Storm Tide (38 page)

But what Crystal took for diligence was also a way to hide. Friends had warned me during the election, “You’ll never have enough time for the nursery or a personal life.” That was exactly the point. I belonged to the town now. Not since I played baseball was so much expected of me; or so little. I worked for everyone now, too busy to be touched.

J
OHNNY

    Johnny found it odd that Crystal should sometimes remind him of his dear departed Emily Ann. Crystal was a woman who had been around the block a few times. He suspected it was more her vulnerability that had got her into trouble than wantonness—although there was a kind of perfume of that about her at times. He put it down to her sorry upbringing. Her father had preferred drugs to his family. Her mother was a petulant woman, far more involved with her own disappointments than with her two daughters.

It was Crystal’s desire to please that reminded him of his wife. Emily Ann had wanted to make everything better for him, for her sons, for everyone around her. She must feed every hungry bird. She took in any stray that came by. She had raised an orphan girl, Mary Rose, now living in California with her salesman husband. Turned out better than his own son William, although it hurt him to admit it. Crystal was a good mother, as Emily Ann had been, until she could no longer manage.

Watching Crystal with the other girls, he observed her basking in her role as the more-or-less wife of a selectman. But there was the rub. Living with was not marriage, and Crystal knew it. That was where her vulnerability had got her in trouble again. If you could milk the cow free, why own it? There was a slightly broken quality to her, a resonating fragility like a good porcelain set being used for every day, that made him connect her in his mind to Emily Ann.

His wife would have labeled Crystal a bad woman. Emily Ann had a proper upbringing, her uncle a priest, her parents watching over her, and her aunt and her grandparents all protecting her not only from danger in the world, but from knowledge of danger. Her innocence, her purity had touched him from the first time he met her, at a victory dance held in the ward where she lived in Boston. He had been working for the reelection of a city councillor, his apprenticeship in politics. That very purity had broken her over the hard years. He could read faint cracks in Crystal’s composure too. But once she was safely married, she would heal. She was not as pure or fine a creature as his Emily Ann, and marriage would not weaken her but make her stronger.

He was used to looking out for his own, and she had proved to be his, loyal to him, openly admiring, trusting him. She was his hidden
weapon in this long struggle to hold on to this sleepy village he had made known to the rest of the world. He would reward her.

That afternoon, he called Crystal into his office. “I want you to take another look at those lots along the river. Come on.”

He drove her out there again, taking the road across the dike. She perched forward on the car seat chattering about her son, his good teachers and his bad teachers. He nodded and made encouraging noises, planning his approach.

He talked about what the land here meant to him, although he was sure she was only half listening. Then he got to the clincher. He parked the car in a cul-de-sac and went around to her side to open the door for her, with a courtly little nod. “This is a prize piece of land, Crystal. Can you imagine a house here?” It was hot, but a brisk breeze was blowing off the bay. That was lucky, because his pitch wouldn’t go so well if they were both slapping mosquitoes. This near the river, some days they hung in the air like a living fog bank.

Obediently she stared around her. “Right at the end of a road so that you wouldn’t worry about your kid being run over. And a nice view of the river.” She was trying to sound interested, and he appreciated the effort.

“Near the river. It’s too shallow here to worry about your son. Wouldn’t this be a lovely spot for him to grow up?”

“My son?” She turned to him as if she didn’t understand. “I don’t even dream about something like this.”

“Crystal, you’re working so hard to save this land. I want to show my appreciation. I could sell you this lot so cheap that you and David could afford to build on it. I could arrange a mortgage. I could make sure that you can raise your son in a proper house on your own land.”

She stared at him, her mouth slightly open. “Would you really do that?”

“Don’t you deserve it? Doesn’t your boy?”

Tears formed in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She hurtled forward and hugged him, raising her face as if to kiss him, then caught herself. She stepped back, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean—”

“You were showing your gratitude, child. You make me feel young again. But of course this can only work if we win the battle. If those maniacs open the dike, this land will be waterlogged. It will be wetlands again and nobody can build on it. And I won’t be able to sell it to you, because I’ll have less than half my lots buildable …. But don’t fret. We’re going to win. For you and your family. For all the young families that deserve a home.” On his shirt and linen jacket he could smell the flowery perfume she wore, still clinging. He could feel her soft big body
against him. His member rose in his pants. He smiled in surprise. There was a bit of fight in him still, and a bit of life too. It had been four years since the last time he had used his old friend, a quickie with Maria at the cottage.

There were women whose touch could raise the dead. Crystal was one of them. He would see that she got married. There was always time by and by for a little pleasure. She would owe him, and she would know it. He would see to her as he had arranged for so many of his people to get what they really needed. Crystal walked back to the car with him, almost dancing.

“Mr. Lynch,” she said softly, “you’re like a father to me.”

“And you’re my good girl, Crystal. The one I count on. And I take care of my own. I always have.”

