The Last Girls (36 page)

“Now, now,” the nurse said.

“I want my baby!” she was crying.

“Miss Todd,” the old doctor said. “I regret to tell you that this infant was dead upon delivery. It happens sometimes. It is nobody's fault. That is all I can say. I'm terribly, terribly sorry.” Dark lines cut into his face; his hooded eyes were bloodshot. He had been up all night, too.

“I want to hold her,” Anna said.

The old doctor nodded to the nurse.

When they brought her in and put her on the pillow beside Anna, she unwrapped the soft white blanket and touched her baby's lips, her nose, her funny spot of reddish hair—“Little carrot-top,” she whispered. She counted her baby's fingers and toes. Mothers are supposed to do that. She gently opened her baby's eyes and as she had expected, they were blue, not a pale misty blue but a bright solid blue, like wooden beads. “Your name is Anna Carolina,” Anna said. “Anna Carolina Todd.” She closed the little eyelids and bent down to kiss both cheeks. “Can I have that bag over there?” she asked, and somebody jumped to get it for her. Anna opened it and dressed her baby in the long white dress with the blue cross-stitching that she had brought to take her home in. She tied on the little blue hat. “Oh God,” somebody said. Somebody else said, “Isn't there
anyone
…” But there was not. And she had killed her own baby, strangled her to death with the cord.

Anna doesn't remember the whole next year. For some months she was in the mental hospital in Milledgeville, then she was back at the Flamingo, then she was in the hospital again, then she was back at the Flamingo again. One of the sisters had died and the other one, Miss Bette, was having a hell of a time keeping the bank from foreclosing on the property. When Anna got well enough to understand this, she knew she must pay Bette back. She thought of asking her old friends for money—Baby, who was so rich, or Courtney, who had married well—but somehow she just couldn't do it. She couldn't even imagine doing it. She thought of her days at Mary Scott as days in another
world, a sunny blue enclosed world like that model of the Globe Theatre she had built painstakingly with popsicle sticks for extra credit in English while she lived with Miss Todd. She couldn't even imagine how to tell her friends what had happened to her or where she was. Also it seemed to Anna that once you set out on a course, you had to finish it. You had to keep going forward, not back.

In the end she took a job housecleaning the luxury rental estates at the end of the island. This got her back into shape, though she was heavier now, and it paid well, and best of all, it was solitary, as the maids went in when the renters left or before the owners came, so she never had to talk to anybody. These houses had everything: huge TVs, king-sized beds, ice makers, trash compactors. They had signed art on the walls, and hot tubs and gas grills and little green plots of grass in front, with sprinkler systems. Anna liked cleaning these houses. She liked opening the bottom dresser drawers and looking in the closets and finding their scrapbooks and family pictures and financial statements and trying to figure out what the owners were really like, since she never met them. She felt that she could reconstruct them completely just from the contents of their medicine chests and desks and bookcases and storage sheds. It amused her to think that she was a reconstructionist, the exact opposite of Kenneth the deconstructionist.

One day she reconstructed a family with a wife who looked somehow familiar in their family photographs. Digging further in their master bedroom closet, she came upon a Mary Scott yearbook. The woman had graduated two years behind Anna, who had not really known her. But the yearbook was filled with pictures of people she did know, including … herself, as a junior. Anna stared and stared at her own pale face, surrounded by all that long curly hair. She'd been living for art then, and look where it had gotten her. Now she was cleaning houses. Still, she used to be a writer. She really did. Look at her here, holding on to the stupid daisy chain in the
Calliope
photograph. Maybe she'll find that manuscript she started when she came to the island—isn't it still under her bed?

Anna turned back to the faculty section at the front of the yearbook and looked at Mr. Gaines. He must have been younger than she realized—he looked like a boy himself in this photograph, sitting on his desk, leaning forward, laughing. He looked so
nice
—engaged, interested, expansive. He
was
nice, damn it. She should never have written that anonymous letter to the dean. Anna shut the yearbook and pushed it back onto the shelf she had taken it from. She stood up, shaken. She cleaned their bathroom.

