He opened the hood on the VW and regarded the frozen piston. Today was the first day he’d felt up to facing it, and as he examined the engine mount and the impossibly snug layout of the entire engine area, he realized that his genius idea of taking the housing out and beating on the piston from underneath would require many, many hours of work. It was prohibitive, in fact. Not worth the time, definitely not worth the effort. Which put him back where he started—trying to beat the piston out from the top down. He was still leaning into the engine compartment, regarding the situation, when the sound of Chemal’s voice startled him.
“Dude, you get it out yet?” he said.
Johnny straightened up and shook his head. Since Johnny had been discharged from the hospital, Chemal had begun a habit of daily visits, and Johnny couldn’t say he disliked the new routine. The kid was rather handy to have around. Johnny still couldn’t drive, and Pauline had returned to work a week after the craniotomy, so having Chemal pop in each day meant an extra set of hands to take the General out when Johnny wasn’t feeling up to it, to fire up the leaf blower after a nor’easter stripped the buttonwood tree and deposited the spoils on the back deck, to run up to CVS for prescriptions.
“No,” Johnny said to Chemal now. “I think it’s hopeless.”
Chemal came over and examined the frozen piston. He tapped it with a mallet. “You’ve got to expand the housing,” he said. “Heat.”
“There’s no way,” Johnny said. “If you heat the housing, you heat the piston, too. They’ll both expand. It’ll get tighter.”
Chemal studied it.
“Mind if I try an idea?” he said.
Johnny shrugged. “Try whatever you like,” he said. “I’ve given up.”
“You got fabric?” Chemal said. “And something flammable?”
They wandered through the house and found some quilt batting in a sewing basket Pauline had shoved up on a shelf in the laundry room. Back in the garage, Johnny fetched a bottle of brake fluid from under the workbench. Chemal put a piece of batting soaked with brake fluid on top of the piston. He ignited it like a wick and kept a stream of fluid directed onto the fabric. After a few moments, the heated fluid began to run down the sides of the cylinder walls, seeping into the tiny voids between the piston and the housing.
“See that?” Chemal said, grinning. “It’s a-gonna heat up them walls, you’ll see.”
Johnny watched, astonished. Chemal kept up the process—a stream of brake fluid would hit the burning batting, get hot, and dribble into the cylinder. After about ten minutes, Chemal doused the flame and grabbed the mallet.
“Ready?” he said.
“Ready,” Johnny said.
Chemal reared back and bashed the top of the piston with the mallet. The piston broke free of its housing and clanged to the garage floor underneath the VW. Johnny took a step back and looked at Chemal, who was swinging the mallet and grinning from ear to ear. “How do you like me now, Mr. Freeze?” he said. “How do you like me now?”
They fetched the piston from under the car and cleaned up the puddles of Marvel Mystery Oil which had accumulated over the past month.
“Heat, Iceman,” Chemal said. “When something’s frozen, you need heat.”
“When’s your birthday, Chemal?” Johnny said.
“Next month.”
“Eighteen?”
“Indeed.”
“Clear your schedule,” Johnny said. “I’ve got plans for you.”
He went inside and texted Roy with his new phone.
I got us a new driver, he wrote. Hell, give him a couple of years. Maybe a foreman.
Roy had come over to see Johnny last week and told him and Pauline about his idea for reusing some of the leftover boner ice that didn’t make it into the shipping bags. Melt it, Roy explained, and refreeze the water in oversized cubes. Sure, it’s not sterile anymore, he said, but it’s clean enough for a new novelty product line: ice sculptures. All the rage at parties and events, he said, and hardly anybody in Jacksonville was competing. Only new equipment needed was the cube molds.
