Storm Tide (49 page)

The night before I left, Terry called me a fucking asshole, then fell asleep in my arms. I knew that I wanted him to start visiting me, but when I brought that up with Vicki, she put me off as always. She was living with the three kids in a garden apartment in West Palm Beach. She was defensive about her plans. I could not get her to talk seriously with me about Terry or anything else.

The winter back home continued to break all records, which seemed to fit my needs. When I ventured out, it was for breakfast or long walks with my new dog. Work was mostly snow plowing. I occupied myself with crises. The pipes freezing in Town Hall. The roof collapsing in the fire station. An age discrimination suit. What I lacked in intimacy, I made up for in meetings.

“I see you got yourself a dog,” Judith said. It was early April and three days of rain had all but washed away the last of the winter’s ice. She was standing on the Squeer Island bridge, shielding her eyes from the sun. She looked neither happy nor annoyed to see me, but amused, if not at the mud all over my clothes then at Flubber, who kept leaping up the slippery embankment and sliding back down on his belly.

He was a golden retriever puppy, the kind that wiggles all over and runs for a stick before you throw it. “Stay!” she said firmly when he clopped up the embankment, and stay he did in his way, chasing his tail in circles. Her own dog, the shaggy black one, was upon us in seconds. Both of them slid into the muddy creek bottom, sniffing, running toward each other and away, leaving us alone on the bridge to accomplish much the same thing.

I’d seen Gordon’s three-legged dog sitting up in the prow of Stumpy’s dinghy, following him into town for his beer and sausages, and now a bag of kibble. “Did Judith give him away?” I asked.

“Didn’t give nothing away. This ’un picked me out,” Stumpy said proudly. “Moved in on me.”

I’d watched for Judith at meetings, at the post office, the tea room; collected stray facts and rumors as if amassing a scrapbook. The stories had her moving to New York, sleeping with another lawyer, selling the house, becoming a lesbian, buying a boat, starting a shelter for wounded seabirds. I’d avoided the island for seven months since Crystal’s death, but lately I began walking the dog here in hopes of crossing Judith’s path. If she still had Silkie, she had to walk her. Her favorite walks were around the island or from her house to the bridge and back.

She looked even thinner, tired around the eyes. I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t smile at me the way she once had; encouraging, expectant. If anything she seemed to look through me. I’d practiced a hundred different opening lines and promptly forgot every one. “Did you hear about the new candidate Johnny’s running for selectman?” I said. “Bernice Cady.”

“Are you serious?” Judith stepped toward me, then stopped. “That sweet little girl who used to be a teller at the bank?”

“Loan officer now. Very bright. Native born. Makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Not abrasive, unassuming. Absolutely one hundred percent loyal to Johnny. People miss the old favor machine.”

“Sure, the people who got the favors.”

“Well, she’s very convincing. Didn’t you read about last Monday’s meeting?”

Judith hugged herself as if against the cold, shaking her head. “Must have missed it.”

“She gave a speech about the way Saltash used to be. Neighbors who used to build each other’s houses. Flags in every window for the Fourth of July parade. Respect for our elders.”

“Sounds like it got to you.”

“Might have, if it was anything like the town I grew up in.”

“Sorry I wasn’t there.”

“People loved it. She may win.”

Judith looked in my eyes for a moment, then back up the road, as if someone were calling. “It sounds as if you have your hands full,” she said. “Come on, Silkie,” she walked back the way she had come.

I was surprised to be invited to the
alter kockers’
meeting because none of them had spoken to me since the hearing on the dike. But if we were to keep the wolf at bay, if we were to defeat Johnny Lynch again, we had to do it together. I was sitting behind the glass-topped liquor cart when I met Judith for the second time. She was wearing a cashmere turtleneck, ribbed, blue; silver half-moon earrings and a perfume that brought me back to the day she led me to her shack, let her coat slip to the floor, and slid her cold hands under my shirt.

In the middle of the meeting she turned suddenly and murmured, “Is there something you want?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re staring at me.”

“Well, there is something.”

“Go on,” she said. She didn’t sound pleased.

“Do you remember that broom crowberry I got for you last year? Is it still alive or did it die over the winter? It’s been a very cold winter.”

“It’s alive. I had a mulch of pine needles on it.”

“Because if it’s still alive … I think I could get some more and we could make a very nice area for it. If you want to.”

“I’ll think about it.” Her eyes took me in.

“Well, if you do want it …”

“I know how to get in touch with you,” she said. “If I do.”

You can go without seeing somebody for months in this town, then suddenly cross paths every day. Or maybe I was trying to bump into Judith, and she stopped avoiding me. I caught sight of her at the grocery, in the street, her car flashing past, her suede jacket disappearing into the library. She was chatting in front of Town Hall. She was buying a Sunday
paper at Barstow’s Convenience. She had resumed coming to the selectmen’s meetings occasionally.

I brought Kara and Allison to a Disney movie. I was taking them to the four o’clock show with a hundred other parents or surrogates and two hundred overexcited kids, then out for pizza. There was Judith with her lawyer, Timothy Worth. I’d seen him argue a case before our zoning board. Bow tie and Brooks Brothers suit; deep voice and little content. With them was a girl about ten. Before I figured out what to do, Kara bounded over. “Judith!” she screeched. “When is Natasha coming to our school again?”

