Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) (12 page)

22

I
t was good that Grand loved me, because in the spring of 1965 I turned fourteen, and anyone else would have dropped me off the wharf with a one-hundred-pound bag of cement chained to my legs.

I was so ugly Stella Drowns didn't dare come to Grand's house when I was around. I didn't realize how brave Daddy was at the time. Maybe years spent rolling on a bitchy ocean had set him up to weather my storms and silences.

I stayed in my room and cried. I talked back to Grand. Once. I yelled at my body in the bathroom mirror. A full crop of light fuzz had finally settled in between my legs, but I was still flat and my feet were big and my period was nowhere in sight.

“You don't even want your period, and you've got it,” I grumbled at Dottie one Sunday about two weeks before my birthday. We were walking toward the ledges in the State Park.

“You're lucky,” Dottie said. “It's a pain.”

Dottie was almost as tall as me, now, but much bigger through her hips. She whistled a little bit as we reached the edge of the rocks and plunked herself down on Mr. Barrington's bench. “Madeline wants me to go on a diet,” she said. “I hate to break the news to her, but I think I'm just big.”

“Least you don't look like a fence post with straw stuck on the top.” I sat down beside her and we looked out over the water. “Remember when you found me?” I said.

“Christ, you was a goner,” Dottie said. “You was blue, you was that friggin' cold.”

“I felt warm,” I said. “I felt good.”

“You couldn't see you from where you sat,” Dottie said. “You looked like hell.”

“Thanks for finding me that day,” I said.

“'Course. I got to get back,” Dottie said. “Barb Raymond's bowling on TV this afternoon.”

When I got back to Grand's house, I found four large boxes, one stacked on the other, in the hall. I undid the flaps of the top box and found it filled with Carlie's clothes.

“How'd these get here?” I asked Grand.

“Stella brought them by,” Grand said.

“Why did she do that? She has no business doing that.”

Grand said, “Florine, like it or not, she's been living there for a while now. She needs the room. She asked me if you might want your mother's clothes to keep here with you. She said she would never toss them out. You want some fresh apple pie?”

“Shove the damn pie,” I said, and ran upstairs to my room. I studied the pictures of Carlie I'd hung on the wall opposite the bed. I said to her, “I'll bet they said, ‘Well, you know Florine's going to have a fit but she'll settle down. It'll be hard for her but she'll get over it.' But I won't. I'll never get over it.” No matter how much Grand insisted, I couldn't believe that Stella wouldn't throw out the rest of Carlie's things. In fact, I could see her cackling like a witch as she burned them in a pile. I had to go and rescue whatever might be left. As the dark fell down and night came on, I lay on my bed and hatched out a plan to do that.

On Monday, I dressed, ate my breakfast, and grabbed my school books about a half hour earlier than I usually did.

“Why you headed up to the stop so early?” Grand asked, handing me a bag for lunch.

“I feel like getting some fresh air,” I said.

“I packed some apple pie,” Grand said.

“Bye,” I said, and took off for the bus stop. But I veered off and snuck into a part of the woods. There were no paths, just spiky branches, stubborn prickle bushes, dead leaves, and brambles. I clutched my books to me and fought my way through it all, scratching my arms and catching my clothes. By the time I had made my way in a hard-fought straight line to The Cheeks in back of Daddy's house, I'd ripped my skirt and run my nylons. I crouched behind a decent-sized set of pines and watched Dottie and Bud walk to the stop, heads close, gabbing about something or someone. Probably about what a joke I am, I thought. After they'd gone by, I took a seat on a rock pile in the middle of the pines, opened my lunch bag, and took out the slice of apple pie. I bit through the top and bottom of Grand's fine flaky pie crust into tender, sweet and spicy apple slices, and waited.

Daddy had long since gone out on the water for the day. I could see the dinghies, left back while the big boats roamed the ocean, take the tide against their bows.

