The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  A newspaper box stood outside the station, and one of its headlines read: “Reedy’s Killer Strikes Again?” And that was the end of my morning of wonder.

  I couldn’t read much through the box window, but the first paragraph of the story said that last night in Savannah, a body had been found, its condition similar to that of Robert Reedy, murdered four months ago near Asheville.

  I glanced at the passengers around me, sure that my face betrayed my guilt, but no one seemed to notice. Quickly I walked back to the train. I took a swallow of tonic to steady me; so little was left, perhaps enough for two more days. Then what would I do?

  The train began to move again, but I took no pleasure in its movements. All I saw ahead of me was an endless struggle to survive. Now I knew why my father called our condition an affliction.

  South of Jacksonville, the landscape grew more tropical. Trees I’d never seen before grew profusely — a jungle of palms of various shapes and sizes interspersed with trees whose leaves grew in red-tinged clusters. Again, it bothered me that I didn’t know their names.

  Green-tinged ponds spotted with water lilies bordered plots of land covered by black plastic tarps, under which verdant vines grew profusely. What was growing there? Houses, some little more than sheds or shacks, and small churches had front doors facing the railroad tracks. We passed towns with exotic names: Palatka and Crescent City and Deland. (Although its station looked pretty and picturesque, I sensed something sinister about Deland. Later I learned that it was a frequent site of natural disasters, accidents, and murders. Why is it that some places are so much more prone to trouble than others?)

  When I let my mind turn inward again, it was much calmer. It was grisly to think of another death like Reedy’s, but whoever had done it would only deflect attention away from me. I didn’t bother to speculate about who might have committed this murder — it could be any one of the thousands of vampires my father had told me were out there, getting by in whatever way they could. I let myself hope that whoever died had been a bad person, even though I’d been taught that there was no excuse for murder.

  Then I thought ahead, to what might happen in Sarasota. I took the small book of wedding photos from my backpack and studied each picture. My mother’s smile suggested that she’d never had a moment of worry or despair, yet from my father’s stories I knew she’d known both, before and after the wedding. Why would she have chosen to return to the city where she was married? Wouldn’t the memories be painful?

  I studied the details: the tropical plants in the background, the candles and glowing paper lanterns used to light the ceremony. There were few guests; one photo showed a heavily rouged Aunt Sophie and a younger, thinner Dennis with my mother (I assumed my father had taken the picture); another showed my parents standing before a woman in a black gown; her back faced the camera, but from their positions it seemed she was pronouncing them man and wife.

  I flipped the page, and a postcard fell from the album’s binding. An image of a creature floating in turquoise-colored water stared up at me; I bent to pick it up. On the card’s other side, a legend identified the animal as a manatee, also known as a sea cow. I’d heard that word before, in a crossword dream.

  The message, written in right-slanted handwriting, read, “Sophie, I’ve found a new home. No worries, and no word to the others, please.” It was signed simply, “S.”

  But it was the postmark that interested me most: “Homosassa Springs, FL.” I thought, Five S’s in one name.

  The next time the conductor made his way through the car, I flagged him down. “I’ve made a mistake,” I said. “I bought a ticket to the wrong place.”

  The conductor shook his head. He seemed genuinely sorry that he couldn’t change the ticket. The only person who could do that, he said, was a ticket agent, and he advised me to talk to one at the next station.

  And so I left the Silver Star at the next stop, Winter Park. The agent in the small brick station told me three times that it said no re-fund on my ticket. Then he told me three times that Amtrak had discontinued service to the Gulf Coast.

  I still had no idea where Homosassa Springs was, which probably was an asset in my negotiations. I kept saying “I need to find my mother,” and he kept saying, “Amtrak doesn’t go there,” until finally a person in line behind us said, “She could take the bus!”

  Someone else said, “Give the kid a break.”

  And that was how I got a refund of eighteen dollars and advice on how to find the bus station (which I had no intention of following). I headed down the main street of Winter Park, lined with shops and sidewalk cafés. The air smelled of stagnant water and women’s perfume. As I passed a café, I heard a woman tell a server, “That was the best Bloody I’ve ever had.”

  I stopped walking, and went back to the restaurant. The server seated me on the patio. “I’d like one of those,” I said, pointing at the woman’s tall red glass.

  The server said, “May I see your ID?”

  I showed him the only ID I had: my library card.

  “Uh huh,” the server said. He came back with a tall glass that looked like the one my neighbor was drinking. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be nothing more than spicy tomato juice.

  Chapter Twelve

  Light and shadow: you need both to paint a scene or tell a story. To represent three dimensions on a flat surface, you need light to form the object and shadow to give it shape.

  In composing a picture or a story, you pay attention to negative and positive space. The positive space is what you want the viewer’s eye to focus on. But negative space also has substance and shape. It isn’t the absence of something; it’s a presence.

  My mother’s absence in my life was in many ways a presence. My father and I were shaped by it, even in the years when we didn’t mention her name. The prospect of finding her tantalized me, yet made me anxious; it threatened to rearrange and displace everything familiar. If I found her, would I become the negative space?

