Tips for Living

by Shafransky, Renee

  The traffic signal in front of the pharmacy turned red and I stopped. I noticed Mr. Duck, with his dirty orange bill and mud-spattered feathers, sitting at the edge of the huge puddle on my right that forms during big rains in the alleyway between the pharmacy and liquor store.

  Mr. Duck looked forlorn. And why wouldn’t he? He’d lost the love of his life. Mr. and Mrs. Duck never left each other’s side. You’d see the two of them mostly down on the wharf, except in a rainstorm. Then they’d waddle over to this puddle, ruffle each other’s tail feathers and snuggle. Until another gray day, when one of the Piqued had complained, and a green van from animal control pulled up. They captured Mrs. Duck, but Mr. Duck escaped. He comes and sits here whenever the puddle appears, watching for her. I wrote a small item about him in the Courier. It elicited higher-than-usual reader response. One letter read: My wife was taken by cancer. Some days I’m angry with her for leaving me. Other days I want to die and be with her. She was my best friend. I am Mr. Duck.

  I suspect Ben wrote that one and signed it with a phony name. People do crazy things when they hurt.

  The signal turned green. Driving ahead, I saw that the lights were on in the Courier office. Ben would likely be there organizing coverage along with Lizzie and the rest of the staff, if they weren’t already at the scene. Should I go there? They had probably tried to call me. Was I ready to talk with them? I’d need coffee first. I pulled into a space in front of Eden’s.

  I hesitated before stepping out of the car, realizing what I must look like. My pajama bottoms, men’s dark navy plaid flannel with a drawstring waist, were conspicuous. I’d been wearing them for so many years, I’d forgotten until this moment that I’d appropriated them from Hugh. For a second my heart ached once more at the memory of him sleeping in them at my side, and then it went numb again.

  I swung the visor down and quickly glanced in the mirror to check my hair. It resembled a bird’s nest. I looked awful. There were puffy bags under my eyes. My normally flawless skin was splotchy. Oddly, there was a small cut on my cheek, like a cat scratch, near the top of my right cheekbone. Even odder, there were pieces of dead leaves in my bangs. I brushed them away. Something dry and stiff dropped out of my hair into my lap.

  A twig.

  I stopped breathing for an instant.

  I flipped the visor back up. How did I get that scratch on my face, and where had the twig and leaves come from? I hadn’t walked in the woods; I’d gone straight down the gravel driveway to the car when I left the house. I brushed my teeth the night before, and I hadn’t seen any of those things as I looked in the bathroom mirror. I glanced down at my fingernails. They were a little ragged. I guess I could have run a rough nail across my face while I slept. But that didn’t explain the twig and the leaves.

  It couldn’t be . . .

  No. Nope. Keep your head, Nora. That’s all over and done with. It stopped so long ago. Put it out of your mind.

  The rain was starting to come down harder. I turned up the collar of my trench coat, bolted out of the car and ran for the coffee shop.

  Stepping into the heart and soul of Pequod is like time traveling to the early 1960s, except for the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. There were a few patrons scattered inside Eden’s among the green-leather-upholstered booths and the chrome swivel stools at the soda fountain. I recognized the town’s pharmacist. They were all looking up at the TV, transfixed by the news. The same local reporter I’d seen earlier was repeating information I already knew. What I hadn’t noticed at first was Lizzie. She was standing on the far right by the register in her camouflage rain poncho and olive drab cargo pants. Her carroty hair was dripping wet.

  “Nora!”

  She spotted me at the door and hurried over carrying two coffees-to-go.

  “I’ve been trying to call you. Have you heard about the Walkers?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m so sorry. You must be completely freaked out.”

  “Lower your voice, please,” I whispered, motioning for her to follow me to a small wooden table in an empty section on the side. “I don’t want everyone in here to know about my connection to them.”

  “Right. Right. Of course,” she whispered back.

  I’d decided I had to tell Lizzie and Ben about my divorce the day she walked into the office and said a famous painter named Walker purchased the house at Pequod Point. The Courier publishes the largest real estate sales every month. Tracking them was part of Lizzie’s job. I’d figured she would do her research on Hugh and find out soon enough.

