“Fuck you, Jack.”
“My fondest wish,” he said. “Or it would have been if you’d chanced along sooner.” He looked up at Orion’s Belt. “I wish, I wish, I wish I were your figment, even if I could never be your fig man.” He stood with his back to her, admiring the stars.
“You’re drunk.”
“At this age, I nearly always was,” he said. “Amazing what a body can endure. In my thirties I still thought I was invulnerable.” He turned and dropped the leaf and held out his arms. “Look at me.” The soft light touched the planes of his chest, his narrow hips, taut muscles. Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. With a huge erection.
She looked away. His magnificence was that of a long-ago Jack; the effort he must have expended to reach that state was touching but mystifying. He resembled her memory of Mallo only in stature, but even that similarity plucked a long untouched chord that sent deep vibrations through her, their tremors a threat to the brickwork that walled in her grief.
“What, does this embarrass you?” he said. “Offend you?”
“I don’t like this you.”
“You can’t choose,” he said. “Although I grant, some of me is more likable than the rest.”
“So now I get to see your scary side.”
“What’s so scary about a man aching with desire? A man who would love nothing more than to find your very core and caress it until you come moaning and blinking back into this world?” He swatted at a passing bat. “Ah, the places I could have taken you. Lucky you, there’s still time. But you won’t dare go there again, assuming lover boy even got you there in the first place.”
“It’s none of your bloody business what ecstasy I did or didn’t reach,” she said. “What makes you think that hard-on of yours is such a prize?”
He thrust his hips forward. “Some women would be impressed, honored, by this.”
“As you claim hundreds were.”
“Goddamn right, you prissy, icy bitch.”
“Icy,” she said. “You slobbering exhibitionist. All talk, no action.”
“My action was legendary!”
“Have you got a point?”
He looked down his torso. “Less and less.” He picked up the palm leaf and studied it, running his fingers over its folds, then swirled it like a fan dancer before settling it over his crotch. “Obviously my exhibit is a distraction from my message.”
“Out with it.”
He stood at the foot of the steps, swaying slightly, and looked up at her. “You’re no more here than I am. Dead before your time.”
“You’re jealous.”
“You got that right, Ice Queen,” he said. “I’m seething with envy that someone left such a mark on your heart. But that’s not my point.”
“Get to it.”
“Too late to resurrect me, but maybe this man can bring you back from the dead if you give him a chance.”
“What man?”
“You know damn well who I mean.”
“If I want a matchmaker, I’ll let you know.”
“You’re quite the pair, now that I think about it,” he said. “He’s as guilty as you of obsessing on the dead, and as unwilling to make the move.”
“If you know so much, who’s his obsession?”
“He never told me,” he said. “Even in his cups, and believe me, he was there as often as I for a time.” He walked to the edge of the garden and stepped in, tossing the leaf over his shoulder. It flopped onto the court, a crinkled, dark shield against the pale stones.
CHAPTER 28
From the study window, she watched Liz swing one tanned leg out of Jason’s truck, examine his reflection in the wing mirror, and rake back his hair. He climbed out, eased the door shut, and straightened his shirt. It was the cornflower-blue linen he’d worn that night at Sunshine’s, which turned his eyes the same color.
When he looked up at the house, she ducked behind the curtain. The sun was just striking the court. He leaned against the truck and closed his eyes, and she wondered how it would be to watch him sleep.
He opened his eyes. “Inside?”
She dropped her paintbrush into a jar of thinner. “I thought you might have sailed already,” she called back.
“In an hour.” He grinned and peeled himself away from the truck. “Request permission to come aboard.”
“Granted, Captain.”
He took the steps two at a time. She wiped her hands on a rag and started to remove the shirt of Jack’s she’d appropriated for a smock. He burst through the study door, pinned her arms to her side with an embrace, spun her around, and set her down, still holding her elbows.
She caught her breath, felt the warmth of his hands on her arms.