J
UDITH

    It was the sort of weather tourists, summer people and motel owners liked, and regular residents and the keepers of shops and galleries hated. One sun-baked day followed another under an aluminum sky. Every day was a beach day. The grasses parched to brittle straw the color of rabbit fur. Little ponds dried up and bigger ponds were surrounded by a wide margin of heavily trampled beach. Judith had to water constantly. Her tomatoes were half their normal size. All afternoon Trey, the three-legged dog who preferred to be outside, moved from patch to patch of shade around the compound. The cats stretched in the deep cool under the porch, bellies to the earth, all except lo and Portnoy. lo, with long white fur, lay on the bathroom tile. Portnoy spent all of his time in Gordon’s bed or on the porch with him, when Gordon could be helped out there. Portnoy had appointed himself a caretaker. He was careful not to sit on Gordon but was never more than a foot from his side. Portnoy was a solid gray cat with a dignified air, a little chubby and extremely affectionate. He had been hit by a car when still a kitten. Natasha had heard about him. Judith paid his bills and Natasha brought him home. His name was Thousand Dollar Bill until Gordon renamed him.

Judith was summoning all the family members and Gordon’s closest friends now for Rosh Hashanah. It came early this year—the second week of September. It did not matter if the children were back in school, it did not matter what kind of arrangements each of them must make on the job. They were to come. Gordon was dying and this would be the final gathering. The doctor thought he would last that long but not much past September. So Judith was giving them six weeks notice to make their arrangements.

She suspected it would be her next to last public duty as Gordon’s wife; after that would come only the funeral. She lived with death now in a daily, intimate way, something never entirely out of mind no matter what she was doing. She only hoped that the doctor was right and that Gordon would make it through mid-September. She urged him to stay in his room with the air conditioner, as that spared him the heat and filtered the air.

Gordon was sometimes entirely silly and seemed drunk from the
painkillers. Sometimes he disappeared into himself and his eyes did not register her presence. Sometimes he was happy as a puppy. Sometimes he was nostalgic about friends long dismissed or dead, epic demonstrations, mythical parties, journeys to Kyoto and Budapest. Sometimes pain took him over and occupied him like a hostile army. Sometimes he was bitter with anger. He would be silent an entire day and then words and stories would bubble from him. Other days he slipped into heavy sleep or unconsciousness and was gone from her. His fever rose and fell. The doctors changed his drug regime constantly. They were just tinkering.

She copped a plea for Betty; she got a divorce for the woman who had been abused and hustled her off to a new life where she hoped the ex would not find her. Preliminary motions were occupying both her and the prosecution in her defense of the doctor who had assisted a suicide. The roof case kept being postponed: the least of her cases would drag on the longest from that batch. She had a new custody case, a drunk driving case, a tenant suing because lead paint poisoned his daughter. There was never an end to human troubles with the law or each other. She kept busy.

Natasha was down in Florida, learning to care for feral birds, pelicans fishermen had maimed out of hostility, tearing off half of their beaks; herons that had taken fish with hooks in them; a gull shot in the wing; a wood stork hit by a car. Judith wondered in trepidation what discarded pet or lame animal Natasha would bring home with her this time. But the animals were company for her this August of Gordon’s slow departure. She lavished attention on all of them. Beppo the Crow was healed and ready to depart, and she let him go. He circled her on the dune once, twice, and then beat off steadily to rejoin his tribe. The next day he came back, but only to visit. Then he was gone again. She expected that she might see him in the winter, when rations were scarce. Would she recognize him, seen with his fellows like Hasids dressed all in black? It would be like seeing David in town and remembering intimacy.

They had less company this summer than ever, for she had made clear (without telling Gordon what she was doing) that people were to come for the holiday to say goodbye to Gordon, but not before then. All summer vacations on the compound were canceled. For the first time since she had visited that July fourth weekend when she had connected with her Bashert, her predestined husband, they were alone—except for his nurse, Mrs. Stranahan, and for Jana Baer, who came in to help and cook. The doctor asked if she would not prefer for Gordon to move
into the local hospice. She did not even ask Gordon. Anything that could be done for him would be done right here, with her in attendance. Their marriage would end, but it would end with them together.

She spent all the time she could manage in the compound, even if it meant getting up in the middle of the night to beat the tide across the bridge when she had a court date in the morning. She would not lose any of their remaining time together. She would not waste it. She forgave herself for the time she had spent, yes, spent like mad money on David. She had honestly thought it might work for the three of them and later for her and David. She cut her losses, striving to forget him. At least she and Gordon had accomplished something politically—unless Crystal succeeded in subverting David to Johnny Lynch’s will. That was a possible outcome, and it would be ironic indeed—but not irony she would appreciate. If David did betray the people who had elected him, she hoped he would wait until Gordon was gone, so her husband would not lose that sense of accomplishment that had so pleased him; the sense that he had finally changed the rules of politics in Saltash and opened up the government. If David took that away from Gordon, she would get even.

Mattie had shown her the letters in the papers from Crystal. By that point they were two weeks old. Mattie was embarrassed to explain how she had noticed them so late. “Well, it’s just that I pile up old papers by the toilet …” Another month had passed since then. Basically Judith saw almost no one outside her office, except family.