Godsend

by Barry Knister

  Just coffee, then, but she had to come in, just for a minute. As they got out, Ray’s wife opened the door. Taller and lighter-skinned than her husband, with rich black hair that hung loose to her shoulders, Mrs. Colon was dressed in tan shorts and a black tee shirt. She looked from the strange woman to her husband as Ray spoke Spanish. Now Mrs. Colon smiled broadly and beckoned for Brenda to come in.

  The living room looked lived-in but tidy, a mix of styles and colors that suggested resale. Striped wingback chairs, a well-worn tweed couch. On the walls hung a beach-scene sunset and a village plaza in rural Mexico. Next to the plaza hung a reproduction of a Nordic-looking Jesus.

  “Please tell your wife I don’t want to be rude, but I have to get back.”

  Ray translated. “Sí, sí—” Mrs. Colon nodded and left. Ray gestured for Brenda to sit. A TV was playing but stopped, and now a boy and girl came through the archway, herded by their mother. Carlos and Carmen, eight and ten, named for grandparents. Buenas noches—Brenda shook their small hands, waved when they were ushered back through the archway.

  Then the coffee, strong and black. She said no to cream and sugar, this was how she always took it. As she sipped, Ray and his wife spoke Spanish. Mrs. Colon shook her head with an expression of weary acceptance, men and their foolishness. More coffee? Thank you, Brenda said, I have to go. She stood, handed Mrs. Colon her empty cup, and promised to come for a second, real visit. Ray translated, then gave his wife’s reply: you must keep your promise, and when you do, I will give you some true Mexican cooking, not the terrible food they call Mexican here in the States. Brenda said her goodbyes and left.

  It was dark, the Colons’ side street unlighted. As she retraced her way back to the road to Naples, she felt warm and energized by the coffee. She felt hopeful and happy for Ray and his family. And for his cousin. They had come here from nothing, one of them legally, the other not.

  On Friday, toweling off after her swim, she had watched two men cutting grass on the fairway. They sat on big riding mowers, dressed in long-sleeved khaki shirts, pants, caps and gloves. Goggles and noise-protector headsets completed the robot image.

  Quinto Colon, AKA James Rivera, had found a way to trade in the khaki uniform for Oxford-cloth shirts and fishing trips with wealthy customers. Driving now along Immokalee’s main street, Brenda again saw him smiling up as she came down the escalator. The image was made for Norman Rockwell. Before Kennedy and Vietnam, Brenda thought. Before Watergate and Iran-Contra and Monica and Enron. Before 9/11.

  Charlie Schmidt made a practice of hiring people down on their luck. Even ex-cons. He said it was wrong to write off someone because of their past. More and more, she needed Charlie’s steady, calm voice. Needed his take on James Rivera.

  She was now on the dark rural road that would take her to the Interstate. Here and there, her headlights glanced off bright oranges hanging on trees close to the road.

  People down on their luck, Brenda thought. A hundred-plus years ago, how many millions down on their luck in Europe would have saved themselves and their families the same way Rivera had? Without the Atlantic Ocean in the way, how many would have done the exact same thing? All Hands on Deck—she smiled. Rivera had come by ship, and maybe that explained his company’s name. He too had crossed a sea, like millions from Europe. And then, very quickly, he and his cousin had found—no, had made their way to the American dream.

  White raised arms were waving ahead in the glare of the Buick’s headlights. A woman in a cowboy hat was flagging her down. Off to the side, turning now with huge, light-glazed eyes, stood a gray horse. Brenda slowed. The woman dropped her arms and came forward. Trotting at her feet were two dogs, tongues out. The ears belonged to Pembroke Corgis.

  Brenda came to a stop and lowered the window. “What’s wrong?”

  The woman bent and shook her head. “I ride over to say hello, she isn’t here. I ask Dad, ‘Where’s Mom?’ He’s watching TV, he has no idea. I go out, I’m looking.” The woman shook her head again and knocked the car with her cowboy hat. “She can’t be far.”

  “Let me park.”