“I hope I’m the first to wish you a Happy St. Patrick’s Day.” He kissed her quickly on the cheek and stepped back.
“Aye, laddie, but ye’ve got yir Celts confused,” she said.
He looked slowly around the study, examined her oil painting on the easel—a still life of a cut papaya, its seeds glistening fish eggs against the peachy flesh—and the watercolors of flowers she’d propped against the wall. “That passion flower is really good,” he said. “And the hibiscus.”
“My first daubings since high school,” she said. “It’s forcing me to really see again, not go about in oblivion.” She hung Jack’s shirt on the easel. “Vivian encouraged me. She and Eulia are writing a cookbook of her recipes, and she asked me to illustrate it.”
He considered her mother’s self-portrait without comment. While she leaned against the wall, he walked around the room, picking up paintings and sketches. She watched him flip through her watercolor pad full of scenes of Oualie. The room was too small for the two of them.
“Do you ever paint people?” he asked.
“Most of them don’t sit still long enough.”
“Paint from memory,” he said. “Or imagination.” He took her notebook and looked a long time at her pencil sketches of Jack. “Well, obviously you know what I mean. This one here got him perfectly.”
“Those are just doodles,” she said. “Private doodles.”
He turned the pages slowly.
“Stop,” she said. “That’s as bad as reading someone’s diary without invitation.” She grasped the corner of the pad, then let go and crossed her arms. He reached a page with a series of sketches of his own face. He held her gaze and handed her the notebook. She turned away and tossed it onto the daybed.
“I brought you a present,” he said. He took her hand firmly. His boyish excitement ignited her curiosity, and she let him lead her down both flights of stairs. On the way, she looked at how his tanned hand—which gave no sign of letting go—encircled her pale one, and remembered when he had helped her aboard Iguana. But that had been all business, and this was not.
“The last time you dragged me anywhere, we fought over that damn flag,” she said.
“Sometimes the only way to get you anywhere is to drag you,” he said. He opened the truck’s passenger door. In a carton on the seat was a tiny puppy. He cuddled it against his chest. It nibbled his thumb. “If you’re going to live here, you need a dog.”
“You think I need protection.”
“I think you need to rescue this adorable, abandoned creature.”
He handed her the puppy, and she wondered if this was his idea of an apology. She gathered the ball of fur into her arms, felt the puppy’s warmth, its fragility, the tiny ribs beneath its loose skin, its racing heart. While she stroked its head, it licked her hands.
“What makes you think I even like dogs?”
“The way you were with Trixie,” he said. “If I guessed wrong again . . .” He reached for the puppy, but Els held on tighter.
The dog was honey colored, with a white chest blaze and paws. Above its blue-gray eyes, lighter patches formed blond eyebrows. Holding it under its front legs, she let the body dangle. A female.
“Susie,” she said, and rubbed noses.
“You’d continue
Jack’s naming tradition.”
“Why not?” She carried the puppy into the kitchen.
Liz followed with the carton and unpacked a heating pad, baby bottle, and liter Coke bottle of milky liquid with a recipe for puppy formula and feeding instructions taped to it.
“Jason’s known as a softie for abandoned pups,” he said. Susie squirmed and yipped. “Someone left a litter in a box on the dock at Oualie, all of them badly dehydrated. He couldn’t save the others.” He reached over and tickled the puppy’s chin. “She’ll probably need nursing for at least another two weeks.”
“You’ve presumed a lot about my own soft spots, much less any maternal instinct.” Els poured a little of the formula into the baby bottle and put a bowl of water into the microwave to warm. “But as it happens, we raised hunting dogs at home. There was often a whelping box next to the Aga. When we lost one of Father’s prize bitches in labor, a . . . boy who lived with us and I raised the pups with droppers. Six of them.” She put the bottle into the warm water.
“I imagined you growing up with lots of boys,” he said. “To get so tough.”
