Heart of Palm (3 page)

When he glanced over his shoulder again she was gone. He stared stupidly for a moment, watching the tow rope’s wooden handle dance like a water bug above the lake. He let off the throttle, spun the boat around. He could not see Arla. The lake was suddenly very quiet. The second boat, the one he’d been trying to avoid, bobbed in the distance, by now probably a half mile away.

“Arla!” he yelled. He puttered back in the direction he’d come. “Arla!”

After a moment, he saw her, a soft shape drifting like a sodden piece of fabric. Her hair fanned out into a crimson halo. She was waving at him.

Dean gunned the throttle again and raced toward her. She was bleeding from a gash above her eye, and her face was pale. The buzzing in his head intensified. One of Arla’s skis floated, untethered, thirty yards away.

“I think I hit a piece of wood,” she said. She was treading water with one bare foot, struggling to remove the other ski. “I can’t get this ski off.” Dean slowed his approach, but he overshot, moved past her, had to turn the boat around again to return to her. He finally pulled up alongside her and reached to pull her into the boat.

But he’d missed her again. His hands grasped air. She dipped under the water once and came up choking. Then she passed out, and her face slipped below the surface.

“Arla!” he screamed. “Arla!”

He spun the boat around a third time and tapped the throttle to move closer to Arla. He leaned out to reach for her again. The propeller was still spinning. His head was still buzzing. He thought he might throw up. He leaned farther out of the boat, reaching. With Dean’s shift in weight, the stern tipped toward Arla, and then the boat jumped slightly—a blunted, soft jolt, as if the prop had made contact with something malleable.

He cut the engine, jumped in, and swam to Arla. He pulled her to the boat and dragged her up behind him, aware that he was operating with the bizarre strength of some sort of colossus, and yet when he lowered her body into the boat and heard her begin to sputter and cough, and when his eyes drifted down the length of her legs, past her ankles, to the place where something was wrong, and where the blood was beginning to fill up the bottom of the boat like bilge, he felt like a very, very weak man.

Her left foot had been cut in half. The tissue had been severed cleanly, but the bones had resisted, so that even after two hours in surgery the repair was sloppy, disordered, made difficult by the task of trying to organize a series of abbreviated metatarsals that had to be coaxed back into their rightful positions. What remained was a foreshortened adaptation of a foot, with a solid heel and enough extended musculature to be moderately useful for balance and posture, but not much use for unaided walking. A cane, if not a crutch, would always be in order. That’s how the doctor explained it to Arla, and to Dean, the morning after the accident, when she awoke in a musty hospital room with a fat bandage on her forehead, a view of a commercial laundry out the window, and a pale version of Dean at her side.

The toes on her left foot itched terribly. She told Dean, but he looked at her and shook his head. She looked once at her bandaged stump of a foot and then did not look again.

“Did you call my parents?” she said.

“No,” he said. She winced and shifted position.

“Where are they?” she said.

“At home, I suppose.”

“I mean my toes,” she said.

“Oh, them.” He drew a breath. “I suppose they’re at the bottom of Lake June by now, Arla,” he said. “I guess we gotta consider them gone.”

They were quiet then. The doctor signed the discharge papers, and then the nurse came along with a wheelchair and helped Arla get dressed. Arla looked into the bag that Dean had brought, and she saw her pink ballerina flats. And though she tried to ask the nurse for the pail, she didn’t make it in time; she vomited all over the front of her best honeymoon sundress. Then she started to cry.

“Shhhhh,” said the nurse. “Hush now, baby. Don’t you take on so. They’s only toes, you know.”

Dean left the room, his footsteps fading as he strode down the hall to get the truck and bring his new wife home.

Vera wept when she saw Arla.

“My God,” James said. His face was white. His hands shook. They stood in the middle of the newlyweds’ rented efficiency off US1 in St. Augustine, staring at the peeling linoleum, the rusted range, their daughter’s hideously fat, bandaged foot. Dean was at work. Arla sat in a rented wheelchair.

