Duma Key, Page 41

  "No, thanks. Just let me borrow a sip of yours." I had three aspirin in my pants pocket. I fished them out and swallowed them with some of Wireman's coffee.

  He wrinkled his nose. "In with all your germy change. That's nasty."

  "I have a strong immune system. How is she?"

  "Not good." He looked at me bleakly.

  "Did she come around at all in the ambulance? Say anything else?"

  "She did."

  "What?"

  From the pocket of his linen shirt, Wireman took an invitation to my show, with THE VIEW FROM DUMA printed on one side. On the other he'd scrawled three notes. They jagged up and down--from the motion of the ambulance, I assumed--but I could read them:

  "The table is leaking."

  "You will want to but you mustn't."

  "Drown her back to sleep."

  They were all spooky, but that last one made the flesh on my arms prickle.

  "Nothing else?" I asked, handing the invitation back.

  "She said my name a couple of times. She knew me. And she said yours, Edgar."

  "Have a look at this," I said, and slid the manila envelope across the table.

  He asked where I'd gotten it and I told him. He said it all seemed a little convenient, and I shrugged. I was remembering something Elizabeth had said to me--The water runs faster now. Soon come the rapids. Well, the rapids were here. I had a feeling this was only the start of the white water.

  My hip was starting to feel a little better, its late-night sobbing down to mere sniffles. According to popular wisdom, a dog is a man's best friend, but I would vote for aspirin. I pulled my chair around the table and sat next to Wireman, where I could read the headline: DUMA KEY TOT BLOSSOMS FOLLOWING SPILL--IS SHE A CHILD PRODIGY? Beneath was a photograph. In it was a man I knew well in a bathing suit I knew well: John Eastlake in his slimmer, trimmer incarnation. He was smiling, and holding up a smiling little girl. It was Elizabeth, looking the same age as in the family portrait of Daddy and His Girls, only now she was holding out a drawing to the camera in both hands and wearing a gauze bandage wrapped around her head. There was another, much older girl in the picture--big sister Adriana, and yes, she could have been a carrot-top--but to begin with, Wireman and I paid little attention to her. Or to John Eastlake. Or even to the toddler with the bandage around her head.

  "Holy wow," Wireman said.

  The picture was of a horse looking over a fence rail. It wore an unlikely (and un-equine) smile. In the foreground, back-to, was a little girl with lots of golden ringlets, holding out a carrot the size of a shotgun for the smiling horse to eat. To either side, bracketing the picture almost like theater curtains, were palm trees. Above were puffy white clouds and a great big sun, shooting off happy-rays of light.

  It was a child's picture, but the talent that had created it was beyond doubt. The horse had a joie de vivre that made the smile the punchline of a cheerful joke. You could put a dozen art students in a room, tell them to execute a happy horse, and I was willing to bet not one of them would be able to match the success of that picture. Even the oversized carrot felt not like a mistake but part of the giggle, an intensifier, an artistic steroid.

  "It's not a joke," I muttered, bending closer . . . only bending closer did no good. I was seeing this picture through four aggravating levels of obfuscation: the photograph, the newspaper reproduction of the photograph, the Xerox of the newspaper reproduction of the photograph . . . and time itself. Over eighty years of it, if I had the math right.

  "What's not a joke?" Wireman asked.

  "The way the size of the horse is exaggerated. And the carrot. Even the sunrays. It's a child's cry of glee, Wireman!"

  "A hoax is what it is. Got to be. She would have been two! A child of two can't even make stick figures and call em mommy and daddy, can she?"

  "Was what happened to Candy Brown a hoax? Or what about the bullet that used to be in your brain? The one that's now gone?"

  He was silent.

  I tapped CHILD PRODIGY. "Look, they even had the right fancy term for it. Do you suppose if she'd been poor and black, they would have called her PICKANINNY FREAK and stuck her in a sideshow somewhere? Because I sort of do."

  "If she'd been poor and black, she never would have made the paper at all. Or fallen out of a pony-trap to begin with."

  "Is that what hap--" I stopped, my eye caught by the blurry photograph again. Now it was big sis I was looking at. Adriana.

