Queen of Broken Hearts

by Cassandra King

  It turned out to have been a deliberate omission, Mack never telling me, or even Dory and Son, about Shirley Scott. Dropping his head, he admitted that he’d been ashamed of her, and even more ashamed of his treatment of her. He’d picked her up in Gulf Shores while they were both still in high school, a tough girl from the wrong side of the tracks who’d dropped out of school to move there with a girlfriend. Shirley initiated him into another world, fast and furiously. Mack confessed that he was as enamored of her as he was of the pot they smoked during sex, and the thrilling way it heightened the experience for both of them. Only because of his training as an athlete did he give it up, albeit reluctantly. And not altogether, either; each time he went home to Fairhope from Bama, he found himself going to Gulf Shores, toward Shirley’s inviting bed. The last time he’d been with her was the weekend before he met and fell in love with me. After the team had played a game in Mobile, he’d gone to Gulf Shores to see Shirley, then sneaked back into the hotel where the team was sleeping, without the coach ever knowing he’d been gone.

  That summer, however, Shirley presented him with the news: She was pregnant. He was in despair, knowing that his father would disown him, and he’d lose me as well. Desperate, he got rid of her in a way that was easy for him at the time: He paid her off. With money for an abortion and a new start, nineteen-year-old Shirley returned to her hometown of Naples. “That was ten, eleven years ago,” he said in despair. “There’s no way the child could be mine.”

  I met his look, unflinching, and said tightly, “It’s a paternity suit, Mack. I guess you’ll find out in court, won’t you?”

  With Rye representing him, Mack ended up settling the case out of court for a staggering sum in back child support, paid out to Shirley’s relatives, since he had no proof of the large amount of money he’d given her previously. After she’d blown the money Mack gave her to start over, her life spiraled out of control. With a baby and no education, no way of supporting herself, Shirley got by the way she always had, by latching on to any man she could. After being involved in several abusive relationships, she ended up doing hard drugs, and her child was passed from relative to relative. A week before her thirtieth birthday, Shirley overdosed on cocaine, leaving behind an eleven-year-old girl and a piece of paper with Mack’s name and address on it.

  I wasn’t home when Mack and Rye returned from Naples after settling the paternity case. Instead, I was in Baton Rouge, completing the final edits of my dissertation. By the time I returned to Fairhope, Mack had gone back to work on the houses he was restoring. This time it was with a different purpose: He’d gone heavily into debt to settle the case, paying off past years of child support and court costs, and he worked such long hours that I rarely saw him. Not only was he working off his debt, he was also avoiding me, going to bars after work rather than face me. It was the worst time of our marriage. He adamantly refused to discuss the case, or what he’d found in Naples, and would walk out of the room when I questioned him. At last, I could stand it no more, and I went to Rye.

  “Of course we saw the little girl, Clare,” Rye said, sitting behind the big mahogany desk in his office and looking at me with pity. “Poor thing’s not a very appealing child. Scrawny and in bad need of braces, not very healthy-looking. The kid’s had a rough life, I’m sure.” As I was leaving, however, he said with a wistfulness I hadn’t yet heard from the carefree, fun-loving Rye, “But you know? Beneath that mess of hair, I got a glimpse of Mack’s gray eyes.”

  To this day, I’m not sure what made me head straight to the Landing after I left Rye’s office. All I knew was, for some reason I wanted desperately to be with Zoe Catherine. I found her at the bird sanctuary, working on a cage for a red-tailed hawk whose legs were taped up. Seeing me, her face lit up. “C’mon,” she said. “I need to show you something.”

  Zoe led me to the dock, jumped into a battered old canoe, and motioned for me to pick up an oar. Seemingly without a care in the world, she chattered about the injured hawk as we paddled down the creek, me following her lead and dipping my oar in synchronicity with hers. My gloom lifted, and I found myself reveling in the smooth glide of the canoe over the mottled green waters of the creek, the salt-sweet air on my face, the soft splash of the oars. For the first time in weeks, I heard my laughter as Zoe brandished her oar to scare away a couple of ducks that followed us, their webbed feet moving under them like little eggbeaters. Shaking her head, she told me, “See that big-billed one paying me no mind a’tall? That’s Jimmy Carter. Rosalynn will set him straight, wait and see.” Sure enough, after much quacking and flapping of wings, the two ducks gave up their pursuit and returned home, twitching their tails and leaving a gentle wake behind them.

