A Superior Death (23 page)

“Not hardly.” Carrie, at thirteen, had already mastered the art of adolescent sullenness. Two words, and the night, the stars, the glittering lake, were dismissed as entertainments for the aged.

“Ah.” Anna wished the child would sulk and flop back to where she’d come from.

Carrie squirmed a shush of denimed buttocks over the wood. “Mom send you out here to keep an eye on me?”

“I was here first,” Anna replied, repressing the urge to add: “You silly little shit.”

Mystery number seven—or was it eight? Who was Carrie Ann’s boyfriend, and, outside a small circle of friends, who the fuck cared? The wine was very much in control. Anna noticed her vocabulary deteriorating. Till she’d moved in with Christina, she’d never given it a thought except at her mother-in-law’s dinner table. Christina’d never said anything, but the first time Alison had announced that Jimmy Fulton was a fuckhead, one perfectly shaped brown eyebrow had been raised in Anna’s direction. Since then she had weeded the four-letter words from her conversations.

Anna knocked back the last swallow of the Graves as if it were a shot of vodka and refilled her glass. “Why would Patience want me to keep an eye on you? Are you harassing the wildlife, camping out of bounds, running a white slave trade, what?”

“Nothing,” Carrie grumbled. “Mom thinks I’m a baby.” Anna forbore comment.

With the teenager’s paranoid ear, Carrie heard the implied agreement. “I’m not. I’m thirteen. Juliet Whatsername was married when she was thirteen.”

“And dead at thirteen and a half. Careful of your allusions.”

“Mom grew up in the sixties. She probably slept with every guy in Santa Cruz. Now it’s like sex has been recalled or something. Like a Pinto. Rear-ended once and it blows up.”

Anna laughed. Carrie didn’t join her. The sentence hadn’t been meant as a joke. “There’s AIDS,” Anna offered.

“Oh. Yeah. Like everybody’s got AIDS,” Carrie sneered.

“Can I have some of that wine?”

“Nope.”

“You drink too much.”

Anna was glad she had never had children.

Carrie began scooting over to where Anna sat. Anna hoped she would get splinters in her butt, but the gods were not with her and Carrie arrived unharmed. She snatched up the Graves from where Anna had it sitting on the deck and held it close to her face. “Graves. Mom’s giving you the good stuff,” she said.

Anna guessed she’d already picked up more about wines than most adults would ever know. “I’m impressed,” she admitted.

“Mom likes to pretend she’s cosmopolitan.” Carrie shrugged off the compliment she’d worked so hard for. “I’ve been drinking wine since I was five.”

“Watered?” Anna needled.

“I guess,” Carrie replied indifferently. “You ought to ask her for some of her secret stash. But you can’t guzzle it.”

Anna was growing tired of the company. Not wanting to relinquish her corner of the night, she chose silence hoping Carrie would grow bored and go away.

“Carrie!” came a call.

“Oh God,” the girl moaned. “Mom.” She lumbered off. Whether to or from the voice, Anna didn’t care. Just as long as it was away from her.

“Carrie!”

Evidently Carrie Ann had run from, not to. Short staccato steps announced the arrival of high-heeled pumps on the wooden deck. A faint scent of perfume invaded the clean night air as Patience came round the bulge of thimbleberry branches. A flashlight raked across Anna’s face and she winced.

“Sorry,” Patience said curtly. “Have you seen Carrie? I’m going to strangle her.”

“In that case, yes I have. She went thataway.” Anna waved into the darkness back the way Patience had come.

“She must’ve slipped off the edge of the deck and run around through the bushes. Little beast.” Patience sighed, clicked off the flashlight, and sat down on the step. “I’m damned if I’m going to go running after her. She’ll come home eventually.”

“You can strangle her then,” Anna suggested.

“Don’t think I won’t.”

“I encourage it,” Anna said, inadvertently awakening the protective maternal instincts.

