Second Nature (16 page)

“Oh, man,” Connor said. “I think he is.”

Lydia came up beside Connor and took Stuart’s wrist into her own capable hands. “I wish I hadn’t lost my Swatch,” she said.

Stuart’s eyes fluttered, then opened. He looked at Connor, then at Lydia, who, in her hurry, had put her shirt on inside out. He would have asked what they were doing there, if the answer hadn’t been so apparent.

“I’ve taken over your shack,” Stuart guessed. “I’ve put you out.”

“He’s alive,” Lydia announced, proudly, as though she had personally brought him back from the other side.

“Yeah,” Connor said without much conviction. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness and now he could see the improvements his uncle had made—no more garbage or broken glass, no more hideaway for him and Lydia. “You’re planning on staying here?” Connor asked his uncle.

Stuart raised himself up on his elbows. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “I’m not planning.”

When people on the island heard the news about Stuart they clucked their tongues and shook their heads and swore they’d known all along he’d wind up this way. What could anyone expect with a family like his? Of course he was now talking to bluefish on the beach and reading old novels Lydia Altero got him from the free bin at the library. Kay’s travel agent was the one who told her that Stuart was claiming squatter’s rights and, by all accounts from the clerks in the hardware store, was about to put a wood-burning stove into his shack. He’d ordered a set of the finest fish-scaling knives made in Bar Harbor, Maine, and bought a pair of knee-high boots for walking through the marsh. He’d started going to the AA meetings at the Episcopal church on Wednesday nights, though as far as anyone could tell, he didn’t have the slightest drinking problem.

Kay drove over to the north beach the following morning. Stuart wasn’t her responsibility, she knew that. Still, there was such a thing as a clear conscience. She’d just take a peek. She parked at the beach lot, then walked the rest of the way on the road, which curved around the marshes and was often filled with mud puddles. A green heron fishing in the reeds frightened her. That was completely ridiculous. She was a member of the Audubon Society; she had been to this beach a thousand times before and had no reason on earth to be nervous. The tumbledown shacks were scattered along the beach, but she knew Stuart’s as soon as she saw it. There was a wheelbarrow propped against the far wall and, leading from the front door to the marsh, a path lined on either side with shells. Oyster shells, she could tell that from where she stood on the road, creamy white with purple hearts, dropped from above by gulls to split open on the rocks, then carefully gathered by Stuart. Kay stood there on the road for so long that the heron took her for a statue and came close enough for her to see its heart beating in its chest. By the time she’d turned and walked back to her car, Kay had decided to put off her trip to Jamaica, at least until after Christmas. The weather was good enough right where she was. Summer was ending with pale golden sunlight and a sky full of geese, already headed south to the Carolinas, where the beaches, she’d heard, were excellent, although not quite as fine as this one, which was just two and a half miles from her front door.

In the last week of August, Marco Polo was found in his driveway with his throat slashed. Jeff Carson covered him with a beach towel, and toward evening he buried him in the backyard, beneath the forsythia, where the dog had always hidden on days when he was to be taken to the vet for a bath. People whose backyards abutted the Carsons’ yard pulled down their shades and turned away, rather than watch Miriam throw herself on the dog’s grave. That was too painful to see; it was bad enough that everyone could hear her wailing, all through the night, and that they remembered how she had fed the basset hound cream and called him sweetie when she took him out for his morning walk.

For days afterward there were bloodstains in the driveway. People kept their pets inside, and George Tenney, who came to comfort Miriam and wound up with her hysterical when he told her they’d probably never find the culprit, took to suggesting that people build kennel runs for their dogs and lock their front doors. By Labor Day, tempers all over seemed to flare, perhaps because of a heat wave, a final burst of summer that often accompanied the beginning of the school term. Michelle Altero had several overwrought girls come to the guidance office on those first days of school; there were rumors that the dog had been killed by a maniac, a slasher who wandered through the marshes and along Cemetery Road looking for his next victim. Michelle gave each girl smelling salts and a good talking to, then sent her back to homeroom. But the truth was, even Michelle couldn’t concentrate on her work. She had tried to discuss with Paul what ever it was that was wrong.

