“Let’s play another hand,” I said. “Susan, you in?”
“Oh, Florine,” she said. “I wish you’d give it a chance. I think you’d really like it.”
She sat down, but then she popped up again and took the record off. She handed it to me. “Here,” she said, “take this home and give it a listen. Just a listen.” She walked back over to the record player and put “The Wanderer” back on.
“Gin,” I said, five minutes later.
But as the night wore on, I got agitated. When Bud kissed Susan’s ear, I felt his lips as surely as if he’d kissed my ear. I watched Glen run his large hand up his girl-of-the-minute’s leg. I lost concentration as I imagined Bud’s hand moving up my leg and reaching the place in the middle. Susan won the whole game.
It was ten o’clock when we pushed back from the table and went into Ida’s spotless living room. Susan and Bud sat down on a tan couch together, while Glen and his girl took up Sam’s large chair. Glen’s girl cuddled into his neck. Dottie and I sat down across from them in two other chairs.
“Well, what do you want to do now?” Dottie asked.
Bud said, “I don’t know. We could watch some television, I guess.”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can watch television there. Coming with me, Dottie?”
Dottie shrugged. We got up, humped into our winter coats, and headed for the door.
“Don’t forget to listen to ‘Yesterday,’ Florine. I think you’ll love it,” Susan called.
“Want to come in?” Dottie asked when we reached her house.
“No,” I said. Stella and Daddy were inside.
“You letting me go in there with all them grown-ups?” Dottie asked me.
“You can come and stay overnight with me,” I said.
“Nah. Guess not. Wish me luck with the old folks.”
When I walked into Grand’s house, I was surprised to find the television on. But Grand wasn’t watching it. She was sitting on the porch, rocking, looking out over the dark water. I joined her in my rocker.
“Thought you’d be in bed,” I said.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. Her flowered housecoat sat over a long, flannel nightgown. She had pulled on her ugly pink slippers and she rocked up, then back, showing brief flashes of her thick ankles.
Grand said, “Franklin and I used to go dancing up at the Rod and Reel Club every New Year’s Eve. He was a wonderful dancer. Quiet, but he talked loud with the way he moved. All the other wives were jealous of me. He took each one of them for a spin, but he came back to me for the last dance.”
“What else about him, Grand?” I asked. She didn’t talk about Franklin, much.
“The flower garden on the side?” she said. “Franklin planted it for me when we was first married. He dug up all of them side gardens for me and we picked out the flowers we wanted in them. He had to haul in so much dirt. Used to have Daniel Morse, up the road, bring down a couple loads of chicken shit. We dug up seaweed and mixed it all in with the dirt and got them gardens planted. On summer nights when the moon was full he’d wake me up in the night and bring me out to the garden to dance.”
I tried to picture a much younger Grand with Franklin, but I had trouble getting past the way she looked now, with her old lady hair in wisps around her head, holding on to a tall, thin old man who thought it was romantic to dance in a full-moon garden. It wasn’t such a horrible picture. I liked the thought of growing old with someone, being woken up to go into a garden he’d made for me and taking a turn around the peonies and roses.
“I miss him so, Florine. I never got to grow old with him. I would have liked to grow old with him,” she said, soft as the new snow outside. We rocked for another minute or two, then she said, “Well, I had him for some good times, anyway.” We went upstairs and said “Happy New Year” to each other at the doors to our rooms.
I couldn’t sleep. I thought about old people loving one another, summer gardens, my mother dancing on my father’s shoes, and Susan cuddled next to Bud on the couch. When midnight came, I heard a muffled “Happy New Year!” from the Butts house. A car drove down the hill, and I heard Susan and Glen’s girl call, “Goodbye.” Glen walked up the hill by Grand’s house and hummed “The Wanderer.” When the sound of his footsteps faded out, I got up and walked down to the kitchen and looked out the window over the night. All of the lights in the other houses were off. I looked out for a little while, and thought about Susan and Bud. Then I remembered Susan’s record. I figured I might as well listen to it, so I could tell her how much I hated it and get her off my back. I went back to my room and popped “Yesterday” onto my old record player with its worn-out needle. I kept the sound low.
“Yesterday,” the song began. By the time the second verse started, I had slipped off of my bed and onto the floor to sit in a puddle of sadness. After four times through the song, the needle got stuck in one place, and I kept letting it skip.
Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip. Why she had to go . . . skip.
I don’t know.
24
At ten o’clock on Monday, February 24, 1966, the phone at Grand’s house rang. I was home on winter vacation from school. I was close to the hanging phone on the kitchen wall, so I picked it up.
“Hello,” I said.
“This is Parker Clemmons, Florine,” he said.
My heart stopped. “Have you found her?”
