Turtle Moon

by Alice Hoffman

  “You came here to tell me that instead of phoning?” Evan says.

  “Actually, I came for the reunion,” Lucy says. If she didn’t have this cover story, she would have to invent one; the truth would only reignite Evan’s desire for custody.

  Along the street, some of the automatic sprinklers have switched on; there’s the sound of water spraying and the scent of rich earth.

  “You’re here for the reunion?” Evan says, more confused than ever. “You didn’t call me to let me know Keith was all right. I thought he’d been kidnapped. I haven’t been using the phone in case a ransom call came through. I haven’t left the house in case Keith appeared at the door.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy says, for more than he’ll ever know.

  “I have a right to know these things,” Evan says. “I mean, Christ, I’m not some outsider.”

  Lucy swallows hard. “I agree.”

  “Where exactly was he all this time?”

  Lucy tilts her face upward; the pulse in her throat is throbbing. If Julian Cash were here, he’d know she was lying.

  “At his friend Laddy’s.”

  “Jesus,” Evan says. “All that worry. Something’s seriously wrong here, Lucy. It really is.”

  “Why does this sound like you think it’s my fault?” Lucy asks.

  “Because he’s unhappy.”

  “Well, that’s nothing new, is it?” Lucy shoots back. “He’s been unhappy since the day he was born, and that was before I had a chance to screw him up.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Evan says.

  “Look, do you think I could come inside?” Lucy asks.

  “Maybe it’s good that you’re here,” Evan says, still speaking to her through the screen door. “We need to talk seriously about Keith. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but ever since winter vacation I’ve been getting letters from him. He’s been calling me collect. He wants to come home.”

  Lucy stares at the man she married when she was twenty-one, when her hair was still so long it reached her waist, when she thought she had all the time in the world.

  “For good,” he says.

  She had forgotten you could actually get a chill here early in the mornings. It’s so unlike Florida, where the heat doesn’t bother to wait until a decent hour to strike.

  “I’d really like some coffee,” Lucy says.

  “Coffee?” Evan says. “Here?”

  It was never that difficult to win an argument with Evan; he was far too kindhearted to go for blood.

  “I sat in Atlanta all night.” But still he doesn’t open the door. “You don’t want me inside,” Lucy says flatly.

  A woman’s voice calls tentatively from the hallway. “Evan?”

  Lucy is embarrassed to discover that she’s never once thought of or imagined Evan with another woman; she didn’t feel proprietary about him even back when they were married, so she’s not at all certain why she suddenly feels so uncomfortable. Evan looks completely distressed, as though he’d like one or both or all of them to disappear into a puff of smoke.

  “It’s okay,” Lucy tells Evan through the screen door. “You’re allowed.”

  “Look, Lucy, I think you should call before you do something like this.”

  The woman appears behind Evan; she’s dressed but still sleepy. Her hair hasn’t been brushed yet.

  “Evan?” she says when she sees Lucy out on the front porch.

  The woman has long dark hair, and Lucy can tell, right away, that she’s younger, possibly by as much as ten years.

  “You remember my wife,” Evan says to the woman. He turns back to Lucy, flustered. “Melissa Garber,” he reminds her. “Kindergarten.”

  Lucy sees that the dark-haired woman was indeed Keith’s kindergarten teacher. They’d had endless conferences about Keith’s misbehavior, even back then. Melissa came up with the idea of making him the permanent hamster monitor, to build his self-esteem and sense of responsibility, but it hadn’t worked. He’d continued destroying the library corner and stealing pocketfuls of Legos, and Lucy had had the damned hamsters to care for over every school vacation.

  “Right,” Lucy says. “Melissa. Miss Garber, right?” she says to Evan.

  What Lucy can’t help wondering, as Evan finally opens the door and leads her into the kitchen and Melissa excuses herself, is how long this has been going on, whether it was already starting all those years back, during their parent-teacher conferences. It hits her, all in a rush, that she may not have been the only one who was unhappy in their marriage—a possibility she has never once considered before.

  “It’s very strange to be here,” Lucy says. She is sitting at the kitchen table watching Evan fumble with the coffee grinder.

