Turtle Moon

by Alice Hoffman

  Julian signals for Lucy to follow him. Maybe he didn’t hear her, maybe that’s why he’s leading her into his house and maybe that’s why she’s going. Loretta goes directly to her place beside the door. It’s a small house, basically one room, with a couch and an unmade bed and a braided rug, which is dusty no matter how many times it’s hung over the porch railing and beaten with a broom. In the kitchen there are the shadows of everyday things: a toaster, a plastic dish rack, a blue tin pot used for boiling water. Right in the center of the ceiling there’s a circular fluorescent light, but when Lucy reaches up to pull the string, Julian stops her. He doesn’t want her to see him. He doesn’t want her to know how hot he is in this tiny kitchen where the windows don’t budge unless you hit the frames with a can opener. The white moths smack their wings against the small panes of glass as Julian sits down on a wooden chair. He takes out a cigarette, and when he strikes a match there’s a sudden flare of yellow light. Quickly Julian shakes out the match without bothering to light his cigarette.

  “I could make coffee,” he offers.

  If you drank hot coffee in this kitchen you might faint from the heat. You might lose all your willpower.

  “No,” Lucy says. “Thanks.”

  “Good, because I make terrible coffee. All I have is Cremora,” Julian says. He knows he sounds like a complete idiot.

  “I don’t want you to tell anyone where the children are,” Lucy says. “Just for a few days,” she adds after he looks at her. “Until I can find out who Karen Wright was and why someone would want to kill her.”

  He doesn’t argue with her the way she expected he would; he doesn’t ask why she thinks she has a better chance at the truth than the Verity police or Paul Salley. He just keeps looking at her. He’s not going to stop.

  “I don’t want Keith to look like he’s guilty,” Lucy admits.

  “He does,” Julian says. “Look it.” He places his unlit cigarette on the table and studies it. “And what do I get out of this?”

  “You get the identity of the dead woman and maybe the person who murdered her.”

  Julian should reach for the phone and call Walt Hannen right now. When he looks up, he sees that one white moth has managed to find a crack in the glass; it sweeps in from the night air, wings beating.

  “I don’t think that’s what I want,” Julian says.

  In the doorway to the kitchen, Lucy can feel him wanting her. If it weren’t so dark, she’d be able to see that the mark across his forehead has turned scarlet.

  “You should tell me to go home,” Lucy says from the doorway.

  “Go home,” Julian says, and he means it.

  But in this place, in the middle of the night, they are light-years away from reason. Julian would never make the first move. He knows if it were day she would run, and who could blame her? He doesn’t have to look in a mirror to know who he is. As a boy, he was frightened not of ghosts and spiders but of his own reflection. Drawn by his desire, Lucy steps through the kitchen doorway, and once she’s done that it’s impossible to go backward. Julian reaches for her hand, and when he pulls her onto his lap, he knows he’ll never be able to stop himself.

  Lucy can feel his hands under her blouse. She can feel his heart beating. It’s so hot in the kitchen it’s unbearable, hotter still when he kisses her throat. It is possible, in heat like this, to find yourself dissolving. When he takes her face in his hands and kisses her on the mouth he wills her to close her eyes, and she does. This is what they call May madness, when you do things you never expected or even imagined yourself capable of. It comes upon you suddenly, and it doesn’t let go. Lucy feels his shoulders, his back, the ladder of ribs that hides his heart. Her skirt rides up, past her thighs, as she moves to wrap her legs around him. That’s when he stops kissing her, abruptly, leaving her gasping. He wills her to open her eyes; he gives her one more chance to really look at him, and to flee.

  Right then, Lucy decides to forgo daylight and perfection, simple thoughts and reason. She lifts her mouth to his ear and whispers that she wants him, and he takes her to his bed, where the sheets are blue and unironed. He pulls off her skirt and her underpants, he can’t do it fast enough; he lifts her on top of him, cross-stitching himself onto her skin. The noises he makes sound as if he is in pain, and when he moves inside of her he has his fingers laced through hers.

