Turtle Moon Page 7

  Lucy opens her mouth as if she’s going to argue with him, but nothing comes out. She’s not going to sleep tonight and she knows it. She’s not going to tell him the things she should. As Julian follows her through the apartment, he notices that it’s the exact same layout as 8C. The same terra-cotta tiles in the kitchen and bathroom, the same acoustical tiles on the ceiling, the same hanging globe of light in the hall. Before Lucy opens the door to the boy’s room, Julian can feel the discontent inside, a thick, blue cloud reaching from ceiling to floor. He walks past Lucy and stands in the middle of the rug, surveying the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. He can smell cigarette smoke and popcorn. He figures the window shades haven’t let any light into this room for months.

  “Has he ever been in any kind of trouble?” Julian asks easily as he heads for the closet. He opens the closet door, waiting for an answer, but Lucy’s not talking.

  “Your boy?” Julian asks. “Ever had any kind of trouble with him?”

  As he takes a denim jacket from a wire hanger, Julian manages a look at Lucy.

  “No,” Lucy says. There’s a pulse on the left side of her throat that flutters as she speaks.

  “No?” Julian says. He can feel the outline of a pack of matches in the pocket of the jacket. Inside the lining there’s a slit in the material, cut with a sharp knife, perfect for shoplifting. “That’s rare,” he said. “Most boys his age get in trouble for something. Smoking, shoplifting, that kind of thing.”

  “Really?”

  The way Lucy says “really” makes Julian want to kiss her. His blood feels much too hot, as though it doesn’t even belong to him anymore. She’s going to protect her son, no matter what, Julian knows that for a fact. All his life, he has tried to understand what makes a mother love her child and what makes her cast him aside. He has seen female pelicans care for their young so tenderly they’ll pluck out their own feathers to line their nests, leaving pinpricks of blood along their skin. They’ll starve themselves if necessary for the sake of their brood. Certainly, there can be no uglier offspring than a baby pelican, which can’t even waddle without staggering under the weight of its enormous beak. And yet Julian has witnessed this sort of devotion again and again. He’s watched a twenty-pound fox stand up to Loretta, its fur a ridge of fury along its back, all because of a hidden pair of kits. He’s found ants dead of exhaustion on his windowsill after carrying hundreds of egg cases to safety. Why is it, then, that a she-bear would have loved Julian more than his own mother? He was born premature, too soon for his mother to get to the hospital in Hartford Beach, a tiny baby so ugly he must have seemed like a punishment. Just two hours after Julian was born, he died. He simply stopped breathing, and he would have stayed dead if his mother hadn’t run all the way to Lillian Giles’s house. Miss Giles rubbed his hands and feet and breathed into his mouth; she wrapped him up in dishtowels and finally placed him on a rack in the oven, where she kept him until he was no longer blue. He has tried to remember back to that day when he was given away. He’s been told he was fed sugar water, dripped into his mouth from a cloth, until he would take a bottle of milk. When he cried, the toads in the garden buried themselves in the dust, the wild limes dropped from the trees.

  Although he’s had no personal experience with it, Julian knows there are certain things you can’t do in the presence of devotion. You can’t look for marijuana seeds in the dresser drawers, for instance, or satanic messages scribbled inside a school notebook.

  “How about a Coke?” Julian says. “Maybe with some ice.”

  “Now?” Lucy says.

  “I’m dying of thirst.” Julian puts a hand to his throat and realizes that it’s true.

  “I only have Diet,” Lucy tells him.

  “Diet,” Julian says. “Diet’s great.”

  Once he’s gotten her out of the way, Julian goes through the desk drawers, then sorts through the clothes tossed into a jumble on the floor. He gets down on all fours and peers beneath the bed. It’s not as if he knows what he is looking for, but he does know more than he’d like to about boys who search for disaster until they find it. He also knows when he’s being lied to.

  When Lucy comes back with his Coke, the light from the hallway forms a white circle around her. That’s when Julian understands how much she knows. He reaches out suddenly, and as he pulls Lucy to him, the Coke spills on the carpet. Lucy’s knees buckle beneath her, and for hours afterward she will wonder why she didn’t break away from him right then. He keeps one hand on her waist, while his other hand quickly moves down her leg. Lucy pushes against him, but he grabs her foot anyway and jerks off her sandal. When he lets go, Lucy stumbles backward until her spine is pressed up against the cool plaster wall.

