Son of Destruction (5 page)

That scrawny, lascivious skank, Davis? Really? Is that the best you can do?
Wrong.
Did you not think I would find out, Davis?
No.
Were you trying to torture me?
No.
What are you, retarded? Like, you thought you could get away with it?
No.
I
said
, don’t ask, just get the hell out of here.
No, you need to guilt him a little bit, make him grovel before you kick him out, tell him . . .

This is embarrassing. I heard Bobby’s front door open and I didn’t hear it. I hoped to God it wasn’t him. I kept going even after somebody called, ‘Nenna?’ and I went faster because I knew it was him.

I didn’t stop until he caught up with me.

‘Nenna Henderson!’

‘Oh.’ Any other day I would have hugged him:
Bobby, it’s so great to see you
, even though it wasn’t, but I was caught short with my messed-up life hanging out, and partly it was the shock. He’d fallen away in the shanks. In the way of redheads whose lives are over but they don’t know it, his hair had faded to brown. I was too tactful to say,
What happened to you?
or ask him how he really was. I wanted to say
something
, but all I could think of was, ‘Oh!’

‘I saw you going by and I had to come out and say hey.’

‘Hey, Bobby.’ He was so friendly – did I smile? Did I look OK or did I look awful? Beyond it, I guess, because he looked all worried, and it pissed me off.

‘How are you?’

‘Don’t ask me now.’

‘I’m sorry. I . . .’ Maybe he was waiting for me to spill so he could pour out his story; maybe he wanted to tell me what brought him down, and God knows we’re all dying to know. I should have said,
Are you OK?
but it was getting late, I was exhausted, everybody would be home soon and I had cut him off before he had a chance to start.

‘Don’t be.’
Oh, Bobby, don’t linger.

He kept going along beside me. ‘I thought maybe your car broke down.’

‘Not really.’

‘You looked like you could use some help.’

I did, but nothing I could tell him. If I’d shown him mine, he’d have shown me his. We could have hugged goodbye with, maybe, promises of more to come, but not just then. I had to keep going, so I did. ‘Not really. I’m fine.’

Bobby tagged along, whether or not I wanted it. Football captain, May King two years running and there he was following me like a dog. He’d been home in the Florida sunshine for three years but he must have spent it inside, he was that white in the face. He’d gotten skinny in there, but he was grinning and dancing along next to me as though no time had passed, ‘Nenna, wait up.’

It all piled in on me and I started to run. ‘Can’t, Bobby. I’m late.’

‘Late for what?’

It wasn’t just Davis I was mad at, it was him.
When you were eighteen you wouldn’t even look at me
. ‘I’m in a hurry, Bobby. Why should I stop and talk to you?’

‘I’ve missed you, Nenna. It’s been forever.’ He’s changed but he smiled, just like in our yearbook.
Most popular
:
Bobby Chaplin and Laura DePew
. And, this is ironic.
Most Likely To Succeed: Bobby Chaplin and Lucy Carteret.
‘Nenna?’

You’ve been home three years.
‘You could have phoned.’

‘It’s. I couldn’t.’

‘And you want me to stop and talk to you?’

‘What are you doing out in this heat?’

‘It’s a nice day, I thought I’d walk.’

‘If it’s car trouble, I can call Triple A.’

‘I’m almost home.’ Home. Davis. Accusations and the fight.

‘Let me ride you, Nenna. You look beat.’

My feet were raw but I wasn’t about to stop now that I was so close. ‘I
said
, I’m fine.’

At First Street, which you have to cross to get into Far Acres, Bobby did stop, exactly like your dog hitting the electronic fence. ‘OK Nenna, take care.’

‘I’m sorry. I have a lot to do.’

I do. In this town, there’s a ritual checklist: call your lawyer, tell the kids, field a phone call from Coleman Rowell, who must have radar about these things, he’s like a sex vulture waiting to pounce, the list was running through my head. OK, lady, get this over with, then tell Coleman
no.
Change your hair and dress to kill and go looking for a good man who will for God’s sake do right by you. Bobby would be perfect, we could have started, but I wasn’t about to stop for him. I was bent on getting home. Every nerve and muscle in me was screaming but I had to end my own business before I could think about starting anything.

To find out about the past, you have to go there.

