Duma Key, Page 8

  I had been shading the young man's jeans with Venus Blue. Now I dropped it, picked up the black, and stroked the word

  ZALES

  at the bottom of the sheet. It was information; it was also the name of the picture. Naming lends power.

  Then, without a pause, I dropped the black, picked up orange, and added workboots. The orange was too bright, it made the boots look new when they weren't, but the idea was right.

  I scratched at my right arm, scratched through my right arm, and got my ribs instead. I muttered "Fuck" under my breath. Beneath me, the shells seemed to grate a name. Was it Connor? No. And something was wrong here. I didn't know where that sense of wrongness was coming from, but all at once the phantom itch in my right arm became a cold ache.

  I tossed back the top sheet on the pad and sketched again, this time using just the red pencil. Red, red, it was RED! The pencil raced, spilling out a human figure like blood from a cut. It was back-to, dressed in a red robe with a kind of scalloped collar. I colored the hair red, too, because it looked like blood and this person felt like blood. Like danger. Not for me but--

  "For Ilse," I muttered. "Danger for Ilse. Is it the guy? The special-news guy?"

  There was something not right about the special-news guy, but I didn't think that was what was creeping me out. For one thing, the figure in the red robe didn't look like a guy. It was hard to tell for sure, but yes--I thought . . . female. So maybe not a robe at all. Maybe a dress? A long red dress?

  I flipped back to the first figure and looked at the book the special-news guy was holding. I threw my red pencil on the floor and colored the book black. Then I looked at the guy again, and suddenly printed

  HUMMINGBIRDS

  in scripty-looking letters above him. Then I threw my black pencil on the floor. I raised my shaking hands and covered my face with them. I called out my daughter's name, the way you'd call out if you saw someone too close to a steep drop or busy street.

  Maybe I was just crazy. Probably I was crazy.

  Eventually I became aware that there was--of course--only one hand over my eyes. The phantom ache and itching had departed. The idea that I might be going crazy--hell, that I might have already gone--remained. One thing was beyond doubt: I was hungry. Ravenous.

  ix

  Ilse's plane arrived ten minutes ahead of schedule. She was radiant in faded jeans and a Brown University tee-shirt, and I didn't see how Jack could keep from falling in love with her right there in Terminal B. She threw herself into my arms, covered my face with kisses, then laughed and grabbed me when I started listing to port on my crutch. I introduced her to Jack and pretended not to see the small diamond (purchased at Zales, I had no doubt) flashing on the third finger of her left hand when they shook.

  "You look wonderful, Daddy," she said as we stepped out into the balmy December evening. "You've got a tan. First time since you built that rec center in Lilydale Park. And you've put on weight. At least ten pounds. Don't you think so, Jack?"

  "You'd be the best judge of that," Jack said, smiling. "I'll go get the car. You okay to stand, boss? This may take awhile."

  "I'm good."

  We waited on the curb with her two carry-ons and her computer. She was smiling into my eyes.

  "You saw it, didn't you?" she asked. "Don't pretend you didn't."

  "If you mean the ring, I saw. Unless you won it in one of those quarter drop-the-claw games, I'd say congratulations are in order. Does Lin know?"

  "Yep."

  "Your mother?"

  "What do you think, Daddy? Best guess."

  "My best guess is . . . not. Because she's so concerned about Grampy right now."

  "Grampy wasn't the only reason I kept the ring in my purse the whole time I was in California--except to show Lin, that is. Mostly I just wanted to tell you first. Is that evil?"

  "No, honey. I'm touched."

  I was, too. But I was also afraid for her, and not just because she wouldn't be twenty for another three months.

  "His name's Carson Jones, and he's a divinity student, of all things--do you believe it? I love him, Daddy, I just love him so much."

  "That's great, honey," I said, but I could feel dread climbing my legs. Just don't love him too much, I was thinking. Not too much. Because--

  She was looking at me closely, her smile fading. "What? What's wrong?"

  I'd forgotten how quick she was, and how well she read me. Love conveys its own psychic powers, doesn't it?

