Ferris Beach (16 page)

“Aunt Edith and Uncle Ray are here,” he said, not looking at me at all. “Daddy said to come home right now.”

Misty got up without saying another word and followed him across the street and up to their front door, where now in the picture window I could see this woman, Aunt Edith, Mr. Rhodes’s sister, with her arms wrapped around his waist, her cheek pressed against his thin stark chest. They stood there as I went to sit where Misty had been, her seat still warm, Oliver still waiting, in hopes of another rub. I could barely see over the tips of the lagustrum bushes and into their picture window, where Uncle Ray stood with his arm around Misty. She looked so pale, so much smaller as she stood there beside him. The whole lot froze like the end of a play, and then Aunt Edith pulled the drapes, leaving me to only imagine what was going on behind them. It had not registered with me yet. I could not believe that Misty had just been here, this very seat; it was as if I had dreamed it all until our phone rang and then I knew it was truth. It was as if I could sit and watch the whole town wake and respond to the news—cake pans pulled from the pantry, chickens frying, florist trucks up and down our street. By noon the wreath on their door was already drooping in the heat, and everyone knew the whole story.

When Mo died I felt she took with her some knowledge of my own life. There was a look of recognition the time Angela met her face to face in the front yard; there was a moment when the two stood there, mouths about to drop open in an “Oh, it’s
you
” but then a change of heart, a thought that it’s better not to speak. I imagined that Mo knew the whole story, knew all about Angela’s young marriage. I imagined that Mo had been wanting to sit down and tell me the whole story, that she had been waiting for just the right time.

I thought of it all, only to feel guilty for thinking of myself while Misty lay beside me, her eyes red and swollen, her breath restless as she turned from side to side, periodically getting up to look from my front window to her own house. “He’s gone to bed
now,” she had reported with her last look, sighing as if relieved. The hands on my clock glowed ten after two.

It had not fully registered with any of us, and still didn’t the next day when Misty was rummaging through her mother’s drawers in search of a handkerchief to take to the funeral. I was over there, but the impulse to turn and run was almost more than I could stand. Mr. Rhodes was in Buddy’s room, just sitting in the rocking chair with a stuffed turtle on his lap. He stared at the turtle and passed it gingerly from hand to hand as if it were made of glass. I was in the hall, waiting for something to happen, knowing that something had to happen. The only saving grace was that Misty’s Aunt Edith was there to tell everyone what to do.

“What do you think?” Misty called out, and when I walked into her mother’s room, where the bed was carefully made, she was standing in front of the full-length mirror with a multicolor scarf tied around her forehead. “Do I look like Rhoda on ‘Mary Tyler Moore’?” she asked, and when I shook my head no, she began crying again.

“Stop it.” Dean burst into the room, pushing me to the side and yanking Misty by the arm, twisting until her skin turned pink under his grip. “I’m sick of you acting this way. Daddy is like a zombie, and you’re a basket case. Just stop. Stop!” He screamed and slapped her face with his open palm. Then he stood there and waited while she held her cheek and slowly sat up, eyes wide and empty. “It’s time to go. See if you can get him to come out now.” He nodded his head toward the nursery and then headed for the door. I stepped to the side to let him pass, but he stopped right in front of me. “What are you looking at?” he asked, getting right in my face. “You’re in the way over here.” He looked me up and down and then stepped back. “I ought to slap your face, too. It’d be good to make your cheeks match for a change.” Instinctively my hand went back to its old position of covering, and had it not
been for the sight of Misty leading her dad like a blind puppy from the room, I probably would have left and never come back.

