On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1) (9 page)

Fourteen

Hester was satisfied with the way the patio looked for now, and for the first time in days, felt hungry. She went inside and unwrapped the low-fat zucchini bread she’d baked for Al before the storm. She cut off a slice and stared at it, trying to decide if ingesting it would be a mistake since her stomach was still a little queasy. Just as she took a bite, someone tapped on the slider. She jumped and choked down what was in her mouth. It was Dee and Eve.

They looked like two middle-aged misfits peering through the glass. Hester knew they’d seen her sitting there, so she had to let them in. They were both pretty disheveled, which seemed par for the course for Dee, but totally out of character for Eve.

“Wanted to come by and tell you the good news. No fatalities! Isn’t that just the best news, Hester? And already the cleanup crew is all organized, the Dumpsters are on site, all of that’s been done.” Eve was so alive with energy, she was out of breath.

No fatalities, huh? That’s what she thinks,
Hester tried to act interested in the details about the clean-up, but she wasn’t, considering the mess she had on her hands. Al’s mess. How could she think about anything else?

“Come on, we need you.” Dee was already cutting herself a piece of the zucchini bread.

“What about my roof? I’ve got to get ahold of the insurance guy.” It was the only excuse Hester could come up with. What did she give a shit about the roof for now? The damn roof was the least of her worries. It, at least, could be fixed.

“Hester, honey, Dee told me about your roof. How awful you got hit so hard; but let me tell you, they never cover hurricane damage,” Eve said as she moved into the chair opposite Hester and sat staring at her like she was a lost child. “They cover wind damage, they cover flood damage, but they don’t cover hurricane damage, which is really wind damage and flood damage rolled into one. It’s so unfair, I know, but you have to read the fine print on everything these days. Nobody will tell you the truth, especially insurance people. They’re the worst. You can’t believe a thing they say. Right, Dee?”

Dee nodded. Her mouth was full.

“But more importantly, Dee told me all about Al. How awful. You must be so worried about him,” Eve whispered, and her voice was so soft, it felt like a kiss to Hester. Hester wanted so much to smile at Eve and say,
oh, he’ll be just fine
, but she knew she’d choke on the words.

“How are your units?” Hester, desperate to get these women out of her trailer, changed the subject, when she really wanted to blurt out, thanks for stopping by, but I want you to go away, to get the hell out of my house, I mean, my half-destroyed trailer, or rather my totally wrecked life—the one in which my perfect husband screws my former beloved student, who by the way is dead. And, you see, I’m trying to pretend it was all an accident, a freak of Nature accident.

“I lost two screens. I was lucky.” Dee was leaning against the counter, brushing crumbs off the large shelf of her breasts.

“Great, that’s great.” Hester tried to sound sincere. She looked back at Eve.

“Nothing, no damage at all. All of Coconut Palm Drive is completely intact.”

“Good for you, Eve. That’s great. I’m glad it wasn’t a total disaster for everyone.”

“Nothing around here is ever a total disaster. We’ll have this park fixed up in no time. Right, Dee?” Eve winked at Dee, “It’s the Pleasant Palms way!”

Hester feared she might regurgitate the mouthful bread she’d forced down if these two didn’t stop with the affirmations.

“Believe me,” continued Eve, “I’ve been here off and on winters since I was a little girl back in the sixties, when my parents bought into the park. Pleasant Palmers stick together and get things done. Some trailers may not be worth much, but the land they’re sitting on is worth a ton of money. Marvin says sooner or later, some big developer’s going to come along and make us an-offer-we-can’t-refuse for this place.”

Eve Bridgeford, fit, cute, with hair dyed the color of pennies and cut into a short, straight page boy, was passionate about Pleasant Palms. She was married to Marvin, an older man from their hometown in Flint, Michigan, who started a business decades ago manufacturing hot-water heaters.

“Hot water is a red-hot business,” was how Marvin put it the first time Hester met him. “Don’t know a son of a bitch alive who likes a cold shower. Do you?”

Eve was pretty subtle about it, but every season Marvin and she arrived in new Town Cars, his navy, hers cherry red. You never saw her in the same bathing suit twice. She talked endlessly about their three kids who went to posh private schools and on to Notre Dame and into the family business. Four years ago, Eve and Marvin bought the old mayor’s 1953 West Wind on the Intracoastal at the end of Coconut Palm Drive. They had it shredded and carted away and put a brand-new Destiny prefab in its place. Hester never saw a trailer like it, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, a crystal chandelier, Jacuzzi tubs in both bathrooms, and a gas fireplace.

