Lie Down with the Devil (26 page)

She hadn’t looked at me, just peered through the tilted blinds. I hadn’t said anything. Either she would go on talking or she would stare out the window forever, or at least until a doctor came in and gave her news about her father, one way or the other, favorable or unfavorable, life or death. Minutes had passed. I’d listened for the gulls, but couldn’t hear them. Maybe they’d been flying out over the dark ocean. Maybe, I’d thought, I’d still be here when they shrilled out a harsh greeting to the dawn.

“I was drunk.” Alma Montero had spoken so softly, I’d held my breath to hear her better. “I’m a drunk. I drink and then I forget. I forget and then it comes back to me in a haze, so I don’t even know now if I really heard it or if it’s true. I drink.” She’d turned to face me, taken a single step toward me, and sunk on her knees to the floor. “What kind of a mother drinks and lets her daughter die? And now, look what I’ve done.”

“What? You can tell me. It’s okay to tell.” I kept my voice low and gentle, unthreatening, but still I got no answer. “Did you argue with your father? Did you
try to find out what was going on between him and Julie?”

Tears leaked from her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “Yesterday. I went after my dad. I yelled at him and he’s so old. I told him he had to tell me why Julie died—and look what’s happened, look what’s happening, look what’s—”

“Calm down. Relax. You didn’t mean anything bad to happen. You didn’t know this would happen.”

She’d nodded faintly.

“Was he at home when he passed out?”

“In Julie’s room, in her bedroom. He kept going there, just sitting in her chair, on her bed. I drove him to it. I said such terrible things—”

I’d stayed with her. I’d patted her hands. I’d brought her coffee. But she didn’t know. She had no idea why Julie would have come to me under a fake name, pretending to be somebody else, although Alma stressed that her Julie had always been a fine little actress, a girl who starred in all the high school plays, a talented girl who could laugh or cry on request.

Mom wasn’t overstating the girl’s talent, I’d thought. Even knowing, as I did, that Jessie/Julie’s story about her fiancé had been a total lie, I still believed in her basic premise, that it was somehow crucial to the girl that I follow “Ken” on that Friday night, follow him and report back on where he’d gone and whom he’d seen.

A pink-cheeked doctor eventually came by and said Mr. Farmer had suffered a “minor ischemic episode.” When Mrs. Montero looked at him blankly, he translated: a stroke. She hung on the word
minor.
He said they would know more in the morning. He seemed hopeful. Yes, she could stay with her father for a while. His vital signs were stable.

Alma had grabbed my hand like a lifeline. In the stifling room, the sound of the old man’s breathing was raspy and hard. It took Mooney’s help to transfer her grip from my arm to a nurse’s arm.

All that, all that, and maybe I had been talking to the wrong person, coaxing the wrong person, and who knew if the right one, Mitch Franklin, would ever be able to recall what his granddaughter had told him before she died? The stroke certainly could have impaired his memory. Dammit, if I hadn’t been going on no sleep and coffee fumes, I might have gotten more from Alma, steered the conversation down more productive paths.

“There’s a B and B on Mass. Ave. between Porter and Alewife,” I said to Moon after the speed of the car and the smoothness of the road told me we’d reached Route 6. “Or I could crash at the Marriott in Kendall Square.”

“I don’t want to drive all the way to Cambridge. What if the old guy can talk in the morning?”

“You can’t stay in Nausett. The feds told you to clear out.”

I think I fell asleep again, because the next thing I remember we were pulling onto a gravelly lane in the darkness, up a steep incline, and the car was coming to a stop.

“Where—?”

“Am I? Welcome to the country estate of the Mooneys. Believe me, nobody will find us here.”

“Where—?”

“Are we? You know Marshfield? The Irish Riviera, tucked in between the Cape and Boston. Welcome to the Mooney family summer shack. And when I say shack, I mean shack. There are some fancy summer places around here, but this isn’t one of them.”

“Beds?”

“Beds, air mattresses, sleeping bags. I’m hoping for running water and heat, but I haven’t been here in years. I think I remember an outdoor shower.”

“You’d have to break the icicles off.”

“I’m hoping for indoor plumbing, too.”

“You have a key?”

“As I recall, on a hook to the left of the door.”

“Trusting.”

“Nope. Everybody owns a place down here is a cop.”

