Poppy stared at Kimmy and said, “What’s gotten into you?”
Kimmy shrugged helplessly, took a Kleenex, continued to cry.
Poppy said, “It’s OK, it’s been quite a day. It’s gonna be A-OK, girls,” and she offered comforting hugs to both of them.
The girls continued to cry for a bit longer, until the tears turned to laughter, and Kimmy reached for Alex’s hand again and they began to laugh really, really hard all of a sudden, and everything felt better, and OK.
Eventually, Poppy and Alex went to the bathroom to clean up. Alex was appalled at the blood and the mess, but Poppy said it was nothing—she’d bled more from a paper cut. Alex had had the presence of mind to grab fresh undies in her bedroom, so she got changed and freshened. Poppy showed her how to use a tampon. As Poppy walked Alex back to the bedroom, she leaned down and whispered, “I know you’re going to be just fine, but your roomie in there . . . Whaddaya reckon’s got her so wound up? Do you think it’s the deer?”
“Beats me,” Alex said. “Maybe she just really hates the sight of blood.”
13
POPPY WOKE AT five o’clock in the morning, instantly as bright and alert as if someone had crashed a cymbal at her face. She had slept soundly after the incident with Alex and Kimmy, and now felt strong and energetic as she moved from the bed to the other side of her room, where she plucked her running clothes from a pile of dirty laundry. She hadn’t wanted to commit herself to any more runs on the island after the humidity had given her such a hard time yesterday, but today she woke feeling so intensely good, she could hardly wait to get out there and work her muscles until she hurt. In the bathroom, she dumped John’s pills into her palm and counted them. Satisfied with the result, she returned them to the bottle. Even though it had been months at the same dose and not a single slip-up, every time she counted she feared the worst. She didn’t know why she was so convinced the world was out to get John.
In the kitchen, she boiled water and poured it into a mug with instant coffee. She stretched as she waited for the coffee to cool enough for her to guzzle it.
She double-knotted her shoes.
Outside, caffeine and early-morning adrenaline zoomed through Poppy. She took a left out of the driveway, planning to run the same route as yesterday, except today she wouldn’t stop at Gram’s Diner for a cigarette.
The air smelled wondrous. Sand crunched beneath her feet on the concrete sidewalk. The moon was still bright above her, white as cream against the navy sky. She started to sing Madonna’s “Thief of Hearts” quietly to herself. She felt zippy and strong. Today she might even do a few push-ups and crunches when she got back. Today she would make that pitcher of frozen margaritas she’d been talking about. Today would be a wonderful day.
Five minutes into the run and still feeling like a million bucks, Poppy spotted another runner approaching on the opposite side of the road. A thin young woman, long tanned legs, long blond braid that swung back and forth like thick rope, white T-shirt, and blue mesh shorts. When she got closer, Poppy called out, “Oh, hi! Good morning!” as she recognized her acquaintance from the day before.
The young woman paused in her stride, and her face brightened with recognition.
“Morning!” the young woman called. “I’m impressed you decided to give it another go after yesterday.” It looked like she wouldn’t mind pausing to chat, so Poppy jogged over to join her on the other side of the road.
“How funny, running into you again,” Poppy said. “You got the morning off work?”
Roxie nodded. “Lunch shift today, don’t have to be in till eleven.” She wiped sweat from her chin into the collar of her white T-shirt.
“How long of a run you doing?” Poppy said.
“If I tell you, you’re gonna think I’m insane,” Roxie said.
“Then you must.”
“Two laps around the island.”
“The entire thing, twice? What’s that, twelve miles?”
Roxie nodded. “Thirteen.”
“Good God! So what mile are you on now?”
Roxie looked down at her watch. “Somewhere between eight and nine. I live just up that way”—she thumbed behind her—“but I drive across the island to start my run at that end, so I finish on a two-mile downhill.”
“You’re gonna run an entire half-marathon before the sun’s even up,” Poppy said.
Roxie nodded. “Being out like this in the quiet of the early morning . . . it sets me straight.” She bent back her left leg, gripped her foot, and pulled it up to her buttocks, stretching out her quadriceps, releasing a sigh as the stretch warmed up through her body. “Why do you go this direction?” Roxie asked.
