Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  That laugh again. Pepper looks out the window, though there’s nothing to see, just black shapes sliding past, houses and palm trees and telephone poles crawling with vines. There’s always something a little overgrown about Florida, isn’t there? As if the landscape is just waiting for its chance to take over again.

  “Sure, go ahead and laugh,” she says. “You’re not the one with a broken foot, being held against your will.”

  “Nice try, but I’m not buying it. No one holds Pepper Schuyler against her will.”

  She turns her head and narrows her eyes at his dark profile. “You seem to know a lot about me, for a man I don’t know from Adam.”

  “I work for a law firm in Washington. I’ve seen you around.”

  “Oh, another lawyer. I should have known.”

  “You’ve got a problem with lawyers?”

  “No. I just seem to attract them, that’s all.”

  He shrugs. “Flies to the honeypot. So how did Mama kidnap you?”

  “I sold her a car.”

  “A car? What kind of car?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  There is a little silence. He checks the rearview mirror, slows the car, makes a left turn across an empty street, into an even emptier street. He drives competently, she’ll give him that: fast and easy, clutch and gears in perfect synchronization. His hands are large and firm on the steering wheel, a detail Pepper admits reluctantly, because she’s in no mood to find any man attractive, let alone this one, who just broke her foot.

  “No,” he says at last. “Why? Should she?”

  “It’s a mighty nice automobile, that’s all. Cost her a fortune. Where’s this hospital of yours, anyway? North Carolina?”

  A nice easy chuckle. “No. Coming right up. How are you feeling?”

  “Like a pregnant woman with a broken foot.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Oh, a masochist, too. It figures.”

  A flurry of lights appears before them on the right-hand side of the road. He brakes carefully, and Pepper has the feeling he’s grinning, the bastard.

  “I’m not a masochist. I just figure you must be all right, if you can still snap like a turtle.”

  3.

  “I suppose I should ask your name,” Pepper says, as he’s carrying her to a wheelchair inside a pair of thick arms. Her nose bobs along next to his neck, which smells absurdly of soap, sweet and clean. Soap! Who still smells like soap at two o’clock in the morning? Annabelle’s son, apparently. She tilts her nose away.

  “Oh, Mr. Dommerich will do.”

  “Not for what I have in mind.”

  “You’re a tough customer, Miss Schuyler.” He deposits her in the wheelchair and swings around to grasp the handles. “It’s Florian.”

  “Florian?”

  “Dare I hope it rings a bell?”

  “It’s not Tom, Dick, or Harry, anyway.”

  “Well, I guess you’ll remember me now, at least. The ox with the oddball name who broke your foot.” He pushes her confidently down an antiseptic white corridor. A nurse looks up from the station as they pass.

  “Mr. Dommerich!”

  “Well, hello, Nurse Smith. Long time no see. Late shift tonight?”

  “Lucky me.” She glances down at Pepper, and her mouth turns downward. She points her sharp finger to the right. “Labor and delivery is that way.”

  Florian laughs that laugh again. “Nope, not yet, Smitty. Just a broken foot. We’re headed to the ER.”

  He must have flashed her a hell of a smile as he said it, because she brightens like a Christmas tree, right before she flushes like a beet.

  “Oh! Of course! The ER is straight ahead,” she sort of stammers, and Pepper rolls her eyeballs.

  “I know. But thank you, Smitty. I’m just flattered you recognized me.” He puts the faintest emphasis on the word you.

  “Of course. I—I didn’t realize you were married, Mr. Dommerich.”

  “Full of surprises,” he says, over his shoulder.

  Pepper says, once the nurse is behind them: “On familiar terms, I see.”

  “My dad was in and out of here for a while before he died. I got to know the joint pretty well. Here we are.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “What, an apology? Christ, what’s next? You’ll be thanking me, and I’ll expire from shock.” He addresses the orderly at the admittance desk. “Good morning. Not too busy, I hope?”

