Turtle Moon

by Alice Hoffman

  How can she go on living her life when no one on earth really knows her? Her mother keeps cooking her nutritious dinners and touching her head for fever. Her grandmother has suggested vitamin B and iron, as if what is wrong with her is a dietary ailment. She’s gotten so used to masking her true feelings that when she sees the children at the Dumpster she doesn’t appear to have any reaction. She continues chewing on a piece of ice; she keeps one hand on the meshing of the screen door and her back remains straight. But deep inside, she feels as if she’s just discovered something important. She knows how to be quiet, since it’s the only way to have any privacy when you live in a tiny house with a mother who thinks every sniffle is pneumonia. With no noise whatsoever, she turns and goes to the refrigerator, gets out the milk, and pours a tall glassful.

  “Oh, no!” Maury kids her as he cleans out the fryers. “Don’t tell me you’re eating healthy. You can’t be your mother’s daughter.”

  That’s exactly what Shannon herself keeps wishing and then she feels horrible for wishing it. She loves her mother, she’s crazy about her, she just doesn’t want to be anything like her.

  “Calcium,” Shannon tells Maury. She grabs two chocolate sugar-frosteds and grins at him, then heads back to the screen door. As far as she can tell, the boy is about thirteen or fourteen, tall and thin and absolutely filthy. His little sister is nothing more than a baby, with some kind of rag over her head and streaks of mud on her arms. She’s like a little doll eating garbage. It’s pitiful; she’s so quiet and serious and she keeps one hand gripped on the boy’s jeans. Shannon opens the screen door with her toe and edges onto the back stoop. She used to do this at their house when her parents were still together and deer came into the yard; she could get less than a foot from them before they noticed her presence and fled. Now she bends down and places the milk and doughnuts on the step. She’s concentrating hard; her tongue darts out between her lips the way it always does when she’s thinking, and she backs up into the kitchen slowly, on raised toes.

  It’s the screen door closing behind her that the boy hears. He turns his head, the way the deer used to in the tall grass in Shannon’s backyard, then stands there frozen. The little girl holds tight to his leg and makes a high-pitched humming sound. The boy sees Shannon through the screen, sees her pink apron and the arc of her profile as she reaches out to steady the screen so it will stop creaking. They stare at each other across the parking lot, where the asphalt is melting and the heat waves rise like butterflies. In the kitchen, the frying vats sizzle as they’re tossed into a sink of green soapy water. The smell of oil is heavy and rich; mixed with the heat, it can make you feel faint. Shannon runs her tongue over her lips. Someday, she’ll live where there’s frost in the early morning and the sky turns orange in October. But right now it’s in the high nineties, and in this kind of weather milk can sour in a matter of minutes. So Shannon leaves the screen door and goes out front to the counter, where she works the register. An hour later, after convincing her mother that she doesn’t have the flu and the pink on her cheeks isn’t fever but blush-on, Shannon goes back to the kitchen. When she looks out the door, she sees that the glass of milk has been drained and the doughnuts eaten, and the footprints on the steps are white and powdery, pure sugar that will disappear as soon as the raccoons venture out after dark.

  Just before suppertime the next day, the only customers at the Hole-in-One are the high school boys who lounge at the counter, drinking Pepsi and eyeing Shannon as she counts the singles in the cash register drawer. Lucy sits in her Mustang, with the air conditioner turned off, since Marty from the towing service has warned her to get a new radiator before she uses it. She watches through the plate-glass window as the boys blow their straw wrappers over the counter, begging for Shannon’s attention.

  Lucy is here even though she knows that Keith is too smart to retrace his steps; if he saw her parked car, he would probably run in the other direction. She feels no comfort being in the last place he was seen; the air is mild and orange, but the deserted parking lot is spooky, the asphalt looks like a wide, black sea.

  Lucy gets out of her car and goes into the doughnut shop, then sits at the far end of the counter.

  “I’ll be right with you,” Shannon calls from the register.

