CHAPTER 11
Julia
Julia walked back into the house where Charlie was watching The Cat in the Hat on the grainy television on the porch. Heath was curled up in a chair reading a Harry Potter book that looked thicker than War and Peace. Every now and then she reached up to scratch her scalp.
“So,” Julia said, hoping to get the adolescent to look up. “We’re going to do something about the fleas.” The girl repositioned herself in the chair, glanced up at Julia, and then back down to her book where she deftly flipped the page.
“Why?” She continued to stare at the words.
“Well, because we can’t live with fleas. It’s dangerous and unsanitary. Fleas carry typhus, which can make us really sick. Plus, it will drive us mad.”
Heath shrugged. “Yeah, we’ve had them before, and they did make Charlie sick. Phydeaux’s been wearing that same collar a long time.” Then the girl looked up at her and glared. “You aren’t going to tell anybody about the fleas, are you?”
Julia furrowed her brow. “Nobody other than Skeeter and Jed . . . Why?”
The girl stuck her nose back in her book and shook her head. Then she started to rub at a bump on her chin.
Julia stepped carefully forward. “So when you had them before, did you use one of those bombs?”
The girl looked out of the window. She seemed to detest meeting Julia’s eyes. “Dad used to use those, but Mom just put this powder around last time and put all of the mattresses out in the sun. That seemed to work okay.”
Julia stared at Heath until she looked to her. “Well, I’m going to give this place a good cleaning and then Jed and Skeeter are going to set one of those bombs off this afternoon, so we need to pack an overnight bag—after I do the laundry—since we’re going to stay at Skeeter and Glenda’s.”
The girl gnawed at the inside of her cheek. “Maybe I could just stay with Mom at the hospital. Dr. Young said she was better.”
Julia could feel her neck muscles tightening. Of course, better meant raring-to-go to a twelve-year-old, but she sensed that Heath knew better. She remembered when her own mother had a hysterectomy back when she was eleven, and she got so tired of the beanie weanies her dad fixed and the odd rotation of babysitters and relatives, she was aching to go to the hospital and stay with her mom.
“She’s still too weak.” Julia took another step closer to the girl, whose back seemed to go as rigid as an irritated cat’s. Julia tried to speak gently. “But you can call her if you want and tell her y’all are on the way.”
The girl began to exhale. “Mom said we could only use the phone for emergencies.”
Julia crossed her arms. “I don’t think she would mind you giving her a call to let her know you are coming.”
Heath softened her back slightly and cracked the faintest smile. “Okay.”
“And I’ll try to round up Charlie and Etta, who I haven’t even gotten a good look at yet.”
The girl stood. She had that gangly, awkward look of a girl between childhood and womanhood. She wore baggy clothes—a loose Bell Buoy Seafood T-shirt and baggy pajama bottoms. She had some sores on her face, a few pimples on her forehead and chin, and she seemed to carry her head down a little bit as if she didn’t want to look anyone head-on. Or maybe that was just Julia.
“Good luck with Etta,” Heath said over her shoulder as she went to the kitchen and dialed the number of the hospital written down on a little pad by the landline.
Julia went upstairs and rummaged through the pile of clothes on Charlie’s bed since his drawers were bare. She didn’t know if the pile was clean or dirty. She would wash it all, but she would do the overnight bag stuff first. She picked out two pairs of shorts, two pairs of underwear, two T-shirts—one with a bulldozer and another with a monkey swinging from a vine—and threw them in the hall. Then she found a little duffel bag in his closet and carried it to the bathroom, where she found a Spider-Man toothbrush, which looked as though it hadn’t had much use in a while, and a tube of Thomas the Train toothpaste, and stuck them in the bag. Then she turned toward the only closed door upstairs, the one that had to be mysterious little Etta’s.
She knocked gently on the door. “Etta, can I come in? We need to wash clothes for an overnight bag because we’re going to Skeeter’s after you visit your mother at the hospital this afternoon.”
No response.
