Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) (15 page)

27

A
ll through that school year, and as winter turned the corner from 1966 into 1967, I found myself itching for freedom in a whole new way. I pictured myself behind Petunia's steering wheel, heading out for that far horizon. My determination to keep my lips sealed and not bug Daddy lasted until early spring. And when I couldn't take it any longer, I broke down and asked Daddy if I could get my license when I turned sixteen. Bud already had his license and was close to buying the car he'd been saving for since he was thirteen years old. Glen had failed on his first attempt because he went through a stop sign to beep at a friend on the opposite side of the intersection. Dottie had permission to get her license. I had my permit, but Daddy and I hadn't practiced much because he was so busy. Still, I wanted my license. But Daddy said that I should wait until I was seventeen to go for it.

“Why?” I asked him as we walked up the hill from the harbor.

“I just think it would be a good idea to wait,” Daddy said.

“Why would it be a good idea? What's good about it?”

“I don't see the reason for it, really. I can get you where you want to go. The truth is, I would feel better if you was a little older.”

“You think I'm going to take Petunia and drive off into the sunset? Never come back?”

He looked at me and nodded as he stopped to catch his breath at the crossroads. “Maybe that's it,” he said and sighed. “Maybe that's it.”

“Daddy, I didn't mean that,” I said. “I'm not going anywhere, but it would be nice to be able to go places. Take Grand places. I'm too old for the bus. I feel stupid.”

“Another year isn't that far off,” Daddy said. “Grand gets where she wants to go.”

“I'm already a freak. Now I'll be a freak without a license.”

“Can't be helped,” Daddy said. “That's the way I feel, Florine. You think of something else you might want for your birthday and we'll see what we can do.”

We parted ways and I went into Grand's house. She sat at the table surrounded by some of her ruby glass. I frowned. It wasn't time for ruby glass cleaning.

“How come you have the glass out?” I asked.

“Don't know,” Grand said. “I went by the cabinet and I just got a bug to take it out and shine it up. I like looking at the color, I guess.”

“You're weird, Grand,” I said.

“You live with me,” she said. “What does that say about you?”

She had a point. I picked up a teacup made of red glass and ran my finger along its cold inside. “I'm sorry I threw your heart away,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “you was awful upset that day.” She heaved herself out of the kitchen chair, carrying a vase toward the cabinet. I saw how she hitched herself at the hips with each step she took. It occurred to me that I would look like that someday; that it would pain me to walk, and that I might become forgetful.

“Daddy told me that I have to wait a year before I get my license,” I said.

Grand walked back to the table and picked up one of the teacups. I handed her the other one and she walked them to the cabinet.

“Everyone else on The Point is getting their license,” I said.

She walked back to the table and picked up a pile of dessert plates.

“He's probably just afraid I'll drive off into the sunset and never come back.”

“He might be a tad protective that way,” Grand said. “I guess he's earned it. Might be a little hard on you, but you'll bear up, I guess.”

My mind flashed to Carlie and Patty driving off. And suddenly, I knew what I wanted for my sixteenth birthday. “I'm going to ask Daddy to take me up to Crow's Nest Harbor,” I said. “He asked me to think of something else I wanted. That's what I want. I want to see where Carlie stayed and where she might have gone.”

Grand lowered herself into the chair across from me and squinted. She said, “I don't know as it's such a good idea, but I can see why you want to do it.”

“Why isn't it a good idea?”

“I know you want to figure out what happened,” Grand said. “But it might be just as good for you to tuck your mother close to your heart and claim something of your own. Carlie would be the first one to tell you that.”

“I know,” I said. “I know she's not coming back, Grand. I just want to see the last place she was.”

“Maybe it's best to leave it alone,” Grand said. “I'm not so sure Leeman wants to relive it. You might want to think about something else for your day. I'd be happy to have a party for you. Invite some friends down. Don't know as you've ever done that. I bet they'd like it down here. See where you live.”

