The Invaders (22 page)

“I didn't see you there,” she said.

She flopped down next to me and tried to assemble the pool toys at her feet. Foam noodles and plastic throwing stars, shit I used to play with as a kid, too.

I tried to shield the sun from my eyes so that I could get a better look at her. She looked tired and annoyed, not like the other times. She had a trashy book beside her. The cover had a man grasping at a half-naked woman with plump lips and huge breasts.

“Is it any good?” I asked.

She looked down at the noodle, then her book.

“Lots of heavy petting,” she said.

“I figured,” I said.

She stared at the book, and I knew she felt the need to defend it more.

“Sometimes you just need to shut your brain off.”

Then she stared at the pool and her children flapping around with their swimmies on.

I wished that she could have come up with something more insightful, but this was it. Tired housewife who may or may not have hated her kids. There was no forced sandwich-making necessary. I closed my eyes again. I could hear people talking, but they weren't talking to me, so I fell asleep.

•  •  •

I felt my face burning hot and someone shaking me awake. I opened my eyes and saw Jill there.

“How long have I been asleep?” I asked.

“About fifteen minutes,” she said.

Why had she shaken me awake? She smiled when I asked her.

“I was bored by the book,” she said, and then, “So few weekends left to sit out here.”

I groaned because the summer was ending. It was over. It would get cold soon.

The bored women would go back into their houses, shut themselves in, and wait for next summer when they could take off as many clothes as possible and try to make a go of it. Take chances again. She was quiet for a moment. I pushed myself up trying to wiggle the back of the chaise up; she leaned over and tried to help me.

“You don't have to,” I said, feeling like a child.

“Why don't you come watch me anymore?” I thought I heard her say.

I turned to her and she smiled. “I kept hoping you'd come back,” she said.

I felt a buzzing in my ears and I wasn't sure how to answer.

We both stared at the pool.

“Do you love your kids?” I asked.

“Of course. What kind of question is that?” she asked.

“Would you ever leave them?”

She looked at me and laughed. She said, “For you?” Jill put her sunglasses on and waved to her children, who waved back with a lot of excitement. She was waiting for me to say something else. I could see her little smile from where I was sitting. I didn't want to sit there anymore. I started getting up.

“Don't go,” she said quickly.

I slid back into my seat. People were looking at us, or was I just being paranoid?

“Why are you doing this?” I said.

“I'm not doing anything,” she said.

“I wasn't watching you,” I said.

“You were.”

She put her book down.

“You're reading too much of that shit,” I said.

She was quiet for a moment and then slid the book under her seat.

I closed my eyes, hoping she'd disappear. I didn't want her to start telling me about loneliness or missing husbands or shitty kids. None of that. I didn't want her to talk anymore.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

I didn't know how to answer.

Leave me alone, stay, touch me again.

Things like that popped into my head, but I didn't say them.

“Nothing,” I said finally.

We lay there, side by side, staring at the pool full of children.

I opened my eyes and Jill smiled at me and said, “Let's go to the rocks tonight. I'll get a babysitter.”

I said okay and she left and I had to go wait for her. Hours still.

When I got home, Cheryl was in the garage, shuffling around. I asked her what she was doing, but she didn't answer me, didn't even register that I was there. I called out to her again and she finally looked up. I didn't feel like telling her about my ordeal. I didn't want her to think I was a fuckup again.

“What are you trying to do?” I asked.

“There's a hurricane coming.”

“Maybe we should call Dad,” I said.

The phone in the kitchen was off the hook.

I ran back outside.

“I need help with these boxes if you have a second.”

It was so bright outside, but in the garage she had found the shadows and was hovering in them.

“Maybe you shouldn't open those,” I said.

“It's all just junk.”

I stared at her, trying to get rid of it all. She told me, “We have to board up the windows.”

Cheryl came into the light and she was smiling. She put her hands on her hips and looked around the garage.

“Spring cleaning a season late,” she said.

I asked her if she had talked to my dad and she said she had and he was going to try to make it back before the storm. I was glad there was something that was actually making her worried and that she wasn't acting crazy because she was going crazy. Everyone on the shoreline was afraid of storms.

She held up some
Playboys
and
Hustlers
, my father's collection, and said, “Maybe we could board up the windows with these?” She was smiling when she said it, like everything was a big joke.

“We could show them what it's all about, right?” she said.

She flipped through a
Hustler
magazine. “Why are they always wearing pearls?” She looked at me as if she expected an answer. She held up the magazine and showed me a woman with her legs spread wide, no underwear but with a bra on and a long string of pearls around her neck. I had no idea, but the magazine had to be from the early '80s. They still had hair in dark Vs.

“You should probably put that down,” I said.

Cheryl continued to thumb through the magazine.

“I remember them being worse,” she said.

She put the one she was holding down and picked up another one, a
Playboy
from a long time ago.

“We always had these around the house when I was a kid,” she said.

She hardly mentioned her past and I wanted her to say more, but she never did. When she first came home with my dad, I had no idea where he had found her, and at the wedding no one came for her at all. My dad had told me that her family was poor, broken apart, that she had
risen above it all
.

They said they wanted to keep it small. People were still mad at my dad for leaving my mother and Cheryl wanted to move quickly. My father hated being alone, so he didn't ask any questions. Then, after my mother died, the neighbors got even more pissed. I was pissed, too, but
I knew Cheryl was just another victim of my dad's whims.

Now, here she was, rifling through his things. She picked up videocassettes and held them out.

“What do you think are on these?” she asked. She stared at the black cases. “I can't make out what the scrawls say. Your father always had horrible handwriting.”

I didn't want to see anymore. I didn't think she should be looking, either.

