Turtle Moon.
by Alice Hoffman.
PART ONE.
The last major crime in the town of Verity was in 1958, when one of the Platts shot his brother in an argument over a Chevy Nomad they had bought together on time. Usually it"s so quiet you can hear the strangler figs dropping their frilit on the hoods of parked cars, leaving behind pulp and tiny black seeds. Since Verity is the most humid spot in eastern Florida, local people know enough to drink their coffee iced in the morning. The air all around the town limits is so thick that sometimes a soul cannot rise and instead attaches itself to a stranger, landing right between the shoulder blades with a thud that carries no more weight than a hummingbird.
Charles Verity, who founded the town, after killing off as many native people as he could, is said to have discovered this the hard way. He couldn"t get rid of the spirits of all the men he"d murdered; they perched up and down his spine and on top of his cookstove, until he caught them in a sugar bowl, then tied the lid closed with thick brown string so they couldn"t escape. Charles Verity swore he would live forever. Every night he drank a bitter tea made from the bark of the paradise tree to ensure his good health, but as it turned out he was eaten by an alligator up by the pond where the munic.i.p.al golf course was later built. Each year, on Charles Verity"s birthday, children parade down Main Street to the parking lot of the medical center, where a mud pit ringed with ropes is set up. For ten dollars, anyone can wrestle a papier-mache" alligator and raise funds for the burn ward.
Up until the early sixties there were alligator farms all around the outskirts of Verity. At least once a year there would be a big escape, and Half Moon Road, which is now part of the Interstate, would be green and slithery for days, until a posse went out with shotguns and fishing nets. When breeding for profit became a federal offense, Verity turned its past around to suit itself, naming the high school football team the Gators, and featuring Alligator Salad in most restaurants, a mixture of spinach, green pepper, avocado, and chopped egg tinted with green food coloring.
People in Verity like to talk, but the one thing they neglect to mention to outsiders is that something is wrong with the month of May.
It isn"t the humidity, or even the heat, which is so fierce and sudden it can make grown men cry. Every May, when the sea turtles begin their migration across West Main Street, mistaking the glow of streetlights for the moon, people go a little bit crazy. At least one teenage boy comes close to slamming his car right into the gumbo-limbo tree that grows beside the Burger King. Girls run away from home, babies cry all night, ficus hedges explode into flame, and during one particularly awful May, half a dozen rattlesnakes set themselves up in the phone booth outside the 7-Eleven and refused to budge until June.At this difficult time of the year people who grew up in Verity often slip two aspirins into their cans of c.o.ke; they wear sungla.s.ses and avoid making any major decisions. They try not to quit their jobs, or smack their children, or run off to North Carolina with the sertticeman who just fixed their VCR. They make certain to stay out of the ocean, since the chemical plant on Seminole Point always leaks in the first week of May, so that the yellow film float to the surface, bringing sharks closer to sh.o.r.e. In the past few years, there has been an influx of newcomers, lured by the low rents and wild hibiscus. As a result, Verity is now home to more divorced women from New York than any other town in the state of Florida.
None of these women had any idea of the sort of mess the month of May in Verity could make of their lives, any more than they knew what daily exposure to cMorine could do to their hair. There were now dozens of green-headed women all over town, all addicted to Diet Dr. Pepper, and each and every one of them was shocked to discover that in Verity mosquitoes grew to the size of b.u.mblebees and that the sea grape, which grew wild along the beach, could pull their children right into the thicket if they didn"t keep to the wooden paths.
After midnight, when the heat was almost bearable and anole lizards ran fearlessly across quarry tile floors, these women never wept but did their laundry instead. While the bleach was added to the white wash and the laundry softener doled out, it became clear that although some of the children these women had transplanted were doing well, most were not. There were toddlers who called out for their fathers in the middle of the night, and boys who dreamed so deeply of the houses where they grew up they"d wake damp with sweat, smelling of cut gra.s.s. There were sullen teenage girls running up astronomical phone bills, and babies so accustomed to ranch houses they got hysterical at the sight of an elevator.
