It was a long distance from that place in Revere to a private jet soaring at forty-one thousand feet; a long way to this rental car, which was a Crown Victoria—what the goodfellas in the gangster movies invariably called a Crown Vic—heading for ten days in a place where the tab would probably be . . . well, she didn’t even want to think about it.
Floyd? . . . Oh shit.
“Carol? What is it now?”
“Nothing,” she said. Up ahead by the road was a little pink bungalow, the porch flanked by palms—seeing those trees with their fringy heads lifted against the blue sky made her think of Japanese Zeros coming in low, their underwing machine guns firing, such an association clearly the result of a youth misspent in front of the TV—
and as they passed a black woman would come out. She would be drying her hands on a piece of pink towelling and would watch them expressionlessly as they passed, rich folks in a Crown Vic headed for Captiva, and she’d have no idea that Carol Shelton once lay awake in a ninety-dollar-a-month apartment, listening to the records and the drug deals upstairs, feeling something alive inside her, something that made her think of a cigarette that had fallen down behind the drapes at a party, small and unseen but smoldering away next to the fabric.
“Hon?”
“Nothing, I said.” They passed the house. There was no woman.
An old man—white, not black—sat in a rocking chair, watching them pass. There were rimless glasses on his nose and a piece of ragged pink towelling, the same shade as the house, across his lap. “I’m fine now. Just anxious to get there and change into some shorts.”
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His hand touched her hip—where he had so often touched her during those first days—and then crept a little farther inland. She thought about stopping him (Roman hands and Russian fingers, they used to say) and didn’t. They were, after all, on their second honeymoon. Also, it would make that expression go away.
“Maybe,” he said, “we could take a pause. You know, after the dress comes off and before the shorts go on.”
“I think that’s a lovely idea,” she said, and put her hand over his, pressed both more tightly against her. Ahead was a sign that would read PALM HOUSE 3 MI. ON LEFT when they got close enough to see it.
The sign actually read PALM HOUSE 2 MI. ON LEFT. Beyond it was another sign, Mother Mary again, with her hands outstretched and that little electric shimmy that wasn’t quite a halo around her head.
This version read MOTHER OF MERCY CHARITIES HELP THE FLORIDA SICK—WON’T YOU HELP US?
Bill said, “The next one ought to say ‘Burma Shave.’ ”
She didn’t understand what he meant, but it was clearly a joke and so she smiled. The next one would say “Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida Hungry,” but she couldn’t tell him that. Dear Bill.
Dear in spite of his sometimes stupid expressions and his sometimes unclear allusions. He’ll most likely leave you, and you know something? If you go through with it that’s probably the best luck you can expect. This according to her father. Dear Bill, who had proved that just once, just that one crucial time, her judgement had been far better than her father’s. She was still married to the man her Gram had called “the big boaster.” At a price, true, but what was that old axiom? God says take what you want . . . and pay for it.
Her head itched. She scratched at it absently, watching for the next Mother of Mercy billboard.
Horrible as it was to say, things had started turning around when she lost the baby. That was just before Bill got a job with Beach Computers, out on Route 128; that was when the first winds of change in the industry began to blow.
Lost the baby, had a miscarriage—they all believed that except maybe Bill. Certainly her family had believed it: Dad, Mom, Gram.
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“Miscarriage” was the story they told, miscarriage was a Catholic’s story if ever there was one. Hey, Mary, what’s the story, they had sometimes sung when they skipped rope, feeling daring, feeling sin-ful, the skirts of their uniforms flipping up and down over their scabby knees. That was at Our Lady of Angels, where Sister Annunciata would spank your knuckles with her ruler if she caught you gazing out the window during Sentence Time, where Sister Dormatilla would tell you that a million years was but the first tick of eternity’s endless clock (and you could spend eternity in Hell, most people did, it was easy).
In Hell you would live forever with your skin on fire and your bones roasting. Now she was in Florida, now she was in a Crown Vic sitting next to her husband, whose hand was still in her crotch; the dress would be wrinkled but who cared if it got that look off his face, and why wouldn’t the feeling stop?
She thought of a mailbox with RAGLAN painted on the side and an American-flag decal on the front, and although the name turned out to be Reagan and the flag a Grateful Dead sticker, the box was there. She thought of a small black dog trotting briskly along the other side of the road, its head down, sniffling, and the small black dog was there. She thought again of the billboard and, yes, there it was: MOTHER OF MERCY CHARITIES HELP THE FLORIDA HUNGRY—WON’T
YOU HELP US?
Bill was pointing. “There—see? I think that’s Palm House. No, not where the billboard is, the other side. Why do they let people put those things up out here, anyway?”
“I don’t know.” Her head itched. She scratched, and black dandruff began falling past her eyes. She looked at her fingers and was horrified to see dark smutches on the tips; it was as if someone had just taken her fingerprints.
“Bill?” She raked her hand through her blond hair and this time the flakes were bigger. She saw they were not flakes of skin but flakes of paper. There was a face on one, peering out of the char like a face peering out of a botched negative.
“Bill?”
“What? Wh—” Then a total change in his voice, and that fright-354
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ened her more than the way the car swerved. “Christ, honey, what’s in your hair?”
The face appeared to be Mother Teresa’s. Or was that just because she’d been thinking about Our Lady of Angels? Carol plucked it from her dress, meaning to show it to Bill, and it crumbled between her fingers before she could. She turned to him and saw that his glasses were melted to his cheeks. One of his eyes had popped from its socket and then split like a grape pumped full of blood.
And I knew it, she thought. Even before I turned, I knew it. Because I had that feeling.
A bird was crying in the trees. On the billboard, Mary held out her hands. Carol tried to scream. Tried to scream.
“Carol?”
It was Bill’s voice, coming from a thousand miles away. Then his hand—not pressing the folds of her dress into her crotch, but on her shoulder.
“You okay, babe?”
She opened her eyes to brilliant sunlight and her ears to the steady hum of the Learjet’s engines. And something else—pressure against her eardrums. She looked from Bill’s mildly concerned face to the dial below the temperature gauge in the cabin and saw that it had wound down to twenty-eight thousand.
“Landing?” she said, sounding muzzy to herself. “Already?”
“It’s fast, huh?” Sounding pleased, as if he had flown it himself instead of only paying for it. “Pilot says we’ll be on the ground in Fort Myers in twenty minutes. You took a hell of a jump, girl.”
“I had a nightmare.”
He laughed—the plummy ain’t-you-the-silly-billy laugh she had come really to detest. “No nightmares allowed on your second honeymoon, babe. What was it?”
“I don’t remember,” she said, and it was the truth. There were only fragments: Bill with his glasses melted all over his face, and one of the three or four forbidden skip rhymes they had sometimes chanted back in fifth and sixth grade. This one had gone Hey there, Mary, what’s the 355
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story . . . and then something-something-something. She couldn’t come up with the rest. She could remember Jangle-tangle jingle-bingle, I saw daddy’s great big dingle, but she couldn’t remember the one about Mary.
Mary helps the Florida sick, she thought, with no idea of what the thought meant, and just then there was a beep as the pilot turned the seat-belt light on. They had started their final descent. Let the wild rumpus start, she thought, and tightened her belt.
“You really don’t remember?” he asked, tightening his own. The little jet ran through a cloud filled with bumps, one of the pilots in the cockpit made a minor adjustment, and the ride smoothed out again.