In Every Way (11 page)

CHAPTER 8

M
ARIA FINDS A
tandem bicycle in the back of Karen's storage shed. The seats are cracked and dusty. There is a clatter of metal on metal as she pulls it into the light, its various mechanisms long ago loosened and rusted. But it rolls. She puts air in the tires with a foot pump. She is embarrassed at the prospect of riding this thing by herself, its second seat empty, but she wants at least a bit of speed for the trip she is going to take. In the basket affixed to the handlebars, she places a white canvas tote bag monogrammed with Karen's initials. She folds the bag over on itself, self-conscious about being seen with anything monogrammed. Inside it are three Mirado Black Warrior pencils, a blue sketchpad, and a towel.

Four days have now passed since she made out with Christopherson in the abandoned house. Since then, Maria has kept her distance, a task that has been surprisingly easy. With a friend, Christopherson runs a little lawn care service, and this time of year they are fully employed, blowing leaves out of neighborhood yards into tall, tidy piles at the foot of the curb. He is almost always out of the house. Maria has heard him talk about her with his partner in the yard, though, mixing oil and gas for their leaf blowers, using the words
Chapel Hill
as some type of teenage totem. She has witnessed these words work their magic before, conjuring the specter of college before wide high school eyes.

But even though Maria has avoided Christopherson just enough to let him know that any romance between the two cannot progress, she does not regret what happened on the dusty floor of that dark abandoned house. She has thought about it many times since, each time gaining a confidence and a rush of feeling wanted. She is aware of a need to be wanted.

But Christopherson has not given up. Last night he passed a note under Maria's door, but she did not find it until morning. It was a drawing of a cartoon ghost with an empty thought bubble floating above it. Underneath was written:
HEY GHOST
—
WHAT ARE YOU DOING
? Maria folded the note, like it was a piece of artwork by a child, and carefully placed it into her address book.

With Karen helping care for her mother, Maria now feels untethered. Not pregnant, not required to be near her mother's bedside, confident about the home of her daughter, she is once again a young woman with time on her hands. Her void of responsibility seems more profound than a mere reprieve from the chores of life, as if it is the emptiness of age, earned. She wonders if this is what it feels like to be retired. She feels like she might have earned this time, at least for now. This day.

Squeaking at each push, she pedals onto Federal Street, a short tunnel of arcing chestnut limbs interspersed with a dense network of honey locust and crape myrtle. Though the bike emits a constant rattle, she aspires to be inconspicuous. She can just see the driveway of Philip and Nina's house, where twice in the past four days she has glimpsed her daughter, both times exiting a small blue Mercedes, not modern, perhaps from the 1980s. She rattles even closer. This morning the driveway is quiet. Empty. There will not be another sighting today.
Maria is not disappointed, though, only more determined. She will return again, maybe tomorrow, maybe later that same day, because the urge to see Bonacieux has increased not only with each glimpse Maria has caught of her, but even with each failed attempt. It is a growing thirst, and she knows now where the well is to sate it.

So she pedals on, continuing toward the water. She does not care that a few people have turned to watch. It is enough to have a means of escape, particularly today, after an earlier conversation with her mother—a conversation that she is happy to leave behind.

From her bed, her mother had said, apropos of nothing, “Do you miss Jack?”

“Less than I thought,” Maria said. But she was lying. Her heart, she is afraid, has undergone a physical transformation in the wake of Jack's break. He has injured it. Of this she is certain. Because sometimes when she thinks about him, it feels like it hurts for blood to pump through it.

Her mother had turned to the window to watch Christopherson, in shorts and cowboy boots, push a quiet lawn mower across the neighbor's front yard. The low whir of its little engine filled the space.

Then she said, “I do.”

“You do what?” Maria said, having lost herself in the memory of Christopherson's flesh.

“I miss Jack.”

Maria was shocked. Is shocked, still. She thinks the damage inflicted by Jack on her heart should trump any lasting desire on the part of her mother to smoke weed with him or listen to his Wu-Tang files.

