Turtle Moon (8 page)

"What was inside?" Lucy says. She looks truly frantic now; Julian can almost see her bones rise to the surface of her skin. "There were rings?"

"I don't want you to worry about this," Walt says.

"All right," Lucy says flatly. She's much too calm.

"Did you ever see the victim wearing two gold rings?" Walt asks.

"No," Lucy says. "I didn't."

Lucy's hair is cut short enough for Julian to see the back of her neck.

Just looking at her he can feel the white edge of desire. The reason he's so attracted to her isn't simply that he can already imagine her in his bed. It's that she just lied, and she's going to do it again.

"All we want is for you to let Julian go up to the boy's room and get what he needs so the dog can do her job tracking," Walt says as he helps Lucy to her feet. She stumbles once, and Walt has to catch her beneath her elbow. "Can you do that?"

Lucy nods and starts for the entrance way. She moves like a sleepwalker, staring straight into the darkness. Before Julian can follow her, Walt takes him aside.

"Just grab something and get the hell out of there before she freaks out again," Walt says.

Lucy has stopped just outside the building, waiting for Julian. She reminds him of the merlins that nest in the cypress trees along his driveway, ready to take flight in an instant.

"Be careful with her," Walt suggests. "Don't mention the goddamned alligator."

"I won't talk to her," Julian says. "How's that?"

He stands behind her in the elevator, aware that he's making her uncomfortable. When they get to her apartment and she opens the front door, Julian remains out in the hall.

"Mud," he explains.

The wall-to-wall carpeting is a pale gray, and Julian's boots have covered acres of marshland.

That's why he prefers bare wood that can just be swept once a month.

"Do you think I care about my carpet right now?" Lucy says. "Is that what you think?"

"Why don't we just get this over with," Julian says. "All right?"

Lucy opens her mouth as if she's going to argue with him, but nothing comes out. She's not going to sleep tonight and she knows it. She's not going to tell him the things she should. As Julian follows her through the apartment, he notices that it's the exact same layout as 8C. The same terracotta tiles in the kitchen and bathroom, the same acoustical tiles on the ceiling, the same hanging globe of light in the hall. Before Lucy opens the door to the boy's room, Julian can feel the discontent inside, a thick, blue cloud reaching from ceiling to floor. He walks past Lucy and stands in the middle of the rug, surveying the glow-inthe-dark stars on the ceiling. He can smell cigarette smoke and popcorn. He figures the window shades haven't let any light into this room for months.

"Has he ever been in any kind of trouble?" Julian asks easily as he heads for the closet. He opens the closet door, waiting for an answer, but Lucy's not talking.

"Your boy?" Julian asks. "Ever had any kind of trouble with him?"

As he takes a denim jacket from a wire hanger, Julian manages a look at Lucy.

"No," Lucy says. There's a pulse on the left side of her throat that flutters as she speaks.

"No?" Julian says. He can feel the outline of a pack of matches in the pocket of the jacket.

Inside the lining there's a slit in the material, cut with a sharp knife, perfect for shoplifting. "That's rare," he said. "Most boys his age get in trouble for something. Smoking, shoplifting, that kind of thing."

"Really?"

The way Lucy says "really" makes Julian want to kiss her. His blood feels much too hot, as though it doesn't even belong to him anymore.

She's going to protect her son, no matter what, Julian knows that for a fact. All his life, he has tried to understand what makes a mother love her child and what makes her cast him aside. He has seen female pelicans care for their young so tenderly they'll pluck out their own feathers to line their nests, leaving pinpricks of blood along their skin. They'll starve themselves if necessary for the sake of their brood. Certainly, there can be no uglier offspring than a baby pelican, which can't even waddle without staggering under the weight of its enormous beak. And yet Julian has witnessed this sort of devotion again and again.

