A Superior Death (35 page)

Carrie was crying like a baby, great whooping sobs and hiccups. Whether from humiliation or fear or just plain anger at being caught, Anna couldn’t tell.

Patience pulled off the sweatshirt she was wearing and Carrie struggled into it awkwardly, twitching away from her mother’s helping hands.

“Get on the
Venture,
” Patience ordered, maternal softness turned back to asperity by rejection. She caught up something from the floor just inside the cabin door. “You forgot this,” she added acidly, dangling a white bit of cloth from her fingers. It was a training bra. In the light from the stern, Anna could see the little spandex cups and the thick sensible straps.

With a shriek Carrie grabbed it and, gulping air and sobs, clambered over the gunwale into her mother’s boat and disappeared into the cabin, slamming the door behind her. From the muffled sounds that followed, Anna guessed she had thrown herself down on the seat and cried into folded arms.

During all this Jim Tattinger had not appeared. The light in the cabin on the
Gone Fishin’
had stayed resolutely out, and there hadn’t been a single sound from within.

Patience pushed the cabin door wide. An unseen hand pushed it shut again. With a force that made Anna flinch, Patience kicked the thin wood. The veneer cracked and the door banged inward. There was a sharp scream of hinges or of pain. Anna hoped it was the latter. Patience stood to one side of the black opening. “Come out or I will burn your fucking boat to the waterline,” she said quietly. “I swear to God I will.”

A rustling followed, then a pale shape began to insinuate itself into the darkness of the doorway.

“All the way out,” Patience said coldly. “I’ve never seen a child molester up close.”

Tattinger came out into the unflattering white light. He’d either retained or dragged on his T-shirt and underpants. They were white Fruit of the Looms, baggy like ill-fitting diapers. The undershirt was tucked into the panties. He had blue socks on his feet and his carroty hair was standing on end.

From the shadows of the
Venture,
Anna braced herself for the familiar whine, the stream of self-justification that was bound to follow. Just as she began to think that for once he had the good taste to be ashamed of himself, he began to speak.

“Look here, Mrs. Bittner,” he said as if Patience, instead of being his peer, were decades older than he. “It’s not what you think.”

One graceful hand shot out, plucked the blue and white band of his underpants away from his bony frame and let it snap back. Tattinger turned pigeon-toed and grabbed his crotch in a parody of masculine modesty.

“It’s what I think,” Patience said. “Just shriveled and uglier.” Tattinger opened his mouth to speak, but she forestalled him. “You will not talk to me,” she commanded. “You will not talk to nor come near Carrie. If you do I will kill you. Really. If you stay away, I will content myself with telling Lucas, getting you fired, getting you sent to jail. There you will be the little girl the ugly men want and I shall rejoice in every day you spend facedown bent over some bench with your trousers down around your ankles.”

Finished, Patience stepped away from him, took a solid stance, doubled one fist inside the other, and, straight-armed, swung a roundhouse. Her knuckles collided with Jim’s jaw just below his left ear and he went down.

As the
Venture
motored away, Anna could hear him screaming, “That’s assault! That’s assault! I’ll press charges!”

“He will, you know,” she said. “He’s that slimy.”

“So will I,” Patience returned. “And mine will stick.” Carrie Ann began to howl.

CHAPTER 24

“
C
ounseled!” Patience fumed, spitting out the word. At Patience’s request Anna had followed her and her daughter back to Rock Harbor in the
Belle Isle,
then accompanied them to the Chief Ranger’s house on Mott Island. After talking with Lucas Vega, the two women and the eternally weeping thirteen-year-old returned to Patience’s apartment behind the lodge. Carrie had stumbled off to bed to cry into her stuffed animals. Anna sat on the couch watching Patience stomp around the tiny kitchen.

