Sea Glass (30 page)

Which is not so odd, Honora thinks, because she feels like going quite hysterical herself.

“You’re as pale as a sheet,” Vivian says. “Actually, you’re worrying me. Shall I help you into the front room so you can lie on the settee?”

Honora shakes her head. The last thing she wants to see is ashtrays full of butts.

“Perhaps a cup of tea?” Vivian asks.

Honora thinks of the new life inside her. She should be thrilled. This is everything she has hoped for, isn’t it?

“Vivian,” Honora says. “I’m not sure when I’ll be able to tell Sexton. So let’s just keep this between us for now, all right?”

Vivian makes a gesture at her mouth of turning a key and throwing it away. Honora dutifully eats the crackers and peanut butter and drinks the glass of milk. The nausea of earlier is gone now, though the sleepiness that seems to have infused her limbs is still there. She pushes the crackers away.

“Oh, Vivian,” she says.

Honora walks out onto the beach. It is too hot inside the house, and she needs to breathe.

She strolls, keeping her head down, searching the sand for the telltale hints of color, the shapes that look like New York and Kansas and Louisiana. She is sweating beneath her dress and has to pull the rayon away from her body to cool her skin. She walks into the ocean, the icy water sending welcome shivers through her shins.

She remembers McDermott’s face hovering close to hers. The smell of soap and sweat and gum and cigarettes mixed with the low-tide scent of the sea. The tree that sounded like water.

She bends to retrieve a shard of opaque white sea glass, but discovers it is only a shell.

He put his hand under her skirt, and it would not have mattered to anyone except McDermott and herself.

She digs her toes deep into the wet sand as she walks.

She said to McDermott,
I wish.

She finds a piece of brown pottery with a ragged edge and drops it into the water.

He said to her that she was afraid.

She surveys the beach and the ocean and the cottages in the dunes, and she knows that she
was
afraid. Not of physical love, which she longed for. But of who she would become.

It might have been, she thinks now, the single worst decision of her life. Because now . . . because now she can never even think about being with McDermott. She is pregnant with her husband’s child.

In two years or three years, she thinks, she will have a small companion on her walks. Honora can see, for the first time, an image of a child bending his head to the sand, looking for bits of treasure. He will have Sexton’s dark blond curls, perhaps her own brown eyes. He will glance down and find an azure piece of sea glass, its edges smooth and safe, and will hold the prize up for his mother to see. And she will call him Seth. If it is a boy, Honora will call him after her brother, whose atoms she has imagined all these years floating just beyond her reach. Seth will be reassembled after all.

You got your wish,
McDermott will say.

A shudder of regret, deep and obliterating, moves through Honora’s body, as if a small quake were rolling along the beach. She kneels on the sand to let it pass through her.

In another life,
he said.

An incoming wave washes itself up the drop-off and then slides out again. A wet speck of color catches Honora’s eye. She staggers to her feet. She runs and puts her foot on the bit of glass. When a second wave has receded, she bends down to retrieve the treasure she has caught with the ball of her foot. She cannot believe her luck. A shard half an inch in diameter and an eighth of an inch thick lies in the palm of her hand. Hardly worth noticing if it were a brown or an ivory. She holds it up to the light.

Crimson.
Scarlet.
Bloodred.

  Alice Willard

  Alphonse

His breath is tight and there is a pain in his side that he knows will not go away. He sprints along the road that runs through the marshes and he is moving so fast that he keeps surprising birds and ducks, which squawk and leap out of the grasses and flutter for a moment in his face before flying away. It is high tide in the marshes, and he thinks it is amazing the way it can be so beautiful and quiet and calm here at the beach while in the city there was screaming and flying rocks and fires and smoke, and then the shots. And then they were all at Rose Street, and he is pretty sure he will never forget the expression on his mother’s face, or the way Marie-Thérèse stood with her fists to her mouth and whimpered and carried on like it was she who was hurt and bleeding and not some stranger she had never met.

