Florida (12 page)

In tiny increments, she extracted her body from under his hand. She stood from the puddle on the concrete where she was sitting and moved, stiff and cold, toward where she remembered the door to be. She had to put down the beer bottle that she had clutched all night to move a shelf out of the way and lift the lock. In a burst of strength, she ripped the gate up and away from the ground.

The day dazzled with sun. Steam rose from the street,
a clean sheet of liquid light covering the cobblestones, a wet skin glittering on the buildings. Gold drops fell from the treelimbs, and a cool gentle wind swept the hair from her face. Her leg was caked with blood, the wound livid, her body racked in the joints. She didn't care.

Behind her, the shopkeeper shifted to his feet, bottles ringing on the wet floor as he struggled. She turned, ready to shout, but he was gazing beyond her into the outside. The reflection from the street pushed into the dark of the store, made his round and greasy face shine with moving sunlight. He held on to the shelf before him, and she saw his fear, different and subtler than hers, rise from him and move deeper into the shadows of the room. The shopkeeper tilted his head and closed his eyes, and soon he said,
Campainhas,
and this was a thing she understood, because she also heard the churchbells ringing into the morning. She said, Yes. He looked at her as if surprised to find her there; he had forgotten her; she was merely the postscript to his tempestuous night. She was a mere visitor. She was nothing. Helena reached over to the tin
orixá
above the cash register and found it to be sharper and lighter than she had imagined it, a thought turned to matter, an idea that fit in the palm of her hand.

For a long while, she stood in the doorway, listening to the bells, happy for them; but they went on and on, and she began to listen for them to stop. Each peal, she
was sure, would be the last. The bright sound would dissolve back into the sea-touched wind, and the ordinary noises of Salvador would rise to take the bells' place, the calling voices, a scooter, a dog barking, a drum; and Helena would be freed to move forward, outward, up. But each note disintegrated and was followed by another and then another, and she felt stuck where she stood, a wild feeling rising in her. Her body grew unbearably tense; her heart began to beat so fast it felt as if it were winged.

And then she saw, plain as the street before her, her mother in her bedroom at home, pale among her pillows. Helena could not tell if she was alive or dead. She was so peaceful, so very still. The Miami sun fingered the edges of the blinds. The birds filled the loquat tree just outside the window, the tree her mother had planted herself before Helena was born, the fruit already rotten, the birds already drunk on the fruit, wildly singing.

Helena's hands flew out to stop the vision, and the nail of her index finger began to throb where she had hit the wooden doorway at her side. The wet street was again spread before her, the air still full of horrid bells. She sent one last rattled look inside the store and found the shopkeeper kneeling amongst his ruin. He held a can washed free of its label, a roll of undamaged toilet tissue in pink paper. His face was strange, as if it had collapsed into itself. He was making a low whistling sound through the gap in his teeth.

She took a step toward him without thinking, then
stopped. She hated herself for her first impulse, to comfort. The caretaker of others wasn't who she wanted to be—it was not her natural role—but it somehow had become who she was.

She watched herself as if from above as she moved back into the store, picking over the rubble. The shopkeeper stood as she neared. He smelled of wet denim and sweated-out alcohol and sour private skin. Up close, he looked at her face briefly, with a doggish expression, something both hungry and ashamed. Maybe he had a family, a wife who had worried when he hadn't returned in the night. Certainly, he, too, was the child of a mother who was either very old or dead.

He looked up at her, then he closed his eyes, as if she, this morning, was too much for him.

She reached out to touch him, but in the end, she couldn't. She took a step back and picked things up off the ground. A pen. A dustpan. A bath toy. She piled the items gently in his arms. And when he didn't move, she stooped to collect more: pens, cookies, a hand of bananas. One perfect orange, its pores even and clean.

It is Halloween; she'd almost forgotten.

At the corner, a man is putting sand and tea-light candles into white paper bags.

He will return later with a lighter, filling the dark neighborhood with a glowing grid for the trick-or-treaters.

She wonders if this is wise, whether it is not, in fact, incredibly dangerous to put flames near so many small uncoordinated people with polyester hems.

All day today and yesterday she has been reading the early naturalist William Bartram, who traveled through Florida in 1774; because of him, she forgot Halloween.

She's most definitely in love with that dead Quaker.

This is not to say that she is no longer in love with her husband; she is, but after sixteen years together, perhaps they have blurred at the edges of each other's vision.

She says to her dog, who is beside her at the window
watching the candle man, One day you'll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud.

The dog ignores her, because the dog is wise.

In any event, her husband will inevitably win, since Bartram takes the form of dead trees and dreams, and her husband takes the form of warm pragmatic flesh.

She picks up her cell—she wants to tell her best friend, Meg, about her sudden overwhelming love for the ghost of a Quaker naturalist—but then she remembers that Meg doesn't want to be her best friend anymore.

A week ago, Meg said very gently, I'm sorry, I just need to take a break.

Outside, in Florida, there's still the hot yellow wool of daylight.

