Turtle Moon

by Alice Hoffman

  “God damn it,” he called. “Bethany?”

  Bethany sat on the couch while he screamed at her through the crack in the door. She was fairly certain that she was no longer breathing. Throughout their marriage he had never once shouted at her or called her names; it didn’t even sound like his voice. Then she realized, all in a rush, that they were no longer the people they had been, neither of them, and that that was what happened once you started to fight over custody.

  “I’m going to break the door down,” he vowed.

  She really couldn’t move, that was the amazing thing. She couldn’t have let him in if she’d wanted to. When the door didn’t give way, Randy backed off. Bethany was still on the couch when she heard the glass breaking. He had put his fist right through the living room window. Bethany’s breathing was hard and sharp as she ran into the kitchen and went through the drawers. She had a rubbery feeling in her legs, as though she might collapse, but instead she grabbed the bread knife, a long one with a serrated edge, and ran back to the living room. Randy was shouting her name, as if they didn’t have neighbors or a baby asleep in their bed. He had unlocked the window and was sliding it up when Bethany went to the front door and flung it open. It was an Indian summer night, and Bethany wore only shorts and a white blouse. She stood in the doorway, her long dark hair electrified, her white shirt illuminated by moonlight, waving the knife in front of her.

  “Get out of here!” she screamed in a voice she had never heard before.

  Randy walked right toward her. There were shards of broken glass in his hair and blood on his hand and down his arm, staining one of his favorite blue shirts. “Go on,” he said. “Act crazy. That’s what you do best.”

  “I mean it,” Bethany told him.

  The knife didn’t feel the least bit heavy in her hands. A few months before, the most she had to worry about was picking up lamb chops for dinner and whether the gardener had planted white or purple wisteria. Now, as Randy walked closer, Bethany thought about Rachel being taken from her for no good reason, and the knife felt more and more comfortable. Randy had that serious, sweetly concerned look on his face, the one that made women go limp with desire. He had thought briefly of being an actor—he’ d been the lead in all his high school plays—and although his father had finally convinced him to go into the family business, Bethany could see he would have made a good actor. He could make you believe that you needed him, that he cared.

  “The decision is up to the court,” he told Bethany that night. “There’s no point in us fighting.”

  He had almost reached the door by then. Bethany jabbed the knife in the air and he stepped back. For a moment she could see she had truly frightened him.

  “You can have anything you want,” she told him. She’d grown up in Ohio and her voice had a sweet, flat timbre, although tonight it was little more than a whisper. “You just can’t have Rachel.”

  “You want to tell that to my parents?” he said.

  There was a dinner party going on next door at the Kleinmans’, and they could hear laughter through the open windows. They used to go to those parties together. Bethany would bring her ribbon cake, and Randy a blue glass pitcher of margaritas, and when they came home they’d take a shower together and get into bed.

  “If you try to take her, I’ll kill you,” Bethany said in her quiet voice.

  “Can I quote you?” Randy said. “In court?”

  Bethany lowered the knife to her side. She was a beautiful girl who had never finished college or balanced a checkbook and who needed to take antidepressants in spite of the fact that she’d married the boy everyone had been in love with.

  “We should stop fighting,” Randy said.

  “You’re right,” Bethany agreed.

  “We’re not going to kill each other, we’re just going to make each other miserable, and that’s just the way it’s going to be,” Randy said.

  That was when Bethany knew she wasn’t going to win her case. She left two days later, and during the bus trip through the Carolinas she invented new names for herself and the baby. When they got to Atlanta she found a pawnshop and sold both her diamond necklaces and her wedding ring, keeping the sapphires and the two gold-plated rings she’d inherited from her mother. She also discovered that if she went out behind the used-tire shop down the street and paid two thousand in cash she could get a fake ID from the state of her choice. She chose New Jersey, so she would always be reminded of that moonlit ride when the rain came down so suddenly and she refused to stop. She, who hadn’t driven any farther than the local shops during the time she’d been married, just kept on going, outdistancing the rain.