If Eve’s trailer was the palace, then Dee’s was the pits. Dee Larson, a retired state worker from Connecticut, had been a secretary in the accounting department, which to Hester’s thinking must’ve been a rather dull way to spend forty-three years of your life. But to hear Dee talk, the people she worked with were fascinating. She had wild stories about outrageous liaisons. Accountants, it seemed, screwed around more than college kids on spring break in South Beach.

Before Hester accepted Dee’s stories as gospel, though, she had to consider the fact that once you got to know Dee, you learned she would say or do just about anything to be the center of attention. It was obvious by the neglected appearance of her dark and dingy 1982 Vagabond trailer that she’d rather be out somewhere gossiping than home cleaning. Why, to even get from the doorway to the kitchen, you had to navigate stacks of
Sun Sentinels
and
Star
magazines, and boxes and bags full of yard-sale finds or things she swore she was getting ready to take to Goodwill. The once-olive sheers on the windows were as old as the hills. Orange-brown faux-wood paneling made the space look even smaller than it was. The counter in the kitchen was obscured with open cans of food, a grease-encrusted toaster oven, and an array of dingy Post-it notes Dee had obviously written to herself a while ago. When Hester went to visit her a couple of days before the hurricane, Dee ushered her past the disorderliness to the bedroom, where two twin beds were hinged to opposite walls. Thankfully, nothing was on them. Dee made Hester sit on one while she propped herself up with pillows and reclined like Jabba the Hutt on the other and told her a half-dozen stories.

“Eve, you know what?” Dee said now, “Marvin’s not the only one around here who thinks some developer wants to get his hands on the park. I heard the other day…”

“I hate to interrupt, girls…” Hester didn’t hate to interrupt at all, but she said it anyway. “I had a rough night last night and I really need to rest. So do you mind…”

“Hitting the bottle again, old girl?” Dee had a twinkle in her eye, but Hester felt herself stiffen at the comment. Really, Dee hardly knew her well enough to make such an accusation.

“Come on, Dee, my place is a mess. I’ve got to get somebody over here to put a tarp over the bedroom and…”

“And her poor husband’s in the hospital,” Eve added. “Leave her alone, Dee. Can’t you see she’s upset?” Eve turned to Hester with a serious look on her face that reminded Hester of the way her mother frowned at her when she got her first period. It was an expression that meant, “You poor thing.” It made Hester miss her mother, again, for the millionth time.

“Hester, you should’ve gone in the ambulance with Al the other night. You want me to drive you to the hospital now? How is he anyway? He was barely conscious.” Eve reached across the table, put her hand on top of Hester’s and patted it like she was trying to tamp down dough.

Dee was rooting in the refrigerator for some milk. Her large buttocks in her bright-red sweatpants looked like a giant inverted heart. She was mumbling something about fat-free milk and how gross it was. Hester slipped her hand from under Eve’s and started feeling worse about everything. She knew Eve meant well. They both meant well. They were damn nice women Hester was lucky enough to have met; but nice or not, she needed to be alone. She figured she’d throw them a bone of information and then maybe they’d leave and not be offended.

“Look, thanks for coming over, and Eve, thanks for offering to take me to the hospital. Al’s okay. He had a concussion, broken ribs, slight heart attack…”

“A heart attack!” they said it together.

Dee spun around and her thick lips hung open in amazement. “Hester, jeezus, so it was a freaking heart attack!”

Why didn’t Hester just keep her big trap shut? God, she was furious with herself. Now she’d have to listen to them say how upset they were about poor Al. In an hour all of Pleasant Palms would be at her door with everything from garlic hummus to key lime pie. By noon tomorrow all the details about poor Al’s condition would be in the goddamn “PP Newsletter.”

“Dee, Eve, I’m exhausted. Don’t tell anyone anything. Let’s just wait a few days and see how Al does. Please, I just want to lie down and take a rest now.”

“Okay, we can take a hint. Right, Dee?” Eve got up, locked eyes with Dee, and jerked her head toward the door, but before she took a single step toward it, she said, “Oh, I forgot to ask about your young house guest. What’s her name? Nina, was it? Where was poor Nina when all hell broke loose?”

Hester’s cheeks turned red hot.
Yes, where the hell was Nina when all hell broke loose? In bed with my husband!
How she wanted to say it, to tell the truth.
There was a fatality. Almost two fatalities. I wanted to kill my husband. I almost did.

But what she said was, “Nina was on the beach. Can you believe it? She was looking for shells, but she saw the storm coming and ran back here to the trailer. Thank God she had enough sense to get out of danger. Thank God she’s alright. She was pretty shaken up.”

