When Paul went to see a customer in Osterville, Lily took Terry to the secret beach she had found, a lagoon full of clams and mussels on one side and a small horseshoe of empty sand on the other.
‘Where is everybody?’ The other beaches were crowded.
‘They don’t know about it, so let’s not tell them.’
‘Is it private?’ A swimming raft was anchored some yards out.
‘Beaches belong to everyone. It’s our special, secret place.’
Before she could start blabbering about fairies and mermaids, Terry ran into the sea and swam out to the raft.
That evening, Paul’s friend Harry came down, and they went to a small summer theatre and saw a musical. In the interval, a glamorous woman with sparkling silver eyelids and a cloud of colourless hair like cotton candy swept through the crowd to them with cries of rapture. She was in charge of the theatre, but she was also in the horse world, and knew Harry quite well. Her name was Paige, which was no kind of name for a woman, or a man either, come to that.
‘Poll Stephens!’ Holy shit, she knew Terry’s father too. He had sold her a saddle she adored to death. She kissed him theatrically.
‘My dear,’ she told Lily, standing far back to allow room for her huge spangled boobs. ‘You’ve no idea what this adorable guy of yours has done for my seat!’
People were looking at them. Paige shone out in the crowd as if she were on stage in her own spotlight.
‘Don’t you adore the show, dahling?’ She swooped on Terry.
He nodded without bringing his head up again, and ducked away to pretend to look at the old theatre posters which papered the walls.
She invited them to stay in the bar after the show and meet the cast. Terry thought he would fall through the floor, but off the stage the actors were just ordinary people in jeans and sweat shirts. The one who had been the bald comic uncle, who was now young with hair, showed Terry tricks with coins and glasses. Paige and Harry and some of the actors sang, and Terry’s father played the piano. Terry expected to die of shame, seeing him up there banging away, with his foot thumping the pedals and his hair disordered and a wild light in his blue eyes, laughing when he hit a wrong note or muffed a chord. But everybody thought he was great.
Harry pulled Lily on to the little stage and made her sing a cockney song with him, which she did quite well, in an odd deep voice, in the same octave as Harry. Terry stayed firmly at the table, with his arm hooked through the back of the chair for safety. He would not sing, but he told the comic uncle his story about the German policeman.
During a break in the singing, the uncle called out, ‘Listen, everyone, you’ve got to hear this! Tell it again, Terence.’
The blood rushed up into Terry’s head and out at the top, but he told it. They all roared, including Lily, who had already heard it six times in different accents. His father was so proud that for a moment of incredible surging lightness, Terry wanted to die for him.
When would real life come relentlessly back? When would the weight drop down?
Because there was only one bedroom in the dwarf house, Harry had to sleep on the rollaway bed in the living-room and Terry slept on the floor in a sleeping-bag. Or tried to. Harry turned on the light to make himself a drink, and wanted to tell Terry at some length how wonderful his mother was and that he must always remember she was the most wonderful mother in the world, although he had been making up to Lily all evening, and telling Paul how wonderful she was.
Next morning, Terry did not want to get up, but he had to, because after Harry left, they were going to Provincetown on the tip of the Cape to see the old fishing village gone arty, where men wore jewellery and make-up, and then to picnic on the great outer beach. Terry was edgy in the car. He practised whining. Pity to lose that useful small-fry skill. Provincetown was too crowded and the only man with jewellery was a fake pirate with a ring in his ear selling nets and plastic fish. On Newcome Hollow beach, Lily had forgotten the Coca-Cola. There were ham and cheese sandwiches, but no peanut-butter.
Terry left them to climb on all fours up the high dunes. Poised on top of the cliff above the Atlantic ocean, with nothing between him and Spain, he could have taken off like a bird. Some kids behind pushed him, and he dropped over the sheer edge on to the steep slope, stumbled up and ran and slid on his heels with his arms out, and across the beach to dive into a breaking wave, which knocked him back to shore.