He's watched a twenty-pound fox stand up to Loretta, its fur a ridge of fury along its back, all because of a hidden pair of kits. He's found ants dead of exhaustion on his windowsill after carrying hundreds of egg cases to safety. Why is it, then, that a she-bear would have loved Julian more than his own mother? He was born premature, too soon for his mother to get to the hospital in Hartford Beach, a tiny baby so ugly he must have seemed like a punishment. Just two hours after Julian was born, he died. He simply stopped breathing, and he would have stayed dead if his mother hadn't run all the way to Lillian Giles's house. Miss Giles rubbed his hands and feet and breathed into his mouth; she wrapped him up in dishtowels and finally placed him on a rack in the oven, where she kept him until he was no longer blue. He has tried to remember back to that day when he was given away. He's been told he was fed sugar water, dripped into his mouth from a cloth, until he would take a bottle of milk. When he cried, the toads in the garden buried themselves in the dust, the wild linses dropped from the trees.

Although he's had no personal experience with it, Julian knows there are certain things you can't do in the presence of devotion. You can't look for marijuana seeds in the dresser drawers, for instance, or satanic messages scribbled inside a school notebook.

"How about a Coke?" Julian says. "Maybe with some ice.

"Now?" Lucy says.

"I'm dying of thirst." Julian puts a hand to his throat and realizes that it's true.

"I only have Diet," Lucy tells him.

"Diet," Julian says. "Diet's great."

Once he's gotten her out of the way, Julian goes through the desk drawers, then sorts through the clothes tossed into a jumble on the floor. He gets down on all fours and peers beneath the bed. It's not as if he knows what he is looking for, but he does know more than he'd like to about boys who search for disaster until they find it. He also knows when he's being lied to.

When Lucy comes back with his Coke, the light from the hallway forms a white circle around her. That's when Julian understands how much she knows. He reaches out suddenly, and as he pulls Lucy to him, the Coke spills on the carpet.

Lucy's knees buckle beneath her, and for hours afterward she will wonder why she didn't break away from him right then. He keeps one hand on her waist, while his other hand quickly moves down her leg.

Lucy pushes against him, but he grabs her foot anyway and jerks off her sandal.

When he lets go, Lucy stumbles backward until her spine is pressed up against the cool plaster wall.

"Size eight," Julian says as he examines the sandal. "How come I'm not surprised?"

This is the time of night when the humidity can be downright unbearable, the ivory hour when nothing rises, not even your spirit.

They stand facing each other beneath the glow-in-the-dark stars, not noticing when the stars begin to fall, one by one, pulled down by the thick, wet air.

Neither of them has to be told that once someone is lost a stone forms in the place where he used to be. Rattle it once, in the smooth cup formed by your hand, and you may just draw blood.

part three.

EFORE there is any light there is the sound of birds. Their song spirals slowly upward: mockingbird, green heron, indigo bunting, kingbird. If you wake to this song, beneath the open sky, your heart may beat too fast. You may not be certain whether or not you're still dreaming until you see that the stars are already disappearing into the morning sky, flickering as they fade.

In a lair of sugar cane and strangler figs, beyond the muddy reaches of a green pond, the meanest boy in Verity scrambles to all fours, his eyes still closed, his mouth dry with sleep. His chest heaves, but amazingly enough, the raccoon at the edge of the pond methodically washing its hands isn't frightened off by the sound of the boy's heart beating. The baby who sleeps beside him remains curled up, knees to chest, her thumb in her mouth.

In her sleep, the baby moves closer, until her spine rests against the boy's leg. For twenty-four hours they have lived on stale doughnuts and one plastic foam cup filled with tepid water.

At the very bottom of the boy's backpack there is still a peanut butter sandwich, found in a trashcan at the far end of the golf course. The green pond, which has begun to shimmer as the last few stars vanish, is the one where Charles Verity disappeared. Some local boys believe that an alligator still swims here. Golfers mistake its broad back for a half-submerged log. Gulls that light in the center of the pond often sink without a trace, except for a circle of ripples as the water closes over their heads. It is damp this morning and the boy's T-shirt is soaked; his jeans are coated with mud and beetles' wings. The boy gets up on his haunches, to stretch and ease the cramps in his legs, but he can't stand upright beneath the sugar cane. His lungs feel thick and wet; when he opens his mouth to cough, nasty little brown clouds come out.

