“Fuck you, Jack.”
“Oh, yes, fuck me. Yes, yes. That sad refrain. I would expect no less from you. Your last pathetic words. Profane, hackneyed. So predictable. So lamentable. Not your fault, really, but sad nonetheless.”
From his rear pocket he drew out the glass blade, its grip tightly wrapped with white adhesive tape. He angled swiftly in front of Norman, and with a practiced backhanded swipe, he slashed the big man’s throat. And then to be sure, he reset his feet, and staring into Norman’s flabbergasted eyes, he made a second quick incision.
For a moment, Norman gargled on his own blood. He staggered forward a half step as if he’d stumbled across the trip wire of his pain. Then the big man lifted his hands and patted his throat and stared with confusion at his glistening fingers.
Norman mumbled something, and he reached out slowly as if to take the mirror blade away and toss it out to sea, where it would harm no one else. A last valiant act. A final gesture of nobility and honor.
Dodging out of range of the big man’s lurching jabs, he watched as Norman’s legs gave way and the large, sad, lumbering man went down to his knees in the sand.
And then he began to talk.
A gushing jabber of words. A hoarse, attenuated sentence flooding out of him, blood-garbled and uninspired, it came, a last soliloquy, as if in cutting the big man’s throat, he had also severed Norman’s restraints, his embarrassment and confusion. Released him to speak his mind, speak and speak and speak the interminable sentence of his grief. Words and words and more words, disgorging like hunks of undigested meat. The crude eloquence of death.
He waited till the big man’s speech dwindled to a few final indecipherable words and Norman sank face-down into the sand; then he turned back to the frolicking girls.
“Hey, ladies,” he called out. “Emma, Jennifer, wait up. Wait for me. I’ve got an idea. I’ve got a fabulous idea.”
“What is it?” Jennifer called back. “A threesome?”
She tittered.
“Close,” he said quietly as he marched in their direction. “Very close.”
The girls were slopping around in the knee-high surf, dousing each other with slaps of water and giggling hilariously.
“Where’s Norman?” Emma said.
“He’s back there a way. Lying in the sand.”
“What happened?”
“He’s just relaxing. Gazing up at the stars. Contemplating.”
“Norman, contemplating? I gotta see this.”
Emma and Jennifer started back along the shallow surf. Jennifer kicked a spray of water at Emma and both girls squealed.
“Norman is your daddy. Did you realize that, Emma?”
“What?”
“He just confessed it to me. He’s your father. How does that make you feel?”
She spun around and staggered through the knee-deep water toward him, her dress saturated and glistening with moonlight.
“Norman was the love of your mother’s life. You mean you didn’t know?”
“What the fuck’re you talking about?”
“Go ask him. See what he says.”
“What’re you, crazy?”
“That’s why he’s been so patient and long-suffering with you, Emma. He’s your flesh and blood. And you’re his. You’re inextricably linked, the same galactic materials, the same crystalline web of biology.”
Emma stared at him for a long moment, then swung around and headed down the beach at a trot. Jennifer started after her, but he grabbed her shoulder and halted her.
“I think they need to be alone at a time like this, don’t you?”
“Hey,” Jennifer said, trying to shrug free of his grasp. “You’re hurting me.”
He smiled at her, let the wine bottle fall to the soft sand; then he snapped out his right hand and stunned her with a blow to her cheek. Jennifer’s knees sagged, but he got an arm around her back and caught her before she dropped to the sand.
He took hold of Jennifer McDougal’s jaw and turned her narrow face to the available light. He needed to see her eyes. He needed to watch the fear turn to anger. To rage. He needed to see that.
Jennifer swallowed hard and tried to say something, but he was holding her jaw too tightly for her to speak, lifting her up on her toes, peering into the shallow girl’s shallow eyes.
And there it was. The terror subsiding, the rage flowing in. Hatred, repulsion. Just enough moonlight to see her eyes, to see the flicker of pure murderous loathing. She flashed her nails at his face, but he ducked away. And then he let her see her eyes. Their reflection in the slender blade of mirror. He let her look for the briefest second—the last vision of this world she would ever have.
“Jennifer!” It was Emma’s wail coming through the dark. “Run, Jennifer. Run away. That guy’s a killer. Run, Jennifer. Norman’s dead.”
But by then, of course, her warning cries were useless.
He let Jennifer’s body sag from his hands, crumple into the surf, and he turned and waited peacefully for the small dark girl with the pale eyes to come hurtling out of the dark. This poor girl who had discovered her birthright a few seconds too late.
THIRTY-ONE
In her white jeans and hunter green turtleneck, Alex sat on the front porch and waited for Jason to return. She rocked and rocked, listening to the grains of sand she was grinding against the pine planks. Eyes unfocused as she gazed through the aluminum screen at the hazy, darkened houses across the way.
A long-ago fragrance stirred on the breeze, the sweet green scent of pine needles mingled with the hearty musk of the sea. One stray breath and she was again that sun-browned girl rocking on the porch of the Mellow Yellow. Unformed, full of naïve hope and confidence. Still there, trapped in the innocent past. As if she’d been left behind, forgotten as her parents drove home to Miami without her. Alex chasing after their retreating car with the dark-haired girl sitting in the back seat, that little girl looking over her shoulder, staring numbly out the rear window as Alex ran and ran after them, never to catch up.