  Since Keith disappeared, Lucy’s nerve endings seem too raw; she’s susceptible to forces she’s never even noticed before. Fluorescent lights are much too bright; change tossed on a Formica counter echoes. She wonders what it would be like to put her arms around Julian Cash, what it would be like for him to hold her. Would she be frightened by the sound of his heartbeat? Would she lose her nerve and run? Lucy is so busy trying not to think about Julian that she doesn’t notice when Janey Bass comes out of the kitchen to clear the shelves behind the counter.

  “Are you guys buying?” Janey asks the high school boys. “Or just breathing my air-conditioning?” She’s been working since five in the morning, and she still looks beautiful, even though she’s dying to close up and go home.

  “They just ordered more Pepsis,” Shannon tells her mother.

  “Sure,” Janey says. “Like they’re here for the drinks.”

  As soon as she spies Lucy, whom Kitty’s pointed out to her twice at the Winn Dixie, Janey nudges Shannon. “I’ll take care of her. You go on and ring us out.”

  Janey gets two cups of coffee and brings them to the far end of the counter.

  “You’re the one with the fear of parakeets,” Janey says, as she puts a cup of coffee down in front of Lucy.

  “I thought that was you,” Lucy says.

  “No,” Janey says. “That used to be me. Now it’s you.”

  Janey goes to the covered racks of doughnuts, gets a jelly-filled cruller, and brings it back to Lucy on a white china plate. “Your favorite, right?”

  Surprised, Lucy nods.

  “You know the joke about my mother,” Janey says. “Bigmouth Bass.”

  Over at the register, the boys gather around, paying Shannon for their Pepsis. She’s probably the prettiest girl in her class, but she doesn’t look twice at the boys; she just hands them their change, and when they head mournfully for the door she calls, “Mom, we’re all set to close.”

  “Go ahead and wait for me in the car,” Janey says, then she turns back to Lucy. “Who would have thought somebody like me would have an honor student for a kid? Go figure.”

  When Janey laughs she arches her neck. She has three beauty marks, two on the left side of her face and another at the base of her neck. Lucy tries to imagine Janey Bass and Julian together, but she just can’t do it; they’re the least likely couple in the world. Just looking at Janey makes Lucy doubt herself. She must have been crazy to cut her hair so short. She was thinking about comfort in the heat without once considering how she would look.

  “I hear you’ve had a lot of problems with your boy,” Janey says.

  “Let me guess,” Lucy says. “You and Kitty have been talking about me.”

  “You’re right,” Janey says.

  “How nice for you.” Lucy’s not sure why, but she feels as though she’s just entered combat.

  “I was the one who saw your boy, you know,” Janey says. “And I guess I don’t blame him for running away after all the trouble he’s been in, although he kind of screwed himself even worse by taking that baby with him, didn’t he? And don’t worry, I didn’t tell my mom he had the baby with him, not the way she talks. I only told Julian.”

  Lucy pushes her cup of coffee away. She can feel herself get all flushed.

  “Uh huh,” Janey says. She’s got a smile on her face, but it’s like a cat’s smile—you don’t know whether or not to trust it.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lucy asks.

  “Like I said.” Janey nods. “It used to be me. Now it’s you.”

  Lucy takes her hands off the counter. She can feel a pulse vibrating in both her wrists. “Whatever you think you know, you’re wrong.”

  “Oh, come on
,” Janey says. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. I thought you were going to faint when I said his name. I’m one of the few people in the world who understands completely.” When Lucy looks blank, Janey tosses her head, impatient. “How bad you want him. It’s all over you.”

  Janey’s not one hundred percent certain she’s right until she sees Lucy’s reaction: she looks so guilty you’d think she’d just committed a crime. For a moment Janey feels ashamed for making Lucy so uncomfortable. Janey’s never been the jealous type, she’s never had to be. It’s not even that she wants Julian anymore. She just remembers how much she used to. She remembers so well her throat aches.

  “You know what I think?” Lucy gets up, reaches into her jeans pocket for a dollar, then tosses it on the counter. “I think you and Kitty ought to find someone else to dissect.”