“Counseled
again,
” Anna said unhelpfully. She wasn’t feeling much like defending the Park Service. Though Lucas had been as shocked as they, if the flashing of his usually somber dark eyes was to be believed, all he could promise was that Jim Tattinger would be forced to undergo psychological counseling. For reasons Anna could understand, Patience didn’t want to drag her daughter—or herself—through the courts trying to prove attempted statutory rape or child molestation. Lucas would lodge a complaint, but without Patience pressing charges, he didn’t have the power to fire or even suspend Tattinger without pay. Chances were good the higher-ups wouldn’t want to be tainted by the tawdry goings-on below. As in any bureaucracy, the best way up in the Park Service was to produce a smokescreen of paperwork, an avalanche of plans and studies and proposals, but to be very careful to never actually
do
anything.

“I’m getting cynical in my old age,” Anna said to break her train of thought.

“Cynicism is the fool’s synonym for realism,” Patience snarled. Anna laughed. At first the other woman looked angry; then her face cracked and she laughed. “Pretty bad, aren’t I? This has been one of those life’s-a-bitch-and-then-you-die days. The worst of it is, I remember being happy. I remember when I was a nice woman: cheerful, optimistic, fun. I remember, but just barely. The good old days are getting older by the minute.” There was a satisfying pop as she eased a cork from a bottle and the familiar, comforting glugging noise as the wine was decanted.

Patience brought the glasses over to the couch and handed Anna one. “To counseling,” she said and raised the glass.

“To old friends and better days,” Anna said.

Patience would drink to that. Tonight, Anna suspected, Patience would drink to anything. “Too much light,” the woman said. She turned off the lamps at the ends of the sofa and opened the drapes that had obscured the black square of night beyond the picture window.

With the lights out, the window ceased to show a blind eye, but looked out across the sparkling waters of Rock Harbor. Raspberry Island was a ragged silhouette against a pearl-gray curtain of fog that hung further out on the lake.

“It doesn’t take much here,” Patience said as she curled her little body up in an armchair. “Even a halfmoon throws enough light. I do this all the time. Not all the time,” she amended. “When I can browbeat little Miss Video into turning off the television. You never had kids?”

Anna thought she sounded a bit wistful. “Never did.” She drank her wine.

“Never wanted them?”

“Never wanted them.”

“You were married, though,” Patience said. “I got that from Sandra. Widowed, she said, not divorced. Supposedly that’s easier to take. Probably depends. I would like to have been widowed, like to have widowed myself with my bare hands a time or two—” Patience stopped abruptly and fifteen seconds ticked by audibly on a clock Anna couldn’t place. “If I’d had more than a couple of tablespoons of wine I’d blame it on the drink. As it is, I shall have to accept the fact that I am an insensitive clod. Nerves—will you buy that? My mouth is just running away with me. I hope I haven’t been riding roughshod over any old wounds.”

“Talk doesn’t open them,” Anna answered truthfully.

“What does?”

“Forgetting. Thinking you’re healed, you’re as strong as you used to be, that you can leap those old buildings at a single bound. Then the wounds open and you fall and you wonder if you’ll ever be the woman you were.”

They sipped in silence, watching a late-arriving sail-boat, sails furled, motoring up the channel.

“Divorce isn’t like that,” Patience said. “The wounds maybe aren’t as deep—certainly aren’t as deep—but everybody, everything rubs salt in them. Other women that look like the Other Woman, his friends, your friends, things he kept, things he didn’t get, kids that want to call Daddy every time you yell at them and come to Mommy anytime they want money. Money. God yes, money! Suddenly at thirty-five you’re shopping for clothes at Wal-Mart and dusting off your library card because you can’t afford even a paperback. At least with death you can look tragically beautiful in something black and silk you bought with the insurance money.”

Anna laughed. “Patience, you would sell orphaned virgins into white slavery before you would wear anything from Wal-Mart.”

“I would,” Patience admitted.

“Zachary wasn’t insured.” Anna wasn’t sure why she told that to Patience, it just seemed natural. “He’s been dead seven years.”

“What happened?”

“Hit by a cab crossing Ninth Avenue in New York City.” Both women laughed.

“Sorry,” Patience said.

“It’s okay. It strikes everybody funny. Me too. Comedy of the absurd, I guess. Divorce: is that when you went to work in the winery? After the divorce?” Anna moved the subject back to Patience.