  They were headed for Miami, but they got off the bus in Hartford Beach to buy diapers and milk and a decent lunch, and never got back on. The air smelled like oranges and the sky was wide and blue; the baby clapped her hands and cooed when she saw a yellow parakeet in a tall cabbage palm. Bethany bought a used Ford, cash, and drove toward the ocean. She didn’t stop until she got to Verity. She bought her condo, furnished, the following day. All through that fall and winter she told herself she’d have to get a job, but she couldn’t stand to be separated from her daughter, not even for an hour. She took the baby everywhere, to the hairdresser’s, where she had her dark hair cut short and dyed auburn, and later, when her money began to run out, to the pawnshop in Hartford Beach, where she sold her last necklace, the sapphires Randy had given her on the night they were married.

  It seemed, quite luckily, that everyone in Florida was from somewhere else. No one questioned Bethany about her past, although several women in her building gave her advice. Always, they told Bethany, ask a man if he has a criminal history before dating him. Never bad-mouth your ex in front of your child; even if you’re still angry, better not to mention him at all. When her neighbors offered each other hints on how to deal with their children’s problems, Bethany only pretended to listen. Her baby, who was now fourteen months old, was as sweet as ever, maybe even sweeter, as if she were being fed sugar water rather than homogenized milk and applesauce. How could a child conceived in a desperate last attempt to keep a marriage together be so good-natured? How had she been able to learn her new name so quickly, to know, instinctively, not to look at strangers, and to sit on her mother’s lap down in the laundry room and not make a peep? Each time Bethany looked at her baby, she knew she had done the right thing. If there was a problem, it was only that they both suffered from insomnia, as if they were somehow more able to be their true selves after darkness fell. Bethany often did her errands in the evening, and she took the baby grocery shopping in Hartford Beach, where the Winn Dixie was open twenty-four hours a day. It was there that she first sensed that someone was following her. Bethany was in the frozen-food aisle, getting the bagels the baby liked to chew on when she was teething, when she felt someone behind her. She grabbed her cart and went straight to the checkout line. She scanned the aisles; if she had seen even a shadow, she would have picked up the baby and bolted, leaving her cart behind, but there was nothing suspicious, just a few late-night shoppers, and Bethany let Rachel play with a bag of plums while she unloaded her cart.

  The parking lot was nearly empty when Bethany rolled her cart out. It was a hot, starry night. In her seat in the cart, the baby was covering her eyes and playing peek-a-boo. She had not yet begun to speak, but Bethany understood her all the same.

  “I see you,” Bethany had said, laughing, and then she felt it again. She looked over her shoulder. No one was there, but this time she knew she was right. She pushed the cart right up to her car, unlocked the doors, and slid the baby into her car seat. Bethany was breathing hard and her ears were burning. She opened the trunk and threw the groceries inside. She kept feeling something, like a shadow that was passing over her own. She got in behind the wheel and quickly locked all the doors.

  “Ba-ba,” the baby cried, wanting her frozen bagel right away.

  “As soon as we get home,” Bethany said.

  Her hand
s were shaking as she backed out. It was silly; here she was, in the same parking lot she came to all the time. She drove to the exit and stopped behind a station wagon idling at the red light. An old man of seventy-five or eighty was at the wheel. Bethany looked in the rearview mirror so she could see her baby. Rachel whimpered, still hoping for her bagel.

  “Peek-a-boo,” Bethany sang, and then she saw the car behind her with its headlights turned off. She could feel, quite suddenly, a line of ice across her back. The stoplight was still red; the old man in the station wagon was riffling through a bag of groceries. Bethany had broken into a sweat; her blouse was completely drenched.

  She couldn’t see his face, or even the model of the car he drove, but in that instant she decided to run. She turned the steering wheel sharply and stepped on the gas as hard as she could, so that the Ford shot over the curbstone, out into the street and oncoming traffic. In the trunk, a dozen eggs hit against each other and broke. The baby began to cry.

  “Don’t cry,” Bethany said. “Please don’t cry.”

