Storm Tide (36 page)

“I hope so, David. I hope so.”

Although they made love that evening and he spent the night with her, she had to recognize that it was not as it had been. She was more reserved. She could not help it. She needed a sense of commitment to let herself go sexually. She did not feel that commitment from David. She was reluctant to end the sex, for she and Gordon no longer made love. He simply did not have a sex drive, and any brisk physical activity could cause a dangerous coughing fit. But she had to recognize that the intense almost overwhelming pleasure she had felt with David had diminished into something merely pleasant. She had felt for a while that she had two mates. That had been an illusion, for David had not felt mated to her. If Betty was a desperate bigamist, one could say she herself had tried to be a sane and pragmatic bigamist. She had failed as thoroughly as Betty.

Perhaps Crystal’s need was greater, and she should simply get out of the way. If David would only fight for his relationship with her, she would persist. But if it did not mean that much to him, then she could not allow it to mean a great deal to her. He seemed to be choosing Crystal, or at the least allowing Crystal to choose him. She did not sleep that night. As she lay beside David, she found herself reluctantly but inevitably beginning to let go.

In the morning after he had left for work, she lingered at the table with Natasha. Her first appointment had canceled; that couple had reconciled. Her next appointment at ten was with the insurance company representatives. She finally had a good deal for Enid from the fall through the planking outside the pizza parlor. “I’m on the verge of giving up on David.”

“But why?” Natasha put her sharp chin into the cup of her hand. “Don’t you think you’re better for him? Don’t you think he loves you? I see the way he looks at you.”

“Crystal will do anything to keep David. She’s a mother alone with her son and little ability to support him. I keep thinking about Yirina. My mother wasn’t the world’s most honest and truthful woman, but she did really love me, and she did her best. Men were a means.”

“But you know you’re better for David.”

“I don’t know if David understands that, and I’m beginning to think what’s best for everybody is for me to give up and get out. I can’t go on fighting her. It’s demeaning. And I can’t help knowing how hard it is for her. Like my mother. Like so many of my clients.”

“But if you love David, you have to stay in there and fight for him.”

“I thought I loved him, but I’m not sure any longer if I ever knew him well enough to love him. I can’t go on combating Crystal. She’s the wife now. Let her take what she needs. I can survive without David. I don’t think she can.”

Natasha said, “Or she thinks she can’t.”

“It amounts to the same thing, in the end.” Crystal needed him; he seemed to want Crystal. What room was left for her? Only the way out.

D
AVID

    I saw a small red car race up the dirt road, stopping just behind my truck. Alan McCullough shouted over the lawn mower, “It’s your sister!” and the two of us watched her run up the hill. “David, Mom’s had an accident.” Holly was gasping. “They’ve taken her to the hospital. Come on.”

My mother volunteered two mornings a week in a day care center in the Universalist Church. Crossing High Street at noon, she was struck by a kid on a bicycle. “Did she break something?” I asked. “Did she hit her head?”

“I don’t know.” Her nose almost touching the wheel, elbows pinned to her sides, Holly’s whole body seemed to be aimed at the hospital, as if steering a bullet through summer traffic.

“Did they catch the kid?”

“How do I know? Crystal was calling from the ambulance.”

“Crystal? How the hell—”

“I don’t know, David! I just don’t know anything.”

I left Holly to find a space in the lot and ran to the E.R. entrance. I was halfway to Reception when Crystal called out to me. “We’re okay,” she said breathlessly. “It’s a minor concussion. That’s the good news. But she’s in X ray now. They think the ankle is fractured. Her kneecap may be cracked. Over here!” Crystal waved to my sister. She draped her arm around Holly and repeated what she’d told me. “I saw a crowd outside my office window. I ran out when I heard the sirens. When I saw who it was, I couldn’t believe it. She was so strong, she kept trying to get to her feet. She wanted to kill the kid. He was laughing. I swear they had to hold her down. She kept yelling, ‘You little one-armed worm.’”

