by Silas House
There is red beans and rice, corn bread, chunks of tomatoes and cucumbers swimming in vinegar, avocados picked from the tree by Bell’s front porch, sliced and drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Neither Asher nor Justin has ever eaten an avocado before.
After they fill up their plates and start eating, Evona tells a long, funny story about a time when Bell’s back had gone out on her and Bell laid in the courtyard for hours until Evona returned from the beach to find her.
“I was trying to help her up but I was too weak—”
“That’s her nice way of saying I was too fat!” Bell says.
“And once I got her up she just couldn’t even move her legs, bless her heart. Her back was gone—”
“And so then we both just sort of folded down onto the gravel path out there and by this time it was dark—”
“We just sort of slid down on the ground with me on top of Bell—”
Then they are both so tickled that Asher finds himself laughing in a contagious way and he catches Justin laughing, too.
“I was trying to get out from under her,” Bell says, “and there we laid all tangled up about the time a couple of the guests came home from the beach—”
“And they were about the worst guests we ever had,” Evona says. She is laughing so hard now that tears are in her eyes. She can hardly contain herself.
“They had complained about everything their whole stay,” Bell says.
“I don’t know how long we laid there laughing, but long enough that Bell’s back was okay by the time we finished.”
Asher keeps his eyes on Evona a beat too long, and she catches him looking.
“We’ve got dessert,” Bell says, pushing down on the table to stand up. “Blackberry pie.”
Evona starts gathering up plates. Asher stands and fixes his eyes on Justin so he’ll know to offer his help, too.
“Oh, thank you,” Evona says, as Justin picks up the silverware. “What a gentleman you’ve raised, Asher,” she says.
Back home most of the women wouldn’t have let a man carry dishes into the kitchen. They would have insisted that the men sit down while they took care of everything. Asher could recall only one memory of his father; he had left when Asher was so small. They had just finished supper and his father sat at the table. He pulled out his false teeth and sucked at them while Asher’s mother cleaned up everything. Then he went into the living room and watched the news and hollered at Luke to not be in there with her. “That’s women’s work,” he had said, and winked at Asher.
“Bell, won’t you let us do all of this? Go on,” Evona says. “We’ll do these dishes, then have our pie and coffee.”
“I won’t argue with you,” Bell says, and struggles away. Lately she has a hard time walking and seems to be in pain. Now often when she rises from a chair she winces.
Evona looks at Asher with worry, a quick glance that tells him everything.
In the kitchen, Justin, Asher and Evona clean up, the dishes and silverware clinking between them. Asher watches the sink fill with hot, soapy water, the suds growing so big they look like they’ll spill out onto the floor. He draws in the clean lemon scent, a smell that always makes him think of Zelda. Every single day he regrets that one moment. He had been out of his mind.
“Go clear the rest of the table, buddy,” Asher tells Justin.
“He’s a special boy,” Evona says, and eases her hands into the dishwater, testing it for heat. “That prayer,” she says. “Like a little man.”
Out in the living room Bell plays the piano. Justin stands behind her as her shoulders undulate, her head swaying back and forth. Her eyes are closed, her hands moving like waves on the ocean, her whole face feeling every note.
After that, almost every evening is like that. A good meal and Evona laughing and Bell plays a Joni Mitchell song for them and then they eat peach ice cream or lemon cookies and at some point in the night Asher finds himself looking at Evona the way he never looked at Lydia. Sometimes Evona sings while Bell plays. Asher likes it best when Evona sings Mama Cass songs. Other times they all talk on the porch while Justin lies on the ground with Shady, watching the stars.
Some nights Evona can’t come out of her room for supper and later he can hear her softly crying.
Some nights he feels paralyzed by fear: fear they’ll be found; fear he will never find Luke; fear that he will find him.
Some nights it’s easy to forget that Tennessee even exists.
Some nights Asher thinks Key West is the whole world and that the people who are sitting there with him eating pie or watching the night are the only ones left.
Some nights he thinks they are just a dream God is having.
Sometimes he thinks there may not be a God at all. This is perhaps the most frightening thing of all for him.
Other times Asher looks at the blue-black sky and imagines Zelda watching the stars, thinking about him and Justin, and he can hardly stand it. He thinks about the way Lydia would never go out and look at the night sky but how she is probably awfully lonesome now.
He hates thinking of Lydia being lonesome, even if he has to battle hating her. It seems to him she’s afraid of everything in the world and doesn’t know what to do about it.
Some nights he thinks Tennessee is just a dream he had one time, with green hills and cows chewing their cuds and cicadas screaming in the hot night.
13
The three of them ride their bicycles down the narrow streets, zigzagging beneath the tunnel of tree limbs lush with leaves and purple flowers. They ride past the graveyard where the tombstones glow in the gray shadows, then ride faster once they near the ocean and catch its salted scent.
Evona leads the way, turning down one street and then another, sometimes standing on her pedals while she sings.