  She set her coffees on the well-worn tabletop. We both sat down.

  “So how are you doing?” she asked.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not really sure. It’s hard to accept that it’s actually happened.”

  She nodded gravely. “That’s normal. You’re in shock.”

  It was almost reassuring to hear Lizzie confirm my self-diagnosis. It explained how crazy I felt.

  “You’re right. Shock would be a normal reaction, wouldn’t it? What else have you heard? What does Ben know?”

  “Ben is at the scene. I’m going over there now. He says they’re not letting the press past the end of the driveway. He’s working his contacts by phone.”

  “So, there’s nothing beyond the preliminary report yet?” I asked, indicating the TV, which was airing the Sue Mickelson footage again.

  “Well, one thing . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “But it’s unconfirmed.”

  “What is it, Lizzie?”

  She hesitated and bit her lip.

  “Come on, spill.”

  “There’s an unconfirmed report saying they were shot in the bedroom. In their bed.”

  “Oh shit.” I felt the blood drain from my face.

  “God. You’ve gone white as a sheet, Nora. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have told you. Like I said, it’s unconfirmed.”

  “No. No. It’s okay. I’m glad you did. Who’s the source?”

  “I don’t know. Ben got it from one of his people. Listen,” she said, frowning. “You should take care of yourself and go back home. We have this covered. I’m on it. Ben is on it. No one expects you to deal with this. Ben certainly doesn’t. He’s worried about you.”

  “He is?” I was taken aback.

  Lizzie nodded. “First thing he said, ‘This is going to be tough for Nora.’”

  “But I need to do something.”

  She noticed the time on her watch. “Damn. I have to get over there and snap some shots of the roadblock and cop cars. And we need quotes from neighbors.” She picked up the coffees. “Nora, promise you’ll go home?”

  “Hmm?” I answered, dazed.

  She looked at me sternly. “You. Home.”

  I waved her away. “Okay, okay. I will.”

  Lizzie left. I stared out the front window after her. Was it true? Had someone really acted out my fantasy and shot Hugh and Helene in their bed? How could I just sit on the margins listening to sound bites and watching looping TV images, waiting for other people to tell me what was going on? As my hands gripped the edge of the table, I felt the war inside me beginning, the wolf hair growing on my knuckles. I’d sworn I would never spy again. I promised myself.

  “Coffee?”

  “Huh?” I looked up at the waitress who’d appeared beside me.

  “Sorry to make you wait. We just brewed a fresh pot.”

  “No, thanks.” I stood up. “I just remembered I have to be somewhere.”

  As I walked out of Eden’s onto the rainy street, I saw Mr. Duck waddling down the sidewalk toward me, quacking emphatically.

  I got the distinct feeling that he was telling me to run.

  Wipers thumping unevenly. Tires whooshing on wet pavement. Rain beating on the hood. I drove in a kind of trance. How many road trips had Hugh and I taken in all kinds of weather? Navigating a deluge in England or Ireland on the wrong side of the road. Crawling through fog along the northern Oregon coast. Winding throug
h Zion National Park in the heat with a broken air conditioner. Plowing through snowdrifts on the way upstate to the weekend house. We were good traveling companions, Hugh and I. “Who’ll be our trip master for the first fifty miles?” he would ask before we started out, sorting through the CDs we’d tossed into a travel bag. “Sinatra? David Byrne? Patsy Cline? You pick.”

  Avoiding the roadblock was easy. I drove south on Old Route 20 wishing I’d bought that coffee. I had to keep the window open despite the rain to distract from the dull ache in my head. Passing Van Winkle Lanes and continuing beyond a stretch of undeveloped woodlands, I made sure no one was behind me before turning right at the two tall white pillars and cedar-shingled guardhouse that marked the entrance to the exclusive Dune Golf Club.

  The Dune course closes the first day of November, so no one was there to stop me. No one had a list without my name on it that would prove I hadn’t paid the $18,000 yearly fee. Dune members are primarily older, wealthy, conservative types. Most summer here and winter in Palm Beach. The public course is on the other side of town. Near the dump. Someday I’d do a story on the Dune Club’s unwritten membership policies.

