Life Guards in the Hamptons

by Celia Jerome

  We paid and left. We walked to his car to pick up my books, then he walked me to Mom’s Outback around the corner.

  “You know,” he said when he put my books on the back seat, giving the James Herriot dog stories a fond pat, “no one will push us to blend your genes with mine. I’m not—what do they call you?—a Visualizer. I couldn’t call up anything. Not even you when I left messages.”

  I apologized. Again.

  “Yeah, I’ll get over it. What I’m trying to say is don’t worry about that Royce Institute I heard so much about, or that M word. You changed my head around, but not my ancestry. They won’t encourage a match between one of their most unique talents and a mostly ordinary man. That’s like breeding a Westminster champion poodle to a five-generation mongrel from the pound.”

  The genealogists at Royce mightn’t like the match, but my mother? My grandmother? Matt was a healthy male with a steady job. That was enough for them. I got in the car and opened the window so we could still talk.

  “Well, you don’t need to worry about the M word either. Or the Other stuff. I’m not visualizing anything these days. I’m writing about the past, what we saw, embellishing, not inventing. I haven’t drawn a single stressed-out dolphin, rare bird, or bank robber, so the town can relax, too. I’m here to help my grandmother, then I’m gone. Back to the city and my deadlines and my normal friends and neighbors.”

  “Fair enough. If you need me, call. I have to earn my place at the poker table.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be fine, now that you’ve fixed up my dog. That’s enough.”

  He leaned against my door. “You will let me help, won’t you?”

  I didn’t know.

  CHAPTER 7

  WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW COULD FILL AN ocean. What I didn’t like about what I did know was the Titanic, headed smack for the iceberg.

  I didn’t know if anything the council theorized was true. Paumanok Harbor had a regular mayor and a town clerk, board members and department heads, all elected and salaried by the taxpayers. It also had an underground council that met privately, loosely, usually for emergencies. That unpaid, unelected, illegal, and un-American committee consisted of anyone who heard the call, land line, cell, in the street, or in their heads. A bunch of members served on both village boards, like the mayor and the police chief, so while one administration selected the date for the annual tree lighting on the village green, the other made sure there’d be a light dusting of pretty snow.

  The esper council rarely interfered with the legitimate government, but their pronouncements held sway with the psychics. I think my grandmother ran it.

  Now they’d concluded that I was contagious, a Typhoid Mary of the mentalists. Could it be true? I didn’t think so, but I’m sure they had a handful of truth-knowers on the committee. They guessed I’d somehow transferred a touch of power to Matt, contaminating him. I know they all thought of those talents as gifts. To me, they were a plague. Who wanted such responsibility, such paralyzing danger, as much tension as I’d known this summer? All I wanted was to be left alone in my comfortable, safe apartment writing my books.

  Now I had a watchdog, besides a lapdog. I didn’t like the word Lou used. For that matter, I didn’t like Lou much. He always scared me, even before I knew he was an agent from DUE. They told me Lou had guarded me in Manhattan from mad kidnappers, but I never believed it. My grandmother liked him. Susan thought they’d had an affair. I didn’t want to believe that, either. The silver-haired psychic psychiatrist from Shelter Island I could understand, but Lou the Lout?

  And he thought I needed a guardian. Was Matt supposed to watch me, or watch out for me? Two whole different things. I didn’t need a babysitter, and I didn’t like the ominous feeling that word “watchdog” sent down my spine. Pit bulls and Rottweilers, fangs and snarls.

  I also didn’t like knowing I’d endangered Matt more. Not from any of the otherworld beings, but from ruthless agents like Lou. Lou’s job consisted of keeping the paranormal private. Which meant protecting Paumanok Harbor and its citizens, and following orders from the Royce-Harmon Institute for Psionic Research in England, which few people knew existed apart from the reputable Royce University. Lou would do anything to keep it that way. Anything. Fangs and snarls. Guns and grenades.

  And I’d put Matt in the ring with the pit bull? Damn.

  I liked him too much to feel good about that.