It was a while before she reconstructed anybody else.

But finally she
had
to; cleaning houses was too boring otherwise. She started to snoop again. She was especially fascinated by the marble monstrosity situated on the prime lot at the southern point of the island, a house which made no architectural concessions at all to the fact that it was located on an
island,
for God's sake, reportedly full of expensive antiques and Oriental rugs and huge arrangements of silk flowers. From time to time it was rented by corporate clients for high-level strategy weekends. Anna could not imagine who would have built such a pretentious house, or why—it seemed out of sync with everything else on the island. Finally the service assigned it to her.

The guys went in first, to vacuum and haul out the garbage and hose down the decks and carport.

“Thanks!” Anna yelled after them, starting in on the kitchen which was fairly tidy anyway since the last group had apparently brought their own chef along. This kitchen had black marble countertops, white cabinets, and a restaurant-sized stove. Anna scrubbed everything. Out the window, she watched the long line of green surf where the outgoing tide from the marsh behind the island met the ocean. It was the best view on the island; she should know. She'd been in enough houses.

Anna worked her way through the guest rooms, each with its own
bath, putting fresh sheets on each bed. The house slept sixteen. It was afternoon by the time she reached the master bedroom suite (described in the brochure as the “solarium suite” in the “aerie”) on the top floor. She was tired, but curious—surely there'd be
something
to indicate who these owners were.

Carrying her basket of supplies, she rode up in the elevator, emerging into darkness. All the draperies in the semicircular master bedroom were pulled shut, hiding the view, which must be spectacular. Anna set her bucket down with a clatter, inching her way over toward the windows in the dark. She touched a switch and the draperies slid open to reveal the sky, the beach, the ocean, and the huge king-sized master bed with a man in it, half covered up by a wad of sheets.

“What the hell!” He sat up abruptly.

Anna screamed.

“Shit,” he said. He was huge, his massive chest and back covered by black hair, like a bear, like a monster. He shook his big head back and forth to clear it.

Anna screamed again.

“Calm down, honey,” he said wearily. “I ain't gonna hurt you.”

“What are you doing in this house?”

“I own the goddamn house,” he said.

“You do not.” Anna was as sure of this as she had ever been sure of anything. She backed up against the wall.

“You wanna bet?” Now he was grinning at her through his black moustache. “I built this lovely house for my lovely cultured princess bride who has now run off with the kids' fucking shrink, pardon my French, who never even liked the goddamn house anyway, preferring the place in Maine which is just as goddamn cold as she is. So the divorce is final this weekend, and she got this house. She got all the houses.”

“But the cleaning service—,” Anna started. “You can't just—”

“So I didn't tell the cleaning service I was coming, all right? I can't
be bothered with every goddamn thing. Besides, I don't even know the name of the damn cleaning service.”

“Merry Maids,” Anna said automatically.

“Oh yeah? And who are you? Little Miss Merry Maid?”

“Actually I'm a writer,” Anna said. She couldn't imagine why she'd said it.

“Sure you are, honey.” He threw his big head back and laughed, a laugh so contagious that Anna found herself smiling too before she remembered that she was furious.

“I'm going to call the service,” she said.

“No, you're not. You're going to have a drink with me. I came down here to drink, and I'm still drinking. I'm a long way from through.” He climbed out of bed stark naked and walked over to the wet bar. He had a huge dark hairy torso with scars running all over it and thick white legs. The scars were raised and puckered like somebody had squirted toothpaste on him.

Anna turned away. “Put your pants on,” she said.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “You've seen one, you've seen them all. Besides, it doesn't even work.” He turned his back and she stared at his hairy ass while he poured two tumblers full of scotch and handed one to her.

“Lou Angelli,” he said, clicking his glass against hers. “Angelli's Delis, maybe you've seen them? All up and down the east coast, mostly Florida and New Jersey. My story is, I went public too soon. You're a pretty thing,” he went on. “I don't mind a big girl.”

“Please!”
But Anna was drinking the scotch.

“Don't I know you from someplace?” He gave her a broad wink.