  The orderly points to the door. “Labor and delivery, not ER. Don’t they tell you anything?”

  “No baby tonight, actually. Broken foot, if I know my metatarsals, and it’s a doozy. The right one. How’s the wait?”

  The orderly looks down at Pepper’s foot and frowns. He pulls out a clipboard from a stack, sticks in a sheet of paper, and hands it to Florian. Pepper makes a move to snatch it away, but Florian shoos her expertly. “You sit tight with the ice bag, all right? I’ll take care of this.”

  “Are you the husband?” says the orderly.

  Pepper opens her mouth to say no.

  “Looks like it,” says Florian.

  The orderly laughs. “Name?”

  “Florian Dommerich.”

  “I mean your wife’s name.”

  “Oh. Pepper.”

  A frown. “Her real name, Mr. Dommerich.”

  There is an awful little silence. Pepper is still sitting in her state of shock; the casual word wife seems to have glued her jaw shut.

  “Darling,” says Florian, “what is your real name? I’ve forgotten.”

  Nobody knows Pepper’s real name, if she can help it. She stares mutinously at the orderly, whose blue ballpoint pen stands poised over the paperwork on his desk.

  “She’s kind of funny about it,” Florian says. “Wouldn’t tell me until right before the ceremony, and even then she made me whisper the word, so only God could hear me. Just one of her adorable little foibles.”

  She was going to kiss him. She was going to murder him.

  “I don’t have all night, Mrs. Dommerich,” says the orderly.

  Florian coughs. “You can’t just write down Mrs. Florian Dommerich? We are one flesh, after all. Joined at the hip.”

  “Is your foot broken, Mr. Dommerich?”

  “Well, no.”

  The orderly points his pen at Pepper. “So I’ll be needing her name, okay? And condiments don’t cut it, not in the ER, not on my watch.”

  “With all due respect—”

  “Prunella,” says Pepper. “Okay? It’s Prunella. Family name.”

  The orderly’s eyebrows rise. Behind her back, Florian’s chest makes a grave little shudder that travels through his arms to vibrate the wheelchair. He lifts one hand and snaps his fingers.

  “Ah! That’s it. How could I forget?” he says. “Prunella.”

  4.

  On the way back to the villa, Pepper asks him why he did it.

  “Did what?”

  “Pretend you were my husband, back there.”

  “Oh, you know. Makes the paperwork easier, doesn’t it? No awkward questions.”

  His tone is light. His tone is mostly always light, as if nothing is too serious for him to handle, everything’s a joke; that taking a stranger, a heavily pregnant woman, to the emergency room in the middle of the night and pretending she’s your wife is . . . well, just one of life’s little adventures. He’s rolled up his shirtsleeves, and his forearms are sturdy, his hands strong as they hold the wheel. He is altogether dependable.

  “Well, it ends now, okay?” she says. “No husbandly privileges when we get back.”

  “Perish the thought.” Florian reaches for the radio dial and fiddles with it. Static, mostly, and then a thin stream of lonely trumpet pierces the noise. “I also f
igured you might need a break.”

  “A break, do I?”

  “You know, holed up like this, no one around to rub your feet and buy you jars of pickles. Mama’s got a nose for folks in trouble. I thought maybe you didn’t need any more of it. Trouble, I mean.”

  There are all kinds of heroes, Annabelle said, on the ride up to Cocoa Beach, and as Pepper stares at the gray landscape a week and a half later, through an entirely different windshield, she hears those words again. Almost like the woman’s sitting right there, like a chaperone—yes, right there delicately on the bench seat between the two of them, Florian and Pepper—and whispering in Pepper’s ear.

  “I can handle trouble, all right. People say it’s my middle name. My first name, too, if you think about it.”

  “Oh. Prunella, you mean?”

  “Don’t get sassy.”

  “I’ll get sassy if I feel like it, Miss Trouble. It’s the least I can do for you, get you snapping again. Back in fighting-turtle form.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Florian slows the car and turns, and Pepper realizes they’re already back at the house, that the dark space washing away to her right is the ocean, and the line of pink above is the breaking dawn.

