Sea Creatures (20 page)

“You know me.”

I stood up. “Do you want the paint or not?”

“What do you want me to say?”

The room was still and silent, dark for daytime because of thick, churning cloud cover. My palms were hot. “Your neighbors think I'm one of your whores.”

His face went tight and he exhaled through his nose. He glanced out the window toward the red house, which was shuttered, no boat at the dock. “That's unfortunate. I don't know that I can fix that.”

“So who are these women?”

He opened his palms. “I don't know what to tell you.”

We stared at each other.

He said, “A while back I had a runner who brought girls when he came out. He liked to party. I guess I liked it, for a time.”

I felt a little light-headed. “Why?”

“I'd left home. I was lonely.”

“And?”

“Vivian started getting sick. I went back home for a while. This was about six years ago. We fought like idiots.
I
fought like an idiot. Then she got worse, and I put her in that place and came back here.”

“And?”

“And that's that. You're acting like—”

“I don't like people thinking that way of me. Or of you.”

“I don't either.” His voice softened. “There were no more women, after I came back.”

“Really?”

“Christ, Georgia.” He gestured impatiently with both arms, as if to summon me toward him, but I stayed still.

Quietly, I said, “Maybe trust me on the paint color.”

“Stay. We'll put up a coat.”

He waited until I nodded, then brought me an old T-shirt and stepped out while I changed. We worked without talking. He took care of the edges with a paintbrush and I used a roller on the walls. He brought in his radio and played the jazz station and I found myself thinking of dancing with my mother in the kitchen, the way her broom skirt swayed, and the gold chains we both wore around our ankles, which we'd bought together in the Bahamas. At the thought of my mother, my eyes filled with hot tears. I had no idea when missing her might start to feel less like a physical wound, or if it ever would. When we'd finished priming the fourth wall, we moved the drop cloth back to the first wall, and Charlie stirred the blue paint with a clean brush.

We looked down into the can. “Okay, it might be too dark,” I said.

“Here goes nothing,” he said, and brought up the brush.

The color lightened as it dried. By the time we finished, my legs were covered in splatter and there was a streak across my cheek—I could feel it there, tightening on my skin as it dried. We sat down against the door and looked around, at the walls and the muddy sky through the windows. The room was reborn, even with the paint still drying and all the boxes crowded in a corner. I started to get up, but Charlie put a hand on my knee. “Wait,” he said, then took away his hand.

“I don't want Frankie to be at school too long.”

“Just a minute.”

I sat back.

“I'm sorry about what we talked about. I don't want you to think—oh, I don't know.”

“These friends of your wife's, they don't seem to think very highly of you.”

“I suppose not.”

What I said next came out fast. “Did you and your wife think about having more kids?”

He scratched his cheek. “We tried. We couldn't.”

“I can't either. Frankie was an exception.” I would never have said it aloud, but the word that came to mind was
miracle
. “Why does it seem like other people's lives are easier?”

He didn't say anything for a moment. My legs were crossed in front of me, my feet bare. He sat with his legs out straight, and I could feel the pressure of his upper arm against mine. His forearm lay across his thigh, the hair catching muted light from the window. He said, “Some are, but most aren't. Don't feel sorry for yourself.” He waited. “I want to say—the thing about having one—if something happens, you're not a parent anymore. Just like that. I don't want to tell you what to do. But if we'd known, we might've tried harder.”

I looked at him until he met my eyes. “Nothing is going to happen to Frankie,” I said.

“No, of course not—”

“Nothing is going to happen to him
.
”

“I didn't mean—”

“Don't say that again.”

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said it.”

I rubbed at a constellation of paint flecks on the front of the T-shirt he'd loaned me, which was now ruined. “I'm sorry you're not a father anymore.”

He swallowed before speaking. “Riggs lost his son, you know. That's how we met. Grieving parents group, Vivian's idea. His boy would've been about your age.” His eyes rested somewhere around my knees. “So would Jennifer.”