In the kitchen, her sons are eating their dinner of bean tacos glumly.

They had wanted to be ninjas, but she had to concoct something quickly, and now their costumes are hanging up in the laundry room.

Earlier, she put her own long-sleeved white button-down backward on the younger boy, crossed the arms around and tied them in the back, added a contractor's mask she'd slitted and colored with a silver Sharpie, and because he was armless, she pinned a candy bucket to the waist.

Cannibal Lecture, he is calling himself, a little too on the nose.

For the older boy, she cut eyeholes in a white sheet for an old-style ghost, though it rankled, a white boy in a white sheet, Florida still the Deep South; she hopes that the effect is mitigated by the rosebuds along the hems.

She also forgot the kindergarten's Spooky Breakfast this morning; she'd failed to bring the boo-berry muffins, and her smaller son had sat in his regular clothes in his tiny red chair, looking hopefully at the door as mothers and fathers in their masks and wigs who kept not being her poured in.

She wasn't even thinking of him at that hour; she was thinking of William Bartram.

Her husband comes in from work, sees the costumes, raises an eyebrow, remains merciful.

The boys brighten as if on a dimmer switch, her husband turns on “Thriller” to get in the mood, and she watches them bop around, a twist in the heart.

It's not yet dusk, but the shadows have stretched.

Her husband puts on an old green Mohawk wig, the boys shimmy their costumes on again, and the three of them head out.

She is alone in the house with the dog and William Bartram and the bags of wan lollipops that were all that remained on the drugstore's shelves.

It's necessary to hand out candy; her first year in the house, she righteously gave out toothbrushes, and it wasn't
an accident that a heavy oak branch smashed her window that night.

She can almost see three blocks away into the kitchen of Meg's house, where beautiful handmade costumes are being put on.

Meg loves this shit.

A week ago, when Meg broke up with her, they were eating ginger scones that Meg had made from scratch, and the bite in her mouth went so dry that she couldn't swallow for a long, long time.

She just nodded as Meg spoke kindly and firmly, and she felt each rip as her heart was torn into smaller and smaller pieces in Meg's capable hands.

Meg has enormous gray eyes and strong hips and shoulders, and hair like a glass of dark honey with sunshine in it.

Meg is the best person she knows, far better than herself or her husband, maybe even better than William Bartram.

Meg is the medical director of the abortion clinic in town, and all day she has to hold her patients' stories and their bodies, as well as the tragic lack of imagination from the chanting protesters on the sidewalk.

It would be too much for anyone, but it is not too much for Meg.

On the mantel in Meg's house, there are pictures of Meg with her children as babies, secured on her back, all three peering at the camera like koalas.

She, too, has often felt the urge to ride nestled cozily on Meg's back.

She would feel safe there, her cheek against her strongest friend.

But for the past week she has respected Meg's wish to take a break, and so she has not called Meg or stopped by her house for coffee or sent her children down the street to play with Meg's children until someone runs home screaming with a bruise or low blood sugar.

What is it about me that people need breaks from? she asks the dog, who looks as though she wants to say something but, out of innate gentleness, refrains.

A generous kind of dog, the labradoodle.

Well, William Bartram won't need a break from her.

The dead need nothing from us; the living take and take.

She brings William Bartram in his book costume out to the front porch, where it is cooler, and fetches the candy in a bowl and the dog and the wineglass so big it can hold a full bottle of ten-dollar Shiraz.

She settles herself under the bat lights she plugged in because she forgot to make jack-o'-lanterns and watches real bats swinging between the rooftops.

William Bartram seduced her with his drawings of horny turtles and dog-faced alligators, with his flights of ecstatic gratitude that lifted him toward God.

A week ago, after the ginger scones and suffocating with sadness, she took the afternoon off from work and
drove to Micanopy to look at antiques, because she feels solace when she touches things that have survived generations of human hands.

She stood in the center of Micanopy hating her unsweet tea because it was encased in plastic foam that would disintegrate and float on the surface of the waters forever; but then she found the plaque about William Bartram, who had passed through Micanopy in 1774, when it was a Seminole trading post called Cuscowilla.

The chief there at the time was called the Cowkeeper.

When the Cowkeeper heard what Bartram was doing, traipsing about Florida collecting floral specimens and faunal observations, he nicknamed him Puc-Puggy.

This translates, roughly, to Flower Hunter, which—as bestowed upon Bartram by a warrior and hunter and proud owner of slaves he'd stripped from the many tribes he'd brutally subjugated—was probably no great compliment.

Still, what would bright-eyed Puc-Puggy have seen of Florida before the automobile, before the airplane, before the planned communities, before the swarms of Mouseketeers?

A damp, dense tangle.

An Eden of dangerous things.

A trio of witches comes up the walk, and not one says thank you when she drops her bad candy into their bags.

An infant dressed as a superhero, something like sweet potato crusted on his cheeks, looks on as his mother holds
the pillowcase open for the treat and then clicks her tongue in disappointment.