“I just don’t feel well,” she’d told him. “Things aren’t right.”

“Okay,” he said. “What can we do about it?”

Well, she’d dropped it right then and there; he’d assumed she wanted him to fix something, but it wasn’t like that. It was something inside, some kind of loneliness, a bitter thing for which there was no easy cure. She felt as if her one pleasure in life was her twelve-year-old, Jenny, a sweet, genuine girl who was still enough of a child to take Michelle’s hand occasionally when they walked down the street and who often asked to have stories read to her when she was sick in bed. Jenny had been particularly helpful lately, perhaps only because she was afraid her mother’s temper might be unleashed. She’d done the laundry the week before as best she could, but accidentally had mixed in the dark colors with the whites; she’d fixed macaroni and cheese one day and brownies from a mix the next. When Michelle saw the plate of unevenly cut brownies on the kitchen table she had burst into tears.

It just wouldn’t do. She would have to snap out of this, ready or not. She had her hair permed; then she set about seriously to work and didn’t think about the fact that her husband didn’t understand her and her older daughter didn’t talk to her, and it was going quite well, actually, this new regime, until the third Friday of the month, a lovely crisp day when the girls at school could at last wear their new corduroy slacks and their denim jackets. She and Julie Wynn had just led a seminar in drug awareness for interested faculty members, and Michelle was on her way back to her office when she saw Lydia and Connor beside the water fountain. Lydia’s arms were around him; she had to stand on her tiptoes to kiss him, and she didn’t stop kissing him until the bell for class had rung.

Connor saw Michelle first. He took Lydia’s hand and nodded. Lydia stared across the hallway at her mother as if she were a total stranger.

“Get into my office,” Michelle said to her daughter. “Now.”

“She’s only late to class because of me,” Connor said, unaware that no one was interested in what he had to say. Not about this.

“You’re not my boss,” Lydia said to her mother. She was wearing long silver earrings that chimed when she tossed her head. “I don’t have to do whatever you tell me.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” Michelle said.

“Technically, she really doesn’t have to,” Connor said. “There’s a five-minute grace period after the bell.”

His voice broke, but his eyes were steady and clear. He was so tall that Michelle had to look up to see how blue they were. She was the first one Robin had called, minutes after he’d been born, and she’d sat up all that night to finish the baby blanket she’d been crocheting. Blue and white, a basket stitch, and Robin had marveled over the match with his eyes.

“Don’t you dare talk to me,” Michelle told Connor. “Don’t say one damn word to me.”

“You wonder why I don’t tell you anything?” Lydia said. “You wonder why I despise you?”

“This is not going to continue,” Michelle said.

She left school, although dismissal wasn’t for another hour, and drove to Robin’s in less than ten minutes, probably ruining the gearshift on the way. Robin was out in the driveway, shoveling mulch into the bed of her truck.

“What?” she said when Michelle came tearing up the driveway. “What’s wrong?”

“Your son,” Michelle said. She was standing in mulch up to her ankles, and her face was so hot she looked sunburned.

Immediately Robin thought
car accident.
She leaned against her truck for support. She used to worry about that when Roy worked at night and there was ice on the roads; sometimes she wouldn’t fall asleep until she heard him come home.

“He’s
the one that Lydia wouldn’t tell me about. It’s Connor.”

“No,” Robin said. “They hate each other.”

Michelle took off her jacket and tried to breathe deeply.

“Don’t they?” Robin said, more uncertain now.

“All this time, he was the one she was running off to meet. He’s like his goddamn father. I’d bet he’d fuck anything, just like Roy. But he’s not getting my daughter.”

Robin took a step back. She refused to believe she had heard Michelle correctly. As a matter of fact, her ears were ringing; she could have easily misunderstood.

“It’s up to you to stop him,” Michelle said. “I want you to keep him away from Lydia.”

Robin looked at Connor’s bike, which he’d left near the back gate. just the other night he suddenly decided he would go see his father, or at least that was what he’d told her. Robin had been so grateful to have that time with Stephen that she hadn’t thought to question Connor. But then she’d happened to look outside as he was getting on his bike, and he’d looked so joyful, intoxicated almost, that she’d been thrilled by his youth.