  Brenda backed up until clear of an open-gated driveway. She turned in and put the car in Park. In the rearview, the woman was now tying her horse to the gate. Brenda got out and held still as the two Corgis bounded to her and began sniffing. The approaching woman was in her forties, dressed in cutoffs and a sleeveless blouse. She had lots of freckles and looked resigned. The hat was a Kenny Chesney special.

  “Do you have a phone?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank God. I didn’t bring mine, and of course they have just a land line. Critters sometimes eat the wires, and I can’t get a dial tone.”

  “Where have you looked?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, here and there. This isn’t the first time.” The woman looked up the drive.

  “Get in.” The woman came quickly around and opened the back door.

  “Okay if the dogs come?”

  “Sure.”

  “Go on, git, git—” The Corgis clamored in. The woman followed and slammed her door. Brenda drove slowly forward. “I haven’t got a clue,” the woman said. “Not a clue.”

  The headlights now revealed the blank blue walls of a large house with a red metal roof. “You two behave, that food’s not yours…” The dogs whined—and now the house was fully visible. Corrugated hurricane shutters had been lowered to cover all the windows and the front entry. The place looked armored.

  “She gets like this on Saturdays,” the woman said. “My mother. Not every week, maybe once a month. It’s some kind of anniversary thing, that’s what I think. I asked her, I asked Dad. Neither of them know what the hell I’m talking about, but that’s my theory. Something happened on some Saturday way-back-when. That’s when she remembers and goes looking.”

  They were now outside an attached garage. Brenda switched off the ignition. “Why don’t you check inside?” she said. “Maybe she came back.”

  “Good idea.”

  They both got out. The woman and dogs hurried along the side of the garage and now disappeared. Brenda looked ahead, then to the right over the car’s roof, then to her left. On all sides of the property, coconut palms hung limp against moonlight. She saw no other houses or lights. In the new silence, the air came alive with insect sounds that she hadn’t heard at Donegal. An owl called. She heard what must be bats, wings battering.

  She followed where the woman had gone. At the back, a two-story pool cage extended from the house. Except for a lighted entry, all was dark. More hurricane shutters covered the windows and door walls. Behind the cage spread a landscaped area that sloped down, with a path.

  She took the path, smelling what might be jasmine. It was dark, the trees motionless but somehow sentient. Her feet were crunching on a path of crushed stone that ran between boxwood hedges. Something skittered, and she stopped. After a moment, Brenda continued along the path, divided between looking ahead for a silhouette and being careful where she stepped.

  The path wove in a lazy S, but in seconds, what had been a half-visible garden of flower beds and hedges now fell behind her. Now she was walking between broad-leafed foliage that covered much of the path. The ground underfoot no longer crunched and must be mulch.

  “Please, Allen—”

  Brenda stopped. The words had come from a point just ahead. It was a woman’s voice, old and urgent. “You needed to listen to me.”

  The voice gave her a sense of direction, and her eyes had adjusted. Brenda moved again over the sponge-like foot trail. She looked up and stopped again. Twenty feet ahead stood a woman, small and featureless in the dark, but a woman, in a nightgown. Spreading in a broad circle around her legs was a pond scored by streaks of moonlight. Her presence in the water was causing small disturbances, and here and there floated lily pads. Now came the odd, ratchet-like sound of tree frogs.

  The water was up to the woman’s knees.

  “Are you all right?” Brenda moved
to the edge of the pond. “Please let me help you.”

  The woman didn’t turn. “When he comes back, then we’ll all go,” she said. “Allen? Say something.” As Brenda moved into the water, the woman looked straight up. Brenda looked. Above her floated a near-perfect circle of night sky, formed by a spiky crown or wreath of palm fronds. “Please, Allen.”

  “Wait!” The horsewoman was coming, running. “Hold on!” Moving toward the woman, Brenda slid but righted herself on the pond’s silt-slick bottom. She reached the woman and could see her now—eyes wide, vigilant, listening—

  “Please get her out of there, that pond’s full of water moccasins.”

  “He’ll follow us,” Brenda said. “Come on, we should start back, Allen will see us leaving and come after.” Terrified all her life of snakes, she put her arm around the woman’s shoulders, wondering what it would be like, what in the next second it would feel like to be bitten by pit vipers, and she managed now to turn the reluctant woman.

