“And what,” I asked, “do I tell my brother when he asks if I deliberately misled him back in June?”
“Tell him,” Rex said, “you are not at liberty to discuss any matters pertaining to the case without your attorney present.”
“Oh, please.”
“You’ve got to see the larger picture, here, Meg. There’s no point derailing months of work with a single, offhand remark.”
In Eleuthera, I boarded another flight—a twin engine, this time, with six seats and air-conditioning—and by late afternoon, we were landing in Marsh Harbor. The ticket counters had already closed for the day, so I took a taxi into town and found a place to stay along the waterfront. There were restaurants, craft shops, an ice-cream parlor, even a coffeehouse that served espresso, cappuccinos, lattes. No more than two dozen businesses in all: still, it was too much. Too many people passing on the sidewalks, some turning to stare at my raw, pink forehead and cheeks. Too many cars on the streets, too many scooters on the sidewalks. Teetering bicycles, stray cats, skittery packs of potcakes. I’d gone out looking for something to eat; now I discovered my appetite was gone. Looking in the window of the art gallery, I felt the way I had as a high school senior, when our class had taken its graduation trip to New York City. We’d stayed at a noisy midtown hotel, four to a room hardly bigger than the beds. Outside our window, forty stories below, were the taxi-clogged streets I’d seen in movies, diligent streams of pedestrians, glittering advertisements rising like giants, like conquering gods. While the other kids trooped off to Phantom of the Opera, I stayed behind, claiming a stomachache that, over the course of the three-day weekend, transformed itself from fiction into fact. I didn’t go shopping at Macy’s. I didn’t ride the subway to the Guggenheim. I didn’t wait in line to take the elevators up to the top of the World Trade Center—one of those seemingly small decisions that haunts you, looking back, for the rest of your life. Instead I sat in the hotel room, flipping through the TV channels, looking for shows I recognized: reruns of Gilligan’s Island, All in the Family, M*A*S*H.
The morning after I got back home, Toby took me out for breakfast. I told him the trip had been no big deal, that, mostly, I’d watched TV.
“You are seriously telling me,” he said, “that you went all the way to New York City to watch television?”
“It was my vacation,” I said, defensively.
“Aw, Cowboy,” Toby said. “Damn.”
We were at the Cup and Cruller. We were having the special: pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse heads with fried-egg eyes, sausage-link smiles. I felt young and stupid and foolish. I’d been looking forward to New York for months. I didn’t understand what had happened.
“You should have given your reservation to someone who couldn’t afford to go,” Toby said. “Your friend Cindy Ann, for instance.”
“She’s not my friend.”
“She used to be.” He studied my face. “I don’t suppose you’ll ever tell me what happened between you two?”
I touched an egg with the tip of my fork; it broke, spilling warm, oily yolk across my plate. “Her stepdad was weird,” I said.
“So that’s her fault?”
I remembered the door to the crawl space. I remembered Cindy Ann’s voice on the phone, the night that she’d called me from the DC. He made me touch it. I felt the way I had in Manhattan the few times I’d forced myself to venture out of the hotel, as if my breath were being sucked into the humming of the traffic, the shuddering of the subway, the collision of languages, sentences, shouts of people who might as well have been ghosts. I saw them all while, at the same time, seeing no one, in the same way that no one saw me. All of us were equally invisible, standing shoulder to shoulder at each curb, everybody’s gaze fixed on someplace in the distance, on the sidewalk, on the flashing sign insisting do not walk.
“He did something to her,” I said. “I mean, before he killed himself. But you can’t tell anyone, okay?”
Maybe he thought you wanted him to. I would always remember the look on her face, just after I’d said it. It was a terrible thing to say. It made it seem as if I thought Cindy Ann was the one who’d done something wrong. Which wasn’t what I’d been thinking at all. It was just that I’d been knocked off balance. It was just that I couldn’t wrap my mind around the thing that she had said. The way I’d felt when Bernadette told me she’d forgiven Dr. Matt for what he’d done.
Hasn’t anyone forgiven you? Are you certain?
