What You Have Left (18 page)

Hugh had promised that the kid would be out of the picture this week, staying with his dad. It doesn't look like he's staying with his dad. It looks like he's come outside to do a chore for his mother—unhook the hammocks and pile them in the crate. Wylie has half a mind to leave. If it weren't for the money, he would. But he needs the thirty bucks. Every penny is one penny closer to getting out of the By the Sea Motel and into an apartment where he won't be ashamed to bring his daughter. So he slips quietly from the car and cuts through the grass, hoping to avoid the boy. But just as he reaches the porch, the kid spins around, startled, as if Wylie has materialized from thin air.

“You must be Ted,” Wylie says. It never hurts to be sure. He tries for a neighborly smile, would offer his hand if he thought he could keep it steady.

“Yes, sir?” The boy studies his face. Wylie knows it's not a pretty sight, what he's done to himself these past few years. After the funeral, when he left Holly, he'd meant to be gone only a couple of days, a little time to figure things out. He didn't plan on staying gone. He was only a few years shy of making district claims manager at State Farm, was already saving for the down payment on a nice little house in Forest Acres with room in the driveway for a bass boat, maybe a deck out back. You don't plan to ditch a life like that. But two months later found him in Atlanta, passing afternoons in the cheap seats at Fulton County Stadium. Another month and he'd begun a string of jobs that were easy to get, easy to leave—tending bar in Bamberg, pumping gas at a Beaufort marina, driving a mill truck out of Greenville. What he did mostly, though, was drink, every single day for almost three years, a stretch of time that bends and ripples in his memory, as if seen underwater, or through a glass. In the end, it took a DUI and ninety days in the Horry County Jail to dry him out; if he still looks like a drunk stumbling off the highway, so it goes.

“School out for the hurricane?”

Ted nods.

Wylie glances at the store. He's close enough now to see three women watching from the window. “Last I heard, they're saying the storm's out of gas.”

Ted shakes his head. “It is not.”

Wylie shades his eyes. Up and down the highway, it's sunny skies, the South Carolina you know from postcards. “What makes you so sure?”

“My mom,” Ted says. “She saw the Gray Man.”

“Who's that?” Wylie says, though he already knows. When he was Ted's age, his grandmother used to sit on the dock behind their beach cottage, plying him with ghost stories so long as he kept her paper cup three fingers full of sherry. He must have heard the legend of the Gray Man a hundred times.

“Don't you know?” Ted says, lowering his voice like they're sitting around a campfire. “The ghost.”

And Wylie can't resist. “Tell me the story?”

“It's not a story,” Ted says. “It's true.” He takes his time getting settled on one of the joggling boards, clearly glad for a break from his chores. “What happened was, once upon a time, there was this man—he lived on Pawleys Island—this was back when people rode horses instead of cars. And he was going to see his girlfriend. He was going to ask her to marry him.” Ted smirks at this. “But his horse wasn't watching where he was going, and he stepped in quicksand, and they both got swallowed up and died.”

“That must have broken the girlfriend's heart.” Wylie takes a seat on the other end of the joggling board, and the boy automatically starts it bouncing.

“It did,” Ted says. “She spent the whole next day crying and walking on the beach all by herself. And that's when she saw the man. Only he wasn't a normal man. He was all gray.”

“Her boyfriend?”

Ted nods impatiently—
of course.
“But when she reached out to touch him, her hand went right through and then he just turned into a puff of fog.” That night, Ted says, the girl dreamed she was in a boat in the middle of the ocean during a terrible storm. It scared her so much, she made her whole
family leave the island the next morning. “They thought she was crazy”—Ted twirls a finger around his ear—“but then a hurricane came and killed everybody on the island. They all drowned. The crabs and sharks ate their guts.”

“Mmm,” Wylie says, rubbing his stomach. “Pickled people.”

It takes Ted a moment to stop giggling and get back to his campfire voice. “Now the Gray Man walks up and down the beach whenever there's a storm. He comes to warn everybody who's smart enough to listen.”

“To warn everybody?” Wylie says. “I always figured he was coming back to look for what he'd lost.”