  “Do you think he will?” she asked.

  “Yes, I do—Look, here’s your daughter, here’s—” She didn’t know the woman’s name, the daughter waiting at the water’s edge in tall riding boots, but waiting at the edge until Brenda reached her with her mother.

  “Come on, Mom, let’s go now, here we go, watch your step…”

  Brenda followed them, afraid to look down, sure snakes followed people, that you weren’t safe once you were on land because snakes followed. She moved behind the two, watched the ground, the old woman’s sodden, dragging nightgown.

  “Just your luck showing up when I’m out in the road, doing my thing.”

  “It’s all right,” Brenda said. “Let’s get her inside, and you can make your call.”

  They reached the garden. The mother seemed unaware of gravel underfoot. Quickly the three passed up the incline, along the pool cage.

  “Weird, I know,” the daughter said. “No chance of a hurricane until June, but that’s Dad for you. He sees too much news, all this crime. He has a remote, he closes the shutters every day before dark.”

  They went inside. A voiceover was shouting somewhere. Big kitchen to the left, a long, dark hall ahead. As the woman led her bare-footed mother down the hall, Brenda looked to her right. A man sat in the dark, in one of two BarcaLoungers. He was backlit by a huge TV, and gave no sign of hearing that people had entered. Ahead, the woman was still moving her mother forward, marching with her, snapping on overhead lights.

  Brenda followed. The closed shutters had sealed off the interior from any moonlight. Walking over plastic, she felt the house, cold and dry, smelling of bleach. An eerie flashback put her for a moment two hundred feet below ground, in the paranoid sculptor’s studio.

  The woman reached the end of the hall and disappeared. A light came on as Brenda followed her into a large living room heavy with shadows. On her left, the mother was now seated on a couch covered with more plastic. The hem of her nightgown and muddy feet were already forming a puddle on the floor. Like the furniture, the carpet had been covered in plastic. The daughter stood looking down at her mother, making up her mind about something. All the furniture seemed part of a dated pop-art installation, because of the plastic. The walls were bare.

  “Could I use your phone now?” Brenda handed it over. “What a nightmare,” the woman said, tapping buttons. “I don’t see where we can take it…” Hand on her hip, she waited. “Where do you think I am?” she said. Looking at Brenda, she mouthed my husband. “That’s right, and she went into the pond. I had some help, this nice woman helped me get her back to the house, but their phone’s out…”

  She turned away. Feeling like an intruder, Brenda stepped back into the hall. It was gray, identical to the color of her apartment before Thanksgiving. “Don’t you blame this on me,” the woman said. “If you hustled more, we’d have money to get some help…”

  The husband would want to know his wife was safe. Brenda’s wet boat shoes sounded like squeegees as she slicked her way down the plastic carpet runner. As she neared, the familiar, demanding voice of a Fox News talking head came again from the lighted opening. She reached it and looked in, knocked on the frame. “Excuse me—” Nothing. “Excuse me!” The man turned in his chair. “I thought you might like—”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Your daughter stopped me for help, she—”

  “No you don’t—” He rocked forward and stepped free of his chair, swung to face her and raised his arm. “You think you can just walk in here and take what you want—” He held a handgun. “Not here you don’t, not in my house you don’t, not yet.”

  “Dad!” Feet slapped down the hall. “Wait!”

  Brenda held herself motionless as the TV voice went on shouting. As he watched television, the old man had held the handgun in his lap. It’s how he lives, she thought, facing the backlit black cutout of a man with a gun. Every day.

  “No, Dad!” The woman stopped next to her. “She’s not a thief, Dad, she’s with me, she let me use her phone.”

  He lowered his arm. “Please let me have it,” the woman said. “Come on, Daddy, this is no good, you could really hurt someone.”

  She moved to him. “Please,” she said. “Do it for me.” He looked at her a moment before handing it to her. “Thank you.” The man watched as she stepped back into the hall. Now Brenda heard the two dogs panting, maybe in the kitchen. The woman motioned for her to follow.