  Lucy kisses him on the mouth, certain she’s under a spell. For this one night she’s crazy, crazy to be in his bed, where he keeps her until it’s no longer possible to tell what part of the heat is outside and what part is made up of their own flesh and bones. By the time the stars have begun to fade, the sheets are soaked and the heat has risen into an arc just below the ceiling. Never in his life would Julian have believed he could have fallen asleep with someone in his bed. Still, it comes as no surprise to him that when he wakes up, he’s alone. It makes perfect sense that he would be awakened by the barking of dogs and the sound of a woman running down his driveway in the pale first light of morning.

  No child has driven Lillian Giles crazy, not yet. She pities parents, it’s such a thankless job and so many of them mess up so badly. She probably would have done the same with her own, would have scolded too often or not often enough; she might have whacked her truant boy with a hickory stick or sent her fresh-mouthed girl to bed without supper. As it is, she’s more patient than the spider who’s been living in her rafters for years. She’s convinced she’s so good with children because of Julian. Once you bring a child back from the dead, nothing he does can distress you. After that, everyone else seems easy.

  She lifts her curtain and watches through the window. That baby is still trailing after the boy, playing in the tall, dry grass. She’s just about the best-natured child Lillian has ever seen; this morning, when she was fed her oatmeal with cinnamon sugar she opened her mouth like a bird whenever she wanted more. Lillian does not plan to get overly attached, since sooner or later someone will come along to claim the child. She’s getting a little too old to have so many emotional ups and downs, but it’s hard to stop herself from loving this baby. Just once, she would like to raise a child all the way through. She almost did it with Julian, but then he was sent off to that boys’ school, and anyway, he was never anyone’s baby, not really. From the start, Miss Giles knew enough not to hug him; even as an infant, he never liked to be held and preferred to be in his playpen, set up outside in the fresh air.

  This baby girl would be different. This one you could take in your arms and rock, you could tell her stories and she’d look at you, with those wide brown eyes, and listen to every word. The Social Services Department has decided that Miss Giles is too old for their list, but they’re wrong. This baby’s going to need her, since her heart’s going to be broken real soon. The way she looks at that mixed-up boy sends shivers down Miss Giles’s spine, even though she’s drinking a hot cup of lemon tea. When they finally have to separate these two, and they’ll have to, that baby’s going to cry hard enough to wake the dead. She’s going to have sleepless nights and beg for her bottle, even though she’s just about outgrown it, and Miss Giles would like to be able to comfort her.

  She’s tried her best with the boy, with no success at all. She’s given him licorice cough drops and honey and he still can’t say a word; she’s had him sit on the rim of the bathtub with the hot water turned on full blast, so the room is steamy and gray, and his throat is as closed up as ever. She’s had him chop more wood than any boy in her memory, aside from Julian, and he doesn’t complain. Last night, Miss Giles dropped her big iron pot, the one she uses for boiling corn, on his foot, purposely, just to get him to cry out loud, but he didn’t do anything more than blink, then turn white with pain.

  Early this morning, when the sky was still gray, and the boy was at the kitchen table, adding raisins to the baby’s cereal, Miss Giles went to fill her teakettle, and that was when her heart nearly stopped. She let the water go on running as she looked through the window above the sink. Behind her
, the baby was banging her spoon on the table; the milk Miss Giles had put up for hot chocolate had begun to boil. Out in their cages, the rabbits were growing restless, because over where the willow trees used to stand was a woman looking through the kitchen window; only it wasn’t Miss Giles she was staring at, it was the boy.

  It took a few seconds for Miss Giles to understand that this woman was real; as soon as she understood that, she knew this was the boy’s mother. It gave her the chills, it really did, it made her feel that the first baby she ever loved had been given to her yesterday. She turned to see exactly what this woman saw: the boy at the table, sleepily eating his breakfast; and when she looked back out the window, the woman was gone. Miss Giles took the pan of milk off the stove then, and set her teakettle down; as long as she lives she will never figure out why it is that some boys refuse to see that somebody loves them.

