Child of My Heart (15 page)

“I’m. with my mom,” he said, and pointed, and sure enough, just down the beach, there was Sondra in a black bathing suit and a large black hat, baby June and Janey digging in the sand at her feet. Janey was still wearing Flora’s mother’s straw hat, and her own mother was sitting like a movie star on her blanket, her back arched, one knee raised, her hands cupped around it. Suddenly she waved to us, and we both waved back.

Petey still had his hand in my hair, and he tugged at it a little to say, “She’s with the police.”

Although I recalled what my mother had said this morning about the police being at the Morans’ again, I had no idea what he was talking about. I remembered Tony telling Janey that the cops would pick her up if she left the street and wondered for a minute if this unusual family excursion to the shore wasn’t part of some sentence that had been doled out by the local criminal justice system. I actually felt heartened by the notion until I saw a burly young man come out of the water and head for Mrs. Moran’s blanket, with Tony, as exuberant as a puppy, high-stepping it through the sand behind him, and then Judy, also wet and buoyant, running to catch up with them both. The young man threw himself on the blanket beside Sondra, and the two children, as if uncertain about how far they should follow, stood a short distance away from it, like puppies waiting for the stick to be tossed once more. The man spoke to them while drying his broad chest with a small towel, and then sank back behind their mother, who suddenly leaned back, too, on her elbows, in the shade of their umbrella. Judy and Tony, rebuffed, I supposed, but showing no indication of it, simply dropped to their knees beside their two sisters and began to throw sand into the hole they had just dug.

I looked once again at Petey, who had taken full possession of that handful of my hair, touching it idly to his lips.

“Your mother’s here with a policeman?” I asked.

He nodded. His black eye had faded to a gray shadow, nearly healed.

“He took Grandpa to jail last night,” Petey said.

“And then he brought him back this morning. And then we met him here.”

He shrugged, as if none of it concerned him.

“Don’t tell Daisy about her present.”

I took hold of his wrist and gently slipped my tangled hair from between his fingers.

“I have nothing to tell,” I whispered.

Later that afternoon, when I carried our lunch wrappers to the garbage cans at the top of the parking lot, I saw Dr. Kaufman, a beach chair and a newspaper under his arm, walking to his car. He waved to me and I waved back, and then he turned on his heel, as if he had just thought of something, and gestured that I should wait. Now he was wearing a bathing suit under that same dark tennis shirt, and black leather sandals.

“Sugar,” he said, squinting in the sun although his sunglasses were on top of his head, “I’d tell this to my own daughter.

You’re lovely to look at, but you can get fined for baring your breasts like that on this beach. A couple of Village Improvement Society matrons by me went apoplectic. If there’d been a cop nearby, they’d have had you arrested.”

I lowered my eyes and said, “There was,” but he didn’t seem to hear me.

He stepped closer.

“Come use our pool if you want an all-over tan,” he said.

“It’s perfectly private.”

I looked up at him, I had to, but I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything for long enough to make it seem purposeful.

I knew my cheeks were red, but I felt I was looking at him from behind them somehow, that my face was only something I had placed between us, like a fan. His smile faltered a bit and then he said, “I don’t mean to embarrass you. Just thought you should know.” He began to turn away and then turned back again.

“Also,” he said. It occurred to me that he was going home to Red Rover and an empty summer house, a solitary summer evening.

“The little girl, your cousin.”

“Daisy,” I said.

He nodded.

“Daisy. Is she all right?”

I looked over my shoulder as if to check on her. She and Flora both were lying on the quilt, under their beach towels.

“Yes,” I said.

“She’s all right.”

“Has she been sick recently?” he asked.

“Had any surgery, accidents?” There was suddenly something solid and reliable in his manner, something I had seen before, when he was with his own children, but had missed in him today. If I hadn’t already been sunburned and blushing, I might have blushed again.

I shook my head.

“She’s always pale,” I said, to show him I understood his concern.

“She looks anemic,” he said.

“She may well be. You might want to mention it to her parents. A blood test might be a good idea. And sooner rather than later.”

“She’s fine,” I said.

“I’m sure she is,” he told me.

“But you should mention it to her parents. Tell them it’s my suggestion, as a friend of the family.” He smiled, a nicer smile than before.

“So that’s enough advice out of me. I’m gone Monday through Wednesday again next week,” he said.

“But I might come back early if it’s real hot in the city. Red will be looking for you.”

I nodded.

“We’ll be there,” I said.

“Daisy and I.”

He turned again.

“Use the pool,” he said over his shoulder.

When we brought Flora home that afternoon, there was no sign of the cook, and Ana, dressed in slacks and a silky blue shirt that showed her cleavage, was cooking something in the kitchen. Something in a big pot that smelled oniony and thick.

Without a word to Ana, Daisy and I gave Flora her bath and put her in her pajamas and then sat with her while she ate.

Then we put her in her stroller again and walked her up and down the street until her head began to droop. I lifted her out at the end of the driveway, and Daisy pushed her empty stroller over the gravel while I carried Flora inside and put her in her crib. I put a light blanket over her shoulders. The pictures on the wall seemed to have very little to do with the actual child sleeping here or her missing mother. Flora, for one thing, was no longer an infant. I stopped into the kitchen to tell Ana that Flora was asleep and she cried, “Merci, merci,” in a sweet voice that was straight out of a movie.

“Good night, girls,” she added, in English, waving her fingers over her shoulders.

“Have a pleasant evening.”