“Poor thing. Maybe she can help with the clean-up. Keeping busy might help take her mind off things. She can come with us. It’ll get her out of your hair, and you can have some quiet time to yourself.”

“Well.” Hester could barely think what to say. “Well, I’ll tell her when she gets up. You know how young people are. They could sleep forever.”

As soon as Dee and Eve left, Hester lowered the bamboo shade and the mini blinds. She lay on the couch in the dim room and put her feet up on the throw pillows. The wound on her calf throbbed. She closed her eyes. She hated telling lies, but she told them anyway. To her parents, to Al, at some point, to just about everybody. And now the lying was going to have to go on and on and on. What was the alternative?

Al’s words rang in her head. He’d been emphatic. “Hester, I did not do anything wrong.”

Maybe it wasn’t what it looked like. Maybe Nina was scared. Maybe…
bubbles of thought burst inside of Hester’s skull and disintegrated. She could not sustain the process of putting two and two together. It was as though her brain had shrunk to the size of a pea.

Nina’s dead body was in one of those thoughts. Hester tried not to let it burst open inside her head, but it did, and she saw the plastic bag in the hole beneath the Bo tree. It was useless to try to stop the thoughts. Another burst. She could see the outline of the young woman’s features against the black plastic of the garbage bag. Maybe, Hester, had made a mistake, and Nina hadn’t been dead and maybe even now the girl was trying to squirm out of the sheets and the bag and the earth.

Old Chet’s kitchen light, probably a hundred and fifty watts, shone like a beacon and backlit Hester’s shade. What was in her medicine cabinet that might anesthetize her—K-Y Jelly, saline spray, Visine, Tums, Tiger Balm, Benadryl? Benadryl. Maybe a handful would work.

She rolled over and turned her back to the light, but it seemed to be everywhere and penetrated her closed lids. Too exhausted to get off the couch and get the pills, Hester lay there and let her memories torture her. Some would never go away.

Fifteen

At their wedding reception Al was at one of the tables telling a joke to a couple of school board members. Hester stood by the next table waiting for him. Her colleagues Janine Apgar and Frances Middleton were seated not far from where she stood, and bits and pieces of their conversation drifted into her hearing range.

“They didn’t know each other that long. Hell, Frances, she just got hired in September. You know that, and I’ll bet everything I own, they didn’t know each other before she got here. Did they?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I think they make a nice couple.” Frances took a sip of her drink.

“Yeah, a nice couple of hypocrites.”

“Janine, you’re just jealous.” Frances laughed.

“Well, to tell you the honest-to-God truth, I am jealous and why shouldn’t I be? I liked Al. Hell, I still like Al, and before Hester was hired, he was coming on to me all the time. He just never asked me out.” Janine sounded terribly disappointed.

“He didn’t take Hester out either, that I know of. He never took anybody he slept with out. All Al Murphy ever wanted out of anybody was sex.”

“Really? So who else has he had sex with?”

“Well, let’s see.” Frances’s eyes shot up toward the ceiling, and she started silently counting on her fingers before she looked back at Janine. “Everybody on staff under the age of forty.”

“Get out of here. Even Dr. Vanguard? I don’t believe you!”

“Oh, Janine, under that heavy sweater and behind those bifocals is a tigress. Why, she knows more about the reproductive habits of whales than the president of
National Geographic
. She shows this video of them doing it, and you can see the male whale’s enormous penis. It’s six feet long, and all of the kids go wild when they see it. They say she just stands in the back staring at that screen. Personally, I think it’s creepy, the way she exposes her students to such suggestive things.”

“She’s just plain weird.”

“An understatement.”

“Then Mr. VP Murphy must be even weirder to screw around with her.”

“Oh, he’s harmless really, just completely insatiable. You know how some men are just oversexed.”

“So why’s he marrying Hester?” Janine sucked the last of her drink through the straw.

Frances lowered her voice and Hester lost what was said. Then Janine said, “Huh? I can’t hear you.”

“Maybe she’s…you know,” shouted Frances.

“No way, no way, she’s way too thin to be, you know.” Janine’s voice was full of authority.

“Okay, so if she’s not pregnant, then she must know some tricks nobody else knows. Or maybe she’s just able to keep up with him. They used to do it every day in Stalmeyer’s old office.”

“What? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, you’ve got to be kidding, you didn’t know that? Everybody knew that. Even the students knew that.”

“I’d heard it, but I didn’t think it was true.”

