Duma Key, Page 49

  I thought of asking her when her mother had called, but I doubted if she'd remember, and it didn't matter, anyway. But, my God, hadn't Pam sensed anything wrong besides tiredness, especially in light of my phone call? Was she deaf? Surely I wasn't the only one who could hear this confusion in Ilse's voice, this weariness. But maybe she hadn't been so bad when Pam called. Perse was powerful, but that didn't mean it still didn't take her time to work. Especially at a distance.

  "Ilse, do you still have the picture I gave you? The one of the little girl and the tennis balls? The End of the Game, I called it."

  "That's another funny thing," she said. I had a sense of her trying to be coherent, the way a drunk pulled over by a traffic cop will try to sound sober. "I meant to get it framed, but I didn't get around to it, so I tacked it on the wall of the big room with a Pushpin. You know, the living room/kitchen. I gave you tea there."

  "Yes." I'd never been in her Providence apartment.

  "Where I could look . . . look at it . . . but then when I camed back . . . hnn . . ."

  "Are you going to sleep? Don't go to sleep on me, Miss Cookie."

  "Not sleeping . . ." But her voice was fading.

  "Ilse! Wake up! Wake the fuck up!"

  "Daddy!" Sounding shocked. But also fully awake again.

  "What happened to the picture? What was different about it when you came back?"

  "It was in the bed'oom. I guess I must have moved it myself--it's even stuck on the same red Pushpin--but I don't remember doing it. I guess I wanted it closer to me. Isn't that funny?"

  No, I didn't think it was funny.

  "I wouldn't want to live if you were dead, Daddy," she said. "I'd want to be dead, too. As dead as . . . as . . . as dead as a marble!" And she laughed. I thought of Wireman's daughter and did not.

  "Listen to me carefully, Ilse. It's important that you do as I say. Will you do that?"

  "Yes, Daddy. As long as it doesn't take too long. I'm . . ." The sound of a yawn. ". . . tired. I might be able to sleep, now that I know you're all right."

  Yes, she'd be able to sleep. Right under The End of the Game, hanging from its red Pushpin. And she'd wake up thinking that the dream had been this conversation, the reality her father's suicide on Duma Key.

  Perse had done this. That hag. That bitch.

  The rage was back, just like that. As if it had never been away. But I couldn't let it fuck up my thinking; couldn't even let it show in my voice, or Ilse might think it was aimed at her. I clamped the phone between my ear and shoulder. Then I reached out and grasped the slim chrome neck of the sink faucet. I closed my fist around it.

  "This won't take long, hon. But you have to do it. Then you can go to sleep."

  Wireman sat perfectly still at the table, watching me. Outside, the surf hammered.

  "What kind of stove do you have, Miss Cookie?"

  "Gas. Gas stove." She laughed again.

  "Good. Get the picture and throw it in the oven. Then close the door and turn the oven on. High as it will go. Burn that thing."

  "No, Daddy!" Wide awake again, as shocked as when I'd said fuck, if not more so. "I love that picture!"

  "I know, honey, but it's the picture that's making you feel the way you do." I started to say something else, then stopped. If it was the sketch--and it was, of course it was--then I wouldn't need to hammer it home. She'd know as well as I did. Instead of speaking I throttled the faucet back and forth, wishing with all my heart it was the bitch-hag's throat.

  "Daddy! Do you really think--"

  "I don't think, I know. Get the picture, Ilse. I'm going to hold the phone. Get it and stick it in the oven and burn it. Do it right now."

  "I . . . okay. Hold on."

  There was a clunk as the phone went down.

  Wireman said, "Is she doing it?"

  Before I could reply, there was a snap. It was followed by a spout of cold water that drenched me to the elbow. I looked at the faucet in my hand, then at the ragged place where it had broken off. I dropped it in the sink. Water was spouting from the stump.

  "I think she is," I said. And then: "Sorry."

  "De nada." He dropped to his knees, opened the cupboard beneath the sink, reached in past the wastebasket and the stash of garbage bags. He turned something, and the gusher spouting from the broken faucet started to die. "You don't know your own strength, muchacho. Or maybe you do."