  "Nothing, hon. Well . . . my hip's hurting a little."

  "Have you had your pain pills?"

  "Actually . . . I'm stepping down on those a little more. Plan on getting off them entirely in January. That's my New Year's resolution."

  "Daddy, that's wonderful!"

  "Although New Year's resolutions are made to be broken."

  "Not you. You do what you say you're going to do." Ilse frowned. "That's one of the things Mom never liked about you. I think it makes her jealous."

  "Hon, the divorce is just something that happened. Don't go picking sides, okay?"

  "Well, I'll tell you something else that's happening," Ilse said. Her lips had thinned down. "Since she's been out in Palm Desert, she's seeing an awful lot of this guy down the street. She says it's just coffee and sympathy--because Max lost his father last year, and Max really likes Grampy, and blah-blah-blah--but I see the way she looks at him and I . . . don't . . . care for it!" Now her lips were almost gone, and I thought she looked eerily like her mother. The thought that came with this was oddly comforting: I think she'll be all right. I think if this holy Jones boy jilts her, she'll still be okay.

  I could see my rental car, but Jack would be awhile yet. The pickup traffic was stop-and-go. I leaned my crutch against my midsection and hugged my daughter, who had come all the way from California to see me. "Go easy on your mother, okay?"

  "Don't you even care that--"

  "What I mostly care about these days is that you and Melinda are happy."

  There were circles under her eyes and I could see that, young or not, all the traveling had tired her out. I thought she'd sleep late tomorrow, and that was fine. If my feeling about her boyfriend was right--I hoped it wasn't but thought it was--she had some sleepless nights ahead of her in the year to come.

  Jack had made it as far as the Air Florida terminal, which still gave us some time. "Do you have a picture of your guy? Enquiring Dads want to know."

  Ilse brightened. "You bet." The picture she brought out of her red leather wallet was in one of those see-through plastic envelopes. She teased it out and handed it to me. I guess this time my reaction didn't show, because her fond (really sort of goofy) smile didn't change. And me? I felt as though I'd swallowed something that had no business going down a human throat. A piece of lead shot, maybe.

  It wasn't that Carson Jones resembled the man I'd drawn on Christmas Eve. I was prepared for that, had been since I saw the little ring twinkling prettily on Ilse's finger. What shocked me was that the photo was almost exactly the same. It was as if, instead of clipping a photo of sophora, sea lavender, or inkberry to the side of my easel, I had clipped this very photograph. He was wearing the jeans and the scuffed yellow workboots that I hadn't been able to get quite right; his darkish blond hair spilled over his ears and his forehead; he was carrying a book I knew was a Bible in one hand. Most telling of all was the Minnesota Twins tee-shirt, with the number 48 on the left breast.

  "Who's number 48, and how did you happen to meet a Twins fan at Brown? I thought that was Red Sox country."

  "Number 48's Torii Hunter," she said, looking at me as if I was the world's biggest dummox. "They have a huge TV in the main student lounge, and I went in there one day last July when the Sox and Twins were playing. The place was crammed even though it was summer session, but Carson and I were the only ones with our Twins on--him with his Torii tee-shirt, me with my cap. So of course we sat together, and . . ." She shrugged, to show the rest was history.

  "What flavor
is he, religiously speaking?"

  "Baptist." She looked at me a little defiantly, as though she'd said Cannibal. But as a member in good standing of The First Church of Nothing in Particular, I had no grudge against the Baptists. The only religions I don't like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God. "We've been going to services together three times a week for the last four months."

  Jack pulled up, and she bent to grab the handles of her various bags. "He's going to take spring semester off to travel with this really wonderful gospel group. It's an actual tour, with a booker and everything. The group is called The Hummingbirds. You should hear him--he sings like an angel."

  "I'll bet," I said.

  She kissed me again, softly, on the cheek. "I'm glad I came, Daddy. Are you glad?"