Perhaps Cindy Ann had forgotten what I’d said. I’d seen her at the park, shortly after Evan’s birth, and I remembered, now, how happy she’d been for me, how she and her girls had crowded around us to see him. How she’d run a gentle hand over his head. How she’d held out a finger for him to grasp. For the first time, it occurred to me that Cindy Ann would remember this, too. I imagined her, again, in the detective’s photographs, sitting at her kitchen counter, bringing the glass to her lips. She had not been enjoying an evening with friends; she certainly hadn’t been laughing. She’d been by herself, in a darkened house. Idly, I scratched at my chest, at my arms, where the rash was still dark, the color of wine. Such a terrible itch that could not be sated. Such a terrible thirst that could not be quenched.
I bought a plate of conch fritters from a stand, walked over to the ferry dock, sat down to eat them at one of the gull-spattered benches that overlooked the harbor. Rex and I had anchored here back in August; perhaps, in another week or two, Rubicon might be tucked somewhere among the twinkling mast lights and bobbing hulls, stopping over on her long, slow passage to Miami. I wondered if Leon had had any more seizures. I wondered if, perhaps, I could send a note to Bernadette in care of the pediatric neurologist. Susan Martin, Audrey thought was her name, or maybe Susan Martinson? Susan, Suzette, something like that. How many pediatric neurologists at Miami Children’s could there be?
The last of the light drained into evening. The bars and restaurants filled, lines overflowing onto the streets. In the lobby of my hotel, I called my parents from a pay phone, left another message on their answering machine—the same message I’d left from the airport in Eleuthera—telling them that I was on my way. I called Toby at the fish store, spoke to that machine as well, considered calling him at his apartment over the mill, then changed my mind. What if Mallory picked up? What was I going to say? If she’d hated me before, she must despise me now, believing, as she must, that I’d deliberately lied to Toby about our plans. And yet, she and Toby had sent the invitation. There wasn’t a trace of bitterness in what either of them had written. I wondered if they’d seen the photographs of Cindy Ann. I wondered if, perhaps, they’d come to feel differently about the civil suit, about our reasons for pursuing it, now that there was proof of what we’d claimed. Or perhaps Cindy Ann hadn’t told them about the settlement. Perhaps she’d told no one at all. Why reawaken all the same conversations, speculations, that had shimmered for months beneath the Cup and Cruller’s perpetual cigarette haze?
Back in my room, I was restless. I turned on the television, turned it off again. I touched the coffeemaker, the remote control, the light switch. I flushed the toilet. I filled the ice bucket, picked up a piece of ice and held it, aching, in my hand. All the things I’d once taken for granted: like oxygen, friendship, marriage. When Rex had told me he couldn’t imagine returning to life onshore, not even for a few weeks, I’d felt something tear at the back of my mind, quietly but irreparably, like a thin, soft sheet of felt. Now, with something like relief, I considered the possibility that I, too, had been ruined for shore. Perhaps, as soon as I got to Wisconsin, I’d be ready to turn around again. Fly back to Echo Harbor. Hop aboard Chelone, take off without a backward glance.
The following morning, I found a seat on yet another mosquito-size plane, and by midafternoon, I’d cleared Customs and Immigration and was on my way to Ibis Lakes. I hadn’t visited my parents since the Labor Day weekend before Evan’s death, and as I lowered the taxi window to punch in the gate code, I remembered, abruptl
y, Evan’s fascination with the key pad, the guard box, the wrought-iron security gate, which swung back on its black hinges like something out of Batman. The taxi passed between a series of tall fountains, following the curve of the golf course with its manicured sand traps and shallow lakes, until it reached the first grouping of town homes, each with the same cream-colored siding, the same attached garage, identical pillars standing guard on either side of the arching doors.