I didn't want to tell her that I hadn't made any friends. I suddenly felt like a double freak, a friendless, license-less freak. “I'll think about it,” I said to Grand.

“No you won't, but the invitation is always there,” Grand said. She patted my hand and I took in how tired she looked. I stood up and kissed the pink scalp where it shone under her fine white hair.

I asked Daddy the next day. He said no. “I can't do it right now,” he told me. He was sanding down the hull of the
Carlie Flo
, preparing her for her launch in a couple of weeks, which happened to be on my birthday. Usually, she was taking him out into the bay by late March, but he was running late this year. “You can see that, right?”

“No,” I said.

He picked up a bucket of white paint, a mixing stick, and a brush and handed them to me. “If this is going to be a long conversation, Florine, do something useful while we talk. The inside of the cabin needs a good whitewash.”

He looked tired. Everyone, it seemed, looked tired. It had been a long, harsh winter and spring had been slow in coming. I climbed up the ladder into the boat and took the paint into the cabin.

“So, why can't you take me?” I asked, mixing the paint with the stick. Thin rivers of amber-colored oil disappeared into the white.

“I know it's going to make you mad no matter how I put it, so let me just say that I don't want to travel up there, Florine. It don't set well with me. Won't do me any good, and it won't do you any good.”

“How do you know what will do me good?” He'd already cleared the cabin of everything. He'd taped newspapers over the windows and spread them over the floor, so all I had to do was slap paint on the walls and ceiling.

“I knew you was going to say that,” he said. “I don't know, for sure, what will do you any good. I just know it will make me think about the whole thing all over again, and I don't need to go through it again.” I ran the paintbrush slow along the edges of the wall leading out to the deck. I stared into the white, until, when I blinked, reds and oranges and yellows faded into blues and greens.

“Daddy, I know she's probably dead,” I said. Dead. It was the first time I'd said the word out loud. The sound of it went through my body and down through the bottoms of my feet and slunk into the deep, cold earth. Daddy stopped sanding and we looked at each other, then he gave a slight nod and went back to sanding.

“Thing is,” I said, “you know what the last place she was looks like. When I picture it, it's different every time. I don't know the streets. I don't know what the motel looks like. It all changes in my head, every time. I keep thinking of it, different. If I knew what it looked like, then I could stop making it all up.”

“Florine,” he said. “I can understand that, I guess, but honey, I just can't go through it again. Maybe when you've had your license for a little while and you've got some experience under your belt, you and Dottie can go up, or Grand might like a day's ride.”

“I can't get my license for another year, though, right?” I said.

“We been through this. No,” Daddy said.

“You won't do this for me?”

“Not when I don't think it would be good for either of us.”

I ducked back into the cabin. No wonder Carlie got so agitated with you, I thought. Jesus, it's like talking to a friggin' rock stuck into cement. I painted the cabin out as fast as I could go, then I climbed down the ladder and walked away from the boat.

“Florine,” Daddy said.

I didn't turn around, just said, “I don't want to talk to you,” and kept walking away. He went back to sanding before I was out of earshot.

When I was almost to the end of the driveway, I heard the low chug-chug of a motor up by Ray's store. A shiny black car with a red top turned down The Point road and headed toward me, beeping the horn. It took me a minute to make out the driver, but then I saw that it was Bud. He stopped the car next to me and rolled down the window.

“Want a ride?” he asked.

I ran around to the passenger side and jumped in. The whole inside was red and warm, like being inside someone's mouth. I stroked the leather seat and looked around. I grinned at Bud.

“When did you get it?” I asked.

“Just picked her up now. Runs like the tide's chasing her into shore.”

“What kind of car is this?” I asked.

“1961 Ford Fairlane,” Bud said. “Dad knows the guy was selling her. Got me a good price.” He pointed out all the knobs and buttons to me, and I listened, although mostly I was aware of his thin, strong fingers playing over the instruments and his coffee-flavored breath. And I knew how I would get to Crow's Nest Harbor.

