“Sugar, you’re just a worrier by nature,” Kitty told Lucy at lunch while they ate their Alligator Salads on the veranda of the Post Café.
Lucy had flinched each time a bird flew overhead; she shook too much pepper on her salad and then had to clean off the spinach leaves with a paper napkin.
“Don’t you have anything better than birds to worry about?” Kitty had asked her, and of course she has. She has Martha Reed, formerly of Valley Stream, New York, calling her every week to report on Keith’s transgressions and set up conferences in the guidance office at the junior high. She has full custody of a twelve-year-old boy who’s been marking off the days on his calendar until he can finally go back to New York for summer vacation, and who now wears a skull earring. She has trouble with the cooling system of her Mustang, so that the motor cuts out whenever the air-conditioning is turned on high. And of course, she has her job at the Sun Herald, where she writes obituaries, and cultural pieces that are almost as deadly; earlier this week she had reviewed the high school production of West Side Story, making certain to mention Kitty’s granddaughter, Shannon, who’d had her brown hair tinted black at the Cut ’n’ Curl for her role as Anita. Lucy has not even begun to worry about the fact that she seems to be addicted to Diet Dr Pepper, or that if she keeps on devouring the jelly doughnuts Kitty brings to work every morning she won’t fit into any of her jeans.
Every afternoon, at a quarter to five, Lucy begins to dread going home, because every evening she and Keith fight. They fight about his lack of privacy, as she roots through his backpack, about his failing grades and bad attitude, about the Florida heat. They have even had a particularly savage battle over the right way to replace the ice cube tray in the freezer. Their arguments seem to escalate with the humidity, and tonight the air is so damp and thick that Lucy’s straight hair has begun to curl by the time she drives home. A bad sign. The sign of screams, accusations, slamming doors, sleepless nights. Every day at five-thirty the parking lot of 27 Long Boat Street is a madhouse, and the lobby isn’t much better. For the past few months someone has been jimmying open the mailboxes, stealing child-support and alimony checks, so everyone wants to pick up the mail pronto, especially around the first of the month. There are thirteen divorced women in the building, and although they might reveal their baby-sitters’ phone numbers or meet for dinner at the Post Café, they never, ever speak about their past histories. Occasionally, a bit of a previous life accidentally surfaces. Karen Wright from the eighth floor had also been a customer at Salvuki’s, the salon in Great Neck where Lucy used to pay fifty dollars for a haircut; Jean Miller and Nina Rossi discovered they had been students at Hofstra College at the same time. But the facts of their lives mean so little; they know what they all have in common: some hard disappointment, best forgotten, which has propelled them to Florida.
That is why Lucy knows that Diane Frankel, who holds the elevator open for her tonight, goes to aerobics class during her lunch hour and eats nothing all day but two Ultra Slim-Fast shakes and a tossed salad, while she has no idea where Diane grew up or what her ex-husband’s name is.
“I’m starving,” Diane says as Lucy steps into the elevator.
“Yeah, right,” Diane’s sulky fifteen-year-old, Jenny, says from the rear of the elevator. “You look it.”
“Be glad you don’t have a daughter,” Diane tells Lucy.
“Oh, I am,” Lucy says. “Now if only I didn’t have a son.”
Lucy and Diane look at each other and grin, while Jenny gives them the evil eye. Jenny has long brown hair worked into dozens of braids, and, Lucy knows from conversations in the laundry room, she’s already on the pill.
“That is so weak,” Jenny says. “Like we asked to be born.”
Lucy knows that the girl has a point, but it’s a point she forgets as soon as she walks into the apartment and hears the stereo blasting. Guns N’ Roses. She gets herself a Diet Dr Pepper from the refrigerator, kicks off her shoes, then counts to one hundred before she heads for Keith’s room. She knocks once, knowing he can’t hear her, then opens the door. As usual, all the shades are drawn and the room smells like cigarettes and popcorn. Keith sits in the center of the rug, methodically dismantling the motorized car Evan sent last November for his birthday. He’s almost as tall as Lucy, and his hair is short like hers but spiked up in front, as if naturally agitated. Ever since they moved to Florida, the ridge of his nose has been sunburned. Immediately, Lucy smells french fries and oil on his skin.