  He was a nice guy, really nice. And sweet and smart and kind. Good-looking without being drop-dead gorgeous, sexy without being a tomcat. I mean, a woman wouldn’t have to worry about him chasing every skirt in the state. No one ever gossiped about his affairs or dates that I knew of, and his divorce happened before he moved here. He reminded me of a rock, a steady, calm, solid rock you could lean on, not altogether smooth, but not affected by every passing breeze either. Maybe a rock near a thermal spring, because there was nothing cold about the warm-hearted vet.

  Except he wasn’t for me. Not Matt, not this suffocatingly small, ingrown town, not my mother’s neighbors, not this breeding ground for sorcerers. Maybe Matt’s talent was being intelligent enough to figure out that the whole of frigging Paumanok Harbor had gone bonkers and he’d leave. If Lou let him.

  Either way, I could always find a decent vet in Manhattan. I was not staying here.

  I called my grandmother on the cell phone from the car again. She lectured me about that, again.

  “I just wanted to let you know I’m on my way home. I’ll walk the dogs, hop in the shower, and be there soon.”

  “Did you eat?”

  The sparrows ate more. “I didn’t have dessert.” No lie, and the best part of meals at my grandmother’s. The worst part was worrying what she put in the food to get her way.

  I took the extra ten minutes to do the lice shampoo on a washcloth thing. The fierce itching was back, now that I wasn’t concentrating on Matt and his story. I put my clothes in the washing machine, fed the big dogs a treat and a carrot, thought about leaving Red home with one to gnaw on. There he sat, though, right next to the front door, looking mournful, as if he’d been abandoned, again. I swear he raised his sore front paw, as if threatening to gnaw on that if I didn’t take him.

  “Okay, but if you pee on Grandma Eve’s antique rugs, she’ll turn you into a rabbit and make stew out of you.”

  We walked. I carried Little Red, a flashlight, and a sack of fresh shelled pistachio nuts I’d bought for my grandmother before leaving the city. They might be one of the few things she didn’t manage to grow on the farm.

  The fields were dark and the farm stand was closed, but nearly every light in the big house glowed in the twilight. Grandma Eve had the door open, the tea kettle whistling on the stove, and half a peach pie made from the last of the local fruit. Oh, boy.

  “Jasmine and Roger”—Susan’s parents—“just left. They wanted to welcome you home”—Paumanok Harbor was not my home—“but they looked half asleep over dessert, so I sent them off to their own house. You can see them tomorrow.”

  That last was an order. But I liked my aunt and uncle. They didn’t try to manage my life too much. Having their precious daughter turn into sleep-around Sue had to shatter their child-rearing confidence. I appreciated that they’d left me half the pie, too. “I’ll walk over before Aunt Jas goes to school in the morning.”

  “And you can tell her about your date with Matt Spenser.”

  “It wasn’t a date.”

  “Who paid for your roast beef sandwich?”

  “Hah! You don’t know everything, after all. I had a veggie burger.”

  “You should have gotten the roast beef as usual. Joanne never could make a decent vegetable burger. Too much soy, not enough vegetables. Who paid?”

  I sighed over the slice of pie she put in front of me. “Joanne must have told you already.”

  “No, she told Janie at the beauty salon, who told Martha at the real estate, who came by for an eggplant. The vet paid. That’s a date.”

  “He didn’
t drive me, didn’t take me home. I was going to treat for the ice cream, but it got late while we talked, and I knew you were waiting for me. So, no, it wasn’t a date.”

  She sniffed, just like my mother.

  I turned down Grandma Eve’s tea—she kept trying to read the leaves—in favor of lemonade, settled Little Red on the kitchen floor with a carrot, and watched my grandmother try to hide her yawns while I scarfed down the peach pie like I hadn’t eaten in days.

  “I won’t stay long. I can tell you’re ready for bed yourself. Keeping late nights, are you?” I looked around, half expecting Lou or Doc Lassiter to pop out of the living room.

  “I’m not keeping company, if that’s what you are hinting at. It’s that damn bird, keeping all of us up at night. Tweet, tweet, for hours. Here, at Jasmine’s, at your place, Susan says.”