At 27 Long Boat Street, just off West Main, in a pink stucco condominium facing the flat blue bay, there lived a twelve-year I old boy, a mean little Scorpio named Keith Rosen, who would have liked nothing better than to knock someone"s block off. He was so mean he could cut his own finger with a serrated steak knife and not flinch.
He could drop a brick on his bare foot and not cry out loud. Last week, when his only friend, Laddy Stern, dared him to pierce his ear with an embroidery needle, Keith didn"t even bleed. The following afternoon he stole an earring shaped like a silver skull from a jewelry concession at the flea market over at the Sunshine Drive-In. He has never been a particularly good boy, but after eight months in Florida, he is horrid. Already, he has been suspended from school three times.
He is willing to steal almost anything: lunch money, teachers" wallets, birthstone rings right off his cla.s.smates" fingers. He keeps everything in a secret stash in the laundry room down in the bas.e.m.e.nt, inside a hole he punched into the plaster behind a washing machine.
Punishments are pointless. They don"t work with him. He is no longer allowed to see Laddy Stern, not since they were caught cutting school and drinking KaMtia and c.o.ke, but who can really stop him? Laddy"s mom is the hostess at the yacht club restaurant, and she works odd hours, so Keith still goes over to their condo whenever he pleases. That is where he spends most of the first day of May, and by the time he leaves, after a vicious argument that has left Laddy with a b.l.o.o.d.ynose, it is already ninety-nine in the shade, although where he bicycles, on Long Boat Street, there is no shade. He"s dizzy from the Miller Lites he drank and the half pack of Marlboros he chain-smoked, and it isn"t so easy to avoid the smashed turtle sh.e.l.ls. Hard green globes the size of Scooter Pies line the asphalt and clog up the sewer traps. There is no point in Keith"s trying to talk to his mother.
Most days he sneaks out of the apartment while she is getting dressed for work, or he waits in bed until he"s sure she"s left, so he won t have to see her and pretend to be normal or cheerful or whatever it is she wants him to be.
He bikes as fast as he can, through the heat waves, past the surfers at Drowned Man Beach.
He keeps at it until his lungs hurt, then he rides over the curb and into the park at the corner of West Main and Long Boat, where he pulls out the cigarettes and matches he stole from Laddy.
It isn"t his parents" divorce that bothers him. He could have lived with that. It was the way things just happened to him. He wanted to live with his father, but who asked him? His parents argued with each other until they came to a decision, and now his mother is stuck with him, when everyone knows they have never gotten along.
He never climbed into her lap or held her hand.
He knows he was a difficult child, he"s been told often enough. He threw off his blanket, rattled the bars of his crib, bit baby-sitters so hard he left teeth marks in their flesh. His mother can pretend to want him all she likes, but the only thing he wants is to go back to where the heat doesn"t make you break out in red b.u.mps, and every restaurant doesn"t serve grits and Alligator Salad, and some people have fathers.
Keith balances his bike against his hip, then lights a cigarette, which he keeps cupped in his palm, the way he"s seen the high school boys smoke, even though the embers burn his skin.
Nothing ever happened in Verity. That was a fact.
He could die of boredom, right now, his heart could give out and he"d shrivel up in the heat and turn purple before anyone thought to look for him. He"d probably fossilize before his mother reported him missing. When his heart doesn"t stop, Keith props his bike up against a trash can, then flings himself on a wooden bench so he can blow smoke rings in the air. The smoke rings just hang there, dangerous white clouds going nowhere. School won"t be out for another fifteen minutes, but at the far end of the park some teenagers, playing hooky, toss a Frisbee around.
As far as Keith is concerned, anyone down here who is capable of enjoying himself is an idiot.