“Carrie Ann is not like she is,” Patience defended her offspring. “She was always a biddable child. Who thought she’d go through the terrible twos eleven years later than most children? It’s this damn boyfriend. If I knew who he was I’d have him off this island in a second. I don’t know why Carrie is being such a little ass about it. Why she doesn’t just let me meet the boy. I’m such a monster? She’s old enough to have a date. It’s this sneaking that’s got me so crazy. What’s the big deal about this boy? We haven’t any coloreds working up here this summer.”

“Coloreds.” Anna hadn’t heard that term in a long time. If Patience wanted to nurture a cosmopolitan image she would have to update her bigotries.

“What else could generate all this creeping around and lying?” Patience asked.

Anna could think of a dozen answers. Not feeling particularly soothing at the moment, she began to list them: “Married men, convicted felon, illegal alien, older man, older woman, drug dealer, alcoholic—”

“Enough!” Patience cried. “I feel better already just talking with you.” She laughed. “Any Graves left?”

“A glass or two.” Anna handed the bottle to Patience.

“I never do this.” A white flutter blurred the darkness.

She took a swig from the bottle, then neatly wiped the mouth clean with her hankie.

“Keep it,” Anna offered. “I owe you a drink for procuring good wines. A touch of class. Helps maintain our civilized veneer in the wilderness.”

“Damn Carrie,” Patience returned to her former theme.

“You’d think she’d . . .” She seemed to be mentally listing things any sensible person would do under like circumstances and rejecting the possibility that her daughter would do likewise. “Damn, damn, damn, double damn, hell!” she fumed, and Anna laughed.

“Why don’t we go look for her?” Anna suggested. “We won’t find her unless she wants to be found, but it’ll give you something to do. Nothing personal, but you’re not your usual scintillating self.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Again Patience sighed. She pushed herself to her feet and flicked on the flashlight. The beam caught the swirl of her skirt. Flame-orange silk; it moved like a vapor in the still air. Dainty flame-colored suede shoes burned against the dark wood of the deck.

“Half of the fun of coming to Rock is seeing what you’re wearing,” Anna said as she levered herself unsteadily out of the lounge chair. “I have a feeling by the end of the season I’m going to be heartily sick of Patagonia and L. L. Bean; of anything functional, durable, or fuzzy.”

“No more feety pajamas?”

“Never give up your feety pajamas,” Anna said. Upright, she realized she was slightly inebriated. Maybe even more than slightly. The feeling was of lightheaded well-being. And on a good vintage there wasn’t even the shadow of an impending hangover to sully it.

Below the lodge, along the bay, two harsh intruder lights threw their glare out onto the water. Quays poked concrete fingers into the mooring area. Boats, many still showing lights, lined them bow to stern. The effect was of magic lanterns, or, Anna thought, luminarias on the snow.

She turned and walked out on the second of the piers.

“Where are you going?” Patience sounded alarmed.

“Thought we’d check your boat. See if Carrie is holed up there. Or took it. You never know.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Does Carrie only like boats with cute boys on them? I can sympathize with that.” Anna arrived at the
Venture.
The green striping showed black under the lamps. No light inside, no sign of life. If Carrie and the unauthorized beau were in the cabin, they were lying low.

Or dead. Anna shuddered at the unwelcome thought. Off duty she allowed herself the luxury of cowardice. “You want to look?” she asked Patience, who was still hanging back as if checking her boat was ridiculous.

“I guess if anybody has to play Miss Coitus Interruptus it may as well be the outraged mom.” Patience sounded too sour to permit Anna to laugh.

Patience rapped out a sharp shave-and-a-haircut on the fiberglass. No reply. She stepped off the dock into the boat. Anna followed. Both cupped their hands around their eyes and peered in the small windows. What little space there was inside was filled with gear: tanks, a dry suit, flippers. No naked little girls, no half-clad sheepish boys.

“Told you,” Patience said.

