Hemingway's Girl (45 page)

Who, indeed,
Mariella thought.

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and went out to the living room to her
mother’s chair. She sat with her knees pulled into her chest and looked out the window.
The statue of Mary in the garden across the street looked back at her, her eyes sad,
pitying, loving. Mariella was filled with an unexpected peace. She gazed back, trying
to hold that peace until she could no longer keep her eyes open.

There was a commotion outside on the street.

Mariella’s eyes jerked open. It sounded like a parade—but it was frantic and disorganized.
The cigar man was sitting across
the street. She saw him turn toward the commotion and then stand to get a closer look.
The girls came out of their room, eyes thick with sleep. Eva followed, with worry
all over her face. Mariella stood and opened the door. She stepped out onto the porch.

A gang of people moved down the street in a wave. Some of them jumped. They were screaming
and laughing and crying. She saw Papa first—towering over the crowd, his face lit
with the same smile she’d seen when she pulled up to the dock at Bimini all those
months ago. Then she saw John, Nicolas, Mark Bishop, the Thompsons. Then Skinner,
Isabelle, Jim, Toby.

What the hell was going on?

Papa was screaming her name—they all were.

She walked down the ramp with her mother and sisters close behind her. The sun was
bright in her eyes, so the mass of people became a shadow. She put her hand over her
eyes to shield the glare.

She heard his name before she saw him.

“Gavin!”

Lulu screamed and ran, pushing past Mariella. Mariella felt the air leave her lungs.

Then he was there and trying to run toward her in spite of his limp and his injuries.
He was laughing and crying and screaming her name. She looked back at Eva—
My God, is he real?
Eva was crying and had her hands over her mouth. Estelle called his name.

“Gavin!”

Mariella was frozen.

Lulu reached Gavin first and tackled him. He grimaced, but he still beamed. He looked
like he’d just returned from the war. He covered Lulu with kisses and carried her
in his good arm as he continued toward Mariella.

Then Papa plucked Lulu out of Gavin’s arm so he could get to Mariella faster. And
then it hit her!

My God!
He was alive! The soldier, the arm, the dead—it wasn’t him! It was another Argonne
vet.

My God!

She shot off like a gun and covered the block in seconds. Arms she thought she’d never
feel again wrapped tight around her, pulling their hearts together, beating the same,
forever.

Key West
July 16, 1961

It was eleven o’clock at night, two weeks after Papa’s suicide. The people who had
crowded the wall around the Hemingway House snapping pictures and sharing their stories
had gone. Someone had left a bouquet of flowers and a shot glass. Someone else had
left an old fishing reel.

Mariella clutched the letters to her chest as she and Jake walked toward the gate
outside the house. She looked through the iron bars and remembered that day so long
ago when she’d trembled at the front door, waiting for her first day of work.

Mariella’s shaking hands prevented her from getting her key into the lock, so Jake
gently reached for the key, opened the gate, and locked it behind them.

Jake had stayed with Mariella for these two weeks. He now knew everything about the
year that Mariella met and fell in and out of love with Papa. He knew the story of
his father wooing his mother, the fight his dad lost on Bimini, and the fight he won
for his life in the hurricane. Mariella had told him how Gavin was rescued by Red
Cross workers and placed in a hospital in Homestead, and didn’t regain consciousness
for days. How investigators from FERA, the Florida
State’s Attorney’s Office, and the American Legion interviewed him about what he’d
seen. How the National Guard burned most of the bodies because they could not be identified,
and because their rapid decomposition compromised the health of the rescue workers.

Mariella had told Jake that at least 250 vets and four hundred civilians died in that
hurricane. That only ten of the sixty-five children from the school on Matecumbe survived.

She told him that through Gavin’s and others’ testimonies at congressional hearings
in 1936, the House passed a bill to award $217 a month to the deceased veterans’ families,
such as Lorraine and Teddy and little Janie, who had long since moved north to live
with Lorraine’s parents, never to be heard from again. She told him how the emotional
scars from that time were potent and terrible, and left Gavin and the others never
quite the same, though their new life on the water running charter boats seemed to
restore Gavin a little more with each passing day.

She said the letters Papa and others had written her over the years would tell the
rest. Especially the last letter, which she’d received three days ago. The letter
he’d written just before he killed himself that didn’t reach her until after he was
gone.

Mariella walked around the side of the house listening to the chatter of the insects
and the faint noise from the nightlife a few blocks east. Her memories rose around
her like ghosts in the garden. She could see the silhouette of Pauline in the window
looking out at the yard. She could smell Isabelle’s bisque on the breeze. She felt
the whisper of Jane Mason’s dress the night she brought out the Green Fairy.

As Mariella approached the writing cottage, she could see that Toby had left on a
light for her, just as she’d asked when she’d called him earlier that day. Toby, who’d
spent all these years caring for the house and readying it for Papa or the boys’ visits,
was broken up bad, but said he’d be at Sloppy’s tonight in tribute to Papa so she
could have the house to herself.

Mariella stopped and stared up at the door, at the room lit from within, and felt
tears well up in her eyes. God, how she ached to hear the click of Papa’s typewriter
in rapid fire, cutting through the screen door and the dark. How she ached to see
him sitting at his writing desk.

She reached up to cover her mouth and waited for the emotion to pass.

“Mom,” said Jake. “Maybe we should come back another time.”

“No,” she said. “I want you to read these here while I pay my respects.”

He nodded and followed her up the stairs to the cottage.

Mariella took a deep breath and walked through the door and over to his writing table.
It was empty. She motioned for Jake to sit and read while she walked the perimeter
of the room, running her hands over Papa’s books and stuffed game. She could hear
the shuffle of the papers behind her, along with Jake’s chuckles, gasps, and sighs.

Mariella ended up by the window that faced the direction they’d come and realized,
for the first time, that she could see her house on Whitehead Street from this spot.
And she was suddenly overcome by the feeling of Papa, as if he stood behind her, and
she knew that he’d somehow be there, watching over her, always.