Since dropping out of Harvard a decade ago, Rochelle had a history of choosing her men unwisely. Hanging out with drunks and cowboys even after they'd bloodied their fists against her. She told Thorn she'd thought of it as a challenge, breaking broncos, something like that. A certain thrill, stirring her competitive instincts. If she could just hang on a little longer, keep from getting bucked off, the guy would calm, learn to mind his manners, and the two of them could ride off together.
A week or two ago, standing in her parents' living room, Rochelle announced that she'd finally found the right guy, the one she'd been looking for all along, and her mother and father just kept smiling nervously at Thorn.
Rochelle had grown up in Key Largo, but she'd never aspired to be an island girl. No waitress-in-training. No shrimper's wife. She'd had citified ambitions that sent her off to Harvard full of brash idealism. A mathematics major. But things had not gone well. In her first semester she'd been seduced by the chairman of the math department. A married man in his fifties. Thorn hadn't heard all the details. But there was some kind of scandal, and Rochelle came back to Key Largo bitterly subdued.
Eventually she'd reconciled herself to the limited culture of the Keys. She had her books, she had the diary she worked on for an hour or two every morning. But still she seemed restless, cramped.
For Thorn Key Largo was exactly challenge enough. He had no desires this island and its waters couldn't fulfill. But he knew Rochelle was struggling. And he suspected that she was using him, their relationship, to heal some wounds she hadn't even admitted yet. That would've bothered him, made him worry about the healthiness of their affair, except he supposed he was guilty of doing the same thing. Both he and Rochelle were dedicated loners. Both of them tired of being by themselves.
"Yellow with green shutters," Thorn said.
"You'll like it," she said. "It'll be homey."
He pronounced the word to himself. Homey. Thinking about it. Like
comfy
or
cutesy,
it wasn't a word he remembered using.
Homey.
It wasn't a word Darcy would've used either, except with an ironic twist.
But then he couldn't keep using Darcy as the measure for all things. After all, the earth spun on, gravity and ultraviolet rays worked their relentless magic. This year Thorn was creakier than ever, moving slower, his flesh less resilient. He was spending a lot longer in prone positions than he had five years ago. Eyes harder to focus. Slower to wake up. Major arteries narrowing. Maybe it was damn well time to admit he was no longer a kid, time to start including those words in his vocabulary,
homey, comfy.
Grow up, live like the big people did.
"I don't want to come in here," Rochelle said, "some female whirlwind, change everything around. Tie you up in my apron strings. You want to keep it just like it is, fine. I have no problem. I'm not trying to put my stamp on you."
"I know," he said.
She leaned over and they kissed. Thorn touching the back of her head, the soft burr. The kiss lingered, became something more, Thorn firming. He drew in her lavender scent, and something else, a pumpkin flavor, warm, nutmeggy. All those aromas her skin had absorbed from a day of cooking. Another thing to get used to, a woman who cooked, who liked it, was damn good at it. Considered it a pleasure. Dishes he'd never heard of. Fattening Thorn up, his stomach tightening against the waistbands of his shorts for the first time in his life.
She pulled away, drew a breath. She gave him a smile and shucked off the chemise. Her body always surprised him. It seemed too lean to support the weight of her breasts. Thin arms with such strength. Stronger than any woman he'd known. Hardly any hips at all. Dancer's legs and delicate feet.
Thorn stripped out of his cutoffs, his T-shirt, reached out for her and they sank back into the kiss. Her fingertips tracked down his arm, left a trail, her hand finding his, taking hold, lifting it. Breaking off the kiss, so she could bring his hand to her mouth. She pressed her lips to his fingers one by one like a mother kissing away her child's hurt. Then drew each finger into her mouth and washed it clean. Took special care with his thumb.
With her eyes on his, she guided his damp hand across her mouth, down her chin, her throat, pressed it flush against her chest. Held it there until he could feel the agitation of her heart.
She eased his hand down her stomach, brushed his palm across the fine dusting of hair around her navel. Touched his pointing finger to the wrinkled depression, then lower and lower, until finally his fingers were snarled in her dense pubic hair.