“How could you let this happen?” Vera said. “Oh, Arla, I can’t cope.”

“You don’t have to cope,” Arla said. “It’s not your foot.”

“Come back home,” Vera said. “We’ll take care of you.”

Arla rolled across the kitchen, reached into a drawer for a bottle of aspirin, and shook two into her hand. She put the bottle back and rolled backward into the center of the room. “I am home,” she said. “Dean will take care of me.”

James shook his head. He looked at her again, and Arla saw the shift, saw the decision and the closure, so what he said next was less a surprise than a vaguely expected regret.

“This is madness,” he said. “Self-destruction. I won’t stand by watching.” He walked to the door, then turned back. “Come home today,” he said to Arla. “Or not at all. There’s nothing we can do for you here.”

“James,” Vera said.

“No,” he said simply. “No.” He nodded at Vera. “I’ll be in the car,” he said. The doorframe was swollen with moisture, and he had to kick at it to get it to open. After a moment, Arla heard the car’s engine roar to life and then settle to an idle.

“Arla,” Vera said.

“I’m not coming home unless Dean comes with me,” Arla said.

“Well, that’s out of the question.”

“Well, then.”

Outside, James revved the engine. Vera walked over to Arla and bent to kiss her, but they connected awkwardly and bumped faces in a self-conscious way that left Arla’s cheek unpleasantly damp with her mother’s tears.

“Will you hand me a glass of water?” she said. She looked at the aspirin, flat on her palm.

“It hurts?” Vera said.

“It hurts,” Arla said, though now she looked at her bandaged left foot in amazement, feeling the pain far beyond the flesh that remained, a throbbing pulse localized, impossibly, in her five missing toes. Phantom pain. She’d read about it. Hurting for something that wasn’t even there.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Vera said. “He’ll settle down.”

Her tone was unconvincing. Arla did not reply. When her mother left the kitchen she squeezed her fists against her ears to drown out the sound of her parents’ car revving angrily backward into the street.

That night, Dean announced it was time to buy a house. In Utina.

“Utina?” Arla said.

“It’s where we belong, Arla,” he said. They sat close together on the couch in the apartment’s tiny living room, his fingers threaded through hers. When she turned to look at him, her damaged foot, covered in a thin sock, brushed his ankle, and he jerked his leg away, as if it burned.

“Who’s we?” she said.

“We. Us. The Bravos,” he said. And for the first time, she felt the weight of the name, felt it heavy and cold across her shoulders, around her chest, into her heart.

“What’s wrong with St. Augustine?” she said.

“Utina,” he said, and she was startled to hear that, although her hand was still warm in his, his voice was final and cold. She sensed an odd shifting of balance at that moment, a bobble in the dynamics of their relationship, and she felt something odd, something she’d never felt before. She felt cowed.

The house was a Queen Anne, once regal, built in 1927 by a reclusive sugar mogul from Miami who’d retired up to Utina after that God-awful Dade hurricane in 1926. The land he’d chosen had a pristine stretch of Intracoastal Waterway frontage and a thick cluster of slash pine and sweet gum trees, with a handful of showcase magnolia. The house was three stories, with a towering corner turret and a porch that circled the ground floor like a moat. Downstairs, a long hallway cut like a channel through the center of the house, past a cavernous living room and into an expansive kitchen overlooking the water. The middle floor had four bedrooms; the top floor had three. In all, there were five bathrooms in the house, though two of them had been locked and unentered since the toilets gave out years before. From the back porch, the view of the Intracoastal was unobstructed and commanding. If you sat on that porch, on the back of that house, you couldn’t avoid looking at the water.

Which is what Dean was doing in October of 1964, five weeks after Arla’s accident, on one of her first outings without the wheelchair. Arla was inside the house, talking to the owner, a soft-hearted widow who took a shine to Arla’s red hair. “Oh, it’s just like mine!” the widow said, though the old woman’s hair was the color of dust and had the consistency of twine. “But my dear, what have you done to yourself?” She looked at Arla’s left foot, wrapped tightly in a compression bandage, and at the thick wooden cane Arla clutched. The woman looked closer, saw the foreshortening of the bandaged foot, the odd blankness where there should have been the outline of five petite toes. She blinked rapidly, looked away.

