Turtle Moon (10 page)

"Well?" Julian says.

"If you could give me a ride home, I'd appreciate it," Lucy says.

"Otherwise, I'll call a taxi."

There's less than twenty inches between them in the front seat, so Julian leans up against the door. "I haven't mentioned to Walt Hannen that it was your boy who called nine-one-one. But you and I know it was. I haven't even told him that alligator in the shoe box wasn't some kind of voodoo offering. I think you can tell me what she pawned."

While Lucy considers this, Julian turns the key in the ignition, then pulls out and makes a Uturn.

"A sapphire necklace, less than three weeks ago, Lucy finally admits.

"She had money," Julian says.

"Had," Lucy says. "Before she got divorced."

She stares out the window as they drive east, toward Verity. "It wasn't as if he killed that alligator," she says finally. "He tried to feed it lettuce but it died anyway.

"I never said he killed it," Julian says.

"It just died in our bathtub."

"All right, it died. Did it happen to have two gold rings with it when it was interred or whatever the hell you did with it?"

Lucy crosses her legs and moves so that her back is up against her door. "No," she admits.

"There weren't any rings."

"There you have it," Julian says.

"What do you have?" Lucy demands.

"He stole those two rings." Julian glances over at Lucy when he should be looking at the road.

"We both know he did."

"So what does that prove?" Lucy says.

"Nothing," Julian says. "Except that he's a thief."

As they pass through the outskirts of Verity, where the alligator farms once stood, Julian knows that he has to get rid of her fast. He's talking like a maniac. If he's not careful, he'll be acting like one, too. "I never said he killed anyone."

"You just thought it," Lucy says icily.

"No," Julian says. "You're the one thinking it."

When he steals a look at her he can see that pulse in her throat again.

"Look, don't hit yourself over the head for it. You have a perfect right to be suspicious. This is a kid who's been looking for trouble.

Believe me. I know. I killed a man when I was seventeen."

He can hear Lucy's breathing quicken and he knows just how far gone he is. If he doesn't stop soon, he's going to have to buy himself a muzzle.

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Lucy says.

The light coming through the car windows is so clear and yellow Julian almost forgets what day this is. It's his birthday, the most horrible day of a horrible month, when there shouldn't be any light around him.

At least he has the satisfaction of not having blurted that out, because if she or anyone else felt pity for him he wouldn't be able to bear it. He would curl up right here, on the road that leads to Verity, and in all probability he would never be able to rise to his feet again.

The Angel lies on his back, beneath the tree, looking up through the branches at a Delta flight headed north to La Guardia Airport. He has been nineteen for a very long time, and although he can still climb to the top branches of the gumbolimbo tree in less time than it takes to blink an eye, and still wears the same white T-shirt and blue jeans as always, his presence has never been detected. He no longer leaves footprints on the ground.

Once he had been the most beautiful boy in Verity. His hair was as yellow as butter; he had rolled over in his crib and smiled at the age of two weeks. Everyone called him Bobby, except for his mother, who called him darling or sweetheart, as if his own name wasn't good enough for him. She adored him, and she had every right to, but her sister-in-law, Irene, was so jealous that she cursed the day he was born. When Bobby was two he noticed that his Aunt Irene was gelling much bigger, as if she had eaten a melon seed and it had taken root inside her stomach. But she was still as sour as a lemon; she fought with Karl at the diner over the price of a cup of coffee, she wandered through the aisles of the general store, weeping as she looked for molasses and canned soup. Her face swelled up, and in the end she gained so much weight she couldn't walk without a wooden cane. When she was thin again and had no baby to show for it, nobody asked any questions. But on deep, starry nights the grownups talked about her as they sat on their front porches, fanning away the mosquitoes and drinking iced tea, and that was how Bobby learned he had a cousin somewhere.