The joggling board comes to a stop. “I thought you never heard of him.”

Wylie manages a smile. Right now,
he
could use a cup of sherry. “You know, maybe I did hear it once.” But when he winks at the boy, all he gets is a flat stare.

“Actually,” Wylie says, checking his watch, “I'm here to see your mother. She around?”

Inside the boutique, three women are speaking in low voices at the register. They stop talking and beam bright smiles at Wylie as he comes in. Any of them could be Ted's mother. A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead—like Neapolitan ice cream, Wylie thinks. Quarts of it have taken the place of vodka in his icebox. The brunette sets down her mug and comes out from behind the counter. “Can I help you?”

She has a swagger not unlike Maddy's—a woman who knows how long her legs are—and Wylie is surprised to think he was married to a woman like that. That a woman like that would have been married to
him.
When he thinks of
her, the picture he always gets is from a spring night in 1972, the two of them taking turns pushing a stroller down a dusty lane on Cal's farm, praying dear God for the baby to stop howling and fall asleep. Maddy sauntering along in a halter top and short-shorts, sipping High Life from a bottle she kept tucked in the baby's blanket, him thinking she looked too good to be pushing a stroller.

“I'm here to see Tracy Evans,” he says.

A look passes among the women, a crisscross of glances too quick for Wylie to untangle. Hugh had promised that Tracy wasn't expecting the summons, but it's clear they're on to him. The brunette tucks a stray curl behind her ear, picks an imaginary bit of lint from the sleeve of her yellow blouse. “Tracy's out buying tape for the windows.”

She may as well have said,
There, I'm lying. What are you going to do?
Which is par for the course. In the past few months, Wylie has been cursed, threatened, even spit on.

“The boy said she was here.”

“That kid's in his own world,” she says. “If you ask me, his mom lets him play too much of that—what's it called?”

“Dungeons and Dragons,” says the redhead.

“I've been asked to deliver some papers. If it's no trouble, I'll just wait.”

“Papers?” the brunette says.

Wylie clears his throat. “Legal documents.”

“You mean custody papers.”

“I don't read them,” Wylie says. “I just deliver them.” Which is bullshit, of course. And anyway, what the documents don't tell him, Hugh does. Wylie knows that Tracy's ex-husband is Boyd Evans, the developer, a man who's made his mint off blue-hairs from New Jersey, a builder of expensive oceanfront condos, proof you can't buy good taste. In the
year since the divorce, Ted has been living with Tracy, but now that Boyd is remarrying, he wants his son. To hear Hugh tell it, Tracy doesn't stand a chance.

“If you say so,” she says. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got work to do.”

Judging from the silence that settles over the boutique as the brunette slips out the door, Wylie would bet the ranch that she's the one he wants. The redhead busies herself rearranging knickknacks on a shelf—coral paperweights, necklaces made of seashells, sand dollars painted to look like cats. “Hey, Barb,” she says. “Why don't you get us a weather report?”

“In a sec.” Barb the Blonde is dropping strawberries and ice cubes into a blender. Frozen daiquiris, at eleven in the morning. That's what a hurricane will do for you, Wylie thinks—it'll turn a Tuesday into a holiday. Folks are either running for their lives or throwing a party. He goes to the window to make sure Tracy isn't headed for one of the cars. To his relief, she's staying put just beyond the porch, helping Ted load the last of the hammocks into the crate. And if he had any lingering doubt that this was in fact Tracy Evans, it's gone now; anyone with two eyes could see that she and the boy belong together.

The redhead strolls over to the television and flips through the channels as Barb tops off the blender with a healthy pour of rum. Wylie can smell the sweet bite of it all the way across the room. What he wouldn't do for one quick pull from that bottle.

“I know that's Tracy out there,” he says. “And I know she's your friend. But the judge is going to call this obstruction of justice.”

“Shh,” Red says, adjusting the TV volume as Barb clicks
off the blender. Even Wylie turns to watch. For once, the lead story isn't inflation or the arms treaty; it's Hurricane David— shots of military police on standby in Florence, yachtsmen at Kiawah towing their boats out of the water. A man from the Department of Wildlife and Marine Resources tells a reporter that the flooding may cause snakes and alligators to be uprooted from their natural habitats.
They're liable to turn up anywhere—your yard, your house, your swimming pool.

