Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833)
Page 25
Except for Mr. Barrington’s breathing, the cottage went silent. I heard a drip outside as an icicle melted, or maybe it grew thicker, even as things cracked and broke inside.
Andy said, “D . . . D . . . Don’t insult Florine like that. I love her.”
“Oh Andrew,” Mr. Barrington shouted and threw his hands into the air. “Andrew, my son, you wouldn’t know what love was if it came up and bit you on the ass.” He looked at me sitting on the divan, a puddle of white wine warming my thighs. “She’s lovely right now,” he said, and he moved his hand as if to make me disappear. “But many, many women are, and it doesn’t last. It isn’t important in the long run. Please use your head—the one on your shoulders. I beg of you. Go back to school—whatever school will have you. Then go to college. Do it. FINISH this one thing.”
Andy stood up and came around the table. He held out his shaking hand and I took it and stood up. Wine trickled down my legs. Andy turned around and faced his father.
“I’m not going with you,” he said. “I have everything I need here. Florine has a house on The Point and we can live there. I don’t need you.”
I tried to think back to when I’d asked him to live with me and I couldn’t think of when, but now wasn’t a good time to bring it up. He was facing down his father, and I could see what it was costing him to do it. Right now, he was my man. My scared but brave man, and I had to stand by him.
“You are eighteen years old,” Mr. Barrington said. “She is seventeen years old. There might be some law against you two fornicating, I’m not sure. At any rate, Andrew, I meant it when I said the sheriff was coming. I told him to give me thirty minutes. Now, I’m sorry I did that, but I had a feeling you might get stubborn.”
“Well, I’m leaving right now then,” Andy said. “We’re going to Florine’s house. You have no right to come after me there.” And he pulled me and we went out into the hall, where he grabbed our coats.
“Andrew,” Mr. Barrington said. “You will be under arrest the minute you step out of her house. I swear you will. And it will be for your own good.”
“Come on,” Andy whispered to me and we slipped out the kitchen door. I looked across the driveway and pictured a younger Bud, Dottie, and Glen hiding in the bushes on that summer night so long ago. They looked at me sadly as Andy and I walked down the stairs and started for the truck. Mr. Barrington wasn’t far behind. “Andrew,” he called. I turned around just in time to see him step down, slip on a patch of ice, and fall backward onto the steps, hard. He went still, out cold, or maybe dead. “Shit,” Andy said, and we hurried back to Mr. Barrington. His face was waxy in the night, his body limp. A dark liquid gleamed on the step in back of him. I crouched down and lifted his head as gently as I could. Warm, sticky blood covered my fingers.
I said, “Andy, we have to call a doctor,” and Andy said, “Okay.” I lowered Mr. Barrington onto the step again. Andy reached into his father’s pocket, snatched the car keys, grabbed my hand, and said, “His car is faster than my truck. Let’s go.”
He led me to the passenger side of the Mercedes BMW, opened the door, and sat me down on the soft, butter-colored leather seat. But instead of melting, I froze as he slid into the driver’s seat, turned the key, backed the car up, and threw it into gear. We bucketed down the dirt road. I thought we would turn toward The Point, but we kept on going straight toward Long Reach.
“Where are you going?” I asked. “What are we doing? We need to find a phone. We can’t leave him there.”
“Get help,” he said.
“The Point is closer, Andy. Let’s go back.”
“I can’t go back,” he said.
Parker passed us in his sheriff’s car and I turned around in time to see him disappear around a curve.
Andy and I drew ragged breaths against the strains of some classical symphony on a station Mr. Barrington must have been listening to on the way up. I looked at the almost dried blood on my hand.
“Andy, we got to call a doctor,” I said again.
“Sheriff will find him.”
“You’re mixed up. Let’s go back to The Point and let them help.”
“No,” Andy said. “No. I’ll take care of it.”
He pressed down on the gas pedal and the Mercedes BMW roared into another gear. “Andy, you need to slow down,” I said.