Starting that Monday, Bud took Dottie, Glen, and me to school. No more bus for us.

“You drive safe, now,” Grand said to Bud when he stopped for me that first morning.

I rolled my eyes as I climbed in beside him. He said, “Don't worry, Grand, I'll be careful.” Dottie ran across from her house and climbed in the back. “You making me sit back here with Glen?” she asked me. “You get back here with me. I don't feel like fighting him off first thing in the morning.” When we got to Ray's, I hopped in back and Glen rode shotgun. We drove to Long Reach that day, feeling like we were on top of the world. We walked into school with a new lift to our steps.

“Isn't it great?” Susan said to me as we walked the halls between classes. “I can't wait to go parking.” She glanced up at me from underneath her minky eyelashes.

I pictured her small body straddling Bud's thin thighs in some dim place under a grove of pine trees. “I have to go,” I said to her, and turned into my English classroom.

I sat at my desk looking up at the mild blue sky, trying to think of a way to get Bud to drive me up north. But it turned out to be easy. With some surprise help from Dottie and Glen, he fell into my idea like a melted marshmallow into a campfire. We'd been driving uptown together for about two weeks. It was Friday, May 17, the day before my sixteenth birthday.

“What you want for your birthday?” Dottie asked me on the way to Long Reach that morning.

“I already know what I'm not getting,” I said.

“What's that?” Bud asked.

“I wanted Daddy to drive me up to Crow's Nest Harbor so I could see where Carlie stayed and put that to rest, but he won't do it.”

We were driving up over Pine Pitch Hill. I looked into the woods where all those kids, except for Stella, had lost their lives. Why, out of all of them, had she lived?

Glen said, “Let's skip school and go, today. We can get there by noon and walk around a little bit, then drive back. Get back by six or so. We can say we stayed uptown for a while. Or we had to wait for Bud to stop balling Susan.”

“Jesus, Glen,” Bud said, “shut the hell up.”

“Trying to think of excuses for us,” Glen said. “You come up with something.”

“I'm not coming up with anything,” Bud said.

“Oh, come on,” Glen said. “Where's your sense of adventure?”

“I have some money,” I said. “Grand gives me five dollars a week and I've saved up fifteen. I've got enough for gas, and a little for food.”

Bud looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You're as crazy as Glen is,” he said.

“That's not news,” I said, and we locked eyes until he had to look back at the road.

Dottie sealed the deal. In a rare burst of sappiness, she said, “Soon, we won't be together. Seems we could do one last thing before we get booted in different directions.”

“What do you say?” Glen asked Bud.

“I say, ‘Firecrackers,'” Bud said, and caught my eyes in the mirror again. I gave him such a big, sloppy smile that his eyes danced before he looked away.

“Florine should get her birthday wish,” Glen said.

“One more time,” Dottie said.

Bud shook his head, but when we reached the high school, he drove past it. He looked back at me in the mirror. “Be careful what you wish for,” he said.

We drove through Long Reach and crossed the high bridge that straddled the river. Immediately over that bridge to the right was the road to Mulgully Beach. I looked down that road and pictured Petunia driving toward the beach, carrying a red-haired, fire-crotched woman and her daughter. Inside her plush interior, the two of them listened to summer songs on the radio, wanting to reach the beach so they could soak up some sun.

28

W
e stopped for gas in Wiscasset, bought a map, paper cups, orange juice, and chocolate donuts. After I promised Dottie that she could have half of my birthday cake, Glen and I switched seats so I could ride shotgun.

White and brick houses dotted the towns winding along the dips and bends of Route 1 and always, to the right, peek-a-boos of the ocean. Woods and fields greening into the spring set between the towns, and Bud rolled his window down and invited the May air inside to tickle our nostrils. He drove the speed limit, just in case we passed cops. He cranked the radio.
“It's a beautiful morning,”
the Rascals sang, just like a flock of butterflies rising to catch the sun on their wings.