  She sped toward the center of Hartford Beach. She heard the squeal of tires in the parking lot, but she knew he couldn’t catch up to her. She drove for hours, down to Miami and then back up the Interstate to Verity. The baby slept curled up in her car seat, and when, at dawn, Bethany finally pulled into her parking space and lifted Rachel out of the car, she felt a wave of relief. Her baby was safe, and that was what mattered. What she didn’t stop to think about, or even consider, was that she hadn’t been found at the Winn Dixie in Hartford Beach. She’d been followed there. All night long, while she’d driven to Miami and back, the man who’d been sent to find her had been waiting in the parking lot of 27 Long Boat Street, and that didn’t bother him in the least, since he was being paid well and had all the time in the world. Or, at the very least, he had until nightfall.

  After her hair had been cropped short down at the Cut ’n’ Curl, and most of the green chlorinated ends chopped away, Lucy Rosen looked about eighteen years old. From a distance, that is, in the right sort of light, late in the evening when the sky was thick with blue shadows. Lucy can still fit into one pair of jeans she bought before Keith was born, and twice she’s been asked for ID at the Sea View Liquor Store, although she’s far from being a teenager, as her ex-husband, Evan, recently reminded her when he forwarded an invitation to their twentieth high school reunion later this month. The invitation is shoved behind the Kleenex and the hand cream on her night table. Sometimes, as she gets into bed, Lucy sees the corner of the response card she’ll never mail, and she feels shivery and somehow embarrassed, as if, after twenty years, when the facts of her life should all be settled, she hasn’t even begun.

  This is not the first time Lucy has had to start over. She’d been so self-reliant as a child that mothers on the block begged her to baby-sit; they offered her bags of potato chips and paid her fifty cents more an hour than any of their other sitters. Lucy’s own parents, dizzy black sheep who had given up everything for music and love, rarely noticed when Lucy brought home A’s or vacuumed the living room rug. Her father, Scout, played piano at bar mitzvahs and weddings, accompanied by her mother, Paula, who had once been a backup singer for Vic Damone. They were out most nights until dawn, so Lucy could easily have eaten Mallomars until midnight and read comic books and romance novels. She could have smoked cigarettes and tested all the bottles in the liquor cabinet. Instead, she did her homework and left olive-loaf sandwiches on the counter and noodle casseroles in the oven, and although her parents swore her dinners had saved them from starvation when they arrived home at four or five in the morning, the food never actually seemed to have been touched.

  Scout’s family, the Friedmans, whose baked goods could be found in every supermarket in the Northeast, had sat shiva for him and cut him off without a cent when he married a Catholic girl; they left everything to his brother, Jack. Aside from the fact that no Friedmans’ doughnuts or pies were ever allowed into the house, Scout believed he had gotten the best of the bargain.

  “We’re on a raft!” he would cry cheerfully at the end of each month when the bills came in and they were thoroughly broke. “Just the three of us on a raft, in the middle of the deep blue sea.”

  Actually, they were in a tract house in Levittown, and they had no idea how sick it made Lucy just to think of being on a raft with her parents, who seemed so ridiculously in love. Scout and Paula were killed at a Long Island Rail Road crossing, just before dawn, on the way home from a June wedding in Bellmore, found with their arms wrapped around each other. Lucy still wonders if they hadn’t seen the oncoming train because they were too busy kissing. She was sent to live in Great Neck with her Uncle Jack, the brother Scout hadn’t talked to in eighteen years. She spent all that July locked inside her bedroom, which was, she couldn’t help but notice, larger than the living room of their house in Levittown. She refused the smoked salmon sandwiches and tea cakes her Aunt Naomi sent to her room; she knew and didn’t care that her cousin Andrea, who was only a few months younger, despised her; and each time her Uncle Jack played the piano, she put cotton balls in her ears, rather than hear how much better he was than Scout. When Lucy finally came out of her locked room, on the night of Andrea’s sweet sixteen party, her skin was as white as a calla lily and she had a careless, wild look in her eyes. It was only natural that the first boy to see her would fall in love with her and, in spite of the fact that nothing made her happy, stay in love long enough to marry her. On the night of Andrea’s party, they went out behind the pool house, which was always well stocked with white wine and Tab, and there, on a stone path that led to the pool filter, Evan kissed her for the first time. In that instant, while the cicadas sang in the heat, Lucy became the mystery girl, the blonde cousin from nowhere who knew, without ever being taught, how to kiss.

