In Every Way (8 page)

Maria takes a deep breath and tells herself that Jack is trying to apologize. She cannot lose him. She thirsts for him like water. In this situation, with her mother sick and her stomach now not yet returned to form and what feels like a hole in her heart that could be filled only by the daughter she gave away, she feels the need to cling to Jack in whatever manner possible. She says, “I'm telling myself right now that anyone can make a mistake. I'm really trying to convince myself.”

“Well, it's been like maybe five mistakes,” he says.

The morning light has moved from soft to solid. A bright parallelogram of it now shines on the kitchen linoleum beneath Maria's feet. It makes the whole room glow an increasingly intense yellow. It is all too bright. Maria closes her eyes against it. She feels the need for Jack in her life now trumped by his selfish cruelty.

“Are you OK?” Jack says.

“Go,” Maria says. But she does not want him to go; she wants him to stay, to beg forgiveness. He should know this, she thinks. She shouldn't have to explain. But of course he does not. He sighs a slow susurrant hiss. Maria does not open her eyes. They maintain this stalemate for one long moment until Jack steps to the door and opens it. Maria raises her eyelids. Through the window, she watches Jack walk up the driveway, stop at the recycling bin, and select from it a plastic Tide bottle. He spikes the bottle onto the concrete and it bounces high into the air. Jack then continues into the street and enters his dirty black Scirocco, but the bottle never returns to earth. Maria approaches the window. She looks up into the magnolia and at her neighbor's roof. But Maria cannot see the bottle anywhere. She is not surprised. On this October morning, in this sunlight, with this knowledge about Jack and Icy People, with her underwear lined with gauze and her mother bald and dying, the broken rules of physics cannot even begin to astonish her.

AFTER DARK, MARIA
steps into the backyard and stares at the few small clouds above, their edges lit by a moon she cannot see. She walks into the driveway and slides herself into the small space under the Volvo. There, atop an oil stain, she feels both safe and dangerous. It is the fact that she should not be here, that no human should, that attracts her to this odd space. She has reached a point in life where new zones of refuge are required. She understands this is the action of a crazy person. But by lying here, she is giving herself the opportunity to try that role on for size. Here she is, so she must be crazy. She is not sure if she is convinced.

Maria remains under the Volvo for what feels like a very long time, though she is not sure it actually has been—she is wholly distrustful of any measurement of time these days—then emerges and enters the yard of the Copelands, who live next door. The house is dark. They are rarely at home. Mr. Copeland services a series of manufacturing plants throughout Virginia and the Carolinas and has a house in each state. Maria lifts from their hot tub the stiff blue cover, its vinyl surface slimy, and flops it onto the patio. The prospect of cold water has always held some perverse allure for her, if only for its ability to shock the system. So she removes her clothes, piling them at her feet, and slides naked into the flat water. As her heart races in the chill, she reveals her face to the mysterious glowing sky, resting her head on the cold plastic lip.

She imagines Bonacieux at that moment and wonders if she is longing for Maria's milk, her arms, or her love. She feels certain the child is not. Bonacieux is in a beautiful home with beautiful people ready to love her. But parental love, Maria knows, is not enough to safeguard a child from life. She wonders if Bonacieux is going to grow up lonely and betrayed. She wonders if maybe she should have had an abortion. She knows she is overreacting and courting melodrama, but she cannot deny her despair.

“Maria?” says a man.

She flinches, each fingertip tingling with terror. On the porch behind her stands Mr. Copeland, the owner of this house, fidgeting with an unlit flashlight.

Maria folds her arms across her chest. Mr. Copeland remains still, as if confronting a wild animal, and Maria is aware that she is, at this moment, scaring him.

“I'm sorry,” Maria says. “I didn't know you were home.”

Mr. Copeland shifts the flashlight from one hand to the other as Maria splashes out of the hot tub. He averts his gaze as she yanks up her shorts. She buttons her shirt into the wrong buttonholes.

“I'm so sorry,” she says, lifting the hot tub cover from the ground. She struggles to place it atop the tub. “I was just . . .”

