Turtle Moon

by Alice Hoffman

  He doesn’t plan to miss his chance again, he’s not about to stick around until someone figures he’s guilty of murder or kidnapping or even petty theft. Yes, he brings the breakfast dishes to the sink for Miss Giles and he fills up the little wading pool for the baby and holds her hand so she won’t slip while she’s hopping around in the tepid water, but that doesn’t mean he’s staying. The baby loves to play in the water, he remembers that from Long Boat Street, how she’d sit on the steps of the pool beside her mother with a plastic watering can and a pink plastic sieve while he and Laddy splashed each other and held each other’s heads underwater for as long as they dared. This little girl is never going to hold someone’s head underwater in a swimming pool; the boy can tell that already. She’s thoughtful and cautious; when the boy lets go of her hand, to sneak a cigarette behind the woodpile, the baby sounds like she’s about to cry, and he has to come right back and watch her as she sits down carefully in the water and wiggles her toes.

  He doesn’t have to be responsible for her and he’s not going to be. He doesn’t have to notice that she looks up at him, quickly, each time he moves, just to make certain he’s still there. So what if she steps out of the pool as soon as he nods to her and picks up her towel when Miss Giles calls them in to lunch; that doesn’t mean he owes her anything. No one could guess what the boy was really thinking or planning. He eats his franks and beans, even though they turn his stomach. He lies down beside the baby till she falls asleep at nap time. He even hangs the laundry on the line for Miss Giles without being asked. He doesn’t care about anyone and nobody can make him. He doesn’t care as he sits at the kitchen table and watches Miss Giles stir her batter for icebox cookies, he doesn’t give a damn about anything any of Oprah’s guests have to say, he couldn’t care less that his mother hasn’t even bothered to try to find him.

  “You’ve got a funny look to you today,” Miss Giles says to him after the baby has woken from her nap and reattached herself to the boy’s leg.

  The boy makes his face go all innocent and confused, but he can tell Miss Giles isn’t so easily fooled. Little by little, she’s been getting the baby to like her, and now the baby will leave the boy’s side long enough to go out to the yard with Miss Giles and feed bits of lettuce to the rabbits. She even let Miss Giles wash her old, muddy stuffed bunny, though she sat right out on the porch with it until it dried. Miss Giles may be smart, but if she thinks the boy’s got a funny look to him she doesn’t have to worry. It’s the last one she’ll ever see on his face. If people are stupid enough to trust him they deserve whatever they get. Actually, he’d bet good money that Julian Cash would have done the same exact thing when he was his age. He would have gotten the hell out of there as soon as he could; he probably would have traveled a hundred miles on the Interstate by now.

  It’s not easy to sit through the rest of the afternoon, and then through supper and a plate of the icebox cookies Miss Giles baked. The baby lets Miss Giles put her to bed tonight, a first, since she’s always made a big fuss if the boy isn’t the one who tucks her in and gives her the stuffed bunny rabbit to sleep with. It’s just as well, it’s better this way, it doesn’t really matter one damned bit. He’d have to be nuts to be jealous, since he’s not about to have this baby hanging on to him for the rest of his life. He watches the big clock in the kitchen, waiting for the sky to fill with orange light, then begin to darken. At a little before nine, when the baby’s asleep, Miss Giles looks up from her day-old issue of the Sun Herald and says, “Don’t you have a chore to do?”

  Like he’d ever forget, like he hasn’t been waiting all day just for this. The boy nods politely and swings open the back door, and then he’s free. By now the sky has turned dark purple, the color of the quilt his mother and father used to keep on their bed. It is not so difficult to make a left rather than a right when he reaches the end of the driveway, and so instead of heading to Julian’s place, the boy takes off running in the opposite direction. He runs along the edge of the road, through the damp, purple night, his heart beating fast. He figures it won’t take him long to hitch a ride north once he gets to the Interstate, so he lets himself slow down. He fishes a wrinkled cigarette he stole from Julian’s kitchen out of his jeans pocket and lights it with a wooden match, then inhales greedily. The sky above him settles into blackness and the white moths appear, as if out of thin air. All he has to do is clear his mind and keep walking, and before he knows it, he’ll be home.

