by Lise Saffran
Jenny glanced at Miranda and Frankie and smiled. Frankie was clearly enjoying having the older girl’s undivided attention without her sister around. Jenny avoided looking directly at Trinculo and pulled her phone from her pocket to check, once again, for messages. Nothing.
Trinculo brought his coffee cup up to his mouth with both hands. “Caliban, on the other hand, looks like he could use some sleep.”
Caliban hunched in a plastic chair with a sweater wrapped tightly around his shoulders, staring off into the distance. An untouched powdered donut sat on a paper plate on his lap. He was wearing sunglasses though the morning was still shrouded in fog. His skin had a sickly green tinge.
Jenny stirred her coffee with the plastic straw. “Peg will be furious if he blows the performance tomorrow night.”
Trinculo said, “Oh, no. Don’t worry. He’s a professional. He may have forgotten how to tie his shoes last night, but come tomorrow he will know his lines.”
Jenny kept her eyes in her cup, watching her coffee settle back into a smooth, black disk.
“I’ll talk to her again, Jenny,” said Trinculo softly. “Whatever it takes.”
She shook her head. “No. It should be me who does it.” The coffee was cold, but she swallowed a mouthful of the bitter liquid anyway. “You know, I was standing here remembering the first real broken heart that Lilly had. She was sixteen.”
Trinculo’s expression was pained. “It doesn’t get easier.”
Jenny met his eyes for the first time since Waldron. “No. It doesn’t.” She looked from his face back out to the water. The ferry was close enough to see people standing on the deck outside. “She was crazy in love with this boy at school. A senior. And he loved her, too, I think. For a while. He was her first …” She kicked a small rock down the hill with the toe of her boot. “God, I shouldn’t be telling you this. She would kill me if she knew I was telling you this.”
The fog was breaking up in chunks, like snow melting off a car. Trinculo set his cup by his feet and fished his sunglasses out of his pocket. “Look. I don’t want to come between you and your daughter, but I will say that you’ve both seen me naked and in, well, a somewhat compromised position.”
“Shhhh,” said Jenny and she touched her finger to his lips. She then added, in a pretty good imitation of Peg, “That is not to be spoken of.”
Trinculo laughed. “I was just sayin.’”
Jenny continued, “The thing was, it was so Lilly. We went to Marin to visit my sister, and while we were there she got an e-mail from the guy saying that he’d met someone on vacation with his parents. He didn’t say he wanted to break up with her, what he said was he thought he might be in love with both of them at the same time.” Jenny smiled. “And Lilly, being Lilly, knew right away that this was bullshit. She sobbed in my arms for maybe five minutes all out, and then she looked up at me and do you know what she said?”
Trinculo waited.
“She said, ‘He couldn’t go without sex for two weeks?’”
They both laughed.
“No one is going to pull anything over on that girl,” said Trinculo, shaking his head.
“No.” Jenny touched his arm. She could feel the warmth of his skin through the fabric of his waffled cotton T-shirt. “We should go down.”
Trinculo looked at the back of her hand and then raised his eyes to her face. His look had such desire in it that she blushed.
“When will I see you next?”
“Tomorrow night. At Peg’s.”
“I meant alone.”
Jenny chewed her bottom lip. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s play it by ear, okay?”
The ferry captain let out a long, loud blast. The cars in line started their engines and from the Village and the market and the parking lot and the edge of the cliff, each of the Waldron travelers began to make their way down the hill toward the boat.
The actors followed the line of tourists off the ferry in twos and threes, separating at the landing as if an invisible string binding them together had been cut. They called out their good-byes to each other on their way to the market, to a restaurant for lunch, or in the case of Caliban, home to bed. Jenny and Trinculo touched hands so briefly before parting, and said so little, that it was unlikely that anyone noticed but themselves. Frankie climbed into the truck with her backpack clutched to her chest and her hair wild around her head. She had packed her toothbrush, Jenny thought, but it was unlikely that she had used it.
“You tired?” Jenny started the engine and looked over her shoulder, backing up and then out of her spot on Second.
