Strawberries in the Sea (32 page)

“What was your husband like?” he asked suddenly, as if he were reading her mind.

“Something like you.” She took a clean blouse out of a drawer and put it on. In the mirror she saw him, black head and brown torso against the pillows and was incredulous all over again. Two days ago he had not existed for her and now she was as familiar with the weight of him upon her as she had been with Con's, and those hands punching a pillow into comfort behind his head had been where only Con's had been.

“How like him?” He was prepared to be entertained.

She said, “I've got to go, remember?” She escaped.

She wondered if the mailboat would bring Jamie back today, or the Coast Guard. A dreadful anticipation overwhelmed her until she heard Quint walking around overhead. Yes, he was somewhat like Con, but more vulnerable. Con had lost his parents young, but he'd had adoring relatives, to hear him tell it. She hadn't been a refuge for Con, she'd been just someone else to adore him and give him what he wanted.

She hadn't been able to refuse him anything, even Phyllis. But how far away it all seemed, the soreness was all worn off. Any immediate pain was connected with Jamie; she thought of him without a name, she could not say it even in her thoughts, and wondered how long it would be before she could say it. Would anyone notice if she didn't go to the cemetery? She had had a crawling dread of funerals since her mother's, when she was fourteen; she had gotten through her father's by some form of self-hypnosis.

She tacked a couch cover over the stairway window looking toward the harbor, and carried a basin of wash water, with soap and towel, up to Quint. “I wish we could eat downstairs,” she said, “but I don't dare take chances.”

“Never mind, we'll go right back to bed.”

“I have to mail your letter, remember. I want to get down there before the boat comes.” So I won't have to see many people. So I won't see if they've brought him. . . . She made up the beds and went back down to fix a hearty breakfast.

The small bedroom was pleasant in the morning, with the misty sunlight coming in, and the scent of the woods stirred up by the wind. They were both hungry in spite of what haunted them, both shared and private.

When they'd finished he tried to coax her back onto the bed with him. “Just to be matey, that's all. . . . Come on, love.” His eyes were shining with innocent greed.

She needed days of rain to end the drought. She stood in the doorway, her toes curled in her moccasins and her arms folded as if in defense against her own instincts; below her armpits her fingertips dug painfully into the tender area over her ribs.

“Your letter, remember.”

“To hell with the letter.”

“That's what you say
now
, but after the boat went you'd be saying Christ, I can't hide in this room forever, it's driving me up the wall now.”

He slumped on the edge of the bed looking at his feet. “I forgot what I was hiding from.”

I made you forget, she thought proudly. I brought you rest. She went over to him and he embraced her around her hips and put his face against her belly. “Don't be gone long.”

“I won't,” she promised. “And stay up here. There are children next door, and other children come there. They might run across into the yard after a ball or the dog, or something.” She took his head in both her hands and tipped it back; he looked blindly up at her and she leaned down and kissed him.

O
nce she was out in the lane the atmosphere became staggeringly oppressive. Even the Percy house was unusually quiet for this hour of the morning, as if the children were being kept in because their noise would be disrespectful to the dead. The dead. THE DEAD. It couldn't be.
Just stick your head out the door and whistle
. I should've done that, she thought wildly. I'll bet he'd come. It had to be someone else Quint saw. But the yellow hair. Who else is that blond? Maybe that's what sticks in his mind, but it was someone else he hit.

With consternation she saw that she was almost at the wharf, and she wasn't yet prepared to look Mark Bennett in the eye. Should she say, “I'm sorry,” or pretend she'd been at home sick and hadn't heard anything yet? How could she carry that off? She never could hide anything, good or bad.

“You young ones come up off that wharf
now!
” Maggie Dinsmore was hurrying down through the shed, Tiger rushing ahead of her. She hadn't noticed Rosa, who stood by the railing over the water and looked out across the windy gray-gold harbor without seeing it, trying to get up the strength to walk into the store, drop the letter in the slot under the post-office window, and walk out again.