“I need to slow down,” he repeated. He took his foot off the gas pedal and braked just as we crested Pine Pitch Hill. But it was too little, too late. We sailed up and into the very trees that had spit back Stella Drowns from the dead. In the headlights of the car, those trees gleamed bright and toothpick-thin. This will be okay, I thought. The trees will break in half and we’ll set down nice and easy in the bushes.
41
The first thing I saw when I woke up was Daddy, who was sitting in a chair beside me, looking like he’d drunk poison and it was slowly killing him.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “Did they find Carlie?”
Daddy said, “No. You were in an accident.” I looked around then, at least, as far around as I could look with a neck brace. “Where am I?” I asked.
“We’re in Portland,” Daddy said. “You been out for a couple of days. You’re in intensive care at Maine Medical Center. You got in a car accident with Andy Barrington. They took him to Boston. Broke both legs and a hip. He’s going to make it, though. Parker found Mr. Barrington—they stitched up his head. You’re all lucky.”
Lucky, lucky me, I thought, as I went under.
I wound up with a twisted, badly sprained back and neck, a broken right leg, a mangled right arm and shoulder, cuts and abrasions, and a bad concussion. I drifted in and out for about a week, mostly out.
They kept me in intensive care until the concussion went away, and then they wheeled me into a semiprivate room with an old lady named Hazel who had pneumonia. She hacked up phlegm while I floated down rivers of medication. We were quite a pair.
Hazel was so small that only the tips of her feet and her hands folded on her stomach showed under the blankets. Her face was yellow against the white pillowcase, and her white hair was in bad need of a trim. When she could talk without coughing up her lungs, and I could speak without jarring some nerve, bone, or muscle, she told me she lived alone with her twelve cats. She told me the story of each one. Hazel couldn’t wait to get home to her cats. “A neighbor’s watching them, but it’s never the same,” she said.
Jane, a student nurse only a few years older than me, told me one day when Hazel was sleeping that she wasn’t going home. A couple of nieces had found a nursing home for her. Hazel’s house had been sold to pay for Hazel’s spot in the home. The poor cats had been sick and about half of them had been put down. The other half had been taken to the local shelter.
I went along with Hazel and her cat stories for as long as she was there. The day the nurses wheeled her out with her nieces on either side of her chair, Jane and I had a good cry thinking about what must have happened when she realized that she wasn’t going home, and that her cats were gone.
Without Hazel to distract me, each injured body part took a turn putting on a show-and-tell of pain. It was hell not to remember what had happened. For a long time, the last thing I could remember was Andy saying, “I got to take care of my baby,” in front of Grand’s house. Then it began to drift back to me: Stella talking to Mr. Barrington, Mr. Barrington smashing the wineglass into the fireplace.
I wanted to talk to Andy in the worst way, to get his take on things. But like most of my life, during those early days after the accident, he seemed like a dream to me, as if we had never happened. It was almost as if he and what we had meant to each other had been jarred out of my head. To bring him back, I did something I’d done when Carlie had started to fade in my memory. I went through each sense; how Andy looked, smelled, tasted, felt, and sounded.
When Dottie w
asn’t bowling, she showed up after school and stayed until closing time if she could. She sat with me, along with Daddy, Madeline, Bert, Ray, and once and a while Glen, Bud, and Susan. Ida and Sam Warner visited once, but Sam was nervous and Ida explained that he hated hospitals. I told him not to come back if he was going to be spleeny. He kissed my forehead, thanked me, and left.
I wouldn’t let Stella near me, no matter how Daddy tried to smooth things over. “She was afraid you would get into trouble. She was protecting you,” were some of the reasons Daddy thought were enough for Stella to have ratted out Andy.
“She did a bang-up job of it all,” I said to Daddy.
“She feels terrible, Florine.”
“Good.”
“Well, honey, you got to forgive her, because you have to come home with us to our house when you leave here,” Daddy said. “You got to have a first-floor bathroom.”
