“Promise me you’ll try.”

“No,” he said. “I will not try.”

Clen, Agnes, the hospice workers-and then, finally, the priest. Not Father Healey, who had seen Dabney from Baptism to First Communion to Confirmation, but a new priest, a young man, a man too handsome for the cloth, if you asked Dabney. Father Carlos, he had a Spanish accent and soft brown eyes. He sat at Dabney’s bedside, took her hand, and said, “Pray with me.”

She had everything she needed except… And it was time to stop longing for that. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. She had confessed her sins and said her penance, but her real penance was that she would go without the one thing she needed.

Her journey was coming to an end. Forty-nine years. She had hoped for ninety-nine, didn’t everyone, but Dabney couldn’t complain. She hadn’t sunbathed on the golden shores of Saint-Tropez, she hadn’t visited the Taj Mahal, she had never seen the Hollywood sign or Mount Rushmore or the pyramids. She hadn’t shopped in Moroccan souks or eaten in a greasy spoon on Route 66.

But, Dabney knew, she had Nantucket. She had been born and raised here, she had worked twenty-two years in service to this island, and she would die here. She had been faithful to Nantucket. Oh, Nantucket, more of a mother than her own mother.