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to offend you,” Janey says.

  “Oh, yes you did.”

  Lucy is shaking as she heads for the door. When she gets outside she has to stop and fish through her purse for her car keys. What’s bothering her isn’t so much what Janey’s said but her own reaction to it; there’s something fierce inside her, and she doesn’t even know what it is.

  “Wait a minute,” Janey calls. She’s come out of the shop and has begun to follow, but Lucy clutches her purse and heads for her car.

  “All right,” Janey says. “Run away.”

  Lucy turns then to face her. “You think I’m afraid of you? You think I care about anything you have to say?”

  “There’s one thing men will never understand,” Janey says. She walks over to Lucy. “We really don’t give a damn about the way they look. They think we care, because they care, but that’s not what drives somebody crazy. I know how it feels when Julian wants you.”

  Lucy has finally found her car keys; she keeps her fingers tightly wrapped around them, till they cut into her flesh.

  “Maybe I’m jealous,” Janey says. “Maybe I should have gone after him when he broke up with me. But I started to listen to all the people around me, and they all told me I was nuts, so I never did.”

  Across the parking lot, Shannon presses down on the Honda’s horn.

  “I kind of forgot about her.” Janey grins. “I guess I should have kept my mouth shut about Julian, but there you have it. Bigmouth Bass.”

  Tonight, when the sun goes down, the sky will clear to reveal constellations Lucy has never even seen before. Standing here, with Janey, she feels as exposed as those orange flowers on a trumpet vine.

  “You want some advice?” Janey asks.

  “No,” Lucy says.

  They look at each other and laugh.

  “Not about Julian,” Janey says. “Considering I did everything wrong.”

  Shannon leans her head out the car window. “Mom,” she calls.

  “Hold your horses,” Janey calls back. “Use lemon juice on your hair,” she tells Lucy. “Some people don’t believe it gets rid of the green ends, but it always used to work for me.”

  As Lucy drives home beneath the coral-colored sky, she misses two turns. Instead of driving around to doughnut shops, considering the effects of passion, she should be doing what Paul Salley and the Verity police probably never will. She needs to find out who Karen Wright was and who really killed her. It’s the only way to deflect attention from Keith. If there are any doubts, and they catch him, he’ll be destroyed. It’s not a question of innocence or guilt, it’s what he’ll believe about himself. If he manages to prove himself despicable, he may never be able to turn back: the small lies will grow larger, like well-fed fish in a pond; the thefts riskier and more expensive, a string of beads formed into a noose around his neck.

  And so instead of going straight to her apartment, Lucy goes to 1A, where the super lives. She doesn’t have to pretend to be flustered when she tells him she needs to get into 8C. It’s silly, of course, but there’s a blouse she lent Karen that she’d like to reclaim. The super, a man in his sixties relocated from the Bronx, grumbles and tells her the apartment has been sealed off by the police. Lucy has to plead. She tells him that the blouse was bought on sale at Macy’s, that she’ll never find another like it, and in the end, he leads her upstairs, tells her she’s got two minutes, and waits for her out in the hall.

  It doesn’t make any sense to be terrified by an empty apartment. The air conditioner’s been turned off and the rooms are stifling. Someone has washed the kitchen floor, and the scent of industrial cleanser lingers. Lucy avoids the kitchen completely and goes directly to the master bedroom. But when she turns on the lights, she’s momentarily paralyzed. The bedspread is one Lucy’s seen over at Bed and Bath on West Main: huge, wild roses on a mint-green background. Those roses could break your heart if you looked at them too long. She throws open the closet door and grabs the first blouse she sees. She never in her life lent Karen Wright anything, and now she regrets it. The blouse is white linen, with pearl buttons, but Lucy doesn’t stop to examine it. Instead, she goes to the night table; she knows where you keep what’s most important. She opens the top drawer and rummages through the earrings and cough drops until she finds what she’s looking for. It’s a photograph of Karen and her daughter, taken at the beach on a day when the humidity was bearable and the sky stretched out forever. It’s even worse than those wild roses, so Lucy slips it into her pocket, then goes to shut the closet door.