Dan reduced his mother to ashes in a brass box, sealed and weighted as requested, and rented a boat so he could drop her in the Atlantic off the beach at Misquamicut, where she used to take him when he was a kid. She hadn’t asked him to say a few words as the box with her in it plunged into the ocean, but he did. Never mind what he said over her. It is between them.

He did what you have to, the sad, necessary things. Filed insurance forms and settled with the funeral home. Cleaned out the apartment. Without her, the rooms were so empty that in a way it was a surgical strike. Goodwill took most of the furniture and useful small objects. He rented a storage locker for the rest. Met with her lawyer and closed up the house. His week is up, but he and his mother aren’t finished.

All his life, Lucy lived as though history began when she had him. She pretended there was nothing before life in New London, and he loved her well enough to let it go, although he didn’t, really.

He’s been carrying it all these years, and all these years later he’s found the hidden keys to Lucy’s life before Burt. She kept them in her jewel box, like notes that she wrote to him, but was afraid to send. Now that she’s safe from whatever she was afraid of, Dan is free to track down the answers to questions he promised not to ask. He’s in Fort Jude.

It was a gut decision: no questions, no regrets. It made itself. He didn’t quit his job, exactly, but he did call the office. His boss didn’t say yes or no because it wasn’t a question. He said, ‘Remember, your mother can only die once.’

There are so many ways to parse this that he can’t bear to start.

Dan Carteret doesn’t want to kill his mother all over again; he just wants to put this thing to rest. He’s here to strip mine her past and pull his father out.

With its flashy neon and artificial palms flanking fancy wrought iron benches, Fort Jude is nothing like New London – or Los Angeles, for that matter. It’s more like downtown Oz – real palm trees and plastic flowers in cement tubs line Central Avenue, with flowers in pots hanging from the ornamental lamp-posts, and mosaic obelisks marking the major cross streets. There’s so much cosmetic architecture here that it’s hard to tell the difference between what is and what used to be. Brash new buildings compete with old hotels tarted up with false fronts like gaudy party masks. Dan skims the facades like a speed reader, looking for places Lucy would have gone. He wants to walk into her past and figure out what went wrong and why she tried so hard to obliterate Fort Jude.

This is not the time for a Holiday Inn, Marriott, Sheraton, any of your anonymous, clean places. It’s not like he expects to run into his mother in the lobby, he just wants to stay somewhere that she might have come. He’s looking for a hotel with a history, where the homefolks meet for drinks in late afternoon – people his mother might have hung out with, the ones who were born here and stayed here, so that they segued from backstory into now without feeling a thing. He’d like to slide down the bar, all,
Hi, I’m new here
. Smile and make them like him, which he’s good at, even though he grew up pretty much alone. If he can make friends, maybe one of them will point him to Lucy’s old neighborhood. They might even know the house. Otherwise, he’ll have to go through Fort Jude street by street, block by block in his rented car, matching tree lines and front porches to the ones in his mother’s snapshot until he finds the place.

It takes him two passes to find it, but the Flordana is perfect. Never mind the wrought iron fence surrounding the overgrown courtyard and the gingerbread trim bolted to the long front porch. Behind its Victorian facade, the Flordana is straight out of the 1920s, blunt and flat-footed and sweet. At odds with the false front is the Art Deco sign, blue neon winking at him from behind faded plastic ivy: FLORDANA HOTEL. Set back from the street, the hotel crouches between hulking office blocks like a nice old lady forgotten on the sofa at a high school party, wedged between two jocks too stoned to notice.

It’s all cool until he parks and gets out of the car. It’s hotter out here than he thought. It’s . . . He doesn’t know. In the courtyard he gets an attack of the dry swallows: gulp. The tiled porches are green with moss. The cement courtyard has a tired, dingy look. As if this is too little, and he got here too late.
Get over it!
he tells himself.
Don’t get weird and don’t pin any hopes on this
. What does he think, that he can flash a snapshot of his mother and real Lucy will fall into his hands, buried secrets and all? That somebody will say, ‘Why, that’s Lucy Carteret, do you want to see her house?’ Not really. He’s a little crazy right now but he is, after all, a reporter. Was. Gulp.

Check in. Scope the place on the web before you start. This is no big deal. It’s just the beginning
.

