“Hi,” I said. Trying not to do this in a New York minute, trying not to stand out as a stranger in town despite my pallor.
“Hey,” he said. “You need a cabin?”
“Got one,” I told him. “I checked in early this morning.”
He looked back at the comic, then back up at me.
“Everything okay?”
“Perfect,” I told him.
He nodded.
I smiled.
“I’m trying to find an old friend of mine,” I said, reaching into my pocket for Sally’s picture. “I haven’t seen her in years. This is actually from about five or six years ago. And the last phone number I have for her is stale.”
His eyebrows went up.
“Out of date,” I said. “Disconnected. She’s not there anymore.”
“Oh.”
“I was wondering if she looks familiar to you, if you might have seen her around, at the Piggly Wiggly or swimming or something,” putting Sally’s picture down on the counter where he could see it.
He leaned over the photo and squinted. “Pretty,” he said.
I waited, but he just sat there, saying nothing, waiting, too.
“But you don’t know her? She doesn’t look familiar?”
He shook his head.
“Well, thanks. Might as well pay for one more day,” I said, putting Sally’s picture away and reaching for my credit card this time.
“Just one?”
“At a time,” I said.
He ran my card. I signed the receipt. I wiggled my fingers at him, and he watched me go.
Five o’clock. Polly was sweeping off the long deck in front of the cabins nearest the road. I walked over.
“I see you got some color,” she said.
“I didn’t find Hank in, but I took a swim anyway.”
“Everything to your liking?” Nodding toward my cabin at the end of the line.
“Fine. I just paid for another night.”
“Checkout’s noon,” she said. Then she shrugged. “Don’t mind if you need a late checkout, though. We’re pretty empty and it always looks good to have as many cars parked here as possible. Place down the road? The Palmetto? You probably didn’t come that way. You flew into Miami, right?”
I nodded.
“They’re jammed. No Vacancy sign hardly ever turns off, name like that,” shaking her head, “no pool, you never know what people want, do you?”
“I guess not,” I said, figuring I should check out the Palmetto next. “By the way, I came down here to look for an old friend of mine. The picture’s from when I last saw her, about six years ago, but I was wondering if maybe you saw her around. The last phone number she gave me, it was this area code,” I shrugged, “but she might have moved or something. It’s no longer working.”
Polly leaned the broom against the railing, wiped her hands down the sides of her peach-colored shorts and took the picture, holding it close to her face.
“Pale, like you. She a relative?”
“Uh-uh. We were neighbors, then she moved down here.”
“I don’t get out much, dear, just into Long Key once a week for supplies. Bertie takes the desk days and I got a man comes in three nights a week, but this place don’t make enough money for me to have a real staff. I’m not complaining, mind you. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. It’s quiet here, even in season. Suits me fine. But,” handing me back the picture of Sally, “young girl like that, maybe she went to someplace bigger, someplace with a little more action.”
“I guess.”
I walked back past the coffee shop, wondering what they might be unable to ruin that I could eat for dinner, heading back to Hank’s. “Bait,” the sign said, and underneath that, “Masks, Snorkels, Tanks, Boat Excursions Arranged, Ask Within.” I tried the knob, no dice. Then I held my hand over my eyes so that I could see in the window, but there was no one inside the small, cluttered shop. Hank, apparently, was still out to lunch.
I decided to keep walking. I thought maybe I’d find a better place to eat, come up with some other ideas. How was I figuring to find Sally? What had I been thinking?
Despite the heat, I began to walk faster, something to keep my mind off what looked like a failed effort. The Palmetto was just down the road, like Polly said, the green neon No Vacancy sign turned on. I walked into the office anyway, told my story, showed the picture, watched the clerk shake his head.
“You say she’s here, at the Palmetto?”
“Guess not,” I said. “But maybe you’ve seen her?”
“I’d remember,” he told me, handing the picture back.
I kept going, trying to stay in the little bit of shade there was, once from a huge billboard, several times from a small grove of trees. And then I saw it, a group of tacky white cottages with tiny porches out front, palm trees at the periphery, the office off to the right and the neon sign, pink, the thing that caught my eye, on a tall pole so that it would be visible to approaching cars. The Madison. Below that, “Vacancy,” the first c out, the y blinking. Is this where they’d stayed? Did this explain the look on Jim’s face when I’d told him his daughter’s name?
I walked into the office. The clerk looked up at me and smiled. His wizened face was the color of mocha ice cream. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his small, round, dark glasses. Then I heard it, a dog’s tail thumping against the wooden floor.
“Okay, Ellen, you can go say hello.”
The yellow Lab was old, too, and walked slowly. She still had her leather harness on. Maybe he was the night man and he’d just come on duty and hadn’t had the chance to take it off her. Maybe she kept it on while she was in the office, to let her know she might be working at any time. I bent and stroked her big head. Then walked up to the counter, where I’d intended to show Sally’s picture.
“Can I help you?” he said, looking somewhere to the left of me.
“I was just wondering if there was someplace good to eat around here. I thought you might know.”
