Second Nature

by Alice Hoffman

  Up in his bedroom, Matthew Dixon, who had begun to pack and would be leaving in only a few days for his sophomore year at Cornell, watched this whole encounter from his window. It had been interesting enough to pull him away from his computer terminal, although he had just managed to access several calling-card numbers he would soon put to good use, making as many long-distance calls as he wished without ever having to pay the charges. He felt almost as if he had caught something, the way he did when he tricked feral cats into coming right to him by setting out open cans of tuna. He was smart enough to know that something had just happened there in his driveway. He had learned a great deal about people by scrolling through their lives, as he often did when he gained entry to private files. With a few choice facts he could predict what people would do. What bills someone would hold off paying, for instance, when going bankrupt. How long it would take until a person realized his money card had been accessed—by the mysterious creature Matthew became at the keyboard in order to make unauthorized withdrawals from an account. But Matthew never would have predicted that Stephen would frighten the deer away, or that he’d stand in the driveway until he was certain she was gone.

  When Stephen went home, he took the same route as the deer, but where the deer had gone on toward Cemetery Road and the woods just beyond, Stephen crossed the Carsons’ lawn. Most of the neighbors were already asleep, but in the Carsons’ driveway, Marco Polo faced Stephen with his great rolling bark. Stephen stopped where he was, beside the hedge of lilacs. He crouched down and called the dog to him. Still, the basset hound continued to bark. He simply wouldn’t budge. Marco Polo was old, he slept on the couch and was spoiled with dog biscuits and saucers of cream, but he certainly wasn’t a fool. Any dog knows the difference between a man and a wolf. And long after Stephen had gone inside the house, and had begun to walk down the hall to Robin’s room, Marco Polo went on barking, his face pointed upward, toward the moon.

  Kay no longer kept sugar and flour and English breakfast tea in the glass canisters along her kitchen counter. She had replaced all that with shells collected from every trip she had taken since her divorce, including that first tearful vacation to Sanibel Island, when she’d wept over each conch and sand dollar and reached out for Stuart every night for a week as she slept, out of habit and perhaps just a little regret. Since then, she’d traveled to Puerto Rico and Cancún, to Boca and Bermuda and a Club Med on a pink island so tiny it had never been given its own name. Each time she returned from a trip she filled another glass canister with mementos, although now when she searched a beach for shells she was quite systematic and not at all teary. She knew exactly what was worth keeping and what she might just as well toss back into the sea.

  Kay planned to visit every damn beach she’d ever dreamed of when she was married to Stuart and he was too busy to do anything as frivolous as enjoy himself or pay her the least bit of attention. There was a beach in Hawaii with black sand where shells in the shape of children’s ears washed onto shore, and another in Baja where the sand sang beneath your feet and abalones had the sheen of opals. Gregor, the housepainter, had told her about the beach of his childhood, a cove on the Black Sea where the shells were as big as cats: put one under a pillow at bedtime and it would whisper and purr all night long, so that upon awakening you might know much more than you did the day before.

  Kay was in the kitchen, considering the pamphlets she’d picked up at the travel agency, when she noticed that Stuart was leaving. He came to the back door. Kay could see him quite clearly through the window; he had shaved and showered, and his clothes were clean and pressed. His overnight bag was slung over his shoulder, and he carried the bucket and mop Robin had bought him. He slipped the key to the third-floor office under the doormat, and then he did the oddest thing: he went right up to the door and kissed it, with a kiss so tender Kay found that she’d begun to cry. Suddenly, she had the feeling that she didn’t have the faintest idea who Stuart was, and that she never had, and that she probably would never see him again. When he had gone, Kay took the key from beneath the mat and went up to the third floor. She was shocked to discover just how tidy Stuart had left the rooms. The cobwebs were gone, and the refrigerator had been washed with warm water and baking soda; when she went to the window she could smell the vinegar he’d used to clean the glass. He hadn’t left a dirty dish or a ring around the old bathtub, and he certainly hadn’t left a note.