The high school boys are so busy diving for the Frisbee and pounding each other on the back they don"t notice the patrol car in the parking lot, idling beneath an inkwood tree. Keith sits up, interested in spite of himself when he sees on the side of the car. They don"t allow dogs at the condominium where he lives. If the super discovers that you have even a guinea pig you"re out forever. There"s a list of rulesthree pages long you have to agree to before you move in.
That way there"s no argument when they insist you take a shower before you swim in the pool, and you can"t even swim alone without an adult until you"re thirteen. If Keith could have a dog, it would be just like the one in the patrol car, a big German shepherd that sits perfectly still, eyeing the boys playing Frisbee. He would love to see what the super had to say about a dog like that; just let anyone try to give him orders if he had a monster like that on a leash.
When the cop gets out of his car, Keith hunkers down on the bench. He was suspended yesterday, and technically he"s not required to be in school. Still, he hasn"t informed his mother of the suspension, so he figures he"s guilty of something. The cop has a mean scar across his forehead and black hair that reaches over the collar of his jacket. He looks like he could pick you up and toss you, a long way. Plus he has that dog, just the turn of a car handle away. They didn"t have cops like this back in Great Neck, where Keith grew up. You never saw a pickup with a gun rack attached, or dead turtles in the street. As Keith watches, the cop approaches the high school boys; before he can reach them the boys take off through a grove of cabbage palms, leaving their Frisbee behind. The cop picks up the Frisbee, then goes back to his car to let his dog out. The dog circles around the cop"s legs, banging its body against him, until the cop lets the Frisbee fly. Then the dog takes off like black lightning, scaring the red-crowned parrots in the palms until they scream and take flight. Beneath a cloud of birds, Keith grabs for his bike, then hops on and races out of the park, toward West Main. He"s sick to his stomach from his last cigarette, but he"s also completely charged. This was almost dangerous. The cop could have turned and spied him; the dog might have attacked. You can get addicted to trouble if you"re not careful. You can feel like you"re flying, when all you"re doing is pedaling through the Florida heat. Instead of heading straight home, Keith turns into the driveway of the Burger King, where he isn"t allowed to stop before supper. As he walks inside, he reaches in his pants pocket for the money he stole out of a cla.s.smate"s locker just yesterday. It"s there, every cent of it, and Keith feels a wicked surge of elation. Sooner or later, he"s going to get caught.
Julian Cash slouches down behind the wheel of the patrol car as he pa.s.ses by the Burger King.
Through the plate-gla.s.s window, he can see the little truant from the park devouring a burger and fries. Julian has seen dozens of these hotshots, boys who pretend to be fearless and dare somebody to prove them wrong. Julian himself isn"t scared of much, but he avoids the Burger King. He doesn"t care what anyone says, he knows the truth about the gumbo-limbo tree that grows at the edge of the parking lot.
On the night of his seventeenth birthday he crashed into it, and twenty years later he still has the scar to remind him. The plain truth is, he would rather confront a psychopath hopped up on drugs than be forced to pull up to the Burger King"s drive-in window.
Twenty years ago the Burger King didn"t exist, and in its place was a stretch of gumbo-limbos.
Julian used to park there with Janey Ba.s.s until dawn, then drive her home and watch as she climbed up the drain pipe to her bedroom window.Back then, there were still islands in the marshes around Verity, although some of them u weren"t any bigger than half a mile across, home to little more than cottonmouths and foxes. The town expanded slowly, embracing the marshes with a Winn Dixie and a Mobile station, and now all the islands are connected to each other by roadways that funnel over the creeks and into the Interstate. There aren"t any more coral snakes in the branches of the mangroves and you can get USA Today and The New" York Times as well as the Verily Sun Herald over at the general store, and at Chuck and Karl"s diner they now serve croissants along with their hickory-flavored coffee. The first time Julian was apprehended, two weeks after his seventeenth birthday, he was standing outside Chuck and Karl"s, waiting to be caught. He had a bowie knife hidden in his left boot and a hundred and fifty dollars in quarters, which would have seemed suspicious even if all the parking meters on West Main hadn"t just been smashed open with an axe. It was May of course, and the temperature hadn"t fallen below one hundred for days, and before June came around, Julian would be apprehended five more times, although he was never officially charged with anything.