  In Levittown, Lucy had been the last chosen for everything. Now, after a month of starvation and mourning, all that had changed. Her gray eyes were luminous, she wore a size seven, and her pale hair fell down to her waist. When the school term began it was decided that she was the girl with talent. She was editor of the school newspaper, and president of the Honor Society, and, although she wasn’t named queen of the junior prom, a title bestowed upon Heidi Kaplan, who had red hair the color of hot-house roses, she was one of the princesses. By her senior year, there were so many boys phoning Lucy that Andrea, who grew more sullen with each call, insisted Lucy be given her very own Princess phone, with a dial that glowed in the dark.

  No matter how many boys were after her—and the thinner and paler she became, the more there were of them, as if she were a flickering light they couldn’t stay away from—Lucy remained true to that first kiss, and to Evan. She can still recall the faces of some of the boys who followed her to her classes and hung around Uncle Jack’s pool. But she always believed that eventually one of them would see through her, and Evan was so even-tempered and so thoroughly bamboozled she thought they would be together forever. Instead, it only seemed that way; they lasted nearly twenty-two years past their first kiss.

  Since their breakup, Lucy has found she doesn’t miss Evan at all. She doesn’t dream about him, or cry over him down in the laundry room the way some of her neighbors do on the anniversaries of their weddings or divorce decrees. Toward the end, all they had in common was Keith. They’d sit in the kitchen in the dark, drinking tea, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Was it something they’d done or simply a nervous condition that made Keith so sensitive, ready to cry at the sound of a hornet, refusing to sleep for days on end, writing with black crayons on the walls? In spite of all this, Evan was a good father, too good, perhaps, since he’d wanted custody, and fought for it in his own mild way until it became clear Lucy wouldn’t give in. Now, of course, there are times when she wishes she had. Keith has grown from a wary, difficult boy into a surly loner, a thief whose backpack has to be checked for contraband every day. When the other women at 27 Long Boat Street meet down in the laundry room or at
the pool to talk about their children, Lucy keeps her mouth shut. She listens to their tales of grouchy adolescent girls who paint their fingernails purple and toddlers who eat handfuls of powdered soap, but she feels no kinship. Even physical illness cannot move her to compassion. There is, after all, strong brown soap for poison ivy, iodine for cuts and bruises, mud for bee stings, honey for sore throats, chalky white casts for broken bones. But where is the cure for meanness of spirit? What remedy is available for unhappiness and thievery? Certainly, if it were anywhere in Florida, Lucy would have already found it, since the sharp yellow afternoon sunlight hides nothing. It’s the sort of light that makes it difficult to begin all over again and doesn’t allow for much invention. You are what you see in the mirror above the sink—in Lucy’s case, a pretty woman with slightly green hair whose son hates her.

  Lucy does her best to avoid the other divorced women in her building. She confides in no one but Kitty Bass, the secretary at the Verity Sun Herald, who has a daughter Lucy’s age and is always a great one for advice. It was Kitty who suggested Dee down at the Cut ’n’ Curl, although as far as she was concerned Lucy’s hair was hardly green enough to notice. When Kitty’s daughter, Janey, who now owns the Hole-in-One Donut Shop over by the golf course, was a teenager, her hair turned so green from swimming in the municipal pool that a loose parakeet mistook her for a cabbage palm and flew right into her hair, leaving her with a fear of birds that persisted for years. Since whole flocks of escaped parakeets nest on the roof-tops in Verity, this is not comforting news to Lucy. Sometimes when she drives home at twilight, the sky is filled with heat waves and parakeets. She can see them out of the corner of her eye, a flash of turquoise or jade feathers just above the stoplights and the telephone wires. It has gotten so that Lucy doesn’t leave home without a scarf or, at the very least, one of Keith’s baseball caps.