In college, she’d read a philosopher who had determined that the present moment lasted only three to twelve seconds, and everything else was memory.
Three to twelve seconds. The juicy sliver of orange you are slipping into your mouth, the sudden sour burst against the tongue. Then abruptly, the next thing. The phone’s shrill ringing. Just that and only that until the next moment appears. An endless succession of brief intervals, always the present. Moments forever arising, and seconds later, forever lost.
But it was also within those three to twelve seconds that the past was recalled. So that every instant of the past was hostage to the vagaries of the present. Any story of yesterday had to be refracted and colored by the narrow lens of the moment. Even Darnel Flint did not exist except as Alex chose to revive him now. As if the past were not the past at all, but only a vast sequence of selective memory.
Accurate history depended on accurate journalism, good record-keeping. But how could there truly be such a thing? As a child, how was it possible to know which things to pay attention to? What to store, what to let go? How many times because of a subtle shift of the viewfinder had Alexandra Collins missed some great streaking comet across her youthful sky?
The same long-ago philosopher had described the past as a palimpsest, that ancient tablet that was erased again and again so new directives could be recorded there, a tablet whose surface inevitably showed the traces of previous texts. New replacing old, but the old never completely disappearing. Shadows remaining, the faint scribbles showing through, year after year, layer after layer accumulating, until the present text was little more than a muddle, a confusion of imperfectly erased sentences from the past.
Jason returned a little after one in the morning. He was drunk and soaking wet, carrying his jeans and shirt and shoes in a waterlogged bundle, tiptoeing up East Ruskin in only his sopping Jockey shorts. He stumbled up the steps, banged himself in the nose with the screen door, roared with laughter,
then pressed a finger to his lips and shushed himself.
He came over to her, dropping his soggy clothes in his wake.
He bent to kiss her, but she steered him away. He blinked, tucked his chin in tight, and raised a hand like a Boy Scout swearing an oath.
“I got waylaid,” he said. “Not laid. Oh, no. Not laid. I’m a faithful fellow, but I admit, I was waylaid.”
The acrid fog of his breath made her turn her head away.
“Maybe you should go to bed.”
“No, I came to get you. To swim. There’s moonlight on the water. It’s great. You’ll love it. There’s people from Bud and Alley’s, the chef and the waiters, and we shut the bar down, and then we went swimming. Skinny-dipping, actually. And I told them all about you and I said I’d come get you and bring you back, so here I am. They’re all naked down there. It’s great. You’ll like them. They want to meet you.”
“I don’t feel like swimming, Jason.”
“But there’s moonlight. A whole lot of moonlight.”
He was wavering over her; his mouth was rubbery, searching for a smile.
“No thanks.”
“Okay, okay.” He tried to straighten himself, get a serious look, control the bob of his head, but the booze wouldn’t let him. “You’re not a swimmer, then. Not a skinny-dipper. That’s fine. No problem. So we’ll go to bed instead. Now there’s the ticket. Bed. Yeah. Some serious slumber.”
“You go ahead. I’m not sleepy yet.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure, yeah. You want to be alone. Right. I can appreciate that. A woman needs to be alone sometimes. Sort things out.”
He stood there a moment more, then swung his head around and surveyed the porch as if he’d just materialized there.
“You should’ve been there, Alex. There was so much moonlight. I never saw so much in one place. Beautiful, just beautiful, dolphins rolling, it was spectacular. You’re sure you don’t want to go swimming? Just a stroke or two?”
“I’m sure.”
She led him to the bedroom. Helped him dry off and then shepherded him to the bed and eased him down. When he was inside the sheets, he squinted up at her and said, “Stop spinning, would you?”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll stop.”
“You’re still spinning. Stop it. It’s making me nauseous.”
She went to the door and switched off the light.
“Is that better?”
But he didn’t answer. He was snoring with such suddenness and fervor that for a moment she thought he must be faking.
In the morning, he shambled into the living room and with a groan sunk onto the couch next to Lawton, who was watching a fishing show on the television. Alex brought him coffee and aspirin and he thanked her with a contrite smile.
“Was I awful?”
“Not awful.”
He swallowed the aspirin and massaged his temples.
“I was close though, huh?”
“Close enough,” she said.
He sipped his coffee and watched with Lawton as a young sunburned man poled his skiff across the glassy flats of the Florida Keys.
“Shhhh,” Lawton said. “All that talk, you’ll scare the damn fish.”
When the show broke for a commercial, Jason asked if Alexandra wanted to go for a walk on the beach, but she declined.
“I know it doesn’t really work this way,” Jason said, “but I’ve got a ton of toxins I need to sweat out.”
“Go to it, then,” she said. “Sweat away.”
He gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek and marched off toward his penance.
After he was well away, Alex switched off the television, and when Lawton protested, she said, “Let’s go meet this Grace.”
He smiled and the light in his eyes powered up so quickly, it was as if she’d hit a switch that had been turned off for years.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” he said. “Those people stopped by for the money.”