Carlie loved our dinghy. We'd named her
Ruthie
, for no particular reason. We'd gone out in her often, hugging the shoreline up and down the harbor. We rowed like a double person, me on one oar, Carlie on the other, drinking in the salt and the sun. We had a special place we'd named Pirates Cove. We would pull ourselves into the cove, slip
Ruthie
's line over a pointed rock, scramble onto the shore, and make our way up onto the stubby cliffs above it. Then, Carlie would shout, “One, two, three!” And we would jump off the cliffs, plunging feet first into the deep green, nipple-freezing water below.

“One, two, three,” I whispered. “One, two, three.” I repeated this until Stella finally came out of the house to go to work at Ray's store. She was dressed in a pair of Carlie's jeans. I could tell because a small blotch of white paint sat up near the right hip. I'd accidently done that during a buoy-painting session, and it had never faded. The jeans were big on Stella's skinny hips, and short. “Take those off, bitch,” I hissed at her from my hiding place.

When she disappeared up the road, I set down my books and my lunch and slipped around to the back of the house, hoping that the door to Daddy's workshop was open. I didn't want to go around to the front, where Madeline or Ida, or even Grand, might have been able to see me. I was in luck. I pushed on the door and it opened. I paused to drink in the smell of fresh cut wood from Daddy's shop. It reminded me of another piece of who I had been not so long ago. A new wooden door had replaced the tarp that had separated the living room from the shop. I opened the door to look inside the workshop. I could see it was spotless. Stella's influence, no doubt.

I walked into the living room, closing the shop door behind me. I hadn't been inside the house since February and, during that time, Stella had changed things around. Two new chairs and a sofa, all a soft green, faced a new coffee table that I guess Daddy must have built. Women's magazines and fishermen's journals were spread just so on top of it. I was happy to see that Daddy's old chair still faced the corner where the television squatted.

The kitchen looked pretty much the same, except that I could almost see myself in the floor, it was that clean. I opened the door to my room. I'd hauled most of my things over to Grand's. What remained of my books and toys sat where they'd always been.

But Stella had claimed Carlie's bedroom, replacing the bright yellow walls with a dark-piney-green. The green bedspread and the white curtains were new. On the wall in back of the bed were pictures of Stella and Daddy in some restaurant, holding hands and grinning across the table at whoever had taken their picture. Another picture showed them in Ray's at the deli counter, with Stella puckered up, leaning over the counter to kiss Daddy. A third picture showed Stella in a black bathing suit, draped over the back of the boat, her thin white legs dangling over the words
Carlie Flo
.

The way her legs half hid our names set me off, and made me forget that I'd been on a rescue mission. Rage, in the form of blood, pounded in my ears. Not asking my brain's permission, my hand reached out and took the photograph of Stella on the boat from the wall. I threw it on the floor and stepped on the glass, breaking it. I did the same to the other two pictures. I took the bedding off the bed, opened the bedroom window, and threw it into the backyard. I went into the closet and took Stella's clothes from the hangers and threw them on the floor. I took her clothes out of Carlie's dresser and dumped them on the other clothes. Then I walked out through the back door and slammed it shut before I hurried up over The Cheeks and into the woods.

“Teach her,” I said out loud to the trees.

I gathered up my books and my lunch bag and walked through the path in the woods to the State Park until I reached the bench by the rocks. I sat down and looked at the cloth-strapped Timex watch Grand had given to me for Christmas. It was nine o'clock. School let out at 2:30
P.M
.

“More time to spend here,” I said to myself.

“Aren't you supposed to be in school?” a stern male voice said in back of me.

I turned around and saw a thin-faced ranger wearing thick wire-rimmed glasses. His oversized brown eyes looked as if they were used to peering into thickets and up into trees. His name patch read D
ICKIE
. He wasn't smiling. “You're supposed to be in school, if I'm not mistaken. You're dressed for school and your books are with you. You wouldn't be skipping, now would you?”

My stomach hurt and I wondered if Grand had mistakenly put some bad apples into her pie. I decided to tell the truth. “Yes,” I said. “I'm supposed to be in school. I skipped because it's a nice day. I've never done it before. I'll never do it again.”

Dickie squinted hard at me. “It's against the law.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll go home now and turn myself in.”

“You
should
be going home,” Dickie said. “But I imagine you'll spend the day here, then head home when the bus is due.”

