by Cathy Holton
“No,” he said, his eyes reflecting the slate-blue color of the sea. “The captain of the ship has to keep his wits about him.” His hair dripped steadily onto his clean T-shirt. It showed a shamrock and read, in big green letters across the front, WHO’S YOUR PADDY? “If you ladies don’t need me, I think I’ll go in and help April with supper.” He stopped at the door and turned around again, grinning. A dimple appeared deep in his left cheek.
“Try not to drop anything else in the water until I get back,” he said to Lola. “Try not to do anything stupid.”
Mel knew suddenly what it was that she wanted. She wanted a man just like him. Someone she could have dinner with, bounce ideas off of, someone who would be there for her when the chips were down, when she was at her most unlovable, when she was old, sick, and out of print.
Jimmy Buffett posed the question “Why Don’t We Get Drunk (and Screw)?” Twilight fell. Pewter-colored clouds massed in the sky, and a faint smattering of stars appeared on the horizon. The island was a dull glimmering shape now, a band of white beach bordered on one side by the black water and on the other by a dark fringe of forest.
Captain Mike came out to light the lanterns. “Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes,” he said. He was whistling. Here on the water, he was very much a man in his element. A man tempered, but not broken, by adversity, Mel thought, noting his profile in the lamplight. She remembered the dead wife, the life he’d had to pack up and stow away like an old suitcase. J.T. Radford would look much the same, Mel imagined, trying suddenly to picture him as he must look today.
She finished her drink and set the glass down on the table, determined not to go down that road. Life was too short; it was useless to spend it wallowing in misery. She had learned that years ago.
It did no good to remember what she had once had, and lost.
They ate dinner on the aft deck, a wonderful meal of grilled ahi with an espresso glacé, while darkness closed around them like a curtain and ghost crabs scurried along the beach in the moonlight. Captain Mike and April joined them, and it was one big party (except that Captain Mike drank tea). He was charming and sweet, getting up to make them fresh drinks, and clearing the plates when they’d eaten their fill. Sometime during the long afternoon and evening he had acquired a certain swagger that suited him well. He had the jaunty, rolling gait of a man of the sea, and it wasn’t too hard to imagine him as a pirate with a plumed hat and a cutlass strapped to his waist. He sat at one end of the table between Lola and April. Mel was pretty sure if she dropped her head beneath the tablecloth and looked, she’d find his hand plunged deep into April’s girlish lap. He had the smug, self-satisfied look of a man who thinks he’s being clever, secretly running his hand over his lover’s thigh. Mel knew that look. She’d seen it often enough.
Lola laughed suddenly, her tinkling laugh like music, like coins jangling in a pocket. She stood up and knocked over a glass.
“Careful!” April called out, watching as she made her way to the galley door. “Do you need someone to go with you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?” Mel said.
“Why is the boat moving?” Lola said.
“The boat’s not moving, silly.”
Captain Mike stood up and went to help her.
Later, they moved up to the flybridge, where they had an unobstructed view of the stars. They sat at the horseshoe-shaped banquette with their drinks resting on the table in front of them. Behind them the dinghy rested in its cradle, covered by a bright blue tarpaulin. A yellow moon rose over the water. The great vault of the sky stretched above them, an endless dome of sparkling lights.
“Don’t climb down these without me here to help,” Captain Mike said, pointing to the steps to the aft deck. “They’re too steep and you’re too drunk.” The deck lights illuminated the chiseled line of his jaw, the heavy browridge above the strong straight nose.
“Who’re you calling drunk?” Mel said belligerently.
“If we call you, will you carry us down?” Lola asked, her sharp little laugh ringing out like a bell.
“Yes,” he shouted, disappearing down the steps. They could hear April below, clearing up the supper dishes.
Mel had a sudden memory of J.T the first night they met him, carrying her up the ridge in the moonlight while Sara stood waiting, her face rigid with anger and envy. “Do you remember the first time we met J.T? That night at the bonfire?”