(My Dixie darling, listen to the song I sing)
Sometimes daring Asher to race her, sometimes coasting along quiet. Asher likes to watch her when she is feeling everything in a big way. She is either happy in a big way or sad in a big way. Asher is like that, too, but no one knows that except him. That’s the difference between himself and Evona: she hides nothing and he reveals hardly anything. That’s the way he has always survived. Sometimes even hiding the truth from himself.
They ride all the way out to the end of the White Street Pier where people are fishing and the wind stammers in steadily from the choppy Atlantic, its whitecaps particularly bright against the dark water. A big pelican is picking at itself on the concrete railing but as soon as Justin zooms by the bird rises, tucking up its legs and flapping away, perturbed at the disturbance. The three of them stand straddling their bikes, and look out at the endless black ocean. Very far away are a few boat lights but mostly there is nothing but the darkness and the warm wind and the sound of the waves supping at the cement pier.
Asher feels exposed here, though, because there are too many bright streetlamps. Nearby stands an older couple, fishing, wearing matching airbrushed tee shirts. The man tries to control the long fishing pole in the pummeling wind. The woman, maybe bored with watching him fight the rod-and-reel, keeps looking over her shoulder at the threesome as if fearing she and her husband are about to be mugged. But Asher thinks that perhaps she is wondering why he looks so familiar.
Justin takes off and Evona follows, pedaling away without a word. Asher rushes to catch up and rides behind them both, watching Justin’s strong little legs pump the pedals, feeling safer once they are back in the cover of darkness. Then Evona is singing the chorus of “My Sweet Lord” and Justin joins in with her.
Some nights Asher feels like they have lived in Key West much longer than a month. Nights like these he wishes they could stay here forever. But he knows that is impossible. Every day that becomes clearer.
They ride along in streets striped by deep shadows, past small, pastel-colored houses with people on their porches smoking or laughing or singing. Often the doors are open or the windows are uncurtained so that Asher can see into each golden
-lighted room (people watching television, eating late suppers, a woman pointing her finger at a man seated in a recliner, her mouth contorted by anger) and see all the little dramas happening to each person in the world.
He still looks for Luke. He cruises the streets and hopes to happen upon him. He searches the internet and he occasionally asks a stranger on the street if they know a Luke Sharp. But he has no more leads tonight than he had before he got here.
They leave the neighborhood of closely aligned houses and then are flanked on either side by a thick woods of palm and pine trees. He is aware of the ocean breathing close by again although he cannot be quite sure how; by now his senses have adapted to island life so that he is simply aware, as if the pulse between his feet and the ground changes when he is near the edges of the land. He has not been in such darkness since arriving on this island, where there always seems to be a light behind the sky.
“Park your bikes and be quiet,” Evona whispers.
“Why?”
“If you want to see the stars the best then we have to sneak out onto this beach where there are no lights. But it’s a private beach.”
“We can’t be breaking the law.”
“It’ll be fine, Asher,” she says. She sounds halfway put out by him and halfway amused. “I’ve done it a hundred times.”
“Come on, Dad,” Justin says, already walking toward the sound of the water. Asher’s eyes have adjusted to the darkness enough that he can at least make out his son’s shape in the front.
“I promise. We’re way down on the far corner of a big resort,” Evona says, and puts out her hand. Her face is touched by the shadows of palm leaves so that a thin, gray light shows only on her eyes and her outstretched fingers. “They’ll never know.”
Asher doesn’t take her hand and she withdraws it.
“It’s against the law,” he whispers.
Her eyes flare in the shadows. “Well, it ought to be illegal for them to fence in a wild thing. Sometimes the law isn’t right.” She turns and he follows her, mostly because Justin is already out of his sight. “Justin,” Asher hisses, trying to be quiet, but Justin doesn’t answer and after a few steps they have arrived at a chain-link fence where someone has taken wire snips to make an opening. Asher wonders if Evona has done this herself. He wouldn’t doubt it. She slides through like a child, then holds back the little flap of fence so Justin can ease through, too.
“Watch the ends, buddy,” she says in a quiet, tender way, and he knows for sure then that she was once a mother. Or perhaps still is. There is something in her words, in her body. “So you don’t get cut.”
The smell of the pines takes Asher back home, to Tennessee, when he used to carry Justin on his shoulders in the woods along the Cumberland River, to his childhood when he and Luke played in the same woods, when things—the good and the bad—made sense to him. Or when he and Lydia first started courting and went for a walk in the woods after church one night. Asher closes his eyes and draws in the scent, filling himself with Tennessee, with the home that he misses and does not miss.
He steps out of the dark woods and finds the beach is just as shadowy. There is a necklace of white and yellow lights in the distance where the resort spreads itself on a curve of the island. Justin and Evona are running down to the surf. By the time Asher reaches them they are lying on the sand with their feet in the water. Justin has his arms behind his head and his face seems lit by a distant light.
Justin sticks his finger into the air. “Look, Dad.” Asher turns toward the sky and his eyes find the most stars he has seen since the flood, when all of the electricity had been knocked out by the high water and he stayed out far into the night, helping neighbors and looking for Roscoe.
Asher lies down beside his boy.