For a moment, I watched the way his torso rose and fell. Then without thinking I pressed my chest against his shoulder and my nose against his jaw. He gave a little under my pressure, then steadied himself. My arm tightened around his waist and I felt his fingers against my shoulder, pulling me in. I was afraid of what might happen if I raised my face to his, so I burrowed against his warm skin, which smelled of salt and sunlight. When I felt I could, I pulled away from him, and went into the other room to change back into my own shirt.

 

WHAT I KNEW ABOUT VIVIAN
Hicks, I learned mostly from Lidia and Charlie. She sewed and knitted, and also she collected antique cameras and used them to take photographs, which she developed herself in a backyard shed Charlie turned into a darkroom. She loved classical music, opera, and late-night variety shows, but had not witnessed a live performance of any kind, outside of plays at her daughter's school, until Charlie got tickets to a taping of
Ed Sullivan
at the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach. This was 1964. They went on their anniversary, and she was so excited beforehand that she couldn't eat. That night on the show, a band called the Beatles played for an American audience for only the second time. Charlie—this would embarrass him later—was unmoved by the music and aggravated by the hordes of screaming teenage girls in the audience. To him, it was all just a lot of lights and noise and crowds, then fighting traffic to get off the island. Vivian, on the other hand, was rapt.

She always had a dog, usually a corgi. One—Kismet was his name—buried its nose in a plastic bag he'd pulled from the trash, and, since his front legs were too short to pull it off, suffocated while they were out of the house. After that, Vivian went to the pound for her dogs, and once admitted to Charlie, with tears in her eyes, that although she loved her rescued dogs every bit as much as her corgis, she sometimes wished the rescues were just a little cuter.

She and Lidia used to meet before dawn in the Biltmore Hotel parking lot, to speed-walk the golf course before the golfers arrived. Once they were running late, and a golfer putted in their direction—meaning to move them along—and Vivian picked up the ball, put it in her pocket, and called the golfer a
motherfucker
to his face. Lidia laughed so hard she had trouble keeping up as Vivian hurried away.

Vivian wore a light pink bouclé suit to Jennifer's funeral because it had been Jennifer's favorite. After the funeral, she went to bed in the suit and didn't get out for two weeks. Lidia came over and changed her bedsheets and watered her plants and ran a washcloth over her face. She was at Vivian's house almost every day and didn't see Charlie more than once or twice. Charlie told me that he'd slept at Jennifer's house during some of this time, to be with Sam, though this seemed a strange choice to me. It was a year before he moved out to Stiltsville, and in that time Vivian left her bed and returned to church and knitting and walking the golf course, but she wasn't the same.

Vivian loved two men in her lifetime. The first was Charlie, whom she'd met in college. Then, after she went into the nursing home, she fell in love with Anthony Gale, Henry Gale's father, though that romance was something different entirely.

I wasn't sure how Charlie learned of Vivian's death, exactly. I assumed that Riggs got the news and hauled out to Stiltsville in his Bertram. I learned of it from Lidia, just as two weeks before I'd learned of Julia's death from her. She was in the living room after I'd dropped Frankie at preschool; I stopped in to use her phone. I called two marinas to ask about live-aboard slips—this was a task I'd been putting off too long—then noticed her sitting stock-still on the living room sofa, staring in the direction of the black television screen. Her eyes were bloodshot and she held a juice glass of whiskey. It was nine-thirty in the morning.

“Liver failure,” she said, shrugging.

“I'm so sorry.”

I asked if Charlie had been told.

“I suppose,” she said. She narrowed her swollen eyes at me. “You know he left her. She was grieving and he left.”

“He was grieving.”

She waved a hand. I was too dense to bother trying to convince. “I heard you on the phone. You don't need to get a slip. Sell the boat, move in here. Stay as long as you want.”

It was the obvious solution. But I was afraid of moving backward, of never gaining that footing I'd wanted so badly in moving to Miami. And besides, I'd grown fond of the
Lullaby
. I wasn't ready to let her go.