  At a bend in the creek, an inlet of land formed a natural beach, white-sanded and reedy. Zoe motioned for me to hold my oar still. “Shhh,” she warned, a finger held high. “They’re making so much racket they won’t hear us, but I don’t want our movement to scare them.”

  I almost dropped the oar into the water. On the beach were hundreds of pure-white birds with a startling streak of black on their heads. The sheer numbers and stark black-and-white colors were magnificent, but I knew it was their tiny chicks Zoe had brought me to see. In the turmoil of the last weeks, I’d forgotten other times when a new batch of ducklings or baby birds or fledglings appeared and Zoe had called me to come see them.

  “They’re not seagulls, are they?” I raised my voice to be heard over their clamor, and Zoe shook her head.

  “Naw, they’re terns. Gulls sound different.” It was true; even I could tell the chirplike call of the tern was different from the strident cry of a seagull. Because of their numbers, the noise was astonishing. “But here’s what I wanted you to see,” Zoe added. “Watch!”

  She pointed at the hordes of terns that circled and flew in and around their colony, landing with bites of insects in their black bills to place in the gaping mouths of their downy offspring. “Both the mama and papa fly off in search of food,” she told me. “Going for miles sometimes. And they make several trips every day. But here’s what you can’t believe! When they come back, no matter how long they’ve been gone, or how many hundreds of little ones there are in the colony, they always fly straight to their own babies.”

  I eyed her skeptically. “Come on. How’s that possible?”

  Zoe shrugged. “Damned if I know. I mean, the little boogers look just alike, don’t they? But it’s not appearance the parents go by. Bird experts claim that the parent and chick recognize the sound of each other’s call. How do they even hear them, much less recognize their call, I wonder.”

  We sat motionless and watched the colony of birds until the sun began to sink over the top of the trees, and Zoe picked up her oar. “Them spoiled ducks will pitch a hissy fit if I’m late with their supper,” she said, and I reached for my oar reluctantly. In spite of the deafening clamor of the terns, the creek was so peaceful, I wanted to float down it forever. At that moment I longed more than anything to disappear around the bend and never come back.

  I looked over my shoulder one last time as we rowed away. “Thanks for bringing me out here,” I said to her. I was in the front of the canoe with her in the rear. Once we’d left the tern colony behind, the quietness of the creek floated over us like downy feathers.

  We paddled in silence for a few minutes until Zoe said in an even tone, “Birds are strange creatures. Sometimes when the parents are gone, things happen to their little ones. Parents fly off foraging for food, and when they return, a predator’s made off with their chick. What folks don’t know is how they grieve, same as humans. Oh, the scientists, they’ll swear it don’t happen, but I’ve seen it too many times. Had a pigeon who pure grieved herself to death after a raccoon made off with her babies. But something even odder. That same bird will be the one to take care of the fledglings left behind when a mama or papa bird doesn’t come back. Guess it’s something nature has worked out to help them both. Beats all, don’t it?”

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sp; I froze, the oar trailing in creek water turned copper by the sun. When the canoe landed on the sandy bank, Zoe crawled past me and pulled it far enough ashore that she could tie it to a dock post while I sat motionless. Finally I raised my eyes to find her waiting for me, standing in the scarlet water as it lapped gently around her booted feet. “You know, don’t you?” I said. Mack had made me swear not to tell anyone about the paternity suit, and against my better judgment, I’d agreed, too heartsick to argue.

  Zoe held out a large strong hand and pulled me to my feet. I climbed out of the canoe, and she regarded me with her keen dark eyes. “Mack came out here yesterday,” she said mildly. “Needed to be on the water and fish for a while, he said. I could tell something was bad wrong, and I figured he needed the creek to help him work some things out in his mind. The creek’s good at that.” She paused and sighed. “You know that Mack don’t talk to me, Clare. Never has. But I was waiting when he got back, and he was so tormented that it all came pouring out of him.”