“It was Jimmy Compton?”

“He thought the whole thing was a joke. The rescue squad was hovering around him as if he was the one who was hurt. But he just got on his bike and rode away. I think we should press charges. I’m going to ask Mr. Lynch. I think we have a case.”

My mother’s accident was like a reunion for the Greene family, the first time (I’m ashamed to say) since my father’s funeral that we spent more
than a seder or Thanksgiving meal together under one roof. My mother left the hospital in a cast, making cooking for herself, even showering, difficult. Ten months of the year finding help would not have been an issue. However, in Saltash everyone had a summer job or two or three. In her way, she managed to put a cheerful spin on a bad situation and see herself, after years of living alone, as the matriarch of a small but dutiful clan.

Marty grilled chicken on her first night back, which we ate surrounding her on the screened-in porch. Laramie relished the extended family. He chased my sister’s girls through the grove of locust trees, in and out of the barn and Georgie’s old apartment upstairs. Although Laramie was between the girls in age, he was more a mascot than a friend. For hours he searched for them in a game of hide and seek. They dressed him in silly costumes. They played fish and giggled constantly, their voices rising in shrieks and then falling in hushed exchanges.

“I’m so lucky.” My mother beamed that night. The following morning Holly volunteered for the breakfast shift and I arrived to prepare lunch. Still no luck in finding a caretaker. That evening I made a lasagna and the happy family dined under the mottled shade of the tall black locusts. I volunteered for the morning shift the following day, but my mother looked uneasy. “I’d rather Holly came. I have to wash my hair or I’ll look like a scarecrow.”

“Sorry I won’t be around for dinner,” Marty said. “I’ll be in Toronto.”

“Of course, Marty.” The demands of my brother-in-law’s schedule were never questioned.

The girls were looking pensive and whispered in Holly’s ear. She sighed, “Mom? Do you think David could do the morning? The girls have an ice skating lesson at eight and it’s almost an hour away.”

“In the summer?”

“We’re trying to keep their training consistent.”

“I’m learning a double axel,” Kara said. “My instructor says I have a good line.”

“How wonderful!” my mother said.

“But I’ll be here at seven,” I said.

“That’s not necessary, David.”

“But Mom, I want to make you breakfast.”

“I said it’s not necessary. I need help getting dressed and … things a daughter should do. Not you, David. You go to work. It isn’t right for a son to be playing nurse. It isn’t right.”

The happy family sat in stunned silence. Holly was once again in the wrong. I was uncomfortable, but how could I force myself on my mother? I tried to think of some reliable teenager to hire.

“I can come,” Crystal said.

My mother protested.

“But I can. I don’t have to be at my desk until nine. If I’m a little late, Mr. Lynch will understand. He’s the best.”

“Are you really all right with this?” Holly was still frowning.

“We’ll have fun. Won’t we, Laramie?”

Tonight the girls had dressed him up in lipstick and rouge, an old white shirt of my father’s and a velvet curtain sash. No, he didn’t mind. For Laramie, clearly any attention was better than none. He liked it, he told Holly when she offered to wash him off. He liked having sisters and a grandma.

Johnny Lynch had no problem with Crystal coming in late every other morning after caring for my mother. One day he showed up for lunch. With my mother sitting in a kitchen chair and supervising, her ankle propped on a cushion, Crystal made sandwiches and served iced tea. She’d begun wearing a blouse I remembered as my mother’s, blue linen with embroidery. Another day, Holly touched Crystal’s rose ceramic earrings. “Mom, I gave you these.”

“They were too heavy for me.” My mother never seemed to enjoy Holly’s presents.

Holly liked Crystal but had always mentioned her to me with a kind of mischief in her voice, as if to suggest sex. Now the two of them conferred about my mother daily. They went over their schedules at the kitchen table, sharing shifts, giving each other a little extra time at work.

