“Mom,” Meghan started to whine, but quieted when I gave her a warning look.
I held on to Meghan in the kitchen, her back against me, my right arm slung around her chest, just above the soft beginnings of her breasts as Marshall and Ada headed out on their walk. We watched through the screen door as Cal accompanied the couple out to the road, veering away toward his outbuilding and leaving them to make their way, slowly, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, down the pine needle-littered street.
He led her away from the path that led to the beach and the romantic sunset over the Gulf of Mexico that was every Southwest Floridian’s pride. Instead he veered toward the path to the bay, where the sunset would be muted, filling the sky with a light that made everything green glow, everything red a torch. It was less showy than the brilliant fireball sinking into the Gulf, but there was a softening beauty in it, and it was, for me and evidently for my son, even more romantic than the beach.
There were other advantages to ushering in the stars on the bay. I knew that he would show her the right way to leap from rock to rock to make it over to the tiny island without soaking her boots, would identify the wading birds that came out to feed, and might even be able to point out an alligator. And, of course, the real draw was that the bay was almost always empty of people, locals and tourists alike, at this time of day.
I watched them go and had a nostalgic longing for Cal to come gather my hand in his and lead me through the palms and pines, to find me an orchid in a tree, to guide me over a root or make sure I avoided a snake. I envied them their romance.
Meghan held no such notions yet and strained lightly against me. I felt myself tightening my arm before I let her go. She opened the dishwasher and began sliding our dessert bowls into their slots in the top rack, the way I preferred it done.
“So, you like Ada, don’t you?” I asked, moving beside her at the sink to rinse and hand her the dishes. She reached up and turned the radio over the sink on, fiddling with the knob until she found the station she liked, moody, alternative. She bobbed her head as she answered.
“Yeah, she’s cool. Don’t you think so? And she knows a lot about a lot of different things. She said she’d teach me more sign language. And she said she’d help me research stuff, like my allergies. And she said maybe I could visit. Sometime.”
“Really? Well, I think you’re a little young to go visit a college . . .”
“No, I mean when her and Marshall go to meet her family.”
“She and Marshall,” I responded without thinking. “When is this supposed to happen?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“This summer. Can I go?”
“Oh, sweetie, let’s cross that bridge when we get to it, okay? I’ve never met her family, I don’t even know...” I trailed off. Ada had communicated with Meghan. Perhaps all my less-than-subtle questioning had been directed at the wrong people all along. “Meggie,” I said, guilt flashing through me at my conscious use of Ada’s nickname for her. Ah, see? New. I was getting the hang of things. “What has Ada said about her family?”
She slid the dishwasher rack in and manually lifted the door into place, yet another broken hinge in our home. “Just the same stuff she told you. They’re really into, like, no chemicals and stuff.”
“Right,” I said. “I mean, what about their beliefs?”
“You mean their religion.”
“Yes. I suppose.” Meghan had grown up with Marshall’s interest in religion, and she turned to me when she had questions. I always enjoyed our conversations. They gave me an opportunity to remember my parents and their interest in the world, their absolute willingness to discuss every theory as a possibility, and Meghan was learning to be inquisitive about life, which, I admit, I adored.
I loved having these two interesting children here, growing up on the backwater edge of the Everglades. Surrounded by people who’d lived here for generations, who made their livings from fishing or manual labor, it thrilled me to be raising children who could move easily in both worlds. It was vanity, of course, arrogance even, but I could not help but enjoy the thought that I was somehow diluting Cal’s hard genes with my more genteel ones, making a lovely cocktail of children who knew how to think in abstract and didn’t wince at getting their hands dirty or toughened by honest work.
I loved it when Meghan looked at me as she was looking at me now, thoughtful and curious, her brown eyes, flecked with the gold of her father’s, pensive. “I think they’re sort of like Kyle. I don’t really know what the name of their church is, but it’s, you know, their way of life?”