Those were the days when the Verity police force was made up of two men, and one of them was a Cash through marriage, not that he, or any of the Cashes, had spoken to Julian since the night of the accident.
They sent him away, to the Boys" School of Correction in Tallaha.s.see, and that was where he first got interested in dogs. There was a hundredand-twenty-pound bloodhound named Big Boy whose job it was to track down anyone courageous or stupid enough to scale the barbed-wire fence. Big Boy stank, and his ears were infected, but appearances didn"t mean much to Julian. His own mother had fainted the first time she saw Julian and she gave him away that very night. As a little boy he was so ugly that tree frogs would go limp with fear in the palm of his hand. So Big Boy"s red eyes and fleas didn"t put Julian off in the least. He stole pieces of meat from the dining hall and started hanging around the kennel after lights out. It didn"t take long for Julian to discover that if you looked a dog straight in the eye and thought real hard, you could get him to come to you and lie at your feet without ever having to say one word. By the end of the year, just before Julian got his high school equivalency, the director of the school got rid of Big Boy. They could hold the sweat-stained shirts of escaped boys under the dog"s nose for as long as they wanted, but Big Boy would just calmly set off and track down Julian Cash every time.
In all his years of working with dogs, at the army base in Hartford Beach, and now with the Verity police, Julian has come to believe that there are two kinds of dogs that go bad. The kind that go bad slowly, whether from inbreeding or being beaten it didn"t much matter. And the other ones, good dogs who suddenly turned on a night when there was a full moon, hauling themselves up from the living room rug and a peaceful sleep, to jump through a window or attack a child for no apparent reason. Julian Cash attributes this to a short circuit in the brain, and that is why he no longer believes in crimes of pa.s.sion.
When men snapped it wasn"t pa.s.sion, it was only a short circuit, just like that well-behaved dog who was after a ball one minute, an arm and a leg the next. The fact that this sort of behavior is so much rarer in dogs than in people, who seem to snap like crazy, especially during the month of May, makes no difference to the nine other men and women on the Verity police force. Not one of them will approach Julian if his dogs aren"t leashed, yet these officers will break up a bar fightwithout thinking twice. They"ll stop a speeder on a deserted back road when they know d.a.m.n well there could easily be a weapon in the glove compartment. They don"t seem to understand that it"s possible to know exactly who a dog is by looking it in the eye for fifteen seconds.
This is not, and never will be, possible with a man.
Twenty years ago, when Julian drove through the hot Florida night in his Oldsmobile, he truly believed it was possible to reach up and steal the stars right out of the sky. Now he doesn"t even see the stars anymore. He doesn"t look up.
The nature of his job as a tracker forces him to look down, and that"s why he can recognize the footprint of an armadillo in the dust. He can hear a caterpillar chewing sweet bay leaves. Since he sees no reason for neighbors, he lives out in what little is left of the marshes, past Miss Giles"s place, in an old cabin some people say belonged to Charles Verity. A kennel runs along the far side of the cabin, built with the strongest chain link available, and this is where Julian leaves the big dog, Arrow, since his reaction to people is much more extreme than Julian"s. Julian usually has t,he other dog, Loretta, with him, even when he isn"t on duty. When he stops for supper, he picks up something for Loretta as well, often from the Pizza Hut. Julian believes in rewarding his dogs, even if this means tomato sauce on the upholstery of his cruiser. This is not the way dogs were handled in the army.
On the base in Hartford Beach small riding crops were used on dogs that refuse to perform, and the lieutenant was proud to claim there wasn"t a dog born he couldn"t train to attack in two weeks. It gives Julian great pleasure to know he"s never once used force on a dog and he"s been asked several times to instruct the K9 corps at the base.