“What people?”
“The ones with the pool company. I think it was the same ones.”
Alexandra stared at him a moment more, then turned and went quickly to the freezer and flung open the door. The stack of cash was gone. Using a dining room chair, she climbed up onto the countertop and pulled down the large straw basket. Empty as well.
Her father was washing his face in his bathroom, lathering it up with the sliver of soap. She stood behind him, caught his eyes in the mirror.
“These people, Dad, the ones who took the money. They saw you?”
“Oh, yeah. They were right out there in the living room when I came up from the beach. I offered them some lemonade, but they weren’t thirsty. We had a pleasant conversation. They weren’t as bad as we thought. A little strange-looking, but basically friendly folks.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Lawton rinsed the soap away and patted his face dry.
“I don’t like it when you take the Lord’s name in vain, Alex. It isn’t becoming to a young lady, that kind of gutter talk.”
“We have to get out of here, Dad. Now, right now.”
“Why?”
“Those people, they’re the ones who killed Gabriella.”
“Oh, they’re long gone by now. They got what they wanted and now they’re moving on down the highway. You can bet on that.”
“They tried to kill us once. They must know we can identify them.”
“I don’t guess that bothers them much. They didn’t kill me the other day. Had the perfect opportunity, too. Lots of guns, no one around. No, Alex, trust me, those people just wanted money. They aren’t thrill killers or anything. They got what they want and they’re gone. Trust me, I know my crooks.”
“I don’t know, Dad.”
“What’s your worry, Alex? You’re so tense lately. There’s nothing to be that tense about. Things always work out. One way or the other, they always do. Worst that can happen is you die. And hey, what’s the big deal with that? Everybody gets old and frail and sick and everybody dies. It’s the most natural thing in the world, next to getting born and having sex. So what’s the worry? When you’ve got the dying thing sorted out, you begin to see there’s just nothing worth fretting about.”
“We need to get out of here, Dad. If those people found us, then Stan can’t be far behind.”
“Nope. I’m not leaving here, Alexandra. I haven’t been happy for a long time and now I am. So that’s that. I’m an adult, and I can damn well decide where I’m going to stay. And I’ve decided it’s right here. So go on somewhere else if that’s what you want, but it’ll mean the parting of the ways for you and me. ’Cause I’m staying put.”
In a yellow shirt with huge pink hibiscus blooms and baggy black shorts, Lawton Collins led Alex unerringly through a labyrinth of sandy paths directly to the front gate of a deep blue Cracker house with red trim. The plaque on the front gate said DOCTOR’S ORDERS.
In the front yard, working at a potting table, was the white-haired woman who’d checked them in two days before. She was wearing faded overalls and a loose-fitting red T-shirt and was planting small green shoots in tiny pots. Her face was slicked with sweat.
“Grace, I’m back.”
She looked up and waved hello with her trowel.
“This is my daughter, Grace. She wanted to meet you, check you out. So be on your best behavior. No dirty jokes.”
The woman came over to her picket fence, smiling into the sunshine.
“Yes, of course. Hello, Alexandra, hello. So glad to meet you again. I’m Grace Trakas.”
She peeled off a leather glove and shook Alex’s hand.
“I say again, because we met before, when you were a little girl. That summer—what was it, twenty years ago?”
“Eighteen,” Alex said quietly.
Grace lifted her head and peered out toward the dunes as if those years were still lurking just beyond the horizon.
“Yes, well, I was living about a mile from here at the time and I remember you all very well.
Your mother and I had some real heart-to-hearts that summer. I was going through my first divorce, and she was a great comfort to me. My first woman friend, really. We kept in touch for months afterward, letters back and forth. But you know how it is. One of us didn’t answer a letter and it petered out. Very wise, your mother was, very wise indeed.”
Lawton tugged on Alexandra’s arm:
“Grace is my wife,” he said. “I married her and took her to Miami. But we decided to move back up here to Ohio. Too much stray gunfire down in Florida.”
Grace Trakas combed a sweaty curl of silver hair off her forehead and smiled at Lawton.
“My first husband had some problems with his memory, too. Started when he was only fifty.”
“Grace is going to give me herbs. She’s the light of my life.”
He leaned across the picket fence and pecked her on the cheek. Grace gave him a gentle smile and patted his shoulder.
“I was a doctor,” she said to Alex. “Retired now. But I was a GP for forty years, specializing in geriatrics. Now I’ve lived so long, I’ve become my own patient.”
Alex smiled.
“But toward the end, I was having some success with conditions like Lawton’s, using a combination of herbs. No side effects, mild benefits. But mild is better than nothing.”
“You got any lemonade, Grace?”
“I do, Lawton. I have a whole pitcher right up there on the porch. Lots of ice, the way you like it.”
He pushed through the gate and climbed the steps and Grace Trakas leaned close to Alex.
“He’s very sweet. But I’m sure it wears on you.”
“Sometimes,” she said, and paused. Then she said, “Grace, I was wondering if you’d mind—”
Grace interrupted her with a wave of the hand.
“Of course not. You can leave him with me anytime you want. He’s really no problem. No problem at all. Say the word.”
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