  “She said it had a loud squawk, but loud enough to keep everyone awake?”

  “Tweet, tweet,” she screeched. Little Red jumped into my lap, soggy, half-shredded carrot and all.

  “Damn, that bad? Somehow I thought it was a little bird without enough lung power for such a shriek. Have you seen it?”

  “I thought I caught a glimpse a couple of times, not enough to guess its size. It hides if anyone gets too close. In the corn stalks, in the pumpkin patch, among the cabbages and broccoli plants. A month later, with the fields plowed for cover crops, it would be easy to spot. At night it keeps away from any light. Just tweets, so we know it’s still there. It starts tweeting after midnight, and keeps it up for hours. Never in the same place, in case I wanted to go out with a net. I’m thinking of a shotgun.”

  I knew she didn’t mean that. “If it keeps moving, that means it’s a good flier. That’s a good sign that it might keep going.”

  Grandma Eve ate some pistachios. “We can hope.”

  “What about during the day? Does it tweet then?”

  “Not a peep, damn it, or we’d have it caught. There have only been a couple of sightings after the first few days when someone spotted it, just enough to keep the jackasses with the binoculars out in force.”

  “I saw the cars this afternoon. Practically on my lawn. And no one got a photograph of the bird?”

  “No, but they identified it from a reliable description, they say, verified by the top birder in Suffolk County. And now they are everywhere, making ruts, raising dust, taking up the farm stand parking, setting their tripods smack on a cabbage. Come six o’clock when we close up the stand, I threaten to have all of their cars towed, government endangered species people included. And I have Kelvin at the garage on speed dial, too. Word got out how much he charges to reclaim the vehicles, so they leave. The environmental people threaten to get a court order allowing them to stay, but they know they’ll never see it at night, anyway. The birds are supposed to be diurnal, fast asleep in a burrow or something at night. No one wants to be the one to step on a rare bird in the dark.”

  “But it doesn’t sleep at night if it’s calling.”

  “We don’t mention that, or they’d be here in tents and sleeping bags, in the pumpkins.”

  I had another bite or three. “So they bother you during the day and the bird keeps you up at night?”

  She nodded and sipped at her tea. She looked older than she did last month, the lines on her face deeper, her hands bonier. And she’d only eaten three or four of the pistachios.

  I wiped peach juice off my chin and fed Little Red a tiny crumb from the pie crust. “Okay, the oiaca and the traffic are both nuisances. What do you think I can do about it?”

  “You can talk.”

  “To the birdwatchers? If they don’t listen to a witch—”

  “Don’t be snippy. I’m too tired for that. Talk to the bird, of course.”

  “You must be thinking of my mother. She’s the one who chats with dogs.”

  “I am not thinking of your mother. I know very well my own daughter’s capabilities. It’s you I need. You inherited enough from her to be able to do it. You talked to the troll, didn’t you? And the lost colt and the fireflies.”

  “But they were telepathic creatures. They talked to me. I could only try to communicate with pictures and hope they understood. What kind of drawing could I do for an off-course avian? One that no one sees, either.”

  “I didn’t say draw for it, I said talk to it.”

  “There’s no way I could chat up a Patagonian peahen. What language do they speak in Patagonia, anyway?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You need to calm it down, figure out what it eats, how to get it home.”

  I swallowed a mouthful of lemonade wrong and sputtered. “Me?”

  “Who else? The so-called experts who are ready to put tranquilizers in bowls of water? The fools with their butterfly nets? Or the self-righteous twits prepared to let nature take its course and let the bird die?”

  None of those plans appealed to me. The rest of the pie did, so I slid some more onto my plate. “I wouldn’t have the least idea what to talk to it about.”

  “You’ll make it up, like one of your stories.”

  “But it’s a bird!”

  “A bird that is going to die out there, tweeting its heart out in loneliness. The nights will get cold, the fields will be stripped. What will it eat? And what about the rest of its species? Who knows if they need this one’s genes to stay viable? What if it’s a female, already pregnant?”

  “But … but …”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know how or you won’t try. As much as I hate to admit it, you inherited genes from your father, too. You care.”

