Second Nature (3 page)

“Are you a marriage counselor?” Robin asked him.

“Well, no,” George said. “I can’t say that I am.”

“Okay, George, just tell me this. Was Roy fucking around the whole time we were married, or just at the end?”

“Robin,” George said in that wounded voice. “That’s not nice.”

“No, it’s not,” Robin agreed. A fine rain had begun, and Robin turned on the windshield wipers, then gunned the engine of the pickup so it wouldn’t die on her as it often did in damp weather. “Do you want to come over for dinner on Friday? Vegetarian lasagna, but you won’t be able to tell there’s no meat.”

“You know I can’t,” George said. He’d known Robin forever and he hadn’t had a home-cooked meal for months, but it wasn’t a good idea to socialize with a beautiful woman who happened to be Roy’s not-quite ex-wife.

“It’s not like I’m asking you for a date, George,” Robin said. “But hey, I guess it’s good to find out who your real friends are.”

She said this just to ride him, since she knew that anyone connected with the police department had to side with Roy. People simply couldn’t stand it when your marriage broke up; they took it personally. Even Robin’s oldest friend, Michelle Altero, who had never liked Roy, and had cried at their wedding, real sobs, not just polite tears, had suggested she give him another chance.

“Can I go now?” Robin asked George.

“Sure,” George said. He wasn’t too happy about standing on the side of the service road in the rain, getting involved in someone’s private affairs. “Where is it you’re going, anyway?” he asked. He truly believed he was being casual.

“Who wants to know?” Robin said.

She could be real fresh when she wanted to be, which George figured came from growing up with the notion she’d be rich someday. As it was, he knew for a fact she’d been hours away from having her electricity cut off the month before. Roy had thought that might bring her back to him, but it hadn’t worked out that way. The electric company had given her a five-day extension, and before Roy could persuade them otherwise, Robin had paid off her bill.

“Come on, Robin,” George said.

“Tell Roy where I go is none of his business.”

“How do you think Old Dick would have liked what’s happened between you and Roy?” George asked. “Did you ever consider that?”

Robin hated to hear her grandfather referred to as Old Dick, but she kept her mouth shut. This is what happened when you grew up on an island, people assumed they had a perfect right to pull you over on a service road and give you marital advice. Maybe Robin’s brother had been right; when he and Kay broke up, Stuart moved into Manhattan. He couldn’t pass a single street corner in town without being reminded of a dozen things he’d done or said. It was like living with ghosts: he couldn’t have a cup of coffee at Fred’s Diner in peace without having some phantom settle down on the stool beside him.

“My grandfather always despised Roy,” Robin announced. In fact, there wasn’t a man in town her grandfather hadn’t loathed. “He refused to come to our wedding.”

“Old Dick would never have favored a divorce,” George insisted, but he let her go and watched mournfully as she pulled her truck onto the service road, then headed toward the bridge where the willow trees grew. Once she crossed over, no one on the local police force could stop her; she’d be out of their jurisdiction, driving as fast as she pleased.

 
 
Beside the wooden bridge, the thick twisted roots of the old willows coiled through the muddy earth. Anyone who approached the island for the first time at dusk could easily believe that these willows had once been men; they seemed to cry out loud and their thin branches tapped against the hoods of passing cars. No one knew when the trees had been planted, but they were already old when Richard Aaron first came to the island in 1923. They’d frightened off everyone but the bravest fishermen and the cats that someone had once brought across to drown in a burlap bag but that had escaped to breed in the marshes, living wild on bluefish and sparrows.

There was no bridge back then, and Aaron had to put on black hip boots and wade through the water to the other side, stepping over hermit crabs and moon snails. He’d paid thirteen thousand dollars cash for the island—a good deal even then, one he’d managed because the previous owner believed that warm air rising from marshes caused malaria and scarlet fever. On the north side the first big Queen Annes were built, with stone fireplaces and fish-head shingles; on the south side were workers’ cottages for the stonemasons and carpenters, some of whom stayed on after their work was through. Off to the west, Aaron built his own house, with bricks carted over the bridge, and panels of stained glass that were tied to the masons’ backs with thick rope, then covered with white muslin to protect them from cracking. He kept five acres of black pine and beach grass and
Rosa rugosa
for himself, most of which was to become Poorman’s Point after his only son squandered everything on a real estate venture in Florida that went wrong because of hurricanes or bad economic times or simple carelessness.