“You didn’t want to think it was true, but just ask Gladys. Every day, ninth period, Hester would come looking for him and pretend they had to discuss something. Murphy would always be down at the gym, and she’d go down there. They’d lock the door, and, well, you know.”

“That’s disgusting. What a little tramp. How could Al marry someone like that?”

“Because he’s a bigger tramp.” Frances fiddled with a speared maraschino. “What do I know? Maybe he’s in love. Whatever that means. Like I said, they look like they make a nice couple.”

“Nice couple, my ass. She’s a…” Janine looked up. Al and Hester were walking toward where she and Frances were seated. She sat back quickly and folded her arms beneath her chest, which pushed her large breasts upward and deepened the
V
of her almost totally visible cleavage even more. She smiled up at newlyweds.

Hester had assumed Janine was nice, had even hoped they could be friends, since they were the same age and taught the same subject.
Not now, not ever
, thought Hester, trying not to get upset; but it bothered her—and she couldn’t deny it—that Janine might have been with Al. How could he? Look at her. Her hair was over-processed, bleached, probably with straight peroxide, and teased on top in a lame attempt to get it to look fuller. To Hester it looked frizzled and ratty. And her makeup was an even worse disaster—thick foundation a shade too dark for the skin on her neck, red-orange lipstick a shade too bright for the dark foundation, too much eyeliner, and even though she couldn’t see them now, Hester knew Janine had humongous thighs, chubby knees, and skinny calves. In a dress or skirt her legs looked like upside-down triangles. The worst, though, was the way she acted when she wasn’t in the classroom—naive and stupid, like a girl instead of a woman. No, there would never be any friendship here.

Well, at least old Frances, the math teacher, had stuck up for Al and her. Boy, had Hester misjudged her. To look at Frances, you would have thought she was as uptight as an algebraic formula. She had this look about her that made you think she was always thinking a zillion steps ahead of you, like she had a brain the size of a watermelon, a brain that could burn rubber as it sped through a secret series of logarithms at the same time she was talking about the latest movie she’d seen or what she’d had for dinner the night before. She wore her hair short, and never completely brushed out the perfect circles left by her small sponge rollers, as though their geometric perfection outweighed any aesthetic consideration on her part. She wore her eyeglasses around her neck, attached to a chain with links made up of plus, minus, multiplication, and division signs. She always wore a white shirt, a box-pleated skirt. She wore thick panty hose and brown walking shoes. Her one nod to whimsy was a patch with the face of Einstein on it which she’d stitched on the breast pocket of her navy blazer. Although everything she wore was crisp and clean, she still looked astonishingly frumpy.

But Hester was feeling warm and fuzzy about Ms. Frances Middleton and thought at the moment that she looked just right, uniquely herself, almost classic. Hester studied her lovingly as one might study an old masterpiece in a museum when she realized that beneath all the dowdy trappings was a woman who wasn’t all that bad looking, a woman who wasn’t all that old, a woman who had probably only recently turned forty.

Holy shit. Another woman Al might’ve done it with.

“Ladies, it is so great to see you here. There’s nothing like being vice principal of a place where the whole staff supports you.” Al was schmoozing the women. “Frances, I love your dress. Why, I barely recognized you without old Einstein close to your heart.” Hester knew if they’d been somewhere else like in the faculty room, what Al would have said would’ve been something more like, without old Einstein sucking your tit. He was vulgar, but he made you laugh, sometimes. “And Janine, Janine, I haven’t seen you much lately. How’s that Shakespeare festival going? Doing
The
Taming of the Shrew
this year?”

“Oh, Mr. Murphy, you really do have such a charming sense of literary humor, but you know me better. I’m playing it safe and sticking to
Julius Caesar
. All war, blood, and guts, lots of corpses and no sex, unless you count the scene where the boy plays the harp.”

“You mean lute, don’t you, Janine?” Hester pounced.

“Harp? Lute? Who cares, Hester? You know what I’m talking about.”

“No, I don’t. What’s sexual about what goes on in that scene? Have you even read it?”

“Of course I’ve read it! What are you trying to insinuate?” Janine still had her arms folded, and as she wagged her head at Hester, the mounds of her breasts jiggled nearly out of her plunging neckline.

“Now, now, ladies, calm down.” Al was smiling, staring at the mounds.

Janine took the chance to talk to him directly. “You know, Al, I really want to get tenure, and the English classroom is a minefield. You say the wrong thing, and people start thinking and talking, and then everything gets blown out of perspective. Now everybody wants to put
Catcher in the Rye
in the curriculum. Can you imagine? All that cursing, and there’s even a character, Sunny, who’s a prostitute.”

