“Mr. Travers, what can I do to make you trust me?” I finally asked in despair.
“Come down here.”
“That’s going to be very difficult at moment.”
“I’d have to see you.”
“Excuse me?’
“That’s the way I am. If I can see you, I can read you and know if you’re okay. Jenny was the same way.”
“So if I come down to Fort Myers Beach and let you read me, you will help me?”
“Depends on what I pick up.”
I made airline reservations for six-fifty the following morning. Lucy and I would fly to Miami. I would leave her with Dorothy and drive to Fort Myers Beach, where there was a very good chance I would spend a night wondering if I’d lost my mind. Chances were overwhelming that Jennifer Deighton’s holistic health nut of an ex would turn out to be a great big waste of time.
Saturday, the snow had stopped when I got up at four A.M. and went into Lucy’s bedroom to wake her. For a moment I listened to her breathe, then lightly touched her shoulder and whispered her name in the dark she stirred and sat straight up. On the plane, she slept to Charlotte, then wallowed in one of her unbearable moods the rest of the way to Miami.
“I’d rather take a cab,” she said, staring out the window..
“You can’t take a cab, Lucy. Your mother and her friend will be looking for you.”
“Good. Let them drive around the airport all day. Why can’t I come with you?”
“You need to go home, and I need to drive straight to Fort Myers Beach, and then I’m going to fly from there back to Richmond. Trust me. It wouldn’t be any, fun.”
“Being with Mother and her latest idiot isn’t any fun, either.”
“You don’t know he’s an idiot. You’ve never met him. Why don’t you give him a chance?”
“I wish Mother would get AIDS.”
“Lucy, don’t say such a thing.”
“She deserves it I don’t understand how she can sleep with every dickhead who takes her out to dinner and a movie. I don’t understand how she can be your sister.”
“Lower your voice,” I whispered.
“If she missed me so much, she’d want to pick me up herself. She wouldn’t want someone else around.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” I told her. “When you fall in love someday, you’ll understand better.”
“What makes you think I’ve never been in love?” She looked furiously at me.
“Because if you had been, you would know that being in love brings out both the best and the worst in us. One day we’re generous and sensitive to a fault, and the next we’re not fit to shoot. Our lives become lessons in extremes.”
“I wish Mother would hurry up and go through menopause.”
Mid-afternoon, as I drove the Tamiami Trail in and out of the shade, I patched up the holes guilt had chewed into my conscience. Whenever I dealt with my family, I felt irritated. and annoyed. Whenever I refused to deal with them, I felt the same way I had as a child, when I learned the art of running away without leaving home. In a sense, I had become my father after he died. I was the rational one who made A’s and knew how to cook and handle money. I was the one who rarely cried and whose reaction to the volatility in my disintegrating home was to cool down and disperse like a vapor. Consequently, my mother and sister accused me of indifference, and I grew up harboring a secret shame that what they said was true.
I arrived in Fort Myers Beach with the air-conditioning on and the visor down to shield the sun. Water met the sky in a continuum of vibrant blue, and palms were bright green feathers atop trunks as sturdy as ostrich legs. The Pink Shell resort was the color of its name. It backed up to Estero Bay and threw its front balconies open wide to the Gulf of Mexico. Willie Travers lived in one of the cottages, but I was not due to meet him until eight P.M. Checking into a one bedroom apartment, I literally left a trail of clothes on the floor as I snatched off my winter suit and grabbed shorts and a tennis shirt out of my bag. I was out the door and on the beach in seven minutes.