“When she comes home for Passover, maybe then.”

“Will she bring a hawk?”

“I never know what Natasha will bring,” Judith said with a rueful smile.

Timothy paid little attention to me. Because they were sleeping together? Or because they weren’t? I tried to see how she looked at him, to gauge the electricity.

“Who’s Natasha?” his daughter asked. If she didn’t know, they probably weren’t involved. Yet.

I cleared my throat and butted in. “Did you think about that broom crowberry?”

“All the time,” she said, and let Timothy Worth draw her away. What did that mean, all the time? Was she being sarcastic? Did she mean she missed me? Judith always meant something.

I should have called first. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. If Timothy Worth’s car was in the drive, I would leave. Judith and I would be friends, nothing more; I owed her that much. It was ten-thirty on a Saturday morning—time enough to be up and dressed. I didn’t want to embarrass anybody. I hit the horn when I turned up the drive. I could see that about a third of the garden had been planted. The peas were up and rows of tiny seedlings. Something was growing under plastic milk cartons. Judith’s was the only car in sight.

Silkie started barking. Flubber spun around in the front seat, whimpering to be let out. Two cats were sunning themselves on the porch railings, one of them the one-eyed lo and the other Principessa, the huge silver tabby who took one look at me and dove under the porch. “Stay!” I said to the dog. I felt enough of an intruder myself.

I was carrying one pot of the broom crowberry with me, as an excuse, an offering, a talisman. Bring me luck. You did before. Judith peered
out the window and then disappeared. For a while nothing happened. Finally the door opened.

I held out the pot.

“But I didn’t say I wanted it.”

“It’s yours anyhow.”

“For how long?”

“To live and die here.”

She studied my face, my eyes, and then finally she smiled and stood aside, letting me in. “That seems a satisfactory guarantee. I guess I’ll take it. Welcome back, David. Welcome home.”

I put the pot down carefully and took her in my arms.

D
AVID

    I couldn’t say I’d ever moved back into my house after Crystal and Laramie died; but now I was moving out. I sold the house quickly. The new owners wanted the couch, the rugs and kitchen appliances, even the sagging queen bed in my room, utensils, plates, the works. They intended to close the place up winters and rent it by the week in the summer. The couple bargained to the last nickel on every item down to the shower curtain, leading me from room to room, taking turns like interrogating cops. If they hadn’t made me feel like a mark, I would have given it all away. I didn’t want to look at this old stuff. I had to get out of here.

Although I told Judith there was nothing left to move but my clothing—what little wasn’t already at her house—she insisted there were objects I’d overlooked. She loaded three boxes with Laramie’s toys alone. There were things of Crystal’s that I had ignored or simply could not bring myself to touch. The suitcase that had served as a bedside table next to Michelle’s old couch. A black silk kimono on a hook behind the bathroom door. Judith arrived with me at seven
A
.
M
. on a Saturday morning and packed boxes furiously until noon. It saddened me to see the house with everything pulled out. A stray button under a dresser, a tiny lost horse behind a door. When Judith’s car was loaded and each box labeled—Goodwill, Salvation Army, Day Care Center, Church—she touched my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“Why not? What do you mean?”

She was looking at Crystal’s exercise bike, which I’d discovered behind the couch and begun dismantling. Six bolts, twice that many screws. But my palms were moist and the screwdriver kept slipping from my grip. It had taken me the better part of an hour. “Is it hard to leave?” she said.

“This house? With all the work it needs?”

“But I can’t help feeling it’s what you wanted.” She unbuttoned her coat and made a place for herself, not next to me but on the floor, where the apparatus lay between us like Crystal’s dismantled life. “A little house. A little family. There’s nothing wrong with that, David.”

“But it was a life with you that I wanted. I just thought I couldn’t have it. Because you loved Gordon. Because you were so much more than I was.”

“David.”

“I did the same thing I did when I played baseball. I turned my back on what took work and patience, what I couldn’t have right away, and did the next easiest thing. What you and Gordon offered was beyond anything I could imagine possible. Living with Crystal felt familiar. Mother. Father. Child. A little house in town. People wanted me to be that person, don’t you see? My mom. My sister. They couldn’t understand what I was doing with you. But with Crystal, I was just like them. Even people in town. I was one of the guys out with the woman and kids at Penia’s on Friday night. I was one of
them
. Finally. Maybe Crystal is what I felt I deserved.”

Judith frowned. “Don’t imagine you’ll be one of them if you’re living with me, David. I’m not the kind of woman nice people like. I say what I mean. That’s considered bitchy. I never had children. That’s considered weird. Your own sister calls me cold. You’ll be living in a ten-acre waterfront compound worth well over a million dollars on the market. Don’t imagine people aren’t counting. That won’t make you one of the guys.”

“Why would I care?”

“Because you always did. You were an outsider from the day your folks moved here. You married into a family that used you. You were always looking for a way inside.”

“Not anymore. I killed a woman and her son doing that. Maybe I can finally be what I choose, no matter how different it is.”

Judith kicked aside the tools and piping between us. She touched her fingers to my lips. “You didn’t kill anyone.”

“Whatever I did or didn’t, it’s over. You’re the one I want.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

“You will. Over time, you will.”