“I'll get that,” Mr. Copeland says.

“I'm sorry,” Maria says. “I'm just, just feeling a little crazy.”

“I understand,” Mr. Copeland says, calmly, as if soothing a skittish dog. “You just let us know if you need anything, OK? We're here for you, OK? No one is made for all this.”

It frightens Maria that Mr. Copeland is so understanding. She feels like her actions have been predetermined, as if she is living a script everyone but she has read.

“I'm so sorry,” she says.

The kitchen is dark and filled with the sharp tang of sour trash that Maria has forgotten to remove. She stands before the oven in a dim region of light cast by the halogen streetlamp. A glimmering puddle collects around her feet, expanding slowly across the worn linoleum. She wonders if Mr. Copeland knows she is doing this very thing. If her mother knows. If Jack knows. If Anne Vanstory knows. If she is the only one who does know what to expect.

TWO

CHAPTER 6

I
T IS HALLOWEEN
. Southeast of New Bern, Highway 70 cuts through a tunnel of longleaf pines grown so closely together that they resemble cliffs of solid green. Maria's arm is hooked out the window, her fingers drumming along to Little Richard. The silver Volvo is so coated in sandy grit that her flesh rises in goose bumps at each tap of her fingers. Within the cocoon of a red plaid blanket, her mother sleeps soundly in the passenger seat, even though the temperature today is a humid seventy-eight degrees. They are driving east across North Carolina, down out of the Piedmont and into the coastal plane, past Smithfield, Goldsboro, over the Neuse River in Kinston, now through the Croatan National Forest, toward the end of the continent, the Carolina coast, destination Beaufort.

Maria sings along in a whisper. “Tutti frutti,” she says. “Alutti.” She need not sing quietly, though. Almost nothing wakes her mother.

A road sign warns of bears, and within six miles of it, an old Ford Country Squire with faux wood paneling is stopped on the side of the highway, its hood crumpled into a small alpine range. On the wide gravel shoulder, one man and a small girl in a tangerine dress stand before a large bear lying on its side.

“Mom,” Maria says, but there is no response.

The bear is black with a tan muzzle and three distinct white spots on its forehead. Maria slows almost to a stop as they roll up alongside the animal. As she does so, the man gingerly pokes the bear with a stick, and Maria steps on the gas, suddenly afraid the bear might at that very moment awake.

One hour and twenty minutes later she enters the corridor of strip malls west of Morehead City, a horror she seems to never recall until she encounters it once again in the flesh. Traffic here is slow, chopped up by stoplights. The cars surrounding them increase in luxury the nearer they come to the coast. By the time they reach Morehead City proper, the cars are almost all SUVs made by Lexus, Infiniti, and Cadillac. Maria begins to fear that they have made a mistake leaving Chapel Hill, that they have remembered this region incorrectly. But then, soon after they pass a thirty-foot-tall inflatable penguin standing in front of the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, the strip malls begin to recede, replaced instead by small, tin-roofed houses painted turquoise, pink, and gray. White latticework surrounds their foundations. Gingerbread lace rots on the dormers. As the landscape of her memories returns, Maria's fears abate.

The Sanitary Fish Market stands among boat slips on the Morehead City waterfront, lorded over by a sculpture of King Neptune holding an invisible scepter, long ago vanished from his cracked wooden hand. Two young girls walk without sunglasses through bright sunlight, their brows so furrowed by the glare that they both appear angry. Their father follows in khaki shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a jumping marlin. Maria remembers walking here so often with her mother, jealous of the tanned flesh of her coastal peers. She tells herself they
will die of cancer long before she does, but then again, her mother is as pale as she.

On the shore beside the bridge over the Newport River stand two rounded warehouses tipped with tiny galvanized sheds. They rise like a pair of huge industrial bosoms. Maria's mother always called this place the boob factory, and Maria is glad her mother is now asleep so that they are not forced to make the joke today, dangerous with all of its pitfall connotations. They pass Radio Island Marina at the base of the bridge and approach the drawbridge that spans the last stretch of water into Beaufort. A green North Carolina state sign announces the town and its founding year: 1709.