  “It’s very strange to have you here,” Evan admits, and they both have to laugh.

  “So you don’t mind if I stay for a few days?” Lucy says once Evan’s got the coffee going.

  “A few days?”

  “You keep repeating everything I say, only when you say it it sounds like I’ve committed some sort of criminal offense.”

  “What about going to Jack and Naomi’s?” Evan suggests.

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Actually, I saw him a few weeks ago. He said they hadn’t heard from you once since you moved.”

  “Look, I’ll stay in the guest room,” Lucy says. “I promise I won’t bother your girlfriend.”

  Evan frowns as he hands Lucy her coffee. She remembers these mugs; she bought them in Bennington, Vermont.

  “I wish you wouldn’t call her that,” Evan says.

  “What do you want me to call her?” Lucy asks. “Miss Garber?”

  Evan is so uncomfortable that he turns his back to her, exactly as he used to whenever he didn’t want to fight.

  “All right,” Lucy says. “If you let me stay I’ll talk to you about Keith.” She doesn’t mention that she won’t tell him a single bit of truth, but she feels justified in that, since in only a few hours she’ll know the identity of her murdered neighbor, information she feels is powerful enough to clear Keith of any charges against him. “I’ll discuss it calmly,” Lucy promises.

  “You’ll consider letting him come back?” Evan says.

  She can’t stand to be with Keith, she does nothing but argue with him, she’s not even certain she likes him very much, yet her hands instantly begin to sweat.

  “I said I’ll talk,” Lucy hedges. “I’m willing to do that.”

  Evan has come to sit across from her at the table. He has something of a grin on his face. “What happened to your hair?”

  Lucy fluffs up her bangs. “Is it awful?” she asks.

  “It’s very unusual.” Evan smiles.

  “Oh, great. Thanks. You never liked anything I did with my hair.”

  “That’s not true,” Evan says. “Exactly.”

  Melissa has been standing in the doorway. She has a quilted tote bag over her shoulder, filled with the clothes she’s hurriedly collected from the bedroom.

  “You don’t have to leave because of me,” Lucy tells her, although she’s not sure if she means it.

  Melissa looks uncertainly at Evan. He was never much good at awkward moments; Lucy sees now it’s because he’s too honest to attempt false cheer.

  “No. I’ll go.” Melissa waits a moment to see if anyone is about to stop her. “How’s Keith?” she asks Lucy when nobody does.

  “Great,” Lucy says. “All he needed was to be switched into a decent school system.”

  It’s a cruel and untrue thing to say, and they all know it.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy says. “I’m just exhausted. I have to go lie down,” she tells Evan.

  “Here?” Melissa says.

  Lucy plans to rest for only a few minutes, but once she stretches out on the living room couch, which she bought on sale at Bloomingdale’s one Labor Day weekend, she falls into a deep sleep. When she wakes, the living room is dark, and she bolts from the couch, frightened, unsure of whe
re she is. Even when she turns on the light, she’s confused. She had not remembered owning so many things: good china and silverware, lithographs and thick wool rugs, woven to last a hundred years. She goes outside, even though it’s already dusk, too late to go to Salvuki’s. Instead, Lucy walks down Easterbrook Lane, past lawns so deep and green it almost seems like midnight. When Lucy first came to Great Neck, after her parents’ deaths, she was mesmerized by all the greenery; she felt as if she could go to sleep for a very long time, lulled by the mockingbirds and the mourning doves. It’s happening to her all over again; it’s an effort just to walk half a block. She used to take this route with Keith in his stroller, and now she sees a boy about his age, maybe one of his old friends, she can’t tell at this distance, dribbling a basketball as he heads for a neighbor’s house, a springer spaniel behind him, lunging for the ball each time it hits the concrete. Lucy can see the boy is wearing the hundred-twenty-dollar Nikes that Keith has begged for, sneakers Lucy wouldn’t buy him even if she could afford to. The Nikes are clean and white, and they’ll probably stay that way till the boy has outgrown them and been given another pair.

  Evan is waiting for her when she gets back to the house. He’s brought a pizza, which they wolf down together in silence. They’re used to doing this; they spent most of the last year of their marriage avoiding conversation.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Evan asks when Lucy insists she has to go up to bed at a quarter after eight.