  "More than you could ever know," I said, and found myself wishing she'd fall madly in love with Jack. That would have solved everything . . . or so it seemed to me then.

  x

  We had nothing so grand as Christmas dinner, but there was one of Jack's Astronaut Chickens, plus cranberry dressing, salad-in-a-bag, and rice pudding. Ilse ate two helpings of everything. After we exchanged presents and exclaimed over them--everything was just what we wanted!--I took Ilse upstairs to Little Pink and showed her most of my artistic output. The drawing I'd done of her boyfriend and the picture of the woman (if it was a woman) in red were tucked away on a high shelf in my bedroom closet, and there they would stay until my daughter was gone.

  I had clipped about a dozen others--mostly sunsets--to squares of cardboard and leaned them against the walls of the room. She toured them once. Stopped, then toured them again. It was night by then, my big upstairs window full of darkness. The tide was all the way out; the only way you even knew the Gulf was there was by its soft continual sighing as the waves ran up the sand and died.

  "You really did these?" she said at last. She turned and looked at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. It's the way one person looks at another when a serious re-evaluation is going on.

  "I really did," I said. "What do you think?"

  "They're good. Maybe better than good. This one--" She bent and very carefully picked up the one that showed the conch sitting on the horizon-line, with yellow-orange sunset light blazing all around it. "This is so fu . . . excuse me, so damn creepy."

  "I think so, too," I said. "But really, it's nothing new. All it does is dress up the sunset with a little surrealism." Then, inanely, I exclaimed: "Hello, Dali!"

  She put back Sunset with Conch, and picked up Sunset with Sophora.

  "Who's seen these?"

  "Just you and Jack. Oh, and Juanita. She calls them asustador. Something like that. Jack says it means scary."

  "They're a little scary," she admitted. "But Daddy . . . this pencil you're using will smudge. And I think it'll fade if you don't do something to the pictures."

  "What?"

  "Dunno. But I think you ought to show these to someone who does know. Someone who can tell you how good they really are."

  I felt flattered but also uncomfortable. Dismayed, almost. "I wouldn't know who or where to--"

  "Ask Jack. Maybe he knows an art gallery that would look at them."

  "Sure, just limp in off the street and say, 'I live out on Duma Key and I've got some pencil sketches--mostly of sunsets, a very unusual subject in coastal Florida--that my housekeeper says are muy asustador.' "

  She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. It was how Pam looked when she had no intention of letting a thing go. When she in fact intended to throw her current argument into four-wheel drive.

  "Father--"

  "Oh boy, I'm in for it now."

  She paid no mind. "You parlayed two pickups, a used Korean War bulldozer, and a twenty-thousand-dollar loan into a million-dollar business. Are you going to stand there and tell me you couldn't get a few art gallery owners to look at your pictures if you really set your mind to it?"

  She softened.

  "I mean, these are good, Daddy. Good. All I've got for training is one lousy Art Appreciation course in high school, and I know that."

  I said something, but I'm not sure what. I was thinking about my frenzied quick-sketch of Carson Jones, alias The Baptist Hummingbird. Would she think that one was also good, if she saw it?

  But she wasn't going to. Not that one, and not the one of the person in the red robe. No one was. That was what I thought then.

  "Dad, if you had this talent in you all the time, where was it?"

  "I don't know," I said. "And how much talent we're talking about is still open to question."

  "Then get someone to tell you, okay? Someone who knows." She picked up my mailbox drawing. "Even this one . . . it's nothing special, except it is. Because of . . ." She touched paper. "The rocking horse. Why'd you put a rocking horse in the picture, Dad?"

  "I don't know," I said. "It just wanted to be there."

  "Did you draw it from memory?"

  "No. I can't seem to do that. Either because of the accident or because I never had that particular skill in the first place." Except for sometimes when I did. When it came to young men in Twins tee-shirts, for instance. "I found one on the Internet, then printed--"

  "Oh shit, I smudged it!" she cried. "Oh, shit!"

  "Ilse, it's all right. It doesn't matter."