“Cold day in hell,” I said.
“You don’t have a choice,” he said.
“What will happen to Andy when he leaves the hospital?” I asked.
“He can take a flying fuck through a rolling donut hole as far as I’m concerned,” Daddy said.
Dottie wasn’t quite so plainspoken. “Parker said Mr. Barrington is sending Andy to some kind of military school. He’ll get taught at home for the rest of the year and go there all next year.”
It broke my heart to think about the military whipping him into something wooden. It would be like hauling a seagull out of the sky and turning it into a chicken. I ached for the free spirit in him. I got Jane to help me as I tried to call him one night. I told her the number, and she did the rest. She dialed a friend in Boston who worked in the hospital where Andy was a patient, but when she spoke to her, she found out that Andy wasn’t allowed a phone.
When I was higher than a star in the sky, I thought of us under layers of blankets on the freezing floor in front of the cottage fireplace. I talked to Jane about him in the middle of the night, when she was on shift. I told her about Carlie, too, and she said she remembered reading about that and wondering what had happened. I told her I wondered every day.
Parker came to see me in the hospital to get my version of the Mr. Barrington and Andy show and I gave it to him, trying to make Parker see that Andy had been scared and that he hadn’t meant for us to get into an accident. Before Parker left he promised, once more, to look for Carlie for as long as it took. “Don’t you think I won’t,” he said, and I pretended I believed him.
42
It took me almost a month to heal enough so I could move without swearing or crying. When I could use my crutches to get to the bathroom, wipe myself, and flush, it was time to go home, Jane said.
She wheeled me out of my room, Daddy and Dottie beside me, on February 24, exactly a month after the accident. Daddy had brought Madeline’s car instead of his truck, and he, Jane, and Dottie loaded me into the back so my leg stuck out on the seat. They put a pillow under the truss tied around my back and the collar that held my neck in place and settled my leg on the seat. I made Jane promise to come and see me at The Point.
“Lobster for free,” I said. “And so is the view.”
She said she would, but I knew she wouldn’t. Angels come and go.
Stella met us in the driveway but I wouldn’t look at her. Glen and Bud helped Daddy get me into the house where they carried me into my old room. A hospital bed waited for me, along with a little radio and a small television and a tray for food, books, or whatever I needed or wanted. A bud vase with a pink rose sat on the tray, with a Welcome Home card that everyone on The Point had signed.
Then Bud and Glen left and it was just Daddy, Stella, and me.
“Are you hungry?” Stella asked.
“Why did you rat on Andy and me?” I asked.
Daddy said, “Can’t this wait for at least fifteen minutes?”
Stella said, “That’s all right, Leeman. She’s got a right to ask.”
“Damn straight,” I said.
She took a deep breath, and her scar went scarlet. She said, “I know you’re upset. And if I’d known what would happen, I wouldn’t have done it. But Florine, the boy was living in a freezing cottage. He was dealing dope and he could’ve gotten you pregnant. Or you could have gotten busted.”
“Or we could have gotten in a near-fatal car accident, for chrissake,” I said. “And I didn’t get pregnant, and we were plenty warm in that cottage. You didn’t have any right to interfere with my business.”
“I told you I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known what was going to happen,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “But your father was upset. Jesus, Florine, you just don’t know how he worries about you.”
“Stella,” Daddy said. “Now, Florine, both of you just stop, now.”
“Well, if I’d been dead, that would’ve really bummed him out, don’t you think? Or maybe you wanted to get me out of the way?” I hollered at Stella.
“Don’t be so goddamn dramatic,” she yelled back. “I don’t want you dead. I wanted you safe, and I wanted your father to stop his worrying. Now know I didn’t mean any harm to come to you. And we got to put up with each other, whether we like it or not.” She walked out of my bedroom and into their bedroom and slammed the door.
“I have to pee,” I said to Daddy.