Someone came out of the store behind bet, talking. “That chopper, won't be back today. It's breezing on all the time.” It was Terence Campion. He was not speaking to Rosa. Someone had come out with him, who answered.

“They won't find him now anyway, poor bastard. He's on bottom somewhere. . . . Hi, Rosa! Where you been?”

She had no time to assimilate the familiarity of a voice which she had known she would never hear again. At the sound of her name she turned and looked into Jamie's face.

Campion nodded and smiled at her and went away. She seemed to see it without taking her eyes off Jamie. She knew her mouth was open, her chin shaking.

Jamie gripped her upper arm, where Quint had gripped, and it hurt. “Are you all right? You look sick.”

She had a dizzying sense of mixed-up time, as if it were happening again, the day she heard from her lawyer and stood out here with the letter.
Are you all right?
Jamie had asked her then.
You're feather-white
.

Today he had a scraped and bruised cheekbone. “I'm lightheaded,” she said unsteadily. “I've been having summer complaint. I shouldn't have come out, I guess, but I—this letter—”

He took it from her without looking at it, and went inside to mail it. She leaned against the wall, feebly waiting. Her head wanted to fly off her shoulders. When he came out again he said, “Is there anything you want from the store?”

“No, I'll just go home and go back to bed.” She laughed weakly.

“How about a bucket of fresh water? Have you got any aspirin?”

“Oh, I'm over the worst of it,” she assured him. “I just n-need to sleep it off. So don't worry about me. I've got plenty of water keeping cold in the refrigerator, and juice, and stuff.” Her voice rattled around in her head like dry peas in a pail.

“All right. But—” He braced his hand on the weathered shingles by her shoulder and said in a low voice, “How about the other thing? I mean, you getting things kind of sorted out? Not feeling so upset?”

“I think so.” God, if her legs didn't give way here and now. “I mean, what's the sense? It's not the end of my life.”

She couldn't get a deep breath. Maybe she
was
sick. This could be the beginning. Heroines in the old stories used to have brain fever when life became too much for them. They passed into delirium and blissful comas, and woke up with everything solved for them, and their hair cut short and growing out curly even if it hadn't been curly before. A drunken mirth began deep down under her ribs somewhere. Jamie's smile was both agreeable and puzzled.

“Hey, is it that funny?”

“It's funny I fussed so long and now it's—” She waved her hands. “Just nothing. All the time I wasted and it doesn't amount to Hannah Cook. I couldn't keep it from happening, but now that it's happened I'm still alive. I've survived.”

“That's great! That's the way you ought to feel. Can I come up by and by?”

“Not till I'm over this. I think I could sleep for about two days. . . . What was the helicopter around for, all day yesterday?”

“Oh, didn't you hear about the fracas the other night?” He explained, somberly. “Poor cuss, he wasn't even a regular, just somebody filling in for a guy who was sick. Probably thought if he could go a couple of weeks he'd make a bundle, the way they've been doing. Of course anybody can fall overboard any time, that's an occupational hazard, but usually somebody sees it happen and can grab him. But in the middle of the fight, and at night—the carrier was lit up like a liner but that made it just that blacker outside, and if you got the light in your eyes you were blinded. That's how somebody took a swipe at me and I never even saw it coming. He touched his scraped cheekbone. “Laid me low in the bottom of the boat and I was damn near tromped to death by Hugo Bennett's boots. . . . Well, this kid could have been blinded like me and made a misstep, or lost his balance, and gone overboard without anybody seeing him. They say he's got no family to miss him, but that doesn't make it any better. His life must have meant something to
him
.”

Oh, it does, it does! she thought. He's been fighting for his life since he was born. She couldn't look into Jamie's face, she watched the harbor while he was talking, at
Sea Star
swinging slowly in a half-arc at her mooring when the gusts came down over the village; then swinging slowly back. She became aware that he was silent. She roused herself.

“That's who you were talking about when you came out of the store.”