  "Sorry," I said again. But I wasn't. My palm was bleeding from a shallow cut, but I felt better. Clearer. It occurred to me that once upon a time, that faucet could have been my wife's neck. No wonder she had divorced me.

  We sat in the kitchen and waited. The second hand on the clock above the stove made one very slow trip around the dial, started another. The water coming from the broken faucet was down to a bare rivulet. Then, very faintly, I heard Ilse, calling: "I'm back . . . I've got it . . . I--" Then she screamed. I couldn't tell if it was surprise, pain, or both.

  "Ilse!" I shouted. "Ilse!"

  Wireman stood up fast, bumping his hip against the side of the sink. He raised his open hands to me. I shook my head--Don't know. Now I could feel sweat running down my cheeks, although the kitchen wasn't particularly warm.

  I was wondering what to do next--who to call--when Ilse came back on the phone. She sounded exhausted. She also sounded like herself. Finally like herself. "Jesus Christ in the morning," she said.

  "What happened?" I had to restrain myself from shouting. "Illy, what happened?"

  "It's gone. It caught fire and burned. I watched it through the window. It's nothing but ashes. I have to get a Band-Aid on the back of my hand, Dad. You were right. There was something really, really wrong with it." She laughed shakily. "Damn thing didn't want to go in. It folded itself over and . . ." That shaky laugh again. "I'd call it a paper-cut, but it doesn't look like a paper-cut, and it didn't feel like one. It feels like a bite. I think it bit me."

  viii

  The important thing for me was that she was all right. The important thing for her was that I was. We were fine. Or so the foolish artist thought. I told her I'd call tomorrow.

  "Illy? One more thing."

  "Yes, Dad." She sounded totally awake and in charge of herself again.

  "Go to the stove. Is there an oven light?"

  "Yes."

  "Turn it on. Tell me what you see."

  "You'll have to hold on, then--the cordless is in the bedroom."

  There was another pause, shorter. Then she came back and said, "Ashes."

  "Good," I said.

  "Daddy, what about the rest of your pictures? Are they all like this one?"

  "I'm taking care of it, honey. It's a story for another day."

  "All right. Thank you, Daddy. You're still my hero. I love you."

  "I love you, too."

  That was the last time we spoke, and neither of us knew. We never know, do we? At least we ended by exchanging our love. I have that. It's not much, but it's something. Others have it worse. I tell myself that on the long nights when I can't sleep.

  Others have it worse.

  ix

  I slumped down across from Wireman and propped my head on my hand. "I'm sweating like a pig."

  "Busting Miss Eastlake's sink might've had something to do with that."

  "I'm sor--"

  "Say it again and I'll smack you," he said. "You did fine. It's not every man who gets to save his daughter's life. Believe me when I say that I envy you. Do you want a beer?"

  "I'd throw it up all over the table. Got milk?"

  He checked the fridge. "No milk, but we are go for Half-n-Half."

  "Give me a shot of that."

  "You're a sick, sick puppydick, Edgar." But he gave me a shot of Half-n-Half in a juice glass, and I tossed it off. Then we went back upstairs, moving slowly, clutching our stubby silver-tipped arrows like aging jungle warriors.

  I went back into the guest bedroom, lay down, and once more gazed up at the ceiling. My hand hurt, but that was okay. She'd cut hers; I'd
cut mine. It fit, somehow.

  The table is leaking, I thought.

  Drown her to sleep, I thought.

  And something else--Elizabeth had said something else, as well. Before I could remember what it was, I remembered something much more important: Ilse had burned The End of the Game in her gas oven and had suffered no more than a cut--or maybe a bite--on the back of her hand.

  Should have told her to disinfect that, I thought. Should disinfect mine, too.

  I slept. And this time there was no giant dream-frog to warn me.

  x

  A thud woke me as the sun was rising. The wind was still up--higher than ever--and it had blown one of Wireman's beach chairs against the side of the house. Or maybe the gay umbrella beneath which we had shared our first drink--iced green tea, very cooling.

  I pulled on my jeans and left everything else lying on the floor, including the harpoon with the silver tip. I didn't think Emery Paulson would be back to visit me, not by daylight. I checked on Wireman, but that was only a formality; I could hear him snoring and whistling away. He was once more on his back, arms thrown wide.