With miles of strip malls behind her, crossing the drawbridge feels like rising to the surface. Maria can now breathe. Nature reasserts its supremacy. Marshes open on either side. Gulls swoop in low. The air is briny through the window. Though Beaufort is not an island, the bridge is the only access point of which Maria knows. Hurricanes have cut into so much land north of town that, depending on the map and tides, Beaufort is basically more island than peninsula. It feels that way. This isolation is part of what Maria loves.

They pass Big Daddy Wesley's, a convenience store whose windows advertise bloodworms, night crawlers, cut minnows, cigar minnows, ballyhoo, the coldest beer in town, cigarettes, and bail bonds. She turns right on Live Oak Street, which is cracked and shot through with tall, rangy weeds. Things are lush and confused here, rich, run-down, immaculate, decomposing. Little feels precious, though it seems it all should be. The houses are as ancient as American homes can be. Mansions stand beside shotgun houses that are little more than shacks. Some are immaculately
restored beside others that look prepared to crumble. Flags flutter on poles anchored to porch columns. American flags, North Carolina flags, Beaufort flags, blue UNC banners. Hand-painted shields beside doorways announce the year each house was built and by whom. J Sharp House 1780, Alexander House 1852, The Chaplain House 1817, The Philip Knowe 1828. In each of these, Maria has imagined herself living a simple, solitary existence. She has no children, no parents, no spouse at all in these dreams. But now, seeing these houses anew, she can no longer believe in her fantasies. They are the daydreams dreamed only by youth, a designation that Maria feels no longer applies to her. A life lived in any of these houses, no matter how lovely, Maria now feels certain, will surely be complicated by birth and love and death. Her conviction seems confirmed by the prevalence of toys in yards, by tandem bikes, and by the ubiquitous sneaking mold, because anything painted white in this ocean-humid town—siding, columns, fencing—is bled through with a faint network of steadily creeping mildew.

And then, up ahead, where the street narrows to a bright blue window, Taylor's Creek flows into Beaufort Inlet. Here the continent ends.

The moment they turn onto Front Street the wind shocks Maria by lifting her bangs and shaking them furiously. Like it always does, the air has gathered strength across the Atlantic and there's nothing left to stop it other than a double-decker tour bus crawling south and three couples holding hands. The gnarled trees all bend in the same direction—away from the water. Grand houses face the inlet with huge porches that sprout columns two stories high. Each house has a widow's walk, a gated square on the roof like a dark crown from which, it is said, the wives of sailors could watch for their husbands' return. Maria used to imagine her mother on one—she now pictures herself.

To Maria's right flows Taylor's Creek, which is not a creek at all, but an inlet closed in by Carrot Island, one of the last tiny shards of land standing between Beaufort and the Atlantic. She can do without the beach, only a few miles away—its crowds and their ensuing expectations of festival hilarity repel Maria like a foul smell. This snaking path of salt water is her coast. On the island, only a hundred yards away, three wild horses graze high grass atop a low dune. Between them and Maria, a dolphin shows its back. The riches of the world here seem almost too exposed. Maria is concerned for the safety of these animals, amazed that they can live like this right out in the open and not behind electrical fencing. This, she thinks, is how she felt when first seeing infants in public, after giving birth. They all seemed too fragile for outdoor travel. She is glad when the dolphin returns to depths unseen.

They park two blocks from the inlet in front of a house she knows well, a three-storied Victorian painted Carolina blue with white trim. The front porch wraps three sides of the house and stretches so wide on the western end that the ground floor there is almost twice as broad as the level above it. Two rocking chairs sit empty on the porch beside a round wicker table holding a potted purple creeper, its vines dangling to the blue floorboards. Feathery ferns sway from the eaves. On the top step stands Karen Balcomb, smoking a cigarette.

Karen was Maria's mother's roommate at Saint Mary's boarding school in Raleigh and then again at Barnard. She is divorced, tall, thin, topped by a curly mushroom cap of dark hair, and utterly committed to Maria and her mother.