“Okay, I’m going to open the door now. I hope you can hear me.”
She slowly turned the old brass knob and cracked the door. Still no response. When she worked up the nerve to open the door, her heart caught in her throat. The child’s small room was wallpapered with sketches and paintings. They hung on every available space on the wall. There must have been at least two hundred of them. There were pencil sketches of the marsh and portraits of Charlie and Heath. There were watercolors and even a few acrylic paintings on small canvases—paintings of wildflowers and the cypress swamp, an alligator sunning on a mud bank, a johnboat tied to a dock, an osprey nest, a low full moon, a tire swing tied to the limb of an enormous live oak tree, a cracked bird’s egg on pine needles, tomatoes on a vine, a field of sunflowers, a bowl of peaches. And there were some that were surreal: an open mouth with some sort of dark figure dancing beneath the tonsils, an eye with a dagger in the center of a pupil, a claw that was half human/half beast. In the center of the claw was a pile of faces, some screaming, some scowling, some weeping, and what was flying up from the faces and between the fingers of the claw were seagulls. They were flying out of the hand, through every open crevice and then up toward the sky. Remarkable and haunting.
Above the child’s bed Julia noticed a small sketch of a man. She walked over to it and touched its curling edge. His eyes looked weary but warm. His face looked older than she remembered. It was the face of an elderly man, sunken and beginning to hollow beneath the cheekbones. But it was him, all right. Her father. And this young girl had captured something true about him. Something in his rich brown eyes that could only be described as love. How could someone with eyes like that cause so much damage? She didn’t really want to answer that question. It was something she had put behind her and planned to keep behind her.
Etta’s closet door had a sign that said “Don’t go in.” And it had a padlock on it so Julia didn’t dare touch it. She just hoped there wasn’t a closet full of fleas or rats filling up in there.
She went to the open window and saw Etta ducking into the old boat shed behind the house—the one her father used as a makeshift studio. She caught her breath, walked down the stairs and out to the shed. The door was locked. She knocked on the door for several minutes. Finally the child appeared in the door window and unlocked it. Then she darted back to a table in a corner, then crawled under and curled up into a little ball, holding her knees to her chest.
“Hey, Etta.” Julia just stepped inside the room but didn’t go toward the table. “I know you know me even though we haven’t seen each other in a long time.” The little ball rocked ever so slightly and the red boots made a little squeak. Julia grinned and looked at the old easels leaning against the wall. “You might not want to talk to me, but I did want to tell you that I saw the paintings in your room. You’re quite a talent. I’m an art professor, so I’m a pretty good judge of that sort of thing.”
Then Julia crouched down a little, and Etta made a quarter turn to face the wall, pulling her knees up even tighter to her chest.
“Did your father teach you?” No response. She waited a couple of minutes, watching the little child’s curved back with its knobby, delicate-looking spine rise and fall with each long breath. She had a long golden ponytail with lumps and bumps on the top of her head, and she reached up to scratch her scalp a couple of times.
“Well, he taught me too.” Julia felt her voice crack. She cleared her throat. “He was a good teacher.”
Not a budge.
Suddenly a foam Nerf bullet hit the glass window of the shed, its suction cup taking hold. Then another. The
Cat in the Hat must have been over because the shed was now under attack.
Julia stood up and addressed the easels. “So I’m here to tell you that you’re going to go visit your mom at the hospital in a little while. Glenda is going to take you. And we’re also going to spend the night at Skeeter and Glenda’s so we can air out the house and get rid of these fleas.”
No response.
She leaned down again. “Do you think you can shower, get dressed, and take your clothes for your overnight bag to the laundry room and be ready to head out in the next half hour?”
The little golden head nodded ever so slightly as three more bullets stuck to the old, thick glass windows.
“Good,” Julia said. Then she turned and stepped out of the shed, shutting the door gently behind her. When she turned, Charlie had her in his sights, and he fired one straight at the center of her chest.