“Yup. We were looking for him all day yesterday. We're going along the shores today on foot. I don't think we'll find him, but some think he may show up rolled up in a mess of kelp. In that case the crows and the gulls will point him out.” He was grim. “We're in everybody's bad books for trying to drive them out that night. Nobody was meant to get hurt, for Pete's sake, we just wanted to make it impossible for them to get that seine overboard. But they called our bluff and went ahead with it. Anybody could see we were firing high. And we went out there and started raising hell to keep the water so roiled up it would drive any herring away. Well, that's when the battle was joined, as the man said.” He had become much older since the last time she'd seen him.

“No knowing what'll happen when things like that get going,” she said. “Well, I'm going home to bed. I'm sorry for what happened. I'm just glad it wasn't somebody from here.”

She pushed away from the shingles. “See you later,” she said, and walked away.
He was alive
. Her whole face felt loose and trembly now, not just her chin.

On the path she met the Percy boys galloping toward the store, slapping their flanks and whinnying realistically. Marjorie came behind them. “Hi!” she said. “Where've you been? I never saw hide nor hair all day yesterday, and not much before that. I started over once yesterday, but Kathy Campion showed up.”

Bless Kathy Campion.—It was easy to sound limp and wobbly, she felt it. “Oh, I've got some bug or other, I'm just lying around and sleeping it off.”

“Oh, hey, do you need anything? I've got stuff for upset stomach, backdoor trot, anything you can mention.”

“Thanks, but all I need now is sleep, I guess.”

“I'll keep the tribe from playing Indian under your windows.”

“Don't be too hard on them.”

“Oh, did you hear about that poor kid?”

“Jamie just told me. It's terrible.”

Once her spruces closed in behind her and the village was hidden, she had the sensation of returning to a reality so concentrated that her brief journey to the outside could have taken place in a dream or delirium.

When she went into the house Quint was sitting on the stairs by the covered window. “I've been looking through a hole,” he said. “Makes it better than a movie. Those kids next door are cute little buggers, aren't they? Their mother's not bad either.” He came down off the landing and as she stood looking at him, trying to think how to begin (why couldn't she simply say, “You didn't kill anybody”) he put his arms around her and burrowed his face in her neck. “I missed you. Isn't that the damndest thing? Just that little while, and I thought you'd never come back, you were giving me away, and I'd—” He lifted his head. His eyes were wet.

“You'd go to jail.”

“No. First thing I thought was I'd never sleep with us wrapped so close we can't tell where one begins and the other leaves off. Then I saw you coming. What it did to me! There's my woman, I thought; And it's the first time I ever thought that about any girl. . . . Surprised me, you know?”

“There'll be no more of it after your friend comes.”

He was smiling. “Listen, I've been thinking. Come on.” He tugged her over to the stairs and made her sit down, one arm around her, the hand in the neck of her blouse. “Just let me handle 'em a little. . . . Look, you're free, and I will be. As soon as I get somewhere safe, where I won't be likely to run into somebody who knows me, will you come?”

All she had to do was tell him that Jamie was alive, and it would be ended. She said desperately, “If you'll take your hand away—” She tried to move it. “It's distracting. I can't think.”

“You're not intended to think about anything but how good we go together.” His touch was delicately exacerbating. “You know what, you're my rock of ages.” He sang in a light true voice. “‘Rock of ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee.'”

“That's practically blasphemy!”

“Why? It's not the Bible, it's just words some guy once wrote and put to music, like you.”

“But he meant—”

“Never mind what he meant. I know what I mean. . . . And it's not all one-sided, is it, Rosa?” He dropped his voice, his warm breath played over her ear. “If you're great for me, I know I'm pretty damned good for you.”

“Yes, you are,” she said. Tell him now, and he'll be gone on today's boat.

“Well, don't sound so sad about it.” He took his hand from her breast and put it under her chin, turning her face around to him. “What's wrong? Don't you think I mean it about you being my woman? Hey, you depressed about that guy? You must have known him. Did you run into sad faces down there? Talk about the funeral, maybe? Jesus, funerals are awful and it's kind of sickening to think I caused this one, even if I didn't mean it. Was he married? Have kids?”