  My mother would have loved a Dune membership. As much as her older sister embraced her Russian-Jewish ancestry, my mother denied hers, changing her maiden name from Sasha Levervitch to Sally Leer. “Sally Leer, my tush!” I heard Lada erupt during one of their fights. “You always wanted to fit in with the Waspy crowd. You pretend you have relatives who came over on the Mayflower instead of the cargo hold of a fishtunkina fishing boat.”

  The road continued to wind through the golf course’s rolling, now-soggy brown lawns. I checked my rearview mirror. Still no one. I let out my breath and filled my lungs with salty sea air. The sea is never very far from any place in Pequod. A forest of pines and scrub oak at the edge of the course blocked the water from view at the club.

  The sprawling clubhouse, another cedar-shingled affair, sat high on a hill at the top of the road’s final curve. The grand-pillared, two-story building with the wraparound porch overlooked fairways, a lake, sandpits and greens. Half-frozen red geraniums still bloomed in the window boxes, but the windows were shuttered. The club was deserted, just as I’d hoped. The parking lot behind the clubhouse butted up against the forest and I headed for it, nervously checking my mirror again.

  Grace and I used to hike in this forest until we were put off by a gruesome accident—a hunter’s arrow ripped into a hiker’s leg. The Dune Club owners posted No Trespassing signs after that. I heard there were a few bold hunters who continued to show up when the club closed for the season, but I prayed they wouldn’t be around.

  Steering into the lot, I breathed more easily. Empty. No pickup trucks or maintenance workers’ vans in sight. I parked at the edge nearest the woods, and when I turned off the engine, I could hear the howl of wind in the trees. Reaching over and opening the glove compartment, I rummaged through the detritus inside: sunglasses missing a lens, local maps, the car’s manual and a miniature flashlight. Also, one small cellophane bag containing four chocolate-covered espresso beans likely purchased during another caffeine emergency. I popped them in my mouth.

  I hadn’t removed Aunt Lada’s opera glasses since the last spying mission. Buried deep down in the well of the compartment, they had lenses capable of magnifying four times at a distance of three thousand feet—enough to see a performer’s facial expressions from the top tier at Carnegie Hall. My great-grandfather Lev had left them to her. He was a “pacher” (Yiddish for clapper) at the City Opera in New York. Lev told Immigrant Services he was a cantor student back in the shtetl and a serious lover of music who knew all about opera. So, they got him a job at the opera house. Janitorial mostly, but one of his tasks was to use his knowledge during the performance to start applause at the right moments.

  “He never left a diva in the lurch,” Aunt Lada said.

  Lada never let me down, either. She was always there to comfort. When my mother and father began fighting incessantly, I even ran off to stay with her in her East Village walk-up. She never married or had kids, and after both my parents were gone, with my father an only child and both sets of grandparents dead, Lada and I were all each other had left. The gold opera glasses were her most treasured possession, and she’d passed them on as a wedding present. I felt guilty as I pulled them out. Here I was, divorced and treating them like junk.

  I stuck the glasses in my coat pocket, closed the window and stepped outside shivering. The rain had let up, but the cold, wet wind snuck up my sleeves. My face and fingers felt raw. I checked behind me again. No one there. I looked left. All clear. Then right. A sharp caw ripped the air at my back. I whipped around and saw a seagull open its claws. A clam plummeted to the asphalt. The big gray-and-white bird swooped down to the bits of cracked shell and pink slime and glared at me, daring me to approach its treasure.

  “It’s all yours,” I said, trembling.

  Pulling my collar high under my chin, I started across the waterlogged grass for the woods and picked up the muddy hunting trail in a few yards. I slogged ahead, still trying to absorb the fact that Hugh was dead. I thought of the time he almost died and how intensely scary that was. He went into cardiac arrest during routine hernia surgery. I wasn’t his wife yet, so the hospital called his next of kin. Hugh’s brother flew up from Virginia to take charge. Tobias Walker was a born-again Christian and a real challenge for Hugh. “A fanatic,” Hugh called him. He’d chafed at finding Tobias by his side when he woke up.

