by Tony Abbott
I turned to the hallway. “I didn’t recognize your voice.”
“Face masks are good for lots of things,” said Dobbsy.
Emerson smiled. “I always wanted your father to find out this way. But he had his accident, and you followed the trail instead. I sometimes think maybe he’s been damaged too much to ever want to know.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “I think he’d want to know.”
“At least you were a good detective.”
“I had help,” I said.
He glanced into the hall at Dia. “I’m glad you found the card. I’m getting old, and you and your father had to know all of it. Before it goes away with me.”
“But the mystery, the chase,” I said. “Why did we go through all that?”
He sat quietly for a while, looking off and thinking as if far, far away, and saying nothing. But I guess I already knew why. It was like Heinrich Punch had said. “For ze danger und ze glory.” The mystery was the heart of what Nick and Marnie had. The air was alive with love and danger. So were we. Of course they were. It was that that kept them going. And that kept us going, too.
He turned to me. “Jason, you followed the trail all the way here. I guess there’s nothing to do now but to keep following it.”
“Keep following it?” I said. “Where does the story go from here?”
“You’re smart. You’ll figure it out,” he said, starting to cough then. A nurse came in and settled him back into his bed. “Meds time,” he said. “When your dad’s better, bring him here? We have a lot to talk about.” Then, handing back the hotel postcard, he added, “Take care of this.”
I said I would, and the nurse asked us to leave.
Chester Dobbs was staying behind, so Mrs. Keats, Dia, and I headed back out the doors when the taxi she had called arrived. Mrs. K went home to sleep and told me that her key would be in the mailbox again — my mailbox, which is why I hadn’t found it the night before. I told her I’d be back after walking Dia home.
But I never made it. Dia and I stayed up all night in her backyard, talking, then not talking. The sun came up early the next day. No free newspaper.
I called Dad. He said he had been hopping mad at me, ready to call out the Army except that Mrs. Keats had come to see him the day before and told him what a busy little house cleaner I was. Then he said that he had talked to Mom. He sounded rested and stronger. He said he actually would be getting out at noon. I told him I’d be there.
“Uh-huh. And are you really going to be here?” he asked.
“Really.”
Not even a fraction tired, Dia and I then went back to Grandma’s house and neatened it up to be ready for him, saying very little. I expected Becca to come any time, and Randy might be there soon with the first folks looking to buy, though I had my own thoughts about that. I figured I’d better have at least one thing done that Dad had asked me to do, so we walked back to Dia’s for the lawnmower.
While she wheeled it from the garage, I stood in her driveway holding the postcard of the Hotel DeSoto.
Nick had said that he and Marnie were really only in the story. Okay. But wasn’t it more than that? Weren’t we all in the story now, too? Maybe the story was still going on around us, and he lived in it and his friends did, and the Secret Order of Oobarab, and maybe even I did and Dia did, too. It was in the postcards and the places, in the grass and sand and swamps, in the trees and in the air around us. With all these ideas bobbling around inside my brain, I was ready to cry or sigh or laugh or feel some big emotion, but something else happened instead.
Bringing the card slowly up to eye level, I began to shake.
“Dia,” I said. “Dia. Dia!”
“I’m adding oil,” she said. “What?”
A new pinhole of light twinkled from the picture. It shone from the leftmost lobby window of the hotel like a tiny beacon.
“Nick added a second hole!” I said. “A hole that wasn’t here before!”
She grabbed the card from me and held it to the sky. Her face lit up like a sun. “Holy crikey and a half! The last chapter of the story! It’s at the hotel! We have to go there!”
“They’re tearing it down today —”
But she was already running to the house yelling, “Mommy, Mommy! We need a ride!”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
We didn’t stop to eat or go to the bathroom, but we did stop and drag Randy Halbert from his icy office, and were still at the Hotel DeSoto in eighteen minutes. I could give you a play-by-play, but mostly it was Randy who knew everyone, since he was Mr. Real Estate and was part of the mall going up there. We found out he could bend the truth pretty well, too. He told everyone that Dia and I needed five minutes alone to take pictures for a photographic history project.
Not a lot of time, but a chance to find the end of the story.
Using the new pinhole on the postcard, we searched around the giant left window inside the lobby. The glass wasn’t there but something Dia called a cornice was, which was a long narrow box over the window behind which all the curtain works were hidden.
We stacked junk high and climbed onto the thing and searched. After only a minute and a half, Dia found it. Snugged inside the uppermost part of the decoration on top of it was a single piece of paper. She unfolded it slowly, looking at me the whole time.
“The end,” she said. “My gosh, Jason, I’m shaking.”
I wondered at first how anything could still be there after the way the hotel was torn apart, but when I saw the words I knew it hadn’t been there very long. It was done on a computer.
