Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) (9 page)

15

D
ottie and I woke up about nine on New Year's Day. We shoved beer bottles to one side of the kitchen table so we could feed Evie and us some breakfast. Evie's black curls bounced in the dim winter light as she ate her cereal. Her pink cheeks nestled into her little heart-shaped face and red lips. She was going to be a beauty, something neither Dottie nor I would ever be. Me, skinny as a fishing pole, and Dottie with her build like a brick shithouse. What would become of us? I wondered suddenly.

“Want to watch cartoons?” Dottie asked.

“No,” I said. “It's red ruby glass day.”

Every New Year's Day, Grand and I cleaned the red ruby glass while she told me the story of her mother, Emma, who had been orphaned in Boston when she was a child and danced on the streets for pennies. Somehow, she got shipped up to relatives in Spruce Point. She married Harold Morse, who was twenty-five years older. He moved them to The Point and Emma gave birth to four children, three of whom died young. Grand was just a kid when her father died of meanness at age sixty.

Harold had died penniless, and Emma thought about selling the house and moving to town and working as a housekeeper until one day, when Grand was playing hide and seek under her parents' bed, she looked up and saw green paper hanging out of a small rip in the bottom of the mattress. She pulled out fistfuls of it and took it to her mother because she thought it was pretty.

It turned out that Harold had filled the ticking with twenties, tens, and not a few fifty-dollar bills that Emma straightaway took to a bank in Long Reach. He'd been a fisherman, and only the devil knew how he'd come by such a stash, Grand said, but it didn't matter. It was enough to make Emma and Grand comfortable until Grand married Franklin Gilham some twelve years later. Emma had lived with them until she passed.

Grand shared her father's Yankee thrift and had a little nest egg socked away to make sure she made it all the way through her old age. She didn't want for anything more than she had. She surrounded herself with her favorite things and she had her garden. I was walking toward Grand's house and thinking how I couldn't wait for summer to come so I could stick my nose into the center of one of her peonies and suck the perfume straight down to my heart when I glanced to my right and saw Stella Drowns walking up our snowy driveway with her casserole dish.

When she saw me, her pale face went pink as the peony I'd been imagining, and she said, “Happy New Year, Florine. Did you have fun at Dottie's house?”

I went to the heart of it. “Did you have fun at Daddy's house?” The January wind picked up the pace and snow began to fall.

Stella hugged the casserole dish to the bulk of her green wool coat with one hand while she freed up a hand to turn up her collar against the cold. “I had a wonderful time,” she said, looking me right in the eye.

“Did you spend the night?”

She took a deep breath, and let out a frosted exhale. “Yes, I did,” she said.

“Daddy is a married man,” I yelled.

“He's a lonely man, Florine. Just because he wanted company for a night doesn't mean he doesn't love your mother,” Stella said. “Do you want him to be lonely?”

“Lonely would be better than you,” I said.

Stella's scar flushed purple. “I want to be friends,” she said.

“Why? You never did before.”

Stella lifted a bit of snow onto her boot toe and then tossed it off. “Happy New Year, Florine,” she said. “I'll see you later.” She walked off up the hill, backside swishing like a cat that's had her cream and sausage, too.

“You can't cook, either,” I shouted, although we both knew that was a lie. I turned and stormed into Grand's house, slamming the door behind me.

Grand was walking from the cabinet to the kitchen with a ruby glass water pitcher. “God's sake, no need to bust in here like that, Florine,” she said.

“Stella Drowns spent the night with Daddy,” I shouted.

“You calm yourself. Sit while I put this pitcher down so I don't break it.”

I sat on the sofa, stiff backed, jiggling my knees up and down. How could she? How could he? How could they? Daddy had deserted Carlie and me for a skinny, scar-faced bitch. I wanted to kill them both.

“Let me take your coat,” Grand said. I shucked out of it and she hung it on a hook in the hall. Then she sat down next to me.

“Now, what's all this?” she asked.

“I was coming from Dottie's and I saw Stella walking up our driveway. She said she stayed overnight with Daddy. She did it with him, Grand, I'm sure of it.”

“Did what? Oh. Well, for heaven's sake.”

“They can't do that, Grand,” I said. “Daddy's married to Carlie.”

“All right, all right,” Grand said. “Just set here and be for a minute.”

My fists hit the tops of my thighs as if they meant to flatten them and I yelled, “I don't want her near Daddy. How could he do that to Carlie and me?”

Grand gathered my hands in her own and said, “I don't know, honey. He's lonely and mixed up, I imagine.”