  Up ahead of him, on the back steps of the Hole-in-One, Shannon is waiting for a sign that will tell her what to do with the rest of her life. Today at noon, as she sat beneath the gumbo-limbo tree, she began to wonder what it would be like to be rooted in one place forever. She thought of all the things the tree had to endure, gas fumes and wood-peckers, termites and hurricanes, and as she rested her head against the peeling bark, she began to weep. She has to choose, otherwise the future will just happen to her; she’ll sit beneath this tree for what will seem like only hours, but when she finally rises from the ground, she’ll discover she’s an old woman, with long gray hair that twines down into the grass. If she goes north this summer, it will change her whole life. She’ll come back for her senior year, and after that for Easter and Christmas vacations, but she won’t be the same person anymore, and she’s not sure how anyone is ever ready for that.

  Tonight, as she stands outside her mother’s shop, it is just as possible that she’ll spend the rest of her life in Verity as it is that she’ll be on a plane headed north for the summer session at Mount Holyoke. She looks up, but there aren’t any stars. She can hear her mother joking with Maury and Fred as they get ready to close up, late, the way they always do on Fridays. Her mother’s been working here since the summer she turned eighteen, not very much older than Shannon is now. Nobody offered her any fellowships or plane rides. Shannon can’t even remember her mother taking a vacation, except for the time she took Shannon up to Disney World a few years back. They went on every single ride—Pirates of the Caribbean, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride—and they kept a log so they wouldn’t miss anything, since they both knew they probably would never come back. People thought they were sisters, but instead of being flattered Janey was downright annoyed. “I paid my dues,” she told Shannon.

  Just thinking about her mother makes Shannon feel like crying, and she doesn’t know why. She breathes in quickly, short little breaths that make her feel slightly dizzy, so that she’s not quite certain what she’s seeing when a figure appears on the road. She stays real quiet, and when he draws a little closer she recognizes him as the boy she saw at the Dumpster. She feels a little fluttery, as if maybe he’s the sign she’s been waiting for, and without stopping to think, she walks out to meet him.

  The boy is startled when he sees her; he takes several steps backward, just the way the deer in her yard used to.

  “Are you running away?” Shannon asks.

  The boy stares at her, then nods his head.

  “I’m thinking about it, too,” Shannon says, because right now that’s exactly the way it feels to her.

  The boy takes one last step back. He should have dodged her before she opened her mouth to speak. Just because she’s stupid enough to hesitate doesn’t mean he has to do that too.

  “I can’t make up my mind,” Shannon admits. “I think I have and then it turns out I haven’t. I feel like I’m driving myself crazy.”

  The boy can feel the momentum begin to drain out of his fingers and toes.

  “Where’s your little sister?” Shannon asks. “The baby I saw you with?”

  If the boy could speak, he would tell her that the baby is asleep in a crib, beneath an old cotton blanket, almost five miles down the road. He would say that she’s too young to know she’s been abandoned. She won’t understand, even after she wakes to find that he’s gone. But nothing comes out of his mouth. All he can do is scowl and wish this girl would disappear. She’s a complete stranger; he doesn’t have to feel the do
ubts she has, he doesn’t even have to consider them. He can be on his own in two minutes flat, he can do it and not look back. What does he owe anyone? Absolutely nothing. What does he feel on this road, so far from home? Nothing at all.

  A car appears out of the darkness and passes nearby, and as its headlights sweep across the road, Shannon and the boy step closer to each other. It’s the moment the boy’s been dreading, the instant when he hesitates. As soon as the car has gone by, the boy looks at Shannon as though he were frightened by everything—the dark, the car’s headlights, the sweet smell of lemons in the air—then he takes off running, back the way he’s come.