“Huh? Oh.” Poppy gazed at the street ahead. “I saw on the map that the whole way to the tip and back would be two miles from our house. Just figured that was a good destination. You know, little overlook at the beach access up beyond Gram’s.”
“I guess,” Roxie said. She brushed her lips absently with the tip of her braid. She nodded in the direction she was headed. “If you go that way, though,” she said, “you get to run through the magnolia grove.”
“What’s that?”
Roxie repeated the quadriceps stretch on her right side. “The road narrows and you’re suddenly surrounded by magnolia trees. They reach across over your head, like a canopy.” She made a rainbow in the air with her hand. “The smell is magnificent.”
“That does sound nice,” Poppy said. “You said it’s thataway?” She nodded back in the direction from which she had come.
“Yeah,” Roxie said brightly. “Why don’t you join me? From here it’ll be about a mile to the grove, about the same distance you wanted to do anyway, and it really is worth seeing.”
Poppy fanned her fingers in the air. “I’ll slow you up.”
“I’m a tortoise, not a hare,” Roxie said. “What are you, about a ten-minute mile?”
“Sure.”
“Come on,” Roxie urged her. “Running goes so much faster when you’ve got company, doesn’t it?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Come on, then,” Roxie said, “come on,” gently taking Poppy’s elbow and guiding it so they were both facing south.
“OK, OK,” Poppy said. “But you set the pace. I do not want to slow you down.”
They started off together. Roxie smelled of apples and laundry detergent. Not a trace of body odor, even after eight miles—Poppy was amazed.
A seagull flapped onto the street near them and poked at a french fry flattened into the concrete. Poppy kicked at the bird when they got close—the gull didn’t give a shit. It stared at her like it wanted to fight.
Poppy said, “You’re never gonna guess what we saw last night.”
“Here on the island?”
Poppy nodded. “I’m not going to make you guess. We saw a gator maul a baby fawn at a lagoon just up the way.”
Roxie drew all her breath in. “Yikes.”
“We were all there,” Poppy said. “Kids too. All eight of us. Staring at this little fawn, I made a move to snag a picture, and then a gator flies up out of the water, gets the thing by its neck, and drags it into the water.”
“That must have been awful,” Roxie said. “I’ve seen them go after birds and squirrels, but never a deer. And just a baby . . . Fawns are so sweet. That sounds terrible. Blood everywhere? What happened?”
“My friend’s husband tried to save it,” Poppy snorted. “Went after the gator with a big old stick.”
“Did it work?”
“He scared off the gator,” Poppy said, “but not in time to save the deer. The rest of us left, and my husband stayed behind to help with the mercy kill.”
“Poor thing.”
“My husband hunts, so he’s used to the blood. Not used to seeing it on a baby animal, not used to having to kill a thing with his Swiss army knife, but so it goes.”
“And the kids?”
“They seemed fine,” Poppy said. “My kids are
tough cookies. The other two . . . well, their older one’s a piece of work. She was being a real shit, giving her little sister a terrible time, making it much worse than she’d’ve had to. And their little one, she was the most traumatized, had a good long cry about it. But she was fine soon after.”
It was quiet for a bit, then Roxie said, “Where did you say you’re from again?”
“West Virginia,” said Poppy. “And lest it cause any confusion, my family’s vacationing with my best friend from childhood—they are the rich ones. They got some all-inclusive package, we’re just along for the ride. My family? We could never afford this. Vacation to us is All-You-Can-Eat Hotdog Day at the county fair.” Poppy lowered her voice as though the two of them were joined in conspiracy against everyone else on the island. “Rich people, though, yech! Right? All of ’em except for my best friend, of course. Lisa’s fine.” She slapped at a mosquito on her shoulder. “Anyway, you’re from up north, you said?”
Roxie nodded.
“How’d you end up on the island?” Poppy said, momentarily forgetting that Roxie hadn’t seemed too keen on discussing the subject yesterday morning.
