“Did you find everything?” Agnes said, taking her turn for an embrace. They both hugged gingerly, and Maud was careful with their thin frames.
“Yes, thank you. Maisie!” Maud said, reaching down. Maisie rubbed her leg with her tail straight up. “Be gentle, Clem.”
“Who are you talking to?” Polly asked. She winked at Maud, who instantly got the game.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I heard you, too,” Agnes said.
“You are mistaken. I’m completely alone.”
Clemmie giggled and pressed into the back of Maud’s legs.
“Actually, I think Maud should have stayed here,” Agnes said, waving her hand at Leeward Cottage. “I thought she was bringing someone with her, but apparently not. Didn’t she say she was, Polly?”
“I thought so. Maybe we misunderstood, Nessie. Oh well. We’ll have to put all the toys back up in the attic.”
Their teasing voices were a balm to Maud, and she listened to the sounds instead of the words as the game went on. The afternoon had grayed, and it was sweater weather, an end-of-August preview of October to come. The briny, mineral scent of the ocean settled her nerves. Now she was sleepy.
Clemmie giggled in her hiding place behind Maud’s legs. Maud knew her rhythms, the extent of her ability to concentrate, and it was about time for her to appear. Maud was poised to introduce her when a man came around the cormer with a large droopy dog. Robert. She’d caught a glimpse of him the summer before. She wanted Agnes to write more about him, too. He could serve as a bridge between the reader and the families of the Point, a person who was and wasn’t part of it all. Though Agnes was too fiercely protective to think of him that way, even, Maud guessed, in her private self.
“A dog!” Clemmie exclaimed and ran over to it, hair flying. Maud had to admit, the unruliness had charm, and more so here in a tough landscape. Clemmie had her own sense of style. It was up to Maud to tamp down her own self-consciousness enough to let it be.
Clemmie reached toward the dog, but as she’d been taught to do drew her hand back and looked up at Robert. “Is it okay to pet your dog?”
He stepped back as though he’d been struck, and looked over at Agnes. She immediately took in his distress, and her furrowed forehead asked a question in return.
Clemmie pulled on his hand. “Can I pet your dog?” she repeated.
“Yes, yes, it’s all right,” he said, recovering. “What’s your name?”
Clemmie bopped a small hand up and down against the patient dog’s flank. “Clemmie.”
“I’m Robert.”
Maud heard this, but was watching Agnes and Polly, who were staring at Clemmie.
“It’s not possible,” Polly said.
“No,” Agnes said. “It isn’t. It’s just a coincidence.”
“What’s a coincidence?” Maud asked. “What’s going on?” She lifted Clemmie up and carried her over to the women. “This is Clemence, but she’s called Clemmie.”
“How do you do?” Agnes said, and shook Clemmie’s hand. “Try again. Grip my hand harder. Good. That’s better. Always show your stuff in a handshake.”
Clemmie squeezed Agnes’s fingers. Polly and Robert shook hands with her, too. During this introduction the stares never stopped. Maud was becoming uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, but what is going on?”
“Maud—I apologize. You see”—Polly shook her head—“it’s just that Clemmie looks exactly like the child who lived here once.”
“What child?” Maud asked. Clemmie pushed away and Maud let her slide down.
“She looks like Nan,” Agnes said.
“Really?”
“Exactly.” Then Agnes asked, “Maud, how old is your mother?”
Maud noticed a bead of sweat rolling down her back and catching in the material at her waist. In the deeper recesses of her mind she was making calculations, too. “She’s forty-five. She had me when she was eighteen.”
“And you said she grew up in Florida?”
“That’s right. With her aunt.”
“Does she remember her parents?”
Clemmie was back with the dog, chatting with her.
“No, not really,” Maud said. “Her psychiatrist thinks something happened to her to cause her to forget.”
“That’s sad,” Polly said.
“What happened to her? Do you know?” Agnes pressed. She reached for Polly’s hand and the two old women clung to each other.
“I wish I did. No one knows. The doctor thinks if she could remember she might begin to heal. I’m sorry, but is Clemmie’s appearance too upsetting?”
“Do you know anything more?” Robert asked.
Maud remembered he’d been Nan’s friend.
“Not really. She wrote a list of words the doctor thinks might be a clue—let me see—” Maud closed her eyes and pictured the piece of paper. “I think it’s SNOW, COLD, BOOTS, ASHES, FUR. I may be wrong, or missing one, but it’s something like that.”
“What the dog name?” Clemmie asked, reverting to baby talk. She, too, had caught the nervous mood. Maud thought maybe they should leave.
“It’s Hope,” Robert said.
Suddenly, Maud pointed to Agnes’s wrist.
“Your bracelets! They’re just like mine!”
Agnes pulled up her sleeve, revealing two bracelets that were perfect matches. “I gave Nan the third bracelet in the set when they took her away.”
Maud’s whole body throbbed. “Your notebook—Fur— isn’t that what Nan Reed called her father?”
Agnes nodded, tears in her eyes.
“But this can’t be happening—” Maud said.
Yet she knew it was, and it wasn’t logic or facts that convinced her. It was the sense she had that she knew this place somehow—through the When Nan books, yes, but even beyond that. To paraphrase Heidi, Maud loved Fellowship Point before she knew she might be here someday. She loved it in her mother, where its beauty still remained.
“Oh my God,” Maud said, and began to cry, and laugh. “Uh-oh, I told myself I’d watch my language around Clemmie.” She wiped her eyes as Polly and Agnes and Robert crowded around her, and they all talked at once, expressing disbelief and belief, asking and answering questions, sputtering anecdotes, until any doubts were resolved.
Heidi was Nan. The clues had been there all along, but it took all of them together to figure it out. Each of them remarked that the only thing better would be if Heidi were here, now. They looked at each other wistfully.
Agnes said, “To hell with tea. I need a drink. Who’ll join me?”
Maud touched her bracelet, her steadying habit. Agnes noticed.
“Your mother will wear that again one day,” she said quietly, and Maud knew it was true.
Drinks it was. Agnes reached out for Clemmie’s hand. Clemmie took it without hesitation and slid her other hand under the dog’s collar.
“I’m bringing Hope.”
CHAPTER 40 Maud, Fellowship Point, August 2002
LATER THAT NIGHT, AS MAUD was going over everything again in her spare, shadowy room, she hoped that she, too, would live a long life. Agnes had once proclaimed that the most perfected human beings on earth were nine-year-old girls, but Maud now thought old women were serious contenders. She considered words like resilience and curiosity, but they didn’t express what she had now grasped. Maybe when she got old she’d know how to explain it. She thought of Agnes and Polly’s bodies, and Heidi’s, too, and how these compilations of skin and bones were constantly changing and adapting, even as death moved closer.