Anna said nothing. Patience had ceased being any fun. The warm glow of the expensive wine was being wasted. “I didn’t know you were a diver,” Anna said in hopes of turning the conversation into more pleasant byways.

“I’m not.”

Anna retreated into silence. As it soaked in around them, Patience seemed to put together Anna’s remark with the cabin full of gear. “Not like you, I mean. Not really. I’m a dilettante at diving as at life. Just playing at it.” Her humor was back, the bantering tone, the sharp commentary, but Anna was no longer in the mood for it. It fell on her ears like lines from a play.

“Think I’ll turn in,” she told Patience. “Suddenly the bottom fell out. The week is catching up to me, I guess.”

“Are you in the
Belle Isle
?”

Anna nodded.

“You’re welcome to our couch.”

Anna declined. This night, a little damp seemed a small price to pay for quiet.

 

 

 

 

The
Belle
was moored beyond the harbor lights in a horseshoe of concrete. Anna sat down on a wooden bench on the quay to enjoy a silence made deeper by the mousy squeaks of boats rubbing against their fenders.

“Anna.”

Her name was called so softly she could believe it had been whispered by the lake. Little hairs on her neck began to prickle.

“Anna.”

She hadn’t imagined it. A shadow coalesced in the back of the
Belle Isle
and sprang noiselessly onto the concrete.

“It’s me, Hawk,” the incubus said before Anna had recovered enough breath to shout. “I guess there’s no way to spring yourself on somebody at midnight without scaring them half to death. Sorry.”

He sat beside her on the bench, very near. The warm glow began to creep back.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Too many squirrels on the boat.”

“I couldn’t sleep either,” Anna said, knowing it was true, though she’d not yet attempted it.

“Shall we try it together?”

“Strength in numbers?”

“Comrades in arms,” Hawk said.

CHAPTER 15

Hawk and Anna sat a while longer on the bench enjoying the warmth where their bodies touched. Anna counted back on mental fingers. Many months and sixteen hundred miles had gone by since she’d last lain with a man. Remembering put the heat of the Mexican desert and a lover’s touch into her bones.

Hawk put his arm around her shoulders. His touch was light but firm. Anna relaxed against him, enjoying simple contact. At forty was there such a thing as casual sex? Somehow, she doubted it; too many memories.

An absurd desire to say the words “I love you” came over her. Not because she meant them, merely because she remembered how good it had felt when she had.

Suddenly she was sorry she’d imbibed so heavily. Her mind was wandering from lust. Anna schooled it. The body had its own life. Hungers of the spirit could be dealt with in the morning.

“I’m sleeping on the
Belle
tonight,” she said. “Can I offer you a nightcap?”

“Only if the night comes with it.”

“It does.”

They walked together, not touching, to the boat. Anna latched the cabin door behind them. Beyond the pilot’s area and down a step, a small door led into the bow. Anna secured it open with a metal hook made for the purpose, then lit two candles. The
Belle Isle
’s cabin lights would run off battery power but this was not an occasion for stark electric reality.

Hawk sat on the blue-vinyl-covered bench and watched without speaking as Anna cranked open the hatch, letting in the soft night air, the light of the stars. He watched while she put two cassettes in her well-used player and punched play on one side and pause/play on the other. As Cher’s voice sang, “It’s in his kiss,” he smiled.

“Be gentle with me,” he said and Anna laughed.

“Your first time?”

“Might as well be.”

“Orphans in the storm.” She sat beside him and he took her face in his hands, smoothed her hair back with callused fingers.

 

 

 

 

I
f anything was new to Anna it was the sadness. As they made love, sweetly, gently, she felt Hawk’s tears falling on her neck and breast. She found herself crying too, without knowing why. In sympathy, she realized, but whether for Hawk or herself she couldn’t tell.

The “Mermaids” tape ended. “Wolf Eyes” filled the
Belle
with music of the north. Anna felt herself drifting to sleep until a thought jarred her. “Damn,” she whispered.