“My family vacationed here when I was a kid,” Roxie said. “My parents, sorry to say . . .” She gestured toward the condominiums they passed. “Yech, like you said. We’d rent a gorgeous beachside place for a week, my mom would still find things to gripe about. Curtains didn’t match the wallpaper. Sheets smelled mildewy. And if it wasn’t something about the house, it was my dad—they’d be at each other’s throats all week long. And I was an only child, so I didn’t have anyone to run off and play with just to escape.” Roxie shook her head at these memories. “Anyhow,” she said, “how I actually ended up living here, that’s a long story and it’d bore you to tears.”
“Probably not,” Poppy said.
Roxie shrugged mildly and didn’t offer anything further on the matter.
Poppy pointed out their rental house as they passed it, on the far side of the street. “That’s my home base for the week,” she said. “Pretty nice digs. The green one with the white shutters.”
“That one there?”
Poppy nodded. “I’m pretty sure it’s haunted. I swear to you, the last two nights, I swear I heard footsteps a couple different times. And everybody’s got their own bathroom attached to the room, so I don’t know what causes . . . Well, anyway.”
Roxie said, “Some people think this whole island’s crawling with ghosts.”
“Really?”
“Sure, there’s tons of spooky folklore,” Roxie said. “Pirate ship set fire to a boat full of orphans coming from England, just off the coast. All the orphans on the boat died in the water but now inhabit the island as ghosts. Some people say they can hear the children singing at night.”
Poppy said, “I do not like that.”
“The Gray Man is another one.”
“Who’s that?”
“Legend started up in Charleston. A guy set out to visit his fiancée, but he and his horse got trapped in quicksand in the marshes near Pawley Island. They say the ghost always wears gray and wanders up and down the coast when a storm is on the way, looking for ladies with broken hearts. See, he’s still trying to find his fiancée. He wants to protect her from storms.”
“I’d punch him in his gray ghost face,” Poppy said, “if he tried to talk to me.”
Roxie laughed. “Half the people who live on this island claim they’ve seen him. They’ve always got some new story. That’s what happens when you wait tables—you see the same-old-same-olds every single morning, and they’re forever coming up with new material.”
“Sounds that way,” Poppy said. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth to prevent a stomach cramp.
Roxie said, “You said you used to work at a restaurant too, right?”
“From junior high till I was almost thirty,” Poppy said.
Roxie ran a palm along the back of her tanned, graceful neck and wiped the perspiration on her mesh shorts.
Poppy glanced at her watch. She felt like a million bucks. She felt she would be fine running twice as fast, twice as far. Roxie was right; a running partner made all the difference. Young people could really do wonders for the middle-aged, Poppy thought. All that vitality, that get-up-and-go.
Roxie said, “So what do you do for work now?”
“I’m in the bounce house biz.”
“Come again?”
“For birthday parties and carnivals and stuff. I rent ’em out, blow ’em up, clean up the puke.”
“Interesting,” Roxie said. “Never occurred to me somebody would do that for a living.”
“It’s a drag,” Poppy said. “Money’s alright, though.”
Roxie slowed her pace and sniffed the air. “Smell that?” She held her arms in the air and slowed to a complete stop, as if standing still would intensify the aroma. “We’re close.”
Poppy lifted her chin, nose to the air. “Yes,” she said, the air suddenly sweet with blossoms. “Smells like honeysuckle.”
“It’s just up ahead.”
They jogged another quarter-mile, around a gentle bend, and, “Wow!” Poppy said, inhaling the air, thick with the sweet aroma of the white blooms. The great branches of the trees, heavy with broad, dark, glossy leaves, reached across to meet overhead, some of them interlacing like fingers.
“Wow!” Poppy said again wondrously, standing still with her chin tilted up to the sky, the scent of the blooms dizzying. She filled her lungs with it.
They stood in a comfortable, lovely silence for a bit. Poppy felt like she was in the Garden of Eden. She jumped to grasp a bloom and pull it to her face, couldn’t quite reach, and missed. Roxie hopped to retrieve it easily, and she pulled it down and handed it to her. Poppy buried her nose in the warmth of the white petals, then she let go, and the branch sprang back upward and bounced. A soft breeze skimmed over her face. A few sandpipers speed-walked across the sidewalk before her, looking aimless and distressed, like they were lost and running late for an important meeting.