“Did you hear what I said?” Michelle asked. “He’s not to see her.”

“It’s not up to me,” Robin said. “I can’t stop them.”

“You’d better,” Michelle told her. “You started it.”

“Wait a minute,” Robin said. “Are you blaming me?”

“Because you always let Connor get away with murder? You never disciplined him, not ever. And now you’re more concerned with who you’re screwing than what your son is doing every night. And don’t tell me you’re not at it with this assistant of yours. I can see right through you.”

“We’d better stop.” Robin was truly frightened of where this had led them. “Right now.”

“Maybe I’d better call Roy,” Michelle said. “Maybe what’s going on is statutory rape. This is the sort of thing that runs in families.”

“Maybe you’d better fuck yourself.”

“Oh,” Michelle said, “is that the way it is?”

Robin grabbed her shovel and started to clear away the mulch. Her breathing was coming too hard, but she refused to cry, and all the tears she might have shed went downward, until they formed a lump in her throat so large she couldn’t have spoken even if she’d known what to say.

“Okay,” Michelle said. “Fine. That’s the way it is.”

Robin kept shoveling while Michelle got into her car and pulled away. Once, a long time ago, they had painted a sign with tempera on a large piece of pressed wood—NO ONE ALLOWED—and hung it on the trunk of the tree they most loved to climb, the big oak at the back of the estate. For years it did not matter if anyone else in the world existed; no one was allowed past the gates of their friendship. Robin’s hands shook as she finished her work, but she kept on going, pulling the hose around the side of the house to wash the last bits of crushed mulch off the driveway. When she saw Connor and Lydia approaching, she turned off the hose and wound it in a circle so it wouldn’t get tangled. She knew enough to wait and let them do the talking.

“We were going to tell you,” Connor said.

Robin looked at her son and saw how young he was and how little he knew, and she wanted to weep. Instead, she wiped her hands clean on her jeans.

“When?” Robin said. “After your firstborn arrived?”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Lydia said. “That’s taken care of.”

Lydia had always been this way, serious and matter-of-fact. When she was six she had asked Robin how she could stand to touch the bonemeal she fed to her plants.

“Well, I would demand to know who those bones came from,” Lydia had said.

Robin had thrown her arms around the girl, and although she felt like doing that now, all she did was nod and say, “That’s good.”

“My mother’s just a bitch,” Lydia said. Her face was drawn; she sounded much too harsh and grown-up.

But Robin knew this wasn’t the truth; it was simply that Michelle refused to see that not everything made sense, love least of all. In a little while Stephen would be coming back from the market—he had gone off to do Old Dick’s weekly shopping, and would drag home the groceries in the two-wheeled cart Ginny had used for marketing before the problem with her legs. Robin’s grandfather was extremely pleased with this arrangement, because Stephen always bought two apple pies, the fresh ones, from the bakery aisle, and together he and Stephen had somehow managed to convince Ginny there wasn’t a bit of sugar in the recipe. Nothing could be done once people fell in love, really; there was nothing anyone could say. Let a chart be printed up, predicting doom and disaster, and unfurled on the kitchen table. Let it be made out of steel and lead, and still it would burn up like an old piece of parchment. Every time she saw Stephen from her kitchen window, Robin felt some ridiculous, incurable hope inside her. Every time she set out the cobalt-blue dinner plates and the silverware, every time she kissed him, every time she saw the way he looked at her, it happened all over again. Who would choose to stop that? Who would even try?

Lydia and Connor were both staring at Robin, waiting for whatever came next. They looked so nervous, standing there in the driveway, their schoolbooks tucked under their arms, that Robin felt the lump in her throat begin to dissolve.

“Why don’t you stay for dinner?” she said to Lydia.

The minute she’d uttered the invitation, she knew that if Connor had been just a little older, or a little younger, he would have thrown his arms around her. As it was, his look of gratitude would have to be enough. All she could hope for was that when it came time for him to judge her, he wouldn’t have forgotten what every boy should know. He wasn’t the only one who wanted something to last longer than a lifetime. He wasn’t the only one who knew how that felt.