Lucy watches the security guard carry the crate to the boarding gate. The terminal is supposed to be air-conditioned, but it’s unbelievably hot.
“What makes you think he’ll want that puppy?” Lucy asks.
“People want all sorts of things they never thought they would,” Julian says. “You know that.”
When the plane leaves the ground, Lucy and Julian both watch the sky. After the boy opens the wooden crate, somewhere above them, maybe he’ll find a way to live with what’s happened to him, and maybe Julian will too. It’s amazing how many losses a person can bear. If Lucy walks away now, Julian will survive. He knows that as well as he knows that by noon the temperature will be in the high nineties. He can look at the long, thin clouds dissolve over the runway and be certain of what the weather holds. And, since it’s the end of May, he can live with the heat too. People in Verity get used to it; it’s no longer so daunting once May has passed. It’s simply what you have to get through every day until the end of summer.
At around this time of the year, when Julian was a boy, Miss Giles used to take out her mosquito netting to hang over the beds. He remembers that when he used to sneak out at night, the mosquitoes zeroed in on Bobby and left him alone. He always wondered about that, whether he had some special sort of protection, or whether even mosquitoes didn’t dare come too close to him. He has plucked a bee right out of the air and had it sit in the palm of his hand, too shocked to sting. He has had fire ants run away from his shadow, so what can he expect from Lucy? The best he can do is to keep his mouth shut as the plane taxis out on the runway. When the plane has disappeared and he asks Lucy if she needs a ride home, he knows she’ll back away from him. It is, after all, nearly the end of the month, the time when people begin to snap out of whatever sort of spell they’ve been under and realize just how close they came to ruining their lives.
Lucy goes back to work the last Friday in May, and when she gets to her desk she discovers that two women have died the night before, of natural causes, over at the retirement home on West Main. One of the women had been a schoolteacher in New Jersey, the other a homemaker for fifty-eight years. They both left loved ones scattered all over the Eastern seaboard, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of whom owned woolen afghans that had been knitted during hot afternoons on the porch of the retirement home.
As she types, Lucy thinks of the obituary that will never be written for Bethany Lee. She keeps Bethany’s photograph in her wallet, wedged between her driver’s license and her MasterCard, and it will still be there long after 8C is cleared out and resold. For a while, Lucy wondered if Randy had gotten off too easily; now she sees his punishment as just, whether he knows it or not. He will never know how quickly his child will learn her colors and numbers. He won’t know that when her hair is washed with lemon juice it will turn a shade of gold you can’t find anywhere else.
If she wrote the obituary for Bethany, there wouldn’t be space to list everything: the look on Bethany’s face when she heard the cry on the intercom, the way she held her baby in the pool so she could kick her feet and pretend to swim, the way her heart beat, so fast it seemed like the heart of a dove, when she crossed the New York State line. Lucy would have to stick to the simple facts, and they don’t even begin to tell the story of someone’s life. She’s tired of that. And so after Lucy finishes her last two obituaries, she packs up her desk. She intends to resign on Monday; there’s no reason to drag it out. If she’s learned one thing from this job, it’s that every second she wastes becomes morning, afternoon, long cool evening.
She leaves at exactly five o’clock, and as it turns out, it is still the hour she dreads, only now it’s because she no longer has Keith to argue with. She can do whatever she wants, but that’s just it. She ties a scarf around her head before going out to her car. The Mustang is driving much better; Evan had the radiator replaced before sending it back from New York. Lucy stops at the 7-Eleven for yogurt and soda and a small package of chicken wings, then drives home. But when she gets to Long Boat Street, she pulls over to the side of the road instead of making the turn into the parking lot. It is the time when you can sense evening falling, even though the sky is still filled with light. You can almost tell what it used to be like here, before there were condominiums and paved streets. Right here, in the parking lot of 27 Long Boat, there was a small pond where alligators slept, submerged beneath the murky water, called to the surface by the yellow light in May.
Lucy puts her car in reverse and backs up, then heads out toward the marshes. She turns off her air conditioner and opens all the windows, in spite of the gnats and the sticky air. When she gets there the merlins dive at her car, then retreat to the tops of the trees. Every nest they make is wound out of cypress leaves and willow branches; not one has ever toppled to the ground. Julian’s car isn’t in the driveway, but Lucy gets out anyway. The piles of hay in the empty kennel are a rich, golden color. They haven’t been touched, and they’ll stay exactly as they are until a heavy rain mats them down. But out in the woods, the dog’s last pawprints have already disappeared; they’ve been covered by leaves and a layer of sand.