“Where did you get the money for Burger King?” she asks.
“Who says I went to Burger King?” Keith says coldly.
Lucy goes to the window and pulls up the shade. “How was school?”
“Okay,” Keith says, running his hand through his hair as he lies. By now he can forge her signature on a suspension notice without much trouble. “Boring.”
Keith’s backpack is hung over the edge of his bed. The guidance counselor has told Lucy not to feel guilty; she has a perfect right to search his possessions.
“Mind if I take a look?”
Keith salutes her as though she were a member of the SS, and he watches, grinning, as Lucy unzips the backpack. When she screams and drops the backpack, Keith scrambles to catch it. He reaches inside and pulls out the baby alligator he found behind the toilet at Burger King.
“Oh, great,” Lucy says. “I can’t believe you did this.”
“I’m not letting it die,” Keith tells her. “You can’t make me.”
She could fight him. She could flush the alligator or call the super and begin their last fight, the one that would end with Keith running out of the house and hitchhiking to the Interstate, where he’d stand in the dark hoping for a ride to New York, if he wasn’t murdered first. Lucy knows enough to keep her mouth shut. She goes into the bathroom and runs cool water into the tub. Kitty Bass has assured her that twelve going on thirteen is the worst; if she can get through this year she can get through anything.
Keith brings the alligator into the bathroom, and they sit on the edge of the tub, watching for signs of life.
“We’re not allowed to have animals,” Lucy reminds him.
“We’re not allowed to do anything,” Keith says as he holds a piece of lettuce under the water, waving it so that ripples form.
Most probably, this alligator has been dying in the Burger King for weeks, and now it seems to be finishing the process in their bathtub.
“I think he has a fighting chance,” Keith whispers.
For the first time in months he actually looks hopeful. Back home all the boys on the block have golden retriever puppies and aquariums filled with neon tetras. They have everything they’ve ever wanted and more. That’s why Lucy doesn’t think about how many times she will have to scrub the bathtub with Comet, and instead changes into jeans and a T-shirt before gathering her laundry and eating a yogurt for dinner. Keith doesn’t come into the living room until the ten-o’clock news has already begun. He says he needs a break since his legs are cramping from sitting on the edge of the tub, but the truth is, he knows it’s too late, and when Lucy finally forces herself to go into the bathroom, the alligator is already dead. Keith insists they bury it, and because his voice breaks, because Lucy doesn’t know what else to do with the creature, she agrees. They get a shoe box from her closet and wrap the alligator in the Metro section of the Sun Herald. The body is very small, that’s the surprising thing, that a dead alligator is so much smaller than a pair of size-eight high heels Lucy has not worn for years.
Outside, the air is thick as soup. They quickly discover it isn’t easy to dig a grave in Florida. The earth is so sandy it keeps falling in on itself each time it’s scooped out with one of the silver ladles, a tenth-anniversary present from Evan’s mother. They are crouched behind the ficus hedge, on the far side of the pool, fearful of the super and any passing cars. The lights are on beneath the water, so the pool seems to float in space, a black hole surrounded by white moths and palmetto bugs. Finally t
hey manage to dig a large enough hole, and Keith places the shoe box inside, then covers it with sand. They can hear a siren somewhere down Long Boat Street; they can hear the crabs that burrow beneath the sea grape during the heat of the day scuttling across the concrete walkways surrounding the pool. On someone’s balcony a wind chime sways; it sounds like stars falling, or glass breaking into pieces.
Together they are shivering in the heat, beneath the black-and-gold sky. Along the shed where the chaise longues are stored, there is a vine of snowy white flowers that bloom only at night. When Keith finally rises to his feet, his breathing is shallow and much too fast.