But what if she and his real father actually came to the Flordana, like, after the prom? Or she stood out front waiting for her bus home from her summer job, praying he would come by in his car. Unless he parked and tugged her inside the Flordana, and she got pregnant here.
Don’t, asshole.
Her lover could have been a night clerk or a waiter in the hotel coffee shop. Unless he . . .

Just don’t.
Hope eats him up from the inside.
He’ll walk in and find me. Be here.
Would they know each other? He thinks so. It will play like a movie:
Father. Son!
Wait. The faithless shithead has a lot of explaining to do. Stupid, he knows, but losing people makes you stupid. Reporter, remember. You make your living finding out. Work this like any other story. Hit the right link and it will open up. Chapter. Verse. What happened to Lucy here. What’s so terrible about it, and who his people are, really. The begats.

It lodges in his throat: the begats.

Other people take family for granted, but then other people have photos of people who look like them posted somewhere, letters, birthday cards. Family trees. A chunk of Dan Carteret is missing. It isn’t just the
no father
that Lucy tried so hard to erase. It’s the gap ordinary mothers fill with particulars: where she’s from, who your grandparents are. What life was like before she got married and had you.

Stop that!

The woman at the desk is either a lot older or a lot younger than Lucy. She’s so carefully put together and made up that it’s hard to tell. Jointed silver fish dangle from her ears, very Florida. So’s the aggressively blonde hair. She looks fit in her frilled tank top, although the wrinkles in the tanned cleavage give her away. Full mouth. Nice smile. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I need a room.’

‘Lucky it’s the end of the season.’ She could do a commercial for those teeth whitening strips. ‘Take your pick.’

Rumpled after the long flight, wrecked by the week of last things and sweating through the back of his khaki coat, Dan realizes that gross as he looks right now, she’s coming on to him. ‘The cheapest, I suppose.’

‘Business trip?’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Jessie.’ The grin says he must look pretty good to her, or that she thinks she’s younger than she really is and he’s older than he looks, unless it’s just her way of adding some color to the day. ‘Now, what shall I put down?’

He doesn’t know.

‘You don’t look like a tourist.’ She means,
What are you doing here?
‘If you’re here on business, you get our special rate.’

Words pop out. ‘I’m down here on a story.’ Why does this lie make him feel so much better?

‘You write books?’

‘No Ma’am. For my paper.’ Like a person here on real business. Smile for the lady, she believes. So can you. ‘The
Los Angeles Times
? A story for the magazine.’

‘Cool. What about?’

He isn’t sure. ‘If I tell you, I lose my job.’

‘So I should put down business,’ Jessie says.

Dan doesn’t answer. He’s thinking hard. There’s some reason he burned out searching the web details on the human fires. Three old women. Here. Cool! Here’s his readymade rationale; two words and he’s justified. ‘Research trip,’ he says, grinning. ‘Preliminary research.’ Just saying it makes him feel better. As a matter of fact, it’s a terrific story, he was just too fried to see it. Like a visa to this strange country, Lucy’s fragment of newspaper justifies his presence here. ‘Now if I could have my key . . .’

She isn’t exactly holding him hostage, but she hasn’t started checking him in. ‘What are you researching?’

‘Just an old story.’

‘Ooooh,’ she says, fishing. ‘We have a lot of old stories here.’

‘It’s a kind of a mystery.’

‘We have a lot of those. Which one?’

‘I. Um. I’m not at liberty to talk about it yet.’ The story shapes up in his head like one of those great unwritten novels – the kind writers only talk about in bars because by daylight, they evaporate. He frames the pitch: FORT JUDE, TOWN OF HUMAN FURNACES. His big break.

‘I said, which one?’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Not Ma’am.’ She has a very sweet grin. ‘Jessie. Which mystery?’

It’s been a long week. There’s no logic to it but he can’t be here at the desk much longer. He just can’t. ‘An old one,’ he says, finishing with a warm smile that he hopes will be enough.

It isn’t. ‘Oh,’ she says, all
faux naïve,
‘which one.’

‘Spontaneous human combustion!’ Why does that embarrass him?

‘Oh, that old thing. Lorna and Mrs Keesler and that other lady.’ Nice grin. ‘You know, there are books.’