“You talk to Daddy. Tell him he can't do this. Tell him Jesus wouldn't like it.”

“Florine, I don't use Jesus to threaten anyone.”

I took my hands from hers and stood up. I paced back and forth, then needing a purpose, I remembered the reason I'd come, and I went toward the china cabinet. I took the heart from the center of the cabinet and walked toward the kitchen with it.

“Not right now, Florine,” Grand said. “You need to calm down. You might break something and then we'd both feel bad.”

“Your goddamn glass is more important than me?” I hollered. Then, I ran down the hall, out of the door and down our driveway to the path that led to The Cheeks. I scrambled over the rocks and waded through calf-high snow to the State Park. Once there, coatless and cold and hidden in the park's deserted aloneness, I barged toward the ledges by the ocean, trying to ignore the bully wind that pinched my face and the snow that nipped at my feet. I slipped on the icy path, belly flopped, and dropped the little heart in the snow. “Shit,” I said, as I groped, found, and clutched it to me. I reached the ledges. Icy spray planted frozen kisses on my face.

I screamed out all my rage, sadness, and hurt over winter's hellish marriage of sleeted water and bastard wind. “MOTHER,” I shrieked, “come home. NOW.” But the ocean and the rocks kept up their own icy battle and ignored me. In my desperation, I shouted, “Here! Now give her back to me!” and I threw the red ruby heart into the cold blue sea.

And then Carlie was with me. Sudden heat hugged me from my head to my toes, as my mother wrapped her arms around me. I smelled her perfume and pressed my nose into her hair and it was just us, in a little glowing circle of warmth.
Love me sweet, never let me go . . .
,
we sang, and I would have been happy to end things there.

But here was Glen, throwing his heavy flannel hunting jacket over me.

“Let's go, Florine,” he said. I looked up and smiled at him, and at Bud and Dottie.

“See? I found her,” I said as Carlie's arms tightened around me.

“Florine, your lips are blue,” Dottie said. “Where's your coat?”

“Can you get up?” Bud asked.

“I don't want to get up,” I said.

“Jesus, Glen, pick her up,” Dottie said. “She's hypodermic.”

Glen slung me over his right shoulder as if I was a rag doll, and hurried back down the trail, my head and arms dangling down his back. Carlie slipped away from me as Dottie kept shouting, “Don't go to sleep. Stay awake. Don't go to . . .”

When I woke up in my bed around dusk, my eyelids felt like someone had placed bricks on them. It was a struggle to open them, so I gave up and kept them shut. Grand was talking to Daddy in our kitchen.

“Well, Florine isn't ready for you to find someone else. She's tougher than tripe, but still she's a girl as lost her mother.”

“The last thing I want to do is hurt my girl. If I'd known how bad she would've felt, 'course I wouldn't have done it,” Daddy said. “But, Ma, it's like living in hell. Taking some comfort for a night made me forget. Is that so wrong?”

“What do you think?” Grand asked. Then it went quiet, while Daddy thought, I guess. Grand said, “Carlie might come back. Or even if she doesn't, Florine needs to wrap her mind around that fact.”

Daddy said, in a voice so low it scraped the floor, “Ma, Carlie ain't coming back. I can't do no more there. I hate calling Parker and the rest of them. They hate it that they ain't got nothing to report. Jesus, we're circling our circles. I loved that woman more than I can say, and if she was to walk through that door, I would welcome her back with a parade. But Ma, she's not coming back. And Ma, I can't do this.” He cried for a while, and I heard Grand's “There, there,” and could imagine her patting his back.

Sometime later, I felt his damp hand heavy on my forehead. I forced my lids up and stared into his worried blue eyes. Then I turned over and faced my bedroom wall.

“Leave me alone,” I said.

16

S
oon after Carlie and Daddy got married, Daddy built a small shed beside the house to shelter Carlie's car, Petunia, during bad weather. His trucks sat out in the snow and rain and rusted, but not Petunia. I never got the full story of how Carlie had come by her—something about waitress tips and winks—but Petunia was her traveling companion. When she'd left for Crow's Nest Harbor in Patty's car, she'd left Petunia parked in the driveway, it being summer. After the disappearance, the police went through her like gulls on fish bait. But they found nothing that might be considered suspicious, unless gum wrappers, a tube of pink lipstick, and a melted Hershey bar (mine) in the glove compartment could be toted up as evidence. It got too sad to see Petunia sitting there and so about two months after Carlie's disappearance, Daddy moved her into her shed, drained her fluids, and shut the door on her.