“Are you okay?” Lucy whispers.
Keith nods, but he isn’t. Anyone can see that.
“It was only an alligator,” Lucy says.
“Yeah,” Keith whispers. “Right.”
As they walk back to the building, their rubber thongs beat a rhythm on the blacktop and the scent of the white flowers follows them. No one ever tells you how hot it can get in Florida during the month of May before you move down. No one mentions that sharks’ teeth as big as a man’s thumb can be found in the gutters after a storm or that the night air brings on spells of homesickness and bad dreams. When they get upstairs, Keith goes to his room and slams the door behind him. Lucy cleans out the bathtub, twice, with Comet and scalding hot water, then gathers the used towels together. When she first started writing the obituary column at the Sun Herald, she’d had a hard time; now it comes easy to her. She thinks in short, trim sentences of death and disease. Young alligator, dead of unknown causes, natural or unnatural, survived by no one, mourned by a single, sullen boy who would never in a million years allow anyone to know how often he cries himself to sleep.
When it is nearly midnight, Lucy knocks on Keith’s door before she heads down to the laundry room. There’s no answer, and, hoping he’s asleep, Lucy grabs her wicker laundry basket and her detergent. Because she’s so late, the laundry room is emptier than usual on a Thursday night. Karen Wright and Nina Rossi are already waiting for their clothes to dry. Karen has taken off her two gold rings, so they won’t snag her baby’s playsuits when she folds them, but Nina always wears her jewelry; she says it’s the one thing she got out of her marriage, and she refuses to take off her gold necklaces and her charm bracelet, even when she goes into the pool. Lucy stuffs her dark wash into a machine, adds soap, then joins the other women on the plastic bench.
“You’re going to be here all night,” Nina Rossi tells her. “It’s so humid nothing’s drying.”
“Lovely weather as usual,” Lucy says.
“For turtles.” Karen Wright grins as she fiddles with her portable intercom, which allows her to listen for her baby up on the eighth floor.
“Dead turtles,” Nina adds as she unloads her dryer and begins to fold the massive amount of clothes her two girls go through every week. “I like your hair,” she tells Lucy.
“Dee down at the Cut ’n’ Curl,” Karen guesses. “Right?”
Karen’s red hair is also cut short, although nowhere as short as Lucy’s.
“Is it awful?” Lucy asks Karen after Nina has taken her laundry upstairs.
“Listen, they would have charged you fifty bucks to do something like that at Salvuki’s,” Karen said.
“Not to mention the tip and the conditioner they would have sold me.”
“They used to talk me into mousse,” Karen says. “Like I need mousse.”
When her baby begins to cry, Karen looks up, startled. Lucy understands exactly what a cry can do. It’s a sound you never get used to, it can cut right through flesh and bone.
“Just once,” Karen says as she hurries upstairs, “I wish she’d make it through an entire night.”
Lucy herself didn’t sleep through the night once during Keith’s first five years. The disturbances came one after another: bad dreams, croup, chicken pox, fear of the dark. She can tell tonight will be a rough one for Karen. Through the intercom she can hear the baby continue her whimpering, but by the time Lucy carries her folded laundry down the basement hallway, Karen is headed back to the laundry room, her little girl in her arms.
“I give up,” Karen tells Lucy as they pass each other.
Maybe it was simply impossible to sleep once you had children. You had to use that time to worry. You had to do it for the rest of your life. It’s almost one-thirty when Lucy gets back to the apartment, and across the hall from her bedroom she can see a line of light beneath Keith’s door. Outside, the stars are turning red with heat. Although the windows are closed and the air conditioner is turned to high, Lucy can still hear the strangler figs as they drop from the trees, and maybe that’s what keeps her son awake. It’s a sound that reminds you that anything is possible, right outside your front door.