It is still hard for me to imagine my parents actually living in a place like Ibis Lakes—five thousand square feet under air, my father is proud to say—in a so-called planned community like this one, professional landscapers tending the hedges, a maid service passing through once a week. When I was a child, my mother collected the leftover slivers of soap from the bathrooms, saved them in a Baggie—the same clouded Baggie, year after year—until she had enough to squish them into a single, recycled bar. She used powdered milk in her coffee, watered the ketchup, the orange juice, the soup. When she wasn’t at the office, she was working in the kitchen, working in the garden, wrestling the vacuum cleaner from room to room. My father himself worked sixty-hour weeks, alternating his suits until the elbows and knees turned silver; nights, he dozed on the old Sears couch beneath my mother’s vast collection of framed family photos. Unlike my friends, I was given no allowance. If I needed money for a movie, I asked my mother, who kept a record of what I spent. Later, in high school, when I started working for Toby, I was expected to put a percentage of what he paid me toward that debt.
And yet, when my tuition bills came, my parents wrote the checks, no questions asked. They’d paid cash for the town house, which was easily three times the size of our split-level ranch. Now they belonged to golf clubs, went to benefit concerts and gala balls. My father had his own golf coach. My mother had a weekly appointment at a spa. The story they told—to us and to others, perhaps even to themselves—was that they’d made their fortune from the sale of Hauskindler Stone and Brick. It was Rex who’d pointed out the obvious: the company had made good money all along.
“Why else would the buyers have paid what they did?” he said. “Your folks lived that frugally because they wanted to.”
I disagreed. “They lived that way because they didn’t know anything different.”
“Here,” I told the taxi driver, pointing to an end unit. I wouldn’t have known it from the others except for my mother’s collection of orchids, hanging from a low branch of a live oak tree that shaded the screened-in side yard. Walking up the driveway, my backpack slung over my shoulder, I could already tell that my parents were gone. The Christmas lights framing the windows were dark. The blinds were drawn, the porch light on. The fountain in the entryway stood silent, the empty well filled with my mother’s potted plants: bromeliads, African violets, a woody stalk of thyme. Still, I rang the doorbell before letting myself in with my key, guiltily, uneasily, even though I knew I would have been welcomed. During the early years of our marriage, Rex and I had come home more than once to find my parents sitting in our living room. My mother would have done the dishes. My father would have oiled the garage door hinges, replaced a burned-out lightbulb, emptied the drip pan under the ice maker. They’d be looking at us expectantly, waiting for news about my latest pregnancy test, about the date of the next in vitro, about where we stood in adoption proceedings, hands folded, like holiday bows, in the center of their empty laps.
The town house was immaculate, magazines spread across the coffee table, paddle ceiling fans stirring the quiet air. White leather couches. Glass end tables. A green silk sweater, neatly folded, lay draped across an embroidered parlor chair. All the kitsch and clutter of our split-level ranch had vanished. My mother’s flour canisters with the porcelain chickens on the lids. My father’s overshoes, which he’d always called “rubbers,” waiting on their mat beside the door. My mother’s family photos watching from the quarrel of mismatched frames she’d collected at yard sales and secondhand shops, one more outrageous than the next. The photos started in the foyer, then spread across the living room, up the stairs and down the hall: baby pictures, wedding pictures, graduation pictures, family pets, everyone and anyone who’d passed, even briefly, through the sights of her Polaroid. There’d been a picture of Cindy Ann and me—along with six other fourth-grade girls—dressed up as turkeys for a Thanksgiving play. There’d been another picture, taken the summer we’d been friends, of the two of us heading out to the beach, wearing matching yellow bikini tops, frayed jean shorts. One of my sixteenth birthday, opening gifts, Toby’s rabbit ears above my head. A picture of Rex, red-eyed with surprise, the first time I’d brought him home. During idle family arguments over when and where something occurred, my mother would rise with the poise of a judge, pace the walls until she’d found precisely the right photograph to support her interpretation.
And yet she hadn’t moved a single one of the photos to Florida. Instead, she’d parceled them into boxes, half for Toby, half for me. Mine were still up in the attic; Toby’s, I guessed, were moldering in his apartment over the mill. Neither of us had wanted them. We’d never liked them. They’d embarrassed us.