Parker said, “Florine, honey, we haven’t found her. But I need to talk to Leeman. I couldn’t reach him or Stella at home, so I thought I’d try Grand’s house.”
“You can tell me what you need to tell him,” I said. “He’s uptown, but I’ll let him know when he comes home.”
Parker paused. “Well, thank you. But I need him to call me.”
I hung up. “Who was that, Florine?” Grand asked, walking into the kitchen. “Parker,” I said, then I heard a truck and saw Daddy turn into his driveway. I was out the door, down the driveway, and beside him before he could turn off the truck. “Parker said for you to call him,” I said. “He just called over to Grand’s looking for you.”
Daddy handed me a paper sack as he rushed into the house. It was heavy, filled with nails. The points pricked my palms and fingers
through the bag, and I dropped it. Nails scattered along the walk. “Damn,” I said, but I left them there as I hurried into the house after Daddy.
Daddy’s hands shook as he dialed Parker’s number. When Parker answered, Daddy said, “Florine said you called. Yes. (Long pause.) What? Where’d they find it? Why there? Well, should I go up there or what? Okay. Okay, I’ll wait for a call. Okay. Thanks. Thanks.” Daddy hung up the phone, looking confused.
“What’d he say?” I said.
“They found Carlie’s purse. That pink one? The one with the shiny gold buckle?”
Like it was yesterday, I remembered her getting into Patty’s car that summer day so long ago with it slung over her shoulder.
“In Crow’s Nest Harbor?” I asked. “The police up there found it?”
Daddy shook his head. “No,” he said. “Blueberry Harbor. In some woods off an old road. A guy walking a dog. Dog dug it up through the snow. Guy turned it in. Had everything in it, Florine. Her license, her wallet. Money. Everything.” As he said the words, I saw his face change as he realized what that meant. Carlie’s money. Carlie’s identification. If she was alive, she had nothing. It hit me, too.
Blueberry Harbor was almost an hour south of Crow’s Nest Harbor, back our way.
“When you go, I want to go with you,” I said, blood pounding in my ears.
“I don’t know as that would be such a good idea,” Daddy said.
“I’m going with you,” I said. I wouldn’t take no for an answer, and Daddy didn’t try too hard to talk me out of it. I went outside to pick up the scattered nails and wrap my mind around the fact that my beloved Carlie, my sweet, sassy mother, had walked through the horizon and was now on the other side of it and more than likely would never return. I clenched a fistful of nails to feel that pain of their points before I put them into the bag with the others. Then I took them inside and we waited for Parker to show up.
Parker drove us up to Blueberry Harbor later that afternoon. We walked into the tiny police station and were shown into a Detective Pratt’s office. Detective Pratt appeared to be about Daddy’s age. The skin around his mouth was loose. He had large pores in his nose and black hairs peeked out of his nostrils. Time and trouble had plowed a deep line on his forehead between his watery brown eyes.
He shook Parker’s and Daddy’s hands and nodded to me. “Young lady,” he said, and we all sat down at a small round table. He reached behind him and brought back a clear bag that contained Carlie’s pocketbook. The “contents,” as Detective Pratt called them, were in another bag. He opened the bag and put the pocketbook on the table in front of us. Then he put “the contents” beside it. Carlie’s red wallet and a red change purse. Her small, light-blue hairbrush. Clove gum and a small white handkerchief with a yellow C stitched into one corner of it. A dark compact with a mirror inside of it. A book of matches that read LOBSTER SHACK on the lid. A bright pink lipstick.
I reached for her wallet. “Florine,” Daddy said.
I looked at Detective Pratt. He nodded and I took Carlie’s wallet and opened it. On the left side, a compartment for change that Carlie never used because it was too small. On the right side, a clear plastic window showed a picture of three people. The photograph was water stained, but I could still see us. Madeline Butts had taken our picture down by the wharf the summer I’d been ten. Daddy knelt on one knee and Carlie sat on his thigh. She held me in front of her, her arms around me. Daddy had his arms around both of us. Daddy said, “That’s my wife.”
We followed Detective Pratt’s car to where the purse had been found. He led the way down a tramped-down slushy path into a patch of woods above a snow-covered pond.
“This is where the dog dug it up,” he said. Clumps of dirt from the dog’s claws had sprayed backwards, outside a small circle surrounded by yellow tape. That dirt and the empty shallow hole where the purse had lain among some crushed leaves were not half as interesting to me as the frozen pond, and one by one, everyone turned to look at it.
“She’s not down there,” I said, but my voice wobbled.
Daddy shouted, “Jesus!” and clutched his head. He walked over to a birch tree and kicked it, hard. “Why the hell does my daughter have to worry about that?” he yelled into the woods. He gathered himself together and turned back to us. I looked at the birch tree and saw the bare wood where his foot had connected with it.