  And now there he is, out in the tall grass. To Miss Giles it looks as if he’s studying weeds, but the boy is simply considering his options. He can’t help but wonder if there’s a man somewhere in town who would like to kill him. He’s sure that the man who watched them run across the parking lot that night got into his car all set to follow them. He remembers the white moon of the man’s face reflected in a windshield; he may have seen a line of blood on the man’s shirt. Although he’s not certain about the blood, he gets all shaky just thinking about it. Would he be able to recognize this man in a lineup? He doesn’t know, but he’s fairly certain that the man would be able to pick him out in a crowd. The boy has no idea of how he could disguise himself; all he can think to do is to take the skull earring out of his earlobe and throw it, as far as he can, till it disappears into the tall grass.

  The baby is wearing a red sundress Miss Giles has kept stored in a dresser drawer. Her hair has been washed and brushed and she’s got on white sandals that Miss Giles found high up on a shelf in the front closet. She keeps one hand on the boy’s ankle while she pulls up blades of grass and pats them into a pile. The boy is as sure as he can be that her face was hidden that night. She was leaning against him, and it was so dark no one could have identified her features. No one could know her mouth was a little crooked when she smiled, or that she had a small scar on one knee, or that when she insisted on holding your hand in hot weather your palm got all sweaty.

  The baby can’t know what’s happened to them; all she knows is that they’re in this together. The boy can feel her watching him for a signal: Should they run or stay? Should they eat the cereal they’re offered or spit it out? By now, Laddy Stern has probably got himself a new best friend, since they never meant that much to each other anyway. He figures that a thousand miles from here on the street where he grew up, the boys have all forgotten his name. He thinks of his mother, and for some reason he’s reminded of a night soon after they moved to Florida when he lay in bed, in despair, wanting desperately to call out for her and not allowing himself to. Now he couldn’t call out if he wanted to. It’s a punishment, that’s what he thinks; he’s said so many awful words that his wicked tongue is paralyzed. He’s actually grateful that the baby can’t really speak; not one horrible word has come out of her mouth. She doesn’t have to wish she could take it all back.

  The meanest boy in Verity watches dust, dragonflies, low white clouds above him in the sky. When the sun is in the center of the sky, he leads the baby back to the house. She does whatever he wants her to, and because of that he has to do what he’s told. He has to go inside to the kitchen when Miss Giles calls them for lunch, otherwise the baby would never eat her chicken soup with carrots and rice. He has to mind Miss Giles so the baby will, and after lunch he has to lie down on the cot, otherwise the baby would refuse to stay in her crib for her nap.

  He stretches out and stares up at the cracks in the ceiling, listening to the mockingbirds that pull at the last remaining roots of the willow trees. In her crib, the baby is falling asleep; she turns on her side and slips her thumb into her mouth and hums to herself the way she always does when she’s tired. There are clean white pillowcases and sheets, washed so many times they’re as soft as snow. The boy can hear Miss Giles’s slippers, and the sound of the old brass hinges as she opens the bedroom door to check on them. He has never in his life taken a nap, but for some reason he closes his eyes and when he dreams he dreams about the dog who found him, he dreams about another place, far from here, where you don’t have to speak in order to be free.

  Walt Hannen is having coffee in the last booth at Chuck and Karl’s diner. The coffee tastes like rocket fuel, but that’s not what’s working on his ulcer. He knows what can happen with these goddamned May cases. There’s a good chance that somebody who happens to up and disappear during the month of May might never be found. It’s the yellow light at dusk and the damned humidity. Before you know it, clues start to evaporate in the palm of your hand.

  Someone with experience can tell when these cases are slipping away, and Walt Hannen’s got a feeling it’s happening again. He’s even more certain of it when Julian’s car pulls into the parking lot. The hair on the back of Walt’s neck rises up when Julian comes into the diner. For the first time since Walt’s known him, Julian is grinning.

  “Hey,” Julian says as he slides into the booth.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Walt asks.

  “What?” Julian says, confused. He’s forgotten to comb his hair and now he runs a hand through it.

  “You’re smiling,” Walt says.

  “No. I’m not,” Julian says, stricken.