  After Stuart had been gone a few days, Kay called him, just to tell him she’d decided on a trip to Jamaica, where a new hotel had been built so close to the ocean that false angel wings and blue-eyed scallops were sometimes found in the teapots. She phoned his apartment, where the message machine didn’t answer, then tried the hospital, where she was put on hold and later informed that he couldn’t be reached. She had that feeling all over again, that he was gone completely, and yet every once in a while she had the distinct sense that he was near, an impression based, she believed, on the sort of radar that comes only after having slept beside someone for nineteen years. She thought she saw him out of the corner of her eye when she was on line at the market, only to discover that the aisle where she’d imagined he’d been browsing was empty. Could that be Stuart, on the steps of the church? Was that his shadow slipping in between the library doors as they closed? Kay grew more and more edgy, but perhaps that was only because Gregor was starting to bore her—he was a crossword fanatic and had the ability to ignore her for hours while studying clues. “Alpha’s opposite,” he’d mutter to himself. “Hep-burn’s forte,” he’d muse. “Pride goeth before this,” he’d whisper into his beer.

  After several more days of trying to contact Stuart, Kay phoned Robin, who seemed unconcerned when she heard that her brother couldn’t be reached.

  “Oh, he’ll turn up,” Robin said cheerfully. “You know Stuart.”

  But in fact, that was the point. Kay wasn’t quite sure that she did. She began to worry in earnest: He was dead in a ditch. He was homeless and drunk, surviving in alleys on cat food and rainwater. He had ended it all by hanging himself, perhaps from the lowest branch of one of the oaks on his grandfather’s old estate, and wouldn’t be found until spring. Kay began to dream about him, slow, languid dreams in which he was a young man, a boy really, serious and sweet, but absolutely deaf to her whenever she called his name.

  As for Stuart, he hadn’t been giving much thought to his dreams. He wasn’t even certain if he was dreaming at all, though anytime his patients had offered that as an excuse to avoid self-examination he’d never believed them. He was sleeping more soundly than he’d imagined possible, here, in the fisherman’s shack where he’d spent so much time as a boy. Since then, dozens of other boys had made use of the shack; they’d run away from home, for an afternoon or an evening, they’d had pirate clubhouses and, after they’d turned fourteen, secret beer bashes as well. Lovers had been here, on nights when they needed privacy, and they’d listened to the wind in the marsh grass and sworn that someone was sighing.

  Everyone who had used the shack, and had thought of it as his or her own, had left something behind: charred firewood and fishhooks, Coke bottles and beer cans, homework that had never been turned in, tubes of lipstick, blankets that had grown moldy over time, intertwined hearts etched into the walls with burning-hot coals. Stuart cleared most of the mess away in a matter of hours, and then set to work with his mop and dust rags. The weather was still warm and fine, so he tied one of the rags around his forehead to make certain that sweat wouldn’t drip into his eyes. After all the trash was sorted and ready to be carried to the dump, and the old wooden floor was so clean it squeaked under his feet, Stuart walked through the marsh grass to the beach and threw himself into the water, and all the rest of the day he licked his lips, enjoying the taste of salt.

  Why shouldn’t he buy wood putty and new panes of glass at the hardware store? Why not have a mattress and army blankets and a Coleman stove delivered right to the road above the beach, even though the deliveryman insi
sted it wasn’t a proper address? He dug a latrine and bought a wheelbarrow to cart away the trash; he used the public phone near the town green to phone the New York Times classifieds and place an ad to sublet his apartment, then bought fresh coffee and bread at the bakery and ate his lunch on the beach, where the sea gulls snapped up any crumbs. Now that he had all the time in the world, time itself had become a different thing. He could blink and there was a fish on his line. He could turn around twice and the sun would already be setting.