In all things, Julian knows, what you need is patience and time, although some talents can"t be taught. Loretta is a great tracker, much better than Big Boy ever was. In seconds flat, she can search out a bundle of marijuana hidden in a packed Suitcase, even if it"s been locked securely inside a car trunk. Last summer, when the mosquitoes were so thick you could hardly breathe and the heat sent you reeling, she found a lost hiker over near Lake Okeechobee long after the state troopers had given up hope. With her record, Julian figures she deserves a slice of pizza now and then; h.e.l.l, he would buy her a Diet c.o.ke if that"s what she wanted. It"s his other dog, Arrow, who"s the difficult one. He would have been put down two years ago if Julian had not seen him pacing the yard behind the animal hospital on the day he took Loretta to the vet for her rabies shot.
Arrow"s owner had bought him right after her divorce, for protection and company, from a religious order that raised dogs and had greedily allowed the breeding of a b.i.t.c.h known to be vicious. The result was Arrow, a hundred-pound monster who was so out of control his owner could no longer walk him down the street. When Julian stood by the fence, Arrow charged him, on his hind legs, biting at the chain link, standing as tall as a man. That afternoon, Julian took him home.
The vet sedated Arrow and helped lift him into the backseat of the patrol car, and when the dog awoke, trapped in Julian"s kennel, he went crazy.
Julian had to wear heavy leather gloves just to set his dish of food inside the kennel gate. It took six weeks before Julian could trustArrow not to attack when his back was turned, and even now the dog can"t be off his lead around people. There are times when he startles for no apparent reason other than the sound of the wind or a shift in air pressure. That may be why he took naturally to his specialized training. He sees not what is there but what isn"t, and that"s what makes him the best air dog in the state, with a sense of smell so fine he can gauge the slightest difference in the air around him. There isn"t a park ranger or state trooper who hasn"t heard about Arrow.
They call him the dog from h.e.l.l, and some rangers insist he be muzzled while tracking.
The officers at the Verity police station don"t like Arrow, and they don"t like his owner much, either. Julian knows what they say about him down at the station house: that he can"t find anything right with human beings or anything wrong with dogs, that he encourages the merlins who nest in the sweet bays and bald cypresses on his property to frighten visitors away, that he"s never once sat down for so much as a cup of coffee with any of his fellow officers. Well, if people want to complain, let them; let them get down on all fours and shimmy through the sea grape and poisonwood and see how they like sand up their noses and fire ants stinging their feet. Let them just try to make their way through the strangler figs and the saw gra.s.s. Chances are, not one of them would ever find a baby sleeping in the reeds.
Bethany Lee, who had never heard of Verity before she drove into town, left New York last October. She didn"t think about what she was doing, so she didn"t begin to panic until she was in southern New Jersey. The full moon had washed the turnpike with silver light, and then, quite suddenly, a drenching rain began to fall. In the trunk of Bethany"s Saab there was a suitcase, and inside the suitcase she had twenty thousand dollars in cash and three neck1ace I two strands of diamonds and a string of gold and sapphires.
Bethany"s hands shook as she tried to keep the car steady; each time a truck pa.s.sed her, a tidal wave of rain slapped against the Saab. Her baby, Rachel, who was then seven months old, was asleep in her car seat, warmly dressed in pink pajamas with feet, unaware that the rain was so hard windshield wipers could do nothing to improve visibility.
Six hours earlier, Bethany had set off to take Rachel to the park, but on this day she drove right on past. Rachel had let out a cry of delight when she saw the slide and the swings, but Bethany ignored the tightness in her own throat and stepped down harder on the gas. If she was lucky, the housekeeper wouldn"t worry and phone the police when she arrived to find the doors locked and no one at home. If she was unlucky, as she had been for quite some time, her husband already knew she was gone.
She probably should have pulled over that night, but she kept going at a slow crawl, never more than thirty miles an hour, until she reached Delaware.