The street was narrow and rutted. In dim yellow light from a distant porch, the shadowy houses looked small and worn. “Then we’ll probably get shot as trespassers.”

“No, but within half an hour, if the grapevine holds, all my distant relatives will know I brought a woman here in the middle of the night. Smile for the cameras.”

“Mooney—”

“C’mon, let’s get that guitar out of the cold.”

There were two main rooms, one up, one down, connected by a contraption that was more ladder than staircase. The room on the bottom level had a tiny bathroom in a curtained alcove. The top room had a galley kitchen against a narrow wall, a child-sized refrigerator, a two-burner stove.

“I remember when they put in the ladder.” Mooney stood under a forty-watt bulb that had sprung to life when he tugged a string. “Before that, you had to go outside, run around the back, and come in again on the second floor. It’s on a slope. My uncle Tommy built the bottom level, and then another uncle—Cy, I think—came along and tacked on the second story.”

“It’s like a dollhouse,” I said.

“Don’t tell my uncles that.”

We discovered sheets and towels in a cardboard box under a saggy bed. I sorted through the bedclothes while Mooney started the space heater rumbling; it was a gas-fueled metal box with small blue flames visible through the front grille. The room didn’t get much warmer. The sheets didn’t match.

There were three cans of warm Michelob in the barren fridge. Mooney plugged the unit in and fiddled with dials till it whirred and chugged. The sole item in the cupboard was a bag of stale pretzels.

“Up or down?” Moon asked. “Down will be warmer. Up gets the better bed.”

“Down.”

The bathroom was the draw.

Of course, once I crawled into bed, once I could sleep, I couldn’t get to sleep. The hiss of the space heater and the whirr of the refrigerator combined in an oddly syncopated beat that seemed as loud as a jackhammer. I got out of the narrow cot, wrapped myself in the thin cotton blanket, and checked on the guitar, wondering whether it would ever sound the same after so much time in the cold. I had told Roz to loosen the strings, but old instruments are delicate, temperamental.

Softly, using harmonics and muting the strings, I tuned it. Most of what I play is loud, driving country blues, and I didn’t want to wake Mooney, but I didn’t want to let go of the guitar either. It felt good in my hands, solid and sure. I started out sitting on a fat sprung armchair covered with a chenille throw and wound up on the wooden floor, huddled near the space heater, just holding Miss Gibson, and moving my fingers over the strings.

I tried to remember the melody Paolina had played
on the Andean pipes, but my fingers kept slipping into more familiar patterns. I didn’t sing it, but Rory Block’s “Lovin’ Whiskey” kept running through my head, first the opening riff, then the strong bass line, then the words, one particular line: “If wisdom says to let him go, well it’s hell, because you just don’t know, what it’s like to love a man who’s …”

Block ends the line with “lovin’ whiskey.” I used to think of it as “lovin’ cocaine,” which was what Cal, my ex, did. Loved that stuff more than he loved me, for sure. I thought I’d have to write a whole new line for Sam; “Lovin’ other women,” didn’t scan.

I was thinking about Sam, but it was Mooney who cleared his throat in the darkened room. I hadn’t heard his feet on the ladder or seen the door at its head open or close.

“You can play louder if you want,” he said. “You look good, sitting there.”

“It’s dark. You can’t see me.”

“Yes, I can.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Maybe he could, by the glow of the small blue flames.

“You haven’t lost Paolina,” he said.

“What?”

“What you said to Alma Montero. That you had a child and you lost her.”

I played a chord. Then another. The notes drifted away like smoke. “You weren’t paying attention, Moon. I didn’t give birth to Paolina. I wasn’t talking about Paolina.”

Alma Montero’s confessed drunkenness lay heavy on my shoulders. Maybe it was because I was exhausted by the weight of her guilt in addition to my own. Or maybe it was because it was late at night after a long day, and so dark and quiet. I don’t know what made me
do it or why, but I found myself telling Mooney what I had never told anyone, not my best friend, not my lover, and it helped somehow that I was holding the guitar. It seemed like I was alone in the dark, telling the story to an old guitar that already knew all the sad stories in the world. The small blue flames flickered.