He thought quite a lot about the baby that had been given away, and as soon as Bobby turned nine and was allowed to wander off by himself, he set off to find him. The cousin, who was seven, lived with a woman old enough to be his grandmother. Every day he sat out on her front porch, collecting small red toads, waiting to be found. After they discovered each other, the boys played every day, secretly at first, and by the time they were eleven and thirteen they were inseparable. Nothing could have kept them apart. By then, Irene had disappeared, to Virginia or North Carolina, no one was sure, and most people had forgotten that the boys were cousins. The younger boy was the shadow of the older in all things, except for one. He had a bad streak; you could see it just by looking at him. When he was angry he'd make such a horrible noise people close by had to cover their ears. As he grew older he looked for trouble. He began to drink and, what was worse, to steal, even from his own cousin, whom he loved more than anyone in the world. He couldn't seem to stop himself until he had stolen his cousin's girlfriend, although that was not what they fought about on the night of the accident.

It was the younger cousin's birthday, and he'd had too much to drink.

They were driving toward town in his Oldsmobile, a beat-up old thing with a huge engine, rebuilt time and time again, arguing about a comb the younger cousin had just stolen from the general store. They had never discussed the girl, and if Bobby knew he was being betrayed he didn't let on. For some reason, that just made the younger boy more intent on being bad; he wasn t even in love with the girl, but he kept on seeing her and making love to her, and each time he did he was more bitter than he had been the day before. That night they argued over that stolen silver comb, with a sharp rat tail you could use, if need be, in a fight. A worthless thing you could buy almost anywhere; still, the younger boy would be damned if he'd take it back and pay for it. He wasn't about to take orders from anyone, not even his cousin.

And just to show him, just to show off, he stepped down on the gas, as hard as he could, on a patch of road that was slick with the pulp of strangler figs, on the third day in May.

At the moment of impact, the older cousin, who had smiled so surprisingly and sweetly at the age of two weeks, grabbed for the wheel, and turned it hard, so that the passenger side of the car slammed against the trunk of the gumbolimbo tree. The younger cousin, who refused to black out in spite of the pain, was left with nothing more than a gash in his forehead. The older one, Bobby Cash, has been waiting beneath the tree for the past twenty years, ever since the day he was killed.

The Angel knows very little of what happened next, that his cousin was sent off to the state school in Tallahassee after a summer of self-destruction, that he broke up with the girl who meant so little to him, that he cannot, to this day, look in a mirror without the glass cracking. He doesn't know that his own mother was so consumed with grief she refused anything but water for thirteen days, or that on the first anniversary of his death his parents realized they could no longer live in Florida or that when they moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, they were soon followed by nearly every other member of the family. He can't know these things because he can't go past a two-foot circle around the tree. Years ago, the sap of gumbo-limbos was boiled into glue, then spread on the branches to trap songbirds, and now it is Bobby who can't escape. Most often he appears as nothing more than a wash of low-lying mist, or a black shadow in the shape of a bird's wing.

Except in May, when boys of nineteen sometimes see him as they're breaking the speed limit, and then he always makes certain to throw himself between their cars and the trunk of the tree.

For all these years, the Angel has been waiting to forgive his cousin, or so he has always believed.

At the instant when he did, they would both be released, and finally Bobby would no longer have to be nineteen. But his cousin has never returned, not once, and in the meantime, just two days ago, something quite amazing happened. Bobby fell in love. He was sitting in the same spot as always, his back up against the tree, when she walked across the parking lot, headed straight for him.

She was almost seventeen and her long hair was tinted black and pulled into a ponytail. When she sat down beside him, the Angel remained completely still, just as he did when hawks nested for the night.

Shannon opened a paper bag and took out a hamburger and a Diet Coke, then carefully placed her lunch on the grass. She'd heard rumors about this tree all her life; she knew people who actually believed it was haunted. No one came here, and maybe that was why the grass was so soft; it hadn't been walked on for twenty years. All Shannon wanted was a place to be alone and some time to think. At this moment in her life she truly believed she might be going crazy. No one understood her.

No one noticed that something was utterly wrong.