  Later, she’ll take the photograph out and prop it up on her bathroom counter. After she phones to reserve a plane ticket back to a place where she never thought she’d return of her own free will, she’ll memorize each one of her neighbor’s features until they’ve become as familiar as her own. And when she’s done, she’ll take some lemons and halve them and rinse her hair twice, but not because Janey Bass told her to.

  Arrow moves through the thickets and the thorns, his huge head down, his tail raised. For the past three days he has unearthed dead moles, the remains of sea gulls, lifeless crickets, curled up and blackened from the heat. Whenever he and Julian work together there is silence, except for the sound of their breathing and occasionally the crack of a branch beneath their feet. Nothing distracts Arrow, not the planes overhead or the heat or the golfers on the fairway.

  Julian keeps the dog on a forty-foot leash, so it’s almost as if he is free. A regular tracking dog might overlook a body that has been in the grass so long Spanish moss has begun to cover it, replacing the human scent with the rich odor of earth and growing things, but an air dog can gauge the extra molecules in the air when something dead is near. So when Arrow stops at the edge of the pond where Charles Verity died, Julian also stops. He’s been thinking about his cousin too much. If he didn’t know it was the thorn bushes that tore at his skin, he would almost believe the streaks of blood on his hands were the physical proof of his guilt. If he doesn’t focus soon and stop thinking about Bobby, he’ll walk right past the trail he’s looking for, he’ll mess up in a big way, all because he was scared by a ghost.

  Julian takes out a cigarette, and waits for Arrow’s next move. The sun has already begun to set, faster than would seem possible. Soon the night birds will begin to wake. As Julian follows Arrow in a circle around the pond, evening falls. Mosquitoes rise up from the shallow water, and the air grows heavier. Julian can feel something, right between his shoulder blades, and he stands absolutely still. It’s just like what they say about damp evenings such as this: the air’s too thick for spirits to rise. It comes as no surprise to Julian that he would attract a loose soul, since he is alive purely by accident. Twice he was supposed to die, and yet here he is. He can tell by the way Arrow looks at him: the dog knows the truth. He’s a dead man whose heart beats. For no reason at all, he’s alive when others are not, whether or not he deserves to be.

  The weight on his back, the spirit or dead air or whatever it is, pushes Julian forward. He lurches toward an overgrown thicket of sugar cane and Arrow looks up at him, startled. The dog growls, low down in his throat, then charges into t
he thicket. Julian is strong, he can beat a man fifty pounds heavier than himself in a fight, fair or not, but he can’t hold Arrow back. He’s dragged into the sugar cane, over wild rose thorns, till he’s flat on his belly. When he’s no longer pulled, Julian crawls farther into the thicket, following Arrow’s slack lead. In the center of the clearing the dog is stretched out, his ears pricked up. In the darkness his eyes are like black stars in a black night. Between his paws is a stuffed white bunny, held tight.

  “Good boy,” Julian says.

  Julian sits up and lights a match so he can see the hollows where the children have slept. Arrow looks up at him and blinks in the sudden light; in his own good time the dog approaches and lays the bunny at Julian’s feet.

  “Atta boy,” Julian says, as he picks up the bunny and strokes its ears.

  They go back the way they’ve come, this time in the dark. Arrow traces the children’s path along the drainage ditch, trotting fast, so that Julian has to take care not to stumble over the weeds. When they near the first concrete tunnel, Arrow stops. He raises his head to the sky and makes a sharp yelping noise, like an SOS no one can decipher. A long time ago, Julian Cash used to come here when he had nowhere else to go. Often he’d bring along a six-pack he’d talked one of the Platts into buying him up at the general store. He came here for weeks after the accident. He’d sit with his back against the cool concrete, thinking black thoughts that no boy is old enough to have. He’s still having those same damn thoughts, and it may be that he’ll never understand why human beings have such a horrible need not to be alone. It doesn’t make any sense, since that’s what you are, from your very first breath.