“He made me feel young,” her mother had said. “I'm already sick of Karen's old-person shit. I can't watch
Antiques Roadshow.”

“Well, you're not young,” Maria said, “and
Antiques Roadshow
is rad.”

Maria now feels guilty and wonders if it was worth picking this fight with her mother, or any. There is so little time left. They have chosen Beaufort for her mother's final days—why can Maria not fill them with pleasure? She will die, she will die, she will die. Maria tells herself this in order to believe, because in truth, she cannot.

Maria parks the heavy bike at a small gazebo on the waterfront across the street from the post office. Beside it, a short and deserted public pier extends into Taylor's Creek. It is her favorite place to access the water. She is not interested in crossing the bridge to Atlantic Beach. Even on quiet days, the shore there is overrun with people hustling for position. Damp swimsuited couples walking hand in hand make Maria feel self-conscious, pale, and out of shape. She prefers instead this dead-end bridge to nowhere. It might be built on nothing more than the bank of a tidal creek, but it feels like it is hers and hers alone. It is also the spot from which Maria first saw Philip the summer before, and though she has yet to see him in public since arriving in Beaufort, she cannot deny that she is hoping he might again appear here.

She lifts the tote bag from the bike's basket and removes the large towel and blue sketchpad. Other than the golden ghost she spray-painted onto the wall of the abandoned house with Christopherson the other night, Maria has still not drawn a single image since well before Bonacieux's birth. But the urge has begun to return. With the sketchpad, she walks to the edge of the pier, folds the towel in thirds, and sits.

Her feet swing only a few feet above the high tide. Sailboats are anchored nearby in the creek. More horses graze on Carrot Island, close enough that she can see their ears twitch at the scream of a gull.
She unties the ribbon on the sketchpad, and from its first pages tumble three brittle four-leaf clovers, like secret messages sent from Maria's past. She found them with Jack months ago; they were growing around a gas pump in south Durham. “Radiation magic,” Jack had said. “Exxon lucky charms!” Two evade her fingers and drift onto the water below, but the third she catches, and as she does, it crumbles into dry green shards in her palm.

Though it is early November, the sunshine is still bright and warm. Maria sketches a sailboat, clumsy with her first lines, but as the image slowly emerges, it does so with increasing authority. She is empowered by this reminder of her skill. She removes the old Brooks Brothers oxford she found hanging in the closet and slips off her shorts. Beneath she wears a black one-piece. The water will be frigid, she knows, but she is not afraid.

Off the pier she dives. Going under is an electric shock. She emerges, gasping for warmth, thrilled and buzzing with life. Three tanned men in an open-hull fishing boat turn in unison and, one by one, wave, as if they can hear the very frequency of her psyche. Maria does not wave back, but is not unappreciative of their attention. She feels herself emerging anew in Beaufort these days, though it is not a return to form; it is a new Maria who has begun to surface. It is a woman yet to be identified. She climbs a ladder of two-by-fours nailed to the pier, each slat grown over in oysters sharp enough to slice open a careless shivering foot, then lies on her back on the warm wood. People on the sidewalk pass intermittently, appearing upside down in her inverted view. They are not interested in her. In Chapel Hill, no matter how sunny the day might be, a person lying on the ground would bring traffic to a halt. Here, in the logic of a place
where bodies are expected to submit to gravity and expose themselves to light, she is not even worth a second glance. After long minutes of this, it begins to feel as if she is in a different place altogether, one removed from Beaufort, one where she is simply observing from a distance, remote and unattainable. And so, when a dog clatters onto the pier and begins to tick his claws across its boards as he approaches her, it comes as a shock.