Frankie nodded and leaned back against the seat. “It was great, wasn’t it, Mom? The show?”
Jenny smiled. “You were great.”
Frankie looked out the window. “Do you think Phoenix will be jealous?”
“I imagine she will.” Jenny started to turn on Argyle to get to Cattle Point, their normal way home, but then on a hunch she kept going straight on Beaverton Valley Road. On the ride from Orcas to San Juan she had taken what Luke had said and turned it over so many times in her mind that it was polished smooth, like beach glass or a witching stone. A declaration of love?
“We have the Shaw and Lopez shows first,” mused Frankie. “Maybe by the time we open on San Juan she’ll have heard so much about it from everybody …” Her eyes were shining at the thought. “She’ll have read about it in the paper even by then, and well, maybe Phoenix will be so used to the idea of me as an actress that it won’t bother her. As much.” She sat up straight in the seat. “Hey! I thought we were going home.”
“Your sister told Luke that she was going to make a declaration of love. It just occurred to me where she might do that.”
“Who is she in love with now? Elliot?” Frankie followed their progress past the neat rows of the apple orchard that produced hard cider in fall and winter. She turned to look at Jenny. “Are we going to the Big Rock?”
Jenny nodded. For fifty years the huge granite boulder on the corner of two heavily traveled roads had served as a kind of community billboard with ever-changing painted messages of loss, longing, love, and celebration. It was there that the Friday Harbor High graduating classes of many years in a row marked their passage. One year it had held a farewell message to the island from a German exchange student named Henrike and another time it had memorialized a young man who had died of AIDS. For one week it had sported a finely drawn portrait of a salmon. The American flag painted on it after 9/11 was painted over within twenty-four hours with a giant peace sign. The images might last for a week or six weeks, but sooner or later someone would always sneak over there and paint something new.
And it was always done in the middle of the night, thought Jenny grimly, pulling her truck onto the shoulder of the road.
Frankie leapt out of the passenger side before the engine died. She ran to the rock and stood in front of it, her mouth hanging open. “She loves Trinculo?”
Jenny took a few steps toward the rock, her boots crunching in the dried grass. It was about twice as tall as she was and ten times as wide and it was covered with dark green paint. There were just three words spelled out in white, and they were drawn in the bubble-shaped letters that Lilly had once used to advertise a car wash for her junior high softball team. Ceres Loves Trinculo.
Frankie turned with a look of disbelief. “But he’s old!”
Jenny reached her hand out to touch the rock and pulled it back with green on her fingers. The paint was still wet.
“Where’d she get the paint, do you think?” breathed Frankie.
“It’s from the shed.” Jenny held her fingers up so that Frankie could see the color. “Remember?”
Frankie took a few steps back and crossed her arms over her chest. She stared at the rock with a mixture of admiration and dread. “Everyone is going to see this.”
Everyone was right, thought Jenny, hopping back in the cab and waiting for Frankie to buckle up before she started the engine. Beaverton Valley Road was one of
about twelve major roads on San Juan and it cut straight through the heart of the island. The rock was on the corner of Beaverton Valley and Egg Lake Road, where Dale and Peg lived. Where they were scheduled to meet the next night to review the Waldron performance and make some last-minute changes before the play opened on Shaw. Jenny did not know how long it would take the news of a mysterious new message on the rock to spread around the island, but by tomorrow night, at least, everyone who mattered to Lilly would have seen it.
Jenny chewed on the nails of her left hand and held the steering wheel with her right. She drove as fast as she thought safety permitted around the curves on Egg Lake and Wold, which in summer was about half as fast as you would think because of those damn scooter cars the half-blind tourists rented from the moped shop. Trinculo was right, heartbreak always hurt, no matter how old you were. But when you were almost eighteen, humiliation was even worse.