She parked down the street from the Wilmington Greyhound station and when Rachel woke up, fussing, her diaper wet, Bethany climbed over into the backseat, told the baby what a good girl she was, and quickly changed her. Then she hoisted Rachel on her shoulder, grabbed the diaper bag, and went out to the trunk for her suitcase. She left the Saab where it was, keys in the ignition.They washed up in the ladies" room at the bus station, got some brealtfast from the snack bar, including a gla.s.s of milk to fill Rachel"s bottle, then waited for the eleven-o"clock bus to Atlanta.
By then, Bethany had not slept for two nights, and she barely had the nerve to ask for her bus ticket. In the past four months she had spent thirty thousand dollars on lawyers, and it had not done her a bit of good. If she had just taken off at the start, she would have had fifty thousand in her suitcase instead of twenty, but she had never made a real decision until the day she drove past the park. She"d had faith in her lawyer. She believed him when he insisted she"d easily win custody, but somehow it hadn"t worked out that way, and it took months for Bethany to realize she"d been tricked. It turned out that the house in Great Neck belonged not to her and Randy but to his family"s business. Even the Saab belonged to Randy"s family. And now they had decided the baby was theirs, too.
Bethany had been a freshman at Oberlin when she met Randy. His sister, Lynne, was her roommate, and she"d warned Bethany that her brother was the handsomest man she would ever meet.
He had dozens of old sweethearts from high school and college pestering him, but when he saw Bethany he fell in love instantly. He told her it was because she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and in fact she looked more like him than his own sister, with the same dark hair and clear olive skin. But after a while Bethany came to believe that he wanted her so badly because he had never in his life met a girl quite so naive. She was perfect, if not for him, for his family. His parents picked their house and their furniture and their cars, and they thought Bethany was the sweetest thing they"d ever seen. It didn"t seem to matter so much that Randy was rarely home. Bethany didn"t question him when he worked late or on weekends. He managed, that way, to be both married, which his parents insisted upon, and single, which was the way he liked it. And the truth was, he seemed more relieved than upset when Bethany began to talk about a separation during her pregnancy.
He moved out five weeks after the baby was born, and he might have been happy to be a weekend father if his parents hadn"t put pressure on him.
Rachel was their grandchild, their first and only, and they were willing to pay any amount to a lawyer who could win her. Randy"s parents, and even his sister, had testified against Bethany, and her medical records had been subpoenaed from the times when she was depressed, especially right after the baby was born and the marnage was already dead and she began taking Elavil. Right before G.o.d and her lawyer and everyone, she was ripped apart until she herself was almost convinced her child would be better off without her. While they waited for the court"s final decree, Bethany had to let Rachel go off to visit her father every weekend. There had been strong words between them by then, and Randy said he couldn"t bear to see Bethany face to face.
Instead, his parents sent a driver. Every Friday night Bethany had to stand and do nothing while Rachel screamed and the driver forced her into her car seat. Often, Bethany had to turn away.
She just couldn"t bear to see her baby cry, and afterward she"d be sick to her stomach; she"d have the dry heaves for hours.It might have continued that way Friday after Friday, until the final decree, and Bethany might never have driven through that horrible storm in New Jersey, if she hadn"t turned at the instant when Rachel was flailing her arms and screaming and seen the exasperated driver slap the baby"s face. And still, Bethany was so paralyzed she didn"t run to the car and grab her daughter.
She stood there, in shock, beside the automatic sprinklers that came on each day at dusk, too horrified to weep. The next morning, Bethany went to the bank to make her first withdrawal, and she went every day that week, until the one joint account Randy had not closed was all but drained. On the following Friday she refused to answer the door when the driver came for Rachel.