Here’s the secret: When I was fourteen years old I gave birth to a child. I gave up that child for adoption, but I keep her or him in my heart. I never saw that baby, never held that baby, but I grieve the separation both for the child and for myself, the self I once was. I divide my life that way, before and after. I hold it in my heart. I never tell anyone.

“Does Sam know?” Mooney’s voice: gentle and far away.

“No.”

“The father?”

“As far as my parents were concerned, it was an immaculate conception.”

“You never told them?”

“I never told anyone.” I shook my head no, but found my mouth moving again. “My high school basketball coach.”

“Jesus,” Mooney said.

“I never told.”

“But you don’t play basketball. Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

“But true. I don’t play anymore. When I went back— Well, the volleyball team had a woman coach.”

“You went back to the same high school?”

“No other choice.”

The door at the top of the ladder opened and then closed. I heard it this time, and the refrigerator whirring and the heater hissing.

“You want a beer? Still pretty warm?”

“No.”

I heard the snap and sigh of a pull-top.

“I’m glad you told me.” Mooney must have been barefoot, because I didn’t hear steps, not even the creak of wood, but his voice was close.

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Did you ever try to find her?”

“I don’t know that it’s a her. They wouldn’t tell me if it was a boy or a girl. They wouldn’t let me see her. Him. It was a different time, you know? Then, you had a kid out of wedlock, you were branded. They made all your decisions for you.”

“You never tried to find the baby?”

“No.”

“You could do it.”

“Break up a family? Why would I do that?”

“You don’t know, Carlotta. Maybe the baby wants to find you. You could wind up making a family, not breaking it. Anybody would want to know who their mother is.”

“I don’t know, Moon.”

“I’m glad you told me,” he repeated.

“I’m sorry. Like I said, I didn’t mean to. Don’t think you understand me now, okay? Do me that favor.” I didn’t understand myself, I wanted to tell him. “I’m just tired.”

“Cold?”

I nodded.

“If we had a fireplace instead of this damn space heater, we could toss another log on the fire. Scooch over.” He took the chenille throw off the armchair, draped it around my shoulders, sat cross-legged next to me on the floor. “Sip of a Michelob? It’s not bad for flat stale beer.”

“No, thanks.”

“Know what I think?” he said. “I think you meant to tell me. I think you wanted to.”

“Why? Why would I do that?”

“You want me to know what a terrible, sinful person you are. So I’ll pull away from you and feel good about not loving you anymore.”

“Really?” The chenille wrap smelled like dust.

“Didn’t work. If you want to prove how terrible you are, you’ll have to do better than that.” He leaned over and kissed me, the kind of long slow kiss that leads to other kisses. Nothing remotely like kissing a sister.

Nothing sisterly about my response.

Maybe I went to bed with Mooney so I could prove to him how unworthy I was. Maybe I did it to pay Sam back for his betrayal. I don’t know or care to contemplate the reason, but in the end there was no reason. It seemed inescapable, inevitable, the fitting end to a day that had begun with a rocky airplane flight. Might as well crash and burn, I thought, as I squeezed him close and tasted his long-forbidden mouth. Crash and burn.

Then there was no sound but the harsh intake of breaths, the long slow exhalations. There was darkness and satisfaction and sleep.

I could see my breath. The puff of steamy fog joined the dust motes hanging in a shaft of light from a high window. I could feel Mooney heavy on my left shoulder. When I turned my head, my cheek brushed against a tangle of dark hair. I should have felt terrible and guilty, and I didn’t. I felt comfortable and inexplicably happy, as though I had come home after a reckless, way-too-long journey, and that made me wonder what the hell I thought I was doing.

“Don’t move,” Mooney murmured. “Good morning.”

“Jesus, Moon, I’m sorry I—”

“No,” he said. “Take it back.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to hear it. No sorry or guilty or sad songs this morning—not unless you really mean them.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. After my divorce, after Cal left me, I went through a stretch of bad times and one-night stands. I was careful then, to drive my own car, to carry cab fare, to leave myself an escape hatch. There was nothing careful or planned or safe about what I’d just done. What we’d just done.

“Carlotta Carlyle, listen to me. If we never ever do this again, it will make me very sad, but I will live with it. I’m all grown up. I’m here because I want to be here. I can’t think of anyplace else I’d rather be. You are not the sole mover in this. You don’t get to be sorry for my supposed ruin.”