Hester wanted to jump in,
yeah, Janine, but Holden only gets beat up, he never gets laid, you goddamn phony, you!
But she didn’t want to make Al mad, so she smiled a fake smile—the kind that makes your lips go stiff—and envisioned endless hours of English department meetings stretching out before her, where her sole purpose in life would be to disagree with anything Janine Apgar said.

“Your invitation came as such a surprise, Murphy.” Frances was speaking with a genuine lilt in her voice. Al leaned over a little in her direction.

“I know, Fran…”

Fran! Hester never heard anyone ever call Frances, Fran. Christ, maybe Al really had done it with her.

Hester listened as Al continued, “But you know when it’s right. You know when you’ve found the one, and Hester is the one for me.”

Al looked up at Hester with those dark eyes of his, his smile natural, easy, his straight white teeth perfect. Hester inhaled and reached for his hand. It warmly encircled hers. This is what she’d wanted all along—Mr. Wonderful, a wonderful man. The kind of man other women wanted, but who only wanted you. Hester, who’d been dumped by a long-haired hippie, who’d done the worst thing she’d ever done for him, and who’d been deserted by him in her hour of need, was now, thank God, Al Murphy’s wife—till death do them part.

Now she could stop missing her mother, her sister, her father. Al was her whole family now rolled into one. Hester happily contemplated her good fortune. She let her eyes drift over the heads of the seated guests, let the music the DJ was playing wash over her.

“Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” by the Shirelles was on, and Hester thought,
yes, yes, I know he will still love me tomorrow and forever. I’ll make sure he will.

Al suddenly squeezed her hand hard. She looked at him, thinking,
poor Al, he doesn’t know his own strength
. She saw him look back at Frances and Janine. Hester tried to pull her hand away, but his hand tightened around hers. Her rings pressed into the soft flesh of her fingers.

“Al, you’re hurting me.” Hester whispered it as quietly as she could. He looked at her blankly, as though he didn’t recognize her, then looked away. Maybe he hadn’t heard her. There was so much noise. Maybe he’d had too much to drink. He didn’t loosen his grip.

“Al,” Hester said louder and closer to his ear, “you’re hurting me.”

He acted like he didn’t hear her. Hester wanted to wrench her hand away, but they were right by Frances and Janine. What would they think if she made a scene? She didn’t want to ruin her own wedding, but why was Al hurting her? Really hurting her. She thought her fingers might bleed; the larger diamond was pressing into bone. The DJ was playing “Love Me Tender.”

“Al, dance with me,” she shouted above the din, took her other hand, and grabbed the wrist of the hand he had clenched around hers. She dug into him with her fake nails. She didn’t care if they all broke off.

He looked at her, looked down at her nails digging into his wrist, smiled stupidly. She let go.

“Your wish is my command, wife.” The stress he put on the last word made Hester wince. Al chuckled, let go of her hand, and ushered her onto the dance floor.

“Love me true…never let me go…” He pulled Hester close, his chin warm against her temple. Everyone on the dance floor backed away and watched them. Hester could feel their eyes on her and knew they must be thinking how in love Al and she must be, how there was such chemistry between them, such a special spark.

Elvis’s voice was sweet and sexy. It made Hester want to cry, she was so confused.
He’s got to be drunk
, she thought.
What else could it be? I’ll have to monitor how much he drinks, pay more attention.

“Never let me go…” Al was singing along with Elvis, the sound of his voice lovely. It filled Hester’s whole head, made her feel like he was inside it. He seemed happy and oblivious about what he’d done. He held Hester gently.

Maybe, he was only fooling around. It couldn’t have been on purpose. She wanted to ask, but was afraid to draw attention to the incident, afraid to hear how he might answer her. He probably didn’t realize how delicate her fingers were.

She began to let herself relax into his arms, and by the end of the song, Hester had almost forgiven him entirely for hurting her. When the music stopped and Al leaned in to kiss her, she let him. Everyone clapped, and they both took a corny bow.

After they cut the cake, Al took the garter off her leg and threw it over his shoulder to one of the single men; Hester threw her bouquet to, of all people, Janine Apgar.

It was time for the last dance, Johnny Mathis’s “Wonderful, Wonderful.” Hester had requested it in advance because in her mind it expressed perfectly the way she felt about Al. He was “oh so wonderful.” The DJ put it on, and Al started spinning her around too quickly, ahead of the music. They were off the beat, but Hester was happy now, enjoying herself and anxious to go home to their new apartment and make love. Everything finally seemed as perfect as Johnny Mathis’s pitch.