Old Dick was not dead, as many people on the island assumed, although he was always talked about in the past tense. He was ninety-one years old and had outlived his son and his sisters and brothers and just about everybody else he considered to be worth two cents. The main house had been closed down for more than twenty years, and Old Dick lived above the garage with his housekeeper, Ginny, who was eighty-four. He couldn’t get out of his bed unless he was lifted, and he hadn’t seen sunlight for years, but when Robin went to visit him he was still able to muster the strength to scream at her. She went only once a month, on the last Sunday, making certain always to bring an apple pie. A good apple pie was the one thing Old Dick wouldn’t scream about, and Robin sneaked slices to him, on paper plates, since Ginny didn’t allow him any sugar or salt.

And that’s what Robin was going to see Stuart about. Trying to get Stuart on the phone was always so frustrating, and this was too important, she couldn’t wait. Ginny’s health was failing and her daughters wanted to send her to a nursing home in New Jersey, and then what the hell would they do with Old Dick? Stuart had been all but supporting him, since Social Security was barely enough to pay Ginny’s weekly salary, and there were food and heating bills and medicine to consider. The truth of it was, Stuart had been helping Robin out, too, since she didn’t want to ask Roy for any more than the pittance she was legally allowed. Thank goodness for Stuart, who was so practical, he liked to joke, that he applied to medical school when he realized he needed a twenty-four-hour-a-day psychiatrist and decided it was cheaper to become one than to engage one at the going rates. When he and Kay divorced, Stuart had insisted she buy a Volvo, after checking every import’s safety record; he heartily disapproved of Robin’s old pickup, which, as she now approached the Mid-town Tunnel, skidded as it always did when she was in a hurry and the asphalt was wet.

There were no meters free, so Robin had to park in one of the expensive lots, on Eighty-fifth, then run through the rain over to Kelvin Medical Center, but at least she was wearing her boots. By the time she reached the building, her hair had unwound from its elastic band and her rain slicker was dripping wet. The storm had now begun in earnest, the kind of downpour that flooded gutters and whipped umbrellas into the air. When Robin got out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor, her ears ached with the drop in air pressure. She was on her way to Stuart’s office, thinking about Medicare and lasagna and a new mildew-resistant variety of aster, when the Wolf Man was led into the hallway. Because he was handcuffed, the attendants assumed he was harmless; they left him in the corridor while they went to sign for his transfer. The air was so murky and still that the mice grew confused, and believing it was midnight, they dashed out of the heating vents. A few nurses and attendants who had the day off had come in just to get a glimpse of the Wolf Man, and they were disappointed when he kept his eyes downcast. Patients on crutches struggled to their doorways in their hospital gowns so that someday they could tell their grandchildren they’d been there, right in the same hospital, breathing the very same air, but most of them mistook the Wolf Man for a maintenance worker and looked right past him.

“Is that him?” Robin asked one of the nurses. “The Wolf Man?”

“We’re not supposed to call him that,” the nurse told her, but of course Stuart called him that all the time, at least in private.

Stuart had talked about this patient constantly when he’d first been flown in from Michigan. All the cases of children raised by animals had been dubious, records had been tampered with, fears reported as fact, medical histories obscured, so that one never knew whether ill children simply had been abandoned out in the woods, where no one was likely to find them, by families too poor or overwhelmed to cope. Not one of these children had ever gained enough language to tell his own story, and Stuart’s hope was that this patient would change all that. If they were lucky, he had been able to speak before he was lost, and with help he might remember all he once knew. But by the beginning of March, Stuart no longer discussed the Wolf Man with Robin, and by the end of the month the arguments he offered to his colleagues about keeping the patient at the medical center sounded weak, even to him. Through all the hours of therapy, the patient had not spoken one word.

“Well, he doesn’t look very fierce,” Robin said to the nurse.