“Why, sure I do. Anita’s. Good home cooking, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, Key lime pie. You’re not from around here, am I right? You got to try the Key lime pie before you leave. You promise?”
“I do. And thanks,” I said.
I waited for a refrigerated truck to pass, then crossed the road to the small white beach across from the Madison. The beaches dotted the coastline, trees in between, not a place for much action, for socializing, just a convenient place to swim, if that was your thing.
The beach was empty, a 7UP can half buried in the sand to my right, a broken flip-flop near it. I stood watching the long, low waves come into the shore, then I headed down the road to find Anita’s. At least there was one promise I could keep.
CHAPTER 23
For the next three days, I woke up with the first light, before six, put on my bathing suit with a pair of shorts over it, ate quickly at the coffee shop and headed out. I saw a lot of heads shake. I heard a lot of people exclaim that I must be down from New York. I ate a few more bad breakfasts and a couple of really good meals at Anita’s. I even lost some of my northern pallor. But there was no sign of Sally Spector.
On Sunday morning, I finally found Hank. The door to his shop was ajar and Hank himself was outside sitting on an old wooden straight-backed chair, sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup.
“Too early to get some flippers?”
“Not around here it isn’t. You signed up for the boat?”
“No, just swimming here,” pointing across at the ocean.
“Good a place as any,” he said. He was shorter than me, wider than me, much more muscular than me, older, too, probably at least sixty. His hair was a yellowy gray, but he had a full head of it and I wasn’t sure if it was wet from an early morning shower or maybe an early morning swim because all he was wearing was a bathing suit and an old T-shirt, both wet.
He looked down at my feet. “Seven and a half, I’d say. That means you’d get an eight.”
“I’l
l need a mask and a snorkel, too.”
“Got those. No problem.”
As in the little corner delis in New York, I couldn’t believe the amount of stuff crammed into what was no more than a shed, the wooden door barely closing properly, the two small windows, one of which I’d peered through the day before, painted shut decades earlier.
I took out my credit card while Hank was putting my things into a paper bag, “Hank’s” stamped on each item. Good advertising, I guessed. When he looked up, he began to shake his head.
“For your convenience, we take cash only.”
I pulled out the cash. Then pulled out the picture of Sally and told him my story. Hank took it in his bent fingers, the tip of one pinkie missing, and held it flat to try to catch the light from the open door. I stepped out of his way.
“So what happened in between?” he asked, putting the picture down on the counter.
“In between?”
“In between when you took her picture and now?”
“You mean why did I wait all these years?”
“Ah-huh.”
“Well, I didn’t. We’ve been writing and calling, but, you know, not all that often. Then I called on her birthday and the number was disconnected.”
“You from New York?”
My heart made a little hop. “Yes,” I said. “Do you…”
“It’s just the way you talk so fast,” he said. “Hard for me to keep up with what you’re saying.”
“Oh. Sorry. It’s a—”
“I know. It’s why I live down here.”
I picked up the photograph. “She’s older now, of course. But—”
“Never seen her,” he said. He picked up the bag, folded the top down and stapled the receipt onto it, an odd touch, odd that he even had a stapler in the shop. He handed me the bag. “I hope you have a good swim,” he said. “You change your mind about the boat, you know where to find me. Seven days a week, at least when I’m in the mood.”
I thanked him and turned to leave.
“You know to spit, don’t you? Into the mask. It keeps it from fogging up. Don’t feel I’ve done right by you big-city folks if I don’t tell you a thing like that.”
I crossed the road and walked along the ocean side, having to wait for traffic sometimes when there was a tree near the road, the trees that made the beach into separate little coves.
As the days had passed, Hank had become my best hope. The more frustrated I’d become, the more I’d pinned on Hank. Now all I had was another dead end and no other ideas, no trace of Sally, no hint of Sally, no nothing.
Getting lost was one thing. Staying lost was quite another. Staying lost meant cutting all your ties, and that’s exactly what Sally had done. She’d left her husband, her child and her home. She’d dropped her education. She’d left her friends without a word to anyone. Hell, if there still was a Sally, if she’d left on her own, cutting ties was precisely what she’d wanted, as far as I could tell. It was the point of it all. So why did I think she’d be here, of all places?
My flight home was the following morning, and I was ready. No one in the area knew Sally. No one had remembered ever seeing her. It was time to go home.
But when I came around a huge palm tree to the small spit of land across from the Madison, the ocean beyond seemed not to be water but light, the way it was in my dreams, and there he was. He stood at the very edge of the sand where the water would barely wet his white feet. He stood watching the ocean, like a lonely wife waiting for her sailor’s ship to appear on the horizon. He never turned when I walked onto the little beach, put the bag from Hank’s down on the sand, squatting down next to it. Even when I slipped the camera from my pocket and took his picture, he never moved. He stood still, his attention riveted on the water, the waves just ripples rising up to the sand, nothing like the waves the ocean made at home.