But her street is a dark one and full of rentals, and the savvy trick-or-treaters mostly stay away.

It's just before twilight, and the sky is a brilliant orange.

She is inside the pumpkin.

In the absence of tiny ghouls, the lizards come out one last time, frilling their red necks, doing push-ups on the sidewalk.

Like Bartram, she was once a northerner dazzled by the frenzied flora and fauna here, but that was a decade ago, and things that once were alien life have become, simply, parts of her life.

She is no longer frightened of reptiles, she who is frightened of everything.

She is frightened of climate change, this summer the hottest on record, plants dying all around.

She is frightened of the small sinkhole that opened in the rain yesterday near the southeast corner of her house and may be the shy exploratory first steps of a much larger sinkhole.

She is frightened of her children, because now that they've arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but not longer than they do.

She is frightened because maybe she has already
become so cloudy to her husband that he has begun to look right through her; she's frightened of what he sees on the other side.

She is frightened that there aren't many people on the earth she can stand.

The truth is, Meg had said, back when she was still a best friend, you love humanity almost too much, but people always disappoint you.

Meg is someone who loves both humanity and people; William Bartram loved humanity and people and also nature.

He was a gifted and perceptive scientist who also believed in God, which seems a rather gymnastic form of philosophy.

She misses believing in God.

Here comes a prospector with a tiny pick; two scary teenage clowns in regular clothes; a courtly family, the parents crowned regents, the boy a knight in silver plastic, the girl a fluttery yellow princess.

What a relief that she has boys; this princess nonsense is a tragedy of multigenerational proportions.

Stop waiting for someone to save you, humanity can't even save itself! she says aloud to the masses of princesses seething in her brain; but it is her own black dog who blinks in agreement.

She reads by bat light and sees two William Bartrams as she does: the bright-eyed thirty-four-year-old explorer with the tan and sinewy muscles and sketchbook, besieged
by alligators, comfortable supping alone with mosquitoes and with rich indigo planters alike, and also Bartram's older, paler self, in the quiet of his Pennsylvania garden, projecting his joy and his younger persona onto the page.

Both Bartrams, the feeling body and the remembering brain, show themselves in his descriptions of a bull gator:
Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder.

Usually, she's the one who trick-or-treats with the boys, with Meg and her three children, but this year Meg is out with Amara, a banker who is nice enough but who competes sneakily, through her children.

She can take Amara in small doses, the way she can take everyone except for her sons and her husband and Meg, the only four people on earth she could take in every dose imaginable to man.

Maybe, she thinks, Meg and Amara are talking about her.

They're not talking about me, she tells her dog.

Something has changed in the air; there's a lot of wind now, a sense of something lurking.

The spirits of the dead, she'd think, if she were superstitious.

The dark has thickened, and she hears music from the mansion down the road where every year the neighbors host an extravagant haunted house.

She is alone, and no trick-or-treaters have wandered by in an hour, the white sandbags of candlelight have burned out, and the renters have all turned off their lights, pretending not to be home.

She reads from Bartram's prologue, where he describes his hunter companion slaughtering a mother bear and then coming back mercilessly for the baby.

The continual cries of this afflicted child, bereft of its parent, affected me very sensibly, I was moved with compassion, and charging myself as if accessary to what now appeared to be a cruel murder, and endeavoured to prevail on the hunger to save its life, but to no effect! for by habit he had become insensible to compassion towards the brute creation, being now within a few yards of the harmless devoted victim, he fired, and laid it dead upon the body of the dam.

And now she is crying.

I'm not crying, she tells the dog, but the dog sighs deeply.

The dog needs to take a little break from her.

The dog stands and goes inside and crawls under the baby grand piano that she bought long ago from a lonely old lady, a piano that nobody plays.

A lonely old piano.

She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the “Moonlight” Sonata.

She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.

The wine is finished; she sucks a lollipop that only tastes red.

She reads for a long time until she hears what she thinks is her stomach growling, but it is, in fact, nearby thunder.

And just after the thunder comes the rain, and with the rain comes the memory of the baby sinkhole near the southeast corner of the house.

Her husband texts: the boys and he have taken shelter at the haunted house; there's tons of food, all their friends, so much fun, she should come!—but he knows her better than that, this would be the third circle of hell for her, she cannot abide parties, she could not abide any friends when she's lost the best one.

She can't even read Bartram anymore because the thought of the sinkhole is like a hole in the mouth where a tooth used to be.

She prods and prods the sinkhole in her mind.

The rain knocks at the metal roof, and she imagines it licking away at the limestone under her house, the way her children lick away at Everlasting Gobstoppers, which they are not allowed, but which she still somehow finds in sticky rainbow pools in their sock drawers.

The rain rains yet harder, and she puts on a yellow slicker and galoshes, and goes out with a flashlight.

Her face is being smacked by a giant hand, and another is smacking the crown of her head.

She puts a fist over her mouth to find the air to breathe and stands on the edge of the sinkhole, then crouches because the light is weak in the downpour.