  "What?" Wireman asked, and his tone was What now?

  "Her bathing suit. Look familiar to you?"

  "I can't see very much, just the top. Elizabeth's holding her picture out in front of the rest."

  "What about the part you can see?"

  He looked for a long time. "Wish I had a magnifying glass."

  "That would probably make it worse instead of better."

  "All right, muchacho, it does look vaguely familiar . . . but maybe that's just an idea you put in my head."

  "In all the Girl and Ship paintings, there was only one Rowboat Girl I was never sure of: the one in No. 6. The one with the orangey hair, the one in the blue singlet with the yellow stripe around the neck." I tapped Adriana's blurred image in the photocopy Mary Ire had given me. "This is the girl. This is the swimming suit. I'm sure of it. So was Elizabeth."

  "What are we saying here?" Wireman asked. He was skimming the print, rubbing at his temples as he did so. I asked if his eye was bothering him.

  "No. This is just so . . . so fucking . . ." He looked up at me, eyes big, still rubbing his temples. "She fell out of the goddam pony-trap and hit her head on a rock, or so it says here. Woke up in the doctor's infirmary just as they were getting ready to transport her to the hospital in St. Pete. Seizures thereafter. It says, 'The seizures continue for Baby Elizabeth, although they are moderating and seem to do her no lasting harm.' And she started painting pictures!"

  I said, "The accident must have happened right after the big group portrait was taken, because she looks exactly the same, and they change fast at that age."

  Wireman seemed not to notice. "We're all in the same rowboat," he said.

  I started to ask him what he meant, then realized I didn't have to. "Si, senor," I said.

  "She fell on her head. I shot myself in the head. You got your head crushed by a payloader."

  "Crane."

  He waved his hand as if to indicate this made no difference. Then he used the hand to grip my surviving wrist. His fingers were cold. "I have questions, muchacho. How come she stopped painting? And how come I never started?"

  "I can't say for certain why she stopped. Maybe she forgot--blocked it out--or maybe she deliberately lied and denied. As for you, your talent's empathy. And on Duma Key, empathy got raised to telepathy."

  "That's bullshi . . ." He trailed off.

  I waited.

  "No," he said. "No. It's not. But it's also completely gone. Want to know something, amigo?"

  "Sure."

  He cocked a thumb at the tense family group across the room from us. They had gone back to their discussion. Pop was now shaking his finger at Mom. Or maybe it was Sis. "A couple of months ago, I could have told you what that hoopdedoo was about. Now all I could do is make an educated guess."

  "And probably come out in much the same place," I said. "Would you trade one for the other in any case? Your eyesight for the occasional thoughtwave?"

  "God, no!" he said, then looked around the caff with an ironic, despairing, head-cocked smile. "I can't believe we're having this discussion, you know. I keep thinking I'll wake up and it'll all be as you were, Private Wireman, assume the position."

  I looked him in the eye. "Ain't gonna happen."

  x

  According to the Weekly Echo, Baby Elizabeth (as she was referred to almost throughout) began her artistic endeavors on the very first day of her at-home convalescence. She quickly went on, "gaining skill and prowess with each passing hour, it seemed to her amazed father." She started with colored pencils (
"Sound familiar?" Wireman asked), before progressing to a box of watercolors the bemused John Eastlake brought home from Venice.

  In the three months following her accident, much of it spent in bed, she had done literally hundreds of watercolors, turning them out at a rate John Eastlake and the other girls found a little frightening. (If "Nan Melda" had an opinion, it wasn't offered in print.) Eastlake tried to slow her down--on doctor's orders--but this was counterproductive. It caused fretfulness, crying fits, insomnia, bouts of fever. Baby Elizabeth said when she couldn't draw or paint, "her head hurted." Her father said that when she did paint, "She ate like one of the horses she liked to draw." The article's author, one M. Rickert, seemed to find this endearing. Recalling my own eating binges, I found it all too familiar.