He ran out with the sucking tide that drew the shingle out, and stayed in the surf for a long time. His father, wearing his shorts and shirt, came down to the edge of the sea and called that it was time to go home.
Terry wanted one more wave, and then one more, and another. He hit a soaring wave at the wrong angle. It tipped him up and knocked him under where it was black for ever, with the weight of the whole ocean on top of him, sucking him out over the shingle, flaying him alive, blinding and suffocating him.
Someone grabbed him painfully and hauled him out. His father threw him up on to the sand like a dead fish, and Terry choked up some water and sat up. He was amazed to see the sea and the sky and the afternoon sun in place, and the kids still toiling up the dune and flying down with their arms out.
‘You all right?’
Terry nodded. He coughed and blinked and wiped back his curly hair which was full of sand, and saw his father’s face. It was terrible, white and stricken, with his smiling eyes staring and his smiling mouth dropped and jittering over his soaked shirt. Lily was standing just behind him, looking scared and helpless.
‘I’m okay.’ Terry got up. ‘No big deal.’
Lily made a small sound, like Buster when he wanted to jump on to your bed. She put her arms round Paul and hugged him, as if she could dry him off and warm him with the closeness of her body.
She got at him, Terry’s mother had said. ‘She’s taken him from us.’ He remembered everything again. The weight sank down and took him with it. I should have drowned, he thought.
Sunscorched and waterlogged, his knees and arms grazed, his wrist aching where his father had grabbed it, Terry fell asleep in the back of the car. He woke and got out grumpy, as he used to when he was a little kid tired after a treat. The tiny house looked like a pink dog kennel, painted by the sunset. Plumes of cloud raced down the sky to follow the descending sun.
‘Look, Terry, how beautiful it is!’ Lily called, as he trudged up the grass slope to the house.
She could never just look at something, or just do something. Everybody else had to see or do it with her. ‘Walk to the post office with me.’ ‘Quick, come out here – the gulls are dropping clams on the rocks.’ ‘Who wants to help me find my contact lens?’
His father called him back to the car to carry something, but Terry went on into the house.
While his father was in the shower, Lily said she would make him supper, so he could get to bed early. As if he were a baby.
‘Hamburger well-done or rare?’ She used to ask, ‘Over or under-done?’ Now she aped the natives.
The frozen fries were limp and pale and only warm. The meat wasn’t cooked in the middle, mushy-red, like a turned-back eyelid.
‘What’s the matter with it?’ Lily saw that Terry had pushed his plate away.
‘It’s not cooked.’
Lily sighed, and took the plate away, making a patient face, which included turning her eyes up to the ceiling. When she brought it back, a few of the french fries fell on the floor. She picked them up and put them on the plate, and Terry pushed them off on to the table. He sneaked a look at her. Her eyes had gone mean and her big full mouth was shut tight. Ignoring the potatoes, she picked up the plate and thumped it down again on the table, and waited, questioningly.
Terry took up his fork and reached for the ketchup bottle. Lily picked up the plate again as he was going to pour ketchup.
‘Hey!’ he said.
She banged the plate down and asked angrily, ‘Did no one ever teach you to say thank you?’
Terry pushed back his
chair and stood up. The ketchup bottle fell over into the plate and went glug, glug over the food.
‘Don’t you tell me what to do!’
He and Lily stared at each other. Her face was too far above him. He had to tilt his head.
‘Don’t talk to me like that, Terry.’ His father came into the room, so she added, ‘Please.’
The weight inside him exploded into a rage that set his body on fire. His sunburned cheeks and lips burned painfully. His throat was choked.
He threw the fork at her and ran. As he banged out of the screen door and jumped the three steps, he heard Lily yell out something, and his father said, in that infuriatingly calm voice when he was taking control, ‘Let him go.’