TWO
THE SHORT CIRCUIT happened last night, sometime between midnight and three, when the yellowfin in the bay turn the water the color of butter. At a quarter to four this morning there was an anonymous call to the station, which could have easily been a joke, since the caller sounded like a kid, except that when Richie Platt finally got himself over there and had the super unlock 8C, there was a dead woman on the kitchen floor. In her closed fist were four quarters that had turned as cold as ice.
By ten-thirty there were four police cruisers and two unmarked black Fords parked in the circular driveway, blocking all the handicapped spaces at 27 Long Boat Street. Some of the officers, grown men who have presided at the scenes of car accidents and three-alarm fires, were so shaken they took turns going out behind the building, where they smoked cigarettes and wondered why they’d ever wanted their jobs in the first place. There is supposed to be a complete blackout, with no news leaks whatsoever, but Paul Salley, whose father owns the Verity Sun Herald and the radio station and just about everything else in town, has positioned himself in the lobby and won’t be budged. Paul has been waiting for a murder like this ever since he got his master’s degree in journalism from the University of Miami. Some people might consider him lucky; he considers himself smart. He was tuned to the police band on his radio and heard too much activity for anything less than a major crime. Greedy for facts, he hasn’t even phoned in to his editor or the obit page, since he’s not about to be scooped.
“One thing about Paul,” the chief of police, Walt Hannen, has said. “You can spit on him and he thinks it’s raining.”
Nobody’s giving Paul the facts or even the right time of day, although the truth is that aside from the body in the kitchen, not a thing is out of place in 8C. No one ransacked the dresser drawers or went through the closet, and there’s over three thousand in cash packed inside a suitcase under the bed. As far as anyone can figure, the victim had a load of laundry going in the basement, came up with a folded load, still in a plastic laundry basket in the living room, and, while searching for change, surprised the thief, maybe even struggled with him, so that he panicked and fled before stealing anything of worth. But there’s more to the crime than all this, and that’s why Walt Hannen is waiting in the parking lot, smoking his third cigarette in under half an hour even though he gave up smoking last month. With Paul Salley bothering people in the lobby and so many single women in town, they can try their best to keep this murder quiet, but by tonight there’s going to be a run on safety locks down at the hardware store. A lot of people will be wanting answers, and it’s all going to be on Walt Hannen’s head.
Julian Ca finally pulls up, late as always, just as Walt takes out his fourth cigarette and lights it. The air is so heavy that the smoke doesn’t even spiral upward, it just hangs there so that it’s hard to see straight. When Walt hired Julian, after all the trouble he’d been in, people thought he was crazy, but Walt trusts him. Julian has a natural instinct for the way people work and an uncanny ability to connect with animals. Though nobody believes it, Walt has actually seen a red-shouldered hawk respond to Julian’s whistle, stop in midair, then swoop down to a patch of grass not fifty yards away. He’s heard
those merlins who nest in the cypress trees along Julian’s driveway raise hell, like watchdogs, whenever a car turns in, headed for Julian’s house.
Julian leaves his dog in the car and comes up beside Walt, then shades his eyes and studies 27 Long Boat Street.
“Not anything you’d want to happen,” Julian says.
“No,” Walt Hannen agrees, figuring there’s no point in griping to Julian about his being late. Behind his back, people have talked about Julian since the day he was born. They say that as a baby he had the loudest and worst cry of any child ever born in the state of Florida, and although he usually speaks softly, like a man just waking from a deep sleep, Walt Hannen would not like to see him truly angry.
“I told you last year to take early retirement,” Julian says.
“You should have been more convincing,” Walt says dryly.
“Well, hell,” Julian says. “Let’s get this over with.”
He lets Loretta out, and she circles around his legs, then sits beside him. She’s pure black, aside from her face markings, and Walt Hannen doesn’t move an inch until Julian has clipped on her leash.
“Jesus,” Julian says when they get to the lobby and he sees Paul Salley. They’ve known each other since grade school, and even though they haven’t said two words to each other in the past five years, Julian would still like to push Paul’s face in. Rich kids don’t go over well in Verity, even after they’re all grown up.
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