“Nice shot, Spider-Man,” she said as she stepped toward him. “Now let’s go in the house and put some real clothes on you so you can go see your mother.”
“Catch me first.” He licked his red lips and grinned before turning and running toward the woods. She rolled her eyes and started to chase him, the hot, thick breeze blowing her hair back, the familiar smell of a muddy low tide filling her nose and taking her back to her childhood. She found him beneath the remnants of her mother’s decaying garden, which was now overgrown with wild fig vines and a few stumps of scrub palmettos. She grabbed him, picked him up, and slung him over her shoulder as he cackled and cackled.
“Spin me, spin me!” he said, and she spun him round and round until she could see stars before setting him down and challenging him to a race to the house, which he eagerly accepted.
BEYOND THE CLASSROOM JULIA HADN’T HAD TO HERD people—especially little kids—in a long time. Heath took forever in the shower, so long that Julia finally had to knock on the door and holler that it was time to get out. She handed her a tube of hydrocortisone, then instructed her to lather up her flea bites and hurry to get changed so Etta could have a turn in the bathroom.
Though Etta didn’t talk or look you in the eye, she did listen pretty well. Julia told her she had five minutes, and she was in and out in four, lathered up with cortisone and all, though Julia had a strong suspicion that she didn’t wash her long blond hair.
When the girls were dressed, it took Julia a minute to find Charlie, who was fairly high in an oak tree and had already gotten some sort of mud stain on his bulldozer shirt. She peeled it off of him, then ran out to the laundry room, found a gray T-shirt that looked about his size, and slid it quickly over his head.
Julia was winded and half-exhausted by the time she loaded them in the car and drove them the mile down the road to Glenda and Skeeter’s. Glenda was waiting in her red, mud-encrusted US Postal Service Jeep with the steering wheel on the right side. She’d been delivering the mail on Edisto for thirty-plus years, and she looked nearly the same as she had when Julia was a child—long, full jean skirt, floral shirt, Keds tennis shoes, big orange bun on her head with a pencil stuck through it.
The children gave Glenda a hug and she gave them each a stick of Juicy Fruit gum.
“Let’s go see your mama and your Aunt Dot. Then we can go to Ye Old Fashioned for a hot dog and ice cream.”
“Hooray!” Charlie hollered. “Can I have a scoop of chocolate and mint chocolate chip?”
“Why not?” Glenda said as she lifted him up into the backseat where Heath had just laid his booster seat in the center. After Heath buckled him in, she sat down beside him, and Etta moved quietly around the other side of the Jeep to take her place in the car.
“I tell you,” Glenda whispered to Julia. “You’re something to come down and watch them.”
Julia shrugged. “I didn’t really have a choice.”
“No, you didn’t,” Glenda said. “But I know this: your daddy is looking down right now with a thankful heart. He didn’t think you’d ever come back here for any reason. And your daddy, despite his many flaws, sure loved his children.”
“Well,” Julia said, “I guess he only has himself to blame for that.”
Glenda nodded. “You’re right, Julia. You’re right.” She settled her eyes on Julia and bit her cracked lips. “But aren’t they beautiful kids? And innocent too, though they’ve seen their share of pain already.”
“Let’s go!” Charlie shouted from the middle of the backseat. Then Glenda patted Julia on the shoulder and walked toward the driver’s seat. “Good luck with the cleanup.”
Julia nodded and waved back to Charlie, who was waving furiously as the engine started. Heath already had her nose back in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Etta had her back to them all, staring out of the opposite window. It was only after the cloud of dust settled as the Jeep started down the dirt road toward the paved one that Julia squinted and noticed that the only one looking at her now as the car turned toward a curve in the road was Etta.
CHAPTER 12
Jed
Jed couldn’t explain the spring in his own step. His plan had been to crash on the cot as soon as he got to the cottage, sleep until lunchtime, then get up and take a sledgehammer to the two shoe-box bedrooms in the back of the house, which he aimed to turn into one large master by the end of the month. After a day of sleep followed by manual labor, he thought he’d do what he always did at sundown on Edisto Island: wet a line on the dock, open a Coca-Cola, and pray for a flounder for supper. If he was unlucky, he’d pull something out of the freezer, eat on the picnic table watching the moon on the water, and then crash on the cot for another eight hours until it was time to head back to the hospital.