Mrs. Beecher is going to be very, very upset, and why oh why does it have to be Alphonse who has to tell her?

Run,
Ross said when they had made it up the stairs, four men carrying the wounded man as if he were a rolled rug, one leg falling against a step and the man waking out of a dead stupor to scream that one time and all the smears of blood on the wooden steps as Alphonse brought up the rear.

Alphonse ran out to the Ely Road, thinking he could take the trolley, but then he realized that would take too long and so he stuck his thumb out and a rusted red vegetable truck came hunkering along and Alphonse got in the back and sat with the rotting cabbages and jumped off when the truck came to a stop near the beach road.

You could tell all day that something bad was going to happen. Ever since Monday morning, all of the picketers had been in a sulky mood, and last night it was so hot and so sticky you couldn’t even breathe inside the house, never mind move or sleep, and you could just see this morning on the line how hot and annoyed everybody was, as if they’d just been insulted and hadn’t been able to think of a snappy answer back.

First there were a few rocks and then there was some shouting and shoving, or maybe it was the other way around, and Mironson tried to get everyone’s attention and said,
Hello there!
and
Hey!
and
Wait a minute!
and finally
STOP!
But no one was giving him any mind, and the militia and the police just stood on the other side of the street protecting the scabs, looking like a wall that was never going to move. The crowd was kind of surging forward and backward and growing thicker and thicker as people got the news that finally, thank God, something interesting was about to happen. And Alphonse remembers the girls, teenage girls in their summer dresses and their hats, all trying to get on top of cars and saying,
What’s going on?
And then Mironson jumped up on the hood of a Model T that wasn’t going anywhere, and this seemed to Alphonse like a very bad idea, making himself a target like that when everyone could see the militia and the police were about to die of heat prostration in their uniforms and wanted to get this thing over with, and that was when Alphonse heard the first shot.

A policeman dropped, just dropped where he was standing, nothing dramatic, no clutching of the heart like you see in the gangster movies at the Emporium, and that shut the crowd up for a second, and then another policeman raised his gun and fired off three or four shots, and Alphonse heard a man scream, and he thought it must be Mironson, but Mironson just looked stunned, as if he’d had a piece of really bad news, and Alphonse saw Tsomides jump up on top of the Ford and drag Mironson off and that was when Ross said,
Alphonse, is your mother in your house?
And then Ross said,
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,
and that scared Alphonse because Ross hardly ever showed any emotion about anything, and that’s when they put the man in the Ford and drove away and the blood got on the stairs and the leg hit the step.

The stitch in his side hurts so much he isn’t sure he can make it, but there, at the end of the road, he can see the house, and there she is, outside hanging up her wash, and Alphonse needs the run to be over because his breath feels like sandpaper in his lungs, but he doesn’t want one single bit to have to tell Mrs. Beecher the terrible thing he has to tell her.

  Honora

The wet sheet blows against her dress and sticks like a bit of newspaper flattened in a wind against the side of a building. She struggles with the sheet and lifts it onto the line and secures it with wooden clothespins. She glances up the road, a small movement catching her attention. A cricket hopping, a wheel rolling in the dust. She peers for a moment into the distance and then she moves a few steps closer to the road. A boy is running, his body and head bent forward, his hands slapping the air as if for purchase, the way sprinters swim at the air at the finish line. At first she can’t identify the boy, but then something in the shape of the head, the spindly body, causes her to realize that it is Alphonse. She looks quickly behind him to see if he is being chased.

She is holding a wet towel, stiff from the wringer, when he reaches her.

He bends, gasping for breath, unable to speak. She drops the towel and takes hold of his shoulders and puts her head close to his while he coughs and tries to speak. She gives him a fierce hug and tells him to come inside, and he says, “It’s Mr. Beecher.”

She says, “What?”

And he says, “He’s been shot, he’s hurt, and Ross said I should tell you and then go get Miss Burton and she should bring you to where he is because he is calling for you and won’t stop.”

“Where is he?” she asks.

“At my house,” Alphonse says. “On Rose Street.”