  He ate one of the peaches he’d bought at the market for supper, a piece of fruit so delicious he shivered with every bite. And when the sun went down, and the air grew cool, that complicated August air that evoked both summer and autumn, he looked upward, waiting. The sky was inky and immutable, and then, quite suddenly, it cleared. When he saw the stars it was as if he were seeing each light for the very first time. What could be more beautiful? Nothing in heaven, nothing on earth. He sat studying the night until his neck ached, and still he felt he couldn’t get quite enough of the sky. He didn’t bother to cover the windows in the shack with pillowcases, as he had planned, and he fell asleep in a wash of starlight, that deep, dreamless sleep that made him smile even before he closed his eyes.

  And that’s the way they found him, when they rushed through the door, already tangled together, their hands all over each other. They hadn’t managed to sneak out for the night in more than a week, and they were more desperate for each other than ever. Soon the school term would begin and they’d have to pass in the hallways, satisfied with only a whisper and the promise of later.

  “Have you missed me?” Lydia asked, after she’d pulled her T-shirt off.

  Connor nodded yes; he would have agreed to anything to please her.

  “Have you thought about me every minute we’ve been apart?” she wanted to know.

  Connor put his arms around her. When he swallowed, his head rang; he was ready to explode. Lydia kissed him, then pulled away.

  “Every second?” she whispered.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Connor said.

  When he saw Stuart in the shed he couldn’t catch his breath, but instinctively he pushed Lydia behind him to protect her, although from what he wasn’t exactly sure.

  “It’s my uncle,” Connor told Lydia.

  “Is he dead?” Lydia peered at Stuart. “We should check his pulse.”

  She was, Connor thought lovingly, the most practical girl in the world. As Lydia fumbled to slip her T-shirt back on, Connor went to kneel beside the body. Stuart was still smiling, and because Connor had never seen him look anything but anxious, he assumed his uncle was dead.

  “Oh, man,” Connor said. “I think he is.”

  Lydia came up beside Connor and took Stuart’s wrist into her own capable hands. “I wish I hadn’t lost my Swatch,” she said.

  Stuart’s eyes fluttered, then opened. He looked at Connor, then at Lydia, who, in her hurry, had put her shirt on inside out. He would have asked what they were doing there, if the answer hadn’t been so apparent.

  “I’ve taken over your shack,” Stuart guessed. “I’ve put you out.”

  “He’s alive,” Lydia announced, proudly, as though she had personally brought him back from the other side.

  “Yeah,” Connor said without much conviction. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness and now he could see the improvements his uncle had made—no more garbage or broken glass, no more hideaway for him and Lydia. “You’re planning on staying here?” Connor asked his uncle.

  Stuart raised himself up on his elbows. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “I’m not planning.”

  When people on the island heard the news about Stuart they clucked their tongues and shook their heads and swore they’d known all along he’d wind up this way. What could anyone expect with a family like his? Of course he was now talking to bluefish on the beach and reading old novels Lydia Altero got him from the free bin at the library. Kay’s travel agent was the one who told her that Stuart was claiming squatter’s rights and, by all accounts from the clerks in the hardware store, was about to put a wood-burning stove into his shack. He’d ordered a set of the finest fish-scaling knives made in Bar Harbor, Maine, and bought a pair of knee-high boots for walking through the marsh. He’d started going to the AA meetings at the Episcopal church on Wednesday nights, though as far as anyone could tell, he didn’t have the slightest drinking problem.

  Kay drove over to the north beach the following morning. Stuart wasn’t her responsibility, she knew that. Still, there was such a thing as a clear conscience. She’d just take a peek. She parked at the beach lot, then walked the rest of the way on the road, which curved around the marshes and was often filled with mud puddles. A green heron fishing in the reeds frightened her. That was completely ridiculous. She was a member of the Audubon Society; she had been to this beach a thousand times before and had no reason on earth to be nervous. The tumbledown shacks were scattered along the beach, but she knew Stuart’s as soon as she saw it. There was a wheelbarrow propped against the far wall and, leading from the front door to the marsh, a path lined on either side with shells. Oyster shells, she could tell that from where she stood on the road, creamy white with purple hearts, dropped from above by gulls to split open on the rocks, then carefully gathered by Stuart. Kay stood there on the road for so long that the heron took her for a statue and came close enough for her to see its heart beating in its chest. By the time she’d turned and walked back to her car, Kay had decided to put off her trip to Jamaica, at least until after Christmas. The weather was good enough right where she was. Summer was ending with pale golden sunlight and a sky full of geese, already headed south to the Carolinas, where the beaches, she’d heard, were excellent, although not quite as fine as this one, which was just two and a half miles from her front door.