  “Size eight,” Julian says as he examines the sandal. “How come I’m not surprised?”

  This is the time of night when the humidity can be downright unbearable, the ivory hour when nothing rises, not even your spirit. They stand facing each other beneath the glow-in-the-dark stars, not noticing when the stars begin to fall, one by one, pulled down by the thick, wet air. Neither of them has to be told that once someone is lost a stone forms in the place where he used to be. Rattle it once, in the smooth cup formed by your hand, and you may just draw blood.

  THREE

  BEFORE THERE IS ANY light there is the sound of birds. Their song spirals slowly upward: mockingbird, green heron, indigo bunting, king-bird. If you wake to this song, beneath the open sky, your heart may beat too fast. You may not be certain whether or not you’re still dreaming until you see that the stars are already disappearing into the morning sky, flickering as they fade.

  In a lair of sugar cane and strangler figs, beyond the muddy reaches of a green pond, the meanest boy in Verity scrambles to all fours, his eyes still closed, his mouth dry with sleep. His chest heaves, but amazingly enough, the raccoon at the edge of the pond methodically washing its hands isn’t frightened off by the sound of the boy’s heart beating. The baby who sleeps beside him remains curled up, knees to chest, her thumb in her mouth. In her sleep, the baby moves closer, until her spine rests against the boy’s leg. For twenty-four hours they have lived on stale doughnuts and one plastic foam cup filled with tepid water. At the very bottom of the boy’s backpack there is still a peanut butter sandwich, found in a trashcan at the far end of the golf course. The green pond, which has begun to shimmer as the last few stars vanish, is the one where Charles Verity disappeared. Some local boys believe that an alligator still swims here. Golfers mistake its broad back for a half-submerged log. Gulls that light in the center of the pond often sink without a trace, except for a circle of ripples as the water closes over their heads. It is damp this morning and the boy’s T-shirt is soaked; his jeans are coated with mud and beetles’ wings. The boy gets up on his haunches, to stretch and ease the cramps in his legs, but he can’t stand upright beneath the sugar cane. His lungs feel thick and wet; when he opens his mouth to cough, nasty little brown clouds come out.

  There are so many things he should not have done he has lost count of them. He should never have pretended to be asleep, when all he was doing was waiting for his mother’s bedroom door to close. He should have left the money he’d stolen from Donny Abrams in his night-table drawer, instead of stuffing it into his backpack and sneaking out of the apartment at three in the morning. He should never have kept his secret stash down in the laundry room, or had a stash at all, or come to Florida in the first place.

  When he got down to the basement it was completely dark, except for the wavering fluorescent light above the vending machines. All he had to do was crouch down beside the second washing machine and slide his hand behind it into the hole in the plaster, then dislodge the tin box where he kept his contraband. Instead, he went to the row of dryers, drawn like a crow or a consummate thief to the two gold rings someone had left on the shelf. He scooped them up in the wink of an eye. If he brought these rings to the pawnshop Laddy had told him about, he figured he might have enough for a pla
ne ticket back to New York. He should have turned and run then, but that was when he realized the sound of water running through the pipes overhead was something else entirely. It was the sound of a woman screaming, and he knew, right away, just how wrong something was.

  He backed up against the cool cinder-block wall and didn’t dare breathe. He doesn’t know how long he stood there, but it seemed like forever, long enough for vines to grow up through the basement floor and wrap themselves around his knees. And then the scream was over, and all he could hear was the thick reverberation of somebody breathing hard and a funny sort of static in the rhythm of a heartbeat. He saw then that an intercom had been left on the bench, and right beside the bench, in a metal laundry bin, slept a baby, not much more than a year old. When she opened her eyes, he lifted her out of the laundry bin and she put her arms around his neck. She smelled like Ivory Snow and milk. She reached for her stuffed bunny rabbit. He knew her by sight; her mother always made her wear a life jacket in the pool, even when she was just sitting on the steps. Sometimes, when the baby’s mother led her through the lobby after grocery shopping, she’d leave a trail of Cheerios behind her. And now, for reasons he could not begin to understand, she seemed to be his, whether he wanted her or not.