  I went downstairs to the kitchen and shook my head over the broken faucet and the juice glass with the dried Half-n-Half scum on its sides. I found a bigger glass in a cupboard and filled it with oj. I took it out on the back porch. The wind blowing in from the Gulf was strong but warm, lifting my sweaty hair back from my brow and temples. It felt good. Soothing. I decided to walk to the beach and drink my juice there.

  I stopped three-quarters of the way down the boardwalk, about to take a sip of my juice. The glass was tipped, and some of it splattered on one bare foot. I barely noticed.

  Out there on the Gulf, riding in toward shore on one of the large, wind-driven waves, was a bright green tennis ball.

  It means nothing, I told myself, but that wouldn't hold water. It meant everything, and I knew it from the moment I saw it. I tossed the glass into the sea oats and broke into a lunging lurch--the Edgar Freemantle version of running that year.

  It took me fifteen seconds to reach the end of the boardwalk, maybe even less, but in that time I saw three more tennis balls floating in on the tide. Then six, then eight. Most were off to my right--to the north.

  I wasn't watching where I was going and plunged off the end of the boardwalk into thin air, arm whirling. I hit the sand still running and might have stayed up if I'd landed on my good leg, but I didn't. A zigzag of pain corkscrewed up my bad one, shin to knee to hip, and I went sprawling in the sand. Six inches in front of my nose was one of those damned tennis balls, its fuzz soaked flat.

  DUNLOP was printed on the side, the letters as black as damnation.

  I struggled to my feet, looking wildly out at the Gulf. There were only a few incoming balls in front of El Palacio, but farther north, near Big Pink, I saw a green flotilla--a hundred at least, probably many more.

  It means nothing. She's safe. She burned the picture and she's asleep in her apartment a thousand miles from here, safe and sound.

  "It means nothing," I said, but now the wind blowing my hair back felt cold instead of warm. I began to limp toward Big Pink, down where the sand was wet and packed and shining. The peeps flew up in front of me in clouds. Every now and then an incoming wave would drop a tennis ball at my feet. There were lots of them now, scattered on the wet hardpack. Then I came to a burst-open crate reading Dunlop Tennis Balls and FACTORY REJECTS NO CANS. It was surrounded by floating, bobbing tennis balls.

  I broke into a run.

  xi

  I unlocked the door and left my keys hanging in the lock. Lurched to the phone and saw the message light blinking. I pushed the PLAY button. The robot's expressionless male voice told me that this message had been received at 6:48 AM, which meant I had missed it by less than half an hour. Then Pam's voice burst out of the speaker. I bent my head, the way you'd bend your head to try and keep a burst of jagged glass fragments from flying directly into your face.

  "Edgar, the police called and they say Illy's dead! They say a woman named Mary Ire came to her apartment and killed her! One of your friends! One of your art friends from Florida has killed our daughter!" She burst into a storm of harsh and ugly weeping . . . then laughed. It was horrible, that laugh. I felt as if one of those flying shards of glass had cut into my face. "Call me, you bastard. Call and explain yourself. You said she'd be SAFE!"

  Then more crying. It was cut off by a click. Next came the hum of an open line.

  I reached out and pushed the OFF button, silencing it.

  I walked into the Florida room and looked at the tennis balls, still bobbing in on the waves. I felt doubled, like a man watching a man.

  The dead twins had left a message in my studio--Where our sister? Had Illy been the sister they meant?

  I could almost hear the hag laughing and see her nodding.

  "Are you here, Perse?" I asked.

  The wind rushed in through the screens. The waves crashed on the shore with metronome-like regularity. Birds flew over the water, crying. On the beach I could see another burst-open tennis ball crate, already half-buried in the sand. Treasure from the sea; fair salvage from the caldo. She was watching, all right. Waiting for me to break down. I was quite sure of it. Her--what? her guardians?--might sleep in the daytime, but not her.

  "I win, you win," I said. "But you think you got your lasties, don't you? Clever Perse."

  Of course she was clever. She'd been playing the game for a long time. I had an idea she'd been old when the Children of Israel were still grubbing in the gardens of Egypt. Sometimes she slept, but now she was awake.

  And her reach was long.