“No,” Sara said flatly, lifting her glass.
“You didn’t want to go,” Mel said, shaking her head, her eyes shining in the lamplight.
A ship passed slowly out to sea, its lights twinkling in the darkness. Sara’s expression was composed, polite. “How’s your father?” she asked Mel. “How’s Leland?”
“He’s—old.” The image of Leland as she’d last seen him filled Mel with a strange sadness. She sipped her drink and looked around the table at their faces, pale and lucid as the moon. Moonchildren. Moon girls.
“I remember your daddy,” Lola said, wiping her upper lip with a dainty finger. “He was sweet.”
“Sweet? Leland?” Mel looked at Sara, who smiled faintly. “You must be thinking of somebody else.” She didn’t want to talk about Leland any more than Sara wanted to talk about J.T. Leland was an old man; his days were numbered. It didn’t seem right talking about him now. It didn’t seem right blaming him. Even in her inebriated state she knew that. He probably thought he’d been a good husband and father. He’d provided financially for his family, made sure no one ever went hungry or without. His bullying had been his way of toughening them up for the hardships of life. Mel doubted he’d ever spent one minute wrestling with his conscience, wondering if he’d done the right thing by Juanita or Junior. He probably thought Junior had died of a congenital weakness of character. He probably thought Juanita had died of agoraphobia. Besides, he had one child who’d managed to survive childhood. Mel was his proof that he’d done things right.
“I don’t think I ever met your dad,” Annie said.
“You’d remember him if you had.”
“It’s great that you’re a writer and you can write him off,” Sara said. She frowned slightly and tilted her head, as if something had just occurred to her. “Is that where the saying comes from?”
Mel drank steadily. She set her glass down on the table and wiped the back of her mouth with one hand. “What are you rambling on about?”
“Your character. Flynn Mendez. She has a problem with male authority figures.”
“So you have read my books!”
“I’ve read a few. Enough to know what I’m talking about. Enough to know that Flynn Mendez bears a striking resemblance to you. Every time she sticks a stiletto into a villain I imagine you metaphorically sticking a stiletto into Leland.”
Mel snorted derisively and put her head back, striving to keep her tone indifferent. “It’s fiction. It’s all fiction. Besides, I let go of that shit with Leland years ago. That’s what therapy’s for.”
She was a big talker. She wasn’t fooling anyone; she could see it in their faces. What was it Leland used to say? Big hat, no cattle. All suds, no beer. She’d dreamed for years of confronting him, and then when the moment finally presented itself, she’d chickened out. How do you confront a dried-up husk of a man? A man who’s cried over you and supported you through cancer. A man who was still there when all the others were gone. How do you confront a man like that, how do you tell him your trust issues, your broken relationships, your inability to love completely are all based on his piss-poor parenting skills?
The answer, of course, is that you don’t. The time for confrontation was long past; Mel had been through enough therapy to know that.
All that was left now was forgiveness.
• • •
Later, Annie drank so much that she did her impersonation of Dolly Parton having sex with Porter Wagoner. (Naw, Porter, you cain’t put it there. What kind of girl do you think I am?) Lola and Mel rolled around on the
banquette thumping each other on the back. Sara laughed so hard she wet herself.
Captain Mike came up on the flybridge to check on them. “I was going to offer you girls another drink, but I think maybe you’ve had enough.”
“Who are you, the Booze Nazi?” Mel took off her shoes and pitched them at him. One landed on the deck but the other one sailed over the railing into the water. “Now look what you made me do,” she said.
He turned and called down to April to make a pot of coffee and bring it up.
“You know that’s an urban legend,” Mel said. “Coffee does not sober you up.”
“Who says we have to sober up?” Annie said.
“Captain Mike.”
“Just one more,” Annie pleaded. “Come on, Admiral Mike, we’re on vacation.”
“Nice,” Mel said.
“Shut up,” Annie said. “I know what I’m doing.”
He walked past them and over to the helm to check the instruments. He peered at the dark floating shape of the island. “I’m cutting you off for your own good.”