  “It means I like you how I saw you in Washington, Pepper Schuyler, even if you wouldn’t give me the time of day. I like you conquering the world, not sitting back and letting it conquer you.”

  Pepper looks through the bug-spattered glass at the approaching garage and bursts into tears.

  5.

  She hates the crutches, and the crutches hate her. Florian knows better than to offer help. He just opens the doors wide as she comes to them, and smiles from the corner of his mouth as she swears.

  “Need anything else?” he says, when she swings herself through the doorway of the guest cottage and tosses the crutches on the floor.

  “Trust me, you’ve done enough.”

  “All right, then. Keep the handkerchief. Take your pills. Sleep as long as you like. I’ll tell Clara to keep the coffee warm.”

  He starts to close the door, and Pepper says Wait.

  Florian pauses with his large hand on the doorknob, eyebrows expectantly high.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  He places his hand to his chest and staggers backward, shutting the door as he goes.

  Annabelle

  PARIS • 1936

  1.

  By the time I saw Nick Greenwald again, in the first week of March, the baby had grown quite large, and I had to dress carefully to disguise the size of my belly. I was glad I did. Nick took off his hat and reached for my hand, and his eyes ran up and down me as if to assess me for slaughter.

  “Good morning, Frau von Kleist,” Nick said formally. “Thanks for agreeing to meet me here.”

  “It’s Annabelle, and I can’t stay long. I have an appointment in half an hour.”

  The appointment was manufactured, but my reluctance was not. I had told Johann in the morning, before he left for the embassy—since January, he had been working day and often night, something to do with treaty obligations—that I was going shopping for baby things today, and I hadn’t lied. The evidence sat on the floor next to my chair: a small assortment of wrapped packages, and many more to be delivered to the apartment later in the afternoon. But I knew without asking that my husband wouldn’t be pleased at my meeting another man alone—he trusted me without reserve, he said again and again, but he did not trust other men around me—and so I hadn’t asked. I had only agreed to meet with Nick because I was afraid of the consequences if I didn’t: Nick showing up at the apartment, or, worse yet, Stefan himself.

  For months now, I hadn’t let the thought of Stefan intrude on my happiness. I had forced him away with an iron discipline. I was happy, I told myself: I felt fit and healthy as my pregnancy progressed; I had had a luxurious honeymoon, a husband who worshipped me daily, a beautiful Paris apartment, an affectionate stepdaughter. After a month in Italy, motoring about in Johann’s magnificent Mercedes, we had traveled straight to Westphalia for Christmas, where Johann had introduced me to the staff of his estate as the new baroness, and the children had arrived home to celebrate the season. We had all gotten along well, though Frieda was the only one who sought me out, to play the cello together and to take walks on the bitter winter grounds. “You must give them time, of course,” said Johann. “They will learn to love you as I do.”

  “Not quite as you do, I hope,” I had replied, because my new husband had spent those weeks in Italy like a penitent who has finally emerged from a long and grueling fast, far more interested in the feast he had married than the art and monuments surrounding us. But that was what a honeymoon was for, wasn’t it? To seal man and wife together, before they faced the world again. When you made constant love to someone, you drove out everything and everyone else, until you almost forgot there was a world outside your union, full of messiness and complication and old lovers. All that physical intimacy made you feel as if you really were in love, you really were married forever.

  Just that morning, I had opened my eyes to Johann’s farewell kiss, and I had thought how handsome he was, how I couldn’t imagine another face bending down to mine in the morning. And, of course, he wasn’t handsome, not objectively. But at that moment, while the baby kicked softly in my belly, and the sheets smelled warmly of Johann, I loved his face too much to think him otherwise.

  So as I stared down Nick Greenwald’s lanky form across the grubby café table, I stiffened my chest against him and thought that he deserved that little lie about the appointment.