“Okay.” Daddy sighed. He got me into the bathroom and onto the portable toilet and we made it back to my bed.
“I’m sorry to be such a nuisance, Daddy,” I said. “I hate it.”
“I don’t mind helping you,” he said. “I’m just so goddamn glad you’re all right and you’re safe. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I’d lost you. But Florine, you got to make some sort of peace with Stella. You two got to get along. She’s here to help you, and I’m not going to be here all day, every day. I got to work. I got house customers and I got to get the boat ready. Do you think you can work it out with her? ’Cause if you can’t, I don’t know what we’re going to do. You ain’t well enough to be alone just yet.”
“I guess I’ll have to,” I said.
“I guess you will,” he said.
He left for a carpentry job two days later, leaving Stella and me alone for the first time.
“Do you need anything?” Stella asked about twenty times.
“No,” I answered, and I made sure I didn’t, unless I needed the bathroom, or I had to do my three times daily walk from my bedroom, through the kitchen, around the living room, and back. She walked beside me, saying, “You’re doing so much better today,” like she was Nurse Nancy. “Don’t you feel better? You look better.”
“Better, better, better,” I mimicked in the same cheerful tone, until she stopped saying anything, just walked nearby in case I took a tumble, which I never did, as luck had it.
She had taken two weeks off from Ray’s, but I guess the daily cocktail I made her swallow—two parts silence, one part nastiness, shaken not stirred—got to her and off she went after a week, up the muddy road, deli apron tucked around her waist. She came back every two hours or so to check on me.
It was quiet after she left the house. It was haunted with memories of Carlie, and of the first days without Carlie. Even though Stella had painted the kitchen a cheerful apple-green and new, green-flecked linoleum shone on the floor, I was zipped back to being twelve years old, waiting for word and hoping as hard as I could. When the phone rang, it drove me crazy. I couldn’t get to it, and I had to wonder if this was the call we’d been waiting for. I remembered being tied to that phone, not daring to go anywhere. The loneliness of that memory made me almost glad to hear Stella walk back down the driveway.
One day in March, Daddy and I had a talk that had been a long time in the making. He was home that day, between carpenter jobs. Stella was working. He cranked my bed to a sitting position and turned
it so that I faced the window. He opened the window so I could get a sniff. Spring was creeping back to The Point like a whipped cur. It was raining, and I could hear each splat of water chonk away at the dirty winter snow. Daddy sat beside me in a rocker he’d made a few years back. It creaked every time he rocked back.
“Have to fix that,” he said. “Always something.” The light from the window reflected on Daddy’s face. Once, that face had lit up like spring, but time and weather had darkened it to the leathery colors of late autumn.
I said, “Being here reminds me of Carlie. It brings it all back.”
“I know,” he said.
“What do you think happened, Daddy?”
He rocked some. “Well,” he said, “I honestly don’t know.”
“Do you think she was happy here? I used to hear you argue about taking trips.”
“We had talks about that all the time,” he said. “Don’t you think I don’t regret not taking a trip with her? It was like to tear me apart after she left—all the things I didn’t or wouldn’t do, or told her to wait on.”
“She didn’t like to sit still, that’s for sure,” I said.
“She didn’t have nowhere to sit,” he said.
I had no idea what he meant. We’d had chairs when she’d lived with us. She’d used the sofa plenty of times. I must have looked confused because Daddy said, “Not chair-sitting. That’s not what I mean. I mean, she couldn’t relax any. You know how you had Grand to live with when I was being such a crazy bastard after she left?” he said. “You had somewheres to go that you knew you were welcome. You felt at home.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Well, Carlie didn’t have that. Carlie didn’t have nowheres to be where she could just set and feel safe. Feel that no matter what she did, it was okay. Growing up the way she did, she was always jumpy. Do you remember when we visited her house? You wasn’t very old, so you probably forgot about it.”
“I remember it,” I said. “I wanted Robin for a sister.”