Mel made a face at his wide back. She nudged Lola with her toe. “Hey, who’s the employer here and who’s the employee?” she asked in a loud voice.
He turned around and gave her a fierce look. “Who’s the captain and who’s the passenger?” he said. He kept his eyes on Mel long enough for her to know that he was serious. “It’s late,” he added, more reasonably, turning back around. “As soon as April brings the coffee, we’ll shove off.” He went back to checking his instruments and getting the yacht ready for departure. Behind his shoulder, the moon shone like a lantern. Edie Brickell & New Bohemians sang “What I Am.”
Annie put her head back to look at the stars. The alcoholic haze in her head had settled down to a pleasant buzz, a feeling of light-headedness and euphoria. She wished she could feel this way always, as light and airy as a thistle floating on a breeze, weightless and lucid and empty of all emotion, even regret. Even guilt.
A pair of deer glided across the moonlit beach. Far off in the forest, a fox barked.
“This place is kind of creepy when the sun goes down,” Sara said, looking at the shadowy island.
“You can feel the dead everywhere,” Lola said, resting her cheek on her hand. In the moonlight, she had the beatific look of a martyred saint. “So lonely.”
Sara touched her lightly on the arm, as if to reassure her.
“Sometimes I get sad,” Lola said.
“We all do,” Sara said.
“That’s part of life.”
“As long as you’re not sad all the time.”
“I’m not.”
Mel sat up suddenly and pushed her coffee away. “It doesn’t help that Briggs has you on all that medication.”
Lola smiled sadly and stared at the moonlit beach. “He does it because he loves me.”
“He has a funny way of showing it.”
“He doesn’t want me to feel my unhappiness,” Lola said. “He doesn’t want me to suffer. It’s kind of like euthanasia, only slower.”
Captain Mike flicked on the running lights. A wisp of melancholy floated on the warm night air, settling over the deck and its occupants.
“Slow euthanasia,” Mel said. “That sounds like a tropical drink.”
“Everything sounds like a drink to you.”
“Let’s make one up. What do you think? Vodka and absinthe? Rum and absinthe?”
“I’m pretty sure absinthe is illegal.”
“Let’s see if we can get some. I bet Captain Mike can get us some.”
Captain Mike ran his fingers over the instrument panel, flicking switches and checking gauges. “Sorry girls, you’ll have to get your own illegal substances,” he said.
Lola’s face in the moonlight was pale and raw, a wounded face, lost in painful memories. She seemed imbued with sadness, lit from within by a flickering, indistinct light. But then a strange thing happened. She put her head back and stared at the sky, and her face cleared and she was suddenly soft and pink-cheeked as a child, and you could see the woman Lola might have been had time and circumstance not conspired against her. “Look at all those stars,” she said dreamily. “Look at that sky.”
April brought their coffee, which was strong and heavy with warm, sweet cream. They sat in companionable silence, drinking and watching Captain Mike get the boat ready. The starry night stretched above them. A sudden gust of wind from the east brought with it the scent of rain. After a while, Sara stirred and said, “Do you know what I was afraid of when I agreed to come on this trip?”
“Alcohol poisoning?” Mel said.
“I was afraid I’d be bored.” She picked up her coffee cup, and held it in front of her in both hands. “I was afraid after all these years apart, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. But the funny thing is, the minute I saw you all it felt like we were eighteen again. We’re different, but the friendship’s still there, it’s intact, and it makes me feel—I don’t know, safe. Y’all are the sisters I never had. I can tell you anything.” She glanced around the table, suddenly shy. “There’s nothing we can’t talk about,” she finished weakly.
Everyone was quiet. They stared at their coffee cups, too polite to disagree with her. Over in the corner, the elephant closed his eyes and went to sleep. There were some things no one was ready to talk about.
At least, not yet.