Sometimes, I went out and sat in the driver's seat and let the tears fall as I looked through the windshield, or I climbed into the backseat and curled up on Petunia's soft musty seats. Sometimes I napped there.

During the winter of 1964, though, I didn't sit in her at all. After my trip out to the ledges, going outside unless I had to didn't set well with my fingers and toes. I was content to guard the house against a possible Stella Drowns invasion.

But Petunia wasn't lonely that winter.

One Saturday in late January, when Daddy was uptown and I was in the kitchen, I spied Bud Warner walking up the hill through the Buttses' yard. He veered to the left and walked toward the shed. He looked around, and then slipped inside the shed door.

I threw a coat on and barged out, opened the door, and glared at a sheepish Bud, who was sitting in the driver's seat, gloved hands on the steering wheel. I walked up to the window and he rolled it down.

“What are you doing?” I said.

Bud shrugged. “Feeling stupid.”

“You look stupid,” I said. “What are you doing in my mother's car?”

“You'll laugh.”

“Better I laugh than knock you sideways to Sunday.”

Bud smiled. “Probably could, too, mad as you are. Move, so I can get out.”

I stepped back and he got out and shut the door. We walked around to the front of the car and he leaned on the grill. He patted Petunia's hood. “She's a nice car,” he said.

“She's Carlie's car,” I said.

“Think Carlie would mind that I sat in her and pretended I was driving her?”

“Why?”

“Well, I know it sounds foolish,” Bud said. “But I like to pretend I'm taking her out on the road, people looking at us, thinking what a beauty she is.”

He looked at me with steady dark eyes and a little smile, trusting me to understand something about him. I liked that, but I didn't know what to do about it.

“Well, you can sit in her, I guess,” I said. “Long as you don't smoke.”

“I don't smoke, you know that.”

“I didn't know you came up and sat in my mother's car. For all I know, you could be lighting up a pack a day.”

“Nah,” Bud said. He moved away from Petunia and we walked to my front door. “Guess I'll go home now,” he said. “You sure you're okay with me sitting in the car?”

“I'm okay with it,” I said.

“Thanks,” Bud said. “I'll see you,” and he walked down our driveway, arms and legs too long and loose. He turned around and waved. I waved back and then he disappeared behind the Buttses' house.

As the longest winter of my life dragged its ass across the calendar, I welcomed every minute of returning light, and I welcomed Bud's visits to the car.

Sometimes he left behind little presents. On Valentine's Day, he set a white candy heart that read S
OME
G
IRL
on the passenger seat, and on Saint Patrick's Day, I found a green ribbon tied to Petunia's steering wheel. I knitted a black watch cap for him and found it gone, replaced with a Charms cherry lollipop.

One day in late March, I spied him slipping into the shed and I decided to join him in the passenger seat. We looked through the windshield, down over the hill to the harbor, where ice cakes glided to a salty death in the spring ocean.

“Be warm soon,” Bud said.

“For sure,” I said.

“Someday,” Bud said, “I'm going to drive away from here for good.”

“Why?”

“I don't want to be here for all of my life. I don't want to fish.”

“Where will you go?”

“Someplace where I don't know everybody. Maybe Long Reach. Maybe beyond that. Don't you feel cramped in, sometimes?”

“Mostly I feel like I got a hole inside,” I said.

Gulls landed on the chunks of ice in the harbor, riding them past us and out of sight. “Carlie felt cramped here,” I said. “She wanted to go places all the time.”

“I know how she felt,” Bud said. “Sometimes, I get so crazy that I get up at night, go outside and walk until I'm tired. I just have to move. My legs can't be still.”

I thought about his lonely, restless, skinny self walking down the dark roads, feet crunching on the gravel or scuffing over tar.

“You think I'm crazy?” he asked. I turned to look at him.

We saw each other different at the same time. We'd always looked at each other as through water, a wavy, liquid, safe distance. But in that car, in that moment, that water evaporated and became air, clear, dry, and true.

“I don't think you're crazy,” I said.

Bud's eyes got wide. Then he turned toward the windshield and shook his head. “I don't want to get stuck here,” he said, more to himself than me. He opened the car door and hopped out, startling me into a series of blinks. He said, “Don't tell no one I go walking in the night, okay?” He shut the car door and off he ran. I let myself out of Petunia, shut the door to the shed, and went into the empty house. I tugged at the string holding my heart aloft and gently lowered it back into place.