“Oh, really?” the nurse said archly, as she started down the hall. “He’d bite your head off in a minute. He’d slit your throat and never think twice.”

The Wolf Man was hunched over on a wooden bench in his black overcoat, which was two sizes too big. His hair had been clipped so short Robin could see his scalp. There was a gash in the back of his neck, left when the barber’s hand had begun to tremble. Robin took off her yellow slicker and shook out the rain; she would have continued on to Stuart’s office at the end of the hall if she hadn’t seen a mouse scurry along the bench. Behind his back, the Wolf Man closed his fist over the mouse before it had the chance to dart away. Then he looked at Robin, suddenly, as if he knew he was being watched.

Robin stayed exactly where she was, dripping rain onto the linoleum, even after the Wolf Man turned his back to her. Slowly he opened his hand, and the mouse ran in circles, as though dazed by the scent of human flesh, before scurrying off to hide in a heating vent. For weeks the Wolf Man had been thinking how easy it would be to tear out one of his doctors’ throats during their sessions together. The doctor would reach for a pen, or turn to look out the window, and he wouldn’t even know what was happening until his shirt was drenched with blood and clouds filled his vision. It was the same with a deer. Even if it was still struggling, you knew it had given up the fight when its eyes turned white, when it saw something so far away it wasn’t even in this world.

The thunderstorm had moved in quickly, across the river, from New Jersey. The windows were rattling. Alone on the bench, the Wolf Man began to shiver. If he hadn’t, Robin would never have gone over to him. When she reached out and touched his arm, the heat from her fingers went right through his black coat and into his skin. She was the first person to touch him who didn’t have to. He still had blood blisters all over his hands and feet, and on rainy days like this the scar that ran along the inside of his thigh ached horribly. Lately, he had been remembering things that seemed to belong to someone else: forks and spoons set out on a kitchen table, slices of an orange on a blue china plate.

“It’s just thunder,” Robin said.

It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring.
He knew that by heart. They thought he understood nothing, but he had heard them talking, right in front of him. The attendant who had kicked his shins while the handcuffs were clasped on was coming down the hall, tossing a set of keys in the air and catching them in the palm of his hand. The Wolf Man looked at the woman next to him; the heat from her touch moved upward, into his throat, until at last the words came out on their own, like birds rising.

“Don’t let them take me someplace,” he said.

When you spoke after so many years, the words actually hurt, each one a crooked bone, a fishhook, a burning star.

Robin dropped her hand from his arm; her rain slicker fell at her feet. Something made her skin feel hot, and although it might have been pity, it might just as easily have been something else.

The Wolf Man had known enough to keep what was inside him secret, and now he cursed himself. He should never have said a word. He looked down at the linoleum tiles on the floor; he tried not to breathe. The edge of the handcuffs cut through the skin above his wrists. In only a few hours, they’d transfer him and he’d be gone forever. Already, he was starting to disappear. Soon he would forget that the upturned leaves on the trees predicted whether or not it would rain, and that a rabbit dared not move if you covered its eyes. That was how they decided what to take down, at least he remembered that. They went after whatever was frightened and gave up easily. Anything that had the courage to stare you down, you let pass by.

And so, in spite of the thunder, he raised his eyes. As soon as he saw her looking at him that way, he knew he hadn’t made a mistake. By then, Robin was telling the attendants that she’d been sent to pick up their patient. Later, in the hallway near the elevator, she would inform the social worker from the State Hospital that the transfer had been canceled. No one had reason to doubt her, not even when she insisted that handcuffs were no longer necessary. And although there was now lightning streaking the sky and the clouds were the size of black mountains, the Wolf Man smiled, exactly as the cook who baked his birthday cake vowed he could, when the attendant handed over the key.

THE EVENING HAD TURNED sweet and blue. Mockingbirds appeared in the gardens to pull worms from the rich, damp earth, and all through the island you could hear their stolen songs. It was the hour when deer ventured out of the pine woods to feast on ivy and potted geraniums, when raccoons in the marshes scooped up mouthfuls of mullet and snails, and the blue air made people dizzy and thankful for all that they had.