I knew he knew I was there. I’d seen one ear turn briefly in my direction before facing back toward the sea. Squinting toward the bright ocean, I sat on the sand and kept the vigil with him.
And then there she was. I saw the tip of her snorkel, her blonde hair, her face, the mask covering her eyes and nose, but no matter. It was Sally. Her hair was lighter than Madison’s, her skin darker, a result of where and how she lived. She was as slim as a young girl and beautiful enough to take anyone’s breath away, beautiful enough to hitchhike down here, even with a dog, to have Hank and everyone else want to protect her from this fast-talking city woman, God knows what on her mind, and for her history teacher to marry her when she’d gotten pregnant with someone else’s child, even when it meant giving up his career.
When she got in close enough to stand, she motioned to the dog to join her, and from complete and utter stillness, he burst forward, leaping into the water, sending it high like sparks spitting out of a new fire, and headed straight for her.
They swam together for about fifteen minutes before heading back to the beach. Then she stood, the water still up to her knees, the dog’s feet not yet finding purchase, and she pulled off the mask, shaking water from her hair, bending to take off the flippers. I managed three shots while her face was turned away before slipping the camera back into my pocket. I stood as she stepped out of the water, the dog shaking right next to her.
She seemed to notice me for the first time, and though the sun was behind her, she lifted a hand to shield her eyes as if the light was too bright for her.
I said her name and took a step toward her.
CHAPTER 24
Sally’s hand stayed where it was, an eave over her eyes.
“Leon sent me,” I said.
She turned to face the ocean and sat, her back to me. I expected to see her shoulders shaking, her head drop into her hands. I expected fear, remorse perhaps. But when I walked up to where she was sitting, the sand sticking to her tanned wet skin, I didn’t get either. I sat near her, Roy now at the water’s edge fishing with his white paws the way Dashiell did.
“I’ve been waiting for this for five years,” she said, “for someone to figure it out. How did you find me?”
“How isn’t the issue,” I said. “Why is the question.”
Sally sighed. “Have you been looking all this time?”
“No,” I said. “Just about a week.”
She turned to look at me, her face as still and blank as it was in the two pictures I’d seen. “Why now? Why after all these years?”
“Because Madison’s in trouble,” I told her. And sitting there on the sand, I told some of what I knew, about Madison’s tics, about the Botox, about Dr. Bechman’s murder. She stopped me there.
“She did that?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what did she say? Did she say she did it? Did she deny it?”
“Madison doesn’t speak, Sally. She stopped talking shortly after you left.”
“Not at all?”
I shook my head. And then we sat for a while without speaking either.
“There’s nothing physical? It’s not part of the tic disease?” Sally asked after a while.
“No, a decision, they think.”
“Does she write notes? Does she nod, shake her head? Does she try to…?”
I shook my head again.
“She’s a great kid,” I said, barely loud enough for her to hear me, even sitting just a foot apart. “But…”
Sally waved a hand back and forth to stop me. “You can’t think that I’m going to go back.” She turned away, toward Roy, toward the ocean, shaking her head. “If you met them, if you met my husband and my daughter, you know that I can’t be anyone’s wife, anyone’s mother. You know I never was. Not ever. I don’t—”
“Tell me how you got here, will you? Tell me what happened that night, the night you left home.”
“Home,” she said. “If only.” She stood and walked toward the water’s edge, the way Jim had when the conversation had gotten more painful. I followed her, and we stood with our feet in the water, R
oy off to the right hauling a frond he’d found around the sand.
“You felt at home in school,” I offered.
She shook her head. “Not really. It was reading I was after, losing myself in books.”
And now here, I thought, looking out at the ocean.
“But even that was hard, with Madison always wanting your attention,” I said. Sally didn’t respond, but Roy came back to stand near her, looking up at her face. “The night you left, had you planned it, had you planned to leave?”
She shook her head. “I was feeling as if I was suffocating, a way I almost always felt then. I thought I’d die if I didn’t get outside and get some air.” She looked me right in the eye. “If I didn’t get away from them.”
“Both of them?”
She nodded. “Both of them. Leon is the sweetest man alive. What he did for me, what he tried to do, what he’s doing now…”
“I met Jim,” I told her.
“You are thorough.” Her foot stirred the water. “So there’s that, too. He’s raising her and she’s not even his.”
She’s his now, I thought, saying nothing. Whatever his faults, he was committed to Madison, to his daughter, you had to give him that.
“So you took Roy, so that you could go out for a walk?”
Sally nodded. “Yes, because he’d ask if I’d just gone out.”
“Where you were going?”
“Why I was going. Like my mother. I was on a tight leash.”
“But you were going to school,” I said. “I thought he—”
“He encouraged that. Don’t get me wrong. He was…” Sally shook her head. “It’s just that he…” She looked at me again, and I could see the pain in her eyes. “He loved me too much,” she whispered, and I could feel the trap, a kid so young with a kid of her own who needed her attention, a husband who was the same way, pulling on her to give them something she just didn’t have.
Without a Word Page 18