“You could hang them in Florida, you know,” I’d said. “I believe they have walls there, too.”
“I’m not moving two thousand miles,” my mother said, and there was an edge in her voice, “to re-create the life I’m living here.”
In the cinnamon-scented kitchen, I discovered the note she’d left for me, pinned to the stainless steel refrigerator with a magnet. She and my father had left for Wisconsin that morning. Flown to Wisconsin, in fact—the first flight of my mother’s life. They’d made reservations at the Pfister Hotel; I should call them on my father’s cell. My mother’s joy at the prospect of seeing me shimmered between each line, as if she had dusted the words with glitter the way that, once, she’d dusted the notes she left for me to find after school. Put in the pot roast at five o’clock. Preheat the oven to 325. Call me so I know you’re home.
I telephoned my father. He picked up on the first ring.
“Meg?” he said, but it was all he got to say before my mother—I could see it happening—snatched the phone out of his hand.
“We got your message yesterday,” she said, her tone no different than if she’d just seen me a few hours earlier. “I tried to book a flight for you, too, but everything’s full. We were thinking, though, that maybe you could drive up in my car, it’s got all-weather tires—”
“Mom,” I said. “Mom.”
She waited.
“I can’t believe you actually got on an airplane,” I said.
“Me neither.”
“So, how was it?”
I could hear my father in the background, laughing, guessing what I’d just asked.
“Let me put it this way,” my mother said. “If you do end up driving to Wisconsin, you’ll have a companion on the way back.”
It was decided, on the spot, that this was what I’d do. If I left in the morning, taking my time, I’d arrive at the Pfister on the twenty-third, the day before Christmas Eve. Plenty of time before the wedding. Plenty of time, in case it snowed.
“Have you seen Toby yet?” I asked.
There was a slight pause before my mother spoke. “We were hoping to get together for dinner, but he had to back out. He’s been busy with—things.”
“Does he know I’m coming?”
“Oh, yes. He’s happy you’re going to be there.”
He isn’t upset about the settlement? It was on the tip of my tongue. But I didn’t want to make my mother feel as if I were trying to drag her into it. Besides, it seemed more and more likely to me that she didn’t know a single thing about it.
“I suppose he’ll be spending Christmas Day at Cindy Ann’s,” I said. “With her kids and everything.” I was proud of how steadily, how reasonably, I spoke. Again, I heard my mother pause.
“He hasn’t really told us his plans. But I went ahead and got four tickets to A Christmas Carol at the Pa
bst. I can donate them back, I suppose, if we don’t use them. Remember how we always used to take you kids?”
“I do,” I said, though what I remembered was going on school field trips, lining up with the other kids for weekday matinees. Back at the Cove, the boat kids had been planning their own version of the play. Scrooge was to be a joyless ship’s captain, Cratchit a good-hearted mate. Leon, assisted by Eli, had been designing the sets. Would Rex go to the performance, I wondered, or would he stay aboard Chelone, alone? What was he going to do for Christmas—grease pumps? Strip teak?
“That’s okay, then?” my mother said, and I said, “What?”
“The tickets. For Christmas Eve?”
“Fine. Sorry, it’s been a long day.”
“I’ll let you go, then. We’ll talk when you get here. Have a good night’s sleep.”
“Tell her to sleep in,” I could hear my father prompting. “Tell her there’s no rush.”
“No rush,” I agreed, but just a few hours later—too unsettled to close my eyes—I found a leather travel bag and packed a few of my mother’s sweaters, a cream-colored cashmere coat, a pair of wool pants from the cedar-lined closet. Her shoes, unfortunately, were no warmer than mine, and half a size smaller besides; I resigned myself to wearing my boat shoes until I could stop by our house for my boots. Then I carried everything down to the garage, along with my battered backpack. A sensor cued the overhead light; I froze, blinking, like a burglar. The air smelled gassy, moist and still. I put the travel bag into the trunk of my mother’s Mercedes, opened the garage door, backed out into the drive, and I was just about to close the door again when I noticed something in the storage alcove, covered with a quilted sheet.
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