It seemed the whole town was in the church, where it was standing room only. In just a few hours there would be a crowd in the small neighboring town where Gene and Betty Files lived. For the thirty-odd hours that Mo Rhodes was out on the highway with her lover, both running away, deserting homes, spouses, children, for those hours, they were the talk at every table, on every phone—cheap and dirty and hussy and whore, low and lousy and thoughtless and cruel, stupid and hellhound and not worth the breath in their bodies. And then forty-eight hours later it was as if nothing had happened: Mo Rhodes had made a mistake and was on her way home.
She was coming home.
All the people who just one day earlier had voiced shock and disgust were now talking about the last time they saw her, about which recipes they had in her energetic scrawl with which humorous instruction. And didn’t she look just like a young Liz Taylor? Wasn’t she such a beautiful woman? Wasn’t it the most tragic loss this town had seen? A woman and her baby? And there was no mention of
Uncle
Gene except to say “all” died, “both” cars. There was no mention of the receipt from the Motor Lodge, where only one room was rented, no mention of the letters neatly tucked away in the zippered part of her purse. It was almost as if the town had killed her; hatred and accusations and condemnations had riddled her name like bullets just the day before, and yet, now that she was no longer alive, no one would voice an opinion, no one would say that what she had done was
right
or
wrong.
There was such a difference in condemning the dead and condemning the living, though I failed to grasp what it was.

I was at the front of the church, in a pew behind Misty and her family. I concentrated on the stained-glass window so that I would not picture Mo sitting alone on that same quilt we had
sunbathed on just the week before when she sprawled out beside us and told story after story of her own adolescence—the time she slapped a boy’s face for trying to kiss her, the time she won a dance contest down at Myrtle Beach, the time she won a blue ribbon in a horse show just because the judges, all male, liked the outfit she was wearing. I had waited that day for my story to be told next, all the secrets that she knew about my family, but instead she talked about the Fourth of July and how she knew a boy while growing up who was blinded by a faulty Roman candle, talked about how fireworks were dangerous and that we should always be very, very careful.

She was alone that night as the Roman candles lit up the sky, alone on the quilt just like Angela was years before as my father and I walked over the sand dune and left her there on Ferris Beach. Like Mo, Angela had been waiting for a man to come for her. Was a man so important that she would sacrifice her children—her life? Was she even thinking of what would happen in a day or week or year? Was she really coming home to stay like everyone now believed—a belief designed to preserve whatever self-respect Mr. Rhodes might have left? And why wasn’t
she
very, very careful, why didn’t she tell
him
to be very, very careful. I stared at the colored glass, at Jesus with his pure solemn face, hands outstretched to the flock of lambs, always ready to take them in while the afternoon light came through the reds and blues and yellows. I could not bear to look at Buddy’s coffin, no bigger than a little foot locker.
Suffer the little children to come unto me.
But please don’t let them suffer.

It seemed the service took forever and the strained silence remained long after the last amen, long after the chords of organ music ended; then finally we were out the door and heading for the final ride to the cemetery, the new one outside the city limits. “A blessing,” my mother had said, “that there weren’t spaces left in Whispering Pines, that Thomas would not have to pass by her grave every day.”

It was when I was getting into the car that I thought I saw Angela, a flash of auburn hair and a black silky dress, a man I did not recognize, a car I’d never seen. I looked around throughout the graveside service but I didn’t see her or that car again. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that it was her, and the more it reminded me that the one person who could have revealed any truth to me, or
would,
rather, was there in front of me, her life ended for the sake of one lousy man. And here she was in the family plot, and one day Mr. Rhodes would be beside her and any passerby would look at them there side by side—husband and wife—when the truth was that had she lived, she would have been far, far away from here; she would have been in Atlanta just as they had planned.

Misty knew it. She was the one who told me about the letters zipped up in her mother’s purse, letters that proved that Mo and Gene Files had had something going on before the Rhodeses even moved from Ferris Beach.
They were friends,
I had offered, a part of me also wanting to believe the best, but she shook her head back and forth. “I read them,” she whispered. “My dad has no idea that I snuck them and read them.” She closed her eyes, jerked her head and shoulders as if to shake the thought away. I waited for her to tell me what she had read but she didn’t. “Dad burned them,” she said.