“I doubt it,” she said, and of course it was just a line, but the funny thing was, she felt she
did
know him from someplace. She recognized him. Somehow they were two of a kind. “I'm Anna Todd,” she said. “Now put your pants on,” and he did, and they sat out on the deck and drank until Mrs. Baggett from the cleaning service,
along with the island's one policeman, Harry Renfro, arrived to evict them.

“I sure am sorry, Anna honey,” he said. She played bingo at Harry's church on Tuesday nights.

“Oh, that's okay,” Anna said cheerfully, sunburned and drunk.

“You're fired,” Miss Baggett said.

“Bitch,” Anna said. Then she and Lou cracked up, staggering along his wife's deck. Harry gave them a ride back over to the Flamingo in the cop car, turning on the blue light and siren at Anna's request. She woke up after noon the next day with the worst hangover she'd had since college—dry-mouthed, heart pounding, terrified that she was back in the hospital and none of it had happened at all. But then she looked over and there was Lou, lying on his back in her own bed with one huge arm dropping all the way down to the floor. She kept on looking at him.

Her door opened just a crack to reveal Miss Bette's sharp-nosed old face. “Anna, is that a
man?
” Mrs. Bette said in a loud stage whisper, over the sound of the window air conditioner.

“Yes,” Anna whispered back.

“Good.” Miss Bette shut the door.

Anna showered and brushed her teeth and took four Anacin and put on her yellow sundress, wincing when the spaghetti straps touched her shoulders. She made coffee on her hot plate and got her manuscript out from under the bed while Lou slept on. She read what she'd written so far. Not bad, she thought. Or,
bad.
But bad enough? Anyway, it beat reconstructing families. Hers could
never
be reconstructed, face it, none of her families could ever be reconstructed, so she might as well write books where it all happened again and again just the way it was supposed to: boy meets girl, sparks fly despite the mad underlying attraction, et cetera, et cetera, until it all ended happily ever after, again and again and again.

In this book, her heroine, a missionary schoolteacher, comes to the
mountains to do good but encounters a wildly dangerous, darkly handsome moonshiner who won't let his brilliant crippled daughter attend school. Her heroine, Rosalie Peach, puts on a little bonnet and kicks the old mule into a spirited trot heading up Devil Mountain to confront him. A shot rings out—

Lou sat up. “Jesus,” he said.

“How do you feel?”

“Like shit. I feel like shit.” But he was grinning at her. He had a snaggle tooth, which she had always found attractive in a man.

She put down her pen. “It really doesn't work?” she asked.

“There are other things to do,” he said, and they did them all afternoon, coming downstairs finally just as Miss Bette's last story of the day was going off the TV. “Well, hello, look what the cat dragged in,” she said.

“I can cook,” Lou said.

“Cook, then,” Miss Bette said.

From then on, nothing was ever like it was supposed to be, except in Anna's books, where
everything
was. Lou and Anna never married. They stayed on at the Flamingo for her first three books. Lou shopped and cooked and cleaned while Anna wrote, reading each day's section aloud to Lou and Miss Bette (and whoever else happened to be staying at the Flamingo) in the late afternoon while thunderstorms raced across the ocean and they all drank Ramos gin fizzes whipped up by Lou. Some of the guests got so involved in the story that they stayed on for days. Miss Bette was a devastating critic, always right. She said the first one,
Mountain Magic,
was “entirely too arty,” and sure enough, it was rejected by Sunset Romances on those very grounds. Anna took all the symbolism and semicolons out, and it was subsequently published by another publisher, Heartline Books, under the title
Devil Mountain Man
. Anna wrote a sequel,
Return to Devil Mountain,
which had a supernatural angle, and then
Come Home My Heart,
which made them rich.

They paid off the Flamingo and went to Europe, which led to
Toujours Toulouse
and ¡
Arriba
!
Baby
which was translated into eleven languages, making Anna famous. Upon their return, they sold the Flamingo property to a German developer for a fabulous sum of money, buying the apartment in New York, the condo in Vail, and a wonderful old house in Key West which needed a lot of work.