Heart of Palm (15 page)

“You’ll just have to let yourself out, Biaggio,” Arla called. “I’m off to bed.”

He shook himself, leaned forward, and looked down the hallway at Arla. “Good night, Miss Arla. You take care.” He was a handsome man, but so beaten. Oh, but they were all so beaten.

She went to the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. She sat on the toilet and had a memory of a day long ago when she’d sat in this same spot, staring at her underwear, looking for the period that never came. That was Sofia, that day, announcing herself to Arla. When she was born Arla had thrilled at the sight of her—soft pink hair that turned brighter and brighter red as the years moved along. Dean had loved her, too, had held her on his chest and fallen asleep with her on the couch every evening until Arla came and lifted her from him and put her in the crib. And then came Carson, and Frank, and Will, all her beautiful children coming so fast, one after the other, those early years such a blur of sticky hands and tears and burp cloths and bibs that she never knew which way she was turning, and she fell into bed at night so tired she could feel the fatigue like a lead blanket across her chest. But they needed her. They all needed her.

Even Dean did what he was supposed to do, those years. He stayed on at Rayonier in Fernandina, bringing home a steady paycheck for a year, then two years, then five, ten, and Arla was amazed at his tenacity. He was shattering all kinds of records for the Bravos of Utina when it came to duration of gainful employment, and for this she was grateful. He still drank like a fish, but even for this she was a little bit glad, for it kept him reaching for her in the night, when the bedroom was fully dark, so she wore trashy lingerie and kept her bad foot tucked under the sheets. She arched her back and talked dirty and tried all kinds of acrobatics and contortions to make him love her, want her, need her like before, and though he panted and groaned and slept like a baby afterward, he never said her name, never looked her in the eye, though she whispered his to him again and again: Dean, Dean, Dean.

She was a good mother. She was. She’d make funny sandwiches for the kids, cutting out pickles to shape smiley faces atop the Wonder Bread, dicing up bowls of apples and sprinkling them with raisins for snacks in front of
Sesame Street
. She tucked them in their beds and bought them Wrangler jeans at JCPenney and made them do their homework. She made them all take piano lessons, made them all practice every day on the old Steinway, though only Will really took to it, and Frank to a lesser degree. She yelled, now and then, but she never hit them, never even thought of it. She read with them, with Sofia mostly, the only one who would sit still long enough. When Sofia was young—two? three?—they read
The Story of Babar
and then
Babar the King
and then
Babar and His Children
, and Sofia loved the books so much that when they’d worn out the stories in English Arla translated them back into their original French and they memorized the lines together, even the horrible part when Babar’s mother was shot and Babar cried and cried. “
Pauvre maman
,” Sofia would say, her tiny baby voice high and soft. “
Pauvre bébé
.” Poor mama. Poor baby.

They were everything to each other, once. They were all they had. Dean’s parents were out of the picture from the very start, and Vera and James orbited Arla at such a great distance as to scarcely exist. Then came that phone call when Will was a baby, the phone call that brought the news: a fire in Montauk, the top floor of a luxury hotel, the way Vera and James were found, their bodies charred and gray and wrapped in towels in a claw-footed tub. Arla turned to Dean that day, the phone in her hand, her blood turning to ice in her veins. He looked at her, puzzled, his head cocked to one side. What? he said. Now what?

Tonight, in her bedroom, Arla took off her clothes and put on a long terry robe. She propped her pillows against the headboard and arranged the wine and the tumbler on her nightstand. She left the closet light on, and a thick swath of light entered the room, bisecting her quilted bedspread like a lancet. She drew the curtains back from the window and climbed into bed. From here, the moon was almost completely visible, a near-perfect orb just minimally obscured by the sharp, scrawling branches of a hundred-year-old live oak.

She poured her first tumbler of wine and looked at the moon, feeling the same small stab of annoyance she’d felt ever since 1969, when those fool astronauts had been tromping around up there and had left behind the American flag. It always bothered her, that flag, left on the moon all those years ago, probably nothing left by now but an old pole and some elemental residue of polyester thread. Now why did they have to go and leave that garbage up there? It was like trashing a picnic site, with the moon before always so lovely and pure, and now the thought of that mess up there like it might as well have been Daytona after Bike Week. She sighed. But that was just the way of things. Somebody always making a mess out of everything.