She turned off all the lights and sat on the kitchen floor, holding Rachel and rocking back and forth while the driver rang the bell for what seemed like forever. An hour after the driver left, the phone started ringing. Bethany ignored it. She fixed Rachel a bottle and put her to sleep in her own big bed, with pillows all around her so she wouldn"t roll off. Finally the phone stopped ringing and Bethany"s heart no longer felt like it was going to burst. She actually thought it was over and went to get herself a bowl of cornflakes and milk, but at a little after nine Randy"s car pulled into the driveway. Bethany sat on the couch, watching the door shake as he knocked, harder and harder, and when it stopped she thought, for a moment, that he had given up.
She had forgotten he still had a key, although he couldn"t do much more than reach his arm halfway inside, since the safety chain had been fastened.
"G.o.d d.a.m.n it," he called. "Bethany?"
Bethany sat on the couch while he screamed at her through the crack in the door. She was fairly certain that she was no longer breathing.
Throughout their marriage he had never once shouted at her or called her names; it didn"t even sound like his voice. Then she realized, all in a rush, that they were no longer the people they had been, neither of them, and that that was what happened once you started to fight over custody.
"I"m going to break the door down," he vowed.
She really couldn"t move, that was the amazing thing. She couldn"t have let him in if she"d wanted to. When the door didn"t give way, Randy backed off. Bethany was still on the couch when she heard the gla.s.s breaking. He had put his fist right through the living room window. Bethany"s breathing was hard and sharp as she ran into the kitchen and went through the drawers. She had a rubbery feeling in her legs, as though she might collapse, but instead she grabbed the bread knife, a long one with a serrated edge, and ran back to the living room. Randy was shouting her name, as if they didn"t have neighbors or a baby asleep in their bed. He had unlocked the window and was sliding it up when Bethany went to the front door and flung it open. It was an Indian summer night, and Bethany wore only shorts and a white blouse.
She stood in the doorway, her long dark hair electrified, her white shirt illuminated by moonlight, waving the knife in front of her."Get out of here!" she screamed in a voice she had never heard before.
Randy walked right toward her. There were shards of broken gla.s.s in his hair and blood on his hand and down his arm, staining one of his favorite blue shirts. "Go on," he said. "Act crazy.
That"s what you do best."
"I mean it," Bethany told him.
The knife didn"t feel the least bit heavy in her hands. A few months before, the most she had to worry about was picking up lamb chops for dinner and whether the gardener had planted white or purple wisteria.
Now, as Randy walked closer, Bethany thought about Rachel being taken from her for no good reason, and the knife felt more and more comfortable. Randy had that serious, sweetly concerned look on his face, the one that made women go limp with desire. He had thought briefly of being an actor-he"d been the lead in all his high school plays-and although his father had finally convinced him to go into the family business, Bethany could see he would have made a good actor. He could make you believe that you needed him, that he cared.
"The decision is up to the court," he told Bethany that night.
"There"s no point in us fighting."
He had almost reached the door by then.
Bethany jabbed the knife in the air and he stepped back. For a moment she could see she had truly frightened him.
"You can have anything you want," she told him. She"d grown up in Ohio and her voice had a sweet, flat timbre, although tonight it was little more than a whisper. "You just can"t have Rachel."
"You want to tell that to my parents?" he said.
There was a dinner party going on next door at the Kleinmans", and they could hear laughter through the open windows. They used to go to those parties together. Bethany would bring her ribbon cake, and Randy a blue gla.s.s pitcher of margaritas, and when they came home they"d take a shower together and get into bed.
"If you try to take her, I"ll kill you," Bethany said in her quiet voice.
"Can I quote you?" Randy said. "In court?"
Bethany lowered the knife to her side. She was a beautiful girl who had never finished college or balanced a checkbook and who needed to take antidepressants in spite of the fact that she"d married the boy everyone had been in love with.
"We should stop fighting," Randy said.
"You"re right," Bethany agreed.
"We"re not going to kill each other, we"re just going to make eachother miserable, and that"s just the way it"s going to be," Randy said.