And Bold City Ice had all the talent right there in-house with Rosa Kaplan, whose artistic sensibilities were about to come in handy. They could get Rosa to do some sculptures in the repurposed ice, get Ed to add it to the marketing mix, and whammo! A new profit center, a recycling triumph, and a hell of a focus for a girl who clearly needed one. Claire and Rosa loved the idea, Roy said. They’d all put their heads together, in fact, and developed this business plan. Roy had dug into a bag and produced a neatly formatted document to demonstrate how the new add-on could increase profits and expand the brand.
“You and Claire did this?” Johnny said.
“Yep,” Roy said. He flushed a bit. “And Rosa. We’ve been spending some time on it,” he said.
“I see,” Johnny said. “Well, I think it’s bully.”
“Seriously?”
“Why not?” Johnny said. “That shit is just going down the drain. We might as well try to make it profitable.”
Roy had tucked the plan back into his bag and grinned. “I always told you ice can have more than one life,” he said. “You just didn’t believe me.”
The OSHA fines were steep. But not devastating. Bold City Ice had been held liable for inadequate security in the tank yard, but no mention was made in the report of negligent maintenance on the tank itself. Now that Johnny and Pauline knew the bottom line—about eighty grand—the ground was feeling a bit firmer beneath their feet. Already Pauline was talking with the bank about an equity line on the factory that would enable them to knock out the fines in one bash and even award a few good-sized bonuses to the key staffers—namely Claire, Roy, and (with Johnny’s grudging approval) Ed from Sales—who had pitched in more than their fair share to help keep the factory humming during the turmoil of recent months. Pauline also pitched a plan to hire a new night watchman: Ford from the neighborhood. (“You sure?” Johnny had asked, surprised. “I’m sure,” she said.) Pauline was even talking about scaling back her own commitment by promoting Claire to VP of Administration.
“I’m tired,” she told Johnny, “of living and breathing ice. I’d like to think there’s a bit more to life.” She was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of cabernet and folding a warm load of baby laundry: onesies, bibs, tiny dresses, and polka-dotted crib sheets. As she moved her hands, the familiar glimmer of her diamond ring cast a tiny prism on the ceiling.
“She’s not even here yet,” Johnny said. “How is it we have laundry?”
“You have to wash it all before they wear it,” Pauline said. “They have sensitive skin. I bought special baby detergent.” She folded a pink blanket and looked at him. “We only have a week, Johnny,” she said. “There’s a lot to do.”
Sharon and Toole were arriving next Wednesday with Lucy. They would return to Scotland the following Wednesday without her. Corran was headed back out to the North Sea rigs at the beginning of December, and the plan had been arranged—Johnny and Pauline would take care of Lucy for a few months. Through the spring, perhaps, maybe even into the summer, until Corran got himself a bit steadier on his feet. He’d make some real money out on the rigs, he told Johnny on the phone.
Sharon had later emailed Johnny with a bit more insight, confirming what Johnny had already intuited: Corran felt the rig work helped him stay off heroin, she said, and a few more good, solid months of sobriety could only help in the long run, couldn’t it? Fine then. Lucy for the spring. And then … and then? And then we’ll just have to see, Johnny decided. One day at a time. He was trying hard not to think about the moment when Corran would have to say goodbye to his daughter. It hurt, saying goodbye to a child. Johnny knew all about it.
The guest room upstairs was now outfitted with a suite of furniture from Babies-Я-Us, and it seemed that every day a new mail-order package arrived, each one bearing baby clothes, baby toys, baby books. Pauline was beside herself. The General was looking more suspicious by the minute, and Pauli
ne had been preemptively scolding him. “Open your heart, General,” she kept saying. “The house is plenty big enough for one more.” On a whim, Johnny had gotten online and dropped a small fortune arranging a long weekend for his ex-wife and her husband at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort. Tickets to the theme parks, a luau at the Polynesian, even a “Keys to the Kingdom” tour that would bring them into the fabled tunnels beneath the parks. Tell Toole to bring his autograph book, he texted Sharon. He can get Cinderella to sign it. Let him live it up, Johnny was thinking. He shook his head against the specter of Toole’s progressing fog and watched Pauline matching baby socks.