  “And he told you about the little girl? Haley?” Zoe nodded, and I asked breathlessly, “W-what did he say?”

  She shook her head. “All he said was he felt bad for her, being passed around to the relatives. He’s paying good support for her, but they’re such a sorry bunch, he’s afraid they’ll blow it and not half take care of her. He said he wishes he could take her in, but he can’t ask that of you.”

  “Oh, God, Zoe! What am I going to do?” I cried, wiping away traitorous tears.

  Zoe looked at me steadily. “I know what you’ll do, because I know who you are. I’ve known it from the first time I saw you.”

  “But what if I can’t? You don’t know how bad this has hurt me.”

  Her gaze was gentle. “Yeah, I do, honey. Yeah, I do.”

  “I don’t know how I can—”

  “Here’s how. You’re not gonna do it alone,” she said, and reached out to give my hand a squeeze. “Neither one of us could live with ourselves if we let that little girl turn out like her mama. And Mack—he’s not as strong as you are, and you know it. He won’t do the right thing unless you do.” Turning abruptly, she motioned for me to follow her. “Come help me feed these ducks before they start raising hell.”

  Half blinded by tears, I stumbled after her as she retrieved a bucket of feed. She’d always made it herself, filling it with every possible ingredient her birds needed in their diet. When I knelt to hold the metal bucket for her, she pried it open and said, “Seems to me like we always have a choice, Clare. We can take the crap life hands us and turn it into something else. Or we can let it take us. Problem with that is, by the time it turns us loose, we might not like what it’s turned us into.” And raising her fingers to her mouth, she whistled her birds to supper.

  It turned out I was wrong that day, thinking I couldn’t love Mack’s child. I hadn’t counted on the way my heart flip-flopped when I dropped her off at school and watched her walk bravely up the steps, blond ponytail bobbing against her thin neck. I hadn’t been prepared for the lump that formed in my throat when a woman stopped us to say how much my daughter and I looked alike, the day Haley got her braces and we went out for a milk shake to celebrate. I couldn’t have imagined my shout of joy when Mack announced that the judge had awarded him full custody, opening the way for me to begin adoption proceedings. When I told Haley, having rehearsed my best professional talk about biological and adoptive mothers, she’d surprised me by asking if the papers meant she could start calling me Mom. I’d been so taken aback, I couldn’t speak; misinterpreting my hesitation, she kept calling me Clare even after the adoption went through.

  That summer after Haley came to live with us, I took her and Jasmine to the beach, where they swam and dove into the Gulf as Etta and I sat on the shore in the shade of a rented umbrella. Haley turned her blond head, waved at me, and called out as easily as if she’d been saying it all her life, “Hey, Mom, watch me swim!” With those words, the ice that had formed around my heart when I first heard about her shattered into thousands of tiny pieces and simply melted away.

  Chapter Eleven

  When I leave the old fish camp—or what I keep reminding myself to call by the new name of Wayfarer’s Landing Retreat Center—I take a short cut to the labyrinth site, going behind Zoe Catherine’s cabin. Genghis Khan sees me and struts along behind me. I’m on a covert mission, so I shoo him back to Zoe’s yard, since I can’t trust him to remain quiet. He jerks back his head huffily but leaves with his dignity intact by chasing Catherine the Great and pretending he wasn’t following me after all.

  My presence disturbs the birds in their aviaries, the pheasants and pigeons and doves, which squawk and screech and flap and rustle their wings in protest. The construction going on across from their lodgings has had all of Zoe’s birds in a dither for the past two-plus months, which I feel bad about. She pooh-poohs my concerns by saying they’re just spoiled rotten, is all. When I wonder how they’re going to react to so many folks being at the Landing for the retreats, she says they’ll pout at first, but they’ll get over it. I need to stop pampering them, she insists. Makes them too hard to get along with. Genghis is the most arrogant, stuck-up peacock she’s ever seen, she says, and it won’t hurt him to be taken down a notch. It’ll be good for the peacocks to share their territory with other people like them. Cooter told me it was Zoe’s fault for pampering her birds. She’s always thought Genghis hung the man in the moon, he added in disgust.