Terry ran blindly down the curving track. At the end, he stopped to see if they were coming after him, then turned down the road to the other houses, turned off at random, and plunged into the woods. He scrambled through, hopping over briars, zigzagging round the sharp trunks of the pines, trying to run where their soft needles had fallen. If he’d known he was going to split, he would have put his sneakers on.
How far was he going to run? To the sea and swim far out. To the Cape Cod canal and hitch a ride to Boston and call his mother. He had cut the bottom of one foot, and bruised the other. The shingle scrapes on his knees were beginning to bleed. He made for a place where the trees cleared, and came out on to a path with a narrow strip of water beyond.
Which way? He heard a car away to the right, and headed toward the road. Then he recognized the tiled roof of the house above the trees on the other side of the water, and the place where he and Lily had gone in to look for razor clams.
Terry stopped and listened again for sounds of someone crashing through the trees. Then he turned away from the road and ran alongside the lagoon to the beach at the far end. ‘Our special place.’
No one was there. On the other side of the small bay within a bay, a few windows were lit in the houses on the headland. The tide was out. The sun had gone down. Terry walked out on the breakwater, climbing the sloping chunks of rock, jumping over gaps between the flat ones. It would be hard to come back this way in the dark. Almost at the end, he sat down. The cormorant rock was high out of the water. Three birds hunched darkly, motionless as hangmen.
The rage was gone. This was a vacuum of time and place. No need to think or feel. It must be like this up in weightless space.
‘Hey there!’ Someone shouted at him from the inlet side of the rocks. When he paid no attention, they shouted again, in voices that were clear and young and arrogant.
Terry turned away from them. He jumped down into the shallow water and headed back to the beach, with the rock barrier between him and the arrogant shouts. Underwater rocks slippery with seaweed trapped him. He would step on a crab. He stumbled over a round boulder and one leg went up to the thigh in a hole. When he got to the beach, they were waiting for him, two smart-ass boys carrying a pail and clam rakes.
‘Get off the beach,’ one of them said, the tall skinny one with the flop of fair hair that he didn’t bother to push out of his eye to see Terry.
‘Why?’ Terry tripped on the last treacherous slimy rock and stepped on to the sand.
‘It’s a private beach.’
‘My – ’ Lily had said it belonged to everyone. ‘My – ’ stepmother, father’s wife? He felt like a toad, but he could only say, ‘My mother comes here all the time.’
‘Well, you tell her to lay off, or my grandfather will get after her. What’s her name? What’s your name, punk?’
Terry shook his head. As he ran past them, they took lazy swipes at him with the clam rakes, and laughed as he ploughed up through the soft sand to the road, turned right and kept on running.
When at last he got back to the house, he was sobbing, not messily, but a dry, steady sob with every indrawn breath.
Lily rushed out of the screen door and called, ‘Paul! It’s all right, he’s back!’
Presently Terry’s father came out of the trees, where he must have been searching, with a flashlight, for God’s sake.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ With all grown-ups, if they got anxious over you, they were so mad when you did turn up that you wished you hadn’t.
‘I went to that beach.’ Terry stood with his sore arms wrapped round him, trying to get his breath, still shaken by sobs like hiccups. ‘It belongs to everyone, she said.’ He would not look at Lily. ‘Stupid Limey. What does she know?’
‘What are you talking about?’ His father came up close and grabbed him by both clenched upper arms.
‘I got kicked off, that’s what. They may come after her and I hope they do, because she … because she…’ Terry collapsed on the grass in a passion of weeping, with his head butting against the wooden back of the bottom step, beating his fist on the top one.
His father picked him up and carried him in like a sack, and dropped him down on the rollaway which was ready for him under the window. He cried until he had no more breath. His father thumped him gently on the back and waited. Finally Terry turned over and lay flat, looking up at their faces through his wet lashes. A few surplus tears rolled lazily out of the corners of his flooded eyes and burned their way down his scorching cheeks.
‘I think I have a fever,’ he said calmly. His mother was a great one with the thermometer. If he bit it and rolled it around, sometimes he could push it up a notch or two and miss school.