  “Of course I care. I don’t like to see any creature suffer. But my father?” Grandma Eve never had a good word to say about the man since he moved to Florida, except good riddance.

  “Yes, him. Him and his cockamamie clairvoyance. Do you know why he dreams of disasters? Because, for all his faults, he cares deeply about you and your mother and his best friends. Even me. Did I tell you how he once warned me about an Indian chief?”

  “Good grief, no.” Grandma Eve would have skinned him alive.

  She poured me another glass of lemonade. “I belittled him. In front of your mother and the others.”

  “You should not have done that. He never, ever meant harm to anyone.”

  “I know that, and I apologized the next day, right after I got rear-ended by a Pontiac. Do you know what they look like?”

  “I don’t pay attention to that kind of thing. I don’t think they make them any more.”

  “They used to be big and flashy, with a silver statue on the hood, like the Jaguars have. This one was Chief Pontiac himself. I found it in the road when they towed my car away.”

  “But could you have prevented the accident if you knew Dad meant a car? You couldn’t stay home forever, or pull over every time you saw that make.”

  “No, but the point is your father tried because he has a good heart. That’s all I am asking of you. Try. Oh, and if you come upon a doddering Brit, call Lou. Royce University in London has misplaced a beloved retired professor.”

  CHAPTER 8

  I WALKED HOME FROM MY GRANDMOTHER’S house, full of pie and resolution to be a better granddaughter. She believed in me, whatever I was. The least I could do was try to deserve that trust.

  No tweeting came across the fields or from the trees that bordered the private dirt drive. No missing professor either. As I stepped around the ruts from the rain and the extra traffic, I heard crickets and a bullfrog in the pond behind Aunt Jas’s house. Sometimes the pond dried up in the summer. Where did the frogs go then? But this year we’d had plenty of rain, floods, in fact.

  I didn’t like walking in the dark this way, with nothing but Little Red and a flashlight for protection. My grandmother would have sneered if I’d taken the car for such a short distance, though, and I needed the exercise, especially after the pie. Besides, I could see the many lights I’d left on at my house.

  And, I told myself, none of the Hamptons’ new robbers
would be stupid enough to come down a narrow dirt road, not that I’d heard of them housebreaking or waylaying pedestrians. No masked man was about to ride out of the trees shouting, “Stand and deliver,” like they did in Mrs. Terwilliger’s romance novels. Still, I’d locked the house up tight, so it took me three tries with two keys to get the front door open.

  All shut up that way, the house felt hot. Summer lingered and the breezes didn’t blow tonight. Off came the sweatshirt, up went the windows. The front door stayed locked.

  I decided to work a little, since the day hadn’t been productive beyond a couple of notes and sketches on the bus ride out. That deadline loomed.

  I checked my email, checked Facebook in case I got fan mail, played solitaire till I won, then got to it. Blank screen, blank sketch pad, blank mind. Blech.

  So I played solitaire some more. Got a Diet Coke from the fridge. Did a mental smack in the head, kick in the butt, poke in the ribs. And sat and thought about my plot, my character, my readers. And, hot damn, I finally figured out the perfect companion for my hero. Not a young boy, a butler, or best friend, but a creature that was both fanciful and fun. I did a bunch of sketches, added colors that would look good on the cover, adjusted the size, fixed the highlights in the eyes to look more intelligent. Lost in the creative cloud, I tried out names, abilities, character traits. Maybe I’d give it a limp. No, a lisp. It had to talk, to fit the story, but a speech impediment made it unique, like my three-legged dog.

  Before I knew it, hours had passed. My back ached from sitting. My eyelids felt scratchy. I let the big dogs out in the fenced front yard, then put a leash on Little Red so I didn’t lose him in the dark. He hated being in the dog run with the old guys, most likely thinking they were going to gang up on him, which they never would. He yipped every time they got close, and yipped when they didn’t move. Aunt Jas deserved a quiet night, especially if she was too exhausted to eat peach pie. I led the Pomeranian around to the side of the house, in the new light from the wrap-around porch.