Marcia Talley: Through the Darkness

“Do you think we’ll be fully staffed by the time we open? Officially, I mean, for the clients?” Garnelle asked, drawing the sheet back over my right arm, and a few seconds later drawing the opposite corner back to expose my left.

Under her hands, I shrugged. “I don’t know, but I certainly hope so. When I went by the office a few minutes ago, every chair was full, and there were a couple of people sitting out in the hallway.”

“So, he’s still interviewing? I thought he was finished with that.”

“He’s looking for an accountant. And I think there are still a couple of openings for guides.” Even as I said it, the word seemed ridiculous, but that’s what Dante’s ad on Monster.com had said:

Spa guides for upper-demographic, full-service spa near Annapolis, MD. Responsibilities of this role include receiving members at front desk, scheduling services, program registrations, payment processing, and telephone reception. Day, early morning and weekend hours; flexible time schedules available.

“‘Guides’? For a spa? What’s the world coming to?” Garnelle tut-tutted. “It’s bad enough when ‘associates’ are bagging your groceries.”

“They’ll be competent, but decorative, too, I suspect, although Emily nixed the skimpy white uniforms that Dante had in mind. Everyone’s going to be wearing khakis and forest green polo shirts embroidered with the spa logo.” Paul’s artist sister, Connie, had designed the logo, a stylized P that morphed into a semireclining female form.

Garnelle sniffed, then picked up my hand and massaged my fingers, one by one, as I lay, limp as a cooked noodle, on the table.

“Not there, you idiot!” Dante was disrupting my wah again. Judging by the beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up, the main doors to the spa must have been propped open and my son-in-law had to be directing traffic somewhere along the serpentine drive-laid out by my older sister, Ruth Gannon, and echoing (she said) the natural movement of chi -that led visitors up a gentle slope to the main entrance of the spa. Ruth was probably, even as we spoke, out with the gardener fengshuiing the heck out of the place.

Garnelle’s fingers slid away, and for a few delicious seconds hovered over mine, which tingled almost as if a charge of electricity was arching between us. “Shhh…” she whispered. “Stay here for a while and rest. I’ll be waiting by the sauna when you’re ready.”

Garnelle drifted away, her sandals silent on the plush carpet. I sensed rather than heard the door close behind her.

Alone, as I struggled to tune out the construction and feel the ocean waves roll out of the speakers, washing over me like a blanket, I made a mental note to speak to Dante about the importance of better soundproofing.

Outside the room, two people began arguing. Dante, for certain, and unless I missed my guess, Emily was the other. Dante spoke too intensely and Emily too quietly for me to make out what they were saying, but from the rise and fall of Emily’s voice, I could tell she was unhappy about something.

A prolonged scraping sound, followed by a splash, and someone shouting shitfuckdamn .

Something had fallen into the swimming pool, something big, but locked in the peaceful embrace of the sea, I was too far gone to care.

When I padded out of the sauna half an hourlater, flushed from head to toe, my hair curling damply against my cheeks, and sipping the fresh strawberry smoothie that Alison, one of the guides, had whipped up for me, I immediately ran into Dante. Still as tall and rail thin as he had been when he married my daughter almost eight years ago, my son-in-law was directing the retrieval of a lounge chair from the deep end of the swimming pool. Ben Geyer, the pool boy, had stripped down to his khaki Bermuda shorts and was poking ineffectually at the submerged piece of furniture with a long aluminum pole. He’d already shed his shoes. Next to the shoes, a sodden green and white striped cushion silently drained onto the tiles.

“I think you’re going to have to get in,” Dante told the young man.

Ben scowled. Clearly, retrieving furniture from swimming pools hadn’t been mentioned in his job description, but he stripped off his belt, draped it over his shoes, shrugged, and jumped into the pool.

Ben had his work cut out for him. The redwood lounge chair, heavy under normal circumstances, would be completely waterlogged. Barring the eleventh-hour arrival of a Navy scuba team, I predicted a swim in Dante’s future.

With a smile and a wave, I left the guys to it and headed off to help Emily.

I found her in the former club room, which was rapidly being transformed into Puddle Ducks. Surrounded by boxes, Emily was unpacking a pint-sized table and chair set painted in bright primary colors. Three wooden puzzles were already arranged on an identical table set up near a picture window that comprised one entire wall.

Behind Emily, my sister-in-law, Connie, stood on a step ladder, dabbing blue paint onto Jemima Puddle Duck’s paisley shawl. Jemima, in her sky-blue poke bonnet, curled her webbed feet over the chair rail and seemed to be speaking with Kip the collie dog about her lost eggs. Still wrapped in my spa robe, I stood still sipping my smoothie, admiring Connie’s handiwork. “That’s really cute, Con!”

Connie turned and sent a thousand-watt smile in my direction. With her copper curls, checked gingham shirt, and a dab of blue paint on her nose, she looked like Raggedy Ann all grown up. “It is, isn’t it?” Connie gestured with her paintbrush. “What do you think about that one?”

I turned to consider the mural on the wall behind me: Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter were picking blackberries in Mr. McGregor’s garden.

“Peter didn’t get any blackberries,” I corrected. “‘First he ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes; and then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley,’” I quoted, the story still fresh in my mind from the number of times I’d read it to Chloe. “Peter got a dose of chamomile tea, if I’m not mistaken. ‘One table spoonful to be taken at bedtime.’”

Connie waved a brush. “Poetic license. I’m an artist, not a novelist.”

I was still admiring the botanical accuracy of the mural when I noticed Ruth chugging down the hallway, both hands jammed into the pockets of the lightweight blue cotton sweater she usually reserved for working in the garden. She’d gathered her abundant silver hair into an untidy bundle on the top of her head, and secured it there with a pencil. “I told him and told him, but did he listen? No,” Ruth muttered before her foot had even crossed the threshold.

Emily looked blankly at her aunt and shrugged. “Told who what?”

“Dante! It’s poor planning, Emily. The day care center should be on the east side of the building, not the north. The Palace of Beijing put the little princes in the east. North is so dark, and negative.” Ruth lowered her voice. “It’s evil and calamity, too. Can’t you do something about it, Hannah?”

“Shut up, Ruth,” I hissed. That last remark was going too far, even for someone as militantly new age as Ruth.

Emily wasn’t having any of it, either. “That is such bullshit , Aunt Ruth.”

“Two thousand years of Chinese civilization can’t be wrong,” Ruth said.

“But in feng shui,” I pointed out, “there’s always a remedy, right?” I’d been around my older sister long enough to pick up on the lingo.

“Well, yes.” Ruth favored me with a smile, as if I were a prized pupil. The awkward moment passed. “And that fabulous mural’s certainly a good place to start.”