  In the last week of August, Marco Polo was found in his driveway with his throat slashed. Jeff Carson covered him with a beach towel, and toward evening he buried him in the backyard, beneath the forsythia, where the dog had always hidden on days when he was to be taken to the vet for a bath. People whose backyards abutted the Carsons’ yard pulled down their shades and turned away, rather than watch Miriam throw herself on the dog’s grave. That was too painful to see; it was bad enough that everyone could hear her wailing, all through the night, and that they remembered how she had fed the basset hound cream and called him sweetie when she took him out for his morning walk.

  For days afterward there were bloodstains in the driveway. People kept their pets inside, and George Tenney, who came to comfort Miriam and wound up with her hysterical when he told her they’d probably never find the culprit, took to suggesting that people build kennel runs for their dogs and lock their front doors. By Labor Day, tempers all over seemed to flare, perhaps because of a heat wave, a final burst of summer that often accompanied the beginning of the school term. Michelle Altero had several overwrought girls come to the guidance office on those first days of school; there were rumors that the dog had been killed by a maniac, a slasher who wandered through the marshes and along Cemetery Road looking for his next victim. Michelle gave each girl smelling salts and a good talking to, then sent her back to homeroom. But the truth was, even Michelle couldn’t concentrate on her work. She had tried to discuss with Paul what ever it was that was wrong.

  “I just don’t feel well,” she’d told him. “Things aren’t right.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What can we do about it?”

  Well, she’d dropped it right then and there; he’d assumed she wanted him to fix something, but it wasn’t like that. It was something inside, some kind of loneliness, a bitter thing for which there was no easy cure. She felt as if her one pleasure in life was her twelve-year-old, Jenny, a sweet, genuine girl who was still enough of a child to take Michelle’s hand occasionally when they walked down the street and who often asked to have stories read to her when she was sick in bed. Jenny had been particularly helpful lately, perhaps only because she was afr
aid her mother’s temper might be unleashed. She’d done the laundry the week before as best she could, but accidentally had mixed in the dark colors with the whites; she’d fixed macaroni and cheese one day and brownies from a mix the next. When Michelle saw the plate of unevenly cut brownies on the kitchen table she had burst into tears.

  It just wouldn’t do. She would have to snap out of this, ready or not. She had her hair permed; then she set about seriously to work and didn’t think about the fact that her husband didn’t understand her and her older daughter didn’t talk to her, and it was going quite well, actually, this new regime, until the third Friday of the month, a lovely crisp day when the girls at school could at last wear their new corduroy slacks and their denim jackets. She and Julie Wynn had just led a seminar in drug awareness for interested faculty members, and Michelle was on her way back to her office when she saw Lydia and Connor beside the water fountain. Lydia’s arms were around him; she had to stand on her tiptoes to kiss him, and she didn’t stop kissing him until the bell for class had rung.

  Connor saw Michelle first. He took Lydia’s hand and nodded. Lydia stared across the hallway at her mother as if she were a total stranger.

  “Get into my office,” Michelle said to her daughter. “Now.”

  “She’s only late to class because of me,” Connor said, unaware that no one was interested in what he had to say. Not about this.

  “You’re not my boss,” Lydia said to her mother. She was wearing long silver earrings that chimed when she tossed her head. “I don’t have to do whatever you tell me.”

  “Oh, yes, you do,” Michelle said.

  “Technically, she really doesn’t have to,” Connor said. “There’s a five-minute grace period after the bell.”