“Come on, Cheryl. Let's talk about this.” I held my hand out for her. She dropped everything back in the box and followed me out.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“A little,” she said.

I put my arm around her and walked her inside. Her hair looked disheveled and I wasn't sure when the last time she'd showered had been. I put her to bed in her clothes and she didn't fight me. I went to call my dad.

I had a few more hours before I could meet Jill. Exhausted, I dialed my father's number. It rang and rang and he didn't pick up.

I hung up the phone and tried again. And again.

I turned on the TV, flipping through channels and looking for the storm. It was in the outlying islands around South Carolina. A man in a rain slicker was being battered by rain and wind. I stared at the sky and couldn't imagine that it was headed our way. Why wasn't anyone else panicking? The weatherman said it would probably miss us, veer right and head out to sea. There was only a slight chance it would make its way to New England. That was what they were saying.

The only thing I could do was go upstairs, push through the bottles of shampoo in the drawer, and get to my pills.

I went to lie down.

•  •  •

There was a banging outside the house that startled me awake. I looked out the window and there was Cheryl, hammering nails into the house
and trying to put up pieces of wood to cover the windows. It was hard to watch. I felt foggy, like my legs weren't going to move much further. I needed to get ready. I moved one leg in front of the other and went toward the shower. I didn't have the energy to stop her and I didn't want to be late.

“WHAT THE HELL
is going on over here?” Jeffrey asked.

My skin began to itch and I had that cold feeling that I felt sometimes when Jeffrey would get loud.

“I've been calling for hours,” he said. “I have nine missed calls from Teddy.”

“Why didn't you call him back, then?”

“I did. I just said I've been calling.” He looked at the mess at my feet. “What are you doing in the garage?” he asked. “Why are you going through my boxes?”

I told him I was preparing for the storm, someone had to. No one else seemed to think there was anything to worry about. He told me to come inside and I followed him.

“How was your trip?” I asked flatly.

“Not long enough,” he said.

“There's a hurricane coming up the coast. I'm surprised you made it,” I said. “I've been thinking of options, possibilities.”

“Well, it's not here yet.”

He made himself a drink in the kitchen. A triple, I think. I was hoping he had reconsidered. I was hoping for some tenderness. Or maybe I should have just changed the locks.

“Do you think it'll be bad?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he said.

We were silent then.

“I have nowhere to go, Jeffrey.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. But he meant it out of pity.

There were different ways to be humiliated, I thought then.

He asked how Teddy was and I told him I had just seen him, but nothing of the circumstances.

“Did you tell Teddy yet?” Jeffrey asked.

I shook my head. I wanted to walk into the ocean and swim away like those people who could cross channels by sheer willpower. People with that kind of inner strength amazed me. I lacked faith, though.

“I'm afraid,” I said.

“We've been through these things before. It'll be fine.” He walked over and refilled his drink.

I had been through hurricanes before. Great big ones, ones with hail the size of golf balls and all the things that weathermen on TV warn you about. Hurricanes with names that sounded benign—Andrew, Gloria, Belle, and Bob. When we were children, my mother would let us stand out on the porch to watch the lightning storms go by. Sometimes we'd run to the lake, my sisters yelling as we raced through the storm light. I had the longest legs and was the fastest. We'd try to find a hiding place under a tree or next to some brush so that the lightning couldn't get to us. We would lie and wait for the bright lights to shatter down through the air. Sometimes, we could see bolts jumping from cloud to cloud and would reach our arms up just enough to frighten ourselves. We could hear our mother calling out for us in the distance, calling us back.
Telling us to be careful. My sisters would shove me out of their hiding spots and leave me to fend for myself. I'd lie down in the sand, at the edge of the water, and wait to be hit. They'd call out to me, yell for me to move, but I'd lie there, just waiting with my eyes shut tight.

I could hear their voices still. “Cheryl, you're going to get hit. Cheryl, you're going to get hit!”

I didn't care. Didn't they know that I wanted to get hit?

“I don't know why people are ignoring this storm. Especially after last year,” I said.

I walked to the window and looked for dark clouds. The sky was blue, unnaturally so. I could feel myself pretending with him, but the possibility of being let out right then, like a squatter, made things too difficult to face at that moment.

“I don't see any clouds, though,” I said.

“Is this how you're going to try harder?” he asked.

“How are
you
going to try harder?” I countered.

“I didn't say I was.”

He was out the door before I could say anything, taking his drink with him. I picked up the phone and dialed Steven's number, hoping he would answer. The line rang and then I heard a crackle, a near moan. The feeling of doing something illicit when Jeffrey was close was thrilling. I could get back at him in a small way.

“Hello?”

It was him. I glanced at the windows to see Jeffrey standing and looking at the ocean.

“I'll be surprised,” I said.

He asked when and, nervous, I checked the windows again.

“Before the storm.”

“Okay,” he said.

I saw Jeffrey urinating on what was left of my flowers. I couldn't believe it. He had been doing it all along. He zipped up and walked
away, down toward the rocks. I hung back and tried to process the cruelty. He knew how much I loved my flowers. Then I heard shouting outside and hung up the phone. It sounded like Jeffrey, so I went back to the windows but couldn't see anything. I followed the sounds outside.

Jeffrey was standing on the end of the seawall, drink in hand, his hair whipped into a frenzy by the wind, yelling at someone. I watched them, close enough to hear what he was saying. He was pointing at one of the new No Trespassing signs and yelling at Mrs. Humphrey, who spent most of her time in Florida and was rarely seen outside of her yard even when she was in Little Neck Cove. She had the house nearest the rocks, and she had made it her business to make sure no undesirables walked along her wall.