  “Wait,” Shannon calls after him, since it’s too soon to tell whether or not he’s the sign she’s been waiting for.

  The boy is amazingly fast, running down the road until the night closes in behind him. You would think he’d never been there at all, unless you had been close enough to feel his warm breath, because he’s gone now, without ever having said a word. Shannon fans herself with one hand and holds her long hair up off her neck with the other. She’s used to hot weather and mosquitoes; she’s seen those white moths appear each May all her life, then disappear again in June. She hears Fred and Maury head out to their cars. She hears her mother calling from the back steps, the way she used to when Shannon was a little girl and woke early, so she could go outside and wait for the deer. It never occurred to Shannon to leave the back porch and walk over to the woods where her father kept a block of salt, just as it hasn’t yet occurred to her that she’s already made her decision. Standing in the road, listening to her mother call to her, she’s already left home.

  Julian Cash sleeps in the car, just as he has for the past two nights, hunched up in the front, so that Loretta can sprawl across the backseat. The only difference is that now Lucy is sleeping less than two hundred yards away, in the guest room of her ex-husband’s house, and that just a few hours ago, while the sky was still inky and everyone else on the block was asleep, what Julian wanted to happen did, and it’s driving him crazy.

  Since she’s gone inside the house, he hasn’t been able to sleep more than an hour at a time. Every time he wakes he’s startled by the moon above him, as if it were a piece of Lucy’s dress, which tore when he touched it, so that his hands seemed filled with light. He thought she would be angry with him when she first got into the car, but she wasn’t. She leaned against the door and pulled her legs up beneath her. She had a way of looking at him that made him think she might bolt and run at any second.

  “Are you here because you think I can’t do this by myself?” she had asked him.

  “No,” Julian had said, and it was the truth. He had been parked outside the country club for hours, with Loretta curled up in the backseat, listening to people enjoying themselves, because he couldn’t not be there. When the guy with the Porsche leaned down and kissed Lucy, Julian went to the glove compartment for his gun. It was just a reflex, he didn’t act on it. But he wanted to, and he knew what that meant. He had lost the ability to focus; if somebody didn’t stop him soon, he wasn’t going to be able to stop himself.

  “I can get the name of this woman on my own,” Lucy had told him. The white dress was so short it moved half way up her thighs and she had to tug at it. “Whether you think I can or not.”

  “I think it’s a good thing you didn’t go home with him,” Julian had said, as he steered the Mustang down the country club driveway. He actually said that; he heard the words come out of his mouth.

  “We’ll never know, will we?” Lucy had said. “Since I didn’t.”

  “Oh, we know,” Julian had said.

  He was certain then that the madness had followed them. It had seeped into their bones, and even a thousand miles between them and Verity didn’t make a difference. He wanted her all the way back to her ex-husband’s house, but he never would have done anything about it if she hadn’t leaned toward him, suddenly, and looped her arms around him. It had happened with so little warning, as soon as he’d parked in front of the house, that neither of them could think straight. But before Lucy could change her mind, or even take another breath, he slid his hand between her legs, and when he felt how hot she was, he knew it wasn’t over yet. He couldn’t stop kissing her. He held her to him, so that her spine was pressed up against the steering wheel, and the most amazing thing was that she didn’t stop him. She wanted him to pull her dress down. She must have, because when he did she arched her back and let him go on kissing her. She didn’t run away when he jammed his seat back, or when he pulled down the zipper of his jeans, or even when he moved on top of and then inside her. She didn’t even close her eyes.

  He could have sworn she told him not to stop. Somebody told him that. Parked beneath the streetlight, he could hear her whispering to him. Even if this never happened again, he didn’t care, and he wouldn’t let her go, not until the sky turned milky and gray and they heard The New York Times delivery truck turn the corner. And now his mouth is sore, and his head throbs, and he feels her all over him, as if she were still with him. He wants more than he promised himself he would, and because he doesn’t dare hope for anything, he finds himself hating New York and everything about it. He can barely breathe here.