Pauline. In the three weeks since she’d quit running, her face had already taken on a slight softness Johnny found appealing, comforting. The resignation had come abruptly—he realized after he’d been home from the hospital for a couple of days that he hadn’t seen her lacing up her Nikes and heading out.
“You must be craving a run,” he said to her. “You haven’t gone in a while, have you?”
“My ankle still hurts,” she told him. “I’m not running.”
“What about your training schedule?” he said. “For the Gate River Run?”
She waved her hand. “I’m not doing it,” she said. “It hurts, and it’s hard, and I hate it. I quit.” She told him she’d find other ways to exercise. And then she crawled into bed with him and they practiced one.
Now she stopped folding laundry. “Oh, my God,” she said. She looked at him, dismayed.
“What?”
“I forgot to get a Diaper Genie.”
“A what?”
“I was at the store and I meant to pick it up, and then I got tied up in the strollers and I completely forgot. Now I’ve got to go back.”
“What in bloody hell is a Diaper Genie?” Johnny said.
“You see! Now there you go again. I told you that you have to clean up your language before Lucy arrives.” Pauline stacked the folded laundry into a basket and stood. She was still dealing with a bit of a limp, Johnny noted, but she made it to the refrigerator and turned to ask him if he wanted a beer. Well, yes. She opened him a beer and refilled her wineglass, and together they made their way up into the old lighthouse cupola, where they sat for a while, watching the evening sun push through the branches of the buttonwood tree and create long shadows against the walls.
“Pauline,” Johnny said, after a while.
“Yes?”
“I don’t think it’s going to be temporary,” Johnny said. “Lucy being here. I think she’ll be staying.”
Pauline didn’t answer for a moment. She took a sip from her wineglass and then placed it carefully on the floor next to her chair. “I know,” she said quietly.
“I don’t think Corran’s able. Or that he will be.”
“I know.”
They said nothing for a long time. As the dusk advanced, Pauline must have sensed him staring at her. She turned to him.
“You’re sure about this now, kidda?” he said. “It’s a lot of work, you know. And they don’t always turn out just like you hope.”
She nodded. There was a light in her eyes Johnny didn’t think he’d ever seen before. She took his hand, and he felt her trembling. “Do you really think we can do it?” she said, “I mean, do you think I can do it? I’m not too old?”
“You can do anything, Pauline,” he said. “And this you’ll do best of all.”
That night the rains blew inland. Johnny dreamed the waters flooded Beacon Street and swept them all into the ocean—he and Pauline and Corran and Lucy—but as they bobbed in the black current and dipped under the waves, the instinct to swim came easy, and he was not afraid. He reached out and gathered them all to him. They sank down, then ascended again toward the light. Silence. Surface. Catch a wave and ride it in.
Twenty-Six
“Get the bore, worm,” Andy was saying to Corran. Andy was the lead roughneck. He had six years on the team. They were painting a stair banister on the deck of the rig. It was cold as death, the wind whipping off the North Sea in great wide coils. Six years, Andy liked to remind him. Big shit. Corran had one. So Corran was the worm. Fine.
He left off painting and went to wrestle the bore into place. It needed to be aligned over the borehole to begin its descent into the drill pipe. The bore was taller than Corran, slick with mud and fat as a utility pole. It was suspended from the bore housing, dangling like a filthy cold pendulum. Corran hugged it with his arms and knees and pulled it into place. Get it, sucker, Corran thought. Do your thing. The bore went plunging into darkness. The whole rig was like a giant hypodermic needle, sucking up oil, drawing blood from the bottom of the sea.
He went back to the stair banister and dipped the brush into the bucket of paint. He and Andy painted, not talking. The deck rolled. Corran rolled with it. His knuckles were bleeding. They were always bleeding. The wind hurt the skin under his eyes. Everything hurt. But that was okay. It had taken him a while to figure this out, but he understood it now: Pain is the only way we know we’re alive. Numbness means death. He was hurting, which meant he was alive. For now.