I nodded. Kyle, a friend Marshall had met his senior year in high school, had been a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an interesting young man, but the friendship, for whatever reason, had been short-lived. I wasn’t completely clear on all their beliefs, but at least I had some direction to go in. “Interesting. What makes you think she’s like Kyle?”
“Well, he talked about healing and laying on of hands and stuff, and that’s why she knows sign language, because she learned it before their church healed her sister.”
“What was wrong with her?” I asked, fascinated now.
“She couldn’t talk, or hear, and she was sort of learning challenged, or something. But they healed her, I mean, the people in the church did.”
“She can talk, and hear now?” I asked.
“She didn’t say, she just said they healed her. Do you think that really works?”
And here was where Cal and I differed. Cal would have simply said “no.” I didn’t believe in absolutes. Who was I to say? I couldn’t say that I believed it, but how could I say that it never happened? Because I’d never seen it? Because it wasn’t widely accepted?
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful though?” I wanted her to see possibilities, to accept the right of others to believe what they wanted to, even if it wasn’t what she, or her parents, believed.
She nodded, and then looked out the window, searching the driveway. “Ada said she’d watch Heathers with me if you let us,” she said.
Ah. This? Definitely not new. “Sorry, honey. We’ve discussed this.”
She sighed, a huge, precursor-to-teen-angst sigh. And that was when I knew that yes, this new was good. Because I did not feel dread well in me at the thought of Meghan turning into a teenager. Instead, I could not keep my mouth from curling into a delighted smile. I was looking forward to every bit of it, to seeing her change, and test her boundaries, and blossom—yes, I actually thought the word blossom—into a young woman I was going to be so proud of.
After Marshall and Ada returned we set up the Scrabble board in the living room, and when Cal returned from working in his outbuilding, he joined Meghan as a team. None of us were any match for Marshall though, who seemed lit from within, and this, too, I reveled in.
Cal and I left the children in the living room sometime after eleven, when Ada finally cajoled Meghan into playing the piano for her, and as we climbed the stairs he reached back and took my hand to the strains of Bach. We shared space amicably in the bathroom, and, as couples who have been married for a certain amount of time often do, there were enough allowances between us, an extra carefulness in passing the toothpaste, a courteous holding out of a face towel, that the path was being gently cleared for sex. This was the romance in our marriage, and, I believed, in most long-term marriages.
We laughed softly, talked softly, fell together softly, and then softly drew apart, aware of and pleased that this was one of the good times and our distance had been successfully breached once again. It was an aftermath with a subtly hopeful sheen, a small, quiet bit of promise.
CAL fell asleep quickly, but I was still awake when I heard the kitchen door open and close. I pulled one of Cal’s buttery soft T-shirts over my head and padded to the window. Marshall, Ada, and Meghan moved in the moonlight like reeds, any difference in their build or sex smoothed out from this height. I could have op
ened the window, called down to them to find out what they were doing, but I felt too satisfied with my children, magnanimous in my newfound acceptance of them as young adults.
It startled me to see Marshall walk up the bumper of his car and onto the hood, oddly reminiscent of the way it had startled me to watch him climb the steps to his first day of elementary school. He got his balance on the shape of the hood, then turned around and held out a hand to Ada. She turned her face up to him and raised her arm. I could see that she was laughing, her mouth open in joy as he helped her up on the bumper and then the hood. She clambered onto the roof while Marshall helped Meghan onto the hood.
They joined Ada on the roof and the three of them lay across it, Marshall in the middle, and gazed up at the stars. My children beneath me, safe in the moonlight, my husband sleeping behind me in our sweetly scented bed, I was all rare, feminine contentment.
Had I known what the next twenty-four hours would bring, I would have flung open the window and launched myself out of it, arcing toward my children in an attempt to cover their fragile bodies with my own, to keep them safe from all that was new.