  The last leg of my journey was the easiest of all. Thanks to the United States Postal Service, I got a free ride to Homosassa Springs.

  In Winter Park, I found a post office and asked the clerk whether a letter to Homosassa Springs would be transported directly there. He looked at me as if I were crazy. “I’m writing a paper about mail delivery,” I said, as an excuse.

  He said a letter addressed to Homosassa Springs would first go to the Mid-Florida Processing Center in Lake Mary. And so that’s where I went, via postal truck.

  I felt a little like an urban legend: the invisible guest in the passenger seat. But the driver never glanced in my direction, except to look at his side mirrors. The road was dull and flat from Winter Park to Lake Mary. Once we’d arrived at the processing center, it wasn’t hard to find a truck being loaded with westbound mail. The driver whistled incessantly as the landscape changed from flatness to slightly rolling hills. By late afternoon the truck arrived in Homosassa Springs, which looked like any of the several small towns I’d seen: gas stations, strip malls, cell phone towers. I thought, not for the first time, If you ever want to hide from the world, live in a small city, where everyone seems anonymous.

  When the driver left the truck, I pulled my backpack from under my seat and climbed out. Standing in the shadow of an oak tree, I willed myself visible and walked around the parking lot and into the post office. The clerk inside, a middle-aged woman with dark hair, stood with her back to the door. She was talking to someone in a room off to the left of the counter.

  I pulled the photo album out of my pack and opened it. When she turned around, I said, “Excuse me. Do you know this woman?”

  The clerk looked from me to the picture, then back at me. “I may have seen her around,” she said. “Why do you want her?”

  “She’s related to me.” I couldn’t say the words “my mother” to a stranger.

  “Where are you staying?” The clerk was thinking, What do you want with her?

  “I don�
��t know yet. I just came into town.”

  “Well, when you find out, you can come back and leave a note for her. Ask for me — ask for Sheila. I’ll make sure she gets it, if she happens to come by.”

  Slowly, I shut the album, and slid it into my backpack. I felt tired, and hungry, and out of ideas.

  The woman was thinking, Am I doing the right thing? “Are you looking for a hotel?” she said. “There are two in Homosassa, right down the road.”

  She gave me directions. I thanked her and left. I walked along a busy highway, then turned onto a quieter road.

  Trees overhung the narrow road on both sides, and I made my way along the roadside path, past small wood houses, a library, a restaurant, a school — all sleepy-looking. I felt that I was plodding, plodding toward nothing. Ahead a billboard advertised the Riverside Resort, where an invisible guest would shortly check in.

  This time I entered the room through a balcony door. I had to try three balconies before I found a door unlocked. Inside, I drank the last of my tonic, and then I sat on the balcony and watched the sun set on the Homosassa River. The blue-green water was speckled with fiery orange, like a bloodstone.

  Later, a visible me went to the hotel restaurant and ordered two-dozen oysters on the half-shell.

  The restaurant had glass windows overlooking the river, and a nearby small island with a red-striped, fake-looking lighthouse on it. As I watched, an animal — large and dark — moved through the trees.

  “Bob’s restless tonight.” The server set down a large silver tray of oysters, along with bottles of hot sauce and cocktail sauce.

  “Bob?”

  “The monkey,” she said. “Anything else?”

  “No, thanks.” As I ate, I watched Bob the monkey pace the small island.

  Once again, the oysters worked their magic. I wondered what gave them their subtle flavor, as fresh and electric as ozone after a thunderstorm. With every mouthful, my energy and spirits revived.

  At least the postal clerk had recognized the photo, I thought. Of course, my mother would be in her mid-forties now, and she probably looked different — but how hard could it be to find someone in a town as small as Homosassa Springs?

  The server asked me if I wanted anything else to eat. “Another dozen, please,” I said. When they arrived, I asked her, “Are these oysters alive?”

  “They’re fresh-shucked,” she said.

  I looked lovingly down at the plate: the beautiful, plump gray morsels still attached to the mother-of-pearl colored shells. Whenever they died, I hoped their death wasn’t painful.

  “Anything else?” The server tapped her foot.

  “More crackers, please,” I said.

  Yes, I did go back to the restaurant the next day for another three dozen. And I confess, this time I went as the invisible Ari, because my money was running low.

  I wanted to wash my clothes, which were more grimy than I liked. One of the perks of vampirism is that we don’t perspire, but our clothes still pick up lint and dust and dirt.

  Washing them would be too risky — they’d need to be hung up to dry, and someone might rent my room in the meantime. So I put on my trousers and an almost-fresh shirt, and I folded the jacket and put it into my backpack.

  On the balcony I looked for Bob the monkey; he had a playmate, I saw now, a smaller monkey swinging from a rope bridge strung between two trees. As I watched, two pedal boats approached the island, and the people on board took out their cameras. Bob and his friend stopped playing. They walked down to the island’s shoreline. Standing side by side, they stared at the cameras.

  Can’t they swim? I wondered. I sent them sympathy and a silent farewell.

