Oh, don't look so worried, Frank-the rope acrost the top of em n that warnin sign are both still there; it's just that I wa'ant much worried about that set of rickety stairs after all I had to go through.
I walked all the way down, switchin back n forth, until I come to the rocks at the bottom. The old town dock-what the oldtimers used to call Simmons Dock-was there, you know, but there's nothin left of it now but a few posts n two big iron rings pounded into the granite, all rusty n scaly. They look like what I imagine the eye-sockets in a dragon's skull would look like, if there really were such things. I fished off that dock many a time when I was little, Andy, and I guess I thought it'd always be there, but in the end the sea takes everything.
I sat on the bottom step, danglin my galoshes over, and there I stayed for the next seven hours. I watched the tide go out n I watched it come most of the way in again before I was done with the place.
At first I tried to think about the money, but I couldn't get my mind around it. Maybe people who've had that much all their lives can, but I couldn't. Every time I tried, I just saw Sammy Marchant first lookin at the rollin pin… n then up at me. That's all the money meant to me then, Andy, and it's all it means to me now-Sammy Marchant lookin up at me with that dark glare n sayin, “I thought she couldn't walk. You always told me she couldn't walk, Dolores.”
Then I thought about Donald n Helga. “Fool me once, shame on you,” I says to no one at all as I sat there with my feet danglin so close over the incomers that they sometimes got splattered with curds of foam. “Fool me twice, shame on me. “ Except she never really fooled me… her eyes never fooled me.
I remembered wakin up to the fact-one day in the late sixties, this musta been-that I had never seen em, not even once, since I'd seen the hunky takin em back to the mainland that July day in 1961. And that so distressed me that I broke a long-standin rule of mine not to talk about em at all, ever, unless Vera spoke of em first. “How are the kids doin, Vera?” I ast her-the words jumped outta my mouth before I knew they were comin-with God's my witness, that's just what they did. “How are they really doin?”
I remember she was sittin in the parlor at the time, knittin in the chair by the bow windows, and when I ast her that she stopped what she was doin and looked up at me. The sun was strong that day, it struck across her face in a bright, hard stripe, and there was somethin so scary about the way she looked that for a second or two I came close to screamin. It wasn't until the urge'd passed that I realized it was her eyes. They were deep-set eyes, black circles in that stripe of sun where everything else was bright. They were like his eyes when he looked up at me from the bottom of the well like little black stones or lumps of coal pushed into white dough. For that second or two it was like seem a ghost. Then she moved her head a little and it was just Vera again, sittin there n lookin like she'd had too much to drink the night before. It wouldn't've been the first time if she had.
“I don't really know, Dolores,” she said. “We are estranged. “ That was all she said, n it was all she needed to say. All the stories she told me about their lives-made-up stories, I know now-didn't say as much as those three words: “We are estranged. “ A lot of the time I spent today down by Simmons Dock I spent thinkin about what an awful word that is. Estranged. Just the sound of it makes me shiver.
I sat there n picked over those old bones one last time, n then I put em aside and got up from where I'd spent most of the day. I decided that I didn't much care what you or anyone else believed. It's all over, you see-for Joe, for Vera, for Michael Donovan, for Donald n Helga… and for Dolores Claiborne, too. One way or another, all the bridges between that time n this one have been burned.
Time's a reach, too, you know, just like the one that lies between the islands and the mainland, but the only ferry that can cross it is memory, and that's like a ghost-ship-if you want it to disappear, after awhile it will.
But all that aside, it's still funny how things turned out, ain't it? I remember what went through my mind as I got up n turned back to them rickety stairs-the same thing that went through it when Joe snaked his arm outta the well n almost pulled me in with him: I have digged a pit for mine enemies, and am fallen into it myself. It seemed to me, as I laid hold of that old splintery bannister n got set to climb back up all those stairs (always assumin they'd hold me a second time, accourse), that it'd finally happened, n that I'd always known it would. It just took me awhile longer to fall into mine than it took Joe to fall into his.