There are no parakeets here, so Lucy reaches up and takes off her scarf. She’s glad she cut her hair. She lives in Florida now, after all. She can’t help but stare at the vines that grow along Julian’s porch; they’re so old no one can remember who planted them. Surely not Charles Verity, who never gave a damn about gardens, but he did have a daughter, and it’s quite possible that she was as different from her father as most children are from their parents. It’s possible that she stood outside this house at exactly this time of day, at this exact time of year, to watch what she planted grow.
Lucy knows she should start home. It’s nearly dinnertime and she’s got a sack of groceries in the backseat of her car, but instead she goes up to the porch that hasn’t been painted for years. All along the porch steps there are spider webs and stones, but Lucy sits down anyway. The fact is, it’s too hot to cook and the sky is filled with light and she’s driven all the way out here, she might just as well stay. If they get used to her, if she comes here often enough, those merlins in the trees might begin to recognize her. They might come right up to the porch railing if she leaves out breadcrumbs and rice.
During the dinner hour the parking lot is always crowded. Gas fumes rise into the orange sky as cars idle; clouds turn crimson. If the Angel cranes his neck he can see through the plate-glass window to where teenage boys in uniforms work behind the counter. There are the customers, waiting for their supper. There are the children, held by the hand. The gumbo-limbo tree is completely empty now. No birds nest here anymore. Even the fire ants have fled. The Angel feels as if he’s been coated with glue; it’s not easy to lift his feet and he hasn’t tried to climb into the higher branches for quite a while. Sometimes he paces out the radius of the circle he has to stay in, other times he just stands there, not moving, for hours or days.
He knows what he’ll feel at the moment of his release: the cold blue reaches of the sky above him, the weightless flight, uncharted, even by birds. The Angel waits for that moment, growing paler in these last few hours of the month. He is standing there, beneath the tree, when Julian Cash pulls into the parking lot. Julian should be on his way home, he wants to go home, he’s dead tired and he has to feed Loretta, but instead he finds a space near the drive-in window. He sits in his car for a while, then locks his gun in the glove compartment and tells Loretta to stay. Twenty years ago he never would have imagined they’d actually go ahead and cut down all those gumbo-limbos to make room for a fast-food restaurant. Not that he’s against fast food; it serves its purpose, he’d be the first to agree to that. He just figures you can never get those gumbo-limbos to grow as tall again. You’d have to wait about five hundred years. Those trees used to be filled with birds, especially in the early evening. The sound could spook you if you weren’t used to it. You’d swear the trees had a voice of their own.
Julian gets out of the car and slams the door shut behind him, then starts walking toward the last tree. He thinks about all the stupid, senseless things he’s done in his life; he thinks about the trees he and Bobby climbed together so long ago. Before the Interstate, before the beach was anything more than a tangled mass of sea grape and sand, there were thousands of stars in the sky; they could make you dizzy if you stared up for too long. For as far back as he can remember, Julian has heard the sound of bees. He hears them now, even though it’s twilight, or maybe the sound is inside him. Maybe it’s always been that way.
Twenty years ago, beneath this tree, everything changed forever, except for Bobby. He is so young, and the white shirt he wore that night is still just as clean. He rises to his feet and walks through the grass, and his grin grows wider when he sees his cousin, just as it always did when he’d throw stones at Julian’s window, then wait for him to tag along. Past the mangroves and the air plants, past the twisted live oaks. They never needed flashlights because they knew the way back home. They still do.
Julian has never seen anything more brilliant than the light above him. A light like this could blind a man, but that doesn’t stop him from looking at the sky. He will always remember this color blue, and he’ll go on remembering it for the rest of his life. For a long time the gumbo-limbo tree will seem to shudder once a year, on the third day of May, but it will be nothing more than the songbirds in the tallest branches, and Julian Cash will probably be the only one to notice, since he’s the only one who cares.
Alice Hoffman, Turtle Moon
(Series: # )
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