Roxie cracked all her knuckles, then her neck.
“I reckon I should head back,” Poppy said. “If I go any further, I’m setting myself up for a hell of a hike back. But thank you for letting me join you and bringing me to this place.”
“My pleasure.” Roxie knelt to tighten the knot on her shoe. “I’m off tomorrow and I’ll be running the same route at the same time, if you care to join again.”
“Tomorrow?” Poppy said. “Yes, that should work. Tomorrow will be our last full day on the island, boo-hoo. We need to be out by ten o’clock the following morning.”
Roxie tucked a loose strand of hair into her braid. “You’ll wanna make the most of your last full day then, right? Get an early start?”
“Good point,” Poppy said. “Let’s plan on it. I’ll meet you right in front of our place, same time.”
“Perfect.” Roxie gave her a half-hug, hip to hip, then she trotted off.
Poppy watched Roxie as she ran, admiring her calf muscles shifting with each stride, that graceful frame, the silky braid, looking like it was straight off a Pantene commercial.
The run back to the house passed quickly, as Poppy was still filled with a bright and youthful energy, the distinct feeling of high hopes.
When she got to the house, she poured a glass of ice water and went out to the patio to watch the sun rise. She did some stretches and ran an ice cube over her forehead.
Then she tiptoed into her bedroom, where John appeared to be sleeping soundly on his side, holding Poppy’s pillow to his chest, just the way he held her when she was next to him. She had noticed that John often shifted to this position when she left the bed for a midnight snack or an early-morning run; he’d pull at a pillow or place the comforter so that it was bunched before him, to make a Poppy-like form to hold in sleep.
She peeled off her running clothes, which smelled of an unpleasant synthetic type of sweat. She took off her bra and
underwear too, everything damp with sweat. Completely naked, she crawled into bed, pulling the pillow from John’s arms and nestling herself in its place, facing him. She threw an arm over his broad shoulder. She put her nose on his neck and felt him swallow. She kissed his Adam’s apple, and it vibrated as he made a gentle “Mmm,” sound, waking to her touch. Half asleep, he ran his hand clumsily down her side, then between her breasts. She shivered. She whispered, “It’s gonna be an hour before anyone else is up.”
He smiled, his eyes still closed. He said, “Mm?”
Poppy nuzzled her face into his neck, which was rough with two days’ worth of unshaven stubble. She exhaled through her nose right into his jaw, and he giggled, ticklish. He whispered, “Did you have a good run?” and turned to lie on his back.
Poppy moved up onto her knees, then up over his belly, straddling him. Since his surgery, sex was easiest with her on top. They had tried out other ways, but this worked best. Poppy liked being on top anyway. She liked to see his face and touch it and direct the pace of things, and she could fairly predictably climax at the same time he did, because she could tell when he was close: a sudden look in his eyes that was at once ferocious and completely defenseless.
She eased herself on top of him and leaned forward to kiss his hair. Many kisses, all over his forehead and into his hair and scalp. He put both hands on the back of Poppy’s head, in her hair, and whispered, “Love you, Pops,” and she said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” feigning impatience, and he laughed softly as she pressed herself hard against him.
All the good old moves, the tried-and-true, as steadfast and predictable as clockwork. Sex had changed once kids entered into the mix, of course; it had to be quick, had to be quiet. Then a bad mattress, then a bad knee, then the bad back; various circumstances necessitated a certain kind of sex, and over time, that kind of sex had become the only kind. Well, and anyhow, they’d been together twenty years, for crying out loud. Poppy didn’t have anything new to show John at this stage of the game anyway—no new dirty talk, no new tricks. Why bother? What did she have to prove? She melted onto him, astounded at how good it still felt, that same old, dear old dance. She wondered if they’d still be doing it twenty years from now, when the kids were long gone and she and John were old, wrinkled, and lazy. Then she wondered about twenty years after that. If they’d still be doing it when they could barely see, barely hear, barely move, when all that was really left of life was the feelings.
The House on Fripp Island Page 17