“Did you know,” Barb says, “that this is the first year they've named hurricanes after men?”

“About time,” says Red, smiling at Wylie as she opens the door for Ted and his mother. They're coming up the steps with the crate, which they angle through the doorway and carry toward the back of the shop.

“Stick these in here?” Tracy asks as they disappear into the storeroom.

Barb nods, then points a crumpled pack of Salems in Wylie's direction. “Smoke?”

“No, thanks.”

“I know, nasty habit.” She lights up, shakes the match out with a soft laugh. “I'll quit as soon as I learn two things: how they make 'em so good, and how they make 'em so cheap.”

But Wylie isn't listening. He's already past both women, on his way to the storeroom.

“Hold on,” Barb says. “You can't go in there.”

When Wylie opens the door, the room is deserted, no sign of Tracy or Ted except for the overturned crate and its coils of rope. Then he hears a car. He follows the sound through the back door, out into the blustery afternoon. Sure enough, it's the 280ZX, hidden between the dumpster and a wilted row of wax myrtles. Tracy nearly clips him as she backs out.

It's not until then, as he steps aside to let the car pass—as he sees the boxes and suitcases piled in the hatchback—that it dawns on him: Rather than risk losing her son in court, Tracy is kidnapping him, has been planning to all along. And what better cover than a hurricane? What better lie to tell the kid? It's just dumb luck he caught her at the boutique, maybe picking up her last paycheck, borrowing some extra cash, saying good-bye.

Wylie hurries around the building in time to see her turn north onto the highway. In the past four months, he's yet to fail at delivering a packet, and he doesn't intend to start today. As he climbs into his car, Tracy's friends come out onto the porch and stand at the rail, drinks in hand, not quite smiling. They look at him like they know everything—not just about his sleazy job, but also the daughter he left, the dead wife whose grave he doesn't visit. They're looking at him like he gets what he deserves.

Wylie catches up with Tracy at a stoplight just south of Myrtle Beach and follows her for about a mile, until she pulls into Coastal Federal Savings. Aside from the gas stations and the Winn-Dixie, the bank is the only place in town doing any business, people getting money for the road, not knowing what they'll find when they return: flattened homes, washed-out bridges, power lines writhing like tentacles in the streets. But if Wylie's right, Tracy won't be coming back. She's here to empty her account. Getaway cash.

By the time he finds a parking space, she's already heading across the lot, moving like there's no time to lose. Wylie doesn't like having been tricked, made a fool of, and as he watches her sidestep a scuttling windblown can, he has to
keep reminding himself: Here's a woman taking a big risk, giving up everything for her kid—no more alimony, no more country club, no more fancy house on the marsh. How can he be angry? In fact, he's rooting for her. Because, really, they're in the same boat. For a moment he even allows himself to imagine them ditching the Datsun together, stopping in Columbia for Holly (
Sorry, Cal, step aside
), then heading up I-77—two parents on the lam with their kids, trying to salvage what's left of their lives.

Once Tracy is inside, Wylie approaches the car, careful that the boy doesn't see him. He wants to be sure he doesn't give Tracy another chance to make this harder than it already is. Ted is leafing through a stack of comic books and drinking a Tab. Wylie can't imagine how Tracy has explained to Ted what happened back at the boutique—assuming the boy believes they're just running from the hurricane—but no doubt Wylie gets tagged as the villain. Which is perfectly understandable, but still he feels bad about the way things turned out with Ted, because he thought they'd hit it off pretty good—a lot better than he usually does with kids. Usually they're scared of him. He can see it in their eyes when he smiles at them in line at Eckerd's, when he stops to admire their sandcastles on the beach. Just yesterday, at the post office mailing cash to Holly, he'd knelt down to pick up a little girl's Slinky from the floor and she'd refused to take it from his jitterbug hand. Now he wishes he had some candy in his pocket, wishes he knew even one Princess Leia joke that wasn't X-rated
—
anything to show the kid he's not so bad.