“Thank you,” I said. I chose my words. “It's not that I wouldn't—”

“Forget it.” She downed her drink.

“I hope you know I'm grateful. I want to give Frankie a home—”

“Understood.” She stood up, wiping her hands on her slacks, but then it seemed she had nowhere to go, and she sat down again. She said, “I don't mean to be rough on you. I realize I'm not your mother.”

It would have been indelicate to agree. If my mother had been alive and had made the same offer, I would have rolled my eyes, maybe even snapped at her. The most telling clue that Lidia and I were not related was how mannerly we were with each other, at least usually.

But I wanted to let her mother me just a little. “You know, I was thinking about something my mother said before I got pregnant with Frankie, about some people not being cut out to be parents. Do you think that's true?”

She blinked at me. “Your mother said some people aren't cut out to be parents?”

With no warning, as they tended to, my eyes filled. I nodded.

“And you think she meant you? Georgia, don't be stupid.”

It took a minute, but I collected myself. “When is the funeral?”

“Sunday.”

My father would be at the Tobacco Road gig. “I'll drive you. Frankie can go to Sally's.”

“Why?”

“So you won't be alone.”

She shrugged a little, as if it was of no consequence either way. I wasn't sure if the matter was decided, but I chose to think it was, and went into the kitchen to call Sally. When I came back, Lidia had refilled her drink. She looked up at me, and then her expression collapsed on itself, and she buried her face in her elbow and wept.

 

I'D ASSUMED IT WOULD BE
just me and Lidia on the four-hour drive to Kissimmee, but Lidia directed me to Marse's Brickell Avenue condo before we left town, and there stood Marse on the sidewalk, wearing a red pantsuit and black sunglasses, hair blowing. Her condo was in a hulking, pyramid-shaped structure with blackened windows, and I could see whitecaps on the bay in the space between buildings. The royal palms that lined the street snapped in the wind. Marse leaned in to tell Lidia she tended to get carsick, and Lidia moved to the backseat.

“Hi,” said Marse to me. “Still friends?”

“You bet,” I said, and turned on the radio.

After we were on the expressway, Marse started shifting in her seat, pulling at her waistband. “This underwear rides up,” she said. “I will be performing this maneuver from time to time.”

“That's fine,” I said.

Lidia cleared her throat.

“What?” said Marse. “Viv is dead, so I can't warn people about my panties?”

“Do we need to make a stop?” said Lidia.

“No, thank you,” said Marse, sighing.

Lidia reached forward and turned off the radio. “Let's share pleasant memories of Vivian,” she said.

The air conditioner hummed, pushing too-cold air against my cheeks. The low, cramped neighborhoods that lined the highway gave way to endless green groves. I'd always wished they'd erected Florida's turnpike along the water; the state's long neck offered some of the dullest driving in the country. In the Midwest, highways were nestled among rolling hills, white in winter and green in summer, among farmsteads with collapsing barns the color of dried blood. In the winter, horses wore heavy blankets and cows huddled together against fences, forming shifting tapestries.

Lidia said, “She hated church. You probably didn't know that, Marse. Once we were sitting together—Charlie wouldn't come, of course, and I wasn't married, not that any husband of mine would be caught dead—and the Father led us in prayer, and I bowed my head. I don't know what I was thinking about—my grocery list or something—but I was, you know, making good in the role of parishioner and all that. And then Viv leans over and pinches my arm and says, ‘Wake up!' ”

Marse's laugh was throaty and died fast. “I guess I understand her husband going nuts like that.” She looked at me. “Sorry.”

Lidia said, “He was grieving. People do it differently.”

Marse said to Lidia, “I met Vivian the first time at your house, right after Jennifer decided not to go to college. Viv said Charlie was angry, and she'd told him to relax. She said all she'd learned in college was how to type a memo and meet a husband, and she could teach Jennifer that herself.”

Lidia laughed lightly for a long time, and then we were quiet.