She took a sip of wine, and then another, and decided it was time. Time to let it come. She wasn’t looking forward to this, but it had been circling around her all day, like a hyena, and she had to let it come in or she’d never be able to sleep tonight. She closed her eyes. Let the memory come. Let it come.

She’d been sleeping when it happened. Right here, in this bed, sleeping long and sweet after the noise of the fireworks, the hot bother of grilling and shucking and paper plates and beer cans. Her dreams had been pervaded by sirens, the thin high whine of fire trucks and police cars. The boys were out on a roam, though it was late; they were teenagers then, wild things, and try as she might she just couldn’t keep them in anymore. Sofia was asleep. And Dean was not with her, but that was not surprising, because it was a holiday, and he had drinking to do, and when he was out she’d come to see her empty bed as a refuge more than a failure. So when the boys opened her door, without knocking, and stood at the foot of her bed staring at her with the dim light of the moon behind them, she felt annoyed, and invaded, and felt there was no end of people in this house who would give her grief.

She sat up, she remembered this now, and had a vague feeling of miscounting, because instead of three rumpled boys—young men they were, really—there were only two, and that was wrong because they were almost always together, all three of them, and so something was wrong, something did not add up. Her vision began to focus and her head began to clear, despite the empty bottle of Chablis on the bedside table, that habit of hers having been in its infancy then. She saw Frank’s face, and then Carson’s, the whiteness of her boys’ skin and the fear and shock in their eyes, and she clenched her hands into fists and said “No.”

It was Will’s own fault, they said. They’d been out at the dunes, and then they were coming home, and they told her how he ran away from them, reckless and crazy like he was, how he jumped laughing out of the pickup when they pulled off the road to take a leak in the woods, how he told them he would walk the rest of the way home. How they told him not to, how they searched for him and called his name:
Will, Will, Will
. She didn’t understand it; she’d never understand it, why he had run away from his brothers, why he’d try that long walk alone through the night. She didn’t understand.

The car—it was a black car, she saw it later and she would always remember that it was a black car—was headed west on County Road 25, not speeding, following the curve of the road and clipping the low gray webs of Spanish moss that dangled from sweet gums reaching across the road like a canopy. When the car hit him he’d been thrown down a ravine, into a stagnant pool of tannin water. He was fifteen. Oh, her beautiful boy, the most beautiful boy of all. The driver of the car had to search for twenty minutes to find him, and then he’d climbed up from the ravine, shaken, sick, had driven like hell back the way he’d come to find a gas station, a phone, an ambulance, anything.

Then they stood at the foot of her bed, Carson and Frank, and she clenched her fists and said “No,” but they nodded, white-faced, cruelly, both of them, though it was Carson who said the word, she remembered that—he was the one, the only one with the capacity to give it a word. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” She hated that insistence of his. Saying it one time would have been enough.

The memory washed over her now like a fever. She poured another glass of wine, and then another. He’d had bright blue eyes—Dean’s eyes, Sofia’s eyes—and the lightest hair of the three boys, a honey brown she loved from the start, not that moody darkness of the others, of Dean and Carson and Frank. It matched his soul, such warmth he had, such sweetness. Chatty and funny and bright—my Lord, he’d talk you to death, mouth always running, couldn’t shut up to save himself, always in all kinds of trouble at school, the teachers didn’t know what to do with him. And if he wasn’t talking he was singing, picking out chords on that cheap guitar, figuring out the melodies and progressions of all the songs on the radio, Journey and Skynyrd and Van Halen and all that stuff they loved. He’d belt out the words he knew, make up nonsense for the ones he didn’t, follow her around the house with the guitar, trying to make her smile. He mooned her in the living room once—mooned her! mooned his mother!—while she was trying to scold him about a D in math and she shrieked and threw the altar linens at him, but then she collapsed into laughter at the sight of his skinny white fanny and she had to sit on the couch and compose herself until he buckled his pants and sat down next to her and promised to study harder. She wiped her eyes and swatted him on the head.

