Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [49]
And now the pinging was especially irritating because it was interrupting that something that she needed to be figuring out, a revelation that had come to her and then retreated, the way her thoughts did her sometimes, as if her thoughts were playing a child’s game of tag, calling out to her, “Catch me if you can.”
She’d noticed, though, that her thoughts took a seat in her brain when she first woke up, hung around some so she could mull over them. But right after her morning medication her thoughts turned to vagabonds, drifting in and out like aimless smoke until the smoke darkened to that blue haze. So this morning she had taken only one of her pills, hoping to forestall that thick navy haze. The other pill she slipped inside the generous tuck around her pillowcase; she would take it later, she told herself as she inhaled deeply to try to remember the burst of insight she just had. Nothing was coming to her though. Just the smell of White-All shoe polish that her nurse used every morning in the utility room next door; she’d hear her walking down the hall in her street shoes, she guessed, while she left her nurse’s shoes there to dry.
She sighed deeply since she couldn’t remember, decided to think about her Finch and all the questions still unanswered about the way he vanished. She squeezed her eyes shut and was seeing the hastily written note that Finch had left on her bureau, probably the last note he penned before he disappeared. After Clarise had calmed Shern, Victoria, and Bliss that Tuesday when both Finch and his “steady Eddie” Tuesday night brownies were absent from the house, and she’d knelt with the girls while they said their prayers at the sides of their beds—“Please, God,” let our daddy be okay,” they’d prayed—Clarise had stumbled, choking on her pent-up tears, into her bedroom. There, right in the center of her dresser, a corner of the paper pressed beneath her velvet-lined wooden jewelry box that played “Sincerely” when it was opened, was Finch’s note. “My darling Clarise,” it said, “I’ve gone crabbing in the luscious salty waters right off of the Maryland shore. Here is the recipe for the brownies that our precious daughters devour so. Feel free to substitute pecans for walnuts. All my love, your Finch.”
He had in fact gone down to the Maryland shore, Clarise was certain. And he had rented the crabbing boat from his second cousin Harel. Harel had produced a mimeographed copy of the receipt, had turned it over to the Maryland police investigating the boating accident. Apparently Finch had netted a good catch too; crabs still clung to the floor of the boat when it washed ashore. The police and the coast guard could not say for certain what made Finch take the small, rickety boat into deeper waters. They surmised he was trying to make it across the inlet to the other side of the shoreline, also known for copious crab catches, when the storm came up and the boat capsized. It must have happened suddenly because Finch wasn’t wearing a life jacket even though Clarise always thought him to be no better than a moderate swimmer.
Now as she sat at the window, waiting to see the aunts and uncles walk through the courtyard, she wondered