That night she told me how she had prayed that her mother would come home and stay home. “And look at how it was answered,” she sobbed. “She’s home for good, isn’t she?” I felt her fingers wrap around my arm, nails squeezing into me as she lay there shaking, breath shallow.

Misty was determined to take the blame, to absorb it all like a sponge. More than ever she wanted to watch the old movies; she seemed to take comfort in the ones where it was the
child
who had left the mother. During
Madame X
she kept saying over and over again how the mother-in-law
made
Lana Turner leave her family, and wasn’t it so horrible that she couldn’t get a message
through, wouldn’t it be so wonderful if somewhere there was a message.
Yes, yes,
I was thinking, wanting so much to tell Misty how I was searching for my own message, how I was sure that I had seen Angela that very day, but the time had passed for that. My own speculations were trite in comparison.

I knew Misty had turned their split-level upside down looking for her answer, and still had found nothing. She seemed desperate in those months to follow, looking, searching. One day I saw her from my upstairs window just standing in her carport. She was wearing one of Mo’s loud scarves around her waist, holding a coffee cup in her hand, with Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” turned up full blast as she collected the little pebbles that had rolled onto the driveway, tossing them one by one out into the yard. I still couldn’t shake the image of her as she was that day, after Mo left home, screaming for her mother again and again, arms outstretched to the black swirling clouds.

Soon, enough time passed that she stopped spending her days around the house, and we were able to get back to normal. We talked about the approaching first day of ninth grade and what we were going to wear; I talked about my fears of algebra and having to dress out in one of those gray gym suits, and she talked about what boys she liked and what songs were her favorites. Misty had discovered the notion of predestination, the belief that her mother’s life had no other course than the one taken, and she was clinging to it. I nodded in agreement. “It’s possible,” I said, offering her the same hope she had always offered me, though I could not stop thinking about her prayer, the prayer that her mother would come home and stay forever. I could not stop thinking about all the prayers, flying upwards, crisscrossing like the airwaves, one request put on hold while another is answered.

Misty was subject to blimp jokes every year on the first day of school when she had to announce in her little self-introduction that her father worked at Goodyear. On the first day of ninth grade there was a whole new audience for these jokes, since our school system had enlarged to include a whole new population of kids from the county. Now our system was fully integrated and until the new school buildings were completed, we would all cram into the musty, creaking halls of Samuel T. Saxon. Misty and I were relieved on the first day to find that we had the same homeroom teacher; we had feared that they would divide us up alphabetically, which would have placed us at opposite ends of the school.

“Blimp,” a boy in the back row murmured, and Misty paused, sucked in her cheeks as she stared at him a long hard second before continuing. He was a complete stranger to us. “And my
mother is dead,” she said, and turned to the teacher, smiled. “She died this summer in a car crash where she was thrown thirty feet from the car. My baby brother, Buddy, was with her and he also died. He was named after the late great Buddy Holly because my mother believed in naming after the dead, particularly the young dead. My mother never knew what hit her, they say. They say she was hit with the impact of a couple of tons.”

Misty continued staring at the back of the room, though the boy who had uttered “Blimp” had his eyes cast downward on his desk. I didn’t want to watch her either; it was too painful to see her there in a purple T-shirt that had belonged to her mother, the arm bands cutting into her skin. My desk was angled such that I could see into the hall, and I stared out there, at pencil scribbles on the cracked plaster and at the old water fountain where I knew someone had stuck a wad of bright green gum at the place the water should come out. I had given up on school water fountains by that time; if it wasn’t a wad of gum, then it was the chance that someone would creep up behind and push your head down into the spout. R.W. Quincy had done that to a girl and chipped her front tooth the year before.

I could see into the classroom across the hall, where a sign on the door read “Davis Homeroom,” and I could see Merle Hucks, or half of the back of his head, could see his wispy white hair as he sat crouched over a piece of notebook paper, a ball-point pen gripped firmly in the visible hand, the left one. His left foot was turned to reveal the worn sole of a Converse hightop and what looked like brown dress socks as he swung his knee back and forth.