“Hey, doggy,” she says, and then she sees its owner—a tall man in a wrinkled white shirt pushing a blue baby stroller. She had not recognized the dog, not from her inverted perspective, but this man she cannot miss. He has a lazy shuffle, and although the sun has backlit him into nothing but a featureless silhouette, Maria knows him at once. She catches her breath. It is Philip. He kicks the head of a dandelion, and its seeds explode into the breeze.

“Ferdinand!” Philip says, but the dog continues his advance. His pointy face growing larger with each step that he takes toward Maria. “Ferdinand!” he says again, “Hey!” But the dog doesn't stop until he's reached Maria's face. She has read that dogs are now trained to sniff out cancer cells in humans, and as his whiskers tickle Maria's forehead, she is certain that he can smell the molecular relation between her and the new child now living in his house.

“Hi, Ferdinand,” she says, and the dog delivers one wet lick to her forehead. She considers the fate of Pinky. She understands that his death was of her own design, that it made sense at the time. She is wary of the shifting ground beneath her, what makes sense one day, only to seem unthinkable the next. Through the space between Ferdinand's legs, she cranes for a glimpse into the baby carriage. “Stay here, doggy,” she whispers. “Stay.”

Philip starts down the pier. At his approach, Maria feels his footsteps shudder through the wood beneath her.

“Sorry,” he says, wheeling the stroller to a stop. “He's always looking for friends.”

“That's OK,” Maria says, sitting up. There is a small bundle in the stroller, immobile. A nose.

Philip affixes a green leash to Ferdinand's collar and says, “Sorry,” again, then, “Come on,” and starts back. Ferdinand's claws tick atop the planks behind him.

He is older than she is. He has a job, money, a career; he owns a house. He knows things that she does not, but still, Maria feels he is someone she could know, someone with whom she could talk and, within minutes, find common ground. He is, after all, pushing her sleeping child down the sidewalk. She admires his taste in home and wife. If he lived in Chapel Hill, she is sure his circle would cross with her own and her mother's. He does not seem interested in being cool. He is beyond that. Philip is a grown-up. He is the opposite of Jack. Maria feels certain that she could step into his life and all involved would be happy to have her there. But with him she will never have the chance. A few words, a lick from his dog, a glimpse of Bonacieux's nose—this is all she can aspire to. She must be satisfied knowing that Bonacieux is with someone with whom she too would like to spend time. It is a gratification, but one not even close to complete.

THAT EVENING, MARIA
opens her mother's Facebook account. Months ago, during the first weeks of pregnancy, she erased her own profile, happy to jettison its social pressure, but from time to time, she likes to look for photos of Jack. The first thing she does tonight,
though, is search for Philip Price. Neither he nor Nina are here. Maria respects them for their privacy. It is in keeping with her opinion of them as travelers in a separate, heightened social sphere. So she turns to her usual search for Jack, which is, as always, a disappointment. He posts images of Ray Davies, Scooby-Doo, Dukakis, and Bob Dylan, but nothing of himself. It is the same high-low mishmash that defines his own identity. Maria can infer nothing from it. But after her conversation with her mother that afternoon, Maria has now started to wonder if her mother and Jack have been in touch.

They have. She finds one message that her mother sent to Jack dated three days prior. It reads,
I don't need any weed. What I need is for you to leave Maria alone because you've broken her heart and acted like a fool. I'm disgusted and disappointed with you and don't want to hear from you again
.

Maria has never played a sport, but she had two friends on the JV volleyball team at East Chapel Hill High. Those girls fought for each other, cried at almost every game, and cheered until their throats were raw. Maria wondered what it was like to be on a team so steeped in tribal loyalty. But now, while reading her mother's message, she understands. It is a rising feeling. An increase in trust. A magical rise in strength that makes her long to do her mother right.

She understands that the message does not negate what her mother had said that morning about missing Jack. He makes people feel opposite emotions all the time. This Maria knows well. No matter how much he offends, it is always part and parcel of what it is that attracts.

She closes the computer, ashamed of having snooped. It is something Jack would have done without regret, she thinks. The fact both impresses and disgusts her.