  Once outside, she looked at the gun. “I’m real sorry about this—” She dropped her arm and faced Brenda. “He has four or five around the house. Maybe more. He started buying guns just before we made him stop driving. I hope you won’t file anything.”

  sunday

  In her TV tabloid days as WDIG’s Lightning Rod reporter, three people had pointed a gun at Brenda. A confused cop, a drug dealer, and a crazed commuter during a live-action report on a road rage incident.

  Maybe that explained why she hadn’t run from the old man. The pond was different. Anything with snakes on TV, she changed channels immediately. As she drove back to Naples in wet boat shoes, it was all she could think of. She kept shivering in the cold car, seeing herself wading to the woman, feeling something touch her leg. More than once, driving, she reached down to her ankle.

  By the time she got back to Donegal, the few moments spent in the old couple’s house fit perfectly with what Marion Ross had said: Naples is where you come face to face with old age. Yes, there were golf courses and beaches and cocktail parties. But also fear, sickness, and madness. And All Hands on Deck.

  ◆◆◆◆◆

  Up early, seated again on the deck in front of her laptop, she entered the password for her email account, then typed out the address for her editor at Esquire. In the subject box she typed BALL-DROPPING BY BRENDA CONTAY:

  I hope this won’t mess up your scheduling—you said my boomer piece would run in Oct/Nov but I can’t write it. Yes, I’m a putz, but if you give me a pass on this, I can deliver something much better.

  Esquire’s demographic is younger, but your readers have parents and grandparents. Believe me, the investigative piece you want out of Naples isn’t about boomers. It’s about their parents.

  Here’s a taste: a woman with onset dementia wanders off at night looking for someone, but only on Saturday nights. Her horseback-riding daughter searches for her and flags me down to help her. Her mother walks into a pond full of water moccasins. Meanwhile, Dad’s in his den, in his big house, all of it sealed off by hurricane shutters. He lowers them every night at sundown, then watches Fox News with a Smith & Wesson in his lap. In the hall behind him, a strange red-haired woman says “Excuse me.”

  Let me know if you want it. If you don’t, I know who will.

  Your biggest, hugest, most grateful fan and admirer,

  Brenda

  It was a good tease but pure bullshit. She didn’t know anyone else who would “want it.” Brenda sent the message.

  Then she typed All Hands on D
eck, and at the home page she clicked Those Who Rely on Us.

  She scanned down the list to Hilda Frieslander. Unlike other customers, the woman had refused to smile. Rivera had posed her in front of a bookcase with horses resting on top, bronze sculptures. Frieslander looked resigned, just doing a favor for likeable James Rivera who needed a picture for his website. “Staff members at All Hands on Deck are affable and efficient. Highly recommended.” Affable. Rivera had written it down in his notebook, along with pick your brains.

  She scrolled up and again studied Chester Ivy. He had died on Friday. The next morning, Rivera had given a heads-up about Ivy’s death to a friend in real estate. And about Hilda Frieslander who had died the day before. Now, the idea of alerting Noelle Harmon so quickly about the deaths came off as too orderly. Too efficient.

  Brenda went to the address box and typed in Whitepages.com. Then “Hilda Frieslander, Marco Island, FL.” The listing gave an address but no telephone number.

  She picked up her cell phone, tapped Tina Bostwick’s number, and waited. Tina’s MS meant it would take her several rings before she could free her phone from the book bag slung on the arm of her wheelchair.

  “Hello, Brenda.” Tina sounded reserved. Not Hi, Dear One, her usual greeting, but Hello, Brenda.

  “Hi. Listen, please give me Charlie’s cell number. I deleted it.”

  “Is that part of the clean break?” Tina asked.

  “I never remember numbers, please just give it to me.”

  “What brought you to this all-too-obvious revelation?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Maybe not.” Tina gave the number, and Brenda wrote it on her notepad. “I don’t think you can reach him,” Tina said. “He left a message on his machine. He went up to his place in Minnesota.”

  Holding the phone hard against her ear, Brenda set down her ballpoint. Minnesota. She looked out at the fairway. “Why? What happened?”