‘You had too much sun.’ Lily sat on the end of the bed. His father was sitting beside him, smiling again, his closed-mouth smile which spread curves into his cheeks.
‘Too much of everything, I guess,’ Terry said.
‘Like what?’
‘You know.’
‘You still upset about the divorce, old son? I thought you felt okay now about Lily.’
Terry moved his head from side to side on the flat summer cottage pillow that felt as if it were filled with sand. ‘She loused up everything. We were okay before she came along and – and – ’ She took him from us, his mother had said, one day when she was brooding and fed up.
‘Terry, I don’t think I want to hear this.’ His father stood up.
‘Paul – Let him. Let him say what’s on his mind.’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’ His father went outside.
Lily stayed at the end of the bed. She did not try to move up. She said, ‘Tell me, then,’ and Terry told her. It was surprisingly easy.
After a bit, she said, ‘You’ve got it wrong. You’ve forgotten I didn’t meet your Dad till after the divorce. I mean, except that time in Iceland centuries ago.’
‘But if you hadn’t, then in the end, he would have – ’
‘He would have come back home? No, listen, Terry. Your Mum and Dad wouldn’t have come back together even if he’d never married again.’
‘I don’t believe you. My mother says …’ He tried to tell her some of the stuff his mother said, but it was hard to explain it, because she never exactly said anything you could grab on to. You never knew where you were. Shit, he was going to cry again. He turned over and told the hard sand pillow, ‘He shouldn’t have married a foreign person. She thinks you’re too young and too silly to cope with anything. She didn’t want me to come here.’
‘I know, but you did, thank goodness, and now it can be all right. Can’t it?’
She wanted it to be, so he turned his hot face sideways and said, ‘I guess.’
Lily turned off the lamp on the table. She sat there with him in silence. Out on the marsh, one of the night birds made a harsh, lonely noise.
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘Outside. He’ll come in.’
‘What will happen to me?’
‘You’ll be all right. What are you afraid of?’
‘Well, the money, and all that stuff. We haven’t got enough.’
Lily explained about the money. His mother was earning now, in the design centre. Her father helped her. Dad gave her enough money for everything she and Te
rry needed.
‘I hate to ask you this.’ Lily coughed and looked toward the door. ‘But what does your mother tell you about the money?’
‘Nothing.’ Nothing he could tell Lily. She said things like, ‘You ought to go to a better school, Ter, but who’s going to pay?’ Sometimes she said things about his father that weren’t true. Or were they? Once, to Silas, she had called him Paul the Prick.
‘Enough, then.’ Lily got up. ‘We’re going to have supper soon. Your first was a flop, so why not have a second one with us? Paul!’ she shouted. She usually yelled from a distance, instead of going to where the person was.
His father came in and made drinks.
‘All right now?’
‘I guess.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Terry and his father said together, and laughed.
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know.’ Terry didn’t. His head had cleared now. It was sore with crying, as if he’d been battered around, but all right on the inside.
‘Nor do I.’
Things were better. Terry was still confused. Okay, so he had got some of it wrong, but he wasn’t sure yet what the truth was.
At supper, when Lily let something burn in the flimsy rented pan, she said she was a young and foolish foreigner, which wasn’t really fair, but she and Terry giggled, and it became a private joke between them.
Even without the burned pieces, she had fried too much chicken, so they would take a picnic supper tomorrow to Brewster when the tide was out and they could walk half a mile out to sea on the hard flat sands.
Next morning, Terry’s mother called. He was to come home.
‘Can’t I stay, Mom? One more day? We’re –’
‘They’ve been getting at you,’ she said crisply.
‘No, but we have stuff planned to do.’
‘So do I. Your grandparents want to see you. We’re going up there for lunch tomorrow, so get the noon bus and I’ll meet you at Park Square and we’ll have time to get your hair cut and buy you some new sneakers.’
Dear Doctor Lily Page 13