  The rain was coming down hard again, slashing through the pines as I trudged along. The oaks that replaced them closer to the shore offered little protection. The storm had stripped off most of their leaves. Icy water ran down my hair, dripped beneath my coat collar and trickled down my neck. I picked up my pace, kicking through the dead leaves and skirting sinkholes of mud. Freezing, I shoved my hands in my pockets. Two fingers worried the leather strap of Lada’s opera glasses.

  I wasn’t sure what was driving me. Was this a sign of trauma? Part of the shock reaction? I kept moving, squinting through the rain and walking faster, breathing hard. I’m miserable, but at least I’m alive. I could feel the sting of the icy rain, the cold air biting my lungs. I could see the trees and hear the wind and smell the sea. What could Hugh and Helene experience anymore? Nothing.

  “Hugh and Helene. Hugh and Helene.” What happened to “Hugh and Nora?” How did it all go so wrong? Had our brief marriage meant anything to him? We wed a few months after Hugh recovered from the surgery. But it wasn’t simply so I’d be empowered in a health crisis to save him from the care of his zealot brother. We could’ve signed a health care proxy for that. We’d always talked about marriage in relation to having children, and after Hugh’s brush with mortality, he turned to me in bed one morning, misty-eyed.

  “Nora, let’s do it. Let’s get married and have a kid,” he’d said.

  I’d gladly accepted on both counts.

  At last the scrub oaks thinned out and the view opened up. Down the slope at the end of the trail, thick, wheat-colored seagrass and reeds lined a ragged coastline. Beyond the grass, a channel of dark, windswept water churned. And because I knew exactly where to look amid all the vegetation, I spied the brown corner of the small wooden duck blind a few yards from the water’s edge. Grace and I had spotted it on one of our hikes after a punishing nor’easter flattened the seagrass enough to expose the roofline.

  I kept my head bent and tried to prevent the rain from pelting my eyes as I ran down the hill, tripping on roots and slipping on mud. I lost control and stumbled off the trail, careening through the high grass, finally stopping by shoving my hands out as I crashed into the back of the shelter. I caught my breath and checked myself; I wasn’t hurt, just sore and winded. I pushed on the door. Sopping wet and shivering, I stepped inside the tiny wooden room and stood there, dripping puddles on the floor. This is insane. Leave. But I couldn’t. I had to set eyes on the murder scene. As if it would prove to the disbe
lieving part of my brain that this had actually happened.

  The dark interior of the blind smelled of wet cedar and sweet grass. Three walls had no windows. The fourth faced the water and was completely open except for the roof’s extended overhang, which shrouded the inside in shadow. It rendered any hunter who sat there invisible to his prey. Friends or relatives of Mr. and Mrs. Duck might be coasting across the sky, feeling the warmth of the sun, enjoying a lift on a thermal when . . . Boom! Someone playing God would decide to end a life.

  The blind had no furniture, no lighting. No heating device. Only a roughhewn wooden bench with an old army blanket folded on top. Removing Aunt Lada’s glasses from my pocket, I stripped off my wet coat and wrapped the scratchy wool blanket around my shoulders. I sat down on the bench and tried to stop my teeth from chattering by clenching my jaw. Finally, I lifted the glasses to my eyes and peered across the inlet, missing the mark at first, getting lost in the choppy water before moving up into the trees. There it was on the opposite shore, perched on high ground in the wetlands of Pequod Point, glass walls and wooden beams soaring up through the pines. Hugh’s house.

  I’d never seen it in daylight before.

  I’ve never told anyone that I spied on Hugh and Helene. Not even Grace.

  I spied on them the same day I found out they’d moved here, when Lizzie walked into the office with the town clerk’s real estate list.

  “Pequod Point sold for two point five million,” Lizzie said, unwrapping a black-and-white Palestinian scarf from around her neck and setting down her backpack.

  “The Miami developer who built the house last year as his summer escape couldn’t pay off his construction loan. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Walker’ bought it from the bank. I bet you it’s that famous artist Hugh Walker.”

  “What?” I gasped. “Can I see that list?” I couldn’t fathom that Hugh would be cruel enough to add that much insult to injury by moving here.