  My phone began to ring. I went back in, still feeling like two Edgars, one earthbound, the other floating above the earthbound Edgar's head, and picked it up. It was Dario. He sounded upset.

  "Edgar? What's this shit about not releasing the paintings to--"

  "Not now, Dario," I said. "Hush." I broke the connection and called Pam. Now that I wasn't thinking about it, the numbers came with no problem whatsoever; that marvelous muscle memory thing took over completely. It occurred to me that human beings might be better off if that was the only kind of memory they had.

  Pam was calmer. I don't know what she'd taken, but it was already working. We talked for twenty minutes. She wept through most of the conversation, and was intermittently accusatory, but when I made no effort to defend myself, her anger collapsed into grief and bewilderment. I got the salient points, or so I thought then. There was one very salient point that we both were missing, but as a wise man once said, "You can't hit em if you can't see em," and the police representative who called Pam didn't think to tell her what Mary Ire had brought to our daughter's Providence apartment.

  Besides the gun, that was. The Beretta.

  "The police say she must have driven, and almost nonstop," Pam said dully. "She never could have gotten a gun like that on an airplane. Why did she do it? Was it another fucking painting?"

  "Of course it was," I said. "She bought one. I never thought of that. I never thought of her. Not once. It was Illy's fucking boyfriend I was worried about."

  Speaking very calmly, my ex-wife--that's what she surely was now--said: "You did this."

  Yes. I had. I should have realized Mary Ire would buy at least one painting, and that she'd probably want a canvas from the Girl and Ship series--the most toxic of all. Nor would she have wanted the Scoto to store it, not when she lived right up the road in Tampa. For all I knew, she might have had it in the trunk of her beat-up Mercedes when she dropped me at the hospital. From there she could have gone right to her place on Davis Islands to get her home protection automatic. Hell, it would have been on her way north.

  That part I should have at least guessed. I had met her, after all, and I knew what she thought of my work.

  "Pam, something very bad is happening on this island. I--"

  "Do you think I care about that, Edgar? Or about why that woman did it? You got our daughte
r killed. I don't ever want to talk to you again, I don't want to see you again, and I'd rather poke out my eyes than ever have to look at another picture of yours. You should have died when that crane hit you." There was an awful thoughtfulness in her voice. "That would have been a happy ending."

  There was a moment of silence, then once more the hum of an open line. I considered throwing the whole works across the room and against the wall, but the Edgar floating over my head said no. The Edgar floating over my head said that would perhaps give Perse too much pleasure. So I hung it up gently instead, and then for a minute I just stood there swaying on my feet, alive while my nineteen-year-old daughter was dead, not shot after all but drowned in her own bathtub by a mad art critic.

  Then, slowly, I walked back out through the door. I left it open. There seemed no reason to lock it now. There was a broom meant for sweeping sand off the walk leaning against the side of the house. I looked at it and my right arm began to itch. I lifted my right hand and held it in front of my eyes. It wasn't there, but when I opened it and closed it, I could feel it flex. I could also feel a couple of long nails biting into my palm. The others felt short and ragged. They must have broken off. Somewhere--perhaps on the carpet upstairs in Little Pink--were a couple of ghost fingernails.

  "Go away," I told it. "I don't want you anymore, go away and be dead."

  It didn't. It wouldn't. Like the arm to which it had once been attached, the hand itched and throbbed and ached and refused to leave me.

  "Then go find my daughter," I said, and the tears began to flow. "Bring her back, why don't you? Bring her to me. I'll paint anything you want, just bring her to me."

  Nothing. I was just a one-armed man with a phantom itch. The only ghost was his own, drifting around just over his head, observing all this.

  The creeping in my flesh grew worse. I picked the broom up, weeping now not just from grief but also from the horrible discomfort of that unreachable itch, then realized I couldn't do what I needed to do--a one-armed man can't snap a broomhandle over his knee. I leaned it against the house again and stomped it with my good leg. There was a snap, and the bristle end went flying. I held the jagged end up in front of my streaming eyes and nodded. It would do.

  I went around the corner of the house toward the beach, a distant part of my mind registering the loud conversation of the shells beneath Big Pink as the waves dashed into the darkness there and then withdrew.