He was clingy as a baby, had cultivated a physical connection to Arla and to all of them that he never quite grew out of, and even at fifteen he’d lean into her shoulder sometimes in the evening, when she stood at the ironing board with the vestments or when she shook the clean linens out onto the couch to start the folding. She was taller than him, always. But he was bigger than her, bigger than all of them, in all the best ways.
Will.

After a while sleep began to play with the edges of her mind, and she put the empty tumbler on the nightstand and slid down between the sheets, the stump of her foot feeling thick and heavy, as always. The light from the closet still shone, and she pictured it, visible through the trees outside, to that place on the road, to that steep ravine. She heard the back door close, lightly, a sound like a secret, and then Sofia crept up the stairs and stopped outside Arla’s bedroom door.

“’Night,
maman,
” she whispered into the room. “
Je suis désolé.”

“’Night,
chérie,
” Arla said. “
Je t’aime
.”

F
IVE

Arla would have a fit, a
fit,
if she could see this. The thought was pleasing, and Sofia smiled. She stood at the dark edge of the Intracoastal, in a narrow sandy patch leading down from the concrete picnic table behind Aberdeen. Then she kicked off her shorts, pulled her T-shirt over her head, and waded into the water in her bra and underwear. Above, the moon was full and soft, spreading a wash of cream-colored light across the surface of the water. A barred owl haunted the trees above the house, and Sofia paused a moment, listening to its call, the question it always seemed to ask:
Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?

The current was fast, but Sofia was a strong swimmer, always had been. It was one thing she could do well, thank you very much. The expanse of Intracoastal behind the house was a quick stretch, three hundred feet or so from one bank across to the other. Sofia felt the soft hairs on her thighs lift, felt her muscles tense in the sudden cool clutch of the water. Less than a yard from the bank, the bottom dropped out from under her, and the familiar steep channel gaped beneath her feet. In the distance, the Fourth of July party at Uncle Henry’s pushed on, though it was late. She struck out for the west bank, felt the guilt washing from her shoulders. Oh, she’d been awful to Arla. She had. But it wasn’t the first time. The swimming washed it away.

She ducked her head under the water, listened to the soft rush of the current. The water felt clean, pure, uncontaminated somehow. It always did, even when the rest of the world sometimes felt so overwhelmingly soiled. She couldn’t do this every night, much as she would have liked. Without the light of a full or near-full moon, like tonight, visibility on the Intracoastal was almost nil, and in winter the water took on a creeping chill that didn’t fully dissipate until April, sometimes May. So these nights, these perfect nights of summer warmth and the clear light of the moon, were precious to Sofia. She intended to use them.

She reached the opposite bank in minutes, rooted her toes in the silty bottom for no more than a second, then turned around and swam east. Her feet were sore tonight, and the slick, slimy sand from the bottom felt like a salve. Bunions. Beautiful. On a woman her age! It’s not like she was some dried-up old prune. She was only forty-three.

It was the ballet that had done in her feet, she knew. All those years of pointe, at Arla’s insistence, all those years spent bending her feet into those ridiculous crescents, flitting across the wooden floor in the dance studio in St. Augustine. Some trade-off. A lead role in her mother’s fantasy of her daughter as a prima ballerina in exchange for a chronic sore back and a case of bunions at forty-three. Arabesques. Pliés. Pair after pair of the God-damned pointe shoes. She was a good dancer, though. She’d admit that. Strong, flexible, powerful. But too big. Too tall, too heavy, too thick in the shoulders and the thighs. The teacher was the one who finally convinced Arla to let Sofia give it up. The teacher! “She’s certainly a very accomplished ballerina,” Madame Linda said to Arla after that final recital, when Sofia was a freshman in high school and had clearly emerged on the exit side of puberty with both a stubborn streak and a robust frame pitiably unsuited for ballet. “But it’s the body type. You know.” Madame Linda raised her eyebrows. “Professional dancers tend to be very, very slim, Mrs. Bravo.” She looked at Sofia, then back at Arla, and she shook her head ever so slightly. And what could Arla say to that? Nothing, that’s what. Sofia had come home and hung up the pointe shoes in relief, had not taken classes again.