  My strategy now was to return to the post office and tell the woman that I was staying at the Riverside Resort. But before I’d walked more than a hundred yards, I noticed small groups of people standing along the road, looking at the sky, as if they were waiting for something. Schoolchildren clustered around teachers, holding small pieces of cardboard. Everyone seemed to be talking at once.

  I’d never seen an eclipse, except once, on television at the McGarritts’ house. Now I stood close to one of the groups and listened to a teacher talk about the eclipse path, about the moon moving into the earth’s umbra. She warned the children to use their cardboard pinhole cameras, and she urged them to watch for the “diamond ring effect.”

  When the teacher stopped talking, I asked her if she had an extra camera. She looked at me oddly, but she handed me two cardboard squares. “Don’t forget to turn your back to the sun,” she said. “Are you from around here?”

  “I’m visiting,” I said. But I heard her think, She looks like Sara.

  “Do you know my mother?” I asked, but she’d already moved away. The sky began to darken, and the air was colder now. We all turned away from the sun, like obedient ducklings. I held the squares apart, so that the one with the pinhole filtered light onto the other. The sun appeared — a white dot.

  As noisy as they’d been before, the people around me suddenly grew quiet. As the moon passed through the earth’s shadow, the sun on my cardboard became a crescent — and for a moment, it did look like a diamond ring, a radiant gem attached to a thin band of light around a dark center. It was, to use Kathleen’s words, totally awesome. And those words awoke my memories of her — racing ahead of me on her bicycle, or lying on floor cushions, flipping back her hair and laughing — a girl full of life, not yet a victim. Standing in the near-darkness, I wished she could have seen the eclipse, and I hoped that she was at peace.

  How much time passed before the sun emerged? We stood silently as mourners in the faint light. I stood looking down at the cardboard long after I needed to. I hoped that no one saw me cry.

  The noise of the others brought me back. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve, and when they were dry, I looked up again, straight into the eyes of my mother.

  She stood at the edge of a group of children, watching me. Except for her clothes — faded jeans, a t-shirt — she looked like the woman in the wedding photos: fair skin, long hair that curled back from her forehead, eyes blue as lapis lazuli.

  “Well,” she said. “We wondered when you might drop in.”

  She held her arms out, and I ran into them. This time I didn’t care if anyone saw me cry.

  And this is the hardest part of all, wouldn’t you agree? How to describe the first experience of your mother’s love, without sounding like a bathetic greeting card?

  Perhaps I needn’t try. A phrase from the Bible conveys it: “peace that passeth all understanding.”

  Three

  The Blue Beyond

  Chapter Thirteen

  The road to my mother’s house was narrow, made of dirt, and bumpy. Her white pickup truck skirted the deepest ruts, but it still made for an exciting ride. She drove fast, and when I looked into the side mirror I saw clouds of dust behind us.

  She left that road and turned right onto an even narrower one. Small white lights marked its curves. Finally she stopped at a tall aluminum gate, connected to a high aluminum fence that sprawled off in both directions.

  “Ugly, isn’t it?” she said. “But necessary, at times.” She unlocked the gate, drove us past it, then locked it again.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her. When she returned to the truck, I said, “Please? Tell me what I should call you.”

  She smiled at me. “Call me Mãe,” she said. “It’s Portuguese for mother, and a nicer sound than mother, don’t you think?”

  “Mãe.” I extended the two syllables: MY-yeh.

  She nodded. “And I’ll call you Ariella. A name I’ve always loved.”

  Tall trees made a canopy over the road; some were live oaks, trailing Spanish moss; others, I’d learn later, were mangroves.

  “The river is off to the west,” Mãe said. “And to the east, we border a nature preserve. We have forty acres.”

  “We?”

  “Dashay, and the animals, and me,” she said. “And now, yo
u.”

  I was about to ask who Dashay was, but we turned another curve and I saw the house. I’d never seen anything like it. The central structure was rectangular, but a dozen or more rooms and balconies had been added on. Skylights and round windows were set at angles and positioned high or low in the walls. The house was made of gray-blue stone; later I found out that the additions were stucco, painted to match. In the late morning sun (brighter than usual, it seemed; did it seem so because of the eclipse, or because of my finding my mother?), the walls seemed to glow.

  We left the truck. Mãe carried my backpack. I paused to touch the wall near the front door; close up, I could see the stone’s veins of silver, slate gray, and midnight blue. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Limestone,” Mãe said. “Built in the 1850s. This part is all that’s left of the original house; the rest was destroyed by Union soldiers.”

  Beside the front door stood a stone statue of a woman riding a horse, next to an urn full of roses. “Who is she?” I asked.

  “You don’t know her?” Mãe seemed surprised. “Epona, goddess of horses. Every good stable has a shrine for her.” She opened the heavy wooden door, and beckoned me in. “Welcome home, Ariella.”

  The smell of home: wood polished with the oil of Meyer lemons, roses, a savory soup cooking somewhere, lavender, thyme, white geranium, and a hint of horses. Mãe removed her shoes, and I did the same, embarrassed at the sight of my socks, one of which had a hole in its heel. She noticed but didn’t say anything.