  I was going over the muddy print for the third time, with Wireman where my right arm would have been, if I'd had a right arm, when the door opened and Gene Hadlock came in. He was still wearing the black tie and bright pink shirt he'd had on at the show, although the tie had been pulled down and the collar was loosened. He was still wearing green scrub pants and green bootees over his shoes. His head was down. When he looked up I saw a face that was as long and sad as an old bloodhound's.

  "Eleven-nineteen," he said. "There was never really a chance."

  Wireman put his face in his hands.

  xi

  I got to the Ritz at quarter to one in the morning, limping with fatigue and not wanting to be there. I wanted to be in my bedroom at Big Pink. I wanted to lie in the middle of my bed, push the strange new doll to the floor as I had the ornamental pillows, and hug Reba to me. I wanted to lie there and look at the turning fan. Most of all, I wanted to listen to the whispered conversation of the shells under the house as I drifted off to sleep.

  Instead I had this lobby to deal with: too ornate, too full of people and music (cocktail piano even at this hour), most of all, too bright. Still, my family was here. I had missed the celebratory dinner. I would not miss the celebratory breakfast.

  I asked the clerk for my key. He gave it to me, along with a stack of messages. I opened them one after another. Most were congratulations. The one from Ilse was different. It read: Are you okay? If I don't see you by 8 AM, I'm coming to find you. Fair warning.

  At the very bottom was one from Pam. The note itself was only four words long: I know she died. Everything else that needed saying was expressed by the enclosure. It was her room key.

  xii

  I stood outside 847 five minutes later with the key in my hand. I'd move it toward the slot, then move my finger toward the doorbell, then look back toward the elevators. I must have stood that way for five minutes or more, too exhausted to make up my mind, and might have stood there even longer if I hadn't heard the elevator doors open, followed by the sound of tipsy convivial laughter. I was afraid it would turn out to be someone I knew--Tom and Bozie, or Big Ainge and his wife. Maybe even Lin and Ric. In the end I hadn't booked the entire floor, but I'd taken most of it.

  I pushed the key into the lock. It was the electronic kind you didn't even have to turn. A green light came on, and as the laughter from down the hall came closer, I slipped inside.

  I had ordered her a suite, and the living room was big. There had apparently been a before-show party, because there were two room-service tables and lots of plates with the remains of canapes on them. I spotted two--no, three champagne buckets. Two of the bottles were sticking bottoms-up, dead soldiers. The third appeared to still be alive, although on life support.

  That made me think of Elizabeth again. I saw her sitting beside her China Village, looking like Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, saying See how I've put the children outside the schoolhouse! Do come see!

  Pain is the biggest power of love. That's what Wireman says.

  I threaded my way around chairs where my nearest and dearest had sat, talking and laughing and--I was sure of it--toasting my hard work and good fortune. I took the last champagne bottle from the pool in which it sat, held it up to the wall-length picture-window showcasing Sarasota Bay, and said: "Here's to you, Elizabeth. Hasta la vista, mi amada."

  "What does amada mean?"

  I turned. Pam was standing in the bedroom doorway. She was wearing a blue nightgown I didn't remember. Her hair was down. It hadn't been so long since Ilse was in junior high school. It touched her shoulders.

  "It means darling," I said. "I learned it from Wireman. He was married to a Mexican woman."

  "Was?"

  "She died. Who told you about Elizabeth?"

  "The young man who works for you. I asked him to call if there was news. I'm so sorry."

  I smiled. I tried to put the champagne bottle back and missed the bucket. Hell, I missed the table. The bottle hit the carpet and rolled. Once the Daughter of the Godfather had been a child, holding out her picture of a smiling horse for a photographer's camera, the photographer probably some jazzy guy wearing a straw hat and arm garters. Then she had been an old woman jittering away the last of her life in a wheelchair while her snood came loose and flailed from one final hairpin under the fluorescent lights of an art gallery office. And the time between? It probably seemed like no more than a nod or the wave of a hand to the clear blue sky. In the end we all go smash to the floor.

  Pam held out her arms. There was a full moon shining in through the big window, and by its light I could see the rose tattoo on the swell of her breast. Something else new and different . . . but the breast was familiar. I knew it well. "Come here," she said.