There are so many stars this night that the sky seems as much silver as blue black, a sky not so much pocked by stars as made from them. There is no moon, which makes the stars even brighter, and when Asher is very still he can pick out satellites zooming across to point out to Justin. They watch in silence, except when Justin sees a shooting star or Evona whispers the names of constellations. They feel the earth turn beneath them.
All Asher can think is what he is always thinking: that he has to memorize everything about this moment, because soon Justin will be taken from him. He has gotten to the point where he can hardly enjoy anything without mourning its loss while it is happening.
And then Justin is up and running and jumping in the night surf. Evona sits up, watching him, the ocean wind sweeping back her hair in a black tangle.
“My God this place is beautiful,” she says, looking out at the dark ocean.
Asher thinks: So are you. But just as quickly he thinks: You can’t be thinking that way.
Evona rests her hand atop his and he jerks away as if he’s put his fingers too close to a fire.
“We’re attracted to each other, so why not?” Evona says. There is no anger in her voice. “Life is so short, Asher. It’s just way too damn short to not enjoy it every little bit you can.”
“All I can think about right now is Justin.”
Asher knows she is in the dark, that she has no idea why they have come to Key West, but he can’t tell her. He can’t trust anyone with that information.
“That boy will be much happier once you are,” she says.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Asher, I know.” She looks at him like she is taking in his entire face.
“What do you mean?”
“I know.”
He waits, not breathing.
“I recognized you as soon as you came here. I remembered your face from the news back when that video went viral. But I wasn’t absolutely sure. So I googled any ‘Asher’ and ‘Justin’ that might be in the news. You should’ve at least changed your first names.”
Asher bolts to his feet, blood thumping in his ears, his first instinct to grab up Justin and simply run. But Evona is on her feet, too, her hands out in front of her as if about to calm a wild animal. Justin is skipping along the edge of the water, away from them.
She puts both her hands on Asher’s forearms. “It’s all right. You’re safe with me. It’s not hard to figure out why you’d take him, after what happened at your church.” She pauses, shakes her head. “The more I looked, the clearer that became. The news said she used that video against you but what you said on there—it was all just right. It all needed to be said. She used it to show that you were incompetent but to me it shows exactly how sane you are. Lots of folks think you’re a hero for what you said on there.”
Asher can’t help feeling betrayed, even if her words are soothing. He pictures her sitting up all night, learning all about them.
“How could you do that? Read up on us like that?”
“It’s not like that. I’m living right next door to you. Just one wall between us,” she says. “Bell may go on her gut instinct, but I’ve been through too much to take chances like that. I’d have been crazy not to have looked you up.”
He can’t argue with her there.
“To an old judge in a little Tennessee town what I was saying was crazy,” Asher says.
“Well, they’re wrong. I don’t see how anyone who spent five minutes around you and that boy couldn’t see the connection between you. It’s awful bright.”
“Did Bell recognize me? Is that why she took us in?”
“No,” Evona says, and nothing else.
Justin is running back their way so Asher lowers his voice, sits back down on the sand. “Do you think we should leave?”
“I think you’re lucky to be in a tourist town where people mostly aren’t watching the news. Although locals are, and locals go to the beach, too. They work at Fausto’s. So eventually somebody’s going to recognize you. Most of the articles online make you out to be a crazy man, and people want to help little children get back to their mothers.”
Asher listens to the waves washing ashore for a time. “Evona!�
�� Justin yells.
“I know what it’s like. To lose your child,” she says, but then she turns away. “You’re safe with me and Bell.”
Justin runs back to them, stands with his hands on his hips, panting. “The water’s warm,” he says. “Warmer than it is in the daytime. Let’s go swimming.”
“Let’s go!” Evona stands ready to bolt off with him.
“Wait, now,” Asher calls, always uncertain of the ocean. “I don’t know about that. Swimming at night.”
“It’ll be fine,” Evona says.
Justin and Evona run out into the water. He wades out behind them and the small waves wash against him like bathwater. Above him the stars are endless. Justin and Evona are laughing and splashing in the darkness but Asher feels his own quiet building around him as he walks farther out, even past them, until the water is at his chin and he tastes salt on his lips.
14
Justin finds a pair of red panties bunched up at the bottom of the sheets one morning when he’s helping Asher clean rooms.
“How’d they get down there?” he asks.
Asher shrugs.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Justin shouts when he sees there is a pair of men’s underwear down there, too. Blue boxer briefs with EXPRESS written around the waistband. He stands there studying on this discovery a long moment, as if figuring out a math problem. “They must have pulled them off while they were in bed and forgot about them,” he says. “Why’d they do that?” Then as soon as the last word is out of his mouth, he realizes, and his face goes red.
Justin pinches one corner of the panties and holds them up for Asher, asking him what they should do with them. Asher rushes over, holding the garbage can out like an offering plate. “Drop them in here, Justin. Now!”
In that same room Justin finds two used rubbers, one in the garbage can and one on the floor beside it (people are always just barely missing the garbage can in these rooms, but when they miss they don’t bother to pick it up like they would at home). Each of them had been tied into a knot and looked like water balloons that had slowly deflated.