  “I’ll be brief, then,” said Nick, lighting a cigarette and signaling the waiter. His face was grim and his eyes, when they looked at me, were hard and resentful. “I just have a few questions for you, on behalf of a mutual friend.”

  “I don’t believe I owe you any answers.”

  He raised his eyebrows. The waiter arrived, and Nick ordered coffee. He took a long drag of his cigarette, and when the waiter had passed out of earshot, he blew out the smoke and said, “I suppose you’ve heard he’s out of prison now.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Stefan.”

  I couldn’t breathe. The baby kicked against the wall of my stomach, and I put my hand on my side. “He’s in prison?” I whispered.

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No. I never heard a word from him, not since August.”

  Nick sat back in his chair, and a little of the resentment left his eyes, which, in the watery March sunshine that percolated through the window next to us, proved to be a charming shade of hazel. “I don’t understand. Your brother never told you?”

  “I haven’t seen Charles since he left town in November. He doesn’t approve of my marriage.”

  “It was a shock.”

  “It shouldn’t have been. My husband is a good man. He’s loyal and faithful, and I love him.” I pushed hard on the word faithful, and my hand moved in a slow circle on my side, around the baby’s protruding foot.

  Nick’s gaze dropped to my hand and back again. “So I see.”

  “If you have any questions,” I said, “I wish you would ask them.”

  “Why did you meet with me, if you’re so in love with your husband?”

  “Not because I felt I owed you any explanation.”

  “Really? None at all? Not to me, I mean. I’m only here because Stefan asked me to see you.”

  My palms were damp. I flattened them against my dress. “Did he?”

  “Yes. He rang me up a week ago, from Frankfurt. They’re not letting him out of the country, you know. They’re following him everywhere.”

  “I don’t understand. Who’s following him? Why was he in prison?”

  His voice lowered. “The Gestapo, for God’s sake. Don’t tell me you don’t know.”

  “I kn
ow a little. Not very much. Is he all right?” My throat shook a little.

  “Well, he was arrested as soon as he set foot in Germany, the twenty-ninth of August. He was put in the new camp at Dachau, near Munich. Have you heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “It took us months to figure out where he was, and then your brother went off to try to get him released. That was November. They finally let him out in February, banged up but alive, and your brother got him settled and came home to Paris, and that’s when he found out, as you know, that you were married to von Kleist and expecting a baby already. And meanwhile Stefan was going crazy over there, he wanted to jump the border and find you, and when I told him the news over the telephone I thought he was going to shoot himself. He said there had to be some mistake. I said there wasn’t.” Nick crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray, just as the waiter arrived with his coffee. He added a teaspoon of sugar and took a careful sip. I couldn’t speak. I watched his lips. He put down the cup and said, “He seemed to think the baby might be his.”

  “It isn’t,” I said instantly. “I started meeting Johann as soon as I came to Paris. I was furious and I wanted to forget, and Johann—”

  “Furious?” said Nick. “Furious with Stefan?”

  “Yes, because he hadn’t told me he was married. And I had always sworn I would never go to bed with a married man, I would never do that to another woman, because of my mother. It killed my mother.”

  Nick was staring at me, astonished. His hand lay still on his cup; his back was rigid against the chair. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “That’s why you left?”

  “Yes. And I happen to think it was a damned good reason. I wouldn’t ever knowingly betray another woman. So I married Johann, and yes, we’re having a baby together, and I am certain, certain, that I’ve done the right thing this time, and I’ll be damned if I let you convince me otherwise.” I sat back, breathless, cradling the round ball of my belly, the fetus who was beating an irregular rhythm against my abdomen, unused to all this turmoil.

  “All right,” Nick said. “Keep your voice down.”

  I picked up my glass of water and drank it dry. Nick lit another cigarette and turned back his head to watch the smoke ebb upward into the stained ceiling. His fingers played with the sugar spoon, turning it this way and that in the cradle of his hand.