  “All right,” Walt Hannen says to soothe him. He calls for two more coffees and takes out a pack of Camel Lights. “I’m quitting tomorrow,” he tells Julian as he offers him a cigarette.

  “I won’t hold my breath,” Julian says. He’s looking straight at Walt, but it’s Lucy he’s thinking about, and he knows he has to stop. He can shut down a whole section of his mind if he wants to. He’d have to be out of his head to jeopardize everything just for a woman he’s taken to bed. “You know these missing kids?” he asks Walt.

  “Unfortunately,” Walt says.

  “I want you to ease up on the case over the next couple of days,” Julian says after the waitress brings over their coffees.

  Walt Hannen holds one hand to his ear. “Excuse me?” he says. “Pardon me?”

  “You can keep looking for the killer and all that,” Julian says, since he’s gone way beyond his better judgment and straight on into stupidity.

  “Well, thanks,” Walt Hannen drawls. “I’ll do that.”

  “Just hold off looking for the kids.” Julian turns and looks for the waitress; this coffee needs milk and sugar and a detonator.

  “Are you telling me you found them?” Walt says.

  “I didn’t say that.” Julian takes a sip of his coffee, then shoves the cup away. “Can you drink this stuff?”

  “Jesus Christ, Julian,” Walt says. “What exactly are you telling me?”

  “I just need a couple of days.”

  “Yeah?” Walt says. He puts his elbows on the Formica tabletop and leans forward. “And what are you going to give me in return for this favor?”

  “What do you want?” Julian asks.

  This is the most consecutive talk Walt Hannen has heard out of Julian’s mouth in the ten years they’ve worked together, and it’s disconcerting.

  “I want you to tell me who you fucked last night.” Walt grins and reaches for another cigarette, but when he looks up he sees Julian has leaned back and he has a closed-down look, like an electrical wire that’s been crossed. “That was a joke,” Walt says. “Or at least I thought it was.”

  Walt can’t help but wonder if his wife, Rose, is right. Maybe he is a little bit psychic. He knew her brother would lose all his money up in Atlantic City, and he guessed Disney was going to buy a piece of Florida long before he ever took over Orlando, and now it looks like he’s right about Julian, too. He’s not a gossip and he’ll keep his mouth shut, but boy, he’d like to talk this one
over with Rose and see who on earth she could figure as a match for Julian. In the past two days, Walt has had to speak at two town meetings; he’s had to bite his tongue each time someone mentions the series on local crime Paul Salley is writing in the Sun Herald. If they could produce the children and have their photos on the front page of the Herald, some of the heat on Walt would die down in spite of the murder. If anyone else in town gets hurt, never mind murdered, it will mean Walt’s job, not to mention his pension. That’s why he won’t dare discuss any of this with Rose. She would hit the ceiling if he did, and she’d have a perfect right, since Walt has already decided he’s going to trust Julian’s instincts.

  Twenty years ago this May, Walt Hannen was just starting out; he’d been injured and decorated in the service and had recently married Rose. He’d been on the Verity police force for three weeks when the call came through from the dispatcher. He was the only officer on duty, and he felt like the only individual on the planet as he got into his new patrol car and drove through the thick, wet night, his tires sliding over turtle shells. He followed the white line in the road, too inexperienced to have remembered to switch on his siren, his adrenaline racing. All the windows in the car were open and the air moved through in dense waves and he didn’t take his foot off the gas until he found the skid marks leading to the gumbo-limbo tree.

  Walt jumped out of his car, and while he ran to the scene his ears were ringing. He groped around in the black air, blinded by the Oldsmobile’s headlights. The car was all crumpled up on itself, and Walt circled it until he found Julian, down on the ground, cradling his cousin’s head.

  “It’s okay,” Walt said.

  He knew he sounded panicky, but he couldn’t help it.

  “I’m calling for an ambulance right now. Do you hear me?” he asked, because it was much too silent. He got down on one knee and reached out to pat Julian’s shoulder. Julian turned on him then, as if he’d kill him if Walt even attempted to touch his cousin.