  “Jet lag,” Lucy says, though it’s nowhere near the truth.

  She keeps thinking about the way Keith looked as she peered through the window of Miss Giles’s house. In the early-morning light, his hair seemed blonder, he was leaner than before, all sharp angles. He looked like a stranger, a boy found in the woods, covered with bramble scratches, but dressed in clean clothes, and safe in that kitchen where there was cinnamon sugar to sprinkle over the cereal.

  When she’s not thinking of Keith, when she’s not careful, she imagines Julian Cash, and each time she does she feels edgy, and nothing can cure that but sleep. Up in the guest bedroom there is a yellow bedspread Lucy doesn’t remember, no doubt chosen by Melissa, since Lucy has always disliked bright colors in bedrooms. Lucy sleeps in her clothes, her arms wrapped around herself. By the time she wakes in the morning, Melissa’s car is already idling at the curb.

  “She doesn’t trust me,” Lucy tells Evan down in the kitchen.

  Evan lifts the window shade and waves to Melissa. “She has nothing to worry about,” he says. “You know what I mean,” he adds when he sees the look on Lucy’s face.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Lucy says. “Since she’s picking you up, can you lend me your car?”

  Evan grudgingly hands over his keys, and when Lucy gets dressed and goes out to the garage, she understands why he hesitated. He has a brand-new red Celica convertible. He’s always wanted a convertible, and Lucy appreciates that he would trust her with it, especially in the shape she’s in. She heads straight to Middle Neck Road, the main shopping district of town, and she’s lucky enough to find a parking space just two blocks up from Salvuki’s. When Lucy moved here all the girls wanted Capezio ballet slippers, whether they were dancers or not, and the boys wore loafers and high-topped sneakers or, occasionally, well-polished Frye boots. Her Aunt Naomi bought Lucy her first pair of Capezios, thin pink slippers that didn’t make a sound when she walked and made her size-eight feet seem as delicate as one of the roses that will soon open beside Evan’s front door. As she locks up the Celica, Lucy realizes that she still has a key to that door in her purse. She just never would have thought of using it. Even when she lived there, especially toward the end, she felt as though she were breaking and entering each time she brought the groceries home.

  She has that same feeling walking into Salvuki’s, even though there is still a pot of coffee at the front desk, and a tray of flaky croissants. The air here always smells like coconut shampoo, which costs twelve dollars a bottle and never seemed to get your hair truly clean. This is where Lucy had her hair cut off to shoulder length just before her wedding, and then she wept all night long, even though her Aunt Naomi assured her that a married woman shouldn’t have all that hair. Clearly, Salvuki can’t help her now; she actually cringes when she sees her reflection in the mirror behind the receptionist’s desk.

  “I’m looking for Salvuki,” Lucy says. Actually, she has to say it three times before the receptionist turns her gaze on her.

  “Mr. Salvuki is out today. He’s doing an entire wedding party,” the receptionist informs her. “And he’s not taking any new clients, since he’s booked with his regulars.”

  “I am a regular,” Lucy informs her right back.

  The receptionist studies Lucy’s green-tinged hair and doesn’t believe her for a second.

  “Well, I used to be,” Lucy admits. “I moved to Florida.”

  “God. What did they do to you there?” the receptionist asks.

  “My aunt, Naomi Friedman, is one of his regular customers,” Lucy says. “She’s one of his best customers.”

  “Mrs. Friedman.” The receptionist nods. “She was in yesterday.”

  Lucy reaches into her purse and brings out her neighbor’s photograph. “You haven’t ever seen her, have you?”

  “Never,” the receptionist says, eyeing the photo, then quickly handing it back. “But believe me, she didn’t have her hair colored here.”