But here he had spent his morning at King’s Market selecting greens, ripe tomatoes, peppers, and lemons for a meal, then wiping down the plates and glasses and votives and setting his outdoor picnic table. After that he started his stone-ground grits, which he would simmer all day, adding a little whipping cream every hour or so to make them rich and fluffy.
It was midday now, and he only needed one more item for his meal, and that was a couple of pounds of local shrimp. He changed from his scrubs into a T-shirt and shorts, slid on his old, chewed flip-flops, and, with Rascal at his side, hopped in his little whaler and set out for the bay where the shrimp trawlers would be pulling in this time of day with their fresh catch.
He loved the feel of winding down Store Creek and hanging a left onto St. Pierre and then another left onto the South Edisto River toward Bay Point. Each turn led him to a wider passageway with a stronger breeze and a broader view of the horizon where the water met the sky. Rascal loved it too. He would stand on the edge of the bow, letting the air lift his floppy black ears, barking at the porpoises and the occasional heron taking flight from a mud bank. The wildlife on this side of the island never ceased to amaze Jed, and on this short journey out to the shrimp boats, he spotted an osprey guarding her nest at the top of a dead oak tree, two groups of porpoises, schools of mullet skittering along the creek’s edge, and what may very well have been an alligator tail swishing at the entrance of Fishing Creek.
Shortly after his turn toward Bay Point, he spotted a small trawler from Cottageville, covered in seagulls, and he held up his wallet as the boat approached and put its engine in neutral. Rascal barked as Jed drove toward the trawler’s stern where a toothless crew member, his skin baked red from a day out at sea, spat over the side of the boat. “How much ya want?”
“Three pounds,” said Jed as Rascal ran over to him for reassurance. He petted his scruff and looked up at the toothless man who was scooping shrimp into a grocery bag. “I really appreciate you stopping.”
“No problem.” The man nodded as he tied the bag in a knot and tossed it to Jed.
“How much do I owe you?”
The fellow looked back at the captain, who put up two fingers.
Twenty was a bargain for fresh shrimp like that. Jed handed the man thirty dollars and said, “Buy yourself some lunch.” The man smiled, revealing his pi
nk gums, as Rascal barked approvingly before taking his place back at the bow where he wagged his tail as Jed made a U-turn, pointing them toward home.
When Jed turned back onto Store Creek, he noticed the moon waxing gibbous and hanging low above the live oak trees on the far left bank, and as he gazed at it—a large moon in broad daylight—he was blindsided by the memory of the night he took Julia for a moonlit boat ride all those years ago.
Jed was fifteen at the time and Julia was sixteen, beautiful and talented, with several sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys from Charleston dropping by to say hello and use her dock for fishing or to tie up their boats. He knew they were there to gain her attention, and he thought he’d never have a chance. But one day after a weeklong family vs. family gin rummy marathon that left him and her duking it out for the winner’s title, he got his courage up and asked her to go for a boat ride. It was a hot August evening just days before they had to head home to Atlanta before packing for their new life in Texas. The moon was low and bright. He had no intention of kissing her. He knew he didn’t have the nerve, and he had never actually kissed a girl before.
But as she was stepping from the floating dock into his little aluminum boat, her toe caught on the edge and he caught her and held her tight for whole seconds until the boat stopped rocking. She had turned and looked into his eyes at that moment with the moon lighting up the creek and he had bent down, as if impelled by some force far beyond his control, and pecked her right on the lips.
She had stepped back and blushed—he could see that even in the darkness, and his throat became so tight and the fear of rejection became so strong that he immediately sat down and started fiddling with his engine as if nothing had happened, and then he turned back as she was fastening her life jacket and said, “Ready?”
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