  The path comes up behind one of the five oaks that encircle the labyrinth, and I pause next to the closest one and peer around its massive trunk. Dory made me promise I wouldn’t come out here until the labyrinth was finished, because she wanted to surprise me, but I was unable to resist. When I saw the dump truck rumbling away after emptying its contents, I knew I’d never be able to continue my inspection of the new building while the labyrinth was being put together. No way. As I take in the scene unfolding before my eyes, I raise a hand to my mouth to keep from gasping and giving myself away. What I see is almost impossible to take in.

  Dory told me that she had summoned the dozen or so members of her White Ring Society for the big day, putting out the word for them to bring along anyone they could. I expected to see them and maybe a half-dozen others. Instead, more than fifty people are gathered at the site, standing in little groups around the mounds of river stones that the dump truck left. There are children and teenagers and white-haired men and women, people of all ages, sizes, colors, and shapes. But the one that surprises me the most is Son Rodgers, brow furrowed as he stands next to Dory with his hands on his hips, studying the pile of rocks and contemplating the task of edging the paths with them. On a glorious bronze Saturday morning in early November, when Alabama, Auburn, Florida, and FSU are playing big football games, the size of the crowd almost brings me to my knees.

  My conscience gets the best of me, and I slip away from the tree trunk and return down the pathway, hoping the squawking of the birds won’t give me away. The least I can do is not spoil the surprise for Dory.

  For the last couple of weeks, I’ve watched her lay out the groundwork for the labyrinth in preparation for the rock edgings, using methods I wouldn’t have thought of in a million years. Once she had the dimensions calculated, she brought in a couple of surprising resources, both former teachers of her boys. One was the high school physics teacher, who constructed what looked like a giant drawing compass to mark off the circles from a center point. How he calculated the center, I have no idea, but he and Dory hammered a huge stake in it, then took a rope with a pointed stick tied to the end to measure the circles. Following behind them, the football coach walked off the circling paths of the labyrinth as he pushed a little wheelbarrow-looking contraption and left a white-chalk outline behind, the way yard lines are marked off for football games. The next day Dory brought in the crew of gardeners who help keep her gardens immaculate, tillers in hand. After they departed, the paths were laid, and the white-chalk pathways were edged by shallow tr
enches necessary for holding the rocks in place.

  On the day after the trenches were dug, Dory grabbed a low branch of an oak on the outskirts of the labyrinth and hoisted herself up on it, laughing at my openmouthed astonishment. Then she held down a hand for me. “Get your butt up here, Clare,” she said as I stood beneath the tree and stared at her in disbelief. “Only way to see a labyrinth when it’s being laid out is from above.”

  “No way in hell,” I protested. “Heights make me dizzy.”

  Dory rolled her eyes and continued her climb up the tree. “If you don’t see it from up here, you might as well not see it,” she called down.

  Like a fool, I hoisted myself up and crawled after her, then clung to the trunk in terror as Dory laughed at me for not going any higher. I dared look down when I heard a noise beneath us and saw Zoe Catherine bending over to unlace her boots. Freed of her shoes and using her long toes as leverage, Zoe grabbed the same branch Dory had used and pulled herself onto it, as agile as a monkey.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I screeched as Zoe passed me while I held on to the trunk for dear life. Zoe kept climbing until she reached the place where Dory had settled into the fork of two fat branches at least six feet above my safe perch, which was only a few feet from the ground.

  “Getting a good look at this pretty thing Dory’s made, is all,” Zoe yelled down to me. “Come up here where I am. You can’t see pea-turkey squat from there.”

  “You don’t have to climb much farther, Clare,” Dory called. “A few more feet and you’ll see the whole pattern.”

  When I hesitated, Zoe scoffed, “When’s the last time you climbed a tree, girl?”

  “Probably forty years ago,” I muttered, anchoring my sneakered foot on a small limb before gripping a higher one with both hands as I inched upward.

  Zoe snorted. “No wonder you’re so uptight, then. Everybody needs to climb a tree every once in a while. I do. Lot of times you’ll find me perching right beside my birds.”