  He grabbed some diapers from the pile of laundry in the bin, and when he carried the little girl up the stairs he found she was heavier than she looked. But what was he supposed to do? Leave her in the laundry room by herself, abandon her in a stairwell, take her back to the apartment where someone had been screaming? He went right to the ficus hedge and set the baby down on the ground so he could dig where the sand was already soft. He found the box and threw the rings inside. He had to. Otherwise, everyone would have known he’d stolen them. Maybe he should have turned himself in and hoped for mercy, but there was no reason for anyone to trust him. His own mother would have probably believed the worst.

  He was acting purely on instinct, so when he heard the soft whir of the revolving door to the lobby he didn’t think twice. He picked the little girl up and took off running, and he didn’t look back until he was halfway across the parking lot. The man who had seen them was racing to his car, so the boy took the secret path he and Laddy had discovered on the far side of Long Boat Street. No car could follow them there, and after a while they’d reach the drainage ditch that ran along the Interstate. He knew he had a perfect right to be afraid. He could feel the bunny rabbit flapping against his chest as he ran; he could tell the baby’s diaper was already soggy. He didn’t call 911 until he dared to leave the path for a road leading to the golf course. He carried the baby into the phone booth and made certain to keep his hand over the mouthpiece when he told the officer who answered that someone might be dead up in apartment 8C. He thinks he may have lost his voice at the moment when he hung up the phone, and he still cannot speak, not even a whisper. Each time he tries, his throat closes up and he begins to choke.

  The baby doesn’t seem to mind that he can’t talk. She’s not a crybaby, and she’s a good sleeper. She doesn’t wake up until the dragonflies have already begun to hover over the pond and a line of pearl-colored light has cut across the sky. The baby keeps her stuffed bunny in the crook of her arm, and she scoots over, right beside the meanest boy in town. Whenever she’s awake, she holds on to the leg of his jeans. At first he tried to make her let go, but she’s stubborn, and he’s gotten used to the tug on his leg, the constant pressure, like gravity. He has even forced himself to change a diaper, something he never in his life would have believed he’d have the stomach for. He tries not to think much about the way his stomach feels. He always laughed at Boy Scouts and nature-lovers, but now he has no idea of what’s edible. Raw sugar cane, a tiny fish caught in the pond, the green figs in the branches above them. They don’t have to talk for him to know that the baby is hungry. She tugs a little harder on his jeans and starts to whimper. In a little while he will have to think about what to do next. In cases like this, there is always a plan. The authorities have probably already gone through his possessions, the stolen money and cigarettes, the green birthstone ring he swiped from a classmate right before gym. How many dragonflies would it take to make a meal? How can he catch them without falling headlong into the pond? If he could speak he would tell himself not to be afraid, but since he cannot, he takes the peanut butter sandwich out of his backpack, breaks it into four neat pieces, then watches as the little girl eats every bit, including his share.

  Some mothers, when handed a black-and-white photograph, taken at the instant their child committed a crime, will swear their boy spent all night right beside them on the couch. They’ll hang on to their son’s shirttails rather than let the police take him away. They believe not in what they see but in what they know in their hearts to be true. But when a woman hasn’t slept all night, when she’s left the window open so that the thick night air has given her a migraine nothing can cure, it’s possible for her to believe that her child may be guilty of something. This doesn’t mean she won’t fight just as hard as the trumpeter swan, who will peck to death any creature that dares to approach her fledgling, and whose enormous white wings will beat against any real or imagined threat. The difference is a simple one. If a fledgling is born deformed—a broken spine, a wing cracked in half—the mother kills it herself rather than allow it to suffer. The trumpeter swan, after all, sees in black and white.

  It is a little past six, on the third day of May, and after going through every possible explanation for her son’s disappearance, Lucy finally telephones Evan. She knows he’ll blame her, and he starts right in.

  “Jesus Christ, Lucy! Don’t you keep track of him? Are you saying that he gets up for school whenever he pleases and maybe he makes it there and maybe he doesn’t and damned if you know!”