“It’s all right, Daddy,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“No, by Christ, it’s not,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s all wrong.”
“Tomorrow we’ll conduct a search,” Detective Pratt said.
The wind that came up from the pond was soft for a February day. A blue jay flew to a branch overhead. It cocked its head and looked us over with its black sharp eyes. “THIEF!” it cried, then flew off, its bright feathers dipping over the ice on the pond.
Going home in Parker’s car, Daddy asked him, “What now?”
“Now, we work on why the hell the pocketbook was where it was and how it may have gotten there,” Parker said. “And we wait for them to search the pond.”
“She’s not there,” I said again. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. It was just one of the places where Carlie wasn’t, and never would be, again, at least in this world.
I was right. They found nothing in the pond. But the odd clue riled Daddy and me up in new ways. What had happened? Why was it there? If Carlie was not among the living, where was she? My grief took a right turn as I imagined where she might be, and how alone she was through whatever had happened. I tried to bat away the worst-case scenarios, but there were so many of them that I found it easier to let one come, ride it out, then wait for the next one. After a while, my imagination ran out of options, and I spun reruns of what might have happened until I was spun out.
25
Maybe it was the full moon on that early March night, or maybe we all read each other’s minds at the same time, but Bud, Dottie, Glen, and I ended up going for a moonlit walk. The night before, a wind storm with some snow, but mostly noise, had blown in from the ocean and up the harbor, making the houses on The Point shiver and shake. I don’t know how everyone else felt, but I curled up like a periwinkle, worried that Grand and I would be picked up, house and all, and hurled into the harbor without so much as an apology. So maybe the relief we felt when the next night gave us a moon bright enough to see the pimples on each other’s faces made us want to band together and just take a hike. I guess I might have started it, or maybe Bud. I was sitting on the porch at about nine o’clock that night, rocking away and soaking in the moon rays, when I saw him come out of his house and start to walk up the hill. It seemed a perfect time to join him, so I threw on my coat, told Grand that I was taking a walk with Bud, went outside, and waited until he walked up to me.
“Mind if I come along?” I said.
“Company would be good. Ain’t the moon something?”
We heard a door slam and looked over to see Dottie coming up from her house to us. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“We’re taking a walk,” Bud said.
“Where we going?” Dottie asked.
“Let’s see if Glen’s around,” Bud said, so we trudged up to Ray’s and convinced Glen to leave the television behind him. Then the four of us, bundled up and moon mad, stood in the middle of the road, huffing our breath out into the cold air.
“Well, you got me out here,” Glen said. “What now?”
“Let’s go into the State Park,” I said. “Not too much snow. I’ll bet it’s pretty in the moonlight.”
We walked through Daddy’s yard to The Cheeks, which were only a little icy, scrambled up over them, and headed into the woods, single file. I thought about that summer night only a few short years before when we’d gone on a mission.
“Remember?” Glen said, and we did. We laughed
about it as we walked along, although I got quiet thinking about Carlie, for not realizing back then that she wouldn’t be around much longer after that adventure. Would missing her ever go away? I didn’t see how. It was different now, like a deep splinter grown over by skin. I could see it but I couldn’t get to it, yet if I pressed it, my heart broke every time.
Dottie led the way that night. She plowed along, snow boots and thick legs making short work of what snow there was. I followed her, then Bud, then Glen behind him. A couple of times, I could have sworn that Bud touched my shoulder, then my back, but this was a night that anything was bound to happen. We all felt it.
We walked to the cliffs and looked out over the grumbling, tired ocean, so recently tossed and thrown by the wind. “I wonder if we’ll always come back to this spot,” I said.
Bud cleared his throat. “Don’t know if I will,” he said. “But if you do, be sure and wear your coat.” Dottie and Glen laughed, and I punched him, and we started back up the path.
“Home?” Dottie asked when we got to the crossroads in the woods. The path leading to Barrington’s was to the right.
“Let’s go that way,” Bud said, and pointed into the woods. So we walked to the summer houses, the path lit this time by the light of the full moon instead of a small flashlight. As we came out of the woods, the eye of the moon stared us down, causing us to blink, then take it in full on.
I wondered at the big dark house, left behind by summer to stand against the loneliness of the winter. “Hard to believe summer’s ever going to come,” I said.
Glen pointed past the house, to the lawn. “Look,” he said. A big pine had snapped, probably in last night’s storm, and it now covered half the lawn. We headed that way, drawn to its downed splendor. Glen and Bud climbed up onto its trunk and began to walk along, grabbing and weaving around branches. I breathed in the scent of freshly fallen pine, took some of the needles, and crushed them in my hand.
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