  I came. I struck one of the room-service tables with my bad hip, gave a muttering cry, and stumbled the last two steps into her arms, thinking this was a nice reunion, we were both going to land on the carpet, me on top of her. Maybe I could even break a couple of her ribs. It was certainly possible; I'd put on twenty pounds since coming to Duma Key.

  But she was strong. I forgot that. She held my weight, at first bracing against the side of the bedroom door, then standing up straight with me in her arms. I put my own arm around her and laid my cheek on her shoulder, just breathing in the scent of her.

  Wireman! I woke up early and I've been having such a wonderful time with my chinas!

  "Come on, Eddie, you're tired. Come to bed."

  She led me into the bedroom. The window in here was smaller, the moonlight thinner, but the window was open and I could hear the constant sigh of the water.

  "Are you sure--"

  "Hush."

  I'm sure I've been told your name but it escapes me, so much does now.

  "I never meant to hurt you. I'm so sorry--"

  She put two fingers against my lips. "I don't want your sorry."

  We sat side by side on the bed in the shadows. "What do you want?"

  She showed me with a kiss. Her breath was warm and tasted of champagne. For a little while I forgot about Elizabeth and Wireman, picnic baskets, and Duma Key. For a little while there was just she and I, like the old days. The two-armed days. For a little while after that I slept--until the first light came creeping. The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes--maybe even often--it's the solution.

  How to Draw a Picture (VIII)

  Be brave. Don't be afraid to draw the secret things. No one said art was always a zephyr; sometimes it's a hurricane. Even then you must not hesitate or change course. Because if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art--that you are in charge--your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty. Sometimes the truth is the big boy.

  The little ones say It's Libbit's frog. A frog with teef.

  And sometimes it's something even worse. Something like Charley in his bright blue breeches.

  Or HER.

  Here is a picture of little Libbit with her finger to her lips. She says Shhhh. She says If you talk she'll hear, so shhhh. She says Bad things can happen, and upside-down talking birds are just the first and least, so shhhh. If you try to run, something awful may come out of the cypress and gumbo limbo and catch you on the road. T
here are even worse things in the water down at Shade Beach--worse than the big boy, worse than Charley who moves so quick. They're in the water, waiting to drown you. And not even drowning is the end, no, not even drowning. So shhhh.

  But for the true artist, the truth will insist. Libbit Eastlake can hush her mouth, but not her paints and pencils.

  There's only one person she dares talk to, and only one place she can do it--only one place at Heron's Roost where HER hold seems to fail. She makes Nan Melda go there with her. And tries to explain how this happened, how the talent demanded the truth and the truth slithered out of her grasp. She tries to explain how the drawings have taken over her life and how she has come to hate the little china doll Daddy found with the rest of the treasure--the little china woman who was Libbit's fair salvage. She tries to explain her deepest fear: if they don't do something, the twins may not be the only ones to die, only the first ones. And the deaths may not end on Duma Key.

  She gathers all her courage (and for a child who is little more than a baby, she must have had a great lot of it) and tells the whole truth, mad as it is. First about how she made the hurricane, but that it wasn't her idea--it was HER idea.

  I think Nan Melda believes it. Because she's seen the big boy? Because she's seen Charley?

  I think she saw both.

  The truth has to come out, that's the basis of art. But that's not to say the world must see it.

  Nan Melda says Where yo new doll now? The china doll?

  Libbit says In my special treasure-box. My heart-box.

  Nan Melda says And what her name?

  Libbit says Her name is Perse.

  Nan Melda says Percy a boy's name.

  And Libbit says I can't help it. Her name is Perse. That's the truth. And she says Perse has a ship. It looks nice but it's not nice. It's bad. What are we going to do, Nanny?

  Nan Melda thinks about it as they stand there in the one safe place. And I believe she knew what needed to be done. She might not have been an art critic--no Mary Ire--but I think she knew. The bravery is in the doing, not in the showing. The truth can be hidden away again, if it's too terrible for the world to look at. And it happens. I'm sure it happens all the time.

  I think every artist worth a damn has a red picnic basket.

  14--The Red Basket