  “You’re the one who keeps encouraging him in these fantasies about going home,” Lucy shoots back. “It’s you.”

  “Yes, he’s excited about coming home this summer,” Evan counters. “Why shouldn’t he be?”

  Lucy thinks about the calendar in Keith’s closet; the last day of school is circled in red with bombs going off around it. Home, it says in Keith’s wavering script.

  “Lucy?” Evan says.

  He doesn’t need to tell her it’s her fault, and maybe that’s why she can’t admit how much has gone wrong. If she hasn’t been able to discuss the stealing and the suspensions from school, how can she begin to explain that a murdered woman’s gold rings have surfaced in a grave she and Keith dug together? She thinks about Julian Cash pulling her to him. For twenty years, Evan believed whatever she told him. Lucy has always suspected that he never truly knew her because she didn’t allow it; now she’s not so sure. Julian Cash identified each one of her lies long before she dared to speak it.

  “I’ll fly down this morning,” Evan says. He’s an architect in a large firm, and when Lucy and he were married he never took any time off. That’s changed since the divorce. Now he doesn’t go into the office on Friday afternoons and he accepts less important clients, summer houses in Bellport, family room additions. “I can leave right now.”

  “No,” Lucy tells him. “You can’t. He may already be on his way to New York.”

  “Jesus,” Evan says. “You’re right. I’ll stay here. God damn it,” he adds. He sounds exhausted. “Look, let’s not blame each other for everything that’s wrong with him. We can’t do that.”

  “We used to do that,” Lucy says in a small voice.

  “Well, that was okay,” Evan says gently. “We were married.”

  She can’t stand it when he’s nice to her, and what’s more, she can’t stay home waiting for Keith to be caught. What she needs is bargaining power, just in case.

  “I’ll call you the minute I know anything,” Lucy tells Evan, and she knows she sounds as if she really means it. After she hangs up, Lucy clicks on her answering machine, then gets dressed and washes her face with cold tap water. She puts on a pair of dark glasses to hide her puffy eyes and drives
down to the Sun Herald. She doesn’t even have to look for Paul; he comes up behind her while she’s locking her car.

  “Tough luck about your kid,” he says.

  Lucy whirls around to face him. They’re both wearing sunglasses, so neither one has the advantage. Between them heat rises off the blacktop in pale, snaky lines.

  “Sooner or later a kid with his record for trouble always winds up running away,” Paul says. “Statistically.”

  Lucy realizes that her mouth must have dropped open, because Paul grins and says, “And how do I know he’s taken off?” He taps his skull gently, as though it contained a secret weapon. “Look, don’t worry,” he tells Lucy. “He’ll wind up in Atlanta or San Francisco or back with his pop. I’d bet money on it.”

  Lucy smiles up at Paul; it gives her some curious, bitter pleasure to know that her son’s companion is the missing baby Paul would so love to find.

  “Tell me about Karen Wright,” Lucy says as she trails along toward Paul’s parked Volvo.

  “That’s not her name,” Paul says. “Not her hair color, not her age, not her driver’s license.” He suddenly turns on Lucy. “Why? What do you know about her?”

  “Nothing,” Lucy says. She takes one step back and adjusts her sunglasses.

  “If you ever want to get out of obituaries, you have to start paying attention to details,” Paul says.

  “You’re right,” Lucy says. She bites her lip, just a little, not enough to draw blood.

  “Ever ride the elevator with her?” Paul says, as he jerks open the door to his car.

  “Well, yes,” Lucy admits.

  “Ever sit by the pool with her? Borrow her suntan lotion?”

  “I guess so,” Lucy says.

  “Then you probably know at least ten things about her that could lead us straight to her, if you were paying attention to details.”

  After Paul’s car has disappeared onto West Main Street, Lucy stands on the asphalt beneath a blue cloud of exhaust. She takes off her sunglasses and pushes them up on her head. In the rich, lemon-colored light of morning, a morning that is already far too hot, Lucy has just begun to realize that, without having paid the slightest bit of attention, she knows more about her neighbor than Paul Salley ever will. She knows where Karen had her hair cut, not only here in Verity but back in her other life. Back in New York.