She released him and on his own he moved to the warm slush between her legs, lingered there, explored, then drifted lower to her thighs, slick as silk, and came back to the dampness. Driving the breath from her lungs, driving it from his own.
It was quicker tonight. The prelude hurried, the unspoken hunger greater. Across the room a breeze bellied out the lace curtains, and Rochelle was suddenly on top of him, steering him inside. Then they were folded together, notch to notch, the flawless match of seasoned partners. The waltz, the tango, there seemed to be no step they couldn't do. Nothing unique about the method, nothing new, but still it was different. The grind of her hips, their heated kiss, their bodies flush. A frantic need. So easy, so uncomplicated, so comfortable.
***
Irma Slater had been lying there for an hour, maybe two, immobilized on top of the bedspread, eyes closed, taking deep breaths, trying to evaluate, digest. A whole new set of conditions. A paradigm shift, they called it. The old laws faulty, finally crumbled under their own erroneous weight. Turns out the universe was not at all how we thought it was. Sorry. All bets off. Shore leaves canceled till further notice. At least until we come up with an entire new set of natural laws.
She listened to Sweetcakes out in the lagoon. Heard the dolphin's hard clicks, blats of breath, water surging. Familiar sounds, but nothing felt familiar anymore. All of it was cockeyed, skewed, sliding away from her, the ground tilting as if the subterranean plates had buckled. A new slant. Lying there, gripping the bedspread with both hands, trying to hang on, ride this out. The bed sailing through the dark.
Her muscles shuddered, an eerie purr working in her blood, as though somewhere nearby a colossal tuning fork set on her personal wavelength had been struck a powerful blow.
She knew she should rise. Throw her clothes in a bag. Dizzy or not, she should get the bloody hell out of this room. Her cover blown. She should flee. She should damn well grab her four hundred eighty-seven from the Tampax box where it was hidden and fly into the night. And this time do a better job of disappearing.
Sugarloaf Retreat, three years. All a lie. A flimsy stage set. Jesse whispering into her father's ear, her father whispering back. If this is what she wants, let her have it. Let her play. Money passing. Now she was certain Morton had visited, spied on her from afar. Yes, that's her, that's my daughter. And for whatever reason, he'd let her carry on her pathetic charade. Not free. Never. Not for a second. The same puppet, same puppeteer.
She stared around at the darkened cell where she'd spent these last three years. In all that time she'd not personalized the room in any way. It was exactly as it had been the morning she'd checked in. Over her headboard hung a gloomy oil painting of a New England beach in winter. In the bathroom was a calendar turned to some January ten years ago. The only other decoration a framed photograph of a family of beavers constructing a dam.
On the wobbly bedside table was a green ceramic lamp and copper ashtray she'd never used. Crammed in on the other side of the bed was a deal desk whose drawers contained a Gideon Bible and some faded postcards showing Sugarloaf Retreat seven years ago. Not much had changed since then.
By the door sat a Danish modern chair with torn red cushions. And the carpet was so ancient that years of tracked-in sand had turned its bright gold to the color of wet cement. The walls were sickly green. An orange water stain on the ceiling directly above her bed shaped like Kentucky. Same stain she'd looked up at seven years ago.
For this was the room where she and her mother had slept side by side. A girls' getaway before Monica left for college. Her mother so different during those two weeks in the Keys. Relaxed, alert. Chatting breezily with a motel worker as she and Monica fed schools of snappers from the dock. A groundskeeper with dark hair and a perpetual cigarette between his lips. In the evening he started bringing her mother cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and the three of them lounged on the lawn beside the bay, watched the sun set fire to the water and clouds, watched the stars. He knew the names of the constellations. Had stories to tell. It came as a shock for Monica to realize she had never heard her mother laugh until then. Never seen her tipsy. Monica going back to the room to sleep. Her mother coming in later, stumbling, laughing to herself.
One night not making it back till dawn. Monica remembered sitting up in bed.
"Mother, is this why we came? Did you know Al was going to be here?"
"Sweetheart," she said. "I knew somebody like Al was going to be here."