That was when Bethany knew she wasn"t going to win her case. She left two days later, and during the bus trip through the Carolinas she invented new names for herself and the baby. When they got to Atlanta she found a p.a.w.nshop and sold both her diamond necklaces and her wedding ring, keeping the sapphires and the two gold-plated rings she"d inherited from her mother. She also discovered that if she went out behind the used4ire shop down the street and paid two thousand in cash she could get a fake ID from the state of her choice.
She chose New Jersey, so she would always be reminded of that moonlit ride when the rain came down so suddenly and she refused to stop. She, who hadn"t driven any farther than the local shops during the time she"d been married, just kept on going, outdistancing the rain.
They were headed for Miami, but they got off the bus in Hartford Beach to buy diapers and milk and a decent lunch, and never got back on.
The air smelled like oranges and the sky was wide and blue; the baby clapped her hands and cooed when she saw a yellow parakeet in a tall cabbage palm. Bethany bought a used Ford, cash, and drove toward the ocean. She didn"t stop until she got to Verity. She bought her condo, furnished, the following day. All through that fall and winter she told herself she"d have to get a job, but she couldn"t stand to be separated from her daughter, not even for an hour. She took the baby everywhere, to the hairdresser"s, where she had her dark hair cut short and dyed auburn, and later, when her money began to run out, to the p.a.w.nshop in Hartford Beach, where she sold her last necklace, the sapphires Randy had given her on the night they were married.
It seemed, quite luckily, that everyone in Florida was from somewhere else. No one questioned Bethany about her past, although several women in her building gave her advice. Mways, they told Bethany, ask a man if he has a criminal history before dating him. Never bad-mouth your ex in front of your child; even if you"re still angry, better not to mention him at all. When her neighbors offered each other hints on how to deal with their children"s problems, Bethany only pretended to listen. Her baby, who was now fourteen months old, was as sweet as ever, maybe even sweeter, as if she were being fed sugar water rather than h.o.m.ogenized milk and applesauce. How could a child conceived in a desperate last attempt to keep a marriage together be so good-natured?
How had she been able to learn her new name so quickly, to know, instinctively, not to look at strangers, and to sit on her mother"s lap down in the laundry room and not make a peep? Each time Bethany looked at her baby, she knew she had done the right thing. If there was a problem, it was only that they both suffered from insomnia, as if they were somehow more able to be their true selves after darkness fell.
Bethany often did her errands in the evening, and she took the baby grocery shopping in Hartford Beach, where the Winn Dixie was open twenty-four hours a day. It was there that she first sensed that someone was following her. Bethany was in the frozen-food aisle, getting the bagels the baby liked to chew on when she was teething, when she felt someone behind her. She grabbed her cart and went straight to the checkout line. She scanned the aisles; if she had seen even a shadow, she would have picked up the baby and bolted, leavingher cart behind, but there was nothing suspicious, just a few late-night shoppers, and Bethany let Rachel play with a bag of plums while she unloaded her cart.
The parking lot was nearly empty when Bethany rolled her cart out. It was a hot, starry night. In her seat in the cart, the baby was covering her eyes and playing peek-a-boo. She had not yet begun to speak, but Bethany understood her all the same. "I see you," Bethany had said, laughing, and then she felt it again. She looked over her shoulder. No one was there, but this time she knew she was right. She pushed the cart right up to her car, unlocked the doors, and slid the baby into her car seat. Bethany was breathing hard and her ears were burning. She opened the trunk and threw the groceries inside. She kept feeling something, like a shadow that was pa.s.sing over her own.
She got in behind the wheel and quickly locked all the doors.
"Ba-ba," the baby cried, wanting her frozen bagel right away.
"As soon as we get home," Bethany said.
Her hands were shaking as she backed out. It was silly; here she was, in the same parking lot she came to all the time. She drove to the exit and stopped behind a station wagon idling at the red light. An old man of seventy-five or eighty was at the wheel. Bethany looked in the rearview mirror so she could see her baby. Rachel whimpered, still hoping for her bagel.