“There was a gang around the estate. I hardly knew any girls until I was sent away to school. And most of them were mean. I was a country hick to them. They aped my accent mercilessly until I gave one of them a bloody nose.” Because of them, she’d learned to temper her brogue, become a speech chameleon as a shield against otherness, but since reuniting with Mallo, she’d embraced her accent as a badge of honor.
“I’ll remember to steer clear of your left hook,” he said.
She tested the formula’s temperature on her wrist. Cradling Susie in her palm, belly down, she offered the nipple and the puppy took it eagerly. She kissed the puppy’s downy head and breathed in her milky smell.
“They can abandon us, but they’ll never keep us down, right, girl?” she said.
“The princess was abandoned in her castle?”
“No fairy tale,” she said. “My mother left when I was nearly as helpless as this little thing. I wasn’t allowed to know why.” When the puppy released the nipple, Els gently burped her.
“Come sailing when I get back,” Liz said.
“And leave my new dependent?”
The puppy peed all over her arms, and she laughed and set the ball of fur into the box. While she was washing, she heard the screen door close and turned with a dishtowel in her hands to see Liz climbing into the truck. “You guessed right,” she called. “She’s a brilliant gift.”
“We don’t allow pets on Iguana,” he called back, “but we’d make an exception for Susie.”
Els kept Susie with her constantly under the guise of building trust and speeding house training, but she found herself talking to the dog more than seemed sane. It hit her that she’d allowed her work, travel, and living in flats to deprive her for decades of canine companionship—the affection that had helped her weather childhood and adolescence, and the loss of Mallo.
One morning in late March, she dumped her paintbrush into her turpentine and looked around for Susie, who was nowhere in the study. Calling, she searched the bedroom, lounge, and kitchen before she heard a yip and a growl from the patio. Pinky was standing still, holding out his hands for the puppy to sniff. Susie approached him cautiously; after he caressed her ears, she let him pick her up. When she licked his chin, he broke into a broad smile and laughed, a mere rush of air.
From February onward, the calabash bowl had reappeared several times a week with fruit or vegetables, once a jar of honey, once a few eggs. She’d returned it each time with sugar, cornmeal, coffee, biscuits. She would occasionally spot Pinky working in the garden, or washing himself at the hose tap at dawn.
Today, there was a papaya on the patio table. Els opened the door. “Pinky, Finney says you can hear me.”
He put Susie down and stepped back. Susie jumped at his shins, barking her playful bark. He was very dark, weathered, his hair matted, his eyes wary, his smile tentative.
“Do you want work?” Els asked.
He gave a quick nod.
“Can you see to the garden, weeding, mowing?”
He nodded again.
“Would you want to be paid in wages or food?”
He touched the tips of his fingers to his lips. He handed her the papaya.
She held the door wider, and he stepped shyly into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and asked, “What di yae like?”
He pointed to the beer and Vivian’s mango cheesecake. Els filled a carry sack with those choices, plus packets and cans, and handed it to him. “Come every day at lunchtime. I’ll ask Eulia to provide a meal for you.”
He smiled, thumped his chest, and made a low whistle, like someone blowing into a bottle.
“I’ll pay you fairly besides,” she said.
Carrying Susie, Els followed him outside and watched him stroll to the back fence and step through a makeshift gate into the bush. “Well, Suze,” she said, “the place comes with jumbie, jumbie pals, and now a mute gardener, all with their own agendas.”
CHAPTER 29
Though it was officially spring, the days marched on with little variation beyond an almost imperceptibly later sunset. Els countered the loneliness that crept in with the dark by sipping rum and reading, making a game of choosing a book at random from the shelves. But tonight she was fidgety, and when she searched for the comforting cadences of the King James Bible, she found it stashed among the novels, a surprising departure from Jack’s meticulous shelving system. Its pages had been glued together and their centers cut out to form a well that contained a packet of letters.