  "It's not all right and it does matter! You need to get some fucking paints!" She replayed what she'd just said and clapped a hand over her mouth.

  "You probably won't believe this," I said, "but I've heard that word a time or two. Although I have an idea that maybe your boyfriend . . . might not exactly . . ."

  "You got that right," she said. A little glumly. Then she smiled. "But he can let out a pretty good gosh-darn when somebody cuts him off in traffic. Dad, about your pictures--"

  "I'm just happy you like them."

  "It's more than liking. I'm amazed." She yawned. "I'm also dead on my feet."

  "I think maybe you need a cup of hot cocoa and then bed."

  "That sounds wonderful."

  "Which?"

  She laughed. It was wonderful to hear her laugh. It filled the place up. "Both."

  xi

  We stood on the beach the next morning with coffee cups in hand and our ankles in the surf. The sun had just hoisted itself over the low rise of the Key behind us, and our shadows seemed to stretch out onto the quiet water for miles.

  Ilse looked at me solemnly. "Is this the most beautiful place on earth, Dad?"

  "No, but you're young and I can't blame you for thinking it might be. It's number four on the Most Beautiful list, actually, but the top three are places nobody can spell."

  She smiled over the rim of her cup. "Do tell."

  "If you insist. Number one, Machu Picchu. Number two, Marrakech. Number three, Petroglyph National Monument. Then, at number four, Duma Key, just off the west coast of Florida."

  Her smile widened for a second or two. Then it faded and she was giving me the solemn stare again. I remembered her looking at me the same way when she was four, asking me if there was any magic like in fairy tales. I had told her yes, of course, thinking it was a lie. Now I wasn't so sure. But the air was warm, my bare feet were in the Gulf, and I just didn't want Ilse to be hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don't they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog. Except the ones you love can really multiply that hurt and pass it around. Pain is the biggest power of love. That's what Wireman says.

  "See anything green, sweetheart?" I asked.

  "No, I was just thinking again how glad I am that I came. I pictured you rotting away between an old folks' retirement home and some horrible tiki bar featuring Wet Tee-Shirt Thursdays. I guess I've been reading too much Carl Hiaasen."

  "There are plenty of places like that down here," I said.

  "And are there other places like Duma?"

  "I don't know. Maybe a fe
w." But based on what Jack had told me, I guessed that there were not.

  "Well, you deserve this one," she said. "Time to rest and heal. And if all this"--she waved to the Gulf--"won't heal you, I don't know what will. The only thing . . ."

  "Ye-ess?" I said, and made a picking-out gesture at the air with two fingers. Families have their own interior language, and that includes sign-language. My gesture would have meant nothing to an outsider, but Ilse knew and laughed.

  "All right, smarty. The only fly in the ointment is the sound the tide makes when it comes in. I woke up in the middle of the night and almost screamed before I realized it was the shells moving around in the water. I mean, that's it, right? Please tell me that's it."

  "That's it. What did you think it was?"

  She actually shivered. "My first thought . . . don't laugh . . . was skeletons on parade. Hundreds, marching around the house."

  I'd never thought of it that way, but I knew what she meant. "I find it sort of soothing."

  She gave a small and doubtful shrug. "Well . . . okay, then. To each his own. Are you ready to go back? I could scramble us some eggs. Even throw in some peppers and mushrooms."

  "You're on."

  "I haven't seen you off your crutch for so long since the accident."

  "I hope to be walking a quarter-mile south along the beach by the middle of January."

  She whistled. "A quarter of a mile and back?"

  I shook my head. "No, no. Just a quarter of a mile. I plan to glide back." I extended my arm to demonstrate.

  She snorted, started toward the house again, then paused as a point of light heliographed in our direction from the south. Once, then twice. The two specks were down there.

  "People," Ilse said, shading her eyes.

  "My neighbors. My only neighbors, right now. At least, I think so."

  "Have you met them?"

  "Nope. All I know is that it's a man and a woman in a wheelchair. I think she has her breakfast down by the water most days. I think the tray is the glinty thing."