MARSHALL
If she wasn’t talking, Marshall could imagine that Meghan wasn’t there, and he and Ada were alone, looking at the stars. Of course, the times she wasn’t talking were remarkably few and far between. But eventually her small voice faded away as she succumbed to the late hour, and Ada took his hand as they stared up at the sky.
He rolled toward her, raising up on one elbow so he could look down on her face, the skin across her high cheekbones stretched taut and nearly translucent in the moonlight. The soft rush of the surf on the beach filtered through the trees in the quiet, and a barred owl hooted in the distance.
He pushed her collar out of the way with one finger, trailed his fingertips across the base of her neck. She breathed evenly under him, gazing past him at the sky, as if she weren’t aware of his presence.
If he stared hard enough, he thought he could see right through her skin, could see the fine arch of her collarbone, the badge of her sternum. Ada remained still as he pressed his lips to hers and tasted the softness of the inside of her top lip.
He ran his fingertips against the side of her breast and nearly moaned when she arched slightly under him and drew a quick breath, the air flowing in past his lips between them. He pulled his head back so he could see her eyes as he pressed more firmly against her breast, and as he did he heard the train coming.
The sound was faint. Ada was likely confusing it with the sound of the surf, and from years of hearing it he knew it wouldn’t get much louder before fading away again, but before it did... and there it was. Her eyes widened as the whistle sounded and her mouth opened slightly.
“Is that it?” she whispered.
He nodded, but remained silent, waiting. There were always two at night. Unless the engineer saw that something was on the tracks. But usually it was just two. And there the second one was.
As the sound filtered through the pines and palms, Ada closed her eyes and pulled him down toward her, letting him melt into her, responsive rather than passive now, staying quiet so as not to disturb Meghan. When she moved her hand down and pressed hard through his jeans, he nearly expired with sheer happiness.
The whistle died away without him noticing, and as the sound of the engine faded she pushed him away. Clouds moved across the moon, and when he looked at her now, her eyes were dark and shadowed, her lips a deep, swollen stain.
“Come on,” she said. They woke Meghan and got her into bed without waking his parents, and then, after enough time had passed for Meghan to enter a deep sleep, Ada came to him in his childhood room.
When she left him, before dawn, he knew that there was nothing else he would ever want. Everything he had been looking for had been found.
He found his life.
He found salvation.
And, oh yes, he found God.
Five
THE kids were gone by the time I rose that morning, and the sun had already evaporated any traces of the cool night. Cal had been up for hours, as was his custom, and a half-pot of coffee was waiting for me. I poured a cup and padded across the yard to the outbuilding, pausing for a moment to check on the sunflowers, happy that the rabbits hadn’t yet found the tender shoots. Heavy white and green buds were nearly ready to pop on the gardenia. I could already smell them and knew that by this evening at least a few of them would be open, their lush petals as soft as velvet.
I made plans to snip them off their bases and float them in a glass bowl in Meghan’s room, as a treat for Ada. I doubted she’d seen, or smelled, many gardenias in Nebraska, and it was a flower that Meghan tolerated beautifully. Brown thrashers, like tiny hawks with their spotted breasts and sharp yellow eyes, flitted away under the ficus hedge as I reached the door to Cal’s workroom, and I smiled at the sound of him singing along with the Eagles.
“Hey,” I said, stepping over the raised metal threshold. He smiled over a boat engine, his forehead lightly slicked with sweat. “You should have woken me.”
“Ah, I figured I’d worn you out last night. It was only fair of me to let you sleep.”
“The kids get off okay? Did they take something to eat?”
“I gave them a few bananas and fifty bucks. They said they were going to stop at the store.”
“That was generous of you.”
He shrugged. “Don’t want him to run out of gas again.”
“Oh, Cal, you didn’t say that to him, did you?”
“No,” he said, drawing it out as he wiped his oily hands on a pink rag and came around the engine to plant a kiss on my cheek. “I’m keeping our deal in mind. How about you?”
“Well,” I said. “I watched the three of them leave the house last night long after midnight—”
“What?” he interrupted me, his hands still wrapped up in the rag. “You let Meghan go out in the middle of the night?”