She took the Bible to the chair, untied the jute twine, and examined the envelopes. Ten, all addressed to Jack Griggs, Nevis, West Indies. The cavity also held a man’s gold signet ring, its blood-stone carved with the entwined initials JGS.
She poured more rum and settled into the big chair with Susie in her lap. She sorted the letters into date order and opened the earliest one, written in a round hand on lined pages torn from a notebook:
February 3, 1978
My Dearest Disappeared Jack,
85 days and not a word from you!
I miss you so much—not just the sex, which was beyond groovy—but just, well, YOU. I’ll keep this short ’cause I don’t even know if you’ll get it—they do have mail down there, don’t they? I finally broke down and called your mother—told her I was married to one of your college buddies and was putting together a surprise 30th birthday party for him and needed your address—and she said she’d gotten a postcard from Nevis. I had to use a magnifying glass to even locate it in the atlas. She’s as snooty as you always said and it sounds like she doesn’t give a hoot where you are, but I do—so please, please write me back right away. Send it to Becky Wickage’s address below. Daddy will make confetti of anything from you if he gets hold of it first.
I can’t bear that we’ve been cast apart by these cruel forces. I wish I could have stood up for you—for US—and fuck Daddy and old Traftie. Can you ever, ever forgive me?
I’m lying on my bed all naked right now. Imagine me wrapped in your musty old fur rug under the stars in our favorite spot, on a cold night like tonight, with my nipples standing at attention, waiting only for you.
All my love, forever,
Susie
There was a heart over the “i.”
The next letter had a border of pink flowers:
May 18, 1978
My Beautiful Pirate,
All I did today is cry. I’m 18 now—legal—and you’re not here to celebrate with me. Or fuck with me. Or take me away with you. Where the hell are you, Jack? You could at least let me know if you are OK and if I’m even sending this to the right little speck of an island.
You always said I had a good imagination, and I’m fantasizing like crazy these days to keep from going nuts—I’ve decided that you turned pirate and are off plundering ships and taking their wenches hostage. I wish I was one of those wenches. Please take
me hostage. You can even beat me—I deserve it. Even so, I don’t think I deserved to be left behind with these bastards and fools. Daddy is watching my every move and makes me be home by 9:00. I’m sure he’s tapping my phone.
They gave me a car for my birthday, with a big bow on it just like in the commercials—can you BELIEVE it’s a Dodge Intrepid? Daddy said it won awards for safety, as if I care. I just couldn’t think of a thing to say —it’s so totally old lady—at least it’s red. The seats fold down and someone even as tall as you could lie in the back. It would make our little “meetings” way more comfortable than your Ghia. I drove it out to your favorite place on the golf course and crawled in the back and looked out the back window at the moon and talked to you and made myself come. I do that a lot now—no way am I going to let any of those pimply Weston Hall guys get what you once had all to yourself—and I have to do SOMETHING or I’ll go insane.
I’m totally depressed. I’ve been stealing Mom’s pills—I have a good stash now. I’ve also been stealing Daddy’s cash—I’ve got a good stash of that too. Just tell me where you are and I’ll get the next plane, or boat, or canoe, or whatever they have down there. If I am stuck here much longer, I’ll take those pills and whatever happens will be ALL YOUR FAULT. Or maybe I’ll drive that red car right off the Currier Street Bridge. Think of me at the bottom of the river. Ophelia.
Your ever-loving Susie.
At the bottom of the page she’d drawn an upside-down car with heart-shaped bubbles rising along the right margin.
The next letter was written with purple Biro on notepaper with a university crest:
September 12, 1978
Dear Sexy Professor,
Hello from the halls of higher learning. I’m officially orientated now. OU is so big I feel like I could just disappear, or maybe start over and make less of a mess of everything. I thought it would be a good idea to room with Ginny Feldberg—you remember her, the one with the frizzy hair—but some days I think she’s Daddy’s spy.
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