“Dobbsy hid this,” said Dia, smiling. “Like . . . this morning.”
We jumped down into the dust without reading it. Just before we left, I took as many pictures as I could, including one of Dia at the bottom of the stairs, holding the final page of Emerson Beale’s story like a prize.
The lobby shimmered in the light reflected from the building opposite, and I felt the heat again as I hadn’t for a while. I was sticky in my shirt. I loved it.
When Randy called from the door — “Time’s up, guys. Really.” — Dia and I thanked him, then went to the diner across the street, where we sat for the next hour, reading that one page over and over and over. I was crying by the end of it. So was Dia.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
— V —
A FLORIDA OF THE MIND
By Emerson Beale
The sun came up on the beach that first morning under wild palms, and the next morning, and the one after that, too. Our lives were magic.
For a few weeks.
But no matter what she said or did or how she smiled at me, Marnie couldn’t last long without her doctors. She was fading.
Whether Fang was the devil of a soulless ghost I’d always thought he was, or just a father torn apart by guilt and pain, didn’t matter anymore. Marnie was slipping away from me, day by day, week by week.
They say you’re whole again when you fly up to heaven. Just maybe, I thought, you can be whole again in a story, too. If we couldn’t be together in life, we could be together there. There it was always Nick and Marnie. Marnie and Nick. Just a little story of a girl trying to fly and a bad man trying to hold her down and a guy running through Hades to save her. That’s the way that story went. That’s the way it keeps on going.
After a while, the story was all we had.
But that was plenty. The more I looked, the more I found it all around me.
Our story was in the palms swaying wildly in the sea breezes. It was in the alligators moving slowly on the mudbanks, scraping their fat bellies noisily into the water . . . scooo . . . splash. . . . It was in the sound of insects whirring at twilight and in the hovering blur of hummingbirds.
It was in the way moss hangs from low branches; the thick, greeny smell of it, and how sometimes when you walk under its tendrils in the early blue morning they touch your face with a damp coolness, but you don’t wipe it away because that would break the charm.
It
was in people, too, living people, who carry it in their own lives so that the charm never breaks.
It has a name, that charm we have.
Florida.
So that was everything. The last word. We must have read that page fifty times without leaving the booth. My heart was heavy and full and coming apart in my chest, but it felt about as good and right as anything ever had. And I knew that if I hadn’t felt something then, I would never feel anything ever. Across the table from me, Dia’s eyes were wet. I wanted to reach out to her, or do something. I don’t even know what I wanted other than not to be anywhere else in the world.
A big commotion came then, and all the trucks moved out. We couldn’t have gotten near the hotel if we’d wanted to. The cranes came in, the wrecking balls swung, and the Hotel DeSoto came down in crash after crash of cinder blocks and dust.
“He saw her there first,” said Dia, watching the plumes of dust rise straight up. “There’s just the postcard now.”
We left the diner. It was still early. Dia said we could walk partway to the hospital and be there before ten, so Mrs. Martin drove us for a bit, then went on ahead while we zigagged through the streets the rest of the way.
“This first postcard,” I said as we waited for a light to change.
“What about it?”
“It had the tiniest clue, so small and almost invisible, but what if I never saw the hole? Or never found the postcard in the first place? Or if my dad had thrown out the magazine before I saw it? What if we had never gone to the hotel or found the story behind the grate or gone to her old bungalow, or Sunken Gardens, or the Ringling house? What if none of it happened? What would the last few days have been like? We wouldn’t be here. The house might be sold. I’d already be back in Boston. Boston!”
The word empty came to me again.
Dia looked at me as if she understood something. “Good thing we didn’t have to find out.”
Dad was waiting in the hospital discharge area with a sad smile on his face. He remembered Dia. She introduced him to her mother, then I wheeled him to the car. By the time we got home, I had finally pulled it all together in my mind. I was going to tell him everything. After all, Dad was one of the most important parts of Marnie and Nick’s story.
When we were alone in the house, he propped his leg up on a carton, sank into the couch, looked at me, and shook his head. “Jason, these past few days, I’ve been doing some thinking —”
I held up my hand, took a deep breath, and started. “Wait, Dad. Before all that stuff, I have to tell you something.”
I told him and told him as best I could. Did the story of Emerson Beale and Grandma and Fang and Oobarab make sense? I didn’t know anymore. Probably not. Dad asked questions that made it seem full of holes. At first, he was angry at some of it, then I didn’t know what he was. His hands were all over his face. He was crying, astonished, crying again, mad. “My father . . .? Mr. Fracker?”
“Dad, I think it was the only way he could do it. He knows you were mad at him, at everything. But if you could see him you’d know he cares. He always cared. He loves you. He loved Grandma. He still does.”