“Not finished,” I teased him. He looked at me expectantly. “Of course not. They just hung out in the yard. Climbed up on the car, actually, but never got in it.”
“So spying on them out the window counts as letting them grow up? Hell, if I’d known that I’d have joined you with my binoculars.”
“I wasn’t spying,” I protested. “I heard the door and looked to make sure they didn’t drive off. I saw them lie down on the car and then I got back in bed. I fell asleep before I even heard them come back in.”
He appraised me thoughtfully and finally nodded his head. “Well, all right, Mom. Aren’t we mature?”
“Aren’t we though?” I grinned at him. “No, it—it feels good actually. I think. We’ve made the next step in parenting. This is what we’re supposed to do, right?”
He sighed. “So I hear,” he said. “Never thought it would be this hard though. How you doing on Ada?”
I shrugged. “Meghan told me a little more about her last night. I don’t know. They’re young. Chances are Marshall is going to move on to someone else soon anyway. I suppose I’m getting worked up for nothing. What do you think? Do you think this is love? Temporary?”
“Who knows. You’ve always been closer to him than I have. I’ve tried talking to him about girls a few times before, but it always devolved into our same old thing.”
“Arguing religion.”
“Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe it is love. Or maybe he just thinks it is.”
“Is there a difference?”
Cal looked at me in surprise. “Well, yes, there’s a difference. Damn, Chloe. That’s pretty cynical.”
I turned away from him, tears suddenly pricking my eyes. The tears didn’t feel cynical. Had I turned cynical? And if I had, why was it a surprise to my husband? The same reason that Ada’s appearance in our lives was a surprise to me, I supposed. I was too sure I knew Marshall.
I had touched every inch of his skin, wiped and cleaned and inspected places I had never, would never, touch on Cal. I thought I knew Marshall so well that
it shocked and nearly confused me to consider hair anywhere on his body but his head. It was the great conceit of motherhood perhaps, that my having birthed, fed, and bathed him gave me never-ending access to his psyche.
Meghan had not pulled away from me yet. Had she? How long had it been since I had seen my daughter naked? Unselfconscious without clothing? And why did allowing them to grow up seem exhilarating until anything sexual came into the picture?
The surprises of motherhood seemed dubious gifts, at best. And the stages—I could no longer call them surprises—of marriage not only seemed dubious but . . . dangerous. A slick, long-grassed slope of dulled emotion, and yes, perhaps even cynicism.
And I cannot deny that the fact that it was a surprise to my husband was both depressing and yet oddly satisfying. I knew he wasn’t paying attention. And didn’t that just prove it?
I wandered over to Cal’s workbench and picked up a wrench. It must have been twenty years old, its shank no longer shiny but lustrous. I tapped it against the side of the bench and then turned back to Cal with it in my hand, enjoying the slightly unbalanced weight of it.
“Think you could fix that screen door today?” I asked.
“I’ll try to get to it,” he replied, gazing at me steadily.
I nodded and, tossing the wrench onto the bench with a clatter, left for my workroom.
Where I got little to nothing done. After the energy and noise of the previous night, the house now seemed too quiet, too still to support creativity. I mixed a green to replace some paint loss on a palm tree, but couldn’t get the right shade. My black wasn’t even, not usually a problem in the frequently less technically correct Highwaymen paintings, but this was a Harold Newton, and the man had known what he was doing with color.
I finally turned to the other Highwayman I was working on, a “fire sky,” filled with brilliant reds and yellows, almost absurdly lurid to anyone unused to southwest Florida’s sunsets. I’d seen plenty of sunsets to rival the fire sky painting, and this time I got my colors right and was finally able to lose myself in my work. By the time I was ready for lunch, I’d worked my shoulders into satisfying knots and managed to replace my irritation with Cal with more pleasant remembrances of the previous night.
Matters of Faith Page 5