In early August a Mrs. Falco, the librarian’s mother, called to say she had lost a client and had time to care for my mom. She had a good reputation. I thought we should grab her. Holly agreed. Only Crystal insisted there was no reason to waste the money. She said my mother shouldn’t have to depend on strangers.

The evening before Mrs. Falco was to start, I was watching a Red Sox game with Laramie when Crystal came in with a large box. “What’s that?” Laramie was intrigued.

“Mom gave it to me,” she said. Since the accident, Crystal had begun speaking about my mother as if she’d known her all her life. Like dolls at a tea party, we’d been assigned roles. I was Daddy. My mother was Mom. Laramie and my nieces were the Kids. Nobody questioned it; nobody blinked. Crystal had simply redefined our family with herself in the middle.

Laramie began pulling at the wrapping tape. “Please can I see?”

“No,” Crystal said, with a harshness that drew my attention. She
wasn’t looking at Laramie but straight ahead, almost blindly. Her fingers grazed the edges of the box as if feeling her way through some dark inner landscape. “It’s time to go to bed.”

But his curiosity only grew. “Please?”

“They’re glasses. Blue cobalt glasses. But we can’t unpack them now.”

“What’s cobalt?”

They were dark blue goblets, dessert cups, water glasses. Because my parents rarely entertained, they were arranged for show on a shelf in our dining room. They’d been relegated to the attic when my mother had new wallpaper put up. I hadn’t laid eyes on them since.

“Why can’t I see one?”

“Because we don’t want to open them here. Because we’ll just have to pack them again when we move.”

Laramie’s face turned the color of newspaper, white-gray. I imagined I could feel the blood leaving his lips, but of course it was my own pulse I felt, behind my eyes, in my wrists as I rubbed my hands against my sides.

“Mom said she was saving these for when we were married. But since David found us another place to live, I might as well take them anyway.”

“Crystal …” I had not found them another place. I had merely asked a friend of my mother’s who managed a cottage colony if there wasn’t a year-round unit available. The conversation had lasted thirty seconds. I was opening my mail in the post office. The woman was tossing her duplicate catalogues. Although the situation sounded ideal, the woman had not yet gotten back to me. “Laramie, maybe you should go to bed,” I said. “Put your pajamas on. I’ll bring in the radio and you can listen to the game until you fall asleep.”

It was as if I had not spoken. “Are we moving, Ma?”

“You know Aunt Holly always wanted these, Mom said.” Her fingers were peeling the stiff brown tape as her face, her eyes, all but her lips remained absolutely still. “Aunt Holly doesn’t need them because she has a house and a business and Uncle Marty to take care of her and buy her things. But we don’t have any of that, so we get these. Aren’t they pretty?” She lifted a blue water goblet to the light. “Aren’t we lucky, Laramie? To have such pretty glasses?”

The boy was looking at me, pleading with me to stop something he had obviously witnessed before, when she raised the glass high and brought it down on the table’s edge. The glass was thick and did not shatter with the first blow. She brought it down again. Then she grasped one of the jagged blue edges of the goblet and drew it along her arm.
She was not aiming to cut a vein. This was more the work of an artist, a carver to be precise, for as Crystal backed away from me, as she drew the glass across her flesh she seemed to admire the long white striations that swelled to pink and burst into rivulets of blood that flowed one into another.

“Crystal, I never asked you to leave—”

“But you want us to.” Her voice sounded distant, controlled. She drew the glass across her arm again.

“I don’t want you to go anywhere. I told you you could stay here as long as you need to, as long as you want to ….” As I neared his mother, the boy was at my side, watching her face and the pressure of the glass on her arm. Yes, he seemed to tell me, not with words but the subtlest distortion of his features, his teeth on his bottom lip, the movement of his gaze from his mother and back to me. Keep talking to her, he seemed to be saying. Keep telling her what she needs to hear. “Crystal, remember the morning Michelle asked you to leave? Remember you said that you’d be interested in a place that didn’t charge two months security deposit?”