For as long as she could remember, Shannon had been planning her future. All she had ever wanted was to get out of Verity, and she always believed her salvation would be a college scholarship. Now she had actually been accepted into a summer program at Mount Holyoke for advanced high school juniors, and she wasn't so certain that she cared.

Since September, she had been sabotaging herself, forgetting about papers due, leaving her books in her locker, staying up long past midnight to do nothing but stare out her window. All those extracurricular activities college recruiters so loved were going up in smoke. She hadn't yet dared to tell her mother, but she was so behind in her schoolwork that she'd been called down to the guidance office twice. She hadn't even bothered to try out for the next school play, although she was practically assured of the lead. She had boys all over her, that was part of the problem.

If she wasn't careful, she'd wind up preguant and married at eighteen the way her mother had, and then she'd be stuck in Verity forever.

She wished that her voice wasn't so breathy, as if she'd swallowed too much air, that her eyes, which tended to wander, didn't make her look slightly confused, maybe even dumb. She could be taking calculus at chool, if they offered it; instead she was wearing makeup and shorter skirts, and the future seemed more and more remote each day.

It was a relief to finally be alone. Here, beneath the gumbo-limbo tree, Shannon feels at peace.

Here, it seems possible that she is more than a silly, confused girl who wears strawberry-flavored lip gloss. With every minute she spends beneath the tree, she grows more sure of herself, until it seems to be the only place she wants to be.

She thinks about the sunlight ffltering through the leaves while she sits through her classes, and when the lunch bell rings, she runs all the way to the Burger King, edgy and confused until she sees the tree.

She's drawn here even in her dreams; in her dreams she makes a bed out of twigs, she covers herself with leaves, and sometimes, in the morning, there are tears on her pillow. Already she has begun to wonder how she can ever leave Verity, how she will manage to exist among pines and sugar maples.

Each time the Angel watches her, he's filled with agony. When she goes, he vibrates like a piece of electricity; some of the leaves on the low-growing branches have already been singed. He would do anything to be able to kiss her, but since he can't, he thinks the word kiss. He concentrates so hard that there are times when Shannon's mouth forms a surprised o and her cheeks grow flushed. What he wouldn't give to be real with her for just one hour, to thread his fingers through hers and walk far into the field beyond the Burger King, his arm around her waist. She looks enough like her mother for the Angel to be reminded of his past, but that's not why he begins to radiate bits of light as soon as he sees her, so that the grass beneath him turns pale gold. He understands her completely, he knows what it's like to want to escape and want it desperately. When she thinks about the future, the Angel can see it right along with her, and for this he'll always be grateful.

Through all the years he's been trapped here, time has moved in instants, pure white flashes of empty space. Now, an hour without her is an eternity. And that is how it happens that, after twenty years of waiting for his cousin to show up, the Angel is reclining beneath his tree, thinking about love, when Julian finally finds it in himself to return to the scene of his crime.

"Pull in there," Lucy says as they near the Burger King.

Julian immediately feels light-headed; his hands have begun to sweat.

"I don't think so," he says.

I: "I need to ask if anyone's seen Keith. That's where he hangs out.

That's where he found the alligator." Lucy has already pushed the strap of her purse over her shoulder. "Right in there."

Julian steps on the brakes, but he drops his hands away from the steering wheel.

"Is there a problem?" Lucy asks.

"No problem," Julian says. He feels as if he's just eaten several pounds of sand.

"Well, there's a space," Lucy says.

Julian swallows hard and then turns the wheel.

He drives into the parking lot slowly and edges into a space at the far end.

"Are you coming with me?" Lucy asks as she opens her door.

"You go," Julian says.

He leans his head back and closes his eyes and listens to Lucy's footsteps on the asphalt. What he would like to do is roll up all the windows and lock the doors, but instead Julian forces himself to get out. Loretta watches him through the window, but he leaves her in the backseat. It's too hot for a dog to be out in the sun, and it's not much better for a human being. Sometimes Julian wonders if living in all this heat eventually does something to your brain. In weather like this the air turns into waves, and those waves break down into sharp white circles, so you feel that you're surrounded by stars in the middle of the day.