He was on the porch in one of the canvas chairs, with his pipe and a glass of red wine, but he let us pass without a word.

Halfway down the drive, I found myself thinking of excuses to turn back, maybe to ask Ana if I should come earlier tomorrow, maybe to thank him for telling her not to give Flora any more bottles—although I suspected he’d done no such thing.

Holding Daisy’s hand, walking quietly toward home—we were both weary—I felt a tremendous reluctance I didn’t quite understand. Part of it, I supposed, was a reluctance to leave Flora—which one of them, I wondered, would go to her if she woke up in the middle of the night? Part of it was my disappointment that he had let us leave without saying a word. After this morning, we were comp licit in something, he and I, something that had little to do with my having found him asleep or with the way he had touched my knee, that had more to do with the way he had bent down to Daisy and opened his palm, just as I had hoped he would. Part of it, perhaps, was the quiet house and what was for them, I imagined, the dark jewel of the approaching evening.

I lifted Daisy’s hand and swung it.

“I love having you here, Daisy Mae,” I said. And she smiled.

“I love it, too.” I kissed the back of her hand and put my arm under hers. She was just a little sunburned. I had slathered her with lotion, but only after the first half hour, so she could get some color in her cheeks.

“We’ll put some cold cream on this tonight,” I said. I ran my fingers down the back of her arm, to tickle her. She raised her shoulders and giggled.

“Last night you giggled in your sleep,” I told her, and she said she knew.

“I always do,” she said.

“Bernadette always tells me. She gets mad when I can’t remember what I was dreaming about. She says if a dream was good enough to make me laugh in my sleep, then it was good enough to remember.” She paused. She might have been
favoring
that right leg again.

“Sometimes I do remember,” she said, “but I don’t always tell her.”

“Good for you,” I said.

“Last night I dreamt about the lollipop tree,” she said.

“The one we’re going to make for Flora.”

I nodded. She seemed a little breathless as she spoke, and her shoes were scraping along the street. I slowed my pace. I said, “I bet Bernadette is missing you like crazy.”

Daisy shook her head.

“I don’t think so.”

I reached down and pulled the hem of my father’s shirt across her shoulders.

“I’m sure she wakes up in the middle of the night and listens and can’t understand why she doesn’t hear you. I’m sure she even thinks you’re there, when she’s first falling asleep. I bet she even says something to you, as she’s drifting off. And then she remembers your bed is empty and she’s there all alone.”

Streaks of white clouds across the lovely sky, and the sun, deep gold again and at moments blinding, just behind the thick black leaves of the trees. Bernadette alone in that tiny room with her Honor Roll certificates, four for each year she has been in school, and space left on the wall for what was to come.

“I bet two big fat tears pop right out of her eyes as she’s lying there. I bet they roll right into her ears.”

Daisy laughed and slipped her arm around my waist. I pressed her against my hip, holding the shirt across her shoulders, her pink shoes scraping against the road. We both felt, for just a moment, I think, the loneliness of that imagined scene. I felt, only briefly, only until I banished it from my mind, my own terrible prescience.

“Do you want me to carry you?” I asked her, and she shook her head.

“Do you feel all right?” I said, and my heart sank when she shook her head again.

“Not too good,” she said.

Petey’s rabbit trap was still on our lawn when we got home, moved now to another corner of the yard, and we weren’t in the house more than a few minutes when he rattled our back door. I had just put Daisy in the shower and would have told him through the screen to come back later except that his face was a mask of sorrow, his mouth open wide, tears streaming down his cheeks. I opened the door and he said, trying to whisper but with his voice hoarse from crying, “It ran away.”

He put his arms around my waist and pressed his head against my shirt, digging his fingers into my flesh.

“The present I had for Daisy,” he sobbed.

“It’s gone.”

I touched his head. I could feel the sand still caked on his scalp. The tips of his ears were sunburned, although the rest of his skin was a solid brown.

“What was it?” I said. And he shook his head.

“I don’t want to tell you,” he said. And then, as if against his own intentions, he said, “I caught one. It was in the box when we went to the beach. I thought it would be safe. I didn’t think it could get out. But when we got back, the box was tipped over and it was gone. It took all the carrots.”

“You caught something?” I asked.

“In that box?”

He nodded into my shirt.

“But it ran away.”

“Are you sure you caught one?” I asked him. I understood that we had entered into some kind of agreement not to say the actual word.

He nodded again, but with less certainty this time.

“You saw it in the trap?”

He looked up at me, the tears spread all over his face.

“It was in the box,” he said.

“I checked the box before we went to the beach and it was turned over.

The stick had fallen. It was in there. I caught it.”

I pushed him away, my hands on his shoulders.

“Did you see it in there?” I asked, and he shook his head.

“Did you hear it moving?” He shook his head again, his sobs becoming only a slight groan at the back of his throat.

“Maybe the box just fell over,” I said.

“Maybe the stick broke. Maybe it was the wind.”

He considered this for a minute, sniffling.

“But all the carrots are gone,” he said. We both looked over at the cardboard box propped on its thin stick, the replica of my father’s matchbox this morning.

“Has Rags been around today?” I asked.

He stood there for a moment, and then I felt his shoulders slump, as if all the bones within them had just shattered, fallen to the ground. He stepped away from me, the extent of his disappointment displacing even the need he had felt, just a few seconds ago, to bury his head in my chest. He looked at the box again and said, “Shit,” and didn’t even glance at me for a reprimand.

“I’ll never catch one,” he said.