Since her husband had died a decade earlier, the widow had not maintained the house. She had not swept the porch. She had not pulled the oak vines or the creeping jasmine off the siding. She had not sealed the leaks or fixed the rotting lumber at the foundation or replaced the collapsed steps of the front porch. She hadn’t even been up to the third floor in several years, she confessed. “Oh, and I used to love it up there,” she said. “You can see the tops of the magnolias outside the back bedroom. That’s where all the pretty blooms are, you know, up at the top. But my knees are not so good,” she admitted. “It’s all I can do to get up the one flight. And really, maybe you shouldn’t either, dear,” the old woman said, glancing at Arla’s foot, but her voice trailed off and she looked away again.

Arla was growing accustomed to people noticing her foot and then hastily looking away. She understood. She’d looked at her unbandaged foot only once since the accident. A week after it had happened, Arla had sat naked and cross-legged on the apartment’s tiny bathroom floor. She’d slowly unfurled the long strip of bandages until her left foot, what was left of it, lay bare and iodine-stained across her right thigh. She’d examined it from every angle, noting the way the surgeon had carefully folded a flap of skin down across the ball of her foot like an envelope. She ran her finger along the thick, bloody stitches. She’d stared at it for more than an hour, until Dean had banged on the door and told her to come out. She’d rebandaged her foot, dressed herself, and opened the bathroom door. She would never look at her bare left foot again.

But Dean would. To Dean, Arla’s foot was like a scab he couldn’t stop picking. In the days after the accident, he changed the dressing on the wound, steeling himself for the vision of the mutilated foot with the bizarre curiosity of a rubbernecker. After the wound had healed, and even while Arla herself averted her eyes as she slid a sock over the stump every morning, Dean could not look away. He watched the stump crust, and then scar, and then atrophy into the unusable nub of flesh that would remain. And though in the beginning the sight of Arla’s stump was a reminder of his own shortcomings, his own mistakes, his own catastrophically impaired judgment, over time it became, to Dean, simply a reminder of the general sting of failure, of pain, of dissatisfaction, and the lines began to blur for him as to who, exactly, was at fault for all that. His new bride was disabled, marred, truncated. He was pained by the wheelchair, embarrassed by the cane. He found her stoicism heroic at first, then mildly contrived, and—finally—purely indulgent, her silence about the accident and her obvious disability feeling like some sort of twisted hubris, some sort of pride that she hoisted on her shoulders, carried like a cartouche. He was shamed by her clomping gait, irritated by her limp. He wondered, at times, if she was exaggerating it. As often as not, the disability was a reflection of everything that was not perfect, after all, about Arla, despite his initial convictions to the contrary. In short, looking at Arla’s foot, Dean felt cheated.

Now, in the strange, sad house off Monroe Road, Arla left the widow in the kitchen and slowly ascended the stairs to the third floor, leaning heavily on her cane. Her right foot did most of the work now, and she could manage to keep the pain in check as long as she didn’t put too much weight on the tender stump of the left. On the third-floor landing, she peered into the darkness. Something scuttled along the baseboard, and as she heard the rumble of Dean’s voice through the floorboards, talking to the widow, she felt a fear in her chest that had nothing to do with vermin.

She pushed forward, into the west-facing bedroom, where there was a view out to the waterway, just beyond a tangled mass of magnolia branches. The broad white flowers, which as the widow had said bloomed only at the top of the tree, had already begun to turn brown in the October sun, and they drooped piteously from the branches. We’re too late, Arla thought. They’re already dead. She limped back down the stairs.

“It’s perfect,” Dean was saying to the widow.

“Dean,” Arla said. “Are we sure?”

“We want to make you an offer,” he said to the widow.

“Dean,” Arla said. He held up a hand.

“Well, all right,” the widow said, slowly, looking at Arla. “If that’s what you all want to do.”