  Lucy wanders over to the sinks and shows the photograph to the shampoo girls, but neither of them recognizes the murdered woman; they haven’t even been working for Salvuki for more than a few months. Lucy herself doesn’t remember the other stylists, but she recalls that no one worked for Salvuki for long; he was, and probably still is, too much of a screamer. There’s nothing Lucy can do until tomorrow; the entire day is wasted, and maybe that’s why she’s so susceptible to the white strapless dress in the window of a shop on Middle Neck Road. The dress is gathered into hundreds of tiny pleats; it’s a dry cleaner’s nightmare and much too expensive. But it’s gorgeous, like a slice of moonlight, and there are silver-colored sandals, which the saleswoman also convinces Lucy to take. She will have to go to the reunion after all, and by the time she’s done shopping, Lucy has spent three hundred dollars she can’t afford, all because she’s back in Great Neck, where the saleswomen don’t bother you with anything as trivial as the price until you’re already rung up and the credit card is out of your hand.

  When she gets back to Easterbrook Lane, Lucy pulls into the garage, then goes into the house through the garage door, which leads to the kitchen. She hangs Evan’s car keys on the hook by the telephone, just the way she used to. She has a cup of coffee, thinking, in spite of herself, about Julian Cash, how impressed he’ll be when she hands over the real name of her neighbor, how willing to keep Keith out of this mess completely. She thinks about the way he looked at her when he told her she should go home. Maybe she should have, because now something’s happened. It was so late at night, and the shadows were so blue, she may not have been seeing straight. Here in Great Neck, so far from that Verity madness that happens every May, she cannot believe the things she did in his bed. She won’t even think about that.

  Lucy washes out her coffee cup in the sink before carrying her shopping bag upstairs. In the guest room, she shakes out her new dress and hangs it in the closet, and then she finally dares to walk down the hall to Keith’s room. She’s been avoiding it, and now she knows why. It’s like opening the door into another lifetime. Lucy had worked so hard to make his room perfect; she’d special ordered mini-blinds in the hues of the rainbow, she’d had shelves built in that were deep enough for fish tanks and globes of the world. Keith hasn’t been here since school vacation in February, but there is still a pile of comic books he left beside the bed. His yellow rain slicker is hooked over the closet door. From the window it’s possible to see the whole backyard: the swimming pool and the climbing structure Evan ordered on Keith’s sixth birthda
y, a green grid of slides and swings and monkey bars. There is the herb garden Lucy so carefully put in, although she left before it could be of use. There is the birdhouse, still in the magnolia tree. A child would have to be crazy not to want to come back here. He’d have to favor man-o’ -wars and dust, heat waves and an old single bed bought at the Sunshine flea market.

  Lucy closes Keith’s door and goes to the guest bathroom. She takes a long shower, and when she’s done she lies down on the yellow bedspread, just for a few minutes, but she winds up falling asleep, with her hair still wet, so that all her dreams are cold and blue. Since she’s come back, she’s amazingly tired, as if she were recovering from a fever, and she sleeps longer than she has in months. She’s out for hours and doesn’t wake until she hears Evan come home. As soon as she gets off the bed, Lucy knows her hair will be a disaster for the reunion. She finds some mousse in the bathroom cabinet, slicks a little over her hair, then slips on the new white dress. She can’t wear a bra with it, which makes her self-conscious, and the silver sandals are half a size too small. But when she turns and sees herself in the full-length mirror, she understands why some people are willing to pay so much for clothes. It’s a wonderful dress. She doesn’t even look like herself. With her hair cut so short, and no jewelry, her neck is as long as a swan’s. All those tiny gathered pleats look like feathers, or layers of abalone shell.

  Lucy knows the full effect of the dress when she goes downstairs and Evan stares at her the way he did a long time ago, when they’d meet in her Uncle Jack’s garden. If Julian could see her now, he’d be lost. He’d be hers, if that’s what she wanted.

  “You’re really going to the reunion?” Evan says.

  “I told you I was,” Lucy says.

  “I thought you hated the past,” Evan says. He’s carrying a dry-cleaning bag and inside is a gray suit Lucy doesn’t recognize.

  “What?” Lucy is annoyed that he presumes to know how she feels about anything.

  “That’s how it always seemed,” Evan says. “You never talked about your parents. I don’t think I know one fact about your first sixteen years. I just assumed you’d never want to see anyone you went to high school with. Melissa’s in the middle of compiling her family history. It’s really pretty interesting. There’s a whole branch of her family that settled in New Orleans.”