She turned onto their gravel road so fast that Frankie’s backpack slid from the seat to the floor. In the settling dust of her own driveway, Jenny could admit to herself that she had been afraid of Lilly’s wrath and that she had been afraid that exposing this new thing with Trinculo (Lilly might be prepared to call it love, but Jenny was forty-two and for her it was too soon to even think that word) would kill it, and that her fear had led her to do things that she was not proud of. She could admit all that, but what she could not do was let it continue.
She hopped down to the ground and headed for the house without even waiting for Frankie to collect her backpack and her jacket. She flung open the door and tossed her pack onto the floor by the coatrack. Her T-shirt was damp with sweat and she was grimy and exhausted from the events of last night and this morning. The muffin she had eaten with her coffee on Orcas was long gone, and her stomach growled. She ignored all that.
“Lilly!”
Seeing the words in Lilly’s handwriting had clarified Jenny’s purpose for her in a way that all her daughter’s flirting and speculating and attention-seeking had not. She would tell her the truth about Trinculo. She would deal with her anger and disappointment. And then she would help her paint over that rock.
“Lil! Where are you?” Jenny flung open the door to Lilly’s room.
“Waa? Oh. Hmmm. Hi.” Lilly’s head emerged from her bed in a tangle of blankets. Outside the fog and the breeze and the sun had given the morning air the freshness of spring, but all Lilly’s windows were closed tight and her room smelled like patchouli, unwashed clothes, and ripe fruit. A bowl with a crust of leftover granola teetered on her night table along with a pack of clove cigarettes, a silver-threaded Indian scarf, and a book of Far Side cartoons, which apparently was what she’d been reading instead of The Tempest. She stretched a bare arm up toward the ceiling and peered at Jenny with sleepy eyes. “I didn’t think you were home.”
“We are now.” Jenny stood with her hands on her hips. She fought the urge to ask Lilly what she thought she was doing leaving Waldron at the crack of dawn without telling anyone and how she had gotten out to Beaverton Valley without the truck. She reminded herself what she had to do. “Frankie and I took a little detour on the way home,” she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Oh, yeah?” A smile played on Lilly’s lips. She sat up, clearly proud of herself.
She was, thought Jenny, dancing happily toward a cliff. And it was Jenny who had to push her over.
“We saw what you wrote about Trinculo,” Jenny said. She reached a hand out to push a lock of Lilly’s hair off her face. The texture of the dreadlocks still surprised her when she touched them. It was so unlike the silk that fell from her baby’s head when she was small. “I think you might want to paint it over. Before everyone else sees it, too.”
Lilly fell back against the pillow. “You mean you want me to paint it over.”
“He doesn’t love you back, sweetheart.”
“How do you know?” Lilly narrowed her eyes.
Jenny heard a rustle and turned to see Frankie standing in the doorway listening.
“Give me and your sister a moment alone, please.”
Frankie moved off reluctantly. It did not sound as if she had gone far.
“I know because, well, he and I …” Jenny swallowed. She could tell her cheeks and throat were bright red. Her ears were burning. This was embarrassing and painful, she reminded herself, but it was nothing compared to what Lilly would feel if that message stayed up another day. “He and I are together,” she said. “Kind of.”
Lilly flinched. All the bravado leaked from her face and she looked stunned and very, very young. Her eyes filled with tears, but it was a moment before she said anything. “Have you had sex with him?”
Jenny took a breath. She knew that any normal, good mother would say None of your business if her child asked her that question. This was not a normal situation, however, and anyway, she was not so sure that she was a good mother. What she did know was that it was important that Lilly not nurture any false hopes.
“Not yet,” she whispered.
Lilly’s expression changed to horror. “But you’re going to.”
“Maybe,” said Jenny. “Probably.”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God!” A sob burst out of Lilly and she flung off her blankets to reveal a man’s tank top undershirt and a polka-dotted thong. She leaped out of bed and proceeded to hurl clothes around her closet as if she were a thief ransacking the place in search of jewels.
“Look, Lilly, I’ll help you paint …”
“Don’t even talk to me!” She held a flannel shirt to her chest and looked at Jenny with wild loathing. “I hate you!” She pushed past Jenny to the door.