I imagined Patty and Carlie looking at the views we were seeing now. What things would have caught their eyes? What scenes were special to them, year after year, as they'd traveled the same road we were on? Wiscasset, Thomaston, Rockland. Camden. A town built to slide along the coastline's curves. Hooded mountains to the left of us, cat-backed islands soaking their toes in the wide and bright blue ocean to our right. Little shops lined the crooked street. Had Carlie and Patty stopped here, every year? Had this been part of their weekend away? Which shops would they have lingered in?

“Let's stop,” I said, but Bud said, “I want to get there, Florine. We're probably not even halfway yet. Look at the map, would you?”

I wanted to give him a good argument but he was taking a big chance by skipping school, driving his new car all this distance, and not telling his girlfriend about any of it.

I thought about Susan moving down the corridors, looking for Bud, expecting to see him, brown eyes worried even as she hurried to class, her little butt swaying from side to side underneath one of the short skirts she liked to wear. Susan had such a happy little ass, perky and twitchy, like a mischievous cat's tail. “Won't Susan miss you today?” I asked Bud. “What if she calls down to The Point to ask where you are?”

“She's not in school today,” Bud said. “She and her family went to Connecticut. Some relative getting married tomorrow. They asked if I wanted to go. I didn't.”

“Jesus, look at that place,” Glen said, pointing out his window at a forest-green mansion behind a stone wall. The house loomed over a scilla-showered lawn. Needle-sharp turrets stabbed at the sky to shoo it away from the gabled, rambling roof. Thick iron bars crisscrossed the glass windows.

“It's like that show,
Dark Shadows
,” Dottie said. “Wonder if they got any vampires?”

“Wonder how much money is in there?” Bud asked.

“Probably more than all of us got put together,” Glen said.

“Couple three million,” Dottie said.

“I wouldn't want to live there,” I said. “How would people ever find each other?”

“I wouldn't mind it for a change,” Bud said. “Christ, seems as if we're all on top of each other at our house.”

“I love the way your mother has it fixed up so nice, though,” I said.

“You can only love it so much when Sam's pissed off and steam's coming out of his ears,” Bud said. “Kind of hard to know where to go when that happens.”

“Bert don't steam. He just yells,” Dottie said. “We don't listen. Evie gives him the big-eyed doll look and I just walk off. Madeline's the one to watch out for.”

“I can sit on Ray now,” Glen said. “Not much yelling from him anymore. Germaine talks soft. When I get the ‘Now, Glen,' with the eye-to-eye, I know I'm in trouble.”

“Carlie never yelled at me,” I said. We'd slipped past the castle and were riding beside long, lean rows of trees. The soft green buds on the limbs made me sleepy. “Daddy yelled, when I lived with him. I wouldn't dare to get Grand mad.”

“No, neither would I,” Bud said. “Her being so close to Jesus and all.”

“Only one person can call me Dorothea without me smacking her,” Dottie said.

“She's my ideal woman,” Glen said. “If we was the same age, I'd go for it.”

We moved on up the road toward Belfast, passed it and kept moving.

The trees thinned out and soon we were tucked between boulders in dead-grass fields that lined both sides of the road. I remembered from fifth grade learning about the glacier that scraped across Maine and left behind this mess of rocks and scarred land. It came to me that while these boulders sat for a few more centuries, everything I felt, thought, or did would be swept up and tossed out like the gravel I tracked into Grand's kitchen. It wouldn't matter that Carlie had disappeared or who Daddy slept with. Cold shuddered through me like a Popsicle burn.

“You okay?” Bud asked. “Want me to roll up the window?”

“No,” I said. “This place is bringing me down, though.”

“Me too,” Dottie said. “How much more?”

“Not much,” Bud said. “Look at the map, Florine.”

“About three-fourths of an inch,” I said.

“Long damn drive,” Dottie said.