“Oh, man, oh, man,” he said softly. “All those years —”
I put the magazine and the typed stories in his lap. “You didn’t lose them,” I said. “I mean, not all of them. A lot of it is in the story he wrote. It’s right here. And he’s still here. Florida is here. And the house.”
He cried for a while, softly, then wiped his cheeks as if he remembered something. “You asked me once about postcards. I did get a few, but I only saved one. The first one.” He asked for his wallet and opened it. The postcard was folded in half, like the one in Fang’s cigarette case. He flattened it and held it out to me.
It was a beach scene of an orange sunset over deep blue water. The awning of a building leaned in from the left side over a railed patio. The description line read, simply:
Twin Palms Hotel and Beach KeyWest, Florida
In the message area were the words, I love you.
Trembling, I gave the card back and said the words to him.
He looked up at me. “I love you, too,” he said. Then he shook his head slowly. “Gosh, we’ve never talked this much.”
“You’re probably really tired —”
“No. I like it.”
I cranked open the back windows. The smell of cut grass drifted into the room, lighting everything up with its fresh scent.
“But I am tired,” he said.
After a little while of being quiet, he slipped down into the sofa pillows, smiling as his father had when he leaned back.
“I’ll call the agent later,” he said. “For now, I don’t know . . .”
I think I did. He drifted off to sleep. I tiptoed out of the room. A few minutes later, my sister Becca called from North Carolina where her flight had a stopover. She said she’d be there in two hours. Fine. Real life was moving in again, but that was okay. After I hung up, I went into my bedroom and stood over the bed where Grandma had had her stroke. It didn’t freak me out anymore. That was okay, too. A little later, Hector called. “You’ll never guess what,” he said.
“You died and came back to life?” I said.
“No . . .”
“You can finally juggle?”
“Still no . . .”
“You’re in jail?”
“I’m in Orlando.”
“You are?”
“No,” he said. “But I will be this weekend. It’ll be as hot as a jungle, but we got a deal. Dude, if you’re still there, we are so getting together!”
We joked back and forth for a while and made plans for when he came down. But being on the phone with him made me realize that I had to talk to her, too.
Amazingly, Mom was at home, waiting for a limo to take her to the airport to fly here. There was small talk at first, then I said, “Mom, I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“Jason —”
“I wouldn’t . . . I wouldn’t hide anything anymore, Mom. Not anymore.”
I heard her breathing softly, just breathing. “Thank you. I know you wouldn’t. I know that. I think . . . gosh, this is so hard . . . and it’s not like it hasn’t been heading toward this for a long time, Jason, but . . . I think your father and I need a break. You know what I mean?”
“I know,” I said, surprised at how easily I was able to say it. “I know. Dad needs somebody. For a while. And I’m here. Maybe, I don’t know, I can help him.”
“You’re not supposed to help him. You’re a boy,” she said, then was quiet for a while. “But maybe you can. I can’t seem to. After the house is sold, if he sells it, then we’ll see.”
“Maybe just a couple of weeks,” I said. “Then we’ll see what’s going on.”
The sun from the backyard was streaming across the kitchen tabletop. I thought I heard someone calling me, but it was birds. We talked for nearly an hour. I told her about Dia, and Hector’s trip. It ended this way.
“Maybe I won’t come down just now. I’ll talk to Daddy later today when he wakes up,” she said, “then we can see about how to handle this.”
“Okay, Mom. But I think it’ll be okay, at least for now.” I started to cry then. I tried not to sound like it on the phone at first, but couldn’t stop it and cried for minutes.
“Oh, my baby!” she said softly. “I love you, you know.”
I breathed in. “We’ll do it, Mom. We’ll be okay.”
“I love you, Jason,” she said, more softly still.
“I love you, Mom.”
That was good enough for then. After the call, I sat for a few minutes, but the sound of birds kept me from getting too deep into myself then. I went to the sink and washed my face, then out the back door to the patio. Dia was raking up the lawn cuttings into piles and humming. It had been a while between mowings.
I watched her work for a minute or two, running over what I had told Dad, and I kept coming back to what she had said once. Maybe it couldn’t happen,
but it could still happen. I thought then how we all have stories. Sometimes they’re so short you could fit them onto the back of a postcard.
I think we need a break.
Other times they’re so long they take a lifetime to write before they’re finished. And sometimes everything that happens is connected to everything else that happens, and the stories are so big and long and deep they never finish. I liked that kind the best.
Finally, I stopped thinking and just watched Dia raking piles in the yard. She might have sensed I was watching, but she didn’t say anything. I went over to her.
“So . . . ,” I said.
“So,” she repeated. “What?”
“So . . . I think maybe we’ll stay for a while.”
Not raising her head from the back-and-forth work of her rake, she smiled. “Yeah, you will.”
THE END