“It seemed genteel somehow,” Patience said. “Paid genteel too: eleven sixty-five an hour. How anyone is expected to live on that is a mystery to me.”

Since joining the Park Service, Anna had never made anywhere near $11.65 an hour but she didn’t say so.

Patience poured the last of the wine into their glasses. Alcohol was beginning to warm Anna’s muscles, relax her brain. “Did you grow up rich?” she asked rudely.

Patience didn’t seem to mind the question. “We had ‘plenty,’ as Mother endlessly reminds me, but not rich, no. My parents own a pig farm in Elkhart, Iowa.” She said it in the tone of a nineteenth-century gentlewoman admitting to a fallen sister or an idiot child.

“Good honest work,” Anna remarked mildly.

“The place smelled of pigs. All my clothes, my hair, the boys I dated, the food I ate, smelled of pigs. I can’t remember not wanting something better. Even when I was tiny, I had this little kid’s vision of heaven. You know those ornate white iron lawn chairs—the ones that look as if they’re welded from fat vines?”

Anna nodded.

“Somehow that was the height of class in my little pea brain. I’d fantasize for hours about sitting in a lawn chair like that, wearing something chiffon, and snubbing boys that had manure on their boots.” She laughed. “Silly. But the dreams got me out of there. That’s what I needed them for.”

“What do you dream of now?” Anna asked.

“Bigger lawn chairs, finer chiffon, and tycoons to snub.” Patience unfolded herself from the armchair. “Dead soldier,” she announced and carried away the empty bottle. Anna stayed where she was, enjoying the moonlight on the fog, enjoying the buzz of the wine. Another pop, more gurgling: Patience was opening a second bottle.

“I’m working in the morning,” Anna protested.

“Not to worry.” Patience brought the wine and two fresh glasses. “This is the good stuff. Too good for me, I kept telling myself, but this talk of pigs has driven me to open it. Once in this life I will have the best. You lucked into it by sheer accident. Here.”

Anna sipped. It was the best; the best she had ever had. A red wine, though it showed black with only the moon for light, rich and so warm Anna finally understood all the effete talk of sunshine and hillsides and aging in wood.

They drank without talking. The wine was the event. In silence they finished the bottle. Patience said good-night by a simple touch on Anna’s arm. Anna lay in the moonlight a while longer enjoying the solitude. She picked up the wine bottle and turned it in her hand. The stuff was excellent. On an NPS salary Anna doubted she’d ever have the money to buy a vintage that fine. The bottle looked the worse for wear, the label wrinkled and faded. Something was vaguely familiar about it. Anna thought of turning on the lamp, but moonlight and alcohol won out over curiosity.

Tonight, it was enough that it had gotten her high.

 

 

 

R
egardless of the quality of the wine, Anna had had too much. Near two in the morning she awoke with the jitters. The bit of moon had continued on its wanderings and the channel was now in shadow. The island was so still she could hear the faint creaks as the apartment building talked to itself.

Alcohol poisoning and the cold hour of the night crowded in. The world seemed a sordid place; people a cancer that was spreading, killing the earth, killing one another.

Wishing she were a cat or a shadow or at least sober, Anna lay on the sofa and stared into the dark until unconsciousness finally took pity on her and returned.

When she awoke again it was light but fog hid any trace of the coming sunrise. She looked at her watch: 5:40 A.M. A dull ache at the base of her skull and a parched feeling told her she would be getting no more rest for a while. Giving in to her hard-earned hangover, she got up and stumbled into the kitchen for a glass of water.

The wine bottles were gone and the glasses set tidily on the counter near the sink. Patience must have had as bad a time as she, Anna thought, creeping about her apartment in the dead of night doing domestic chores. Anna drank off half a glass of water standing at the sink, then refilled the glass. Theoretically, rehydration helped a hangover. Theoretically a lot of things helped a hangover. In reality only the passage of time worked out the poisons. Anna looked at her watch again: 5:42. It was going to be a long day.