I had to agree. What did Patty and Carlie talk about all this time? They saw each other almost every day. What could they say that hadn't already been said? Did Carlie talk about how stubborn Daddy was? Did Patty bring up the latest boyfriend? Did they talk about me, ever? If they did, what did they say?

“We're just ahead of the tourists,” Bud said. “Come Memorial Day, we'd be stuck in traffic somewhere.”

The just-before-town signs and rows of motels began to crop up. Tourist traps, seafood restaurants, and views of the ocean that made Camden's bay seem puny. We drove down a little street into Crow's Nest Harbor, passing a small town square with a bandstand in the middle of it. Shops surrounded the square. Carlie had crisscrossed this square into these shops buying things for me, or her, or for Daddy.

We came up to a stop sign. In front of us was the building that housed
The Crow's Nest Harbor Howler
, the local paper that had run Carlie's photo and a story about us and how we were waiting at home for her return.

“None of it did any good,” I said out loud.

“What didn't do any good?” Bud asked. “Where did Patty and Carlie stay?”

“The Crow's Nest Harbor Motel. Down by the water.”

Bud steered us down a street, close to the ocean, toward a big blue sign with a smiling crow wearing a sailor's cap sitting in a messy nest.

“That's got to be it,” Glen said.

Bud parked on a side street near the motel. “Let's go,” he said.

The motel formed an L of white units on one level, with a fenced-off swimming pool sitting in white concrete in the middle of the units. The pool was empty, but it wasn't hard to imagine Patty waving goodbye to Carlie, then diving into the warm silky water, not knowing she would never see Carlie again.

“What do you want to do?” Dottie asked. They were all looking at me.

I started to shrug, and then I saw a maid go into one of the units. “I wonder if she'll let us look inside,” I said. “I want to know what the rooms look like.”

“Glen and I are going to take a walk down to the slips,” Bud said. “Probably scare her if we all shuffled over there and asked to go in. Come get us when you're done.” He gave me a half smile and he and Glen walked off. Dottie and I walked toward the open door and Dottie poked her head into the darkness. “'Scuse me,” she said. “Would you mind if we looked at the room? My bowling league is thinking of taking a trip up this way and we're trying to decide where to stay.”

The maid, a short, dark woman with a body as plump as a well-fed partridge, pulled a white bedspread up over one of the twin beds. She smoothed down the spread as she moved around the bed. “I don't care,” she said. “Just don't touch anything.”

She hustled into the bathroom, and Dottie and I stepped in. White spreads covered twin beds set against a light-blue wall overlaid with a dark-green fern pattern. Two tiny blue-shaded lamps, the base of each clear and filled with shells, sat on a honey-colored wooden table between the beds. A television sat on a dresser against the opposite wall. A heavy blue drape hid a big window at the other end of the room. A small table and two chairs with light-blue cloth backing sat underneath the window. I walked over and pulled open the drapes. The white light of the bay plunged into the room and landed on Dottie's already-tanned face. Her shiny brown eyes took in the view. “Nice,” she said.

The maid flushed the toilet in the bathroom. She hummed a few notes of something, then stopped. She whizzed back the shower curtain and turned on a faucet.

“I wonder which bed was Carlie's,” I said. She'd slept on the left side of the bed at home. Daddy had slept closest to the door, as he was first to get up.

“I don't know,” Dottie said. The maid turned off the bathroom faucet and walked into the bedroom carrying a small trash can with her. “You girls want to see the bathroom, go ahead. But be quick. I got to get done in here.”

We peeked in. Tiny. Straight ahead, a toilet, with racks above it to hold clean towels. To the right, a tub and shower with a white curtain. A sink and white countertop with a mirror in the middle of the wall over it.

“Barely room to move,” Dottie said.

“Excuse me,” said the maid from behind us. We both jumped. She cradled an armful of folded, fluffy towels. “If you don't mind my asking, why would your bowling league be coming up here? We don't have a bowling alley.”

“Did I say we was bowling?” Dottie said. “We're just looking to relax, is all.”