Once, when he was in a stint of rehab—the one in Jacksonville, maybe, couldn’t remember, didn’t matter—Corran overheard Johnny and Sharon talking in his room. They thought he was asleep.
I don’t think he’s going to make it, Sharon, Johnny was saying.
Stop it. Yes he will. He’ll pull though.
Not just this one time. Not just now. I mean forever. I don’t think he will.
Well, nobody does, Johnny, Sharon said. Nobody lives forever, do they? She was angry.
We have to be prepared, Johnny said.
For what?
For the fact that he can’t beat this. It’s going to get him in the long run.
Fuck you, Johnny, Sharon said.
Corran wanted to smile at the memory. His mother. What a mouth on her. Who had a mother who talked like that? He did. But he didn’t smile. It wasn’t funny. Johnny was right. Corran was clean now. Would he be clean in a year? In five years? In ten?
Roll of the dice, chief. The skag would be there when he got back to the mainland. It was never going away. In some dreams Corran’s hand hovered over a latch on a cage. No, Da.
Don’t let it out, Lucy would say in these dreams, and Corran was so surprised to hear her talking—Already! Clever girl!—that he would pull his hand away from the latch. In other dreams Lucy was gone, and his hand hovered over the latch again, shaking so hard, until one quaking thumb hit the cage door—No, an accident!—and the latch clicked and the Cù-Sìth was out, snarling and heaving, smelling like bile and planting great wide, wet paws on Corran’s chest. He was as likely to have one dream as the other. Going to sleep was as big a crapshoot as waking up. It would be nice, he thought, if the dreams would simply stop.
Corran left the painting and walked to the rig railing. He looked out over the sea and watched as the clouds rearranged themselves. Lucy is warm now, he thought. In Florida the sun shines and warm breezes stir the trees. Pauline had been sending photos: Lucy on the beach under a broad flopping hat. Lucy in a high chair, eating chunked banana. Lucy in a plastic wading pool, water beading on her fat shoulders.
Lucy.
Corran looked down into the black water, roiling mountains that rose and fell and rose again. I don’t think he’s going to make it. Try. Fail. Try. Fail. It is all I have, Corran thought. It is all I know.
He stood a long time in the cold, until the sound of Andy’s voice cut through the wind. The paint. Ah, yes. The paint. The banister. Corran pulled his gaze up from the darkness and caught a hunch of white on the distant horizon, which might have been clouds dying. Or maybe ice, quietly forming.
Acknowledgments
Enthusiastic thanks are due once again to my agent, Judith Weber; and my editor, Amy Hundley. These women can see a diamond in the rough and push me to make it shine. Without their vision, integrity, and patient faith, this book would not exist. Thank you, also, to the many w
onderful people I’ve come to know at both Sobel Weber and Grove Press. I’m lucky to partner with these gifted professionals. Thank you to Todd Sanders, Anthony Gilroy, Elizabeth Olsen, and the entire team at Steinway & Sons, for letting me write about pianos for a living. My job is the beautiful sound track to my writing life. Thank you to the readers, booksellers, book groups, librarians, bloggers, and reviewers who received my first novel so kindly and who gave me the courage to write another. Thank you to Liz Robbins, Ian Mairs, and Michael Carroll. Thank you to my friends and neighbors in St. Augustine, especially Dawn Langton and Dale DiLeo, who gave me a room to write in when I needed it; and Kim Bradley, fiction comrade forever. Thank you to my mother, Judy Cook, who read every draft of this book with patience and wisdom. Thank you to Chris, Iain, and Gemma—my loves. Thank you to all my family near and far, especially the late Johnny Readie, who found his way from Scotland to America all those years ago, and who taught us that if you can say it’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht, then you’re all right.
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