There are so many things he should not have done he has lost count of them. He should never have pretended to be asleep, when all he was doing was waiting for his mother's bedroom door to close. He should have left the money he'd stolen from Donny Abrams in his night-table drawer, instead of stuffing it into his backpack and sneaking out of the apartment at three in the morning.

He should never have kept his secret stash down in the laundry room, or had a stash at all, or come to Florida in the first place.

When he got down to the basement it was completely dark, except for the wavering fluorescent light above the vending machines. All he had to do was crouch down beside the second washing machine and slide his hand behind it into the hole in the plaster, then dislodge the tin box where he kept his contraband. Instead, he went to the row of dryers, drawn like a crow or a consummate thief to the two gold rings someone had left on the shelL He scooped them up in the wink of an eye. If he brought these rings to the pawnshop Laddy had told him about, he figured he might have enough for a plane ticket back to New York.

He should have turned and run then, but that was when he realized the sound of water running through the pipes overhead was something else entirely. It was the sound of a woman screaming, and he knew, right away, just how wrong something was.

He backed up against the cool cinder-block wall and didn't dare breathe. He doesn't know how long he stood there, but it seemed like forever, long enough for vines to grow up through the basement floor and wrap themselves around his knees. And then the scream was over, and all he could hear was the thick reverberation of somebody breathing hard and a funny sort of static in the rhythm of a heartbeat. He saw then that an intercom had been left on the bench, and right beside the bench, in a metal laundry bin, slept a baby, not much more than a year old. When she opened her eyes, he lifted her out of the laundry bin and she put her arms around his neck. She smelled like Ivory Snow and milk. She reached for her stuffed bunny rabbit. He knew her by sight; her mother always made her wear a life jacket in the pool, even when she was just sitting on the steps. Sometimes, when the baby's mother led her through the lobby after grocery shopping, she'd leave a trail of Cheerios behind her. And now, for reasons he could not begin to understand, she seemed to be his, whether he wanted her or not.

He grabbed some diapers from the pile of laundry in the bin, and when he carried the little girl up the stairs he found she was heavier than she looked. But what was he supposed to do? Leave her in the laundry room by herself, abandon her in a stairwell, take her back to the apartment where someone had been screaming? He went right to the ficus hedge and set the baby down on the ground so he could dig where the sand was already soft. He found the box and threw the rings inside.

He had to. Otherwise, everyone would have known he'd stolen them.

Maybe he should have turned himself in and hoped for mercy, but there was no reason for anyone to trust him. His own mother would have probably believed the worst.

He was acting purely on instinct, so when he heard the soft whir of the revolving door to the lobby he didn't think twice. He picked the little girl up and took off running, and he didn't look back until he was halfway across the parking lot. The man who had seen them was racing to his car, so the boy took the secret path he and Laddy had discovered on the far side of Long Boat Street. No car could follow them there, and after a while they'd reach the drainage ditch that ran along the Interstate. He knew he had a perfect right to be afraid. He could feel the bunny rabbit flapping against his chest as he ran; he could tell the baby's diaper was already soggy. He didn't call 911

until he dared to leave the path for a road leading to the golf course.

He carried the baby into the phone booth and made certain to keep his hand over the mouthpiece when he told the officer who answered that someone might be dead up in apartment 8C. He thinks he may have lost his voice at the moment when he hung up the phone, and he still cannot speak, not even a whisper. Each time he tries, his throat closes up and he begins to choke.

The baby doesn't seem to mind that he can't talk. She's not a crybaby, and she's a good sleeper.

She doesn't wake up until the dragonflies have already begun to hover over the pond and a line of pearl-colored light has cut across the sky.

The baby keeps her stuffed bunny in the crook of her arm, and she scoots over, right beside the meanest boy in town. Whenever she's awake, she holds on to the leg of his jeans. At first he tried to make her let go, but she's stubborn, and he's gotten used to the tug on his leg, the constant pressure, like gravity. He has even forced himself to change a diaper, something he never in his life would have believed he'd have the stomach for.