Frankie was perched in the soft chair just outside Lilly’s room. She glanced at Jenny with alarm as Lilly ran by, half-dressed, toward the shed. “You’re not really together with him, are you? With Trinculo? You just said that, right?”
“It’s been a long time, Franks, since there was someone I really liked …”
“Why would you do that, Mom? Why would you steal him from Lilly?”
“I didn’t steal him, Frankie.” Jenny took a step toward Frankie, her arms extended.
The look on Frankie’s face stopped Jenny cold. It was an expression that allowed for no mercy. She remembered seeing it in her English teacher after she turned in yet another essay written on the bus after a night of partying.
Still, Jenny was unprepared for the contempt in Frankie’s voice.
“Are you really that desperate?”
Jenny lunged forward and slapped her, hard, across the face. She did it fast, without thinking, like reaching out to grab a child’s T-shirt to keep her from running into traffic.
Both Jenny and Frankie stared at each other in shock. A life lived with children was like a hike over changing terrain. Jenny knew that. Yet, in the flash of light that followed that thunderbolt of a blow, she understood something else, too. Some ground, when crossed, left you in a place you did not recognize. And once there, you could not go back.
Frankie pressed her hand against her cheek. Then she turned and darted out the front door after Lilly. Jenny heard the truck start up a few minutes later. She did not run out to tell Lilly to drive carefully, as she usually did, or admonish her to remember that this was their only vehicle. She did not call after the girls and ask if they wanted her help.
She stood in the hallway and shivered. The breeze jostled the wind chime on the front porch and, knocking against itself, it made a discordant music. Jenny remained still and listened for a long time before moving. She was alone.
Jenny spent the afternoon at the cabin without her truck and without her girls. She knew that if she called, Mary Ann would come over. She did not call. Nor did she call Trinculo, whom she suspected would hop in the Mini and barrel down her gravel drive at the smallest invitation. In spite of the sadness she felt, the image made her smile.
Jenny cleaned the kitchen and then she carried her cell phone into the sunporch. She set it on the small table besid
e her loom in case the girls called or sent a text. She began to weave the header on the fabric she had recently threaded, bringing all of the threads in order. She had dyed the yarn a rich burgundy, woven together with a soft green in a modified herringbone. Into the center she had woven a caracol, the pre-Columbian snail she had copied from a book on Mexican blankets. A small bowl of water sat on the table next to the phone and she dipped her fingers into it and carefully worked the threads with her hands. They expanded slightly. She dipped her fingers again.
She hadn’t felt this way in quite a long while, she realized: wrung out and jangly and relieved and nervous. It was the feeling you woke with the morning after a long, wild party where you were not quite sure what you might have said or done. It was hard not to let her mind wander back to before she had hit Frankie, before she had told Lilly about herself and Trinculo, all the way back to the blanket in the woods on Waldron. Trinculo’s fingertips against her skin had been remarkably smooth. This was a man who spent his days on a stage, or a set, reading scripts, discussing characters, drinking wine. Most of the men she had been with, even Phinneas, who supplemented his pottery with odd jobs, had the cracked calloused hands of roofers and contractors and fishermen. They had kissed for the longest time. Faint voices traveled to them from around the fire. Waves pushed against the beach. A breeze moved the pine. His tongue had slid over her lips. She had opened her mouth.
Jenny counted threads out for the fringe and then divided each group in two. Frankie, in her infuriating, adolescent way, had asked if she was desperate. She was desperate, to tell the truth, a lot of the time. Desperate for fingers on her skin, a mouth pressed against hers, a long nap in some gentle man’s arms after sex. She had been happy to find that weaving often soothed those longings, in a way that some of the other things she’d dabbled in, such as poetry and pottery, never had. It was the repetition, perhaps, and the slow accumulation of fabric under her hands. Sometimes she got up in the middle of the night to sit at her loom. It wasn’t working today, though, for some reason. She threaded the needle full of wool through the fringe and her mind kept slipping back to that night. To Trinculo.