“No,” I lied. “I'll go home.”

“Be sure you do,” Dickie said. “Don't let me catch you here on a school day again.”

He walked down the trail, his thick boots kissing the hard-packed ground. I headed back up the path, an occasional cramp joining the flutter of discomfort that appeared to be settling in for a long stay.

“I can't go home now,” I said. I took the side path that would lead me to the summer cottages, planning to either hang around the edge of the woods, or maybe sit on the Barringtons' porch, eat lunch, and look at my books until it was time to go home.

But when I reached the Barringtons' property, Louisa was unloading linens from a wood-sided station wagon. I watched her for a while. I loved the way her skin drank up the sun like a rich dark brew, instead of tossing the light back, like my pale skin did. As she moved between the car and the back kitchen door, she sang a hymn I'd heard that I knew Grand would have known. Louisa, it appeared, was friends with Jesus, too.

I wandered back into the woods. Because it was spring, the undergrowth was sparse, and that's how I discovered a thin path leading to the left, about halfway back from the cottage. I followed it through scrubby brush until, unexpectedly, I reached a tiny clearing in the dead center of a circle of old, thick pines.

In the middle of the clearing, three large, reddish brown rocks flecked with mica provided a good sit for a picnic lunch. I eased myself down onto the sun-warmed rocks and listened to the wind and the birds sing. I looked at my watch again. It was ten thirty.

“What have you done, Florine?” a voice said. I stood up and looked around, but I only saw three small birds flitting through the clearing. A crow called from somewhere in back of me.

“I did it for Carlie,” I said out loud.

“You did it for you. Carlie was an excuse,” the voice said.

“I did it for us,” I said. But what had seemed to make perfect sense this morning suddenly seemed wacky. My stomach cramped up again. A baby green grass snake wove across the tip of the warm rocks, near my toes. It paused before it slithered off, becoming a slight shiver in the soft moss.

“I got to go back,” I said out loud. “I got to clean up before anyone finds out what I did.” I jumped up and beat it to the State Park trail. Along the way, I met Dickie again. I dodged him, shouting, “I'm going, I'm going.” I bolted over The Cheeks and down to Daddy's backyard. I burst in through the back door and into the living room, then the kitchen, where I stopped cold. Stella was tossing a dustpan filled with shards of glass into the garbage can. The scar on her face stood out like a whip that I had the feeling could be pulled off and used at will. Her storm-lashed eyes could have capsized me. She walked to the kitchen door and she opened it. “Get out,” she hissed through gritted teeth.

The door slammed behind me so hard that the house bounced. I mumbled something to Grand about being sick and getting a ride home from a janitor and I went up to my room for the rest of the day. That night, Daddy came by and came upstairs to say hello. He put his big hand on my forehead. “Grand says you're sick,” he said.

“It's my stomach,” I said. He doesn't know, I thought. She didn't tell him.

She never told him. But she wouldn't talk to me for a while. We did a clumsy dance whenever we were thrown together, but somehow we avoided each other. If I had to go to Ray's for something, and she was at the register, I set my stuff down, she rang it up, bagged it, put it on the counter, and then turned her back on me, unless there was someone behind me. Then, they got all of her attention.

Three days after I had vandalized the bedroom, my long-awaited period finally started.

I helped Grand more and more that summer. She was eighty now, and she was having trouble bending over. She couldn't stand for long periods of time. Her legs hurt her. She never complained, but watching her limp across the kitchen floor, or watching her struggle up from a chair or the sofa, I knew. It was hard to see her in pain. She was dizzy sometimes, too. One Sunday, after church, she suddenly clutched my arm as we walked up the aisle toward the front door after service. It surprised me so that I gave her a look.

“Got to get my bearings, Florine,” she whispered to me as if she didn't want anyone else to know. But watchful Ida must have seen her take my arm, because suddenly she was on Grand's other side. “You okay?” she asked her, taking her other arm.

“Fine,” Grand said. “I'm fine.” She freed herself and walked straight as a pin up to Pastor Billy to talk to him about the sermon.