“How old are you?” the maid asked her. “You look like you should be in school.”

“Day off,” Dottie said.

“Let's go,” I said. I turned and walked out of the room, Dottie close behind me.

We looked back toward town. Carlie had walked that way one morning, never knowing that she would not be coming back.

The maid came out of her room to her cleaning cart. I gathered up some grit and said, “Can I ask you something?”

She shifted her weight to one hip, ready to listen for as long as it took to get rid of us.

“My mother used to stay here,” I said. “She used to come every summer with a friend of hers.”

“Lot of people do,” the maid said.

“She disappeared from here about four years ago. No one ever found her.”

The maid's hazel eyes opened wide and she straightened up. “Carlie Gilham,” she said. She looked at me, closer. “You're her daughter. I knew Carlie. She was a hoot. She and Patty Higgins, right? Used to come into town when they was here and join us in Frenchman's Folly for a drink sometimes. I felt bad about what happened. Everyone talked about it. My Lord, you're her daughter, here. For heaven's sake.”

My eyes welled up. She'd known Carlie. She'd liked her. People had cared. The town had cared. They'd come up empty, but they'd cared.

“My name is Jorie Rich,” the maid said. “Used to be Marjorie, but I sliced off the Mar when I was a teenager. What's your name? Carlie told me, but it's been years.”

I told her and I introduced Dottie.

“You look like your daddy,” Jorie said to me. “He's a handsome man. Stood out when he was up here looking around. Big man. Felt so bad for him. Came back two years in a row after that around this time. Always looked me up for coffee. We'd drink it down and he'd walk into town, trying to figure it out, he said. Same thing you're doing. How is he? I haven't seen nor heard of him for a while.”

“He's fine,” I said. My brain twirled to learn that Daddy had come here, alone, looking for her. And did Stella know? Jesus, did anyone talk to anyone anymore?

“I came up with my friends,” I said. “I just wanted to see where she was last.”

“Of course you did,” Jorie said. “Well, let me think. Nothing much has changed. That's the way to town. Carlie liked to look around in the bookstore at the end of the street straight ahead. She liked to read them thrillers. She liked Grundy's Dress Shop, too. About halfway down that street. And the Lard Bucket—don't ask, been there so long I can't remember why they called it that. It's got some tourist-trap things in it, fun to poke around. Mostly, though, she liked to sit around the pool, go into town for dinner and a couple of drinks. Patty and her splurged and took a couple of sunset cruises on the sloop
Cordelia
a couple times. That was about it.”

My mind danced through space and time, picturing her here, walking there, shopping there, gabbing with the girls over beers. All this was overlaid with seeing Daddy taking that long drive up here, alone, on the off chance he might find out something new.

“She had some pictures of you,” Jorie was saying. “She had baby pictures, and on up through. She was some proud of you.”

“Oh,” I said, and choked. Jorie walked over to me, stood on tiptoe, and gave me a hug that bent me like a bamboo fishing rod in her direction. “I'm all right,” I said, moving back gently. “Thank you for the nice things you said,” and I turned and walked toward town, following on the heels of my mother's ghost. Dottie trotted along in back of me like a faithful dog. We walked toward the boat slips, where the boys had headed. They were admiring a small yacht at the end of the wharf. We hollered to them and they joined us. We all went into the bookstore.

The bookstore clerk looked at us as if we were high school students skipping school. The thing that confused him, I guess, was the fact that he didn't recognize us as locals. I moved up and down the aisles, looking up at the book titles. “Where's your thriller section?” I asked the clerk. He tore himself away from eyeing Glen and Bud, both of whom were looking at magazines.

The clerk pointed to a wall right behind me. “Have they always been here?” I asked.

“Bud,” Glen whispered so that we all heard him, “get a load of these.”

The clerk frowned, trying to figure out, I guess, why I had asked that question, and whether or not Glen was looking at what he seemed to be looking at.