Chapter 32
nnie was one of those women who went to pieces when her last child went off to college. She had spent twenty years arranging schedules, making sure everyone got to soccer practice and music lessons on time, making sure school deadlines were met and social activities were properly organized. Even up until the very last minute Carleton left for Duke she was busy organizing, making sure he had the right clothing, making sure he packed the proper necessities, making sure he didn’t forget his toenail clippers or his asthma inhaler or his athlete’s foot cream. When they dropped him off at the dorm the first time, she stayed and cleaned his room while Carleton and Mitchell went off to do some last-minute shopping. She made his bed and arranged his closet with a series of color-coded organizers; she packed his clothes neatly in his chest of drawers and made sure his desk was outfitted with the proper school supplies. She hung his Master P and Twiztid posters on the wall above his bed and his robe on a hanger behind the door. His slippers and bath supplies she placed discreetly beneath his bed.
When Carleton saw the room he said, “Mom, you know I have a roommate, right?”
“Don’t worry, I left plenty of room for his stuff.”
“He’ll think I’m a clean freak when he sees this room. He’ll think I’m an obsessive-compulsive psychopath.”
“No, he won’t. He’ll think you come from good people.”
Mitchell, noting the color-coordinated closet, said, “Honey, I think the boy might have a point here,” but Annie gave him “the look,” the look every woman knows innately how to use, the one guaranteed to curdle milk or shrivel male testes with a single glance.
The first week after they dropped him off, Annie sat around the house listening to the clock tick. Tick-tock went her grandmother’s antique mantel clock. After a while she could hear it in her head like a metronome, like someone trying to beat their way out of her skull with a tiny hammer. Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock.
She knew other women who’d gone through the same thing when their last child left home and they suddenly found themselves with too much time on their hands. Some went back to work, some went back to school, some started their own business or embarked on torrid love affairs with men not their husbands. The least imaginative among them got plastic surgery.
None of these things appealed to Annie. “Let’s have another baby,” she said to Mitchell one night over dinner. He had just stuck a piece of filet mignon into his mouth and was busy chewing, and as her words sank in, his eyes bulged and he seemed to be having trouble swallowing. Annie hoped she wasn’t going to have to do the Heimlich maneuver. She knew how to
use it on children—of course, you held them across your knees and pounded them on the back—but she couldn’t imagine doing that to someone of Mitchell’s heft and build.
He opened and closed his mouth several times and then took a long drink of sweet tea (she made it now with artificial sweetener to keep his blood sugar from spiking but he hadn’t seemed to notice). “Are you crazy?” he said finally.
Apparently so. She sighed and got up to go into the kitchen to polish the toaster. She could hear Mitchell chuckling to himself in the dining room.
The loss of her sons was made worse by a long period of spiritual malaise that Annie had been steadily undergoing. Her crisis of faith was not really a crisis; it was more a gradual evaporation, like milk seeping through cheesecloth. She preferred to think of it as a “questioning.” It had begun many years ago and was based, at least in part, on a simple query made by four-year-old William. It was Christmas and they were readying a box for the needy, “for the poor little children who don’t usually have a visit from Santa,” and William looked up at her with his large blue eyes and asked innocently, “But, Mommy, why doesn’t Santa bring the poor children toys? Aren’t they good?” Looking down into his angelic face, Annie was struck dumb. She wrestled for a moment with the concepts of good and evil before replying simply, “Honey, Santa tries to bring each child one gift. It’s the parents who bring all the others, and poor parents can’t afford toys.”
From that moment on Santa only brought her boys one gift each, and all the others were neatly wrapped with tags proclaiming Merry Christmas From Mommy & Daddy.
But William’s question started her thinking, and it was just a short leap from Santa Claus to Jehovah. She found herself puzzling over a loving God who supposedly rewarded the good and punished the bad, because if you looked around, you could see that that wasn’t true at all. The meek shall inherit the earth, but not in this lifetime, and in the meantime liars, fornicators, and thieves were rising to the highest echelons of public office, and good simple people who’d never broken a commandment their entire lives were struggling to pay their medical bills. Where was a loving God in all of that?