  It shouldn’t matter one bit that her ex-husband’s house is so big, or that there were thirty-one Jaguars parked at the country club last night. It shouldn’t matter that he had to show ID to get past the guard at the gate, when he noticed that no one else was being stopped. Lucy told him, as she got out of the car, clutching her dress around her, not to follow her anymore. You’ll make people nervous, she told him. He’s thought about what she said and he knows it’s true. He’s been making people nervous all his life. He does it to her; he could tell from the way she backed away from the car. Sooner or later someone on Easterbrook Lane will pad out across a green lawn to pick up The New York Times, spot him, and call the police, and then he’ll have to report to the New York State police for permission to carry a gun.

  He’s never given a damn about cars or houses before, and he sure as hell isn’t going to start caring now, but he thinks he may have a virus, or maybe it’s just that something’s wrong with the air up here. Loretta, snoring in the backseat of the Mustang, doesn’t seem to notice the difference between New York and Florida, but she must because you can smell it, you can feel it on your skin, like pollen.

  When Lucy finally comes out of the house, at a little after eight, Julian slouches down behind the wheel. She and her ex-husband are in the middle of an argument, probably about the boy. Julian had felt he’d done the right thing in giving the boy his freedom; now he’s not so sure. A boy who grew up here on Easterbrook Lane couldn’t possibly know the difference between a daddy longlegs and a scorpion; he wouldn’t know enough to look out for ferrets and horned owls; he’d never manage to find his way in the dark. A boy from here wouldn’t think to avoid drainage ditches after a rainfall, or make certain to wear shoes, even on the hottest days, because of the fire ants. If Lucy knew her son was walking the roads by himself at night, putting his hands into Arrow’s feed gate, she’d probably be arguing with Julian instead of her ex-husband. If she knew how much he wanted her, still, she might actually slap him. He wouldn’t blame her if she did. Lucy and her ex-husband argue until a white Volvo pulls up to the curb and honks. The ex-husband grins at the driver and waves, then walks over, although before he opens the door he turns to watch as Lucy backs the Celica out of the driveway.

  Julian lets her get a good distance ahead of him before he pulls away from the curb. He follows her through the town of Great Neck, into the village of Kings Point, where the houses are bigger than most of the motels Julian has stayed in. They probably have better service and clean white sheets, ironed so well there’s not one wrinkle. He’s never going to mention what happened between them if she doesn’t. He’s already decided that. He’ll keep his mouth shut and stop wanting things, and when he gets back home he’ll just go on with his life, the same way he always
has. He’ll be out of New York before he knows it, and he never has to come back.

  Still, when Lucy drives through the iron gates leading to a house hidden behind weeping beeches, Julian finds himself wishing he had come here at a different time of year. Maybe then he would have seen snow. He has pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, and from where he’s parked he can see the blue outline of the Throgs Neck Bridge. He gets out and lets Loretta run for a while, making sure to whistle when she strays too far onto someone’s lawn. He imagines that snow must be a lot like the mock orange petals that fell to the ground when he turned his wheel a little too hard and sideswiped the bushes on the shoulder of the road. A shower of pure, cool white; walking in it would be like walking through a cloud. He would have preferred winter; maybe then he wouldn’t still be hearing bees, like the ones that hover in the perennial garden behind those iron gates. When he wasn’t more than five years old, Julian stumbled into a bees’ nest hidden within the roots of one of Miss Giles’s old willow trees. The bees swarmed around him, so many that the air was pure yellow, and that’s the way Miss Giles found him. She washed him in a bath of oatmeal soap, but she didn’t find one sting, and that made perfect sense to Julian, even then. Miss Giles thought it was some sort of miracle, but that wasn’t it at all. If he’d reached out and plucked a single bee from midair, its wings would have stopped beating beneath his gaze.