Monica fantasized that the three of them ran off together. A gardener, smelling of cut grass and whiskey and tobacco. A man with strong hands, a shifty smile, and a blatant appreciation for her mother's slender body. A man who made her mother grin.
At the end of the second week, Morton Sampson made a surprise appearance. Claimed he missed his two girls. But his big smile was skewed. He moved in. Monica was banished to an adjoining room. For hours she kept her ear pressed to the connecting door, but heard nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The next morning her father took them fishing in the motel's rental boat. He anchored only a few feet offshore, cast his baited hook to the same fish that Monica and her mother had been feeding for two weeks, their pets.
Her mother did not speak. Hid behind her sunglasses. Morton caught a dozen fish, made a production of cutting them open and cleaning them on the boat, throwing their guts overboard. Hands covered with slime, the knife flashing. Her mother looked everywhere else.
When he decided he'd made his point, her father drew the anchor, puttered them back to the dock. Monica stepped over the pool of fish blood to climb from the boat but stopped short. There was too much blood on the deck, far too much. She swung around and saw the glint of the fillet knife at her mother's feet, the slick of red spreading across the white deck, the gaping slit. She screamed.
As her mother was lifted into the ambulance, Morton took Monica by the elbow and drew her roughly aside. "While we're at the hospital you have a job to do."
"What?"
"The boat," he said. "It was delivered to us unsoiled, we'll return it in the same condition. In this family we clean up our own messes."
"No way," Monica said. "I won't do it."
He looked into her eyes and for the first and only time he let her see that part of him which must have provoked her mother's vicious headaches.
"You were her accomplice, Monica; this is your reward."
A moment later his smile returned, the savage mist cleared. He gave her his sweet daddy look.
Morton spoke to the owner of the hotel. Left Monica in the man's charge. He provided brushes, hoses, sponge, detergent.
Monica climbed into the boat and went down to her knees, staring at her mother's blood. The manager's wife came out, stood for a moment watching her.
"Get out of there, child. We'll take care of that."
But Monica took hold of a brush, bent to her work, scrubbed at the streaks. The manager's wife staying for a while then going back inside. As she worked Monica scuffed her bare knees against the rough deck, tore them ragged. Scrubbing for hours, her mother's blood mingling with her own, hosing it away. The fish scales, the slime. Down on her knees in the brutal afternoon sun, the smell of her mother's blood, the stickiness.
When she was finished, Monica located the manager's wife and asked the woman where she could find Al. Thinking he should know, imagining that he would confront her father, stand up to him, whisk her mother away.
"Al's clipping somebody else's hedges now," the wife told her. "Don't worry about him, honey, the Als always make out."
That evening they drove home in her father's Cadillac. Her mother bandaged and detached. A man was hired to bring her mother's car back to Miami. The headaches resumed immediately.
***
Now Irma lay on the bed and listened to Sweetcakes splash. And seconds later the dolphin splashed again. Worked up. Showing off. Very peculiar for this time of night. Another splash. A dozen hard clicks. Begging for food.
She rose, padded to the window, nudged a corner of the curtain aside. And saw them. Two men down by the lagoon, the dolphin performing for their benefit. One man tall and heavy. Moonlight glistening on his bald head. She recognized the shape of that skull, the slump of his shoulders.
The other shadow was Jesse, the gray ponytail, the shlubby body. The bastard hadn't given her a day's head start. Hadn't let ten seconds go by. Or else Butler Jack was right. He had come for her, to pluck her out of her life, take her back with him, have her fucking head examined.
Jesse and her father were huddled. Didn't look like an argument. Her father never argued, never had to. Got his way with charm and happy faces. Not a mean bone, as far as the public knew. Slid people where he wanted them to go, made them love going there, think it was their own idea. Smothered them with good, good, I like that. Very good. Got his way. Always, every single time, he got his goddamn way. A nice man. Everyone said so. Amazing that such a nice man had built such an empire. Simply amazing.
Two men of business in the moonlight twenty yards away, having a talk as if Irma Slater didn't exist, as if they weren't the least concerned she might walk out, shotgun them both in the back. If only she had a shotgun.